Posted on 04/21/2015 4:10:39 PM PDT by presidio9
Edited on 04/21/2015 4:31:18 PM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
Hey, is the Pope Catholic? ;-)
To be fair, Horthy's Hungarian government did turn on the Germans, and attempted to make peace with the Soviets. Hence the German coup in 1944. It was for this reason that Stalin did not ask that Horthy be tried as a war criminal.
It can be argued that Horthy only turned on the Germans when it became clear that Hitler was going to lose the war. The same can be said about Finland, Italy, and Romania.
“Nowhere in Comey’s speech did he blame Poland for the Holocaust. He simply mentioned “accomplices,” of which Poland had its share.”
So did Judaism. There were Jews who cooperated with the Nazis against other Jews. It was a Jewish spy for the Gestapo who turned in Gad Beck, for instance.
And Stella Kubler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_K%C3%BCbler
Over 1000 Nazi Jewish spies in Poland alone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBagiew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_13
The stories of Finnish Jews (including a woman) getting Iron Crosses from the Nazis has always struck me: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/museums/10682975/The-Jews-who-fought-for-Hitler-We-did-not-help-the-Germans.-We-had-a-common-enemy.html
Historian Bryan Mark Rigg says that 150,000 Jews or half-Jews served in Hitler’s armies. http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-Soldiers-Descent-Military/dp/0700613587
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/jewishlife/JewishSoldiersMark.htm
Nobody gets to tell the Poles anything about anything anymore. They’ve paid their dues. They owe no one.
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....
In Darkness was a fascinating movie.
As presideo pointed out, and you failed to read - NONE.
"In his mind, Comey and the other FBI agents who helped out Whitey Bulger didn't do anything evil. He convinced himself it was the right thing to do, the thing he had to do."
I read rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I will watch it.
It is hard to be judgmental in a situation we were not in.
I remember a very prophetic conversation I had with a friend at work before my brain injury. I said I would NEVER, EVER use a treatment that came from embryonic stem cells if I got sick.
Well, I got sick. Very sick. And if, in my worst states, a doctor came up to me and said this injection came from stem cells of a fetus and will heal you completely, I just don’t know...I t’s a hypothetical because it is FAR off, and they are using umbilical chord cells now, but the drive to survive is strong...
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?
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.
How about the FBI hair analysis lab?:
FBI admits that ALL its forensic experts exaggerated hair evidence at every criminal trial for nearly 20 years
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3280821/posts
And then there's BenLurkin's post above...
There are also numerous incidents of Jews who survived the concentration camps returning to their homes, only to be murdered by the Polish families now living in those homes. Estimates run between 1000 and 2000 dead.
Unlike in most European countries occupied by Nazi Germany—where the Germans sought and found true collaborators among the locals—in occupied Poland there was no official collaboration either at the political or at the economic level.[66][67] Poland also never officially surrendered to the Germans.[68] Under German occupation, the Polish army continued to fight underground, as Armia Krajowa and forest partisans – Leśni. The Polish resistance movement in World War II in German-occupied Poland was the largest resistance movement in all of occupied Europe.[69] As a result, Polish citizens were unlikely to be given positions of any significant authority.[66][67] The vast majority of the pre-war citizenry collaborating with the Nazis was the German minority in Poland which was offered one of several possible grades of German citizenship.[70] In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, 800,000 people declared themselves as members of the German minority in Poland mostly in Pomerania and Western Silesia. During the war there were about 3 million former Polish citizens of German origin who signed the official list of Volksdeutsche.[67] People who became Volksdeutsche were treated by Poles with special contempt, and the fact of them having signed the Volksliste constituted high treason according to the Polish underground law.
There is a general consensus among historians that there was very little collaboration with the Nazis among the Polish nation as a whole, compared to other German-occupied countries.[66][67][71] Depending on a definition of collaboration (and of a Polish citizen, based on ethnicity and minority status), scholars estimate number of "Polish collaborators" at around several thousand in a population of about 35 million (that number is supported by the Israeli War Crimes Commission).[72] The estimate is based primarily on the number of death sentences for treason by the Special Courts of the Polish Underground State. Some estimates are higher, counting in all members of the German minority in Poland and any former Polish citizens declaring their German ethnicity (Volksdeutsche), as well as conscripted members of the Blue Police, low-ranking Polish bureaucrats employed in German occupational administration, and even workers in forced labor camps (ex. Zivilarbeiter and Baudienst). Most of the Blue Police were forcibly drafted into service; nevertheless, a significant number acted as spies for Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa.[71] John Connelly quoted a Polish historian (Leszek Gondek) calling the phenomenon of Polish collaboration "marginal" and wrote that "only relatively small percentage of Polish population engaged in activities that may be described as collaboration when seen against the backdrop of European and world history".[71]
