Last revised august 30, 2004

. The notion that Christian-based anti-Semitism was the determinative factor governing relations between Poles and Jews must be dismissed as an unfounded generalization—one that omits other important components of the equation. Traditional Jewish religious and ethnic-based attitudes toward Poles were also often imbued with bigotry and hostility, no less so than Polish Christian attitudes. See The Story of Two Shtetls, Brańsk and Ejszyszki (Toronto and Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 1998), Part One, 182–89, and also Mark Paul’s much expanded study Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles, Internet: and .

559 Bernhard Chiari, “Has There Been a People’s War? The History of the Second World War in Belarus, 60 Years After the Surrender of the Third Reich,” in Bruno De Wever, Herman Van Goethem, and Nico Wouters, eds., Local Government in Occupied Europe (1939–1945) (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press, 2006), 231–32.

560 Initially, the Germans recruited Poles (mostly prewar Polish functionaries) for the local administration and police also because of a shortage of qualified Belorussians. Some Poles took up these positions on instructions from the Polish underground in order to regain ground lost under the Soviet occupation, to lessen the harshness of the German occupation, and to infiltrate the German occupation apparatus. See Bogdan Musiał, “Niemiecka polityka narodowościowa w okupowanej Polsce w latach 1939–1945,” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość, vol. 5 (2004, no. 2): 20. Most of the Poles eventually left or were purged and replaced by Belorussians, starting as early as July 1941. Belorussian nationalists formally accused these Poles of sabotaging the German war effort and anti-Belorussian activities. See Grzybowski, Pogoń między Orłem Białym, Swastyką i Czerwoną Gwiazdą, 406–7. At the end of 1941 and in beginning of 1942, Wilhelm Kube, the general commissar, undertook measures designed to eliminate Poles from the local administration and police. Thus the ranks of the auxiliary police came to be filled for the most part by Belorussians. In Dereczyn, for example, the Polish police was cut down by German machine-gun fire and buried in a pit, dug by local Jews, in the woods outside the town. See Zissman, The Warriors, 47. Afterwards, Belorussians filled these positions. See Dereczin, 250. In Iwacewicze, the Germans “dismissed the Polish policemen, suspecting disloyalty and shot their officers”; Belorussians were then recruited Belorussians into the police, and later, were replaced with Ukrainians. See Leonid Smilovitsky, “The Story of Sarah from Ivatzevichi,” Federation of East European Family History Societies, vol. 14 (2006): 73. Members of minority groups like the Muslim Tatars also served in the police force. See Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, 74, 191. Once Poles were largely eliminated from the police force, as in Baranowicze, the police was used in German operations directed at the Polish elites, who were suspected of supporting the underground, and in the liquidation of the ghettos. According to historian Jerzy Turonek, by the end of 1943, Belorussians occupied 80 percent of the administrative positions and made up 60 percent of the auxiliary policemen in so-called Western Belorussia. (This estimate may be on the low side since Turonek does not provide any hard data to back it.) See Turonek, Białoruś pod niemiecką okupacją, 65–66, 185–87; Mironowicz, Białoruś, 162; Małgorzata Ruchniewicz, “Stosunki narodowościowe w latach 1939–1948 na obszarze tzw. Zachodniej Białorusi,” in Ciesielski, Przemiany narodowościowe na Kresach Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej 1931–1948, 289–90. See also the Polish Government’s Home Delegate’s report regarding the situation in the Białystok district (for the period August 15 to November 15, 1941) in Machcewicz and Persak, Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 2, 147. Martin Dean confirms that Poles were viewed as unreliable and were therefore purged from the local police forces in the fall and winter of 1941–1942. Thereafter, the vast majority of policemen in localities like Mir, Jody, and Baranowicze were Belorussians of the Orthodox religion. However, Dean appears to consider all Roman Catholic policemen to be Poles, whereas in fact many Catholics in that area identified themselves as Belorussians. Dean notes that many Polish policemen were secretly members of the Polish underground organization who had infiltrated the police. Later some of them deserted to join the Polish partisans, and a number of them were shot by the Germans when their clandestine activities were discovered. Their representation in the Schutzmannschaft in Belorussia and Ukraine became minuscule as its strength increased dramatically during the course of 1942 from 33,000 in January to more than 150,000 men by December, approximately 40–50,000 of whom served in Belorussia. It was during 1942 and 1943 that the vast majority of Jews were killed in this area. See Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, 21, 46, 52, 74; Martin Dean, “Microcosm: Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941–1944,” in David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine, and Laura Palosuo, eds., Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 223–59; Martin Dean, “The ‘Local Police’ in Nazi-Occupied Belarus and Ukraine as the ‘Ideal Type’ of Collaboration in Practice, in the Recollections of its Members and in the Verdicts of the Courts,” in Joachim Tauber, ed., “Kollaboration” in