Posted on 07/09/2002 11:29:22 AM PDT by RCW2001
Probe: Poles Played 'Decisive Role' in 1941 Pogrom
Tue Jul 9,11:47 AM ET
By Justyna Pawlak
BIALYSTOK, Poland (Reuters) - A probe into a World War II pogrom in the Polish town of Jedwabne found Tuesday that it was a local mob -- and not occupying Nazi forces -- who played a "decisive role" in the massacre.
But, revising earlier conclusions, Ignatiew said German special forces at the scene had incited the killings, although there was no clear evidence they had played an active role.
"We have to conclude that the role of the local population was decisive in the perpetration of this criminal act," Ignatiew told a long-awaited news conference.
"We can say that the crime in Jedwabne was committed with German inspiration."
The Jedwabne case hit the headlines last year after emigre historian Jan Gross blamed the deaths of up to 1,600 Jews on their Polish neighbors, challenging the official version which pinned responsibility solely on the Nazis.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized on behalf of his nation at an emotional ceremony on the pogrom's 60th anniversary, breaking with Poland's long-held self-image as a nation of wartime victims, not collaborators.
CLOSING THE CASE
Despite interviewing nearly 100 surviving witnesses, their accounts were often contradictory and did not provide sufficient evidence to launch new prosecutions, Ignatiew, of the Institute for National Remembrance, told reporters.
He said he would close the case, noting that several convictions handed down after the war, before Poland's communist rulers launched a cover-up, still stood.
Gross' book "Neighbors," while winning praise for breaking the silence about the killings, has been criticized by other historians for its treatment of evidence. Ignatiew said Gross' estimate of the death toll was "improbably high."
Exhumation work found the remains of 40-50 victims in one mass grave, while the number of victims in a second measuring 25 feet by six feet could not be ascertained, meaning the final toll may never be known.
NO GERMAN SHOTS FIRED
Investigators presented harrowing photos of human remains, personal belongings and bullet cases found at the barn's site near Jedwabne, in northeastern Poland.
Analysis of the cartridges found some to be from German weapons used in the area in World War One, while others could have only been shot later in World War II, contradicting some witnesses' claims that German troops had fired into the barn.
Ignatiew said it had not been possible to establish the exact role of Nazi killing units -- the notorious Einsatzgruppen -- which moved into the area after Hitler reneged on a 1939 deal with Stalin to partition Poland and attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
All that remains is circumstantial evidence, such as SS chief Reinhard Heydrich's orders to encourage local people to massacre Jews and others suspected of collaborating with the Soviets.
Ignatiew's recent questioning of former SS officer Hermann Schaper, acquitted in the 1970s in Germany on charges of participating in mass killings behind the eastern front, also failed to yield insights after doctors broke off the interview with the frail 90-year-old.
Another reason to stay armed.
Politically incorrect, but true.
It got very ugly in Jedwabne. At one point Polish schoolboys were playing football with the head of a young Jewish girl.
Amazing what we humans are capable of.
The Poles made the collaborators smash a bust of Lenin before they executed them. 1.5 million Polish Catholics had been rounded up previously and shipped to Soviet gulags. Vengeance was in the air.
. . . .in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, Polish intelligentsia perished in Katyn and in the Gulag. Twenty-one thousand were murdered at Katyn, Bologoe, Dergachi. A million and a half went to the Siberian gulag. Show me another nation in Europe that suffered the fury of two of the most murderous regimes in modern history.Yet even in these circumstances, at least one million people were involved in sheltering Jews (Lukas 150). In these circumstances, everyone of them was a saint, a hero, deserving no fewer accolades than Raul Wallenberg who was sheltered from Nazi retribution by his nationality, wealth and social status. In contrast, Poles who helped Jews were protected by nothing. . . .
It has to be said, bluntly, that while the interests of Jews and Catholics were the same concerning the Nazis, namely, the Nazis were a sworn enemy, in regard to the Soviets these interests did not coincide. For the Jews, the Soviet Union was a possible refuge from the horrors of Nazi occupation. For all too many Jews, the Soviet Union was a land of promise.
A significant part of the secular Jewish community in Poland greeted the Soviets as friends and collaborated with them in every way until the mid-1950s, thus contributing mightily to the destruction of Polish economy, culture, and population. Similar things could be said about the Polish-Soviet war in 1919, when mendacious gossip of "pogroms in Poland" was spread by Marxist and non-Marxist Jews in the West, to prevent the creation of a non-Marxist independent Polish state (Norman Davies, God's Playground, vol. 2, Columbia 1984, 262-3). In contrast, for Polish Christians the Soviet Union was, from the beginning, the country of the Gulag, a sworn enemy bent on destroying the Polish identity. . .
In Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988), Professor Jan Gross says: "For the record, it must be stated unambiguously" that when the Red Army attacked Poland, it was welcomed by smaller or larger but, in any case, visible, friendly crowds in hamlets, villages, and towns. These crowds were largely Jewish . . .
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/498/thompson.html
It didn't help that, in the years prior to WWII, the Poles aped the Nazis and the Nuremburg Laws by passing antisemitic laws of similar nature. The most devastating ones excluded Jews from most professions, trades and businesses, impoverishing many of them.
I suspect that most of these Jews were happy to see the "Soviet" Russians come back.
Polish antisemitism is long and deep and was greatly encouraged by the Polish Catholic Church. I'll only give one example:
Polish Catholic churches would place a baby doll in the church at Easter time with a sign on it saying that it represented the children the Jews will kill before Passover to use the baby's blood to make matzoh. This vile practice persisted in some churches even after WWII.
It was THAT bad.
The old "the Jews deserve it routine?" Just like you posted some time ago about the Jews on the St. Louis who were sent back to the ovens? When I read posts like yours it becomes clear how an event like Jedwabne happened.
List of over 700 Names of Polish men, women and children killed while helping Jews.
Remember vance, if the St Louis Jews weren't sent back America would have become a communist nation.
A necessary evil to protect White Christian America.
Essentially your words (and some disgusting others), Mr. Lied?
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