Polokaust Outline Of Events Jewish Star No Worse Than Polish “P” Epstein

Model Nazi, by Catherine Epstein. 2010

The Polokaust: Artur Greiser and the Mass Murder of Polish Intelligentsia, Cultural Genocide, Passive Biological Genocide, and Eventual Postwar Extermination. Not All Poles Wear “P” Because Too Many of Them, Not Because Nazis Favored Them Over the Jews

This work presents a great deal of information. Though it is biographic-centered, my review of it is event-centered.

FREEMASONRY AND THE GERMANS

Arthur Greiser, in his younger years, was a Mason. (p. 41). Later, the Nazis denounced Freemasonry as a tool of the Jews. (p. 42). Ironically, German Freemasonry (and as confirmed Polish authors) was long pro-German, as pointed out the author, “While Free Masonry was supposedly apolitical, in Germany it tended toward conservatism. In the 1920’s, most lodges espoused strong VOLKISCH and anti-democratic views.” (p. 42).

NAZI ANTI-CHRISTIANITY

The anti-Christian aspects of Nazi thinking are often unappreciated. (p. 49, 102, 143, 156, 194, 221). In fact, Greiser’s anti-church policy was very systematic, and not only directed at Polish Catholicism, but at Christianity in general, as a threatening alternative to Nazism, and often framed in terms of “separation of church and state”. (pp. 221-230). (Sound familiar?)

HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS YET AGAIN

It is obvious for what the Nazis are most remembered. Epstein quips, “We live in an era obsessed with the Holocaust and other cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide.” (p. 11). Analyzing several Holocaust scholars, she supports a functionalist approach to the Holocaust. The Nazi decision to murder most European Jews did not come until as late as December 1941. (p. 389). She realizes that the methods for implementing the Holocaust came BOTH from top-down and local policies. The latter explains why Jews were shot in some locations and gassed in others, placed in ghettos in some places but not others, and spared for forced labor in some places but not others. (pp. 181-182).

When covering Greiser’s postwar trial, Epstein repeats the familiar complaint that the Holocaust was subsumed under “crimes against the Polish people”, although it did not ignore Holocaust crimes. (p. 317). In doing so, she is engaging in classic Holocaust supremacist thinking. Does she suppose that Jews are made of better clay than the Poles? She also forgets that the treatment of Jewish deaths as something special was not generally accepted until some twenty years after WWII.

In the Warthegau itself, German policies against Poles and Jews were interconnected, and often contradictory. This owed to unexpected consequences of their implementation, such as the disruption of productive wartime labor by the German social policies against both Poles and Jews. (p. 266). Interestingly, the Germans saw Poles (and not only Jews) as fundamentally rude, shifty, and deceitful. (p. 195).

POLISH RESISTANCE

Unfortunately, author Catherine Epstein repeats the myth of BLUT SONNTAG (Bloody Sunday) at Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) in 1939. For correction, please see my review of: Dywersja niemiecka i zbrodnie hitlerowskie w Bydgoszczy na tle wydarzen w dniu 3 IX 1939 (Polish and German Edition). Meanwhile, the so-called Ethnic German Self-Defense Force murdered about 10,000 Poles, mostly in the Warthegau. (p. 132).

Polish guerilla action against German rule enjoyed some successes, but was repressed by the massive German presence. (pp. 206-207). More passive forms of Polish resistance included the torching of the barns of those farmsteads confiscated from the Poles and given to German settlers. (pp. 172-173).

NO FAVORS TO POLES OVER JEWS

Some Holocaust-uniqueness proponents have advanced the fallacious argument that, whereas the Jews could do nothing to improve their standing in the eyes of the Nazis, the Poles could redeem themselves undergoing Germanization. In actually, when the Germans thought of Germanizing Polish lands, they were not thinking in terms of transforming Poles into Germans, but of replacing Poles with ethnic Germans. (p. 129, 161, 195). During WWII, nearly 537,000 Germans were settled into the Warthegau. (p. 174).

Any “Germanization” of Poles was an act of recovering German blood (that is, re-Germanization of Polonized Germans), not an act of mercy to Poles! In addition, less than 0.5 percent of Warthegau Poles qualified–merely 17,234 out of 4.2 million Warthegau Poles total–compared further with the 700,000 Warthegau Poles deported. (p. 178, 192).

