"Germans Appropriate the Polish Experience of Victimhood. Colonial patterns of thinking emerge in the debate on collaboration" by Hanna Radziejowska and Mateusz Fałkowski - Instytut Pileckiego

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 11, 2026. Article translated from German into English.

Mateusz Fałkowski
Hanna Radziejowska

Germans Appropriate the Polish Experience of Victimhood. Colonial patterns of thinking emerge in the debate on collaboration

Original title: “Germans are appropriating the Polish experience of victimhood. Colonial patterns of thought come to light in the debate on collaboration”

For several weeks, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has been discussing the book by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe about Polish mayors in occupied Poland. The debate is peculiar because it relies on a highly distorted picture of both the German occupation of Poland and the Holocaust. Above all, however, despite the author’s assurances that he rejects moralizing, the discussion concerns less the past than the question of who is “ours” and who is regarded as an enemy, as Stephan Lehnstaedt and Andrea Löw observed (FAZ, 21 January). Critics of the book are categorized by Rossoliński-Liebe and Jan Grabowski either as Polish nationalists or as cowardly German historians.

Rossoliński-Liebe describes the Holocaust as a “transnational genocide”. He bases this far-reaching conclusion on an analysis of the lives of 35 mayors in occupied Poland (including four Volksdeutsche), whose actions he attributes to antisemitism. He draws the same causal conclusions even in complex cases, for example when an official cooperated with the Polish underground or was imprisoned by the Gestapo while he himself, together with his wife and sister, sheltered Jews. He ascribes to this group of officials a decisive influence on the course and scale of the Holocaust. He compares the relationship between German occupiers and local officials in the occupied territories to that between colleagues at work and claims that for every German perpetrator there were nine non-German “colleagues” from occupied countries. But aside from conceptual issues, how can such a statistical ratio be calculated on the basis of 35 biographies? In Rossoliński-Liebe’s work, everything is forced to fit the thesis of a “transnational genocide”.

Our aim, however, is not to present a review of the book, to question the need for further research into collaboration, or to deny antisemitic attitudes within parts of Polish society. The debate raises more fundamental questions.

Who was a collaborator? German society possesses almost no knowledge of the Holocaust in occupied Poland, and more broadly in Eastern Europe. According to a German Ipsos study from 2024, a majority of Germans (59%) believe that German Jews constituted the largest group of victims of the Holocaust, and many cannot name extermination sites such as Treblinka or Sobibór. Meanwhile, 49% believe that the death penalty for helping Jews had been applied in Germany.

In the current debate, Western European occupation experiences are often projected onto Eastern Europe. In doing so, a remarkable mechanism becomes visible: the experience of occupied Poland is incorporated into German memory culture through a process of transfer or appropriation and becomes part of Germany’s own narrative of victimhood, for example in the assumption that three million German Jews were included among the victims of the Holocaust, or in the belief that the Third Reich supposedly imposed the death penalty for assisting Jews.

At the same time, the Polish experience of occupation is often equated with the situation in the Netherlands, Norway, France, or Denmark. Today, 81 years after the end of the war, it is sometimes argued that Poland should have followed the Danish example and demonstrated in the streets against the persecution of Jewish citizens. In Poland, however, such a situation would have been unimaginable – not because of antisemitism (which in prewar Poland, as Antony Polonsky has written, was no greater than in other parts of Europe), but because of the daily terror of the German occupation, including mass executions and other forms of repression. Between 600,000 and one million German soldiers, policemen, and SS and Gestapo officials were permanently stationed in occupied Poland. Statistically, this meant roughly one armed German soldier for every fifty inhabitants. Under such conditions, it is difficult to speak of any “space for action” within Polish society that Rossoliński-Liebe emphasizes.

He expands the concept of collaboration so broadly that he even includes members of Jewish Sonderkommandos among the perpetrators. He acknowledges that their motivations were entirely different from those of Christians, yet nevertheless claims that they participated in the extermination of the Jews. The Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau was a group of Jews forced by the Germans to organize the deaths of thousands of their fellow human beings. They witnessed the victims’ final moments. Primo Levi stressed that such a form of survival escapes moral judgment. Georges Didi-Huberman described how a member of the Sonderkommando who attempted to warn the victims was thrown alive into the crematorium in front of his comrades, and he asked what resistance would have meant for people in such circumstances – perhaps a dignified suicide? Two uprisings by members of the Sonderkommandos, in 1942 and 1944, ended with the murder of all those involved.

An understanding of collaboration such as that proposed by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe deprives the victims of the Holocaust of their subjectivity and dignity and distorts the reality of genocide. Its point of reference is an ahistorical and confused standard, the consequence of which is a shift of responsibility from the occupiers to the occupied. What in the existing scholarly and philosophical discourse has been treated as the difficult question of the human capacity for resistance under extreme and hopeless conditions of repression is reinterpreted by Rossoliński-Liebe as collaboration.

In this context, we would like to quote a statement by Szymon Datner, a Holocaust survivor and historian of the Shoah, who declared in 1988 that fleeing Jews “knocked on the window of a hut or at the door of a [Polish] home, and immediately the question arose: should I save them or not? And how? Would even a piece of bread help, or should I pretend that I heard nothing? Or should I inform the Germans, as the law required? Every form of assistance was forbidden under threat of the death penalty for oneself and one’s entire family. […] For us today, the decision seems entirely obvious. Yet not long ago, I was deeply shaken by something a young friend of mine, a Jewish woman, told me. She is my age, and I value her honesty and courage. And she said to me: ‘I am by no means certain that I would have given a Pole a bowl of food if it might have meant death for me and my daughter’”.

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe advances the thesis that Eastern Europe is dominated by nationalists who are unwilling to confront the truth and who obstruct research into collaboration. Stephan Lehnstaedt and Andrea Löw also share the view that in Poland “nationalist historical narratives” dominate and pose a threat to academic freedom regardless, apparently, of the government currently in power.

Yet a look at the facts shows something different. International scholarly debate about collaboration in occupied Poland relies primarily on sources from postwar trials in Poland, which are preserved and made accessible in Polish archives. Consider the case of Jedwabne, where, according to research by the Institute of National Remembrance and Jan T. Gross, Polish residents participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. Jedwabne has become a global symbol of the alleged “silencing” of Polish antisemitism. In reality, however, the case reveals a paradox of postwar history. In Poland, testimonies about collaborating neighbors and informers led to the judicial documentation of these crimes. In Germany and Austria, by contrast, silence prevailed both in prosecutors’ offices and within families and circles of friends. The Polish perpetrators of the Jedwabne crime were prosecuted after the war: in 1949, a total of 20 individuals were convicted. One person received the death sentence, three were given life sentences. Others received prison terms ranging from eight to fifteen years, while three died during the investigation.

In the historical Bialystok District, where Jedwabne was located, the Germans murdered approximately 270,000 Jewish, Polish, and Belarusian civilians. For crimes committed in this district, a total of seven Germans were convicted. Tens of thousands of officials of the German terror apparatus were never brought to justice. In the Federal Republic of Germany, fewer than 400 people were convicted after the war for crimes committed on the territory of Poland. In Poland, by contrast, as many as 20,000 collaborators and Volksdeutsche were convicted between 1946 and 1949 (according to Machcewicz and Paczkowski).

Does the insufficient postwar reckoning in Germany and Austria with crimes committed in Poland therefore contribute to shifting Germany’s political responsibility for these crimes onto other states and nations? Those who prosecute and punish create historical sources for future generations. The disproportions in postwar reckoning are evident.

There is another aspect of this debate that we would like to address. We were surprised to find that the Pilecki Institute in Berlin, although it had not participated in the debate so far and, out of a desire for a purely substantive scholarly discussion, had not signed any of the open letters, was repeatedly described as a nationalist institution closely aligned to the Law and Justice party. What is remarkable, however, is that no facts were presented to support this categorization. Not a single project, program, or initiative was cited that had a political or partisan character. The mere fact that an institution (in Poland or in Germany) was founded during the period when a particular party was in power cannot serve as a basis for attributing political affiliations to the people working there.

Stephan Lehnstaedt and Andrea Löw interpret the dismissal of the former director, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, as the result of nationalist political interference. They claim that “the conservative press” was mobilized from the Berlin branch of the Institute against an “academic debate on art restitution” proposed by Ruchniewicz. They do not mention that research projects in Berlin were blocked during the former director’s tenure. Moreover, a confidential letter to the minister of culture and national heritage, which warned of a potential political scandal and pointed to violations of labor rights, was leaked to Rzeczpospolita, a newspaper critical of Law and Justice and generally associated with the political center.

Löw and Lehnstaedt state that their intention is to help Polish colleagues “who live and work in Poland, who wish or are obliged to remain there, and who must operate and find their way in what is currently a very complicated political situation” (FAZ, 25 February). Does this mean that, in their view, Polish researchers are permanently censored and subjected to political pressure? Is Poland a dictatorship? The vibrant and pluralistic discourse on memory and research in Poland demonstrates the opposite.

The professor at Touro University and the head of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History criticize Grabowski and Rossoliński-Liebe for their confrontational tone and their search for enemies, yet they themselves contribute to a dynamic of exclusion. They defend scholarship, but in their two articles above all emphasize their own moral superiority. Polish scholars and their research projects are treated primarily as recipients of help and protection from Germany.

In their second article, Lehnstaedt and Löw stress that they are “aware of the historical-political intentions of the Institute of National Remembrance and the Pilecki Institute”, which they say they had already made “more than clear” in their first article. “We ourselves have in recent years sometimes taken different approaches and have been willing to cooperate to varying degrees”. When we organized a colloquium on the Warsaw Ghetto at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin together with Touro University and the Jewish Historical Institute, we had no idea – while listening to one of the co-authors of the FAZ articles deliver his lecture – what a great sacrifice his participation must have represented for him. We learned this only later from the FAZ.

It is worth reflecting on the impact that the German occupation and the destruction of state structures in Eastern Europe had on the course of the Holocaust. It is also worth discussing Polish mayors. This debate should be conducted in a pluralistic way – that is, without claims to interpretive monopoly and with theses grounded in sources.

Hanna Radziejowska is a historian and director of the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.

Mateusz Fałkowski is a sociologist and deputy director of the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.