Poland's 21st-Century Anguish

"As I stand here before you to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.  With me stand six million accusers.  But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger. For their ashes are piled up in the hills of Auschwitz and in the fields of Treblinka, or washed away by the rivers of Poland; their graves are scattered over the length and breadth of Europe.  their blood cries out, but their voices are not heard."  Gideon Hausner, Israeli prosecutor, Eichmann trial, 1961

 Poland cannot escape its history.  Hugely, it is a history forced upon it by Nazi Germany.  The Third Reich, apart from intending to conquer and subjugate the world, to have it under the control of a Supreme Germany, also had another pressing matter to attend to; the wholesale destruction of world Jewry.  Those charged by Adolf Hitler, under Heinrich Himmler et al to mount a very specific and carefully nurtured program of extermination placed death camps in many countries of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Nazi death camp Auschwitz built in the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany

But most of the death camps were placed in occupied Poland, because it made good sense to Nazi Germany in matters of expediting the issue of extermination, since Poland held a greater Jewish population than any other European country.  Germany preferred not to locate all or even most of the extermination camps within Germany itself; Germans considered themselves too civilized to conduct wholesale slaughter on their own turf, although anti-Semitism was so rife it would hardly have made a ripple of protest.

In all, it is estimated that eleven million people perished in those camps.  Among them gypsies, political prisoners, the physically disabled and homosexuals.  Six million Jews were methodically eliminated, their gassed bodies stacked into the crematoria and burnt, the stench of death hanging over the landscape wherever those camps existed, and they were present in countries all over Europe.  But it was in Poland that most of the camps were located.

Concentration and Death Camps

Camp	Function	Location	Est.	Evacuated	Liberated	Est. No. Murdered
Auschwitz	Concentration/ Extermination	Oswiecim, Poland (near Krakow)	May 26, 1940	Jan. 18, 1945	Jan. 27, 1945 by Soviets	1,100,000
Belzec	Extermination	Belzec, Poland	March 17, 1942		Liquidated by Nazis December 1942	600,000
Bergen-Belsen	Detention; Concentration (After 3/44)	near Hanover, Germany	April 1943		April 15, 1945 by British	35,000
Buchenwald	Concentration	Buchenwald, Germany (near Weimar)	July 16, 1937	April 6, 1945	April 11, 1945 Self-Liberated; April 11, 1945 by Americans
Chelmno	Extermination	Chelmno, Poland	Dec. 7, 1941; June 23, 1944		Closed March 1943 (but reopened); Liquidated by Nazis July 1944	320,000
Dachau	Concentration	Dachau, Germany (near Munich)	March 22, 1933	April 26, 1945	April 29, 1945 by Americans	32,000
Dora/Mittelbau	Sub-camp of Buchenwald; Concentration (After 10/44)	near Nordhausen, Germany	Aug. 27, 1943	April 1, 1945	April 9, 1945 by Americans
Drancy	Assembly/ Detention	Drancy, France (suburb of Paris)	August 1941		Aug. 17, 1944 by Allied Forces
Flossenbürg	Concentration	Flossenbürg, Germany (near Nuremberg)	May 3, 1938	April 20, 1945	April 23, 1945 by Americans
Gross-Rosen	Sub-camp of Sachsenhausen; Concentration (After 5/41)	near Wroclaw, Poland	August 1940	Feb. 13, 1945	May 8, 1945 by Soviets	40,000
Janowska	Concentration/ Extermination	L'viv, Ukraine	Sept. 1941		Liquidated by Nazis November 1943
Kaiserwald/ Riga	Concentration (After 3/43)	Meza-Park, Latvia (near Riga)	1942	July 1944
Koldichevo	Concentration	Baranovichi, Belarus	Summer 1942			22,000
Majdanek	Concentration/ Extermination	Lublin, Poland	Feb. 16, 1943	July 1944	July 22, 1944 by Soviets	360,000
Mauthausen	Concentration	Mauthausen, Austria (near Linz)	Aug. 8, 1938		May 5, 1945 by Americans	120,000
Natzweiler/ Struthof	Concentration	Natzweiler, France (near Strasbourg)	May 1, 1941	Sept. 1944		12,000
Neuengamme	Sub-camp of Sachsenhausen; Concentration (After 6/40)	Hamburg, Germany	Dec. 13, 1938	April 29, 1945	May 1945 by British	56,000
Plaszow	Concentration (After 1/44)	Krakow, Poland	Oct. 1942	Summer 1944	Jan. 15, 1945 by Soviets	8,000
Ravensbrück	Concentration	near Berlin, Germany	May 15, 1939	April 23, 1945	April 30, 1945 by Soviets
Sachsenhausen	Concentration	Berlin, Germany	July 1936	March 1945	April 27, 1945 by Soviets
Sered	Concentration	Sered, Slovakia (near Bratislava)	1941/42		April 1, 1945 by Soviets
Sobibor	Extermination	Sobibor, Poland (near Lublin)	March 1942	Revolt on October 14, 1943; Liquidated by Nazis October 1943	Summer 1944 by Soviets	250,000
Stutthof	Concentration (After 1/42)	near Danzig, Poland	Sept. 2, 1939	Jan. 25, 1945	May 9, 1945 by Soviets	65,000
Theresienstadt	Concentration	Terezin, Czech Republic (near Prague)	Nov. 24, 1941	Handed over to Red Cross May 3, 1945	May 8, 1945 by Soviets	33,000
Treblinka	Extermination	Treblinka, Poland (near Warsaw)	July 23, 1942	Revolt on April 2, 1943; Liquidated by Nazis April 1943
Vaivara	Concentration/ Transit	Estonia	Sept. 1943		Closed June 28, 1944
Westerbork	Transit	Westerbork, Netherlands	Oct. 1939		April 12, 1945 camp handed over to Kurt Schlesinger

Poland's anger with President Barack Obama for speaking of "Polish death camps" bespeaks national guilt and a desire to alter history.  Poland did not build those death camps, did not plan the deaths of millions of people, did not sanction what occurred.  But it was also in Poland where pogroms against Polish Jews commonly occurred, where anti-Semitism was always current, where, when Jews returned to their homes after the war, they found them occupied, and where returnees were also killed by Poles.

America sought to pay tribute to a Polish army officer who risked his life to discover for himself the truth of rumours that were circulating of a massive, official undertaking to exterminate Jews on a scale unimagined: "Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and so he smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself", (President Obama).

Poland's tender sensibilities in this matter are well understood.  But by accusing the White House of "ignorance and incompetence", demanding an apology for the "outrageous error" they feel was committed by the president in his remarks during the ceremony to posthumously award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour that America can confer, they are, unfortunately, over-reacting.

They were Polish death camps, although Poland would prefer that other nomenclature identify them:  as Nazi death camps, German-fascist death camps, Third Reich death camps, just incidentally located within Poland.  Which they most certainly were.  And they are universally understood to be so.  The basic assumption is that anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge automatically equates death camps with Nazi Germany.

Most people take verbal short cuts; instead of remarking on "Polish death camp", the alternate would have sounded like: "Nazi death camp located in Poland", which it would take an extremely hyper-sensitive intelligence to intuit and utilize.  The Polish government would do that, in a strenuous effort to separate themselves from one of the most dreadful genocides of modern history; an American government would not, necessarily.