Stach, Steven. 2018. “It Was the Poles”. CZECH JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY VI:42-61
Long-Term German-Jewish Anti-Polishness Confirmed: Shifting Holocaust Blame to Poles
German historian Steven Stach confirms long-held Polish suspicions, “Poland and its inhabitants were, in particular, depicted as ‘eternal antisemites’ in American and West European media. This stereotype was often even expanded to include the thesis that the deeply rooted Polish antisemitism had been the true reason for German extermination camps set up in occupied Poland – a claim that has long been refuted by research. Western Bloc interest groups nevertheless instrumentalized this stereotype for their political aims.” (p. 43). Facts did not and do not matter.
This began largely with the efforts of German expellee groups, notably the “Gottingen group”, to relativize German WWII conduct (p. 52), to dichotomize Germans and Nazis (p. 52), and to make Poles as bad as the Germans (see below). The eventual goal was the forced revision of the postwar German-Polish border. (p. 44, 60-61). They began by utilizing the already-available Jewish Polonophobia. Stach writes, “Years ago, Klaus-Peter Friedrich already wrote of the 1960s German expellee press’ conspicuous interest in Polish antisemitism and connected strategies and goals… (It) began focusing on Polish antisemitism and Polish collaboration in the Holocaust in 1960. This initially involved statements made by Jewish researchers and journalists as well as treatments of the topic in literature and film, such as in Leon Uris’ books MILA 18 and EXODUS.” (pp. 49-50). So Jewish-German collusion against Poland, whether driven by a conspiracy or not, became a reality.
Poland pushed back, but the western press, as always, took the Jewish side, and made Poland the problem. They blamed the Polish victim for defending itself while dismissing the Polish response as nationalism and (what else?) antisemitism (at that time, Gomulka’s). Nothing has changed today, except the players.
The “Gottingen group”, ignoring Ringelblum’s diaries, published and cleverly re-titled his POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS to the deceptive WARSAW GHETTO: DIARIES FROM CHAOS. The fraud was palpable. Stach comments, “From that perspective, the German occupiers were only of marginal importance to the Jews of the Ghetto, with the Poles being the actual culprits in the persecution and murder of the Jews.” (p. 46). Also, “The text emphasized collective guilt of the Poles, while only peripherally mentioning the German role as the instigators of this activity, especially as planners, organizers, and perpetrators of the mass murder of Jews, portraying this as the deeds of but a few ‘German criminals.’…to create the impression that it was actually the Poles who bore a significant portion of blame for murdering the Jews. This all occurred, besides the change of the title, without altering the text, but through deliberately false contextualization…This strategy was quite a success.” (p. 47). It certainly was.
What about today? The Holocaust Industry never rests. The blame-Poland German-Jewish game is more powerful than ever and is now also “homegrown”, as exemplified by the so-called Polish Center for Holocaust Research. It does not matter that German expellee groups are politically marginal and Germany has no territorial ambitions against Poland. Or so we are told.
So we have German-Jewish Anti-Polishness Confirmed. For more on German and Jewish blame shifting with regards to the Jews’ Holocaust, see:
