'Orgy of Murder': The Poles Who 'Hunted' Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis

The Skidel Revolt (Polish: Powstanie Skidelskie) or Skidal Uprising (term used in Soviet historiography) was an anti-state and anti-Polish sabotage action perpetrated by the Jewish and Belarusian inhabitants of the Polish town of Skidel near Nowogródek (now Skidzyel’, Belarus) at the onset of World War II. It started on the second day of the Soviet invasion of Poland in an attempt to assist the external attack.[1]

Skidal after the 1939 annexation by the USSR
Skidal
Location of Skidal on the Russian map of Polish territories (yellow) annexed and incorporated into the Soviet Belarus (pink) after the invasion of Poland
Contents
Background Edit
Main article: Soviet invasion of Poland
The events Edit
The revolt of 18 September 1939 was organized by the Communist Party of West Belarus which was outlawed by Poland in 1938. According to Russian documents, it consisted of around 200 men, although their number has been contested by Polish historian Marek Wierzbicki as exaggerated.[2] A group of Jews and Belarusians, members and sympathizers of the delegalized Communist Party, all citizens of Poland, took control of the town of Skidel and some nearby locations, acquired firearms, often from skirmishes with Polish Army units and police[2] Similar incidents of various severity, with pro-communist activists attacking and taking over local government offices, arresting or fighting with Polish police and army personnel, took place in numerous nearby settlements including Jeziory [be; pl], Wiercieliszki, Wielka Brzostowica, Dubno, Wołpa, Indura (near Grodno), Sopoćkinie, Zelwa, Wołkowysk, Ostryna, Zdzięcioł (near Nowogródek), Janów Poleski, Horodec, Antopol, Drohiczyn Poleski and Motol nearby among other locations.[1] In a number of instances, individual or groups of former authority figures, such as civil servants, landowners, priests, rural settlers, policemen and reserve officers, usually of Polish ethnicity, were murdered, including in Skidel, Brzostowica Mała, Lerypol, Budowla, and other locations.[2] Wierzbicki estimates that there were dozens if not hundreds of such incidents.[2]

Several Polish families were rescued by their Belarusian neighbors in the village of Sawalówka.[2]

In some settlements, the withdrawal of Polish administration ahead of the Soviet advance prompted Jewish councils to form self-defense groups against the Belarusian raids which further complicated the issue of allegiance.[1][failed verification] Some of the self-defending Jews were driven by deep-seated Polish patriotism.[1][failed verification]

Polish Army units quickly engaged the insurgents, On 19 September 1939 the 102nd Uhlan Regiment of the Polish Army engaged some insurgents around Ostryna, Dubno and Jeziory.[2] After some skirmishes, Polish units put down the revolt and took control of Skidel and neighboring settlements.[2] The insurgents captured with weapons were summarily executed.[2] Shortly afterward, on 20 September, advancing Red Army units, supported by armor, took over Skidel, pushing the Polish forces back.[2]

Aftermath Edit
When Soviet forces took over Skidel, many Poles were immediately arrested. Some time later in 1940 there was a show trial in Skidel of 15 individuals including three women, two Tartars and two Polish Russians, who aided the Polish Army which briefly retook Skidel on 19 September. They were accused of crimes against the Soviet Union. There is no historical record of what happened to them, although Wierzbicki states that fragmentary information and "common practice" suggests that at least some of them were executed.[2] After the end of World War II, and the annexation of eastern Poland, the mass murders and robberies were hushed up and the sabotage action in Skidzyel’ turned by the Soviet Union into a province-wide liberation movement.[2][3]

In 1940 the Soviet authorities found clear evidence of the widespread robberies and mass murders committed on the side by scores of intoxicated peasants and criminal opportunists, but after the intervention of the communist party representative, the Soviet court threw out the case citing political rationale (justified class struggle), as well as procedural reasons (that it has no jurisdiction to persecute crimes that happened on those territories before the Soviet annexation of them on, that legal documents dated to 2 November 1939).[3] After the annexation of eastern Poland, the Soviet propaganda turned the Skidzyel’ events into a liberation movement, and mythologized them.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skidel_revolt
 
Group 13 had between 300 and 400 uniformed Jewish officers, distinguished by caps with green bands.[6] Membership in the 13 required payment of several

