[caww]

Baloney!.....Don't play down Polands role in this or any other country that went along to get along with the Nazi's...and I speak of the citizenship...not just the leaders.

Further you cannot at all compare the Holocaust to the black slave trade. Not even close...the Holocaust was a brutal and deadly systematic annihilation of a people. You must understand that when people willingly follow a leader and it's ideology they will do what they never thought possible they would to save their own skin. The Germans knew...and so did the Poles the camps were there and what they were doing...it was no secret.

How many camps were there in Poland alone.....you simply cannot have that camps without the people's awareness, both in the host country as well as neighboring....

[kiryandil]

How many camps were there in Poland alone

As presideo pointed out, and you failed to read - NONE.

[Leaning Right]

Don't play down Poland's role in this or any other country that went along to get along with the Nazi's

That is simply an astounding statement. You speak of Poland as if it were some sort of an ally of Germany. I do agree with you that many, maybe even most, Poles knew that something horrible was going on. But what in the world would you have the average Pole do?

Note that I am not talking about the relatively few collaborators. I'm talking about the average Pole, who lived under a brutal occupation. What would you have him do?

[presidio9]

You left out the rest of my point (which vladimir998 elaborated): By this logic, "The Jews" were responsible for the Holocaust. Care to take ownership of that statement?

Speaking of which, I can get on board with the idea that we are all responsible for the Holocaust in our own country that is closing in on 58,000,000 innocent lives and counting since Jan 22, 1973.

But to me you just sound like a person who likes to lead with his chin.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Baloney!.....Don't play down Polands role in this or any other country that went along to get along with the Nazi's...and I speak of the citizenship...not just the leaders.

How many camps were there in Poland alone.....you simply cannot have that camps without the people's awareness, both in the host country as well as neighboring...

So is your point that the Poles were complicit in the Holocaust?

Your posts at FR indicate that you are a rabid anti-Catholic, so I can only assume that this drives your animus toward the Poles.

My Polish grandfather was a civil engineer. After the Polish resistance blew up a local railway bridge, Nazi troops came to his house and asked him to help repair the bridge. He refused and was taken away and shot.

My grandmother was taken away to "work in Germany." She was never heard from again.

My father, at age 14, was put into forced labor. He eventually escaped, was captured, conscripted into the German army, deserted in Italy, and eventually joined up with a Polish regiment in Italy.

This level of suffering was the norm for Polish families in WWII. Talk to some.

How do you imagine that these people would be able to liberate the death camps?

Educate yourself. Your ignorance is colossal and appalling. There is no excuse for it in the age of the internet.

[dfwgator]

You realize that Poland had the MOST Jews in Europe before the war. So it stands to reason that the Germans, with their typical attention to efficiency, would choose to build the death camps near where the Jews were.

Also NOT ONE SINGLE ETHNIC POLE served as a guard at the camps, there were plenty of Ukrainians and Lithuanians who did serve.

[pierrem15]

They were very aware of it, but could do nothing.

You seem to think some heroic action on the Poles' part could have changed things: you're forgetting that over 600,000 non-Jewish Poles died in the same death camps as the Jews-- if they couldn't save themselves, how do you expect them to have saved the Jews?

[Cronos]

Firstly, caww -- there was no Poland (see my post above) -- it ceased to exist in 1939

Secondly, Poles were also tossed into German concentration camps

Thirdly the Armia Krajowe (the partisan anti-occupation underground) told the British and the American governments about the death camps -- but FDR and Churchill did nothing about this and the press did nothing either

Finally -- why were there so many camps on what was Polish territory? Because that's where most of Europe's Jewry was -- the Germans were and are efficient -- it's more efficient to kill people where they live rather than truck them a thousand miles away

And, btw, people were aware -- that's why the Israeli Yad Vashem (Righteous Gentiles), on that, the largest group of people who saved Jews are Poles.

In the Polish territories, unlike ANYWHERE else in occupied Europe, if you protected or helped a Jew, you and your family would be sent to the camps yourself or shot. So you took the risk of getting your family killed. Yet many Poles took that risk for their fellow Poles who were Jewish.

[Cronos]

caww "Don't play down Polands role in this or any other country that went along to get along with the Nazi's...and I speak of the citizenship...not just the leaders"

With due respect, your statement is wrong on many, many levels

1. Poland ceased to exist in 1939 -- Hitler wanted it and its people exterminated. He hated Poles just after Jews
2. Poland never officially surrendered, there was NO collaborationist government unlike France or Norway.
3. Poles who were not of German origin did not support the Nazis -- at the very least for the simple reason that the Nazis wanted to exterminate the Polish nation as well as the Jewish nation (oh and btw, many Poles of German origin didn't support the Nazis either)
4. Poland as a nation did not "get along with the Nazis" -- please read the history, it was occupied and torn apart. It was neither an ally like the Estonians or Lithuanians or Hungarians nor a collaborationist state like the Norwegian or French. It was a torn apart nation
5. The leaders fought against the Nazis. Even during the occupation -- WHO spread word to the Western world that a massacre was going on? The Polish partisan AK (and the West ignored it) -- WHO gave aid to the Jews in the ghettos and camps and even had a Jewish division (The Bielski brigade)? The Polish partisan AK? -

And the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 was supported by Poles -- the GErman officer in charge of the liquidation wrote

When we invaded the Ghetto for the first time, the Jews and the Polish bandits succeeded in repelling the participating units, including tanks and armored cars, by a well-prepared concentration of fire. [...] The main Jewish battle group, mixed with Polish bandits, had already retired during the first and second day to the so-called Muranowski Square. There it was reinforced by a considerable number of Polish bandits. Its plan was to hold the Ghetto by every means in order to prevent us from invading it. [...] Time and again Polish bandits found refuge in the Ghetto and remained there undisturbed, since we had no forces at our disposal to comb out this maze. [...] One such battle group succeeded in mounting a truck by ascending from a sewer in the so-called Prosta [Street], and in escaping with it (about 30 to 35 bandits). ... The bandits and Jews – there were Polish bandits among these gangs armed with carbines, small arms, and in one case a light machine gun – mounted the truck and drove away in an unknown directiom

And finally A year later, during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Batalion Zośka, one of the most notable Polish insurgent units, liberated hundreds of Jews from the Gęsiówka section of the Warsaw Concentration Camp

Please do read the history, caww

[USview]

caww,

What in God’s name did you expect the Polish people to do against the TWO Powerful Maniac forces that invaded Poland in 1939.....Nazi Germany and its former best friend Soviet Russia.... when they Co-Invaded Poland to exterminate Jews & Poles??

Poland had a WWII population of 32 million....while Nazi Germany which invaded Poland from the West had 80 million people while shortly after Nazi Germany’s 1939 Good friend Soviet Russia (had 140 million people) invaded Poland from the east. Tell me? How in God’s name was a nation like Poland suppose to stop the Anti-Jewish actions (and Anti-Polish actions) of two HUGE maniac nations....Nazi Germany and its former friend Soviet RuSSia who...made their Nazi German-RuSSian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to invade and destroy Poland and all of its Jews and Poles??? You sound as if you think the Poles should have had some kind of superhuman powers to repel these two huge monster nations. You sound quite irrational and Anti-Polish.

[Grzegorz 246]

“How many camps were there in Poland alone.....you simply cannot have that camps without the people's awareness, both in the host country as well as neighboring....”

And yet the feckers couldn't be bothered to call 911 :)))

But hey at least the 3rd Rome remained clear and what's more, now under leadership of the holy Putin (always a virgin) is still fighting Nazis :))))