Complicated Complicity: European Collaboration With Nazi Germany During World War II, edited by Martina Bitunjac and Julius H. Schoeps. 2021. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Jan Grabowski’s Multiple Falsehoods on the BAUDIENST
This book, largely by German scholars, discusses collaboration with the Third Reich. I limit my analysis to Poles and Jews.
JEW-KILLING “POLISH AUTONOMY” WAS EXTREMELY CONSTRAINED
The Baudienst has been the object of lies about “Polish complicity in the Holocaust”. Let us set the record straight.
German scholar Stephen Lehnstaedt writes, “Any examination of collaboration in occupied Poland must first of all state that there were no official offers of collaboration from the Germans to the ethnic Polish population. The exception of the Polish building service (BAUDIENST) in the General Government, in which volunteers were to build things like roads for the Germans, were notoriously unsuccessful. Food, lodging and the ridiculously low wages of one zloty a day were offered, but instead of the desired 150,000 workers, there were never more than 45,000, almost all of them forced, so that constant escapes were observed.” (p. 55. Emphasis added).
Jan Grabowski has been going around saying that Poles voluntarily took part in the search and killing of fugitive Jews under the auspices of the Baudienst. He is fibbing big time. To begin with, as shown above, only one-third of the expected Poles joined the Baudienst. Any Poles in the Baudienst were there under false pretenses: The Germans had portrayed it a construction battalion and not as a killing unit of Jews. Finally, Poles were forced to stay in the Baudienst, even when the Germans diverted it to the finding and killing of Jews. In no sense was Polish participation in the Baudienst a form of Polish “complicity in the Holocaust”.
For more on Grabowski’s false claims regarding Poles in the Baudienst, see:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/betrayals-of-jews-by-poles-contextualized-hirszfeld/
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/baudienst-not-polish-nazi-collaborators-slaski/
JEW-KILLING POLISH AUTONOMY? GERMANY CONSISTENTLY UNCONGENIAL TO ANY FORM OF POLISH COLLABORATION
Lehnstaedt continues, “The occupiers abolished or forbade and persecuted all organizations of the Polish state at the national and regional levels. Under no circumstances did they want to employ locals in responsible positions. Hitler explicitly rejected such considerations in the summer of 1941 and in the spring of 1943, when both the war against the Soviet Union and the discovery of the Soviet mass murders of Polish officers in Katyn had offered an opportunity for propaganda.” (p. 55).
He adds that, “For Poles there was no possibility of influence, all the tasks they had to perform for the Germans were of an auxiliary nature, were ordered and monitored by the Germans and any mistakes were severely punished. A Polish State Council, elected Polish mayors and city councils or even deputies in the Reichstag, as had existed in the two empires, were inconceivable to the Nazis and incompatible with their ideology.” (p. 66).
Jew-Killing Polish autonomy? Hardly. Any form of autonomy that would have allowed Poles to “voluntarily” hunt and kill Jews was essentially nonexistent. Hear that, Jan Grabowski?
JEWISH COLLABORATORS WERE NOT FORCED TO SERVE THE GERMANS
Nowadays, Jewish collaboration with the Nazis is dismissed as an impossibility, because “all Jews were victims of the Nazis”, and because “Jews were just trying desperately to do anything to save their own lives”. German scholar Julius H. Schoeps, by contrast, allowed for some form of voluntary Jewish collaboration. He writes,
“The debate about whether the Jewish Councils were coerced into working with the Nazis or did so on their own accord continues to be intensely controversial and emotional.” (p. 267).
