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Jedwabne pogrom
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The Jedwabne pogrom (or Jedwabne massacre) was a massacre of Jewish people living in and near the town of Jedwabne in Poland that took place in July 1941 during World War II.
Although responsibility for the massacre had long been laid at the feet of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen (death squad), recent scholarship by historian Jan T. Gross has indicated that the murders were carried out by Polish neighbors of the victims. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance subsequently issued findings in support of Gross' claims. Whether and how far the occupying German forces were involved remains the subject of dispute among historians.
owing their attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, German forces quickly overran the territory of Poland that the Soviet Union had annexed as part of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.
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Encyclopedia
The Jedwabne pogrom (or Jedwabne massacre) was a massacre of Jewish people living in and near the town of Jedwabne in Poland that took place in July 1941 during World War II.
Although responsibility for the massacre had long been laid at the feet of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen (death squad), recent scholarship by historian Jan T. Gross has indicated that the murders were carried out by Polish neighbors of the victims. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance subsequently issued findings in support of Gross' claims. Whether and how far the occupying German forces were involved remains the subject of dispute among historians.
The massacre
Following their attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, German forces quickly overran the territory of Poland that the Soviet Union had annexed as part of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. The Nazis distributed propaganda in the area claiming that Jews, having sided with the communist Soviet occupiers, were responsible for crimes committed by the Soviet Union in eastern Poland; and the SS organized special Einsatzgruppen ("task forces") to murder Jews in these areas. The small town of Wizna, for example, near Jedwabne in the northeast of Poland, saw several dozen Jewish men shot by the invading Germans under Hauptsturmfuehrer Schaper, as did other neighbouring towns.
A number of people collaborating with the Soviets before Operation Barbarossa were killed by local people in the Jedwabne area during the first days of German occupation.
A month later, on the morning of July 10, 1941, by the order of mayor Karolak and German gendarmerie, a group of non-Jewish Poles from Jedwabne and its neighborhood rounded up the local Jews as well as those seeking refuge from nearby towns and villages such as Wizna and Kolno. The Jews were taken to the square in the centre of Jedwabne, where they were ordered to pluck grass, attacked and beaten. A group of about 40 Jews were forced to demolish a statue of Lenin erected by NKWD and then carry it out of town while singing Soviet songs. The local rabbi was forced to lead this procession. The group was taken to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of the monument, while most of the remaining Jews, estimated at around 250 to 400, including many women and children, were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene from the former Soviet supplies (or German gasoline, by different accounts) in the presence of eight German gendarmes shooting those trying to escape. The remains of both groups were buried in two mass graves in the barn. Exhumations led to the discovery not only of the charred bodies of the victims in two mass graves, but also of the bust of Lenin (previously assumed to be buried at a Jewish cemetery) as well as bullets that according to a 2000 statement by Leon Kieres, the chief of the IPN could have been fired from a 1941 Walther P38 type pistols. Two weapons analysis carried out by the IPN in 2001 and 2002, the second one with assistance from the German Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden came to the conclusion that "there is no evidence to support the thesis that the Jews had been fired upon at the scene of the pogrom"
Nazi propaganda during the war
Some sources say that the movie made by Germans during the massacre was shown in the cinemas in Warsaw to document the alleged spontaneous hatred of local people against Jews. For the same reason Polish underground propaganda generally linked the massacre with the collaboration with the occupiers.
1949–1950 trials
In 1949 and 1950 a number of local Poles were accused and put to trial in Poland. The official cause of the trial was the collaboration with Nazis in committing the crime. One person was condemned to death but commuted to imprisonment, nine were imprisoned and 12 were acquitted. The legality of the trials was never challenged following the fall of communism in Poland in 1989.
Records show, that the extreme use of physical torture during pre-trial interrogations conducted by the Security Office (UB) resulted in some individuals admitting to made-up crimes, later renounced by them before the courts. Among those who (at trial) retracted their earlier statements given during prolonged beatings by the Security service were Józef Chrzanowski, Marian Zyluk, Czeslaw Laudanski, Wincenty Goscicki, Roman and Jan Zawadzki, Aleksander and Franciszek Lojewski, Eugeniusz Sliwecki, Stanislaw Sielawa and several other local men pronounced innocent and released by the courts without recompense. Out of 22 indicted for the crime at the time, almost half were wrongfully accused.
The unlawful interrogation methods were confirmed by the Stalinist minister of public security Stanislaw Radkiewicz, who admitted in an internal memo that the "fixing" of the investigation included beatings, the complete omission of circumstances and evidence, and the rephrasing of testimonies to aid prosecution in a way that did not reflect reality.
Controversy and investigation
It was generally assumed that the Jedwabne massacre was an atrocity committed by an Einsatzgruppe until 1997–2000, when Agnieszka Arnold's Where is my older brother, Cain? and Neighbours revisionist documentary films were produced.
These were followed by a detailed study of the event in the book Neighbors, by Polish-Jewish-American sociologist and historian Jan T. Gross, who described the massacre not as a pogrom but as a deliberate, cold-blooded, mass-murder. Gross concluded that, contrary to the official accounts, the Jews in Jedwabne had been rounded up and killed by mobs of their own Polish neighbours, without any supervision or assistance from an Einsatzgruppe or other German force. He referred to the number of victims (1,600) presented on a memorial stone in Jedwabne. Nevertheless Gross states that this massacre could be a provocation, considering that two main local leaders inspiring the mob to murder, Zygmunt Laudanski and Karol Bardon, were NKVD agents.
The publication of Neighbors in Poland inspired a good deal of controversy on its release there in 2000. There was a basic agreement in the mainstream Polish press regarding the basic accuracy of Gross's findings, although specific details and questions about Gross's methodology were debated by Polish scholars. Polish historians (such as Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski), questioned its conclusions and its methodology.
Following an intensive investigation the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) released a report in 2002 in which it largely supported Gross's findings, although the IPN's estimated death toll of the massacre (a minimum of 340 Polish Jews murdered) was significantly lower than the 1,600 reported by Gross. Since then other estimates have been presented, in the range of 200 to 1000.
Another controversy is related to the extent of German involvement in the massacre. The IPN found that there were 68 Gestapo as well as numerous German policemen present ariving from different local posts, as reported by witness Natalia Gasiorowska providing a meal. Yet some scholars note that the German involvement is not certain; while many witnesses claim to have seen German soldiers that day in Jedwabne, others had not witnessed Germans in the town at that time. As contemporary court records show, the active involvement of gentile Poles is certain, but the question of extent and nature of possible German participation has not been settled. The IPN concluded that the crime in a broader sense must be ascribed to the Germans, whilst in a stricter sense to gentile Poles, estimated at about 40 men from Jedwabne and a nearby settlements. Jan T. Gross himself praised the conduct of the IPN investigation.
In 2001 the President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, officially apologized to the Jewish people for the crime on behalf of Poland. This caused a certain criticism, as some considered Jedwabne to be a solely German crime, while others believed that the whole nation was not to bear responsibility for the crimes performed by some. At that time of the apology the IPN investigation was not yet completed. The commemoration service on the 60th anniversary of the pogrom was overshadowed by the boycott of the service by the majority of the citizens of Jedwabne. When the service began, the priest of Jedwabne started to chime the church bells as a sign of protest. The mayor of Jedwabne, Krzysztof Godlewski, emigrated to the USA due to these incidents.
Further reading
See also
External links
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- Joanna Michlic,
- Adam Michnik, , New York Times, 17 March 2001
- by Andrzej Kaczynski, published May 5, 2000 in the Polish newspaper "Rzeczpospolita"
- Museum of Jewish Heritage.
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