Did Polish investigations save the day?

[Archie]

I have seen anti-revisionists adopt a couple of different approaches to deal with the Soviet credibility problem. Occasionally someone will try to defend them directly, but it seems more common to make a strategic concession and admit that the Soviets were not reliable but ... [insert some rationale for why we should still take their claims seriously].

Bombsway has tried to argue that the Soviet reports themselves do not matter much because we can drill down to the underlying eyewitness statements. See here for a discussion of this proposal.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=86

Here I would like to address an argument that Nessie has made repeatedly. Nessie claims that it doesn't matter that the Soviets were unreliable because legit, independent investigations were done by the Poles. This argument is so bad that it's really not worth responding to. But since he repeats it so frequently, I figured I will make a thread for it.

A major confusion Nessie has is that he thinks Poland was independent of the Soviet Union and does not understand that Poland had fallen under Soviet control by the time the camps were "liberated." He frequently conflates the Polish government in-exile in London with the emerging Communist government. The government in-exile was about a thousand miles away from Poland during the relevant period and they never regained power.

Mainstream Sources on Communist Poland

With the liberation of Polish territories and the failure of the Home Army's Operation Tempest in 1944, control over what was to become post-war Poland passed from Nazi Germany to the Red Army, and from the Red Army to Polish communists, who formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN), an early government in existence from late July 1944 in Lublin. Polish communists became the most influential Polish factor in the politics of the new Poland,[34] despite tiny support initially.[35] The PKWN recognized the legal continuity of the March Constitution of Poland, as opposed to the April Constitution.[25][36]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History ... 80%931989)

The Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polish: Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN), also known as the Lublin Committee, was an executive governing authority established by the Soviet-backed communists in Poland at the later stage of World War II.[1][2][3][4] It was officially proclaimed on 22 July 1944 in Chełm, installed on 26 July in Lublin and placed formally under the direction of the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN). The PKWN was a provisional entity functioning in opposition to the London-based Polish government-in-exile, which was recognized by the Western allies.[5][6][a] The PKWN exercised control over Polish territory retaken from Nazi Germany by the Soviet Red Army and the Polish People's Army. It was sponsored and controlled by the Soviet Union and dominated by Polish communists.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Co ... Liberation

The Provisional Government of National Unity (Polish: Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN) was a puppet government formed by the decree of the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN) on 28 June 1945 as a result of reshuffling the Soviet-backed Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland established by the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR) through inclusion of politicians from the close political sphere of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the former prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile based in London. Inclusion of the latter group provided an excuse for the Western allies to approve tacitly the fait accompli of Poland becoming part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and to legitimise the Warsaw government while withdrawing their recognition of the Polish government-in-exile. The puppet government became known as the "Lublin Committee" or the "Lublin Poles" or the "Lublin Government", and it garnered the recognition of all Allied governments at the time.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provision ... onal_Unity

Majdanek

When the Red Army overtook Majdanek in the summer of 1944 a JOINT commission was formed to conduct the sham investigation of the camp.

Report of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the investigation for the crimes committed by the German-Fascist invaders in the extermination camp at Majdanek in the town of Lublin.

Already we can see that this idea of independent "Polish" investigations is a complete fantasy. The Poles were involved yet they went along with the Soviets in claiming 1,500,000 killed at this camp, a number now admitted to be farcical. The Poles provided no meaningful quality control whatsoever. Zero. Below is a clip from a Polish propaganda film (in Polish) of the Majdanek liberation.



The Supreme National Tribunal

The trials held in Poland were all conducted by the Communist government.

The Supreme National Tribunal (Polish: Najwyższy Trybunał Narodowy [NTN]) was a war-crime tribunal active in communist-era Poland from 1946 to 1948. Its aims and purpose were defined by the State National Council in decrees of 22 January and 17 October 1946 and 11 April 1947. The new law was based on an earlier decree of 31 August 1944 issued by the new Soviet-imposed Polish regime, with jurisdiction over "fascist-Hitlerite criminals and traitors to the Polish nation".[1][2] The Tribunal presided over seven high-profile cases involving a total of 49 individuals.[3]

The language here, "fascist-Hitlerite criminals," is indistinguishable from Soviet propaganda.

Auschwitz

The Poles were claiming up until 1990 that 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz. Once again, as with Majdanek, we see that Polish involvement provided no quality control. One of the main early investigators was the Polish judge Jan Sehn.

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/histo ... n-jan/826/

Key Points
-By 1944, Poland was NOT independent of the Soviets
-The Poles were NOT more reliable than the Soviets

[Stubble]

When the casus belli of Polish Sovereignty fell to the wayside, I suppose it was best to kick back on the propaganda of the holocaust to paint the German people as evil and deserving of the firebombing and dam busting. All the better that in the end the claims centered behind the iron curtain because when the music finally stopped, the western allies could say, 'wasn't me, I didn't do it'.

Who could imagine that the music would play this long. We still haven't reached the end of the song.

I fully expect some heart string pulling movie about a crippled violinist being gassed by evil nazis underneath Auschwitz Birkenau next year. And I expect it to win all of the awards, like the movie 'ass' from idiocracy.

[Nessie]

....

Here I would like to address an argument that Nessie has made repeatedly. Nessie claims that it doesn't matter that the Soviets were unreliable because legit, independent investigations were done by the Poles. This argument is so bad that it's really not worth responding to. But since he repeats it so frequently, I figured I will make a thread for it.

The evidence gathering by the Polish War Crime Commission was to a far higher standard than the Soviets. The Poles were far more thorough, tracking down witnesses, taking statements and surveying the death camp sites. They conducted the first camp trial for Majdanek staff in 1944 and then, along with the West Germans, they were responsible for the majority of death camp staff prosecutions. The Soviets were only interested in prosecuting Ukrainian camp staff.

After the war, the Poles were more closely aligned to the West German authorities, than the Soviets, even allowing West German prosecutors to conduct camp site visits for the AR camp trials in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Soviets showed little to no interest in such investigations.

That lack of Soviet interest extended to histories of and memorials to the Jewish dead. There were as more mass death sites in the Soviet Union as there were in Poland, but the Soviets produced no memorials. The Poles did and memorialised the death camp sites.

A major confusion Nessie has is that he thinks Poland was independent of the Soviet Union and does not understand that Poland had fallen under Soviet control by the time the camps were "liberated." He frequently conflates the Polish government in-exile in London with the emerging Communist government. The government in-exile was about a thousand miles away from Poland during the relevant period and they never regained power.

....

Key Points
-By 1944, Poland was NOT independent of the Soviets
-The Poles were NOT more reliable than the Soviets

Whether it was the Polish Government in Exile, that wanted a western aligned post war government, or the Communists who got into power, creating the Soviet aligned Cold War Poland, or after the collapse of the SU, the democratic western aligned government, ALL agreed that the Holocaust had occurred, much of it in their country and there were many Poles who cooperated with the Nazis.

As for the key points, the Poles retained an autonomy that the likes of the Ukrainians did not and as a result, they pursued policies that were at odds with the SU over prosecutions and memorials to the Holocaust. That the Communist Poles who were not independent of the SU, agreed with the non-Communists who opposed the SU, that a large part of the Holocaust occurred in their country and millions of their citizens had been murdered, means that the Soviet alignment is moot. That is even more so, when it is considered that the Soviets had no interest in the murder of Jewish Poles. There is zero evidence of the Soviet leadership dictating to the postwar Polish government, what its policy to the Jewish dead should be.

Their criminal investigations and prosecutions were more reliable, as they were to a higher standard, aligning and even cooperating with prosecutions in West Germany. Polish witnesses attended the camp staff trials in West Germany, to give evidence. Subsequent enquiries, such as the re-investigation of the death camp sites after the collapse of the SU, have added to the work conducted by the Poles in 1945. That is because the Poles then had little money and equipment to run their excavations, compared to the finances and equipment available from the 1990s. Those latter surveys have not found mistakes, they corroborate the initial surveys. Witnesses, interviewed in Poland in 1945, were re-interviewed and nothing new was discovered. No one radically changed their story, beyond what is to be expected due to fading memory.

If the Poles had followed Soviet policy, there would have been little evidence gathering, few prosecutions, no site preservation and no memorialisation. The Holocaust would have been allowed to fade into history. To a large extent, they did save the day.

[Nessie]

...

Auschwitz

The Poles were claiming up until 1990 that 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz. Once again, as with Majdanek, we see that Polish involvement provided no quality control...

From 1945 to 1990 the Poles aligned with Soviet death tolls. After the collapse of the SU, they aligned with Western historian death tolls.

If the Poles had aligned with Soviet policy, there would have been no museum authority for A-B or Majdanek and no site preservation. Contrast how the Poles preserved those sites with the total lack of Soviet preservation at Maly Trostenets and site destruction at Babi Yar.

[Archie]

Nessie on X.



He says the government in-exile was independent of the Soviets, ignoring that this government had nothing whatsoever to do with the camp investigations of 1944 and later.



"Polish reports of gassings started during the war"

Again, this is talking about the secondhand underground reports received by the government in-exile.

