Ep. 78- Polish Mayors and the Holocaust with Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

The Holocaust was a Nazi project, but it required the support, cooperation, complicity, and sometimes collaboration of a wide variety of non-Germans to carry out.  This complicity took a variety of forms and investigating it always generates strong emotional reaction.  

In this episode, I talk with Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe about his meticulous study of the role Polish mayors played under Nazi occupation and during the Holocaust.  It's a difficult but important conversation.

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe is a Lecturer in History at the Frei Universität, Berlin.

Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz.  Polnische Bürgermeister und der Holocaust. Besatzung, Verwaltung und Kollaboration (2024)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.728)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today we're looking at the behavior of Polish mayors during the Holocaust. We often think about issues of cooperation, collaboration, complicity in local populations. And today we're going to be talking about a really important work done by our guest, Krzysztof Wozolinski-Liba on the behavior of Polish mayors.

during the Holocaust. so, Shagars, thanks so much for coming on.

Grzegorz (00:34.873)
Hello, wait a minute, thank you for inviting me to this interesting podcast.

Waitman Beorn (00:40.878)
Can you tell us, can you start by telling us sort of how you got interested in this particular topic?

Grzegorz (00:48.569)
Before working on the mails, I wrote a book about Stefan Bandera, so the Ukrainian fascist who is understood as a hero. This was my dissertation. After finishing the dissertation, I had to change the subject and I was already before interested in the Polish collaboration with the Nazis. But this subject was too broad to write a book. So I was looking for a specific object like policemen or, you know.

and mayors were important group of officials who were not investigated. So it was, I think, a workshop at the Yad Vashem. Karel Belkov suggested that I write, I could focus on the mayors. There was a book in Dutch about Petaromen, about the Dutch mayors, and it was a very good idea because I was looking at the city administration and the mayors were important group within the city administration, and then I focused on the Polish mayors in the General Gormow.

and started to investigate them instead the broad subject of collaboration.

Waitman Beorn (01:52.142)
I mean, and for the listeners, can't see the book, Gregor's book is a thousand pages. It's amazing. It's very, very, very, very detailed. Why do you think this topic hasn't been looked at before in the same way that you're doing it?

Grzegorz (02:12.773)
There was no investigation into the mails in the General Gouverneur. Some historians didn't even know that they were Polish mails in the General Gouverneur. The only publication that was concerning the mails was written by Czesław Madajczyk, a Polish historian, wrote a sub-chapter in his monumental monography of the General Gouverneur and it was published in 1970. So something like what?

more than 40 years ago. And since then, no one was really looking at the males. is a Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. They were investigating, making the Holocaust at the local level. And sometimes they were touching the males and looking at the males, especially in the rural areas. So the subject was not investigated at all as I started to deal with it.

Waitman Beorn (03:08.686)
And one of the things that you mentioned in the beginning is that a lot of the sources on mares are sometimes difficult to find because the mares themselves were able to sort of edit them or delete them as it were after the fact.

Grzegorz (03:30.137)
Yeah, the sources is an interesting question because we have the most important sources to study the mails are the documents of the municipalities of the city administration and we find a lot of them in the Polish archives in the region of the former general government so today they are accessible. The question is that we have actually only two cities, Nowy Targ and Osboc.

where we have, I would say, all the sources or something like 80 or 90 % of the sources. They were not destroyed. And this is not the situation in many other archives. So for example, the documentation of the city administration of Warsaw survived the Warsaw uprising, but it was somehow destroyed almost entirely after the uprising. So today we have something like 10, maximally 15 % of all the sources.

Maybe not even 10, I don't know exactly. And the situation in the cities is very different. It could be like in Warsaw only 10 % of all the sources, but it could be like in Otwock, where you have actually all the documents you need. And the mayor was the head of the city administration. And you find in this documentation many documents written by the mayors. Other sources to study the mayors.

are there memoirs and diaries? But there are not so many diaries, as you can imagine. There are some memoirs and they leak out the Holocaust and many important questions related to violence in the general government. And then we have also the Jewish sources of the Jews who were in the cities, but they did not know what the mails exactly did. Sometimes they knew who is the mayor.

Actually, I discovered only one person, one Jewish person who was working in the city administration and he worked only until August 1940. And after that, the Jews in the ghetto did not know what the mayors were doing. They exposed their politics. So for example, they imagined that this decision was made by the mayors or they supposed that this decision was made by the mayors. The Jewish council, they had some insight.

Grzegorz (05:53.389)
they could look what the mayors were doing, but also sometimes they were confused and did not know exactly if this decision was made by the mayor or by the city governor or the governor of the county.

Waitman Beorn (06:09.59)
I mean, there's so much sort of detail in the book. How did you choose which areas to look at? Because I did notice, you know, this isn't your fault, but I noticed that you decided, you know, not, for example, to talk about District Galician, which is, you know, the area that I wrote about. So I was looking, I was like, oh, no, you're right. But I mean, there's probably a good reason for that, given that it has a different timeline than

Grzegorz (06:27.756)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (06:36.926)
the rest, but you do talk about all the other districts in the general government, which was the German name for occupied Poland, the part that wasn't incorporated into the Third Reich. Can you talk just a little bit, how did you decide what to look at? How many mayors, how many cities did you look at? What was your approach to kind of trying to explore this topic?

Grzegorz (07:04.525)
Yeah, so as you said, I did not look into the district Kalicjent because I wanted to investigate only the old four districts and the Polish mayors and they were something like 450 Ukrainian mayors in the district Kalicjent and they are very good subject for a book. So if someone is listening who is looking for a subject for a dissertation and

they are studying the Ukrainian studies or interested in the Ukrainian history, this would be a very good subject to do a dissertation or write a book about the Ukrainian mails in District Khaleesin. So I focused only on the four old districts, Kraków, Warsaw, Radom and Lublin. They were at the beginning of the occupation 1,100 mails. Since District Khaleesin was excluded, the number became 1,500 mails.

the number of the Polish mails at the beginning of the occupation, almost all the mails were Polish because in Poland before the war, they did not employ Jews or Ukrainians or Germans as mails. But during the occupation, the number of Polish mails went down to 720 or 900. We don't know exactly what was, but it declined. And they were also Volksdeutsche mails. So I investigated it in my book.

35 Polish mayors and four German mayors, Volksdeutsche mayors, so the mayors who signed the Volksliste. Yeah, and I investigated them and choosing different criteria. So one criteria very important was to look at small cities like Wrocław, middle-sized cities like Częstochowa and large cities like Warsaw. All criteria was to look only at towns

in which the Jewish population was at least 20 % because I wanted to study the Holocaust. So I left out the cities which did not have so many Jewish population. And then I also choose the towns and cities which had enough documentation to write something about this because there are some towns like Zamość, you don't have almost any documentation of Zamość, so it makes no sense to write, to study the mails in Zamość.

Waitman Beorn (09:25.386)
So we think about the occupation and obviously this whole conversation in some ways revolves around issues of these words, right? Collaboration, cooperation, accommodation, complicity, however you want to begin to think about this, but the role or behavior of Polish officials in occupied Poland.

What role did the Nazis have in influencing who these mayors were? Or were they basically most of the mayors, the mayors that had been the mayor before the war?

Grzegorz (10:06.731)
It was in some cases so. Something like 20 % of the war mayors had been already mayors before the war. So for example, Konstantin Kosakiewicz or Jan Gadomski was a mayor. But at the beginning of occupation of World War II, some mayors escaped, so the German occupiers were searching for new mayors and they usually elected the vice mayor.

or they took someone who was in the city administration and was in the position to administer the entire administration. It was usually pragmatic position. So if the person spoke German, appeared loyal, most important was a pragmatic person who had the knowledge to administer the city administration, they chose this person.

Waitman Beorn (10:54.478)
And so they weren't really looking for sort of ideological collaborators in the way that they were choosing people.

Grzegorz (11:01.657)
Not really, no, it was even from this point of view, it was even worse. They were sometimes ideologically motivated Volksdeutsche Mayors, but if they lacked the pragmatic abilities to administer the municipality, they did not work with them. So the most important superiors were the Kreis and Stadthausmänner, and if they realized that this Volksdeutsche Mayor is...

politically motivated, ideologically motivated, but he somehow is not able to administer the administration. They replaced him with a Polish mayor who was more experienced.

Waitman Beorn (11:40.454)
So, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the governing structure. I think that's probably helpful in terms of, you know, where do the Nazis come in? know, Hans Frank is the governor general of the general government. But where does the sort of Nazi civilian government interact with the Polish civilian government? And what is that relationship like?

Grzegorz (12:04.953)
Exactly. So the General Gouverneur, this is something like one third of the pre-Polish state, one third of the territory of the pre-Polish state. there is, so the Western parts of Poland were included into German Reich and the General Gouverneur was something like the main part of Poland. Warsaw was there, but they made Kraków the capital of General Gouverneur.

And then, as you said, Hans Frank was the head of the General Gouverneur. And yeah, they did not decide to keep the Polish government, obviously, but they decided to keep the communal structure, so the city administration. They did not replace the staff in the communal administration, in the city administration, in the rural administration. And there was the government in Kraków and there were the...

governments in the four districts and they were the Stadt und Kreishauptmänner, so the county and city governors. And this city and county governors, these were the most important superiors of the males, the Kreis- und Stadthauptmänner, the most important superiors of the males. Something like 50 Kreis- und Stadthauptmänner were in the...

in the general government, it means that one city governor was also working with one mayor, because the city governors, were only in huge cities like Warsaw, Kraków or Lubin, but county governor was working with something like 20 mayors, so he was responsible for 20 mayors. And then below the structure, only actually Poles work in the administration, because the Germans...

did not intend to replace them with the Germans. did not have the power and they did not intend to do this. So something like 98, 99 % of the staff in the city administration was Polish and they were also Poles in the upper structures. in the Kreis and Stadthausmena, they were also with Poles, something like the half of the staff there was Polish. The district governors also were with Poles and they were also Poles in the main government.

Grzegorz (14:26.649)
They did not have any important positions because the German idea was to occupy the most important positions and to occupy, to rule the general government using as few people as possible. And it is why something like 95 % or even more percent of the staff in the administration of the entire general government was Polish. And in the district of Kalicjan, it was Ukrainian. Many Ukrainians were there.

Yeah, obviously from the political point of view, the administration of the General Gouverneur was German because it was established by the Germans and they made the most important decision. But it was also a colonial country, so it means many Poles were working there and Polish was the second language they used in the administration. They used also the Polish law in the administration as long as they replaced this with the new German laws. And this is interesting because when they were doing some decisions, they were first looking

for a new German regulation. And if they did not find a new German regulation, did not have a new German regulation, they were using the pre-Polish law, the pre-Polish regulations. That is why I sometimes say the general government had a German-Polish administration. And this was very much discussed in the debate we had because some people thought I tried to blame the Poles for the Holocaust saying that the administration in the general government was not solely German, but German-Polish.

Waitman Beorn (15:56.928)
But to be clear, I mean, you, you are right in the sense that, as we'll talk about, and we'll talk about this with the mayors, but presumably this is also true with the, the, the sort of other bureaucratic officials working in the government. You know, they are, they are not being forced to do that. And they are enabling, you know, helping in whatever, whatever way they're doing it, the Nazis to, to carry out the Holocaust as well as, you know, their other repressive measures, right?

Grzegorz (16:27.499)
Yes, yes, this is the, you know, the general idea and behavior of the Polish males during the occupation is to help the Polish Christian population as much as they can. And they are doing this at the cost of Jewish population because they don't really care about the Jewish population. are, there were two males in my study, which who are not antisemitic before the war. But even these two examples, Okulus in Wengerow and Kozakiewicz,

They also were involved in the Holocaust because they had to carry out all the orders they get. They got from the German superiors. So their behavior of these non-anti-Jewish males is similar to the conduct of the Jewish councils. They were also not anti-Semitic. They were in power to help the Jewish populations, but they were involved in the Holocaust because they had to carry out the orders they got from their superiors. And in the, we had also...

In my study, are also mails, about 20 % who were antisemitic, right-wing. And we can also say that all other mails, something like 80 % of the mails, were not extremely right-wing. They were also antisemitic because the antisemitism was quite widespread in pre-war Poland. And the general idea was to get some of the Jews from Poland, not to kill them like the Germans, to exterminate them.

This was the German idea of the Nazis, but in pre-war Polish state, the intellectuals, the politicians were playing with the idea, were discussing the question, how can we somehow resettle the Jews from Poland? How they number can decline? Because they are preventing our political, social, cultural development. So the anti-Semitism increased even during the occupation. And yeah, the essence.

When the people are asking me how the mayors were involved in the Holocaust, I say in two ways. One way is carrying out the orders of the German superiors, and the other way is to doing their own anti-Semitic politics, so to initiating at the ground some anti-Semitic measures, or to carrying out the orders they got from the German superiors in their own arbitrary way, so they harm the Jews even more as they could have.

Waitman Beorn (18:51.086)
I mean, and this is sort of at the heart of the book. And I want to talk about some of these in detail, because I think when we're thinking about this idea of what is collaboration, what is complicity, the details are what matter. And I think we probably have the same attitude towards micro history, where I feel like when you do micro history, it's because you're looking at the details.

because that's where things are actually happening. And then you try to step back when you're done and see how much does this tell us about the larger situation. But there's lots of different ways in which in your book, the arguments that you're making, that Polish mayors are sort of taking initiative they don't need to be taking, for example.

Unless they, you know, unless they're anti-Semitic, right? Because they could, they could just not do these things and, and people wouldn't really know about them because the, the, Nazis are relying on them in many ways to sort of know who's who in the town, for example, um, and this kind of thing. And one of the examples that you talked about, maybe you can talk a little about this, cause I thought it was really interesting. It's, it's a bit minor, I suppose, in the grand scheme of the Holocaust. um, one of the things that the Nazis require is Jewish employees.

of, you know, communal government to be fired. And the mayors, you know, are doing this as well.

Grzegorz (20:21.433)
Yeah, this happens very much at the beginning of the occupation because they are starting to release the Jewish officials very early in late 1993, early 1940. There were not many of them in the administration because they were not employed in three or four Poland. So something like only 2%, maximum 2 % of the

employees of the city administration were Jewish, but if we take a city administration of Warsaw, we have 20,000 employees. So we have some dozens of Jewish workers and officials in the administration. And the interesting situation in Warsaw is that the Warsaw mayor, Julian Kulski, he was not a Jew, he was a Pole, but his grandmother, Karolina Meisel, was born as Jewish. So he...

could have been classified as a mixed person and released himself. So, but even so he was here, he was searching for the, out the orders. He got the orders from the Stadthausmenna and he gave the orders to the heads of the, to the divisions, administrative divisions, and he asked them to search for the Jews in the administration and they were doing this and they were doing this two times. The first time,

They were doing this according to the Polish understanding of a Jew, which is a religious understanding of a Jew. a person belongs to the Mosaic faith, it is a Jew. And then, a few months later, they had to search again for the Jews according to the German system, and it was a racist system. So looking at the parents and grandparents of the Jews. And yeah, it is how it happened in Warsaw. We don't know how many...

Jewish employees still stayed in the administration because the documents are largely destroyed. But you can reconstruct the process of searching for the Jewish employees and then releasing them from the administration. And this is the same in many other administrations. They were identified at the beginning of the administration.

Grzegorz (22:40.119)
By the mayor it was sometimes understood as a profitable move because they didn't want to have Jews in the administration. They wanted the Jews don't occupy this position and they were doing this willing.

Waitman Beorn (22:53.422)
And I think as time goes on, you know, obviously the Holocaust begins to, or Nazi policies begin to become more more extreme. starting with ghettoization even, it seems like one of the arguments that you're making is that really the heavy lifting of creating ghettos and also creating the Jewish leadership organizations for the ghettos, the Judenrats,

is really something that's done by Polish mayors.

Grzegorz (23:26.169)
To some extent, yeah, it was the Stadthauptmann or the Kreishauptmann, but he was asking the mayor who could be employed as the head of the Judenrat and so on. So it was a collaborative work between the mayor and the Kreishauptmann. But what is important to understand what is happening in these towns is that the Kreishauptmann, the county governor,

It's not there. So what he is doing, he's sending a letter to the governor and asking him, for example, to set up a Jewish council or to set up a ghetto. And then the mayor is deciding where the ghetto would be or who could be in the Jewish council. The Kleishauptmann is not really intervening in this situation because he relies on the mayor. The mayor is in this town. The Kleishauptmann is not there.

So he can only object, but Christchurch and I don't really object to this proposition of the mayor's because they were relying on their decision and it is why the mayor's could decide so many things in the town. So they always needed an approval of the main superior, the city governor, but actually they were deciding what is happening in the town.

Waitman Beorn (24:49.184)
And what was the effect of this? fact that the mayors were able to choose or have significant input in things like the ghetto boundaries and who's in the Udenrath.

Grzegorz (25:05.025)
Yeah, the Yudanrat is not so important here. Very important is here the ghetto. Because, you know, in 1940, most of the towns and cities, they got the letters from the Kaiser of Mena and they were asked to create a ghetto. And what they were doing, they were first, some of them,

at the beginning said we don't need a ghetto because why should we separate the Jewish population from the Polish population? It is trouble. We have to resettle the population. It is not so good. But after a few weeks, even days, they found out that it could be profitable for them because they can resettle the Jews into a small part of the town, underdeveloped part of the town without, you know, sewers, without canalization, without running water. And they can in this way.

they can win many good apartments in the center of the city. So they learned very quickly how to profit from the policies of occupation and creating the ghettos. Sometimes they make pragmatic decisions, like in Warsaw. So they, for example, said, we will create the ghetto there where most of the Jews already live. In Warsaw, it was in Muranów, so we don't have to resettle so many people. But even...

In this case, when they were creating the ghetto in Muranów, they were trying to exclude some streets, some factories, some buildings from the ghetto to win as much space as possible for the Polish population.

Grzegorz (30:46.184)
Yeah, so the creation of ghettos was a very important process for the mayors because they could decide actually in which part of the town or city will be created. The Kleisthalpmena were not there. They sent a letter to the mayor and asked him to create a ghetto. But because they were not there, it was the

The mayor decided in which part of the town the ghetto would be. the beginning they did not want to create ghettos because they did not understood why they have to separate the Jewish from the Polish population. But they understood very quickly that the city can profit from these policies. So they could resettle the Jews from good parts of the city, the poor parts of the city, for example, to some suburbs without running water and canalization.

And in this way, Polish population was benefiting and the city, the town was benefiting from this, from the doings. So they usually could decide in which part of the town the ghetto would be and they only needed an approval from the Kreishausmann. And usually the Kreishausmann approved of the decision of the mayor because the Kreishausmann, the county governor was not there and he relied on the mayor.

Waitman Beorn (32:16.788)
And one of things that comes through throughout the book, one of the central tensions that we'll talk about perhaps a little bit more is the extent to which mayors are forced to do these things versus or doing them because they're afraid for their lives, et cetera, et cetera, or doing them out of their own.

initiatives. I guess one of the questions as we begin to think about the role of mayors in the actual Holocaust is what is the sort of realm of freedom of action that they have where they can choose to do things without repercussions or were they essentially being forced to do these things on pain of death?

Grzegorz (33:06.92)
Exactly, this is an important question. It is called into the kernel of the book. Yeah, so they have to carry out all the orders they get. They can't object, but they can decide how exactly will they carry out these orders. And then this is a mixture of the spot, and there is a gray zone, because we don't know exactly in which moment they are following the orders and in which moment they are doing their own.

It is very often a mixture of these behaviors, of structures. So the gray zone is very important.

Waitman Beorn (33:50.862)
So, we come back to this a little bit with, know, what are the mayors doing as sort of the Holocaust becomes more obvious, I suppose, to the local Polish population? So things like, what is their role in Einsatzgruppen executions as they take place across Poland? And then moving on to things like...

deportation actions to the extermination centers.

Grzegorz (34:21.13)
So they are more involved in the persecution of the Jews than in the murder of the Jews. Because the murder of the Jews, the deportations, they are done by the Einsatzkommandos who were doing this, of the Aktion Reithardt. And they are supporting this process, but the main role in the Holocaust is to create the ghetto, to appropriate the Jewish houses, take them over.

to work with the Trojan and the trustees who are renting the houses of the Jews. So they are more involved in these processes. But as the Holocaust comes, the actual killing of the Jews, then the Ainszak's commandos are coming to the towns and they are supporting them. Usually in a way,

to organize helpers. For example, they have to organize the Polish policemen or the firefighters who will help to deport the Jews. They have to provide food for the Germans who are coming to the towns. They have to provide lists. So they are responsible for you know, for this processes in the background. And then we can see a difference. This is very interesting between the ethnic German males and the Polish males because the...

Ethnic German males, they try to prove that they belong to the German nation and they are more eager to help Germans in the deportation and persecution of the Jews. So the ethnic German males, they are shooting the Jews at the streets. The Polish males did not do this. I did not find a Polish male who were shooting Jews with German policemen at the street. And the ethnic German males are searching actively for Jewish families who did not come to the deportation place. The Polish males are not...

to are not doing this. And that is also the why the Polish mayors were not found guilty after the war. Only one Polish mayor was actually found guilty and all four other Polish mayors were acquitted. And ethnic German mayors, three of four I studied, they were, yeah, they were investigated and one even was, three of them were found.

Grzegorz (36:46.73)
three of four were found guilty and one was executed for the crimes he committed during the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (36:55.854)
I mean, I want to come back to the post-war piece and the memory piece a little bit later. But one of the areas that I think if we're looking for areas in which the mayors are really able to demonstrate initiative in order to benefit

from the Holocaust or help others benefit from the Holocaust, it's in this idea of property and in the, you know, what happens to Jewish property in the course of the Holocaust through the deportations, right? And here we're talking about both real estate and, you know, small movable property and money, right?

Can you talk a little bit about what are the mayors doing with regards to property, to Jewish property in these towns?

