Polish Jews were targeted as Jews, but non-Jewish Poles were not targeted in the same way (i.e., the Germans were brutal occupiers, but Catholic Poles were not targeted for extermination).

However, there is a modern historical myth in Poland about extermination camps targeting non-Jewish Poles. For many years, there was a Wikipedia article about a fictional extermination camp for Poles. That theory is now discussed in a subsection of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Disc....

The idea behind these theories is to draw an equivalence between what the Germans did to Catholics and Jews in occupied Poland, something that is popular among modern Polish nationalists.

It's true that there's a nationalist movement exploiting that notion, and especially after the war, there's been a lot of mangling with numbers of victims (plenty of the so-called Polish historians, especially the ones tied to the Soviet-installed government, tried to elevate the number).

On the part that non-Jewish Poles were not targetted - while I think we agree the fictious concentration camp is part of what I mentioned above, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles from both modern day Poland and modern day Germany have been victims of organized killings (take note, I don't necessarily mean concentration camps and holocaust as commonly understood). I can agree that catholic Poles were not targeted in the same way - there were numerous differences - nevertheless, the goal of Germany was to eradicate Poland as a country and Poles as a nation through either killings (which materialized in war casualties and through mass extermination), or germanization.

The Germans did terrible things in Poland and had even more terrifying plans for Poland after the war, but there was no Holocaust against non-Jewish Poles. The way that Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were treated was worlds apart. About 90% of Polish Jews were killed (a majority of all Polish deaths during the war, despite making up only 15% of the pre-war population).

Edit: The people trying to draw an equivalence between what happened to Jewish and non-Jewish Poles are largely aligned with right-wing, strongly Catholic Polish nationalists, and are not in and way fond of the Soviet era. This is mostly a post-Soviet phenomenon.

I think we directionally agree; about the post-Soviet phenomenon - I know for fact that this phenomenon started immediately after the war and was part of consolidating power by the Soviets. The communist Poland was, in a weird way, quite nationalistic. But you are right that this phenomenon has its reneissance, or even reinforced version now as we're speaking.

I don't fully understand what specifically do you mean by saying that there was no holocaust to non-Jewish Poles, but thousands of them died in concentration camps all around territories occupied by Germans and often shared identical fate to those who were of Jewish origin.

If I understood you correctly, you use term "holocaust" to describe mass extermination of Jews and Jews only, and as long as you acknowledge there's been other mass killings during the war, I'm completely fine with that.

e: it's not how I was taught history at school - e.g. teachers would include non-Jewish Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Romas, Sinti, and other nationalities that were sent to death camps too - I think by holocaust they basically meant death camps (regardless on who was killed in there) rather than the bigger scheme of killing all the Jews.

> I don't fully understand what specifically do you mean by saying that there was no holocaust to non-Jewish Poles

There was no systematic extermination of Catholic Poles. To be a Jew in occupied Europe was to be hunted. 90% of Jews in Poland were killed. You basically had to have a miracle to survive. There's very little in modern history like this.

> Polish Jews were targeted as Jews, but non-Jewish Poles were not targeted in the same way (i.e., the Germans were brutal occupiers, but Catholic Poles were not targeted for extermination).

What are you talking about? The Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate Catholic Poles (and other Slavs). Murdering Jews was higher priority, but had the Nazis won there wouldn't be too many Slavs around in Eastern Europe today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

And despite losing the war the Germans together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, still managed to exterminate a huge fraction of the Polish elite in a targeted fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

> What are you talking about?

The fact that the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jews in Poland, and almost succeeded. They killed 90% of the Jewish population.

There were horrific plans for most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe for after the war (Generalplan Ost, which you've linked to), but they were never put into operation. Catholic Poles were not subject to anything near the level of persecution as Jewish Poles.

> together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets

The Germans and Soviets weren't "erstwhile allies." The Soviets were defined as enemy #1 by the Nazis. The Soviets were aware of this, and tried to organize an anti-German military alliance with France and to save Czechoslovakia. France refused, and Poland, which itself wanted to get a piece of Czechoslovakia, refused to allow Soviet troops to transit its territory into Czechoslovakia. After Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets decided to make a dirty deal with the Germans, in order to delay the German attack for as long as possible. Not a shining moment, but calling the Soviets "erstwhile allies" of the Germans is a gross distortion of history, particularly given that it's the Soviets who made the largest contribution to the defeat of the Nazis.

This doesn’t change the fact that Russians and Germans were allies, started the war together, and German tanks all ran on Russian fuel. Exactly how it was beneficial for them to become allies is secondary.

The Soviet Union did not start the war, and was not allied with Germany.

