Revised january 30, 2009 a tangled web

.

433 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.

434 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. 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. 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. Once Poles were eliminated, 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, ed., 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, eds., 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 nationality, 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,” in 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. See 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 (USHMMA); and Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 192, 14. April 1942, OAM, 500–1–25, microfilm at RG–11.001M, reel 183, USHMMA. 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, ed., 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); Itzchak Lichtenberg, “Partisans at War,” in Kowalski, ed., 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); Kolpanitzky, Sentenced to Life, 283 (Łachwa).

A number of Jewish testimonies and memoirs contain favourable information about Polish officials in the local administration and Polish policemen. The first head of the police in Mir, a Pole by the name of Krawczenko who was removed from his post by October 1941, saved the life of Lev Abramovsky. See Martin Dean, “Microcosm: Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941–1944,” in Gaunt et al., eds., Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust, 226 n.12. A Jew from Dołhinów describes the deleterious effect of the change in that town, which initially had a Polish mayor who “treated the Jewish people decently,” when the head of police, “a decent Christian man”, was replaced by a “thug” from Krzywicze. See Yakov Segalchick, “Eternal Testament: Memoirs of a Partisan,” in Josef Chrust and Matityahu Bar-Razon, eds., Esh tamid-yizkor le-Dolhinow: Sefer zikaron le-kehilat Dolhinow va-ha-sevivah (Tel Aviv: Society of Dolhinow Emigrants in Israel, 1984), 274 ff.; English translation, Eternal Flame: In Memory of Dolhinow, posted on the Internet at: . According to Avraham Friedman, also of Dołhinów, at least three Poles in the small Polish-Belorussian police force actively assisted Jews in escaping from the ghetto and provided shelter for them outside the ghetto. See Avraham Friedman “Chapters of Life as a Fighter with the Resistance,” in ibid., 525 ff. The Polish mayor of Kurzeniec is praised in several testimonies: “Matros, a schoolteacher by profession, was made town mayor. This liberal man managed to help some Jews. … During the akzia [Shimke Alperovich] was hidden by the mayor in the town hall.” See Yoran, The Defiant, 59. The massacre of the Jews in Kurzeniec was carried out by “SD troops, with the help of Ukrainians serving in the German forces … with their Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary units.” Ibid., 88. According to an Israeli historian: “the Polish teacher Matoros [sic] … was both the mayor appointed by the Germans and a friend of the Jews. … Matoros not only helped youngsters from the underground group [to whom he issued bogus labour certificates] but also personally saved Nahum Alperovicz,” and assisted his family. He “also aided Jewish refugees, exposing himself to considerable danger.” Matoros was executed, with his family, in the summer of 1942, apparently because of his contacts with the Polish underground. See Yehuda Bauer, “Kurzeniec—A Jewish Shtetl in the Holocaust,” Yalkut Moreshet: Holocaust Documentation and Research [Tel Aviv], no. 1 (Winter 2003): 143, 147, 151–52. The Polish chief of police in Raduń, Franciszek Ługowski, provided considerable assistance to Jews. See Aviel, A Village Named Dowgalishok, 25–26, 262–63. For additional favourable references to Polish policemen see: Tec, Defiance, 192 (Kołdyszewo); Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II, 136 (Kurzeniec); Levin and Meltser, Chernaia kniga z krasnymi stranitsami, 315 (Lida); Levine, Fugitives of the Forest, 105 (Żołudek); Eliach, There Once Was a World, 598, 601, 606 (Raduń); Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, 289 (Woronów); Duffy, The Bielski Brothers, 196 (Lida); Lyuba Rudnicki, “Outside of the Ghetto,” in Yerushalmi, ed., Navaredok Memorial Book, Internet: , 246 ff. (police chief in Nowogródek); testimony of Golda Shwartz, Yad Vashem archives 03/6922, July 25, 1993, Internet: