Studnicki tried to convince the Germans that there was no point in murdering Poles, as this would only fuel the popularity of the "so-called London government," as he called it, and the resistance movement in the country. He completely failed to foresee that the Germans would opt for the most radical option, that is, to cut the Poles' backbone by exterminating their elites.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Following the success of his books on the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Piotr M. Majewski in his latest book The Ugly "k" Word looks at the phenomenon of collaboration, drawing on examples from Polish and European history since ancient times. You are invited tothe premiere meeting with the author, which will take place on November 6 at 7 pm at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. It will be hosted by Michal Nogas, and excerpts from the book will be read by Renata Dancewicz. Admission to the event is free..
**
Michał Sutowski: You define Collaboration as the cooperation of a conquered country - its elites or its inhabitants - with the occupation authorities, to this in defiance of at least some of its fellow citizens. You find numerous examples of how "a collaborator is always a collaborator for someone, from someone else's perspective, under given conditions; public support for a collaborating political elite ranges on a spectrum from broad public acquiescence to widespread belief in treason." But today, is the decision to collaborate with Nazi Germany during the war defended somewhere in Europe - in the mainstream, outside the extreme right?".
Piotr M. Majewski: There is a strong revisionist current in Slovakia, which quite consistently defends Fr. Josef Tiso and his policy of collaboration with Germany. In the Baltic states, on the other hand, virtually the mainstream of public opinion believes that cooperation with Germany against the Soviets was a concern for the raison d'état. A part of which, we should add, was the cleansing of the country of national minorities, especially Jewish minorities. A part of Ukrainians, for whom Stepan Bandera is a national hero, also think the same way, even if today he is no longer a "flawless" hero.
But this is an acute example of collaboration ... unsuccessful. Bandera wanted a Ukrainian state in Galicia and Volhynia, analogous to German protectorates of the type of Pavelić's Croatia or Tiso's Slovakia. Why did nothing come of it?.
Because the Germans did not wish for Ukrainian statehood, all the same, whether headed by Melnyk or Bandera. They were only interested in cooperation at the administrative, police, and of course, military level, and it actually took place on a large scale. At least by a certain part of Ukrainians, quite a large part in the west, it was treated as a sure chance for their own state - the territorial coincidence with the former Austrian Galicia is not coincidental here. For although there was also cooperation with the Germans in the east, there was more resistance to this cooperation. Poles viewed cooperation with the Central Powers during World War I on a similar basis. This analogy is very clear, although of course Poles did not murder Jews or commit great ethnic cleansing in the name of cooperation with Austria-Hungary or Kaiser's Germany.
You say that the Germans did not wish for Ukrainian statehood - but Slovakian statehood did. .
Likewise the Croatian: both nations "got" their states from the Third Reich, puppet states, but states nonetheless. The Czechs also maintained a kind of statehood, limited, but nevertheless the entire state apparatus in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was Czech, including the token armed forces. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, did not get a state, the Balts did not get one, and the Belorussians some substitute, but that was due to the private views of the gauleiter there. In other words, German policy on the question of collaboration was - as with many empires, including in the long view of history - highly inconsistent.
Were there any rules? Some fixed criteria - who is entitled to it and who is not?".
There were, of course, racial rules. It would be difficult to imagine any Jewish state that Hitler would have agreed to create, albeit instrumental in using the so-called Judenrats as some form of Jewish autonomy. On top of that, let's remember that all these states were not projects forever - all these "Slavic experiments" would be extinguished over time. This can be seen well in the example of Bohemia.
They were also to be liquidated? .
When the Germans felt that they were on an upward wave, due to their first successes on the Eastern Front, they began to say that they needed... 7 million coffins to solve the Czech problem - these are the words of one German official in the Protectorate. When Hitler needed this and when these nations surrendered, he was ready to reward it, but this did not change the fact that, for example, the Czechs Hitler evidently hated, considered much more troublesome Slavs than the Poles, although at the same time he respected them a little more, because for him they were such half Germanized Slavs.
And he hated them for what?