Germany quite clearly started the war with its invasion of Poland, and without that decision, there would have been no war.

They two countries had a non-aggression pact, and an agreement not to interfere with each other's spheres of influence. The Soviets knew full well that the Germans planned to invade the USSR, and the point of the non-aggression pact was to delay that invasion until the Red Army was capable of fighting a war.

The whole notion of equivalency of evil is actually pernicious, as it is more of a contest of victimhood: "they did worse to us, so we are better". Arguing about numbers abstracts from the reality that even one person being killed for such an inhuman regime is already too many.

I think it would be sufficient to condemn the evil that was committed rather than make a certain group better because "They suffered more". So many suffered from that evil regime that we don't need a contest to see who is better. The Catholic clergy were in fact terribly persecuted in German and Poland by the Nazi regime, hundreds of priests being killed in Dachau alone. This doesn't take away the horrors that others suffered nor allow us to somehow abstract from them just because "our tribe suffered more".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp

Apparently putting down the stones in Poland is met with resistance. If poles want to commemorate killed poles with these stones they will have to take the initiative.

The Poles I'm refering to were killed in Germany and the stones commemorating them exist. My comment is saying that the article is not mentioning them.

There are stones like this in Poland commemorating Jews, e.g. former German city of Breslau, nowadays Wrocław. I believe the resistance came from the fact that Poles were not organizers of those killings/deportations and it was expected to be misunderstood by people unfamiliar with history (e.g. stone commemorating murdered Jews in a city that was formerly German but nowadays Polish, or Jews murdered in Poland by Germans).

Important to mention: there were killings (not supported by the state) of Jews and systemic antisemitism (clearly supported by the state) in Poland conducted and organized by Polish people before and during the war (this was, though, not supported by the state at that time), but incomparable in scale.

> My comment is saying that the article is not mentioning them.

If you care about this, the "article" is wikipedia, and in the time you wrote this posts you could have added it already.

edit: I was quick to comment, the article is protected. So unless you already have an active Wikipedia account, you'd have to request an edit on the talk page.

You're generally right, I can take on it and I will - but before I do it, I wanted to point out that as a consensus of work of many people, it ended up in mentioning petty criminals, but not tens of thousands of people who were expelled, prosecuted, killed, etc. because of their nationality.

It's hard to tell if this is some anti-Polish resentiments of one or many of the authors, or just extremely low level of historical knowledge, but something tells me it's the first.

In Germany there has been a lot of resistance too. Including court cases etc.

But against the stones in general, not specifically against stones for Poles. I followed the discussion and also in other cities Stolpersteine for Poles have been initiated, albeit slowly.

Considering it's 2022, it clearly shows that the sentiment has been against it.

It's their way of commemorating their victims and somehow in the process the second largest group slipped through. I don't want their way of commemorating their victims in my home Poland.

As the GP said there are several stones commemorating polish victims in Berlin and other places.

In this case the stones mark the places where the victims lived.

I assume most Polish victims did not live in the territory of present day Germany.

From personal experience I recall some with "eastern" names in a town that used to have a notable polish minority but I couldn't say for sure.

Btw Can you recommend places to visit to learn more about their stories and history (besides the former sites of the concentration camps)?

I think the only way we can move forward in Europe is to commemorate this past together, accept responsibility, and build a future where that cannot happen again. I think that has worked quite well so far (war between the European countries is unimaginable).

Think about where we would be if we hadn't gone down this path. We can all help move things forward if we meet each other with an open mind, and steer clear of the resentment and national chauvinism of the past.

That wasn't what I was (and still is) taught in school in Germany.

The blame was always squarely put on Germany. It was always stressed that most of the German population had more than an inkling of what was going on and many agreed.

The first time I heard the term "polish extermination camps" was a few years ago when the Polish Government outlawed it.

So I'm really at a loss here.

For such claims you really need to provide solid sources. I have never encountered this sort of "blame shifting" (schooled in East Germany in the 80's, but I also never heard that from the "other side").

The only sort of blame shifting related to Poland that I encountered in East German propaganda was that the Katyn massacre was blamed on Nazi Germany, not on the Soviet Union.

Of course there are extremely far right organizations in Germany which to this day try to deflect the blame, but they are a minority and don't influence the public discourse (unless you live in their bubble of fake news and propaganda of course).

But in general I don't see why nationality matters much in this case. When talking about persecuted Jews, communists, homosexuals (or any other group persecuted by the nazis) of course this also includes Polish Jews, communists and homosexuals.

