What proportion of the Polish population collaborated with the Nazis?

I should point out, Sascha, that a point of extreme embarrassment to all Jews everywhere, is the existance of the so-called "Judenrat", a committee of Jews appointed from among the Jewish communities of Germany to, in a sense, act as go-between (Vermittler) or liaison between the Jews and the Nazis! A great deal has been written on this painful subject in a neverendingly painful chapter of history. There were of course a number of Judenraete all over Germany at tha time, each hoping to by for time by making deals with the enemy, many of which most compromising indeed.

why so? they just wanted to pull out the best for their people. i consider that as a smart move or are jews in general more comfortable with the 100% victim role?

if thats true what you claim that i really doubt their smartness, but honestly there might be some calculation behind, again.....

Embarrassment? Einfach Mitlaeuferei, lieber Sascha-:) Just plain running with the pack, Sascha. Nevertheless, the fact that the Jews of Germany were forced into this situation to begin with constitutes the real tragedy!! Think of the so-called "informers" (Spitzel) in one-time East Germany. Sure, many did it for the kick, while many, many more did so only to stay alive. Ever seen "Das Leben der Anderen"?? I actually pitied Wiesler, the Ulrich Muehe character, at the end. How about you? "Goodbye, Lenin!" was more of a spoof than a serious film. Wonder if there's a Polish version of "Das Leben..", comparing Poland before and after the 'collapse' of Communism.

watched it of course. great movie.
good-bye lenin is some nostalgic movie on the eastern times of gdr. ;)

there are actually in the recent times some decent movies originated from ger, like the baader meinhoff komplex.

a real old classis is the movie, soweit die fuesse tragen. try to find the version from the 50s or 60s. its in b+w but shows the typical german spirit...

collaborators in any kind of form do it imo just to survive and take the best out of the situation. is this at all a topic in pl? pl and their collaborators?

"Soweit die Fuesse.." based on the real-life novel by Hermann Schreiber, isn't it? Think I read/saw it years ago (in the original, of course). Can't recall though.

Well, I fear we've gotten nice and off-topic,
Apologies, Admin. Staff. We'll be good.-:))

Jan Gross talks a lot about Polish-German collaboration regarding a shared anti-semitism. Many have denounced "Strach" (Fear) as nothing more than a pack of lies. I disagree, even though I wasn't there (nor, do I imagine was anyone else here on PF). His sources seem unimpeachable.

Martin Bauer. Whoopsidaisy! Goofed once again, MIST!!!

In the mid to late 1940s, there was a considerable interest in Poland in (1) prosecuting people who collaborated with Germany, and (2) using the pretext of collaboration to prosecute political opponents of the communist government. So, if there was anything to be prosecuted, it was prosecuted (and this includes the collaborators from Jedwabne, for example). And much more.

60 years later Jan Gross woke up and decided to make himself a nice career by catering to the bigotry of descendants of the people, who spent the war comfortably in Brooklyn. His sources are no better than the sources available to Polish prosecutors immediately after the war. If he derives more conclusions from them, it's based on his creativity, selective approach to sources, subordinate to proving his thesis, and (last but not least) the corruption of the witnesses' memories after decades of exposure to certain myths, persistent in the Jewish community. I want to illustrate the latter with a personal experience:

A Jewish man called "Dentist from Auschwitz" came with a lecture to a university where I was working. The lecture started with an account of his pre-war life, he told about studying dentistry in Warsaw, about deciding if he wanted to be religious or not, et caetera. Just a typical account of a life of a wealthy, moderately spoiled kid from a privileged family. And suddenly he probably reminded himself that he forgot something important, and felt obliged to add that "pre-war Poland was unlivable for Jews". See my point? To hell with facts. "Unlivable". Forget about being a student, and about living comfortably enough to preoccupy himself with philosophical problems. 60 years later "everybody knows" that streets in Warsaw were filled by fascist thugs with baseball bats, hunting Jews. Right? The same mechanism is responsible for the historical revisionism of Gross and his faithful readers. You guys just "know"... Perhaps it's time to address the bigotry within your community? Or perhaps you guys simply need this false history, for nation-building purposes or something else?

In 1943, the people who started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, raised two flags above the Ghetto: the one with the Star of David, and the white and red Polish flag. Are you suggesting that they knew less than American Jews?

I AM suggesting, in fact, I'm telling you that American were indeed "kept in the dark" by our own government about much of what was going on in Europe. Even many Jews claimed unawareness of the total extent of the Death Camps, etc..

Looks like not much has changed since. LOL

Many people, especially on internet and in the movies, get very different ideas as to what resistance and conversely, collaboration, are all about.
For some, nothing short of falling on a sword will do.
For others, staying alive through years of occupation is highly suspect.
What is more heroic: a suicide mission or surviving the concentration camp?

thats still the strategy. nothing much has changed.

