Warnings By Poles of Shoah IGNORED Korbonski

Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939-1945, by Stefan Korbonski. 2004

Poles Didn’t Fail the Jews: The British and Local Jews Failed to Heed Polish Warnings. The “Polish Nationalists Won’t Admit Polish Wrongdoing” Canard Debunked

Stefan Korbonski, one of the last surviving leaders of the Polish Underground state, gives many insights into it. This includes everyday life under the German terror. Special emphasis is placed on the development and protection of clandestine radio transmitters. Interestingly, a simple rope-signaling system finally overcame high-tech German surveillance systems (p. 334). Good detail is provided about the murders of Poles at Palmiry, the Katyn Massacre. The reader learns details of the Soviet-betrayed 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and the subsequent systematic destruction of Warsaw by the vindictive Germans.

THE “POLISH NATIONALISTS WON’T ADMIT POLISH WRONGDOING” CANARD

The widely-acclaimed publications of NEIGHBORS and FEAR, by media-acclaimed Jan T. Gross, has accompanied accusations, by much of the media, of Poles being too proud to admit negative aspects of their history, specifically acts of Polish collaboration being ignored because they do not fit the ruling paradigm of Polish resistance, and the supposedly-relevant “Jesus Christ of Nations”. This nonsense keeps being repeated to the present time, notably with the controversy surrounding the much-demonized Polish law in 2018 that criminalized the anti-Polish hate speech that is “Polish Death Camps”.

The utter nonsense of such accusations is readily evident in Korbonski’s book. He devotes considerable detail to Polish consorting with and collaboration with the Germans (e. g., pp. 256-257). Polonophobes, read and reread these pages for your gratification.

BUT WHAT, EXACTLY, IS A POLISH COLLABORATOR?

The line between accommodation and collaboration was not always clear-cut. Korbonski clarifies the Volksdeutsche. While most of them were Polish-speaking Germans, some were ethnic Poles, of which only a small fraction should accurately be reckoned collaborators: “No sentence of death was ever passed on a Pole for having registered as a ‘Volksdeutsche’. The reason for this leniency was that the problem was more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Roughly speaking, the problem bore different aspects in the various aspects in the various provinces of Poland. The Silesians, for example, at the very beginning of the German occupation and in sheer self-defense, decided to register as Volksdeutsche, which in my opinion did not affect their patriotism and devotion to Poland. In Pomerania, from which district large numbers were deported to the General Government, the remainder of the population was compulsorily registered as German, and all men of military age were conscripted into the German Army. The same occurred in Posnania [Poznania]. These soldiers by compulsion eventually deserted from the German army and joined the ranks of the Second Polish Corps in Italy. It was only in the General Government that the Poles were not compelled to register as Germans and cases of defection were extremely rare.”(p. 135).

THE POLICJA GRANATOWA WAS, ON THE WHOLE, NOT COLLABORATIONIST

Wrongly equated with the Jew-killing Ukrainian and Baltic collaborationist units (the infamous Hilfspolizei, or Hiwis), the Polish Blue Police (POLICJA GRANATOWA) was, in actuality, an anti-criminal force: ”The Blue Police consisted of the pre-war Polish Police force; the Germans made them co-operate for the maintenance of public order.”(p. 93). Of course, individual Blue Policemen did become open collaborators, and some of these were killed by the underground for helping the Germans kill Poles (p. 130, 134) and Jews (p. 206).

The question of choicless choices applies to Poles as well as Jews. Some units of the Polish Blue Police were used by the Germans, without their full consent (or ANY consent), for anti-Polish and anti-Jewish actions. As a result, the Blue Police was warned by the underground not to take part in the roundups of Poles for forced labor in Germany (pp. 118-119, 224).

All in all, the actions of the Blue Police defied simplistic classification: ”The attitude of the underground authorities towards the Blue Police was hostile, because as a body it had become a tool in the hands of the German police; but a number of policemen, such as the above-mentioned Inspector, were members of the underground, and frequently carried out most dangerous instructions. The Blue Police were aware that the underground authorities had ordered the suppression of banditry, so they were always glad to take a hand against them.”(p. 242).

POLISH WARNINGS ABOUT THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST–DISBELIEVED BY THE BRITISH

There are common mischaracterizations of Poles being indifferent too, or even secretly approving of, the Germans’ extermination of the Jews. The truth is otherwise. Korbonski recounts the fact that underground Polish reports of Jews being sent to death camps were disbelieved by the British (pp, 252-253). Neither were the events of the Warsaw Ghetto (p. 359) accepted. (The advantage of freed British POW John Ward, reporting on the Germans’ use of Polish civilian shields around their tanks during the Warsaw Uprising was the fact that he, an Englishman, was believed: p. 359).

POLISH WARNINGS ABOUT THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST–DISBELIEVED BY THE DOOMED JEWS

In a cruel irony to the malicious charges (e. g., the movie SCHINDLER’S LIST) of Poles cheering as Jews were being railroaded to death camps, the laughter was actually on the other side: ”However, when the trains from the various countries continued to arrive, and when here and there Polish railwaymen were able to whisper a warning to the unfortunate Jews, they were not believed and were laughed at, especially by those Jews who traveled in passenger trains with their luggage and bedding; who were convinced that they were being transported to some labour camp, and that they would be able to survive the war by working hard.”(p. 254).

THE FALLACY OF “ETHNIC FRONTIERS” THAT WERE IMPOSED ON POLAND

On the basis of the fact that the Kresy (eastern borderlands) had “only” an ethnically Polish minority (albeit a large one), the British supported Soviet claims to Poland’s eastern half. However, most of the non-Poles on these territories were not pro-Soviet, and some were pro-Polish. Consider the following entreaty: ”I am a man from Minsk. Now that the Minsk province is under German occupation we can get in touch with people in the motherland. I have come to Warsaw as a representative of the ancient province of Minsk to ask the Polish Government not to forget our country, so that after the war the Minsk territory may be reunited with the motherland. It has been a Polish land for centuries, and wherever you go you’ll find evidence of it. There are Poles still living there, and they are dreaming of a reunion. And the White-Ruthenians, too, dream of Poland as their deliverer from the Soviet hell.”(p. 314). This was not to be.