The German government had reiterate the German responsibility continuously, in words, diplomatic action and payments for the surviving victims. The Polish government however has decided lately on line of denying their share in the war crimes, effort that includes anti-historic legislation.

Where did you get that idea? I'd say if you'd claim something like that in public in Germany, you can kiss your career goodbye.

Which German government do you mean ? There were 2 at that time.

This is absolute nonsense. We are all very much aware that it was us, the Germans, who did this.

Nobody in germany generally calls them "polish death camps" and nobody thinks poles are in any way to blame. Even if you called them polish deaths camps, people would assume you mean the Nazi concentration camps on occupied polish land.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t mention nationalities at all. For example, it doesn’t mention Germans, either.

If so, why would it have to mention Poles?

It does mention Jews, Sinti and Romas. It doesn't mention Germans because it was Germans who were the perpetrators and were not targetted based on their ethnicity. Meanwhile being Polish (it's an ethnic group, not a nationality - nationality was obviously German in this context) was, same as for the aforementioned ethnicities, a condition that could get someone killed.

Well, but Germans were most definitely targeted: The disabled, for example, the homosexuals, the homeless, the mentally sick, the vocal critics… This is not to say Germans were not the perpetrators, but that they weren’t targeted is factually wrong.

Edit: I’m sorry, I just read your comment again, and realised I misunderstood. I still feel those marginalised groups get overlooked often; the Nazis didn’t specifically select for Germans, but for „pure“ aryans, which excluded lots of different groups.

I looked into the german version, expecting it to mention it more, but Poland is just mentioned once in a side sentence. It kinda saddens me.

That’s because the German version doesn’t list groups at all. It just talks about "victims of the NS regime" in the general.

It's the wiki, just add them to the article! Yes, these biases exist, help work against them by editing those pages that can easily be edited.

Edit: I just tried, that article is locked. Could add it to the Talk page.

I don't know if this was added because of this comment, but the list does include poles:

> The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called "gypsies"), Poles, homosexuals, [...]

Edit: It looks like the word Poles was added today, so I assume it's because of this comment (otherwise that's a pretty wild coincidence.)

I wouldn't say that "historical policy" doesn't include Poles, but yes, the popular view of the Holocaust is dominated by the organized extermination of the Jews (and some other groups) in the concentration camps. Non-Jewish Poles were also Nazi victims, but according to https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-vic..., they were mostly murdered during the invasion of Poland or immediately after, so it's much more difficult to estimate the total number of victims. Also, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims, Soviet civilians and POWs are the second and third largest groups (not that it matters much, especially since Poland is a much smaller country).

Germany has a very interesting views on poles. While Germans living in Poland are officially recognized as a minority with all the rights (German schools, street names) the German government to this day refuses to recognize poles living in Germany as a minority.

Poles living in Germany are usually working migrants, not a minority that has lived there since centuries (like Germans in Poland). It's hard to compare those situations.

No, you are not correct. Poles have been in Germany for centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Germany

From the wikipage:

>The position of the German government is that after the German territorial losses after World War II, the current Polish minority has no century-old roots in the remaining German territory, because Germany lost all the territories where people of German and Polish ethnicity overlapped. Since they are therefore only recent immigrants, they do not fulfill the requirements of a national minority according to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Treaty of Good Neighbourship. Being German citizens, they still retain all civil and political rights every German citizen possesses, and therefore can voice their will in the political system.[10]

I think the original point is that Poles or Germans of Polish descent who survived the war have been forcefully Germanized - as in, refused the right to organize Polish schools etc. not in the modern days, but in the post war era (45-89).

There is a big group of these people (e.g. in Ruhr area) but it's really hard for me to tell (and I'm a Polish migrant living in Germany myself) if that was the case, or it was the idea that Poles/Germans of Polish descent after the war were afraid of ethnical Germans and as a result, repressed the manifest of national identity/ethnicity. It definitely was (and still is) the case for Jewish survivors of the 1939-1945 regime, but the anti-Jewish and anti-Polish sentiments didn't end from day to day and it's extremely hard to narrow down what was the cause of it.

The people who have been living there pre-WW2 were deported or killed. The Poles, other than very very few, who live there now are not descendants of the "original" Polish minority in Germany.

Incorrect.

> It is estimated that in modern times, some 150,000 inhabitants of the Ruhr Area (out of roughly five million) are of Polish descent.

Those lost their polish identity though.

That is because large parts of what is now Poland used to be Germany and not the other way around. Germany did not accept losing the 'German east' until reunification. It took Helmut Kohl threatening to resign for the CDU accepting Poland in its current borders.

The German government in general doesn't collect data on the composition of ethnic groups in Germany.