Talk:Collaboration in German-occupied Poland

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This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

Shira Klein (June 14, 2023). "The shocking truth about Wikipedia's Holocaust disinformation". The Forward. Retrieved June 16, 2023. There were scattered instances of Jewish collaboration in WWII, for example. But Wikipedia inflates their scale and prominence. In one article that remains gravely distorted, alleged Jewish collaboration with the Nazis takes up more space than the Ukrainian, Belorussian and ethnic German collaboration combined.

Current consensus

NOTE: It is recommended to link to this list in your edit summary when reverting, as:
[[Talk:Collaboration in German-occupied Poland#Current consensus|current consensus]] item [n]
To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

1. Polish railway personnel should not be described as collaborators. (RfC April 2018)

2. The scope of the article is collaboration in German-occupied Poland, irrespective of who was collaborating. (May 2018, June 2018)

3. The Facebook posts by Jakub Kumoch, then the Polish ambassador to Switzerland, are not a reliable source on collaboration for the purpose of this article. (RfC July 2018)

4. No consensus has been reached for stating that Jewish collaborators routinely sought to entrap Poles who lent aid to Jews. (RfC August 2018)

SS service

~~SS service of Poles is important! Very important! Fireslow (talk) 13:07, 28 April 2020 (UTC)~~ sock puppet GizzyCatBella🍁 22:17, 11 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious tag ...

Has been attached to "According to Klaus-Peter Friedrich estimates range from as few as 7,000 to as many as several hundred thousand (including Polish officials employed by the German authorities; Blue Police officers, who were required to serve; compulsory "labor service" workers; members of Poland's German minority; and even Poland's peasantry, which on the one hand was subject to food requisitions by the Germans, and on the other collaborated and benefited financially from the wartime economy and the removal of Jews from the Polish economy for much of the war." What part specifically are you having difficulty with? It's sourced to two source - one on JSTOR at JSTOR, and the other " Berendt, Grzegorz (2011), "The Price of life : the economic determinants of Jews' existence on the "Aryan" side", in Rejak, Sebastian; Frister, Elzbieta (eds.), Inferno of choices : Poles and the Holocaust., Warsaw: RYTM, pp. 115–165". I don't have the second one, but the first is available to me. (Apologies for any typos in the following - the copy-past from the JSTOR article is not always working correctly and I may have missed a couple of typos in my corrections)

