Holocaust Exceptional All Jews Die a Myth Shulman

The Case of Hotel Polski, by Abraham Shulman. 1982

The Myth of Nazis Intending to Kill All Jews: Hotel Polski Affair Freed at Least 170 Jews

After the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) and the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, there were still some 10,000—30,000 Warsaw Jews still alive, but now hiding among Poles in the Aryan section of the city. (p. 10). [Note wide range of estimates of Jews fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto. Assuming 400,000 Jews in the relatively well-studied Warsaw Ghetto, this amounts to 2.5%–7.5%, which is much less than the 10% fugitive-Jews rate assumed by Jan Grabowski vel Abrahamer, for all of German-occupied Poland, as the cornerstone of his fantastic total of over 200,000 fugitive Jews killed by Poles.]

OUTLINE OF HOTEL POLSKI

The Hotel Polski in Warsaw became a focus of promises, by Nazis and their Jewish collaborators, for fugitive Jews to come out of hiding so that they could be amnestied by being declared foreign citizens. (pp. 12-13, 111). Interestingly, there are German documents that mention Hotel Polski (pp. 225-227), noting that the Jews there were to be transported away from there. What’s more, according to them, the Hotel Polski functioned while the Uprising was still going on.

About 5,000 fugitive Jews came out of hiding and took up the offer. (p. 23). Most Jews, however, remained hidden, believing that the Nazi offer was nothing more than a trap for them.

Was it? The Jews were allowed to accumulate in the hotel, and the first shipment of Jews from the Hotel was sent to the resort city of Vittel, France—the same place where foreign nationals were housed. (p. 49, 52, 113-119). In these and other places, the Hotel Polski Jews were granted promesas (promises of citizenship), written by foreign consulates, which could be exchanged, by hefty payment, for foreign citizenship. (p. 81, 106). In time, however, most of the Polish Jews at Vittel were isolated, and eventually dispatched to Auschwitz (p. 50), because America would not exchange them for German nationals. (p. 121). A similar fate befell the Hotel Polski Jews sent to Bergen Belsen, ostensibly to await the bestowal of mostly South American citizenship. (pp. 156-157).

HOTEL POLSKI AFFAIR FREED 170 JEWS. SO MUCH FOR THE ALL JEWS DIED MYTH

Pointedly, apart from individual escapes, over 170 Hotel Polski Jews (the Palestinian Group) were actually amnestied and freed. (p. 192-on, 215). So, contrary to Holocaust-uniqueness advocates, the Nazis were not unalterably determined to kill every single possible known Jew in their grasp. Shulman suggests that Hotel Polski may have been a genuine rescue effort that largely ended in failure. (p. 221). If so, then many more Jews may have gone free.

The fact that some Jews were actually freed strongly suggests that Hotel Polski was not a fraud—at least not entirely. Of course, this need not be black and white. So, Hotel Polski was probably simultaneously a fraud (designed to lure Jews out in the open for easy killing) AND an amnesty plan for freeing some Jews. Shulman comments: “And why did the promesas enjoy such success? First of all, the Germans were interested in getting their citizens from foreign countries in exchange for Jews. And, secondly, some of the Jews on the ‘Aryan’ side were fantastically wealthy, and the Germans wanted to lay their hands on these fortunes. And finally, the Germans wanted to create an impression in the world that they were a normal state which behaved decently and let out its foreign Jews.” (p. 81).

In any case, killing ALL possible Jews was not a goal of the Nazis!