Seeing as how he would have been forced to sit on the ghetto benches at university (assuming that he managed to make it past the quotas limiting Jewish students from attending university) and then when he graduated would not have been able to practise (as Jews were in the late 1930s banned from joining the Polish medical association, membership of which was required in order to practice, just as membership of the Bar association was required to practise law and Jews were banned from joining that too), as somebody who wanted to be a dentist he may well have had a point. But do feel free to ignore the inconvenient facts of Polish history.

An old family friend (his widow is still alive in her 90s) was a victim of the pre-war bar association. He wasn't even Jewish, just politically unacceptable to them. So he came to England and made a fortune as a lawyer there.


People can survive in the most hostile situations. And often have to.


Pre-war Warsaw was a lot tougher than you think. And yes, there were certainly fascist thugs.

In the end, it was the apparently seamless upward mobility of many Jews that angered their gentile contemporaries. In Austria, for instance, it looked in the early days of the last century as though all lawyers, doctors (including dentists) and a majority of the university professors in Vienna at least, were Jews, be they full, half-Jews or converts to Catholicism. This also became their undoing, since people such as Freud, Mahler and a number of others from backwater areas or shtettls, quickly acquired a solid education and became accepted into Austrian society (nominally at any rate). While is certainly was true that men such as Dr. Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna and a fierce anti-semite was born to humble working-class parents, and not to the middle or upper classes, his was deemed an exception. Double standard as it was, when a shtettl born Jew graduated from a top university, gentiles immediately picked on his rough, Yiddish-accented country diction as well as his Jewish appearance as running counter the Christian aesthetic. Gentiles such as Lueger, or even the homely, peasant-like composer Bruckner from rustic Ansfelden nearby Linz, could be a countrified as they wished; it was part of their "charm"!

In Poland, the situation couldn't have been more different in this respect. Whereas in Austria, Jews were considered Austrians, albeit perhaps somewhat begrudgingly, in Poland Jews were scarcely regarded as Poles and rarely rose to such positions in their society as Freud, Kraus, Mahler, Mottl, Schnitzler did in theirs!

See what I meant? The myth is so persistent that JonnyM uses (in #105) an example of a family friend who "wasn't even Jewish" to illustrate the alleged persecution of Jews in Poland! Guys, hate blinds you so much that you don't even notice that your arguments are at the Alice in the Wonderland level of absurdity. Forget about historical facts. You know better.

Now, if you really want to hate Poles, then feel free. But what goes around, comes around. You probably wonder what may be responsible for the phenomenon of "anti-semitism without Jews"? Here you go - the hateful historical revisionism, by descendants of people who spent the war comfortably in Brooklyn and L.A., for example.

This concludes my participation in this thread. Thank you for the discussion.

Can you please go into details about how the ban on Jews joining the medical association and the Bar association was "alleged persecution". Or should we assume from the way that you have completely ignored the facts about the dentist who spoke to you that you simply wish to ignore the inconvenient parts of Polish history?


I think that you are confusing what you do with what we do.

It isn't a myth and my example was about the behaviour of the bar association.


Historical facts are that certain professions were restricted - Jews were effectively excluded from sections of society.


You seem to confuse hating certain behaviours with hating Poles. Either you aren't very good at logic or you're being disingenuous.


An easy question. Deep-seated-prejudice.


Not very well, it seems.

P.S. Numerus clausus is just a synonym of affirmative action, by the way.
Pre-war admission system in Poland wasn't banning Jews. It simply adjusted the number of admissions to the proportional representation in the population. As much as I personally disagree with ANY quotas, the quota system in pre-war Poland (introduced in a situation where Jews were already well represented among doctors and lawyers, and constituted over 50% of these professionals) was no different than, for example, what the American Jewish Committee advocated in the amici brief regarding some high profile AA cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. You guys not only can live with the quota system in the present-day U.S. You guys actively support it! Now, think a moment what makes your attitude toward the quota system in pre-war Poland so vastly different. There are several possible answers, and you are not going to like any of them, because they ultimately boil down to Jewish exceptionalism.

Please try to tell the truth: the pre-war association bans prevented Jews from entering the medical and legal professions.


Precisely the same justification which the Nazis used for their bans on Jews entering the medical and legal professions.


No, I do not. But do feel free to argue with what I do not say: you clearly can not argue with what I do say.

He's also avoiding the issue of Jews being excluded from many (most) public sector posts and the mass expulsion of Jewish children from elementary schools by local authorities early in 1939.


You assume too much. Despite the 'quota system' in the US being designed to help a downtrodden minority.

Please try to tell the truth: it was technically impossible for a professional self-government organization, where Jews constituted 65-70% (as in the case of the Lwów bar, see the reference in my above post) to introduce anti-Jewish policies out of anti-Jewish sentiments. There were university admission policies equivalent to affirmative action (introduced in 1937, if I am correct), but this neither constitutes making any country "unlivable" for the affected group, nor was unique to Poland or to the pre-war period.

