May 30, 2012, - 12:59 pm
Poles Were Complicit in Holocaust: Outrage Over Obama “Gaffe” is Fraudulent, Ignorant
Barack Obama has done enough legitimately bad things that we don’t need to manufacture phony outrage over things he does that really aren’t so bad. Such is the case with the feigned shock and fake moralizing over his comments, yesterday, about German Nazi death camps in Poland being a Polish death camp. Here’s a tip for Poland and ignoramuses in the lumpenconservatariat who now engage in revisionist history: Poles murdered millions of Jews, they maintained several death camps, and they wiped out almost all of both sides of my family, as well as those in hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families. This wasn’t just the Nazis. It was tens of thousands of eager Poles and more. Obama made no gaffe here. Poland’s willing executioners took their significant place among Hitler’s willing executioners.
There is a reason why Poland was so easily occupied by the Germans. Yeah, I know–they were “just taking orders.” Just taking orders when they helped round up Jews and helped man gas chambers. As if Nazis from Germany did this alone! Polish police all too happily worked with the SS to round up Jews. Polish police all too easily took their place in helping run and operate the death camps. Facts are stubborn things. But, sadly, not as stubborn as morons and blind partisans.
I had to laugh when I read this:
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday Obama’s words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just “regret”.
Are you kidding? Someone needs to remind Mr. Tusk that his people were the ones doing the hurting and the turning over to the Nazis and the mass murder of at least half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, some of them from my family. You are “hurt” by calling Nazi death camps, “Polish”???? Um, where were they? Who helped operate them and round up and turn in the camps’ Jewish occupants, soon to be turned into ash and fumes?
There is a reason that President Obama, yesterday, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Jan Karski, the former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany’s genocide of European Jews. And that’s because Karski was unlike most of his fellow Poles, who hated Jews just as the Nazis did and proudly turned them over to the Nazis and/or participated in the mass murderous Judenrein. Even in the Polish underground, hatred of Jews was legion. My great-uncle was in the Polish underground, until they slit his throat while he was sleeping because, one day, the head of the Polish underground demanded a cleansing of its Jews, too.
My paternal grandmother had eleven brothers and sisters. Only one brother survived the Holocaust after the Poles murdered the rest along with her parents, after Poles seized their farm. (Grandma Marilyn was brought to the U.S. before the Holocaust began.) My maternal grandmother had only one surviving sister and brother, out of ten siblings. All the rest–and her parents–were murdered by the Poles. My maternal grandfather’s entire family was wiped out by the Poles. Grandpa Isaac’s father was mayor of the town and owned a hardware store. He hid in the haystacks of a Pole who owed him money and had bought tools on credit, but my grandfather escaped and was ultimately rounded up to the camps, after he heard the Pole tell neighbors he was going to trade my grandfather to the Nazis for a bottle of whisky.
My family and the millions of Jews wiped out in Poland never identified as Polish because the Poles never treated them that way. They were subject to centuries of pogroms and extreme anti-Semitism by the country in which they lived, before they were ultimately rounded up to the camps and mass-murdered with Polish cooperation. They were treated as subhuman all along the way, never as fellow “Polish.” So it’s beyond hilarious now to hear that the Poles are “hurt” by Obama’s description of a German Nazi death camp as “Polish.” As if there weren’t any Polish ones or as if the Poles had zero part in the Holocaust they all too eagerly participated in. Read the 93 pages of “Bystanders, Blackmailers, and Perpetrators: Polish Complicity During the Holocaust” for just a taste of what the Poles wrought on the Jews.
Yes, it is laughable that the Poles, Rush Limbaugh, self-hating Jew Matt Drudge, and a gazillion Republicans and incredibly obtuse and ignorant members of the lumpenconservatariat–most of them no different from the Obamabots in their lack of intelligence, knowledge, and common sense and decency–are incensed over this “gaffe” that really ain’t a gaffe at all. It’s intellectual dishonesty to insist that these death camps on Polish soil were not at all Polish and merely “German Nazi.” Here’s a list of the Polish ones–did they not exist? Did they exist in Poland only because the Germans did this and the Polish had no part? Only a liar or a moron would make these claims. The White House should have made no apology to Poland. These major death camps existed in Poland for a reason: Polish complicity in the Holocaust and willing cooperation with the Nazis.
* Auschwitz
* Belzec
* Chelmno
* Gross-Rosen
* Majdanek
* Plaszow
* Sobibor
* Stutthof
* Treblinka
Keep these names in your mind when you read this quote:
Poland’s government keenly watches the global media for descriptions of former Nazi German death camps as “Polish” because it says the term — even if used simply as a geographical indicator — can give the impression that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi Germany’s World War II genocide.
Although located in Poland, Auschwitz for example was set up and run entirely by German dictator Adolf Hitler’s occupying forces from 1940 to 1945.
Huh? The Poles were not just forced into this by the Nazis. They were active participants, many of them gleeful and eager to murder Jews. To call these camps Polish is no “gaffe.” Poland DOES bear responsibility for the Nazi genocide of Jews.
It’s just fact. And it’s denial and fraud for Poland and others to argue otherwise.
Yes, there were a few righteous gentile Poles who saved Jews. A very tiny few. The majority were all too happy for the Judenrein, especially in the way it took place.
That was the real Poland during World War II. Anyone who says otherwise is a fraud.
And if you wonder why so many Jews are liberal and won’t vote Republican, BS, like the absurd denial that Nazi Death Camps were Polish, certainly doesn’t help in endearing Jews to the GOP.
Tags: Barack Obama, Donald Tusk, gaffe, Holocaust, Jan Karski, Nazi Death Camps, Obama, Poland, Poland's willing executioners, Poles, Poles and the Holocaust, Polish, Polish complicity in the Holocaust, Polish death camps, Presidential Medal of Freedom, revisionist history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_with_the_Axis_Powers_during_World_War_II#Poland
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.[43][44] Poland also never officially surrendered to the Germans.[45] Under German occupation, the Polish army continued to fight underground, as Armia Krajowa and forest partisans – Le?ni. The Polish resistance movement in World War II in German-occupied Poland was the largest resistance movement in all of occupied Europe.[46] As a result, Polish citizens were unlikely to be given positions of any significant authority.[43][44] 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 the German citizenship.[47] 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.[44] 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.[43][44][48] 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).[49] 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.[48] 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”.[48]
The anti-Jewish actions of szmalcownicy were very harmful to the Polish Jews as well as the gentile Poles aiding them. Anti-Jewish collaboration of Poles was particularly widespread and effective in the rural areas.[citation needed] It is estimated that some 200 thousand hiding Jews died in 1942-1945 in direct result of this collaboration.[citation needed] The collaboration by some Polish Jews, who belonged to ?agiew, was also harmful to both Jewish and ethnic Polish Underground.
The Polish Secret State considered szmalcownictwo an act of collaboration with the German occupiers. The Armia Krajowa (Home Army) punished it with the death sentence as a criminal act of treason.[3] Blackmailers had been sentenced to death by the Special Courts of the Polish Underground for crimes against Polish citizens. The Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation) by its decree of August 31, 1944 also condemned this act as collaboration with Nazi Germany. This decree is still a valid law in Poland, and any person who committed an act of szmalcownictwo during the war faces life imprisonment. After the war, there were very few trials as most witnesses had already died or left the country.
Viggen on June 6, 2012 at 1:14 pm