Posted on 05/20/2009 1:55:14 PM PDT by lizol
Der Spiegel - other nations helped Germany in Holocaust
20th May 2009
Poland, among other countries helped Hitler mastermind the mass murders, the German weekly says
The Der Spiegel weekly claims that Germany would not have been able to prosecute its WWII mass-murder campaign against the Jews on its own and the country required the cooperation of other nations, including Poland.
The magazine's front-page story, entitled "Partners. European associates in murdering Jews," cites the case of John Demjaniuk, a former Ukrainian SS-officer, who is currently awaiting trial in Munich, in its bid to prove that without the support of citizens from occupied states the extermination of European Jews would not have been possible.
"Obviously, only Hitler and his associates or the Wehrmacht, were able to stop the Holocaust. This, however, does not weaken the argument that without foreign allies, thousands if not millions of the six million Jews killed would have been saved," the Der Spiegel article reads.
In addition, the weekly claims that while the French, Dutch and Belgians could not have really known what was happening to the Jews, Poles were well aware of the fate that awaited them in concentration camps. Historians and experts from Poland and Germany have undermined the weekly's claims, saying it has made a number of misinterpretations.
You really know how to get my blood pressure up. ;)
-Poland was the only occupied country where aiding Jews in any manner was an automatic death sentence.
-There are more righteous Gentiles from Poland in Yad Vashem than from any other country.
-There was no “Vichy” Polish government, it was all occupied and administered by the Nazis, unlike Vichy France, where the French ran things on a day-to-day basis, under careful Nazi watch.
-No Poles served in the SS.
I notice that “judenmord” is one word. I know German is full of examples of this. In English, when we concatenate two words, it tends to differentiate the idea from other ideas, so “jewmurder” would imply a fundamentally different concept than “murder”. Is this the same in German? Does the concatenation imply a seperate concept from “murder”?
Poles are usually particulary evil. Of anything
Poland didn’t exist at the time of the Holocaust. It had been conqured by Germany. They had no government. Any German map at the time would have shown Poland (along with Austria and Checkeslovakia (sp?) as part of Germany.
So they are saying the government that Germany installed (and controlled) after Germany overran and destroyed the country cooperated with Germany. Well what do you know?
What next? That Hitler’s field generals obeyed Hitler’s orders?
Partners? Associates?
Helfers translates directly as "helpers," a more intense description than mere "associates." And Komplizen is more accurately translated as accomplices. The headline reads: The Accomplices: Hitler's European helpers in Jew-murder
Well, here in the USA, the New York Times certainly looked the other way at what was happening....
To be more exact, western Poland was officially annexed into the Reich, and then there was the Generalgouvernment, which was where the Nazis dumped the Poles and Jews. It wasn’t technically a part of the Reich, but was more of a colony.
Poland’s “crime” was to be the place where most Jews happened to live, because over the centuries they were more tolerant towards Jews than the rest of Europe, and they were allowed to flourish more than anywhere else.
I want to say “awesome”, despite its lack of respect for the whole issue, which I couldn’t give a proper indication of anyway. Can I ask how?
And that's not to mention their help--through the lies of criminal-red-lackey Walter Duranty--for Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine and the GULAG system USSR-wide.
A large metal pipe.
Bear in mind that there was no Poland at this time. There was a government in exile in London, which reported the killing of Jews to disbelieving Western allies. Poland itself had disappeared as a country with its own government, and was part of the “General Government,” a purposefully vague and bureaucratic term.
There were individual Poles who might have collaborated with the invaders. There were many who risked their own lives to help Jews. At one time during the occupation, it meant death to be caught even giving food to a Jew. A family sheltering a Jew (as many did) was laying their own lives on the line.
It is probably true that there was anti-semitic prejudice in Poland, but the Poles never dreamed up the Holocaust on their own. It is an historical fact that Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe (about 20% of the population) as a result of tolerance by a Polish king, who had sheltered Jews during the Middle Ages, when many were driven out of the Rhine Valley and elsewhere.
I think that it is grossly unfair to point the finger at Poland, when one considers the whole historical picture.
In fact, it is unjust to judge whole countries in this way. There were good people, and bad people. It is true that many French were anti-semitic at the time, but also true that ordinary French peasants of strong Christian belief helped smuggle many Jews into Switzerland and safety. Disproportionate in this effort were the minority French Protestants, who perhaps recalled their own days of severe persecution.
Of course, he did. It was called "unconditional surrender".
If I remember the story of John Demjaniuk correctly first he was a conscripted soldier in the Russian army after the Russians invaded Poland. Then he was captured by the Germans.
The Germans needing man power offered captured Pols the option to “volunteer” to serve in the German army.
Demjaniuk having the option of spending the rest of the war in a German prison camp on starvation rations or serving in the SS. Demjaniuk chose the German army.
In retrospect maybe not a great choice but who could blame him? Many other Pols made the same choice.
But how Der Spiegel can call this cooperation of other European Countries is just baffling.
Certainly individual collaborated but not the willing cooperation of a substantial number of the polulation.
And wasn't even the "anti-semitic" Endecja party in power then?
Demjanjuk was Ukrainian, not Polish. Poles did not serve in the German army. None!
awesome.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.