The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Morgenthau and his commission wanted the Jews in Poland to secure the same socio-economic opportunities as they enjoyed elsewhere. Officials then drafted a new constitution that was compatible with Poland’s special treaty with the allies in which the country verified its support of minority rights. This would allow the Jews to engage in business and be viewed with respect and as assets to the country. The Jews in America and elsewhere had an interest in their well-being and wish to cooperate in solving the cultural inequality although it might take one or two generations to accomplish. 891

  Hugh Gibson, the U.S. Minister to Poland, as well as the Polish authorities, assisted the ACNP and made accommodations for meeting facilities where they could gather large groups of people. Morgenthau’s group did this “to obtain a correct impression of what had occurred, of the present mental state of the public, and of the attitude of the various factions toward one another” to access the Polish view of the Jews. 892 The commission investigated eight events: 1) Kielce, November 11, 1918; 2) Lemberg, Nov. 21-23, 1918; 3) Pinsk, April 5, 1919; 4) Lida, April 17, 1919; 5) Wilno, April 19-21, 1919; 6) Kolbussowa, May 7, 1919; 7) Czestochowa, May 27, 1919; and 8) Minsk, August 8, 1919. The total number of people killed was 280. Officials punished very few of the civilian perpetrators and allowed the majority to escape culpability. 893

  Anti-Semitism in Poland

  The Polish census of September 30, 1921, enumerated 2,048,878 Jews. 894 The census of December 9, 1931 enumerated 2,732,600 Jews. According to the Anglo-American Committee on European Jewry and Palestine, there were 3,351,000 Jews in Poland in 1939. Many of those Jews who left Poland in the 1930s were young men, making it improbable that there would have been an increase, due to reproduction, of 620,000 in eight years. 895 The 1931 census showed a higher ratio of Jewish females over males which suggests a few probabilities—young Jewish males emigrated from Poland, in search of employment, or, during peacetime, they enlisted in the military. The census did not enumerate members of the military. 896 Gerald Reitlinger justified the huge discrepancy in the number by saying that the census only enumerated “racial Jews.” Even Jewish sources vary from one another in their population “facts.” In one source, it states that the 1931 census enumerated 3,113,933 of the Jewish “faith.” The largest Jewish population was in Warsaw. Over fifty percent of all Jews lived in the central and eastern provinces. 897

  The Jews made up between thirty-one and thirty-seven percent in the cities and towns and in some cities as much as fifty percent of the population, especially in eastern Poland, with comparatively few Jews in rural areas. Throughout Poland, there were about 108 Jews for every 1,000 non-Jews. In the urban areas, there were 375 Jews and only thirty-three in the countryside with three-quarters of the Jewish populace living in urban areas or in smaller towns called shtetls, which functioned as trading and manufacturing hubs for the local peasantry. Only a quarter of the non-Jewish population resided in urban areas. Jews typically did not engage in farming while eighty-five percent of the non-Jews were farmers. There were only 125,123 Jews (including family members), engaged in farming, out of 3.1 million that officials classified as peasants. By 1931, nearly ninety percent of all Jews residing in Poland lived in urban areas. In some towns, Jews composed as much as sixty-three percent of the population while most were between forty and forty-nine percent. According to the 1931 census, there was not one town in eastern Poland, in which Jews made up less than twenty-five percent of the population. 898

  In central and eastern Poland, at least seven times as many Jews were self-employed compared to non-Jews. They were merchants, artisans, doctors, and lawyers, cultural distinctions that generated very clear socio-economic disparities between the Jews and non-Jews, who had a higher fertility rate. In 1931, there were only seven Jewish births compared to 100 non-Jewish births. Birth rates began to drop after World War I, because younger people began immigrating. Older people, with stronger connections to the country, remained which is also applicable to Germany, where, in 1933, 500,000 Jews lived (differs with Klein’s figure), of which 160,000 were over fifty. By 1939, only 272,000 Jews lived in Germany, with 140,000, fifty or older. 899

