Bloodlands

Poland in 1938, permitted its reconstitution as the Polish Workers’ Party in January 1942. Some of its Polish-Jewish activists then smuggled themselves into the Warsaw ghetto, where they urged armed resistance. The largest Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was much less inclined to use violence. In general, these organizations continued their work as distinct entities. In the three months after the Large Action, general accord about the need for armed resistance was reached. The Jewish Combat Organization was established in December 1942. As a group of politicians with little or no military background and no weapons to speak of, its first need was arms. Its first action was to ask for them, from the Home Army.¹¹

Beyond the ghetto, the Large Action forced the Home Army to undertake a Jewish policy. The Polish resistance had already taken some clear stands in 1941, condemning for instance guard duty at concentration camps as “national treason.” But the Home Army, before summer 1942, tended to treat the plight of Poland and that of Poles as one and the same. Prompted by the mass shootings of Polish Jews in the east, the Home Army created a Jewish section in February 1942. It collected evidence of the killings that was transmitted to the Allies and the BBC in April 1942. The deportations of summer 1942 prompted Catholic Poles to organize a rescue organization, which by December was sponsored by the Polish government under the cryptonym Zegota. (Poles were subject to the death penalty for assisting Jews.) Some Home Army officers took part. Home Army intelligence officers supplied identification documents for Jews in hiding beyond ghetto walls. When the Jewish Combat Organization requested weapons in December 1942, the Home Army offered to help Jews escape from the ghetto, perhaps to fight later on. This offer was declined by the Jewish Combat Organization. Its leaders wanted to fight, and so denied themselves an exit strategy.¹²

Warsaw Home Army commanders had strategic concerns that militated against giving the Jews any weapons at all. Although the Home Army was moving in the direction of partisan action, it feared that a rebellion in the ghetto would provoke a general uprising in the city, which the Germans would crush. The Home Army was not ready for such a fight in late 1942. Home Army commanders saw a premature uprising as a communist temptation to be avoided. They knew that the Soviets, and thus the Polish communists, were urging the local population to take up arms immediately against the Germans. The Soviets wanted to provoke partisan warfare in Poland in order to weaken the Germans—but also to hinder any future Polish resistance to their own rule when it came. The Red Army’s task would be easier if German troops were killed by partisan warfare, as would the NKVD’s if Polish elites were killed for resisting Germans. The Jewish Combat Organization included the communists, who were following the Soviet line, and believed that Poland should be subordinated to the Soviet Union. As the Home Army command could not forget, the Second World War had begun when both the Germans and the Soviets had invaded Poland. Half of Poland had spent half of the war inside the Soviet Union. The Soviets wanted eastern Poland back, and perhaps even more. From the perspective of the Home Army, rule by the Soviets was little better than rule by the Nazis. Its goal was independence. There were hardly any circumstances that would seem to justify a Polish independence organization arming communists inside Poland.¹³

Despite these reservations, the Home Army did give the Jewish Combat Organization a few pistols in December 1942. The Jewish Combat Organization used these to win authority and power in the ghetto. To resist the Judenrat and a Jewish police force armed only with clubs, pistols and audacity were enough. By killing (or trying to kill) Jewish policemen and Gestapo informers in late 1942 and early 1943, the Jewish Combat Organization created the sense that a new moral order was arising in the ghetto. Jozef Szerzynski, the Jewish police chief, was shot in the neck, although he failed to die. The Jewish Combat Organization did assassinate Jakub Lejkin, who led the police during the major deportation action, and later Mieczyslaw Brzezinski, who had driven his fellow Jews onto the trains at Umschlagplatz. The Jewish Combat Organization printed leaflets, explaining that collaboration with the enemy was a crime punishable by death. The Jewish Combat Organization thus supplanted the Judenrat, whose head was forced to admit that he no longer had “authority in the ghetto, here there is another authority.” Without an effective Jewish administrative and coercive apparatus, the Germans could no longer do as they pleased in the ghetto.¹⁴

German decisions about the fate of the ghetto and its remaining inhabitants were influenced by considerations that Jews could not possibly have understood. For the Germans, the Warsaw ghetto had first been a transit point for envisioned deportations to the Lublin district, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union; then a temporary labor camp; and then a transit point for deportations to Treblinka. In late 1942 and early 1943 it was again a labor camp, provisional and reduced in size, whose workers were those who had been selected for labor during the Large Action. Though Himmler never wavered in his determination to kill the Jews under German rule, other authorities wished, at this point at least, to keep some Jewish laborers alive. Hans Frank was worried about labor shortages in his General Government. Many Poles were working in Germany, so Jewish labor had become more important in occupied Poland. The Jews were working for the German war economy, so the Wehrmacht, too, had an interest in their remaining alive.¹⁵

Himmler was capable of making compromises. In early 1943 he meant to allow most of the surviving Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to live a bit longer, but also to eliminate the ghetto itself, which he saw as a center of political resistance, disorder, and disease. Himmler intended to kill the Jews who were living illegally in the ghetto without labor documents. Then he wanted to deport the remaining Jews as laborers to other concentration camps, where they would continue to work. Visiting Warsaw, Himmler ordered on 9 January 1943 that the ghetto be dissolved. The eight thousand or so Jews who were there illegally were to be shipped to Treblinka and gassed, and the rest, about fifty thousand, were to be sent to concentration camps. But when the Germans entered the ghetto nine days later to carry out Himmler’s orders, Jews hid or resisted. A few Jews fired on the first Germans to enter the ghetto, surprising them and leading to panic. The Germans killed some 1,170 Jews on the streets and deported perhaps five thousand. After four days the Germans had to withdraw and reconsider. Home Army commanders in Warsaw were impressed. The arms that they had given the Jewish Combat Organization had been put to good use.¹⁶

This was not the first instance of Jews resisting Germans in Poland. There were a large number of people of Jewish origin within the Home Army itself. Although this was a fact known to Home Army commanders, it was almost never discussed. Many of the people of Jewish origin in the Home Army regarded themselves as Poles rather than as Jews. Others kept their Jewish identities secret, on the grounds that it was best in wartime Warsaw not to spread the news of one’s Jewishness. Although anti-Semites in the Home Army were a minority, just one betrayal could mean death. What was new in January 1943 was that Jews had used arms against the Germans as Jews, in an open act of Jewish resistance. This worked powerfully against the anti- Semitic stereotype, present in the Home Army and in Polish society, that Jews would not fight. Now the Warsaw command of the Home Army gave the Jewish Combat Organization a substantial proportion of its own modest arms cache: guns, ammunition, explosives.¹⁷

In Berlin, Himmler was furious. On 16 February 1943 he decided that the ghetto must be destroyed not only as a society but as a physical place. That neighborhood of Warsaw was of no value to the racial masters, since houses that had been (as Himmler put it) “used by subhumans” could never be suitable for Germans. The Germans planned an assault on the ghetto for 19 April. Again, its immediate purpose was not to kill all the Jews but, rather, to redirect their labor power to concentration camps, and then to destroy the ghetto. Himmler had no doubt that this would work. He was thinking ahead to the uses of the site: in the long term it would become a park, in the meantime a concentration camp until the war was won. Jewish laborers from Warsaw would be worked to death at other sites.¹⁸

Right before the planned assault on the Warsaw ghetto, German propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels made his own special contribution. In April 1943, the Germans had discovered Katyn, one of the sites where the NKVD had murdered Polish prisoners of war in 1940. “Katyn,” declared Goebbels, “is my victory.” He chose 18 April 1943 to announce the discovery of the corpses of Polish officers. Katyn could be used to create problems between Soviets and Poles, and between Poles and Jews. Goebbels expected, and quite rightly, that the evidence that the Soviet secret police had shot thousands of Polish officers would make cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile more problematic. The two were uneasy allies at best, and the Polish government had never gotten a satisfactory reply from the Soviets about those missing officers. Goebbels also wished to use Katyn to display the anti-Polish policies of the supposedly Jewish leadership of the Soviet Union, and thus to alienate Poles from Jews. So went the propaganda on the eve of the German attack on the Warsaw ghetto.¹⁹