Nordosteuropa: Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 419. In another study, Martin Dean estimates that between 10 and 15 percent of the local police in Belorussia were of Polish ethnicity and that in certain districts, such as the area around Lida, Poles had not been replaced with Belorussians by the autumn of 1943. He also states that many Poles were recruited more or less by force from the summer of 1942 for the purpose of reinforcing the police in their struggle against the Soviet partisans, and notes that most of those who were recruited after the liquidation of the ghettos were not directly involved in the persecution of Jews. With respect to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, Dean grossly exaggerates the number of Poles in the local police and their role in the liquidation of the ghettos. (Poles did not enter the auxiliary police in Volhynia until the spring of 1943, after their villages were attacked and their population massacred by partisans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was well after the liquidation of the ghettos.) See Martin Dean, “Poles in the German Local Police in Eastern Poland and their Role in the Holocaust,” Polin, vol. 18 (2005): 353–66. Israeli historian Leonid Rein points out that after the departure of the Poles, the local police increased in size dramatically from 3,682 men in December 1941 to 6,850 men in April 1943. The auxiliary police increased their role as the extermination process widened and became more visible during the second wave of mass murders, which began in spring 1942 and reached its peak in the summer of that year. In Eastern Belorussia, where there were no Poles in the local administration, the local auxiliary police forces, called the Ordnungsdienst, consisted of 13,000 men in mid-1942, and 12,000 additional police officers were recruited at that time. A year later, in 1943, the Ordnungsdienst consisted of 45,000 men. Thus the Polish component overall was relatively small. See Leonid Rein, “Local Collaboration in the Execution of the ‘Final Solution’ in Nazi-Occupied Belorussia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 20, no. 3 (winter 2006): 393–94; Rein, The Kings and the Pawns, 328–35. On the infiltration of the auxiliary police by the Home Army see Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 175, 2. März 1942, OAM, 500–1–773, microfilm at RG–11.001M, reel 10, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives; and Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 192, 14. April 1942, OAM, 500–1–25, microfilm at RG–11.001M, reel 183, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. Jewish sources, such as the Oszmiana memorial book, also note that toward the end of 1941 or early the following year, “all the posts occupied till then by Poles were given to White Russians.” See “The Diary of Hinda Daul,” in Gelbart, Sefer Zikharon le-kehilat Oshmana, 25 ff. For additional confirmation of the growing prominence of Belorussians in the local police forces and admininstrative positions see: Ajzensztajn, Ruch podziemny w ghettach i obozach, 95 (Łachwa); Nahum Hinitz, ed., Memorial Volume of Steibtz-Swerznie and the Neighbouring Villages: Rubeziewicz, Derewno, Nalybok (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yozei Steibtz Beisrael, 1964), xvii–xviii (Stołpce); Itzchak Lichtenberg, “Partisans at War,” in Kowalski, Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, vol. 2 (1985), 592 (Łachwa); Tec, In the Lion’s Den, 64 (the head of the regional police and most of the policemen in Mir were Belorussian); Tec, Defiance, 29, 55 (Nowogródek), 52 (Żołudek); Alpert, The Destruction of Slonim Jewry, 36 (Słonim); Yoran, The Defiant, 64 (Kurzeniec); Silverman, From Victims to Victors, 74 (Jody); Berk, Destined to Live, 109 (Baranowicze); Kagan and Cohen, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans, 43, 68–69, 89–90, 173; Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II, 50, 147, 172, 241, 247; Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Baranowicze in the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 31 (2003): 104, 108–109, 126 (Baranowicze), 127 (Belorussian guards at the Kołdyczewo camp); Yehuda Bauer, “Kurzeniec—A Jewish Shtetl in the Holocaust,” Yalkut Moreshet: Holocaust Documentation and Research, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 141, 143, 145 (Kurzeniec); Lazowski, Faith and Destiny, 46–47, 55 (Zdzięcioł); Kolpanitzky, Sentenced to Life, 283 (Łachwa); Dean, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. 2, Part B, 1123 (Smorgonie), 1129 (Świr), 1166 (Baranowicze), 1200 (Iwacewicze), 1209 (Kobylnik), 1215 (Kosów Poleski), 1225 (Leśna), 1239 (Mir), 1275 (Słonim); Elaine Saphier Fox, ed., Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 24–25 (Głębokie); Mironowicz, Wojna wszystkich ze wszystkimi, 169n.11 (Wsielub). Some Jewish memoirs, however, claim that virtually all the policemen were Poles, including the guards at the Kołdyczewo camp. See, for example, the memoir of Mordechai Schmulevicz from Mołczadź: Martin Small and Vic Shayne, Remember Us: My Journey from the Shtetl Through the Holocaust (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009). However, the local policemen Schmulevicz names as persecutors of Jews were in fact Belorussians, and one of them, Volodya Polulich, the police commander from Mołczadź, was welcomed into the Soviet partisans and protected by them when the charges against him came to light. See Moshe Korn, “My Travails in the Holocaust” and Hanan Shmulovitz, “Partisans, Fighters and Avengers,” in Benizon H. Ayalon, ed., Molchadz (Maytchet), In Memory of the Jewish Community, Internet: