Posted on 01/30/2019 3:55:31 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Hitler's Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, not the Nazis, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Sunday, as Poland marked 74 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
"Hitler's Germany fed on fascist ideology... But all the evil came from this (German) state and we cannot forget that, because otherwise we relativise evil..."
"The Polish state acts as the guardian of the truth, which must not be relativised in any way."
"I want to make a promise here to (preserve) the complete truth about that era," he added, in a speech in the southern city of Oswiecim to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Sunday's ceremony at Auschwitz was attended by a number of former prisoners at the camp.
Morawiecki's speech comes after last year's row over a Polish law that made it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in Nazi German crimes.
After protests from Israel and the US, Poland amended the law to remove the possibility of fines or a prison sentence.
Morawiecki appeared to be responding to an idea often mentioned in Poland, which claims that historians try to attribute responsibility for the genocide of Jews exclusively to the Nazis, without recalling the role played by the German state and Germans as a nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.de ...
They also got The Marshall Plan to help build up their economy. What did Poland get? 40+ years of Soviet domination.
Yeah. You’re right though. The Austrians get a pass. I read a number of books by William L. Shier. He mentioned Austrian anti-Semitism. The Austrian Catholics were pretty vicious.
Well, compared to the Croat Catholics, they were angels.
Yup. The Ustasche(sp?) And don’t forget, in return for making Catholicism the official religion of Fascist Italy,Mussolini created the separate nation of The Vatican.
Yup. The Ustasche(sp?) And don’t forget, in return for making Catholicism the official religion of Fascist Italy,Mussolini created the separate nation of The Vatican.
Indeed.
Oh, and then “Father” Tiso in Slovakia, who happily sent the Slovak Jews to the Death Camps.
That’s true. It was the Russians that blocked Poland from receiving Marshall funds. And yes, guilty, England and the US agreed, but after Russia helped end the war, they kinda sorta had to make that concession. Poland became part of the eastern bloc commie countries because a bankrupt western Europe had no taste (or financial ability) for more war, especially with Russia’s reserve of untapped manpower. It’d have been like modern Europe snowflakes trying to take on China’s militarized youth now.
The Poles had a lot on their minds when the Holocaust was going on, but they knew what was going on. By his standard, they're equally guilty.
One of the Polish Jewish survivors of the war who was a kid was taken to a neighboring village by his father, who knew what the Nazi invasion was going to bring on, and left his son with a non-Jewish Polish friend, who just kept him in his home and told the krauts he was the kid's father.
Within days, the kid's home village, all Jews, were rounded up by the Nazis, herded into an area, and gunned down, then buried en masse. His parents and other relatives were wiped out. He continued to pose as the nice Polish man's son (the "father" was obviously taking a huge risk), and survived the war.
The day after the massacre, they went to the local butcher shop, and the butcher was chuckling and joking about the Jews' massacre.
I didn’t say Poland was all bad. However they have pretty much denied the complicity of (some) Poles in the Holocaust....and today Poland has a lot of antisemitism.
It's mostly the "Mohair berets", who are dying off.
Jews are much safer in Warsaw, than Paris, Berlin or London.
Of those officially recognized at Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations, about one quarter are Polish. It has been estimated that more than one hundred thousand Poles would qualify for that distinction if the full story were known. From one to three million Poles are estimated to have participated in a substantial manner in aiding, rescuing, and sheltering Jews, whether individually or as part of various organized efforts.
The Polish government in exile and resistance in Poland went to great effort to bring the Holocaust to the attention of the Allies. A young Polish resistance member, Jan Karski, was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and a transit camp associated with the death camp at Belzec. He was then brought out of Poland to provide a firsthand account of the Holocaust to the US and British governments.
They already knew, of course, and treated Karski as a nuisance and an embarrassment. Determined nevertheless to fulfill his mission of stopping the Holocaust, Karski provocatively gave news interviews and public lectures and wrote a book-length account in order to bring the Holocaust to public attention. Despite becoming a well-regarded scholar and professor at Georgetown and internationally renowned for his work during the war, Karski, a faithful Catholic, was deeply haunted to the end of his life by a sense of failure and mourned the loss of so many Jewish friends and family to the Holocaust.
As Karski posed the question, who should be more harshly judged for not stopping the Holocaust? Those leaders who were personally safe during the war but did nothing to stop the Holocaust, or those who, facing great risk to themselves and their families under Nazi occupation, did nothing or too little? And worst of all, how will Mankind be judged for the Holocaust? Will the many efforts to aid Jews and to stop the Holocaust be seen as cumulatively too slight and feeble to mitigate its moral burden?
So, they were the largest political party in Germany in other words. Some people just might call that winning an election.
They already knew, of course, and treated Karski as a nuisance and an embarrassment. Determined nevertheless to fulfill his mission of stopping the Holocaust, Karski provocatively gave news interviews and public lectures and wrote a book-length account in order to bring the Holocaust to public attention. Despite becoming a well-regarded scholar and professor at Georgetown and internationally renowned for his work during the war, Karski, a faithful Catholic, was deeply haunted to the end of his life by a sense of failure and mourned the loss of so many Jewish friends and family to the Holocaust.
As Karski posed the question, who should be more harshly judged for not stopping the Holocaust? Those leaders who were personally safe during the war but did nothing to stop the Holocaust, or those who, facing great risk to themselves and their families under Nazi occupation, did nothing or too little?
Thanks for sharing - interesting stuff. Even today - why are so few able to see evil while it's ascending?
Evil often disguises itself with declarations of good purpose. In a perverted way, evil is also often urged on by idealism that is more appealing than the balancing of interests and circumstances required by convention moral reasoning.
You’re right. Insightful.
[Idiotic. Yes, there were a few like Reinhard Heydrich and Emil Maurice who had Jewish backgrounds. But for everyone else accepting conversion would never save your life.]
Even here, one imbecile writes that “a lot of the Poles did help the nazis”. Leaving all the other issues aside, shouldn't that be “Poles help the Germans” or... “Nazis help the Nazis” - If we're going to be consistent on that ?
“Point is they were not the completely innocent victims in the Holocaust of the Jews as they seem to like to portray themselves today.”
During WW2 Jews killed more Poles than the other way around so one should rather keep the trap shut...
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