Gancwajch and surviving members of the group later re-emerged posing as Jewish underground fighters, though in reality they were hunting for Poles in hiding or supporting other Nazi collaborationists. After closing the Jewish Gestapo, Gancwajch remained in Warsaw, outside the Ghetto, where he continued working for the Nazis.[4] He was rumored to have died in 1943;[2][4] a hypothesis about his post-war collaboration with the NKVD was never confirmed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_13
 
Eliezer Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw in 1908,[1] the second son of a prominent Polish-Jewish politician Yitzhak Gruenbaum.[2

In 1942 he was arrested (as a communist, not as a Jew) and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.[2][3][4] In Auschwitz, he became a kapo, a title given to prisoners supervising forced labor or carrying out administrative tasks.[6][2] He survived the camp, and after the war he was accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany, and of "mercilessly beating inmates".[6] He was also accused of murdering "tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners".[2] He defended himself claiming that he only accepted the position at the request of other Jews, who wanted one of their own in the position, which was otherwise often filled by anti-Semitic non-Jewish people, including German criminals

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Gruenbaum
 
Is there a point to this thread, or, is it just a platform for one poster to let us all know how much he knows about Polish history?

To respond to the intial topic thread, I think this was probably a trend in any of the nations under Nazi control and not specifically Poland
 
The Nazis systematically sought to weaken the resistance potential and opportunities of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The early Judenräte were foremost to report numbers of their Jewish populations, clear residences and turn them over, present workers for forced labour, confiscate valuables, and collect tribute and turn these over. Failure to comply would incur the risk of collective punishments or other measures. Later tasks of the Judenräte included turning over community members for deportation. Ultimately, these policies and the cooperation of Jewish authorities led to massive Jewish deaths with few German casualties because of the minimal resistance. Once under Nazi control and checked for weapons, large numbers of Jews could ultimately be easily murdered or enslaved. The sadness of the catastrophically large number of deaths because of this lack of resistance led to the saying "never again".[10]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenrat
 
Filip Müller (3 January 1922 – 9 November 2013) was a Jewish Slovak Holocaust survivor and Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp during World War II, where he witnessed the deaths of tens of thousands of people.


Müller in a postwar photo
Contents
Auschwitz Edit

Crematorium at Auschwitz
Müller was born in Sereď in the Czechoslovak Republic. In April 1942, he was sent on one of the earliest Holocaust transports to Auschwitz II where he was given prisoner number 29236. Müller was assigned to the Sonderkommando that worked on the construction of crematoria and the installation of the gas chambers.

Once the crematoria were completed, Müller was assigned to a Sonderkommando unit tasked with operating the death facility; his performing this role, he believed, was the only reason the Germans kept him alive.[1] Müller's unit would meet new arrivals of men, women, and children at the undressing area just outside the gas chambers, in the basement of the crematoria. He testified he would tell the terrified new arrivals that they were somewhere safe. Once the SS had given the command, the naked victims would be herded into the gas chambers, where they were gassed with the cyanic crystalline poison Zyklon B.

After the victims had been killed, Müller's unit was tasked with the removal of the bodies and grouping them by size and fatty tissue to facilitate their disposal in the crematoria. The victims' clothes were collected and disinfected, and all valuables to be surrendered to the SS – some of which the Sonderkommando would pocket for bartering purposes.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filip_Müller
 
archives said:
Is there a point to this thread, or, is it just a platform for one poster to let us all know how much he knows about Polish history?

To respond to the intial topic thread, I think this was probably a trend in any of the nations under Nazi control and not specifically Poland
Click to expand...

About 60% of the Nazi SS was German.

About 0% were Polish.

Germany elected Hitler, not Poland.

I certainly don't deny some Polish Nazi collaborators but similar applies to Jews & other Europeans.

Nazi collaboration was clearly far less in Poland than in most of occupied Europe.

But, Guno seems to vilify Poles & for the most part ONLY Poles.
 
The Truth About Poland's Role in the Holocaust
A new law endangers an honest reckoning with a complex past.

Prior to World War II, anti-Semitism was an increasingly visible factor in Polish society, and government authorities took formal measures to exclude Jews from key sectors of public life. The modern country of Poland was a new one established in the aftermath of the First World War, and during the 1920s and 30s it was still struggling to define its ideological footing and identity. A nationalism deeply rooted in Catholicism was central to that struggle.

On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jews made up some 10 percent of the young country’s population and approximately one-third of the residents of the capital city, Warsaw. Disturbed by what they saw as outsized Jewish influence, some Polish politicians even pressed for the mass emigration of Poland’s Jewish population.

