Certain Polish nationalists were prepared to reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany, despite its record of atrocities in Poland. As might be recalled, six million Polish citizens, including three million Jews, perished during the six-year German occupation.
The Israeli historian Yaacov Falkov meticulously documents the sporadic negotiations between the Polish government-in-exile in Britain and Germany in Between Hitler And Churchill (Academic Studies Press), a work of complex scholarship.
Interestingly enough, two Polish Jewish operatives and converts to Christianity, Samson Mikicinski and Edward Szarkiewicz, were deeply enmeshed in these diplomatic efforts, which irritated the British government of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
These episodes are woven into the fabric of Falkov’s narrative, which is often weighed down by extraneous information that could have been omitted in the interests of readability.
Polish nationalists who were inclined to reach an agreement with Germany over the future of Poland, with or without British involvement, were motivated by a broad range of reasons.
Churchill’s readiness to secretly recognize Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s demand to retain conquered territory in eastern Poland was a major source of Polish apprehension, fear and disillusionment. The Red Army, in accord with Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, had captured these areas during the first month of World War II.
Poles, too, were upset that Western allies, including Britain, did nothing to alleviate the plight of Polish civilians under the barbaric Nazi occupation from September 1, 1939 onward.
The Germans were driven by a desire to create an autonomous Polish buffer zone under their control, and, if possible, to translate this achievement into a diplomatic breakthrough culminating with Britain’s recognition of Germany’s new political order in Europe.
Amid these developments, Churchill’s personal relationship with Wladyslaw Sikorski, the head of the Polish government-in-exile, deteriorated as British and Polish national interests diverged.
One of the first Poles to suggest a reorientation of Poland’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Germany was the conservative diplomat Wladyslaw Kulski, who was instrumental in creating Poland’s short-lived alliance with Germany in the early 1930s.
He made that proposal in 1940, when Poland maintained ties with the pro-German Vichy regime in France and when it still had formal relations with Germany’s allies, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania and Finland.
Wladyslaw Studnicki, a Polish political theorist who appears to have shared Kulski’s views and who regarded Jews as “parasites on the healthy branch of the Polish tree,” presented his ideas to the Nazi leadership in Berlin in the winter of 1940. His trip ended in failure after two of his interlocutors, including Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, dismissed him as “a man of negligible political weight.”
As Falkov points out, Sikorski consistently rejected a rapprochement with Germany. Falkov does not pass judgment over whether Poles like Studnicki and Kulski were traitors. In Nazi-occupied Poland, Polish collaborators were executed by the Polish underground.
Although Studnicki’s mission failed, Nazis from Hitler on down were ready to recognize a rump Polish state. This entity would be required to relinquish its western territories and its exit to the Baltic Sea and give up its bilateral relations with Britain and France. In exchange, Poland would be permitted to keep its independence as a German protectorate.
Stalin roundly rejected that arrangement, warning the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, that it could create friction between the Soviet Union and Germany.
Within weeks of invading Poland, German occupation authorities began wooing Polish politicians with offers of collaboration. Wicenty Witos, the leader of the right-wing People’s Party, was the first to receive one. He refused, but two politicians from the far-right National Radical Organization were far more receptive.
Shortly afterward, as Falkov notes, the official German press reiterated the regime’s interest in the establishment of a small Polish state aligned with Germany under the leadership of Prince Janusz Radziwill.
Britain was roundly opposed to these overtures.
The Germans managed to establish a temporary connection with the Sword and the Plow, a Christian nationalist organization that was hostile to both Britain and the Soviet Union. It received German weapons and deployed them against communist partisans.
Hans Frank, the German governor of occupied Poland, offered Polish representatives “good neighborly” relations with Germany and a “joint struggle” against the Soviet Union, the common Bolshevist enemy.
Germany’s search for a Polish quisling came to naught. The vast majority of Poles, at home or in exile, opposed an alliance with Germany. Yet the Nazi regime did not abandon hopes of finding “willing partners” among Poles, trying to convince them that life under Stalin would be much harder than life under Hitler.