He didn't like the fact that before World War I they made careers and money in Vienna. According to him, it was because of the Czechs that problems arose, they were the ones who were breaking up the Habsburg monarchy from within. Well, and then there's his racial obsession: since the Czechs are so similar to the Germans, they are all the more dangerous, because they nevertheless retained their Slavic identity despite outward appearances. He said they are like cyclists: they bend their backs, but pedal in their own direction. It's a bit like Hitler's notion of the Jews, which, despite appearances, was not just based on boundless contempt: that they were dirty, backward and stank of garlic, but also expressed fears that they were so clever, dangerous, that they assimilated easily, became similar to the majority - and yet remained essential strangers.
Now, does that mean he hated Czechs more than Poles? That's a bit paradoxical, given the policies pursued by the Third Reich....
To the Poles, Hitler made what he believed was a very favorable offer of cooperation before the outbreak of World War II. He believed that Poland would be his leading, though obviously weaker, ally in Central Europe. And a little of the disappointment at the rejection of this offer probably stemmed from the fury with which Polishness was later exterminated by the Germans. Of course, it didn't take him long to convince his compatriots: it was enough to reheat the anti-Polish stereotypes that existed both in the Weimar Republic and earlier in the Kaiser Reich. The Germans exterminated the Poles despite the fact that such a policy was quite costly: far fewer forces and resources were needed to keep the peace in France or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia than in occupied Poland.
I understand that the treatment of a conquered nation - and allowing even some form of collaboration - is sometimes determined by arbitrary factors, some obsessions or prejudices of the leader of the ruling empire. But in what, for Hitler, were such Ukrainians, for example, inferior to Croats? After all, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was friendly with Croatian nationalists. .
Geography and strategic needs played a big role - the racial factor influenced them indirectly, through German colonization plans. Ukraine was a space for large-scale expansion of German settlement, while Croatia was not. The same was true of the Czech Republic - these far-reaching plans to "solve the Czech problem" were due to the fact that it was a German settlement area with large concentrations of Germans in enclaves like Brno and Olomouc. During the occupation, German officials planned the gradual dismemberment of ethnically Czech areas. For this purpose, for example, military training grounds were created on them.
And were eastern and western Europe - from the point of view of the Third Reich - different worlds when it came to simply allowing the possibility of collaboration? .
Of course. Slightly oversimplifying, one could say that in western Europe, which would have included Scandinavia and the Czech lands, however, a different model of occupation prevailed. There, it assumed, as a rule, cooperation with local social elites and authorities, at least administrative ones. In the east, by contrast, it was a purely colonial policy devolving into extermination.
But Jews were murdered both in the east and the west. .
This is true, but the Germans did it by other methods. Even in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia they were not murdered in public, even in the Theresienstadt ghetto there was only one such execution. If someone fell foul, they transported them to a small fortress right next door, where there was a Gestapo prison, and there they murdered them.
What was the source of this hypocrisy? And its absence elsewhere?.
I think it was an attempt by the Germans to present themselves as a civilized nation that upholds certain standards, including for its own citizens. After all, Jews were not murdered in public in the Reich either, if one excludes the pogroms during Kristallnacht or the individual murders shortly after the Nazis took power. Likewise, by the way, in the Polish territories incorporated into the Reich, such as the Poznañ region: rather, they were taken to Fort VII, or to various ghettos and camps. The concentration camps at Auschwitz and Stutthof, as well as the extermination camp at Chelmno-on-Ner were located in areas incorporated into the Reich, but far from the eyes of the vast majority of Germans. The farther east one went, considerations of a nature, whether aesthetic or formal-legal, simply waned.
Timothy Snyder in Black Earth posited that from the point of view of Jewish survival in occupied Europe, the existence of a local - and therefore collaborationist - administration, a local puppet state, was rather an advantage. Do you agree with this? .
In principle, yes, at least from the point of view of local Jews who had citizenship of the state in question. As a matter of fact, all states that were allies of the Reich, or states whose authorities unequivocally collaborated: the French Vichy, Hungary, Antonescu's Romania, all of these states, in the name of a peculiarly understood independence from Germany, defended their Jewish citizens, while they were ready to hand over to death people who were strangers: stateless persons, but also those who - this is the French case - obtained citizenship late.
So they were not "real" French Jews?.
A caesura of 1925 was adopted - if someone was a later immigrant to France, their status was verified. Sometimes citizenship was left, sometimes it was taken away. In the latter case, these individuals were most often the victims of deportations - first to the Vel' d'Hiv' cycling stadium, and later to death camps.
And what happens to those who retained French citizenship?
They generally survived, however, because the authorities protected them, at least delaying the deportations. They were, so to speak, last in line. If the war had lasted longer, the Germans would have taken after this group as well, with the help of the French, of course. After all, already in 1943, the Germans smoothly transitioned from cooperation with the old Marshal Pétain to cooperation with the more radical politicians headed by Pierre Laval and the militia, which was unequivocally fascist and very zealous in catching Jews, including Jewish children.
From the background of countries cooperating with the Third Reich, Slovakia probably stands out negatively - their government subsidized the Germans with 500 marks from each Jew deported to a camp. What was the reason for this?
Akurat these fees are rather out of sheer perfidy: The Germans demanded to "cover the costs" and were able to enforce this because Slovakia was completely dependent on them. But the Slovak authorities actually saw what Hitler was doing with the Jews as a historic opportunity to create a mono-ethnic country. Alexander Mach, the interior minister and the country's leading pro-German politician, said outright that this was an opportunity the Slovaks had to seize. This was in keeping with the evolution of Slovak politics, which was partly under German influence, but partly immanently gaining anti-Semitic momentum.
"Slovak", in the sense of the Slovak state created in March 1939?.
Yes, in this puppet republic created on the ruins of Czechoslovakia, Jews were gradually excluded, starting with the constitution adopted at the time. It contained cursory anti-Semitic provisions that, for example, Jews were not allowed to enter parks and forests. They were stripped of citizenship, although they were treated as "belonging" to the Slovak state, and later a special anti-Semitic code was passed. The deportation of nearly 60,000 people to death camps was already a logical consequence of what had gone before.
Because the German Holocaust plan coincided with Slovak plans for ethnic cleansing?
An analogous situation will be found in the fascist Croatian state: on a similar basis, the Croats saw Germany's policy as a great opportunity to purge Serbs and Jews, as well as to some extent Roma. These were considered undesirable elements that could be gotten rid of while cooperating with the Germans.
Are you able to point out any pattern, any criteria indicating which of the countries under the Third Reich offered some resistance to Germany's anti-Semitic policy, and which even treated it with enthusiasm, as a great opportunity to "make order" at home? .
This was the product of many factors, not reducible to the ideology of a collaborationist or puppet government in a given country. Hanna Arendt, in her report Eichmann in Jerusalem, points out that there were instances when local authorities, including through the cooperation of the Judenrats, deported almost all the Jews to camps - this was the case in Amsterdam, for example. On the other hand, we have the cases of Denmark and Bulgaria, whose authorities protected their Jews quite effectively.
"Their own," that is, not necessarily their own anymore?.
The Bulgarians had no problem sending back stateless Jews, while they treated the protection of their own, like the French in the early years of Vichy, as an affirmation of their sovereignty. Unlike in other countries, they managed to maintain this policy until the end of the war. Admittedly, one of their local politicians, who was in charge of cooperation with the Germans, got very caught up in the German way of thinking and signed a pledge for deportations with the Reich Main Security Office, but Bulgaria, thanks to the attitude of Tsar Boris and other politicians from the monarchist camp, led to block this decision.
In your book one can see the different ways in which the Germans treated collaborators - they treated Quisling in Norway as a harmless dimwit, towards Marshal Pétain, the victor from under Verdun in 1916, they probably felt an elementary respect. But did any of the collaborationist governments manage to develop any kind of subjectivity, any real causality towards the Third Reich? .
It is rather difficult to talk about subjectivity, because, as I try to prove in the book, the constitutive feature of collaboration is the asymmetry between the occupier and the occupied. This balance of power always determines that it is the occupier who deals the cards. Which does not change the fact that where the Germans were particularly keen on maintaining at least social peace, they were sometimes willing to make greater concessions. A good example was Denmark until 1943, occupied on a different basis than all other countries in Europe.
Peaceful occupation?