The "According to Klaus-Peter Friedrich estimates range from as few as 7,000 to as many as several hundred thousand" is supported by page 744 "Estimates of the number of Polish collaborators vary from seven thousand (footnote 197) to about one million.(footnote 198)" Footnote 197 is to Lukas Forgotten Holocaust p. 117. Footnote 198 is to Madajczyk, "'Teufelswerk," p. 146 - the full citation for that is on page 728 where it's "Czeslaw Madajczyk, "'Teufelswerk': Die nationalsozialistische Besatzungspolitik in Polen," in Eva Rommerskirchen, ed., Deutsche und Polen 1945-1995: Anndherungen- Zbliienia (Diisseldorf, 1996), 24-39, esp. 33".
"(including Polish officials employed by the German authorities;" - see page 716 "The number of employees in the administration-in the beginning of 1941 much smaller (122,700) than before the war-increased by mid-1943 to 206,300,24 and a year later the pre-1939 level was surpassed by 50 percent. The Polish share of mayors in the GG (excluding Galicia) reached 73 percent.(footnote 25) The occupiers wanted priests but also Polish mayors, heads of the district councils, and representatives of the cooperatives (Spotem) to take part in attracting young Poles to work in the Reich. Even in the annexed areas of western Poland some Polish civil servants were retained by necessity." Footnote 25 is to Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation p. 141.
"Blue Police officers, who were required to serve;" is supported by pages 722-724. "In a 1990 study on the Polish Police (PP)-the "policja granatowa" in dark blue uniforms-Adam Hempel inquired into one of the most important Polish institutions that was kept by the Germans.(footnote 61) During the occupation, the PP mainly had to deal with keeping "law and order." Its size increased steadily from the end of 1939: in 1942 its forces numbered 11,500, and in 1943 about 16,000.(footnote 62) These Polish policemen carried fire- arms. They could not advance into higher posts comparable to those that existed in occupied western Europe; stations of the PP were directly subject to the German police. In the eyes of Polish resistance groups, the policemen were henchmen of the occupation authorities. Indeed, their main task was to discipline and control the Polish population." Footnote 61 is " Adam Hempel, Pogrobowcy kleski: Rzecz o policji "granatowej" w Generalnym Guber torstwie, 1939-1945 (Warsaw, 1990). Hempel actually finished his thesis in 1983, but lication was postponed until after the abolition of state censorship." and footnote 62 is " Compare with the number of green uniformed German Ordnungspolizei in GG, which consisted, including the Schutzpolizei in bigger cities and the Gendarme in the countryside, of twelve to fifteen thousand men; besides there were two thousand functionaries of the German Sicherheitspolizei, supported by three thousand Poles. Browning "Beyond Warsaw and Lodz" 80." Another bit supporting that is "In any case, Polish policemen were active in the expulsion and deportation of Jews, for example as a part of "ad hoc armies of ghetto cleaners in the Lublin region;". Friedrich does NOT support the that the police officers were required to serve.
"compulsory "labor service" workers;" see page 720 "In 1983, Mscislaw Wr6blewski published the first in-depth treatise on the so-called Baudienst, which was institutionalized in the Krakow district of the GG in May 1940 on the initiative of General Governor Hans Frank, in cooperation with the Reichsarbeitsdienstfiihrer Heinrich Hinkel.(footnote 42) The Baudienst quickly spread to other districts.(footnote 43) Beyond strengthening the Nazified education and discipline of the younger generation through "hard labor," the organization also pursued economic and politically propagandistic aims. The Baudienst was made up of eighteen- to twenty- three-year-old Polish and Ukrainian draftees who were kept in barracks under the command of German officers, paid "pocket-money," and made to labor in public works." Footnote 42 is to Mscislaw Wr6blewski, Stuiba budowlana (Baudienst) w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie, 1940-1945 (Warsaw, 1984). Footnote 43 is to The northeast along with the Warsaw district and parts of the Lublin and Radom districts were excluded. See Krzysztof Dunin-W4sowicz, "Przedmowa," in Wr6blewski, Stuiba budowlana, 7; and the map entitled "Ubersichtskarte der territorialen Gliederung," in the same volume, 48. According to an announcement in the Home Army organ Biule- tyn Informacyjny, Baudienst service was extended to the Warsaw district in 1944. Biuletyn In-formacyjny, no. 4 (211), 27January 1944. The fact that Baudienst took part in Jewish roundups is covered by page 721 "Polish firemen, volunteers of "Organisation Todt" who were usually engaged in construction work, and Baudienst conscripts orjunacy (as they were often called in Polish) took part in anti-Jewish crimes as auxiliary staff.(footnote 52)" Footnote 52 is "See the news organ of the representation of the London-based Polish government in the country (Delegatura Rzadu na Kraj), Kraj, no. 15, 2 December 1943, men- tioning the misuse of firemen in Siedlce; see also Emanuel Ringelblum, Hersz Wasser, and Eliahu Gutkowski, "Die Holle der polnischen Juden unter der Hitler-Okkupation: Rap- port von Oneg Szabat," in Ruta Sakowska, Die zweite Etappe ist der Tod: NS-Ausrottungspolitik gegen die polnischenJuden, gesehen mit den Augen der Opfer; Ein historischerEssay und ausgewihlte Dokumente aus dem Ringelblum-Archiv 1941-1943 (Berlin, 1993), 217; Polish edition: Dwa etapy: Hitlerowska polityka eksterminacji Zyddw w oczach ofiar (Wroclaw, 1986); and, as regards Organisation Todt, an anonymous report on the murder of the Jews in the GG sent to the Breslau archbishop cardinal Adolf Bertram, published in Akten der deutschen Bischife iiber die Lage der Kirche 1933-1945, vol. 6 (Mainz, 1985), 210-15." (that likely has some typos in it... sorry)
"members of Poland's German minority;" is supported by pages 724 through 728 - those pages are part of a sub-section entitled "Open Collaborators: The So-Called Ethnic German Population (Volksdeutsche)", which I think makes the support pretty clear.
"and even Poland's peasantry, which on the one hand was subject to food requisitions by the Germans" see pages 742-743 "duty to deliver produce to the occupying regime." although the article itself makes it clear that Germans had difficulties getting produce/etc only in the second half of the occupation - that during the first half the peasants may actually have benefited economically from the German agricultural policies in the countryside.
"and on the other collaborated and benefited financially from the wartime economy and the removal of Jews from the Polish economy for much of the war." - see pages 733 "Many peasants likewise enriched themselves at Jews' expense after the authorities had invited them to do so." and then goes on to list some examples of this. And then pages 739 through 743, which is a sub-section entitled "Victims as Collaborators? - The Polish Peasantry".