Grzegorz (37:58.218)
So the general idea of the German occupiers is that the entire Jewish property belongs to the Germans, but there are not enough Germans to possess this property. It is very natural that most of the things are going to the Polish people who live there. And the role of the mayors is mainly, they are doing many things. are, for example,

But I would say the most important thing is they are working with the trustees. There is an office of the trustees in the general government and they are small offices, branches of the trustees, offices in all the towns I studied. And the trustees are the people who are responsible for taking over the Jewish houses, factories and so on and renting them to the Polish population or the population which is there. And the mayors...

are employing the trustees and they are working with them all the time and providing various kinds of lists. this is the, and obviously when the, for example, it could be a situation when a Jewish family is staying in the same apartment as before the war, but because the apartment is in the ghetto, they have to pay rent.

for living in this apartment. So for the same apartment, which was before the World War property, now during the war, they have to pay rent to stay in the same apartment and they are further, more families moving into the apartment. So if they were in an apartment of, don't know, with three or four rooms, so they are two or usually two families moving into the apartment.

and each of the family has to pay rent for staying in this apartment, even this family to which the apartment belonged before the war. And this is mainly the job of the trustees, but the trustees are working with the males because they need the infrastructure for doing what they were doing. After murdering the Jews, as the Jews were deported, so Poles usually, all the Christian population in this town was trying to loot the...

Grzegorz (40:14.794)
to go inside the territory of the ghettos and to steal the furniture, the bicycles or whatever was there. And the mails were responsible for protecting this. So they were actually responsible for not allowing the Poles to steal the property inside the ghetto after the deportation of the Jews. But this huge problem of taking over Jewish apartments, yeah, it is running...

through the city administration and the offices of the trustees.

Waitman Beorn (40:51.079)
Are there examples of the mayors using their, even before deportations, using their position vis-a-vis the Jews to enrich themselves through extortion or bribery or just straight up theft?

Grzegorz (41:08.329)
Personally, not so much. So we could, yeah, we see this in the case of the ethnic German mails. It is very obvious. But I did not see this so much in the case of the Polish mails. It was difficult to analyze this, to trace this, because we don't have the... I think it happened to some extent, but I can't tell you to which extent they were personally benefiting from.

So I, for example, did not find a mayor who was moving from a small apartment to a huge apartment because of this process. I think it was because the mayors were already in the large apartments before the war. what I found was, for example, employees of the city administration in Warsaw who benefited from this. For example, a person who had a small apartment and then because of the creation of the ghetto, he got a large apartment in a beautiful...

part of the process. So this is something which is in the book.

Waitman Beorn (42:12.856)
So I mean, I guess one of the questions that I have before we get to some of the larger questions about collaboration and publicity, just as someone who has done really, really extensive archival work, research looking into this topic, we have four districts in the general government that you're looking at. you've explained why we're not looking at district glee scene, because it's kind of.

in many ways a lot different and it's not Polish mayors, it's majority, overall majority are Ukrainian mayors. Are there anything that you notice as a pattern regarding these districts, something that they have in common or some that are different, anything that sort of ties them together?

Grzegorz (43:01.226)
There are a few things, but there are also other things like the personality of the mayor, which is more important than this. For example, in the Kraków district, there were some cities and towns like even Kraków, which did not have a Polish mayor. So in the Kraków district, somehow the Klejsum Trachthausen decided to govern some towns and cities without mayors.

Hans Frank objected to this, but they were, I don't know, maybe something like 10 or 20 % of all the cities like Tarnow, Novoson, that did not have a Polish mayor. It did not happen in other districts. In other districts, almost all the towns had mayors. The resistance was stronger, I think, in the Lublin area than it was in the Kraków area. And in Warsaw area, was also quite strong.

And this also affected the mails. some of the mails, actually all of the mails, work with the Polish underground and some of them had contact to the Polish government in exile. For example, Jugan Kulski. And after the war, they even claimed that they did not work for the Germans, they worked for the Polish government in exile.

Waitman Beorn (44:25.806)
Yeah, I mean, this is a question that we should raise as well in the interest of fairness. Do you have examples of mayors going out of their way to help Jews or to kind of resist or subvert Nazi policy towards the Jews in the Holocaust?

Grzegorz (44:44.968)
Yes, this is very interesting because on the one hand we see very clearly how the Polish mails were involved in the persecution and sometimes in the murder of the Jews, but on the other hand we see a few mails who were helping the Jews. And they put this in two ways. One way was personal ways. For example, like the Julian Kulski mail of Warsaw. He and his wife were hiding a Jewish family of Leon Kacna and four other Jewish persons.

in their houses and properties. And they also could help Jews in an administrative way for giving them false documents, documents for Christians, ID for Christians. And to do this, they needed already a falsified birth certificate or they needed two persons who testified that this Jewish person was actually a Christian. And the Bayos were not doing this. They knew about this. It was the registration departments who were doing this.

And it's difficult to say to which extent did it happen. I mean, they helped the Jews much less than they helped the Polish underground, the Polish resistance movement. There is one document from the Warsaw administration that says that one-fifth of the falsified documents went to the Jews and four-fifth went to the Polish underground. Could be something similar in other city administrations. So the priority was to help the resistance, not the Jews.

Waitman Beorn (46:17.644)
So what happened to these people after the war? I you note in the beginning of one of the chapters talking about the post-war experience that almost all of the Polish mayors who had been mayors during the war end up not being mayors in the post-war period. But what happens to them after?

after quote, I'm using air quotes here, after liberation by the Soviet Union or after the Nazis are driven out of Poland.

Grzegorz (46:49.482)
They usually work in private companies or state companies. Some of them work in the administration, but not in the city administration as mayors. People, Justice Department in Poland somehow has the feeling that they did something horrible during the occupation, they can't prove this.

because the Polish mails, as I said, they did not personally kill or harm other people. They were involved in the Holocaust in an administrative way. And it was very difficult to prove their guilty in the administrative way because they could always say, I only carried out the orders. So only one Polish mayor was arrested, the mayor of Lublin, and some other was arrested and spent three years in prison, so was sentenced. And other Polish mails,

Some of them were arrested and prosecuted by... They were released after two or three weeks because the judges did not have the evidence to prove them guilty.