Yes, there was even a Latin name for it, occupatio pacifica. In this occupied Denmark, all state structures were preserved, there was a king and a government, even elections were held - only German troops were stationed in the country. Nevertheless, the commander of the German occupation forces communicated with the Danish government through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There was, of course, pressure on various issues and there was a constant risk involving refusal, but nevertheless the Germans tried to act softly.
I understand that the racial factor played a role here: the Danes are decent Aryans to the Germans, the Nordic type, and so on. But there were other, non-racial reasons for this unusual approach? .
The Germans wanted to show, especially for the use of the West and the North of Europe, that cooperation pays off, that it does not have to be like Poland everywhere. As long as a nation that is in an occupied zone is "reasonable" and its authorities are also "reasonable," the Germans will deal with them reasonably. To some extent, the same was also true in the Czech lands, albeit in a more brutalized form. And the second thing was purely pragmatic considerations, related to agricultural policy. Denmark was a reservoir of agricultural products for Germany, primarily milk, butter and meat, so it was not worth milking a productive economy with some drastic war-type repression.
Where else did the Germans use such tactics?
They wanted to use a similar system in Norway, but it failed because Quisling misled them. He assured them that it would be the same, that he would deal with public sentiment, but he failed, so that occupation there was already more brutal. On the other hand, some similarities can be seen with the occupation of the Channel Islands - Jersey, Guernsey and some smaller ones - close to the French coast. These were such independent states, which were not part of the United Kingdom, but linked to the British crown by a kind of feudal dependence. The Germans behaved very, one might say, culturally there, because, although they arrested certain categories of people (Jews, communists or those who did not hand over their radio receivers), they maintained a certain decorum towards the local authorities. This stemmed, in my opinion, from a racial conviction that, however, they could not deal with Germanic people as they did with Slavs. And, on the other hand, the British also had "counter-arguments": if the Germans treated the local English population very brutally, the British could treat the Germans brutally in Iraq or anywhere else they fell into their hands.
And in the case of the Danes, did this peaceful occupation translate into the fate of the Jewish community?
It translated positively, because for a long time the Germans did not intervene at all in the Jewish question in Denmark. They decided to do so only in 1943, and failed. The Danish authorities initially decided to isolate the Jews somehow, there were already talks about this, but eventually backed down. Danish citizens, as is well known, joined quite massively in rescuing their Jewish cohabitants, and several thousand Danish Jews were transported across the straits to neutral Sweden and thus saved themselves.
What was the reason for this? The exceptional determination of the Danish people, their authorities or simply coincidence? .
An interesting article about this is written by Gunnar S. Paulsson in his article The Bridge over the Øresund on the fate of the Jews and the attitude of the rest of the Danes during the war. He believes that their merits should not be overly exaggerated compared to others, for the reason that a great deal depended on the Germans, to say the least. A simple example: the German officials and officers warned the Danes about the planned action, so they were able to prepare to counter it - and this was done, among others, by SD governor Werner Best, who informed his Danish contacts.
But for what purpose did the Germans do this?
Paulsson says that, in fact, such a decision could only have been made by Himmler, and this was due to the fact that Himmler was already preparing for negotiations with the Western Allies. It was supposed to be a signal: please, we can be pragmatic. And at the same time, it didn't hurt him very much, because this was about a few thousand people whose capture and brutal murder would have been costly in terms of image, but also logistically. These were, after all, very well assimilated Jews, not like in the east, where they are easy to capture, because you can also recognize them at a glance. In other words, the Germans were able to maintain a certain pragmatism here.
In your book we find two characteristic examples of failed, in the sense: unfulfilled political collaboration. One is the case of Bandera - Ukrainian nationalists had good reasons to trust that the Germans would allow them to create a state.
True, they hoped for a policy analogous to that of Croatia, they were friendly with Croatian nationalists, but also with the Germans themselves. Even before the war, German intelligence supported the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and even after the German attack on Poland, they benefited from its diversionary activities and trained Ukrainians, including in Rabka, where there was a training camp for Ukrainian nationalists. Yet they did not obtain the protectorate, and after the independent declaration of an independent Ukrainian state in Galicia, the Germans arrested OUN leaders - including Bandera - and placed them in concentration camps.