I am happy that you don't support the present-day U.S. AA policies. Neither do I. Nevertheless, AJC does, and this substantially weakens the case of Jews against the Polish quota system.

There was no particular love in the pre-war Poland for the non-assimilating Jewish minority. However, this had NOT translated into genocide or a substantial participation in it during the war. The pre-war Polish solution was two-fold. 1. Assimilation (Tarski, Ulam etc.); 2. Actively supporting the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine. You may find this Israeli source interesting, albeit it is yet another thing incompatible with the revisionist version of history most American Jews subscribe to.


You forgot to add that these children were actually eaten by Polish anti-semites. Come on, there is no absurd you guys cannot say with a straight face.

In Poland there were no laws or institutional policies barring Jews from any public sector posts.

YET,it was an Austrian who came up with the idea of exterminating Jews like roaches and it seems that the rest of Austrians didn't mind it at all.


Because many were not and did not considered themselves Poles.


I heard about Freud,who are the other four?And you are wrong,plenty of Jews in Poland rose to affluent and influential positions.

You are very ignorant in regard to the topic of Polish jews and obviously anti Polish in your ignorance.


Just give up man,it's like trying to prove you are not a camel,you know.

Ok, this is really off-topic, but I'll bite. The AA system in the U.S. actually discriminates against a formerly downtrodden minority (Asians) for the sake of achieving strictly numerical quotas. The current "underrepresented" minorities' "downtrodden" status is attributable to cultural factors characteristic to these communities. All arguments to the contrary disintegrate when they are confronted with the success of East Asians, who don't fail to achieve, in spite of the past discrimination.

Grubas, when you look at the Jews who rose to prominence, they were regarded as Jews FIRST, as Poles possibly last. I also don't believe that the Polish Jews, at least in the major cities (in the small villages, I would asssume not) wanted assimilation any less than those in Vienna, Budapest, Prague or any other urban centers. It stands to reason that the socially mobile felt embarrassed by their poor, less educated and rubish cousins from the shtettl, but the fact is the basic anti-Jewish feeling, especially in the countryside made total assimilation next to impossible.

Quotas still exist in the US, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. Was it for example the Jews' fault that many were steered into various professions, e.g. dentistry, business, real estate etc.., simply because there was an over-abundance of those types of jobs at the time?? Does simple supply and demand mean nothing to you??

You are in fact willfully ignorant of Jewish history, my friend!

Lyzko: as I already have illustrated (post #88) with an example from contemporary America, it is Jews who don't want to assimilate, and who treat assimilation as an antithesis of Jewishness. Definitely, such attitudes slowly vanish, but this has nothing to do with the basic observation: Jews in the past didn't want to assimilate at all, and the cultural bias against assimilation is so strong that to this day it produces uniquely bigoted opinions from rabbis in America, such as the one that I quoted in #88.

Jews in larger urban centers were less dominated by religious factors, and thus more open to assimilation (prominent examples, in re: #106, include the already mentioned mathematicians Tarski and Ulam, also Artur Rubinstein, Julian Tuwim, Jan Kiepura).

Why doesn't it surprise me that someone who rants about "Polish people are being conditioned against patriotism" is the same person who rants about Jews?

As for "uniquely bigoted" - anyone who isn't bigoted could easily pull up plenty of similar examples from different faiths.

There is a huge difference between patriotism and exceptionalism. Patriotism is not based on the principle of denying others their fundamental rights. Exceptionalism makes the rights of others outright subordinate to the needs of the group that considers itself exceptional.

As for "uniquely bigoted" and examples from other faiths: absolutely! Mullahs from Iran and Pakistan immediately spring to mind.

Ah yes, the latter is what can be commonly seen in modern day Poland among self-proclamed patriots, many of which contribute to Poland in ways such as through violence, criminality and tax evasion.

Pretty close. Similar traits that define individuals as criminals are responsible for the exceptionalism of groups/ethnicities.

Jews in America (as opposed to American Jews) stand at a crossroads. On the one hand, never in our history has there been more indiscriminant intermarriage, despite the number of Jews out there for us to choose from. This is NOT America of the 19th to mid-20th century, where outside of maybe New York, Jews were an exotic commodity, nor post-War Italy, Germany etc.. where Jews were in such short supply, EVERY Jew practically was forced by sheer dwindling numbers, to marry outside their faith.

On the other hand, as a response to this phenomenon, never before has sectism been as devisive a part of the Diasporic American Jewish experience as today; Monsey, NY, Williambsburg, Brooklyn etc.... live Jews who purposely live their whole lives and die without ever interacting with a gentile, and (worse yet) remain proud of this fact.

I figure the person who called Jews intellectuals and measures every boychik against a future Einstein... has never been to Borough Park-:)

@ShortHairThug
Donald Tusk' dad served for the nazis, what a scummy ****** we elected as president