In October 1939, the Nazis ordered the mobilization of the pre-war Polish police to the service of the occupational authorities. The policemen were to report for duty or face the death penalty, thus forming the so-called Blue Police.[73] At its peak in 1943, it numbered around 16,000.[74] Its primary task was to act as a regular police force and to deal with criminal activities, but were also used by the Germans in combating smuggling, resistance, and in measures against the Polish (and Polish Jewish) population: for example, it was present in łapankas (rounding up random civilians for labor duties) and patrolling for Jewish escapees from the ghettos. Nonetheless many individuals in the Blue Police followed German orders reluctantly, often disobeyed German orders or even risked death acting against them.[75][76][77] Many members of the Blue Police were in fact double agents for the Polish resistance.[78][79] Some of its officers were ultimately awarded the Righteous among the Nations awards for saving Jews.[80][81]
Following Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, German forces quickly overran the territory of Poland controlled by the Soviets since their joint invasion of Poland in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A number of people collaborating with the Soviets before Operation Barbarossa were killed by local people. Belief in the Żydokomuna stereotype, combined with the German Nazi encouragement for expression of anti-Semitic attitudes, was a principal cause of massacres of Jews by gentile Poles in Poland's northeastern Łomża province in the summer of 1941, including the massacre at Jedwabne.[82][83]
However, research shows that at least as far as Warsaw is concerned, the number of Poles aiding Jews far outnumbered those who sold out their Jewish neighbours to the Nazis. According to the studies of historian Gunnar S. Paulsson, during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw 70,000–90,000 Polish Gentiles aided Jews, while 3,000–4,000 were szmalcowniks, or blackmailers who collaborated with the Nazis in persecuting the Jews.[84]
Two members of the Jewish Ghetto Police guarding the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto, June 1942 The collaboration by some Polish Jews, who belonged to Żagiew and Group 13 inflicted considerable damage to both Jewish and Polish underground movements, as members of the collaborationist groups acted as informants for the Germans, revealing the organized efforts by the resistance to hide Jews,[85] and engaged in racketeering, blackmail and extortions inside the Warsaw Ghetto.[86][87]
Also, the Jewish Ghetto Police was recruited form among Polish Jews living inside the ghettos who could be relied upon to follow German orders. Members of Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst were issued batons, identifying armband, hats and badges, they were used by the Germans primarily for securing the deportation of other Jews to concentration camps, but their work encompassed all forms of public order in the Ghetto.[88] The Polish-Jewish historian and Warsaw Ghetto archivist Emanuel Ringelblum described the cruelty of the ghetto police as "at times greater than that of the Germans.".[89] The size of each police outfit inside a ghetto varied greatly, with the Warsaw Ghetto having about 2,500 active members, Łódź Ghetto 1,200 and smaller ghettos like that in the city of Lwów had around 500 Jewish policeman.[90]
One partisan unit of Polish right-wing National Armed Forces, the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, decided to tacitly cooperate with the Germans in late 1944. It ceased hostile actions against the Germans for a few months, accepted logistic help and withdrew from Poland into Czechoslovakia with German approval in late stages of the war in order to avoid capture by the Soviets. Once in Czechoslovakia, the unit resumed hostilities against the Germans and on May 5 liberated the concentration camp at Holýšov.[91]
In 1944 Germans clandestinely armed a few regional Armia Krajowa (AK) units operating in the area of Vilnius in order to encourage them to act against the Soviet partisans in the region; in Nowogrodek district and to a lesser degree in Vilnius district (AK turned these weapons against the Nazis during Operation Ostra Brama).[48][92] Such arrangements were purely tactical and did not evidence the type of ideological collaboration as shown by Vichy regime in France or Quisling regime in Norway.[75] The Poles main motivation was to gain intelligence on German morale and preparedness and to acquire much needed equipment.[93] There are no known joint Polish-German actions, and the Germans were unsuccessful in their attempt to turn the Poles toward fighting exclusively against Soviet partisans.[75] Further, most of such collaboration of local commanders with the Germans was condemned by AK headquarters.[75] Tadeusz Piotrowski quotes Joseph Rothschild saying "The Polish Home Army was by and large untainted by collaboration" and adds that "the honor of AK as a whole is beyond reproach".[75]
The film 1939: Battle of Westerplatte [Polish: Tajemnica Westerplatte] shows us how the German army crushed Poland by main force. ("Westerplatte still fights on"!)
Read the associated articles on Wikipedia to get a sense of what was going on.
Also, The Defense of the Polish Post Office in Danzig (Gdańsk) was another act of Polish defiance in the face of the Wehrmacht boot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Polish_Post_Office_in_Danzig
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.
Using a base estimate of 12 million victims of Nazi genocide in Europe, we're probably at the equivalent of four to five "Holocausts" right here in the United States of America since 1973.
When you talk to them, you get a picture of a lot of ethnic groups who made a calculated, sincere decision that being occupied by the Nazis was preferable to being occupied by the Soviets.
I’ve read couple of autobiographies of Jews who were from Poland and ended up in the camps and survived.
They tell of living in Poland with the Polish people all in same town and they were neighbors and friends before the WAR. When War started and got ramped up after a few years, Poles, their best friend and neighbors would turn them in for food, for housing, for clothes because they needed to feed and house their families. When Jews got arrested, Poles were there cleaning out their houses for jewels, furniture, food, gardens, etc.
Yes, some Poles did help the Jews but lot looked the other way for self-survival. Lot of Poles were captured and worked to death in the work camps to make clothes, bullets, boots for the Germans.
United States knew what was happening and we turned a blind eye as we didn’t want to get involved until our hand was forced
As a world, we all had a hand in the Holocaust.
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