  Polish records, questionably reliable, indicate that from 1934 to 1937, 68,000 Jews emigrated from Poland to Palestine; though most of them had familial connections in America. From 1933 to 1943, 400,000 Jews went to America, a small fraction of which were from Germany, as substantiated by the pro-Zionist Institute for Contemporary History—most of the immigration did not originate in Germany but rather in Poland. Jewish sources say that only twenty-six percent of the German-Jewish emigrants went to America by the end of 1940. While 4.3 million Jews lived in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries before the war, it appears that the majority of Jews that relocated to America were from Poland. At least 100,000 Jews a year left Poland after 1933. Several western European countries accepted tens of thousands Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. At least 480,000 Jews lived in France, most likely, from Poland, despite Jewish claims that eighty-three percent of the immigrants relocated to North and South America, England, Palestine, and Shanghai. 900

  During the 1930s, with a declining economic situation, angry, resentful Polish citizens regularly coordinated violent campaigns to force Jews out of the economy. The Polish courts, the Catholic Church and the Central Government approved of and/or permitted the boycotts of Jewish stores as well as other such incidents. This led to emigration, especially by young Jews who would have stayed in the country and had families. From early 1932 to when Germany invaded, due to immigration, the Jewish population in Poland was about 2,664,000. Polish records indicate that 31,216 Polish-Jewish soldiers died in the German-Polish War. By October 6, 1939, the war’s end, the number of Jews in Poland would be 2,633,000. Yet, the Anglo-American Committee inflated the figure to 3,351,000, a discrepancy of 700,000. 901

  Thousands of Jews emigrated from Poland to Germany as Polish citizens retaliated against them. Jews preferred to live under Hitler, even with the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935. 902 In July 1937, Albert Alien wrote an article, Polish Pogroms, for The Flight. He said, “In no country has anti-Semitism been so sustained and devastating as in Poland.” On April 2, 1938, William Zukerman, a pro-Soviet Jew, wrote an article for The Nation in which he stated that for the last two years, Jews in Poland, with its anti-Jewish policies, had suffered constant physical assaults and pogroms, unequaled by any other country in Europe. Zukerman, on February 19, 1946, claimed that German anti-Semitism was political while Poland’s pathological anti-Semitism resulted in physical attacks on the Jews in the streets, parks and public places, with daily beatings of students, men and women. 903 Marxist Jews in Poland allied with the Communist Party while the Zionist Jews, allied with Irgun, cooperated with the Polish government, and downplayed the pogroms. Irgun officials pursued Poland’s young, dissatisfied Jews who favored a Zionist Palestine. 904 Zionists in Poland advocated any strategy, including violence, to acquire Palestine. In 1931, Vladimir Jabotinsky created Irgun, a terrorist organization. In the 1930s, angry Poles participated in dozens of retaliatory anti-Jewish riots. 905

  Poland’s Mandate: Exterminate the Germans

  The Germans under Polish jurisdiction were particularly vulnerable as some of the Poles apparently had a seething hatred against Germans, demonstrated by the Polish hymn against Germans which dates from the 1848 revolution when radical Polish individuals were demanding greater autonomy within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

  Let our foe, the German, fall! I, your priest do promise you

  Plunder, rob, and set on fire! Bliss and joy in Heaven above . . .

  Let the enemy die in pain; But the curse will fall on him

  He that hangs those German dogs, who doth plead the German cause.

  Reaps reward from God on High. 906

  An old Polish proverb reads, “Póki swiat swiatem, Polak Niemcowi nie bedzie bratem.�
� This proverb translated into English means: “As long as the world will exist, the Pole will never be the German’s brother.”

  By November 1920, individuals, unrestrained by the authorities, began persecuting Germans despite the treaties, which proved to be inadequate and ineffective, just a paper formality that gave the architects of the Versailles Treaty the aura of impartiality when all the while they recognized that merging predisposed peoples would predictably cause conflict. The treaty functioned as the League of Nations’ injunction for Poland to gain compliance from the subjugated population. 907 Poland, according to the treaty was supposed to guarantee to the minorities “the preservation of their national culture and traditional way of life.” Despite the fact that there was a plebiscite in 1921 against it, the allies awarded the resource-rich German-populated industrial Upper Silesian area, 46,150 square kilometers to Poland. The Versailles Treaty was “another way of continuing the war” that could “become an even greater evil for the whole world than the war itself.

