Eine weitere Erzählung „Polen war das böse Volk“ während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Woher kommt das?

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Poland seeing themselves as victims of nazi aggression and genocide profoundly bothers some jews, who for some reason believe that the top 1 spot in “victims of nazism” is reserved to them and them only. They think that other countries should downplay the terrors that the nazis inflicted on them to make that top 1 spot more special. That’s why in modern Israel when they fly schoolkids to Poland to visit the GERMAN death camps they do it escorted by bodyguards and the pupils are told that the poles were complicit in the Holocaust and that they are at risk from poles attacking them. That’s also where the “polish death camps” thing started, implying that the camps being in Poland and some of the kapos being polish (kapos where prisioners who collaborated in running the camps and they came from all types of backgrounds) means that Poland was somehow the 2nd author of the Holocaust with Germany, with the difference being that while Germany apologizes and supports Israel Poland denies its involvement. This end up in a twisted ridiculous narrative where Poland ends up being the perpetrator of a genocide that they were also victims of, while Germany gets to walk free because they pay reparations, sell submarines and bombs to Israel and beat up pro-Palestine protesters.

Some people are just poorly educated in history. That’s all.

Probably not even some, but most.

Did you take screens from your second account to make it look like it wasn’t you taking part in this convo? And where are those people saying “Poland was the bad people” that are not polish?  All I can see is some paranoid people trying to coinvince themselves that there were no bad people during war that were either trying to either save their live for a cost of others or  just simply benefit or any other reason that we wont know. Look at modern times. Would you say all people living in this country are good? Would you promise me that if there was a war there wouldn’t be a single person who would cooperate with oppreassors just to benefit from it? The further we are from war the more twisted everything will be so thats why its important to save every information from that period besides if it is good or bad for us.  

Mix of lack of historical knowledge, russian trolls and sometimes pure and simple whitewashing (often subconscious).

We need to be pragmatic and stand up for the truth. Choose your battles and argue your point clearly, concisely and link to solid evidence (for those who want to find out more).

If genuine mistakes were made somewhere we should admit them. Aside from being the right thing to do it makes the Polish message more credible and helps to get it across.

If these people seriously believe that Poland was Nazi during WW2 was willingly cooperating with Germans can they explain how come no polish official was ever tried at Nurnberg or in any other Nazi trials?

I mean, surely someone would have been charged, no?

A huge part of the problem is that Poland never had an opportunity to provide their side of the story when the narratives of WWII were being written and shared among nations around the world in the 1940s/1950s (and later). I think the first opportunity they had was in the 1980s which was far too late. For instance, I was 33 when I learned that my babcia’s family (except her immediate family) were sent to Auschwitz; babcia was too traumatized from her experience working as a forced labourer in Germany to tell such stories, but I also had no idea that was something I should research as history courses in US public schools never talked about the horrors done upon non-Jewish Poles.

Obviously I’m not Polish myself so I cannot speak to what’s actually taught within the public schools in Poland but I’ve been living here for a few months (Kraków) and from my visits of the museums, I’m not under the impression that the stories are being “white washed” into saying that Polish had no collaborators or anything like that. There were absolutely collaborators everywhere – to much shame – but to the degree that is stated by many others (particularly Western Europeans) is largely an exaggeration.

Could Poland do a better job acknowledging their wrongdoings? But in the same vein, folks need to ask themselves why did it take until 2024 for Germany to finally agree to build a memorial to the Polish nation? Do people not realize that Germany truly hasn’t done that great of a job apologizing for *all* of their wrongdoing?