As German authorities implemented killing on an industrial scale, they drew upon Polish police forces and railroad personnel for logistical support, notably to guard ghettos where hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were held before deportation to killing centers. The so-called Blue Police was a force some 20,000 strong. These collaborators enforced German anti-Jewish policies such as restrictions on the use of public transportation and curfews, as well as the devastating and bloody liquidation of ghettos in occupied Poland from 1942-1943. Paradoxically, many Polish policemen who actively assisted the Germans in hunting Jews were also part of the underground resistance against the occupation in other arenas. Individual Poles also often helped in the identification, denunciation, and exposure of Jews in hiding, sometimes motivated by greed and the opportunities presented by blackmail and the plunder of Jewish-owned property.

Cases of anti-Semitic action were not limited to abetting the German occupation authorities. There are well-documented incidents, particularly in the small towns of eastern Poland, where locals—acutely aware of the Nazis’ presence and emboldened by their anti-Semitic policies—carried out violent riots and murdered their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps the most infamous of these episodes was a massacre in the town of Jedwabne in summer 1941 when several hundred Jews were burned alive by their neighbors. More difficult to unpack is the tangled history of the southeastern village of Gniewczyna Łańcucka. In May 1942, non-Jewish residents of the town held hostage some two to three dozen local Jews. Over the course of several days, they tortured and raped their hostages before finally murdering them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/poland-holocaust-death-camps/552455/
 
corresponding inline citations. (April 2018)
Miklós Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.

Miklós Nyiszli
Born
17 June 1901
Szilágysomlyó, Austria-Hungary
Died
5 May 1956 (aged 54)
Oradea, Romania
Citizenship
Hungarian, Romanian
Known for
Forced medical labor at Auschwitz
Mengele decided after observing Nyiszli's skills to move him to a specially built autopsy and operating theatre. The room had been built inside Crematorium II, and Nyiszli, along with members of the 12th Sonderkommando, was housed there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miklós_Nyiszli
 
Eugene Lazowski born Eugeniusz Sławomir Łazowski (1913 in Częstochowa, Poland – December 16, 2006 in Eugene, Oregon, United States) was a Polish medical doctor who saved thousands of people during World War II by creating a fake epidemic which played on German phobias about hygiene. He also used his position as a doctor treating people travelling through a nearby train station to conceal his supply of medicine to Jews in the local ghetto, which backed on to his home. By doing this, he risked the death penalty, which was applied to Poles who helped Jews in the Holocaust.

Eugeniusz Łazowski
Eugeniusz Łazowski, Poland
Eugeniusz Łazowski, Poland
Born
1913
Częstochowa, Poland
Died
December 16, 2006 (aged 92–93)
Eugene, Oregon, United States
Nationality
Polish
Alma mater
Józef Piłsudski University
Occupation
Doctor
Contents
World War II
Before the onset of World War II Eugeniusz Łazowski obtained a medical degree at the Józef Piłsudski University in Warsaw, Poland. During World War II Łazowski served as a Polish Army Second Lieutenant on a Red Cross train, then as a military doctor of the Polish resistance Home Army. Following the German occupation of Poland Łazowski resided in Rozwadów with his wife and young daughter. Łazowski spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp prior to his arrival in the town, where he reunited with his family and began practicing medicine with his medical-school friend Dr Stanisław Matulewicz. Using a medical discovery by Matulewicz, that healthy people could be injected with a strain of Proteus that would make them test positive for typhus without experiencing the disease, Łazowski created a fake outbreak of epidemic typhus in and around the town of Rozwadów (now a district of Stalowa Wola), which the Germans then quarantined. This saved an estimated 8,000 people from being sent to German concentration camps during the Holocaust.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Lazowski
 
The first information about Jewish merchants in Eastern Europe dates from about the tenth century. In this period, Jews took part in the slave trade between Central Asia, Khazaria, Byzantium, and Western Europe (in particular the Iberian Peninsula). Important stopping points on the trade routes included Prague, Kraków, and Kiev, towns in which Jewish colonies developed. During the twelfth century, Jews were excluded from this trade, due in part to church opposition to their dealing in Christian slaves.