  On April 10, 1923, Władysław Sikorski, Poland’s Prime Minister revealed the government’s new program, “the liquidation of German estates and the de-Germanization” of certain areas, especially Danzig. By mid-1923, Polish officials took extraordinary measures against German landowners. The World Court, on September 10, warned Polish authorities but they disregarded the admonition, without fear of any legal retribution. 908

  Roman Dmowski and the Polish military promoted hostility towards Germany, which the Polish population readily endorsed. Marxists know that national minorities provide an opportune environment for conflict. The allies exploited the idea of “German guilt,” making it applicable to both world wars, up to current time. 909 Polish individuals often brutally flogged peasants in the Ukrainian villages with a knout, a lash consisting of a tapering bundle of leather thongs twisted with wire and hardened in order to totally mangle the victim’s body. Women were “shamefully mishandled.” The Poles destroyed homes, schools, stores, and libraries. Polish officials sent the Polish Cavalry and police into the countryside on what they called a “mission of pacification,” nothing but a campaign of systematic violence perpetrated against the minority populations. 910

  This pacification operation consisted of Polish soldiers entering a village that was supposedly guilty of destroying Polish farmland. The soldiers seized the leading men of the village—the mayor, church leaders, and other prominent men. These men had to report to the Polish commander of the detachment and turn in all of their weapons. They were also required to give information about any offensive acts committed against the Poles. If they did not supply the right answers, they received sixty to ninety strikes from the knout. If the victim passed out, the soldiers revived them by throwing cold water on them. Then they would continue flogging them. The officials subjected women, for various crimes, to the same treatment. 911

  Polish soldiers also beat women and children who were not properly subservient. They often raped women, the universal custom of soldiers in foreign lands. They destroyed property—it was warfare without planes and bombs—just terrorism against unarmed minorities abandoned by the dictates of the Versailles Treaty. A correspondent for The Manchester Guardian visited a primitive hospital in Lviv, to take pictures and interview eleven, almost unrecognizable victims, whose flesh the Polish agents, in December 1930, had beaten into a bloody pulp. The Poles immediately attempted to find and destroy the plates and prints. The American press horrified the public when they printed some reports about the Polish and their organized raids in East Galicia. How could the Poles suppress and terrorize an innocent peasantry into submission? 912

  By September 1931, some Polish officials admitted that they had driven out more than a million Germans. Yet, the League of Nations remained silent and immobile. Poland’s German minority and the Soviet’s Ukrainian minority, many of whom were Volga Germans, were under the treaty’s protection. Both groups repeatedly appealed for protection but continued to suffer massive abuses under oppressive, hostile governments without any assistance or relief. 913 Alternatively, in 1931, The New York Times had reported dozens of stories about the anti-Jewish riots in Poland, resulting in school closings, and the killing and injuring of Jews. Similar riots took place in Romania, Hungary and Austria. Germany experienced less domestic strife involving Jews than elsewhere. On October 18, the Times reported, Hitler stated that the National Socialist Party, if elected, would restore “law and order” in Germany.

  The Poles herded Germans together by the thousands and force-marched them, twenty-five to thirty miles per day, into Poland’s interior. The victims included women, children, old men and women, as old as eighty-three. They also targeted influential people in the communities—professors, church leaders and others. They tied them together in twos; many of them were barefoot or still in their nightclothes as the Polish officials had dragged them from their beds. The Poles gathered the ethnic Germans from the towns of Bromberg, Posen, Lissa, Gratz, Schroda, Schrimm, Obornik and Wollstein. The Polish guards beat, cursed, and stabbed them with their bayonets. The Germans suffered hunger and thirst; their feet were bleeding and festering. Many were ill and burning with fever. Their destination was eastwards to the infamous Bereza-Kartuska, 914 the former Czarist prison at Bereza-Kartuska as a detention center, authorized for use on July 12, 1934.