Epstein discusses the Warthegau DVL (VOLKSLISTE). Although beset with contradictions and practical difficulties, it generally followed this scheme: People of ethnic German ancestry were typified as: Pre-WWII strongly self-identified Germans (Type A), those weakly self-identified as Germans (Type B), largely Polonized but still deemed racially valuable (Type C), completely Polonized but not known to be hostile to Germanism (Type D), completely Polonized and hostile to Germanism (Type E; designated in Lodz only). Of the five types, only (A)-(C) obtained Reich citizenship. (pp. 195-197). In other areas of German-occupied Poland, a somewhat different system, using types I-IV, was used. (pp. 208-214). Among other things, it facilitated the drafting of Poles into the Wehrmacht. (p. 214).

POLOKAUST CHILLED BY GERMAN MILITARY REVERSES

Initial plans to expel all the Poles from Reich-annexed territories foundered in time. This owed to wartime difficulties as well as the need for Polish forced laborers. (p. 195). Instead, the German authorities imposed a strict segregation of Poles from Germans. For instance, both Poles and Germans were punished for sexual relations between them. (p. 198, 207).

NO GERMAN FAVOR TO POLES NOT WEARING THE “P” VERSUS JEWS WEARING THE STAR

Unlike the Jews who were forced to wear the Star (which is itself a myth, since, for example, the Danish Jews were never forced to wear the Star), the Poles were not forced to wear identification (such as the “P), because this would only highlight their numerical abundance! (p. 197). [Clearly, then, the double standard on wearing humiliating identification owed to utilitarian reasons, and not because the Nazis held some kind of more favorable view of Poles than Jews.] Ironically, it was the local Germans who had to provide identification of being German–a procedure that they commonly resented. (p. 197).

WHY POLES, UNLIKE JEWS, WERE NOT PLACED IN GHETTOS

Poles could not generally be confined to ghettos, because there were too many of them, and someone had to do the farming for the Germans to confiscate. Interestingly, however, some Poles were effectively placed in ghettos. Over 194,000 were locked in large camps, where they lived under very harsh conditions. (p. 177).

THE POLOKAUST: A STEP-BY-STEP NAZI GERMAN GENOCIDE OF THE POLES

Some 10,000 Poles were murdered by the Germans, in just the Warthegau area, in just the first several weeks of 1939 German rule. In fact, Greiser then told Goebbels that there is little left of the Polish intelligentsia. (p. 130). Later, Greiser had tens of thousands more Poles murdered. (p. 206, 266).

The Germans imposed cultural genocide on the Poles. They systematically gave German names to everything in an effort to erase all visible traces of Polish-ness. (pp. 261-262). They confiscated or destroyed Polish books, art, monuments, etc. (p. 235). The German authorities forbade Poles from attending museums, libraries, theaters, and concert halls. (p. 199). They virtually eliminated the use of the Polish language in public life. (pp. 200-201). The Germans closed schools to Poles, and then reopened them for Poles only at the elementary level, without any Polish academic content, and bereft of Polish teachers in favor of untrained German ones. (p. 201).

Although, owing to wartime developments, the Germans were unable to conduct systematic extermination of the Poles, they opted instead for passive forms of biological genocide. Author Epstein recognizes the fact that the Germans made policies deliberately designed to lower the Polish birth rate. (p. 215). This included the imposition of a high minimum age for marriage, discouraging marriages under various pretexts, taxing illegitimate births, refusing child subsidies or tax breaks for multiple childbearing, allowing abortions freely, and confiscating children from Polish mothers engaged in forced labor in the Reich. (pp. 215-21). The Germans arranged for Poles to be able to buy only low-quality food–which recognizably reduced Polish health and vigor. (pp. 199-200). To facilitate early “natural” deaths, the Germans generally deprived the Poles of pensions. (p. 201).

GENERALPLAN OST called for the eventual deportation and/or extermination of tens of millions of Slavs over a twenty-year period. (p. 161). Epstein realizes that, notwithstanding any supposedly fantastic aspects of GENERALPLAN OST, German exterminatory plans for non-Jews were very real. She comments, “Had the Nazis triumphed in World War II, the Third Reich would have seen a wholesale slaughter of many non-German peoples.” (p. 12).