Waitman Beorn (48:05.004)
I mean, this to me was really fascinating because, you know, we know that in some contexts, you know, the Soviets, for example, were very strict or harsh against people they viewed as collaborators, you know, during the war, right? And obviously now we have the challenge of talking about Polish communists versus Soviet, you know, Reed Russian.

communist. I mean, how does the post-war communist, Polish communist state deal with this issue of collaboration in general, suppose, but then also of how it relates to the mayors? Because of course, again, this is an example that's perhaps 100 % applicable, but you have the way the Soviets treat some returning POWs is that the fact that you got captured.

know, is a permanent taint on your record and we're going to treat you badly as a result of that or in Belarus, you know, where mayors who serve even just basically did the bare minimum under the Nazis were removed from positions because they were viewed as collaborators. How did this play out in Poland and why was it different?

Grzegorz (49:24.906)
Yeah, it is very different than in the Soviet area. Yeah, even the first Polish mayor who was sentenced in Lublin, I think it was because there was first the Soviet administration there. Yeah, the Polish administration post-war communist administration is looking very different than the Soviets. It is something like a communist national administration. And they are reluctant to see the mayor's guilty.

If there is an evidence that a person did something personally harm someone, like a policeman shooting someone at the street, that they are acting, but if they see only the administrative involvement in the persecution of other people, they don't do anything. They, I don't know, very different attitude. But it is also interesting because the same administration, which is not interested in proving the...

Polish mayors guilty, they are doing this with the German ethnic mayors and with the Ukrainian mayors. And I think there is this national motivation behind this, but there is also the difference, which I said, that the Polish mayors were not killing people at the street as the German mayors were doing this, or the Ukrainian mayors organizing the pogroms in 1941. So on the one hand, I would say these two things. One thing is that the Polish mayors personally did not

were not involved in the Holocaust, they were involved in the administrative way. And on the hand is the Polish administration, which is different than the Soviet administration. They are not so harsh. They are more reluctant to find someone guilty.

Waitman Beorn (51:11.158)
I mean, this to me is really, is really fascinating because, you know, one of the things that really stood out to me from, from your book and from the examples in your book. And again, this is why I think detail matters is that there were examples of, you know, and I'm not going to remember the exact mayor, but mayor's saying, forwarding a list of names of Jewish citizens to the SS.

or saying these are the names, these are the Jews in my town or saying, please arrest this person for hiding Jews or for being a Jew in hiding, et cetera, which are voluntary acts, right? They're acts that they didn't have to do that. And nobody would really know if they didn't, right? Particularly in the context of informing on people and those kind of things. And at the same time, they're actions that

I think it's reasonable to assume that a Polish mayor would know if I give a list of names of Jews to the SS or to the Ordnungspolizei or to whoever happens to be responsible for that, the SD office in the town, know, that bad things are going to happen to them, right?

Grzegorz (52:27.434)
Yeah, mean the German terror in Poland was quite strong. Two million ethnic Poles were killed during the German occupation, so it played a role. Another thing is what I already said, that the Polish mayors could almost always say, they were only carrying out the orders.

Where is my initiative? What did I do? The Christ-Hauptmann wanted for me to create the ghetto. I created the ghetto. So I am not guilty for doing this. It was the German administration that the Christ-Hauptmann decided this. I only carried out this order. And it is actually until today in Poland like this. If you talk to Poles about collaboration, they will understand collaboration not as cooperation.

which harms the Jews or the Poles and helps the occupiers. They understood collaboration when you can prove that the person like a mayor or policeman was carrying out the order in a way which was worse than the Christ-Helman expected this. So only if he actually from his own initiative, willingness was harming someone. And this is very difficult to prove. Sometimes you can see this if a policeman is shooting someone at the street.

then you have the evidence. But if it happens in the administrative way, you can almost always say, yeah, I was only carrying out the order. Maybe I was even helping the Jews carrying out the order in this way and not this way. So see, at the end, the ghetto had something like 3 or 5 % of the city area. I could have done this in a way that it would have only 1%. So it would be even worse for the Jews. Yeah. And they did not apply this to the...

to the German mayors and to the Ukrainian mayors. They were somehow more responsible for the deed. But as I said, they were also harming the Ukrainian mayors and the ethnic German mayors were harming the Jews in a personal way. Not all of them. For example, of four ethnic mayors I investigated, three were found guilty because they were shooting at the Jews, helping German policemen to execute the Jews. And one German mayor, very interesting, was integrated.

Grzegorz (54:52.966)
into the Polish administration before the war and he behaved like a Polish mayor, not applying the personal violence to other people.

Waitman Beorn (55:07.692)
mean, following on from this, know, were there examples of Polish mayors who refused to go along with the Nazis or sort of put up sufficient bureaucratic obstacles that they were punished or killed or removed from office?

Grzegorz (55:28.266)
Yeah, good question. So, yes, four males, I investigated altogether, I investigated 50 males in my book. And four of them did not survive the war, were killed by the Germans or died in the concentration camps. Four of 50, they were also people in the city administration, officials of the city administration who were killed during the administration in Warsaw. was something like...

3.5 % in the same. they may have usually did not resign. They somewhere playing with this idea to step down, but usually they stay in the office because their motivation was I should keep working as a mayor because if I do not do this, the Germans will employ a person who is

whose behavior is much worse for the community and by the community they meant the Polish community. And it was similar in the Netherlands. I was talking to Petar Omen and also similar in Belgium. I was talking to Nico Wouters, these are two historians who wrote books about mails before me and they found similar constellation in these countries that these people were staying in their offices because they didn't want that the Germans employed

You know, in the Netherlands it could be a fascist mayor and in Poland it could be an ethnic German mayor. They wanted to stay in this office.

Waitman Beorn (57:06.23)
So, you know, one of things that we should probably now think about, you know, is the reception that this book has gotten, you know, since it came out, right? Because I think that tells us an awful lot about, know, where Poland is in terms of its memory work, where Germany is in terms of coming to terms with the Holocaust. Can you talk a little about, you know, for lack of a better word, the controversy that

has sprung up around your documentation in the book.

Grzegorz (57:42.312)
Yet, I was attacked in Poland, this book attacked very much in Poland, like the books by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking before, by the Polish historians who worked for the Polish state and different state institutions like the Institute of National Memory. And there was a debate in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany about the same time. So there were two debates in which the book was discussed.

attacked by historians and politicians at the same time. this main question why it came to this debate, I think it was the collaboration because the people in Poland had a problem with thinking about the males as collaborators. And in Germany, collaboration is also a very problematic approach to history. So in Germany, the historians

In historians usually, I mean, they investigate to some extent the collaboration, but the most important thing in Germany is to investigate the German perpetrators. And if they use the word collaboration, they applied it usually to fascists or to France, to something like political collaboration of twisting or pretend. And if you applied collaboration to males,

who were also motivated in a political way, for example, by antisemitism. This is somehow too much for the Poles and for the Germans. And yeah, so different reasons for attacking the book, but the effect was similar. In Germany, we see the reluctance to deal with collaboration, and in Poland, it is the same.

imagine the history as the history of the victims and not as the history of perpetrators. And it is difficult for them to understand that a victim of German occupation could have been a perpetrator at the same time. So for example, we can say the mayors or employees of the city administration were the victims of the German occupation that did not want to have a general government and work in the general government and they were anti-Nazi and anti-German. But at the same time, they use

Grzegorz (59:59.445)
the structures of the occupation to persecute and kill the Jews. So they were also the perpetrators. And that is something which the people in Poland don't really want to understand. And this confuses also the Germans. don't like... I mean, they integrate to some extent collaboration into the world and some do it very good, like Christoph Dijkman. But many German historians avoid the subject of collaboration and...

focused very much on the German perpetrators, German occupation, the things, on the questions, how the Germans harmed other people, now how the people who they harmed, harm others.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:40.814)
I what is the, I think it's interesting because what is the, what's the reasoning behind that? Because, you know, I mean, is it a desire to sort of, it sounds very strange, but is it a desire for us like the Germans to own the Holocaust? or are they, are they, are they overly sensitive about, you know, upsetting other people in other countries by suggesting that, that there were collaborators in those countries that made, made the Holocaust possible or made it go.

Grzegorz (01:00:43.498)
you

Waitman Beorn (01:01:10.572)
more smoothly.

Grzegorz (01:01:11.75)
Yeah, in a political way, it is difficult to talk about collaboration in Germany, because if you talk about collaboration, is something, you say the Germans were less responsible that they could have been without collaboration, is something what the radical right is the alternative for Deutschland is talking in Germany. So it is the political understanding of collaboration and it also affects the actual academic.

investigation of collaboration and that my German colleagues, they don't like to investigate collaboration. is make them somehow to feel uncomfortable because they know that the people they investigate, were already the victims of the German occupation and somehow the German occupation affected them. So why would they investigate if they did something due to the Jews, if they were already harmed by the Germans? And there is also the...

what is actually important that the Germans, what you say, own the Holocaust. They don't want to the responsibility for the Holocaust with other people. So when I am doing presentation about the mails, I frequently say at the beginning that a German in a country like Poland or Norway or Netherlands, he was also always working with at least 10 local people. So like a Kaishaus man was working with 10 or 20 mails or a German policeman.

was relying on 10 or 20 Lithuanian or Polish policemen. And it is how the Holocaust happened. The Germans had the most important positions in the administration and during the Holocaust and they were the main architects of the Holocaust and they created the Auschwitz and the Axon Reinhardt and the idea to exterminate the Jews was German and they were the main engine behind the Holocaust but there were so many other people from other countries involved in the Holocaust that the Holocaust was not only a German

project because an international transnational genocide.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:13.922)
I mean, what's interesting is also that, I hadn't really put it together until you mentioned it, but France, you know, as a comparator, right? So, I mean, yes, there's the Paytain government, which is officially a collaborationist government, you know, allied, Vichy France, you know, allied with the Nazis. But also when we're back down to the local level of individual mayors in France, I suspect that most individual village mayors,

were not sort of in place, put in place because they were supportive of Vichy. And so a lot of the same arguments that you make regarding Polish mayors, you could make with French mayors. And yet we tend to be harder on the French for, you know, calling them collaborators is easy. But as you say, calling the Polish mayors collaborators is somehow taboo.

Grzegorz (01:04:08.039)
Yeah, it is not included into the Polish history. The Polish history is the, I mean, the Holocaust. People understand the Holocaust as a part of the Polish history, but only if you say that the Germans killed the Jews. If you say that the Poles were involved in the persecution and killing of the Jews as well, that this is difficult and then they can really digest this. They will, it will happen something like during the debate, no?

And it was much better 20 years ago as Jan Tomasz Kroos published a book about the Yrwawne. So at that time, they could digest the idea that the Poles were the paper troopers. Now after the rules of the Peace Party, 10 years, it is difficult to talk about the subject and the historians in Poland somehow adjusted to this national discourses and collaboration disappeared from the general discourses about the Holocaust in Poland.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:06.71)
I mean, it seems like what you're arguing, and I probably agree with this, is that while the Polish government as it existed in occupied Poland, as you say, was not a pro-Nazi government by any stretch, they were not supportive of the Nazis or anything like that. And were therefore willing to work against a lot of those policies with the Home Army, with the resistance.