There is, however, another, rather tragicomic example here of hopes for collaboration that were not fulfilled because the Germans had other plans - I am, of course, thinking of Wladyslaw Studnicki. In order not to bully him, I will ask this way: did this Germanophile publicist and critic of the policies of the Sanation governments have rational reasons to believe that it was worthwhile and possible to collaborate with the Germans in 1939?.
In the purely theoretical plan, it is difficult to deny him rationality: in his book In the Face of the Coming Second World War he predicted quite precisely how the war would proceed and how it would end; that the alliance with England and France from the perspective of the defense of Poland was a sham, that we were doomed to military defeat, that afterwards Germany would pursue a very brutal occupation policy, and would use national minorities, primarily Lithuanians and Ukrainians, against the Poles.
Everything can be ticked off: and so it was. .
Exactly, on top of that, he also pointed out that the German-Soviet war would break out later, so somehow it made sense to assume that the Poles would be needed by the Germans. One, that they will provide dozens of divisions of troops, two, that the Third Reich, going against the USSR, needs peace in the rear - why do they need some partisan movement?
That's why his option.... failed?.
Because in this his rationality Studnicki was guided by the image of the world he took from World War I: a concert of powers, Realpolitik as a cold, hard, unsentimental and brutal policy, but nevertheless not exterminationist - because that would have been irrational. Well, it should also be added that Studnicki was an anti-Semite. The Germans even respected him for this reason, as the author of the most important anti-Semitic book published in Polish before the war. At the same time, it seems to me that even in his anti-Semitism he didn't go so far as to think of exterminating the Jews, so what the Germans did shocked him.
And he tried to talk some common sense into them .
Yes, he tried to convince them that there was no point in murdering Poles, because it would only fuel the popularity of the London government, or the "so-called London government," as he called it, and the resistance in the country. He completely failed to foresee that the Germans would opt for the most radical variant, that is, to cut the Poles' backbone by exterminating their elites. And when the Germans chose such a variant of occupation, Studnicki, with his offers of cooperation, was of no use to them.
I understand that someone may have underestimated the scale of Hitler's ideological extremism, but after all, the leader of the Third Reich wrote directly about plans for colonization in the East. And how to colonize, well.... it's not "land without people for people without living space." If the Germans want to settle someone, they have to displace the inhabitants, at best make them into farmhands.
Yes, although of course there are different models of colonial expansion. Studnicki may have assumed that the Germans, having obtained the territories in the Polish lands they aspired to own - Pomerania, Upper Silesia - would not need the contractual Zamojszczyzna, because after all, they would have at their disposal the vast territories of Soviet Ukraine or Belarus, that's one thing. And two, that maybe they will cooperate with the Poles like, for example, the British with the local elites in India. Well, and the third thing - he probably believed that since the Poles are a nation that has its own cultural traditions, but state traditions above all, that the Germans would respect this. And here he was fundamentally mistaken, because Hitler did not reason at all in terms of historical and non-historical nations, but in terms of race.
Let's return to the question of the "profitability" of cooperation with Germany, a bit à propos of the recently popular alternative history concepts in Poland, among others by Piotr Zychowicz. He puts forward the thesis, inspired, incidentally, by Studnicki, that the participation of Polish troops in the Third Reich's invasion of the Soviet Union could benefit us. Does the experience of the Hungarians, Romanians, Finns, who supplied the Germans with troops to fight the USSR, confirm this?.
In the shortest terms, it looks poor. The Finns were relatively best positioned, but they were a peripheral area from Germany's point of view. A useful ally against Stalin, yet a troublesome country to occupy. When the Finns said that there was no Jewish problem in their country, the Germans accepted this and did not pursue the subject.
And outside the Finns? .
In fact, all those countries that were allies of Germany were degraded over time to the role of satellite states, and then simply collaborators, that is, cooperating against any understanding of their own raison d'etat.
And what specifically does this degradation from ally to collaborator mean? .
The example of Hungary shows this very well. First, they pursued their own geopolitical goals with the help of Germany: they regained southern Slovakia, Transcarpathian Ruthenia, part of Transylvania, and began to restore the "pre-Trianon" borders. Then came the first crush, because when Hungary joined the attack on Yugoslavia, however, its Prime Minister Pál Teleki committed suicide. In other words, part of the Hungarian elite already believed that cooperation with Germany was going too far, that it was against the raison d'etre. Nevertheless, Hungary soon joined the attack on the Soviet Union. They sent their divisions there, which were decimated.
Because the Germans treated them like cannon meat? Because they were soldiers of inferior quality to the Wehrmacht? .
Not necessarily, the Germans did not spare them, but they also probably did not particularly send them to their deaths. On the Eastern Front, losses were generally high, and the Hungarians had a much smaller population potential than the Germans. Therefore, the losses, as with the Slovaks and Romanians, were more painful demographically.
What does this trend - declining autonomy of allies, then collaborators - stem from? .
Two main reasons can probably be identified: the desire to speed up the "final solution," i.e. the extermination of the Jews, and the tendency of some Allies to shirk their cooperation. The former reason was crucial in France, while Hungary is a perfect illustration of both at once.
Because Horthy began to figure out how to get along with the Allies after all .
This happened in installments. First, the Germans began occupying Hungary in March 1944, and Hitler decided to impose a pro-German prime minister. Horthy succeeded in getting Döme Sztójay, a former ambassador to Berlin, to become prime minister. He thought he had won, but was sorely disappointed, as it turned out that the new prime minister was willing to pursue a policy of exterminating Jews, and that the state apparatus was collaborating with the Germans. Horthy was himself an anti-Semite, but he did not want to murder his own citizens, so he led the overthrow of the head of government and began secret talks with the governments of Great Britain and even the Soviet Union.
Only the Germans found out about it? A bit like during World War I, when Austrian Empress Zyta and Karl Habsburg tried to lead Austria out of the alliance of the Central Powers....
They found out because, one, they had efficient intelligence, and two, they didn't fully trust their allies. After all, they understood that these states, for the most part, however, did not fully identify with German policy, so they tried to control them in various ways. As a result, they brought about the overthrow of Horthy in October 1944 and in his place was installed Ferenc Szálasi, who was a fanatic perhaps worse than Quisling. The new leader immediately felt he had gotten his five minutes. Under him, Hungary did more than the Germans themselves would have liked, as they murdered Jews with their own hands.
The thesis that by cooperating at the beginning of the war, it was eventually possible to get along with the Allies is one of the pillars of Zychowicz's argument in the Ribbentrop-Beck Pact. .
Myself, I think the example of Hungary is a memento for all those who think this way: this is what could have happened to countries in Central and Eastern Europe that cooperated with Germany. The calculus of forces and the calculus of probabilities indicated that Hitler would never have allowed them real subjectivity.
Someone will say that between Hungary and Germany, if only because of the population, the asymmetry of forces was much greater than between Germany and Poland. .
Well, let's see what happened in Italy. And this is, after all, a country that could appear to be an almost equal ally to the Third Reich, given its ideological seniority, its own imperial ambitions with the idea of the Mediterranean as the Mare Nostrum, the whole shebang of rebuilding the power of ancient Rome, a powerful navy with battleships, a number of colonies - Poland did not have all these assets. And yet, when Italy went over to the side of the Allies in 1943, the Germans introduced a very brutal occupation of the part of the country that remained under their control. They sometimes murdered Italian prisoners of war or, at best, confined them in very harsh camps. Above all, in the rest of Italy they occupied, they established the operetta Republic of Salo, which was ruled by fanatics similar to Szálaszi. Mussolini became a German puppet.
And were there times when the public was more willing to garner collaboration than the government? .
Where there was no state collaboration or collaboration of a large part of the political elite - this is the example of Poland, which favorably distinguishes us - it was much more difficult to push for collaboration at lower levels. If only because police officers did not receive orders from their pre-war superiors, the administration also felt that it was operating on at least shaky ground.
And if there is no collaborationist government, only occupation authorities - who is the easiest to recruit?.
Certainly - in addition to the local elite - the lower strata. The Germans even enjoyed such gestures: both in Prague and Warsaw, when they entered these cities, they immediately launched "charity trains" and field kitchens, distributing food. There was no shortage of those willing to eat soup there and feed themselves, while from the point of view of these people it was certainly not collaboration. A more controversial example is the denunciations, for example, from occupied Brno, which I read in the archives there. They were directed to the local Czech police or directly to the Germans, who passed them on to the local police.
And what were they about?
Well, precisely often trivial matters. Rather, it was not about hiding Jews, having weapons or handing out leaflets, or helping the resistance: here was someone somewhere selling pork fat on the left, killing a pig illegally, listening to the radio.... These letters, often with errors, were usually written by people who saw the occupation as an opportunity to gain.... subjectivity. They tried to settle their interests that they could not settle any other way. A disliked or troublesome neighbor, for example - they wrote somewhere before, it was ignored, so now they turned to the Germans. And the Germans, oh please, they had the Czech policemen handle it.
This is a story from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. And in Poland?.
I don't think the susceptibility of the popular strata in Poland to cooperate with the Germans was particularly high. Although I have encountered the thesis of researchers of the situation of the countryside under German occupation that for the first two years the resistance movement there was relatively weak, and this was because the Germans did not manage to squeeze the Polish peasants with quotas. Partisanship existed only in spots, such as in the Kielce region, but even German police data on the victims of speeches against occupation structures indicate that the years up to the German attack on the Soviet Union were relatively peaceful. One wonders whether, if the Germans had pursued a more sensible policy, they might not have succeeded in the countryside after all, not so much in persuading people to cooperate as in inducing them not to support the partisans.
Listen to the podcast "About Books":.
On a modus vivendi basis with the occupying power? .
Yes: you produce food and do not help the partisans, and we treat you as human beings. A policy that Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube tried to bring to Belarus. It probably had some chance of success, because Soviet factors were very concerned about it: he was eventually blown up by a Soviet secret service agent.
Because the "human German" was demoralizing the Belarusian peasantry .
Yes, because he distributed land to them from the liquidation of kolkhozes, and worse, he also demoralized the Belarusian elite. He also wanted to get the Belarusians to cooperate with the Germans by creating for them some kind of national local government, which they never really had. This, admittedly, greatly displeased German race theorists, to whom Kube explained that, after all, Belarusians were descended from the Vikings.
And did they believe it? .
Rather not, if he hadn't been blown up by that agent, he probably would have been taken down by Himmler's men anyway.
Perhaps the most drastic manifestation of collaboration that was observed in Polish lands was participation in pogroms against Jews - this is Lviv after the German invasion, where they were murdered mainly by Ukrainians, this is also our Jedwabne. Yet the killing of Jewish cohabitants was probably not universally treated that way? It wasn't cooperation with the enemy? .
For some it was the realization of the national interest - henceforth there would be no Jews in our country or on our land. For others, it was simply an opportunity to rudely enrich themselves, to seize some quilts, crockery, furniture, fur or shoes. But in the lands of the former eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic, which were occupied by the USSR until the summer of 1941, many regarded the pogroms as justifiable retribution for the Jews' collaboration with the Soviets.
Because if a Jew, surely a Communist?
A certain part of the Jewish minority, statistically not even a small part, actually collaborated with the Soviets in 1939-1941, but also about 25 percent of those deported by the Soviets to the East were Polish Jews. This is hardly remembered. Just as about the fact that Poles also collaborated with the Soviets at the time - but only the principle of collective responsibility was applied to Jews.
Because if a Pole collaborated, he ceased to be a Pole altogether, so he doesn't count? .
First of all, the presumption of innocence applied to Poles - that someone collaborated, it must first be proven. And if he collaborated, then there were probably some circumstances that justified it. Because it was impossible otherwise, because he was saving his family from deportation and property from confiscation, and thus the "national substance." On the other hand, with regard to Jews, the prevailing belief was that everyone was basically suspect - because it was all Jewocracy.
Now are you describing the Polish attitude or rather the typical attitude of nations throughout the region?
Of course, this happened not only in Polish lands, but in the entire strip that stretches somewhere from Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania, where pogroms against Jews were exceptionally brutal and indiscriminate, through Ukraine, all the way to Transnistria and Bessarabia. Throughout this entire area, pogroms swept through after the German invasion, the participants of which did not seem to have the conviction that they were walking hand in hand with the Germans in what was perhaps the most abhorrent form of collaboration, helping the occupier murder their fellow citizens.
Because they were simply not "fellow citizens"? Such as in France or Bulgaria, for example, where that passport nevertheless saved lives, so the political concept of citizenship matters? And at the other extreme we have "non-state", grassroots violence, where only the ethnic nation - to which Jews do not belong - matters? .
At the same time, this has not been consistent, because in France, some passports - those issued after 1925 - were challenged, with fatal consequences for those concerned. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, on the other hand, we have a seemingly "Western-style" occupation, that is, with the preservation of local elites, administration, laws, etc., and yet Czech, once Czechoslovakian Jews were treated "Eastern-style" by the Protectorate authorities. True, there were no pogroms, but from the very beginning of the German occupation, that is, even before the outbreak of World War II, Czechs cut themselves off from their Jewish fellow citizens.
They handed them over to the Germans as prey .
In a sense, it was even worse: the Czech authorities tried to get ahead of the Germans in seizing property, only they failed, because the Germans were not in the dark and knew that huge assets were at stake. Czech Jews were not only wealthy bourgeois, but also often industrialists.If we did a survey of where embassies and ambassadors' residences are now located in Prague, it would probably turn out that most of these nice villas are Jewish, and their owners died during World War II.
In Poland, especially recently due to the film White Courage, collaboration is associated with the so-called Goralenvolk - the book's cover also refers to this phenomenon. But after reading the chapter on Podhale during the war, one gets the impression that this was a rather caricatured phenomenon: we read a German report about highland volunteers for the Waffen-SS, who are simply unsuitable because they have, if not tuberculosis, then venereal diseases, and constantly drink vodka. .
The Goralenvolk was significant as a phenomenon for two reasons. First, because of its scale, because there were places in Podhale where a quarter of the population went to cooperate with the Germans, and there were villages where it was more than 90 percent; of course, in the region as a whole it was less, but still more than in the rest of the lands of the Republic. Secondly, this was probably the only collaborationist offer par excellence aimed at a large group of Poles.
That is?.
We give you a better status and treat you differently, on the basis of a moderately convincing racial or historical theory, but primarily on the basis of a declaration of disassociation from Polishness. A caricature came out of this, mainly because this offer had no real addressee on the Highlander side.
Someone did come forward, however..
Sure, there were various people who were interested in doing business with the Germans or surviving the war undisturbed. But they were not a separate ethnic group, nor were they oppressed by the authorities in Warsaw, as the Germans and Goralenvolk activists claimed. This was artificial. Well, and who in the Podhale might have wanted to go to the front to fight for the Nazi Reich? As long as it was a matter of influence in the village, to take over some money from Jews or a disliked neighbor, well, yes, but to go east and stick your neck out for Hitler? After all, that's absurd.
Well, why did the Germans come up with such a concept? .
They had no military benefit from the highlanders, but already, as far as breaking Polish morale is concerned, they did. We see similar initiatives in other countries as well: in the Protectorate, the Germans tried to use a certain group in Moravia as a national minority separate from the rest of the Czechs, which they favored, and it helped them to break down the unity of society. In occupied Belgium, the Flemings were used by the Germans against the Walloons, back in WWI. We had the Bretons in France, from whom the Germans formed a branch of the security forces. They helped bug the French resistance, which tried to use the Breton language to make the Germans' job more difficult. In each of these cases, this minority favored by the occupier serves the policy of divide and rule.
This was already postulated by a Florentine in the 15th century.
Yes, the Germans have clearly done their homework.
*
Piotr M. Majewski (born 1972) - historian of recent history, works at the Department of History, University of Warsaw. From 2009 to 2017 he was deputy director of the World War II Museum in Gdansk, where he was responsible for preparing the main exhibition. He specializes in the history of Czechoslovakia and Czech-German relations in the 20th century. Among other works, he is the author of the award-winning When Will War Break Out? 1938. A Study of the Crisis (Klio Prize 2019, finalist for the Nike Prize and the Moczarski Prize for 2020), Let them not think we are collaborators. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 1939-1945 (Modzelewski Award for Historical Book of the Year 2022), and The Ugly K-Word. The Thing About Collaboration.
