A “land without a Quisling”
Many Poles are rightly proud that, during the Second World War, their nation never produced a collaborationist government and instead spawned one of the largest resistance movements in German-occupied Europe.
Unlike in most other nations conquered by Hitler, there was never a puppet government in Poland.
While some historians, including Norman Davies in his influential God’s Playground, have attributed this to the fact that in the Nazi ideology the Poles were “subhuman” Slavs unworthy of sitting at the same table as the Nordic “master race”, such an argument is unconvincing when we consider the fact that Bulgaria was an ally of the Reich, while collaborationist regimes existed in Slavic lands like the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia and Croatia.
Meanwhile, many Ukrainians, furious at the Soviets for the genocidal famine of 1932-1933 and hoping the Germans would create a Ukrainian state independent of Poland and Russia, joined collaborationist organisations like the SS-Galizien, the Ukrainian auxiliary police or the Nachtigall Battalion.
Even some Soviet military commanders like Andrey Vlasov and Bronislav Kaminski defected to the German side and led formations of Soviet soldiers fighting alongside the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, respectively. Kaminski’s RONA brigade was involved in mass murder during the crushing of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Moreover, early in the war, the Germans approached prewar Polish prime ministers like Kazimierz Bartel (later killed during the German massacre of Lwów professors) and Wincenty Witos with offers to become a Polish Laval or Quisling, yet both declined.
Likewise, attempts at creating a Polish SS division flopped. In the Tatra Mountain region of Podhale, the Germans claimed that the Górale, or Polish highlanders, were a separate race superior to other Poles and tried to create a Góral SS division, whose members would work as concentration camp guards.
Across Podhale, a promotional campaign promised recruits greater food rations and amnesty for their family members incarcerated in concentration and forced labour camps.
However. only a couple of hundred signed up, and when the Germans took them to camps to perform genocidal duties, the Górale got into brawls with Ukrainian guards or deserted; subsequently, the formation was disbanded.
The Blue Police
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The Blue Police (Polish: Granatowa policja), was the police during the Second World War in the General Government, semicolonial entity on a territory of German-occupied Poland. After the Revolutions of 1989 many Blue Police officers were rehabilitated, and earlier communist-propagated stereotypes were revised.
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However, the largest and most controversial collaborationist formation was the Blue Police, officially known as the Polish Police of the General Government.
The Blue Police functioned in four of the five districts of the GG.
Throughout the war, up to 18,000 officers served in the Blue Police. While desertion was punished by execution or deportation to camps, the German authorities also eventually accepted recruits, luring them with greater food rations (in the GG, Germans were allotted 2,613 calories a day, while Ukrainians received 1,000, Poles 699, and Jews just 184).
In 1992, Raul Hilberg, the doyen of Holocaust history, wrote:
Of all the native police forces in occupied Eastern Europe, those of Poland were least involved in anti-Jewish actions…They could not join the Germans in major operations against Jews or Polish resistors, lest they be considered traitors by virtually every Polish onlooker.
However, more recently, Polish historians have found new evidence that makes Hilberg’s evaluation sound excessively optimistic.
In works such as Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland, researchers have pointed to several forms of participation by the Blue Police in the Holocaust.
According to their study of nine rural counties in the GG and Białystok District, two in three Jews who sought refuge among Gentiles did not survive to the end of the war; the “Blue” Police was a major reason for this.
Particularly in the rural GG, the “Blues” guarded ghettos during deportation actions to prevent Jews from fleeing. During such actions, they searched ghetto cellars and attics for hidden Jews.
After the destruction of the ghettos, meanwhile, the police searched for fugitive Jews hiding among the Gentile population. Some were handed over to the Gestapo, but there were plenty of cases in which the “Blues” took the initiative and shot Jews they discovered themselves.
Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote in his 1943 essay Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War:
It is difficult to estimate the number of Jews in this country who fell victim thanks to the Blue Police; it must certainly amount to tens of thousands of those who managed to escape the German slaughterers.
That the Blue Police were engaged in anti-Jewish actions was common knowledge in Poland. Meanwhile, the topic was treated as a taboo, challenging the national myth of universal resistance to the Third Reich, and received relatively little attention from historians until recently.