Nazis after Hitler by Donald M. McKale

Author:Donald M. McKale [McKale, Donald M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Poland

Occasional Trials amid a Continuing Holocaust

The leaflet advertised a message of terror: beat the jews. for the murdered polish children.1 This hate-filled writing appeared in August 1945 in Poland, almost a year after the Red Army’s liberation of the country. The leaflet reflected the belief of many Poles in the age-old myth of “blood libel”—that Jews allegedly murdered Christian children for use of their blood in religious rituals.

Throughout much of Christian Europe’s history, most especially in the Middle Ages, such false accusations or claims against Jews had resulted in the arrest and killing of many of them by mobs. Now, in 1945, these and other similar leaflets represented what amounted to death warrants for Polish Jews who, having survived the Holocaust, had returned to their homeland. The writings threatened the returnees with the worst violence if they remained in the country and informed them that they had only a short time to leave.

Of the more than three million prewar Polish Jews, some 200,000–250,000 survived the Nazi Final Solution. Either before the war or during the initial months of German occupation, roughly 70 percent of survivors had fled the country, principally to the Soviet Union. The Red Army had evacuated some to Russia following the Nazi-Soviet agreement of 1939 (dividing Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union) and the subsequent Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. Other Polish Jews had survived Nazi concentration, forced-labor, and death camps; the war’s end found many of them in Germany and Austria. Still other Jews in Poland had lived through the horror by managing to hide among the Poles or as partisan fighters.

Beginning in late 1944 and continuing through 1945 and into 1946, thousands of the survivors, many haggard and destitute, wandered back to their former Polish villages and homes. A substantial number came from the Soviet Union, following a repatriation agreement signed on July 16, 1945, by Moscow and the new Soviet-controlled Polish Communist government.

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