"& the main camp site examinations were in 1945, before the establishment of a pro-Soviet government in 1946."

This is just totally wrong. The Communists were taking power already in 1944, as explained in the OP.

[Archie]

Also, it is important not to misunderstand the point revisionists are making when we talk about the Soviets.

If the Extraordinary State Commission was dishonest and not credible, then their reports on Auschwitz and other camps are at the very least suspect. That's it. That's the point.

Sometimes the point is distorted to suggest merely that communists are untrustworthy. And this often leads to the false assumption that non-communists are trustworthy. The reality is that the Americans were not very trustworthy either. It's just that the Soviets were especially untrustworthy and they happened to be the ones who had access to the most important sites. As a general rule, we shouldn't take "investigations" done by Germany's enemies at face value. We should expect some bias there. "Omg ALL of Germany's enemies agreed" is not the strong point Nessie thinks it is.

[bombsaway]

I have seen anti-revisionists adopt a couple of different approaches to deal with the Soviet credibility problem. Occasionally someone will try to defend them directly, but it seems more common to make a strategic concession and admit that the Soviets were not reliable but ... [insert some rationale for why we should still take their claims seriously].

Bombsway has tried to argue that the Soviet reports themselves do not matter much because we can drill down to the underlying eyewitness statements. See here for a discussion of this proposal.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=86

It seems like you're focusing on some other aspect but it's incorrect to say that myself and others believe the claims should still be taken seriously. They shouldn't, and they haven't. The 4 million at Auschwitz was never taken seriously in the west, Hilberg produced an underestimate of the current Majdanek death total 65 years ago.

So yeah, again it's about this distinction between direct evidence and secondary sources (like the Soviet and Soviet aligned reports). "Bad" secondary sources do not undermine the direct evidence, nor substantiate claims that that evidence was fabricated.

The Soviets also reported millions of German deaths in Barbarossa, what is the significance of that?

It's quite obvious that Soviet practices don't preclude the possibility of massive German war crimes. A question you might ask yourself is what if the Germans had actually committed these crimes? Would the Soviets have become suddenly scrupulous and put forth accurate narratives that in some way were inconvenient for them (that Jews were singled out to a great extent -- rather than general targeting of Soviet citizenry). An uncomfortable truth for you is that if we take these reports at face value, many or most could be considered Holocaust denial.

[SanityCheck]

This is just totally wrong. The Communists were taking power already in 1944, as explained in the OP.

There is a common pattern across much of the future East Bloc of coalition governments and popular front rhetoric until 1947-1948, when full Stalinism was imposed. Poland was no exception. Moreover, in several cases, including both Czechoslovakia and Poland, prominent figures from governments-in-exile returned.

So Stanislaw Mikolajczyk returned from 1945-47 and was heading up the Polish People's Party, a peasant-oriented party, until politics sharpened against exiles and non-communists. Mikolacjyk's PSL might have won the vote in the 1947 election but that was rigged. As in East Germany, tolerance for pre-war social democrats persisted until Stalinisation, so the equivalent of the SED (merging SPD and KPD) was the PZPR, the Polish United Workers' Party, founded in December 1948. The prime minister of Poland from 1947-52 was Józef Cyrankiewicz, a former socialist (PPS) leader and also imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he led the camp resistance in 1943-44.

The investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes was in the hands of prewar bourgeois lawyers and judges, some of whom came back to Poland having spent the war in London with the government-in-exile. Many of the Polish delegation at Nuremberg (IMT) had this background, deciding that loyalty to nation overrode political worries, as it had for Mikolajczyk. As technocrats, they were able to compromise with the regime and largely stayed after 1947.

This wasn't the case for the overwhelming majority of Polish Jewish leaders, who generally emigrated from 1946-1950 after the Krakow and Kielce pogroms in 1945-46 and the generally worsening state of Polish-Jewish relations. So nearly all the Central Jewish Historical Commission leaders emigrated, and this applied also to the leaders of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKZP), with Emil Sommerstein emigrating in 1946 and Adolf Berman emigrating in 1950 after he was replaced in 1949 for being a Zionist. Berman had been one third of the underground National Jewish Council (ZKN) in 1943-44 alongside Emanuel Ringelblum (arrested and executed by the Nazis in 1944), and Yitzhak Zuckerman. Hersh Smolar took over in 1949 before the CKZP was downgraded; he was a prewar member of the communist party of Poland and a rare survivor of Stalin's purge of Polish communists in 1937-38 because he was in prewar Poland until 1939, then spent the war in the Minsk ghetto and its vicinity with the partisans.

There was considerable unrest as well as persisting partisan warfare in liberated Poland, with some factions of the Home Army continuing to fight the Soviets and Polish communists even after the majority disbanded. The right-wing NSZ also continued to fight. This paralleled the Lithuanian forest brothers and the UPA, the latter also operating on postwar Polish territory and even cooperating with their former enemies in the AK. The provisional government officialdom and police forces were targeted, which resulted in thousands killed on the government side, and large-scale repressions on the opposition side.

The bigger problem for the key crime scenes was grave-robbing, emerging spontaneously from below. A unit of the NSZ reported on grave-robbing at Treblinka while operating nearby, so did the Polish authorities.

The Polish Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland operated everywhere in postwar Poland, although it was less active in formerly German territories to the west. Individual counties responded to enquiries about mass graves and atrocities, files were opened in provincial commissions on specific crimes and camps. This was the context for Wladyslaw Bednarz, Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz and Jan Sehn conducting investigations of the extermination camps; all were as far as can be determined, existing lawyers, magistrates and judges.

Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin in Justice Behind The Iron Curtain (2018) note that there was considerable cooperation between the Main Commission and the CZKH; the judges mentioned above were not Jews, but Jewish investigators took part in or did follow-up inspections of the sites, or were involved as expert witnesses at trials run by non-Jewish Polish judges or prosecuted by Poles. (Nachman Blumental and Joseph Kermish emigrated in 1950, whereas Philip Friedman stayed in West Germany after 1946 and did not return. Michal Borwicz had directed the CZKH in Krakow and emigrated to France in 1947.)

The Polish government-in-exile war crimes section paid due attention to the Holocaust, as did the Main Commission, with a quarter to a third of the indictments filed with the United Nations War Crimes Commission relating to crimes against Jews. Unlike the Soviet regime, the postwar Polish authorities at every stage did not massively downplay or submerge the Holocaust. But the standard line was 'Jews first, Poles were next', a line that goes back to the Polish underground and government-in-exile at the turn of 1942-3. It was a Polish variant on Franz Neumann's 'spearhead theory' articulated in 1943, after Neumann abandoned the 'scapegoat theory' of Nazi antisemitism he had written into the first 1942 edition of Behemoth. Polish exiles and survivors did not need to know about Neumann's argument (which was barely accessible at the time) and were already groping towards Lemkin's original broader conception of genocide, as were other commentators and lawyers.

So Polish courts used the concept of genocide translating it straightforwardly into Polish as ludobójstwo, not much different to the German Völkermord. Lemkin's definition appealed to them as it encompassed denationalisation and Germanisation, not just extermination.

Thus on the legal side there was indeed considerable continuity between the wartime underground/government in exile, the provisional government of 1944-47, and the full Stalinist Polish government after 1948, for the conceptualisations used and the tendency to prosecute multiple crimes against Poles and Jews, especially in the major NTN cases. A certain proportion of trials concerned crimes against Jews only, thus the later trial of Juergen Stroop and Franz Konrad was more clearly 'Jewish' than the trial of Ludwig Fischer and other German functionaries in Warsaw, which is where the Lukaszkiewicz investigation into Treblinka was submitted into evidence as just one of many crimes charged.

At lower levels, as Finder/Prusin discuss, and supplemented by a point raised by Stefan Kuehl re the extradition of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to postwar Poland, there were inconsistencies. Polish courts prosecuted a number of cases relating to eastern Poland, now reannexed to the USSR, because survivors had migrated or been repatriated westwards, and the suspects were on hand. These tended to be 'Jewish' cases. But they prosecuted Major Trapp and other members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 for a reprisal against a Polish village, ignoring their role in deportations and mass shootings of Jews entirely.

Trials of Germans in Poland were deemed to be fair by observers, including Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski who was flown in as a witness (although the Poles desperately would have loved to have extradited him) and came away impressed with Polish justice. There were acquittals or time-served convictions for membership in criminal organisations, and not all cases resulted in death sentences where there were convictions. There is no substantial difference between how long the Poles kept hold of German convicts; most were released and repatriated by the mid-1950s, the same as for western Europe, the British and US trials, and indeed Soviet trials. Poland kept Erich Koch on a commuted life sentence until his death in 1985, preceding the death of Rudolf Hess in Spandau in 1987 as well as the release by the Dutch of the last two of the 'Breda Four' in 1989 (both died the same year).