They had an area of sort of common agreement, I guess, which is the anti-Jewish policy, which was kind of, if, you know, we don't support the Nazis, but if they're going to get rid of the Jews from the community, that's okay, actually. And, and that's not, in other words, that's not a policy we're going to fight because we kind of have common, common goals in that. Is that, that a, is that a fair, is that a fair sort of summary of where you would come down on this?

Grzegorz (01:06:03.869)
Yeah, this makes perfectly sense what you said. And it was not only in Poland. I mean, in Poland very much, for example, as a deportation happened and Jews were taken from the ghettos, driven by the trains to the ghettos. the Polish underground was discussing if we should stop the trains, but they did not because the Polish ethnic Poles, Christian Poles were not in the deportation trains. It were the Jews.

There was only one train stopped by resistance during the entire war and it was in Belgium. And the people who stopped the train and released the Jews in this train, the people in the underground were actually Jews. So actually the entire Europe to different extent was indirectly supporting the Nazis by doing nothing, watching how the Nazis with their helpers were killing the Jews. And obviously as you said,

The Polish government and the Polish resistance, they were very much anti-German and they were fighting against the German, but they were not fighting against the Germans because they wanted to help the Jews. They were fighting against the Germans because they wanted to have a Polish state and they were sometimes attacking them if the Germans were hitting ethnic Poles, but the Holocaust was something like a common ground between these two.

fusions.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:35.442)
And this is something that really sort of jumps out at you when you look at your book, because you have so many examples of the thing that the ways, the myriad of ways, the thousands of ways in which the Polish mayors have a finger in some way on something related to the Holocaust. And what really jumped out at me was

thinking about all the missed opportunities, you know, where if somebody had wanted to...

subvert Nazi policy in the same way that they might've done for Polish Home Army people or resistance or whatever. There are so many chances for you to sort of not include so many names on the list or not turn somebody in or not go after them with any kind of energy whatsoever, wait until the Nazis tell you, cetera. It's kind of that element of, is a lot of times where some of the collaboration really comes through because if they had just

If they'd just sort of done the bare minimum a lot of times, it seems like, you know, there would have been some opportunities for, for better outcomes for their local Jewish community members.

Grzegorz (01:08:53.898)
Yeah, and it applies not only to the males, it applies to, you know, actually the entire Polish society under the German occupation. It was very difficult for Jews to survive the Holocaust in Poland. And it was not because there were so many Germans in Poland, it was because they were afraid of the Polish neighbors who can denounce them. And there were obviously some Poles who were hiding Jews and helping them. It was a very small minority.

And they again were not so much afraid of the Germans, they were afraid of the Poles because if you take a small town, if you take a town or small city somewhere, there are not so many Germans there. are many, 10 or 20 Germans there or in a village, there are no Germans at all. They are coming only once a year. So if someone spots you, finds out that you're hiding a Jew, it is your neighbor or the village head. It is not a German. They are coming to the...

to a German policeman or to the Polish policeman and that you are in trouble. And it was what it was so difficult to hide the Jews, to help the Jews and why so few Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland. It was, I think, only 1 % of the Jews who survived the Holocaust in the general government. And it were the mayors, but also the policemen and the entire Christian Polish society which made this so difficult.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:21.302)
And I think, know, again, I always say this whenever we talk about this topic, you know, that, you know, I, I, and I'm sure you as well don't have anything in particular against Poles. You know, I suspect that if this work was done on, as you say, the Ukrainian mayors in district Elitsin or Lithuanian mayors or Latvian mayors, you know, we might find very similar behaviors. like the criticism here is not one of sort of a

a Polish specific nature, something about the Poles that makes them do this, but really more a criticism of everybody who was in power of some way, or form and had some freedom of action to either make things worse, to not make things worse or to make things better. And making choices to sort of do or not do those things is kind of where we come down.

on judgment with things like ideas of collaboration, right?

Grzegorz (01:11:21.822)
Yes, yes, and I mean the people were also afraid because there was a punishment for killing the Jews and a few Poles were actually executed for killing the Jews. But to find out who is hiding the Jews, is only possible if you have enough people who can denounce you.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:44.985)
Well, thanks so much for coming on. really appreciate it. Before we let you go, though, I want to ask the question. And first of all, thank you so much for doing this work and for weathering the political blowback of it, because I'm sure it's not particularly fun. But I have to say, having read your book, it's thousand pages of detail, of archival work, of archival citations, which makes it very hard to just sort of

for someone to throw it out the window and say, well, that's just an ideological approach or poorly argued. But all that being said, before we let you go, what is one book on Holocaust that you found particularly important or particularly worthwhile that you might recommend to our listeners?

Grzegorz (01:12:33.45)
My favorite book about the Holocaust is Saul Friedlander's book about the Holocaust and pre-war Germany. So he published two volumes and I think many other historians or some other historians who interviewed recommended this book. I find this book so important because of the concept of integrated history. This concept is important to study collaboration because what Saul Friedlander is saying and doing in his book, he says

we should include all the actors important for the explanation of an event and to take all the sources, investigate all the sources which are important for the investigation of the event. what he's saying to concentrate on the Germans and the Jews is not enough. You can also, or only on the Germans. You can concentrate only on the Germans and the Jews if you are...

researching the Holocaust until 1939 or 1938. But after this, have also the Slovaks, the Poles, the Dutch and the Norwegians who are involved in the Holocaust and in the occupation. So, and the collaboration appears on every third page in South England, book. And that is why I would like to recommend this book to the listeners of this podcast.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:52.25)
And that's a that's a great recommendation. And it's something that, certainly I've striven for strove strived for in my work as well. And I think a lot of us do this to create this sort of complete, complete picture. So again, if you're listening, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. As always, you know, give us a like subscribe, tell us, tell your friends and Gregor's thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Grzegorz (01:14:20.362)
Thank you, Waitman, for inviting me.