Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener
in the General Government, the central region of occupied Poland under the authority of Hans Frank.68 Raul Hilberg, although in no way equating the genocide of Jews with the treatment of other victim groups, has nonetheless noted that “[t]he Germans . . . did not draw the line with the destruction of Jewry. They attacked still other victims, some of whom were thought to be like Jews, some of whom were quite unlike Jews, and some of whom were Germans. The Nazi destruction process was, in short, not aimed at institutions; it was targeted at people. The Jews were only the first victims of the German bureaucracy; they were only the first caught in its path.”69 Polish fears of becoming the “next victims” were real, and there is evidence to suggest that even if the course of events during the occupation did not appear to justify these fears, leading Nazis did consider the possibility of undertaking mass killings of Poles.70 At Auschwitz approximately ten thousand unregistered Polish deportees were murdered, and one hundred thirty-seven thousand registered Poles were subjected to enslavement, torture, starvation, and mass execution. Moreover, Poles had only a 50 percent chance of survival at Auschwitz.
The validity of this claim notwithstanding, the fact remains that Poles were never subjected to a systematic and comprehensive policy of genocide, and to equate the German treatment of Poles with the treatment of Jews was an oversimplification and distortion of the historical record. Nonetheless, the notion of Jews and Poles subjected to a common fate—whether under the occupation as a whole or in the Auschwitz camp—remained an enduring myth that could, in subsequent decades, be politically exploited in a variety of ways, especially during the so-called “anti-Zionist” campaign of the late 1960s.71
In the immediate postwar years, however, it was the designation of the occupation as characteristically German that offered the most political capital in the context of the Polish martyrological paradigm. The reader will recall references to the “Hitlerite” and “German” psyche in the position paper of the Department of Museums and Monuments of Polish Martyrology. It was the “German religion” of “Hitlerite racism” and the Polish response to it that was at the source of Polish martyrdom and its commemoration. Likewise, Auschwitz was a distinctively German crime, and not a “war crime” or crime of ideology. In the early postwar period, the Polish press was filled with the vague terms “Hitlerite” and “Hitlerism.” Government officials or Polish journalists much less frequently used the terms “fascist” or “National Socialist” to describe the invaders. There were fascists and Nazi sympathizers in Poland prior to and during the war, and to label the SS and occupation authorities as such would blur the all-important national distinctions between German and Pole. To put it another way, a crime motivated by ideology rather than by nationality was more difficult to label as specifically German. Moreover, to label the Germans as “National Socialists” would perhaps tarnish the popular appeal of patriotic sentiment and “socialism”—two themes that the early postwar government was eager to cultivate among the Polish population. Finally, to designate Auschwitz and other death factories in Poland as “war crimes” would undermine the specific and singularly Polish element of these camps and would place their horrors within the larger context of European conflict. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Polish press and representatives of the new regime presented the Auschwitz crime as uniquely German, as a crime typical of that nation, and as a crime inflicted by evil personified upon the martyr-country.
Emphasizing the German menace was one way for Poles to articulate their common suffering and common cause, and this served the political exigencies of the fledgling Warsaw government. The threat was not a temporary, exceptional phenomenon, but an ever-present danger in a long historical continuum of Teutonic aggression toward the Slavs and, more specifically, of German aggression toward the Poles. This was, for example, the theme of a 1946 Warsaw exhibition on German crimes, the purpose of which was “to show that the Hitlerite crimes in Poland do not constitute an abstract episode in German history, but are a culminating point—the crowning of eternal German annexationism in the East.”72 By recalling German crimes and emphasizing the continuing German threat, the regime was able to posit national identity, national unity, and nationalist fears against a common enemy in the service of its larger political goals, such as international recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland’s western frontier or the highly symbolic prosecution of Nazi criminals. As the nation that had suffered the most under the Germans, Poland had not only a right, but also a responsibility to annex German territory, to punish German criminals, and to inform the world of the horrors of Auschwitz and other camps. The moral duty was clear. As one Polish publicist wrote in May 1945:
The Polish press has written and continues to write much and often about Auschwitz. But it is all still too little, even for the development of the most superficial view of the immensity of German atrocities. It is necessary to write about Auschwitz again and again. It is necessary to write just now as we have arrived at the day of judgement for the perpetrators of those inhuman crimes. It is necessary to write lest the crimes fall into the shadow of oblivion, so that a false sense of compassion does not become the cause of impunity or easy treatment of the criminals. It is necessary to write in order to rouse the conscience and eradicate the indifference and dullness that has overcome the world after six years of war. We must avenge these crimes—those 4 million innocent victims of Auschwitz call for it.73
Writing and rewriting meant italicizing Polish suffering, underscoring Nazi atrocities, and even deleting references to Jewish mass death while emphasizing throughout the call to bear witness to and avenge German crimes. Revenge could take many forms: territorial “reclamation,” reparations, or the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia. Such were the early postwar goals of Warsaw’s policy toward a defeated Germany, and Poles had little patience for German cries of postwar injustices inflicted upon them or for voices in Britain and the United States that were sympathetic to the Germans’ plight or calling for Germany’s rehabilitation. It was Auschwitz, more than any other wartime site of destruction, that pointed to the naïveté, danger, and insult of a conciliatory policy toward Germany. As an editorial columnist wrote on the occasion of the Auschwitz museum’s dedication in 1947:
We are a nation that has suffered the greatest wrongdoing at the hands of the followers of the [German] system. We are not repeating the Auschwitz story in order to spread an unnecessary and harmful self-pity. We are reiterating this doubtless truth because we are a state that is sentenced for all time to be the neighbor of Germans—the nation that invented and carried out “genocide.” That is why we, above all else, should be alert to what transpires beyond our western border. And we, above all, have to remind other nations that what was yesterday our lot could befall other nations tomorrow.74
Auschwitz memory was to be a catalyst for anti-German attitudes and policy, a pillar of support for a consistent policy on the Oder-Neisse issue, and a general caution to the rest of the world. This admonitory role was an appropriate complement to the symbolic role of Auschwitz as the “golgotha” of the “Christ among nations,” for a martyrological idiom that emphasized the suffering and sacrifice of the Polish nation also gave that nation a unique responsibility, or even mission, to the rest of the world.
As inspiring and politically serviceable as this narrative may have been, it left little room for historical specificity and nuance of interpretation. It emphasized, in the first place, the Nazi goal of enslaving the Poles and destroying their state and nation. Auschwitz was, of course, the most memorable and visible symbol of this, and it represented for many Poles their own exterminationist fate, or at least what would have become so had the Nazis had the opportunity to follow through with their plans. Second, the narrative emphasized the sacrificial suffering of the Polish nation and, at the same time, the resistance and resolve of the prisoners. Neither element of the story could easily accommodate the unregistered deportee, Jewish or otherwise; both offered postwar Polish society a locus of common identity and the postwar Polish state a degree of much-needed legitimacy. As Jonathan Webber has noted, “in the post-war Polish construction of the symbolic meaning of Auschwitz, to identify Jews as the principal victims would have been to clutter, if not to obfuscate, the cultural and political message; it was an inconvenient irrelevance best left to one side.”75 Webber’s insight is accurate, especially when applied to the early postwar development of the Auschwitz site and museum, for a Polish-national martyrological