The common patterns across Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain are more striking now we have plentiful national and comparative/transnational research. Poland was like other countries certainly in the grip of a major wave of anti-German hate in 1945-46, but the appetite for public executions disappeared in 1946 after crowds reacted not as they expected to when Arthur Greiser was publicly hanged on July 21 in front of a crowd of 15,000 people. Soviet trials in 1945-46 had been also followed by public executions, but the USSR then abolished the death penalty temporarily in 1947, so the second wave of public trials in the USSR had no 'cathartic' denouement. The overall level of passion and outcry declined in Poland by 1948, as it did elsewhere, with trials winding up and fewer belated cases - the ones after 1950 parallel the ongoing prosecutions in the two Germanies, since Britain and the US got out of the war crimes trial business entirely in 1949.

[SanityCheck]

Also, it is important not to misunderstand the point revisionists are making when we talk about the Soviets.

If the Extraordinary State Commission was dishonest and not credible, then their reports on Auschwitz and other camps are at the very least suspect. That's it. That's the point.

Sometimes the point is distorted to suggest merely that communists are untrustworthy. And this often leads to the false assumption that non-communists are trustworthy. The reality is that the Americans were not very trustworthy either. It's just that the Soviets were especially untrustworthy and they happened to be the ones who had access to the most important sites. As a general rule, we shouldn't take "investigations" done by Germany's enemies at face value. We should expect some bias there. "Omg ALL of Germany's enemies agreed" is not the strong point Nessie thinks it is.

Since ChGK was composed of many thousands of village, town, district, oblast and republic commissions, one cannot generalise about it to poison the well and dismiss it entirely. That also applies to the individual war crimes investigation teams on the Allied side of the Iron Curtain.

The sites investigated by ChGK frequently but not always show up in other sources, certainly for the key camps, so ChGK records become one source provenance among many from the God's eye perspective. And they will include cases of corroboration like naming the same names as a German rear area commandant report naming Russians hanged as 'partisan suspects'.

The question is whether anyone actually relies on the aspects of some ChGK reports you think were inaccurate. As one example, the Auschwitz death toll as is now accepted is the aggregate product of multiple national investigations by ministries of repatriation, NGOs like the Dutch Red Cross, the German Federal Archives, and historians researching inside and outside the Auschwitz museum. The main basis are the records of transports and prisoner registrations, which yield significant quantities of documents not under the control of either the USSR or Poland after 1945, together with the records of other KZs largely captured in Germany/Austria and pooled in the Arolsen archives today to establish outgoing transfers of registered and in 1944 also unregistered prisoners. So historians like Reitlinger and Hilberg were rejecting 4M claims in 1953 and 1961 and instead extrapolated from other sources to estimate 750,000 and 1 million respectively.

The death toll issue is also resolved for the camps in the GG and Warthegau in another example. Soviet investigations were hasty in 1944-45 into the other camps, as was the joint Polish-Soviet commission on Majdanek. The latter extrapolated a death toll of 1.5 million just for Majdanek which with hindsight clearly fits better with all of the Reinhard camps, and since the main number pointing to 1.5 million were shoes found on site, the property plunder aspect caused the misinterpretation of evidence fitting four camps for just one. Subsequent historical research through to the discovery of the Hoefle telegram 23 years ago (ffs) confirmed what was potentially apparent from the Korherr report by the late 1940s.

If Reitlinger could resist 'history by conclusion' 72 years ago why is it so difficult for you guys to evolve past this?

[Nessie]

Also, it is important not to misunderstand the point revisionists are making when we talk about the Soviets.

If the Extraordinary State Commission was dishonest and not credible, then their reports on Auschwitz and other camps are at the very least suspect. That's it. That's the point.

Sometimes the point is distorted to suggest merely that communists are untrustworthy. And this often leads to the false assumption that non-communists are trustworthy. The reality is that the Americans were not very trustworthy either. It's just that the Soviets were especially untrustworthy and they happened to be the ones who had access to the most important sites. As a general rule, we shouldn't take "investigations" done by Germany's enemies at face value. We should expect some bias there. "Omg ALL of Germany's enemies agreed" is not the strong point Nessie thinks it is.

When all of Germany's enemies agree with Germany and its Axis Allies and the countries it occupied, that is a very strong point indeed. It was not just Nazi Germany that was responsible for the Holocaust. Every country they occupied or were aligned with, except Denmark and Finland, cooperated to one extent or another with the ethnic cleansing and destruction of its Jewish citizens. They all agree of their roles in the Holocaust. There were Poles who provided a lot of assistance to the Nazis, as well as those who fought against them, and even they all agree.

I do not find revisionists to be trustworthy. They do a lot of lying and constantly misrepresent the evidence. They cannot even manage the basic tasks of any historical or criminal investigation. They are driven by obvious agendas, rather than the evidence.