This is a great example of why using exact page ranges for information from journal articles is important, rather than just the whole article range. --Ealdgyth (talk) 12:29, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Image removed

I removed [1] the equivalent image to the image removed here with this edit --> [2] at Collaboration with the Axis powers article, as its inclusion also suggests that the farmworkers were collaborators. - GizzyCatBella🍁 01:01, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Kielce and Krakow pogroms and post-Holocaust violence?

There's no mention of the Kielce pogrom or Krakow pogrom in this page nor a link to the Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944–1946. While I understand that some of the pogroms are not technically not a form of Nazi collaboration since they occurred after the war, they did occur within a year of the Holocaust and is an important part of Jewish collective memory. I think they pages ought to be mentioned in the Holocaust section since the current section implies that ethnic Poles harbored little if any antisemitic attitudes. Yes, the actual content does not belong here, but if it is not linked, a reader could be seriously mislead about how the relationship between Jews and Poles.

I understand that this is a difficult point to mention given that ethnic Poles were also victims of the Nazis, and many Poles saved Jewish lives, but it is important to mention these documented cases of antisemitic violence to make it known that many in Polish society held antisemitic attitudes and committed violent actions. _{too_much}curiosity (talk) 18:15, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As you say, this is not about collaboration, this article is. Slatersteven (talk) 18:20, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand which is why I think it should only be mentioned and linked. I agree that it should not be discussed. I believe one or two sentences with links would suffice.

I firmly believe it is wrong to say that "Polish collaboration" has little to do with "Polish antisemitism". A naive reader would certainly assume a relationship between the two. Links would help the reader disambiguate the two topics and learn more about the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles around the time of the Holocaust. _{too_much}curiosity (talk) 18:46, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree, a link in see also is the best we could do, and that might be pushing it. Slatersteven (talk) 18:51, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Care to explain why you disagree? _{too_much}curiosity (talk) 19:05, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I did, its not about collaboration, so has no place here. Slatersteven (talk) 19:06, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Modern context and debates

This article needs a section on modern debates about how Polish people view this topic, why it has become somewhat controversial in the recent years, etc. Jedwabne, Gross, IPN and PiS, all that stuff. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:14, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"This article needs a section on modern debates about how Polish people view this topic" Unless these modern debates involve reliable sources, I fail to see their relevance. We do not include every dispute that is covered by YouTube. Dimadick (talk) 09:23, 28 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am pretty sure this is covered by reliable sources. Like [3]. Although I don't think I have the motivation to write such a section now; just highlighting this as "to do" for our collaborative future. Some likely relevant and reliable sources can be found for example by quering GS for "poland collaboration holocaust memory". See also Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:38, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]