This theme crept into newspaper stories abroad. In March 1943, the Palestine Post ran an article under the headline “Hitler Is Looking For Polish Puppets.”
Two Polish businessmen of Jewish ancestry, Mikicinski and Szarkiewicz, were recruited by the Polish government-in-exile to carry out clandestine operations related to this matter.
Apart from working for Polish counter-intelligence, Mikicinski rescued German and Austrian Jews, enabling them to immigrate to Latin America. And he developed transactional ties with Chile’s charge d’affaires in Istanbul.
For a while, he lived in British Mandate Palestine, to which thousands of Polish citizens, Jews and Christians, decamped after the outbreak of the war. There they established an infrastructure of various services.
Mikicinski’s bitter rival, Szarkiewicz, joined the Dwojka, the Polish military intelligence department, and served in Romania, Palestine and Britain. He orchestrated the arrest of Mikicinski in Palestine, having accused him of collaborating with the Abwehr, the Nazi spy agency.
Like Mikicinski, Szarkiewicz suffered cruel strokes of fortune connected to his Jewish ancestry. As Falkov puts it, “Official documents of the Polish army-in-exile used his dual Jewish-Polish surname, Szapiro- Szarkiewicz, as late as 1943 despite his renunciation of his Jewish first and last names, his baptism, and his self-identification as a full-blooded Pole. None of this should surprise us. Throughout the war, anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread in Polish emigre military units despite attempts by the high command to stamp out this pernicious and shameful prejudice.”
Citing an example of this deep-seated racism, Falkov mentions Colonel Aleksander Idzik, the commander of a Polish military unit in South Africa. In a statement, he wrote, “Jews will always be Jews, full of violent hatred for all things Polish. They pursue only their own interests and care nothing for Poland.”
This antipathy, which had no basis in reality, adversely affected Szarkiewicz’s career and colored the attitude of some Poles to Jews.
Returning to the predominant theme of his book, Falkov demolishes the misconception that Poles “closed ranks” while fighting the Nazi occupation of their homeland. “The myth was kept alive by Polish emigres in the West and their sworn enemies, the communists, who had come to power in Poland after World War II. It reappeared in post-communist Poland.”
He adds that the willingness of “certain players” to negotiate with and even cooperate with the Nazis did not vanish with the German occupation of Poland. This “collaborationist spirit” peaked when Sikorski’s deputy, Stanislaw Kot, opened a secret channel of communication with the Nazis in the second half of 1940. Various Polish political factions continued to engage in dialogue with the Germans even on the eve of the 1944 Warsaw uprising.
Falkov does not question their motives. In his view, they should be regarded as realists and patriots rather than traitors. His assessment, he notes, excludes Polish fascists.
“Their geopolitical maneuvers happened in the context of profound disillusionment,” he writes. “The exiled Polish leadership had little faith that they could achieve their aims through their alliance with Britain and France, which already had fallen. They had experienced the shocking realization that the hospitable British, for all their high-flown rhetoric, cared only about their own narrow interests and were more than willing to reach a settlement with Berlin or Moscow behind the Poles’ backs and at their expense.”
He contends that the Poles’ decision to open secret talks with the Nazis in 1940 “conformed to the general practices of contemporary European diplomacy.”
By that point, Germany’s crimes against Polish Jews had not yet evolved into genocide. As a result, he argues, Polish leaders willing to reach an agreement with Germany did not think they were delegitimizing the Polish government-in-exile or binding Poland to the criminal Nazi regime.
Falkov’s argument is not entirely convincing. Even before Jews in Poland were murdered en mass in extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, they were marginalized, humiliated, ghettoized and killed on a massive scale by the Nazis.
Polish politicians who sought an accommodation with the Nazis were acutely aware of these crimes, but perhaps they did not concern them.