https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Trade
 
The League of East European States or Federation of East European States (German: osteuropäischer Staatenbund) was a 1914 proposal by the German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews for a German-dominated consociational buffer state to be established in the Russian Partition of the multi-ethnic territory of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Contents
Bodenheimer plan Edit
The idea was conceived by prominent Zionist Max Bodenheimer, in the context of World War I and longstanding German Mitteleuropa ambitions, utilizing the concept of national personal autonomy or national curiae, which would allow Jewish representation in the government alongside other groups despite their Pale of Settlement dispersion.[1][2][3] Bodenheimer was a founder of the German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews.[4] The Committee drew up a plan to establish a buffer state between Germany and Russia, created from territory to be taken from Imperial Russia.[5] The biography by his daughter describes a divide and rule strategy to the benefit of Germany: "In this Federation Ukrainians, White Russians, Lithuanians, Esthonians and Latvians would together serve as a counterbalance to the Poles, and the Germans, and Jews would hold the balance of power between the two groupings."[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_East_European_States
 
Henryk Sławik (16 July 1894 – 23 August 1944) was a Polish politician in the interwar period, social worker, activist, and diplomat, who during World War II helped save over 30,000 Polish refugees, including 5,000 Polish Jews in Budapest, Hungary by giving them false Polish passports with Catholic designation.[1] He was executed with some of his fellow Polish activists on order of Reichsführer SS in concentration camp Gusen on 23 August 1944.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Sławik
 
Jan Karski (24 June 1914[a] – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski
 
Jews Feel Safer in Europe’s Conservative East Than Its Liberal West
by Evelyn Gordon
This might be a contributing factor to the higher antisemitism in the West.”

The Joint Distribution Committee’s International Center for Community Development surveyed 893 Jewish leaders and professionals from throughout Europe and found that in general, Jews felt safe everywhere. Nevertheless, there was a stark difference between Eastern and Western Europe.

In the east, a whopping 96 percent of respondents felt safe, while only four percent felt unsafe. In the West, 76 percent felt safe, and 24 percent felt unsafe. Respondents from places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—countries routinely accused of having anti-Semitic, borderline fascist governments—felt safer than Jews in liberal countries like France and Germany by a 20-point margin.

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Moreover, “Western European respondents were more likely to consider antisemitism as a threat than were Eastern Europeans, and to report deterioration in the situation from earlier surveys,” the JDC’s report said.

https://www.commentary.org/evelyn-gordon/jews-anti-semitism-europe-east-west/
 
Collaboration and Complicity




One sentence in a speech by FBI Director James Comey at the Museum’s annual dinner on April 15 has triggered a wide-ranging debate about complicity in Poland and Hungary during the Holocaust. Although scholarship continues to illuminate these important questions, much has been clarified in the past 70 years of research.

During World War II, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews as the Germans sought the domination of Europe and the destruction of European Jewry. As the war proceeded and Germany occupied or allied with almost every European state, it depended on other governments at the national level as well as organizations and individuals at the local level to help carry out what it called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Although there was some level of resistance to Nazi Germany in many countries, it was rarely directed at helping Jews. And although some individuals risked their lives to save Jews, they constituted a very small minority. The Germans were relentless in pursuing their goal, but without widespread collaboration the murder of six million Jews and millions of others in just four years would not have been possible.

Poland
Prior to World War II, antisemitism in Poland had been growing, and Polish authorities had taken various measures to exclude Jews from key sectors of society. Some Polish politicians pressed for the mass emigration of Poland’s Jewish population.

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the country was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. Then in 1941, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, all of Poland came under German control.

Poland was brutally occupied by the Germans. The Nazis viewed Poles as racially inferior and targeted Poland’s leadership for destruction, killing tens of thousands of Catholic priests, intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders. Over 1.5 million Poles were deported as forced laborers. In total, at least 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and soldiers perished.

With the occupation of all of Poland, Germany now had more than three million Polish Jews under its control. The Germans established close to 700 ghettos throughout occupied Poland where tens of thousands of Jews died due to harsh conditions of starvation, overcrowding, and disease.

After killing in mass shootings almost 1.5 million Jews in hundreds of locations in occupied Soviet territories, the Germans decided to construct stationary killing centers in occupied Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau being the most well known. The ghettos became “holding pens” for Jews before deportation to a killing center.

As German forces implemented the killing, they drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.

https://www.ushmm.org/information/p...aboration-and-complicity-during-the-holocaust
 
Historian: Nazi Army Included 150,000 of Jewish Descent
ReutersOct. 30, 2003
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BERLIN - As many as 150,000 men of Jewish descent served in the German military under Adolf Hitler, some with the Nazi leader's explicit consent, a U.S. historian who has interviewed hundreds of former soldiers said on Thursday. Bryan Mark Rigg, history professor at the American Military

https://www.haaretz.com/1.4747962
 
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