  The Polish guards physically and sexually abused the women, and then left them to die along the road. Passing Polish soldiers along the way took out their anger against the Germans on these unarmed, bleeding and dying citizens. They drove the children, often as young as three, along with the rest. The Polish had strict orders to shoot anyone who fell behind. Consequently, they shot hundreds of German minorities, filling the roads and ditches. 915

  Marienburg, in West Prussia, was under Polish jurisdiction and renamed Malbork. The Poles deported Germans and confiscated their assets. There were some 1,840 Germans unaccounted for, missing from their homes and farms. Construction workers recently found a mass grave containing at least 1,800 people, including women and children. All of the bodies were naked when they were buried. Many of the skulls had evidence of bullet holes. Forensic scientists indicate there is “strong evidence” that the remains are German. By spring 2009, the number of bodies recovered was 2,116. Max Domming, now 78, an ethnic German from the area, recalls seeing a group of 200-300 women and children, herded by the Polish militia in the winter of 1945. On November 3, 1947, Polish authorities announced, “the Marienburg area was almost 100% purged of Germans.” 916

  The Germans Shoot Back

  In 1929, René Martel said, “All Polish ideas end up, basically, as plans for expansion. Far from wishing to resolve the question of the Corridor in a manner acceptable to Germany, they are dreaming in Poland of extending that territory by annexing Danzig and East Prussia in one way or another.” The nationalists also wanted land in Lithuania, and in the Czech and Slovakian territories. In 1932, Colonel Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, said, “Poland could not even be content with the status quo.” In 1939, the warmongering Polish government would continue making “territorial demands.” 917

  In 1933, the Polish press, dominated by the Jews, immediately began vilifying Hitler. Jozef Pilsudski sent soldiers to Danzig to support and strengthen the military garrison protecting the Westerplatte, an army depot near Danzig. One of his colleagues issued a statement “for the western territories, Poland can and will speak only with the voice of her cannons.” Hans von Moltke, Germany’s envoy in Warsaw revealed to Hitler in a report the fact that Pilsudski had approached officials in Paris to determine their interest in joining Poland in a “preventative war” against Germany. On May 2, Hitler met with the Polish ambassador, Jozef Lipski, during which he agreed to heed all Polish-German treaties. 918

  On May 17, Hitler spoke before the Reichstag during which he stated that he wished to find an equitable solution that would meet the demands of the Polish officials as well as satisfy the nee
ds of ethnic Germans living under their jurisdiction. In November, Pilsudski, after France rejected his invitation to join Poland in a war against Germany, accepted Hitler’s offer of a non-aggression friendship treaty with Germany and beneficial trade agreements that would help lift Poland’s weakened economy. Hitler instructed Danzig’s NS senate to discontinue reporting its grievances regarding Polish violations of German minority rights to the League of Nations. Germans living under Polish jurisdiction felt discouraged and abandoned over Hitler’s recent reconciliation with Poland. 919

  German-Polish Agreement, 1934

  When Hitler came to power, Pilsudski queried certain French officials to see if they would collaborate with Poland to jointly invade Germany. They rejected his outrageous suggestion of an attack against a country that had not threatened anyone. Pilsudski then sent Ambassador Mikhail Milstein to Lithuania to seek a military alliance with them against Germany. They also wisely declined. 920 Pilsudski, who some credit as an outstanding Polish leader, 921 perhaps now playing the devil’s advocate for the benefit of diplomacy, initially appeared responsive to Hitler’s proposals. Yet, he apparently lacked any genuine authority and the moral courage and fortitude to transform the hearts and minds of the population, a nation influenced by their media-biased ministers and the Jewish-controlled press. Further, despite his political position, he could not compel subordinate Polish officials to impartially treat the German minority, people that the Poles thought merited extermination, which in fact, the Polish government initially sanctioned. When powerful entities, such as local ministers and the press incite people to hatred, it takes substantial power to counter such influence.