Jewish Relations With Poland Pre-1940

Blaming Germany for Everything

Following up on The Party’s last publication on the Transfer Agreement for the Promised Land, we are presenting some research into relations between Poland and the Jews prior to the Second World War and making a comparison to Germany, with an eye on the Jewish Boycott Movement against Germany, Jewish opposition to this same movement, and the Palestine Clearing Agreement that was reached between the Polish state and the Zionist Revisionist movement led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. We will see that, in the heavily edited and censored version of post-war history, Germany has taken the burden for the world’s sins, whereas Stalin gets off with an almost complete cancellation of all his acts of mass executions, and Poland’s pre-war history is carefully covered up in the Winstonian (as of Churchill) narrative of WW2. Blaming Germany for everything seems to have been the top priority of that narrative. That said, Stalin was a great ally of Winston Churchill, and that alone should explain a lot.

The Bird’s-Eye View

If we look back at events that unfolded on the chessboard of history in 1939, we can see that the City government in London had promised to help Poland in a war against Germany, as too did France. We should not overlook the possibility that this may have emboldened the Polish government into picking a quarrel with Germany, perhaps in an effort to distract from the increasing effects of the Great Depression that were still taking hold on Poland’s economy, and much more than on Germany’s, and with the prospect of annexing areas of the German Reich. And yet, by 1944, Winston’s City government had already agreed with Stalin to not only mutilate the boundaries of both Poland and Germany, and to expel millions of people from their homelands – mostly Germans yet also Poles – but to consign Poland to Stalin’s empire as a communist state, with all the confiscations of private property and prohibition of freedom of speech that this entailed. Contrary to what the world is supposed to believe, it wasn’t Germany that carried out race-replacement in Poland, but Winston Churchill and Stalin, as they did to Germany too, albeit to a much greater and more devastating extent.

A similar fate was meted out to hundreds of thousands of Italians in Istria and the Alpine area of Gorizia with Stalin and Winston’s approval, and, on a whim from Stalin, various populations inside the Soviet Union were uprooted and transported from one area to another. Stalin’s gulags and execution squads and deportations of Poles were certainly not what Poland had been promised by Chamberlain and his established imperial cohorts at Whitehall.

Once the mask had fallen in 1945 and the Poles had grasped how their ‘allies’ had delivered them to Communism, Westminster with all its lies would have become the elephant in the room. And so it was deemed necessary to inflate and present an even larger elephant: Germany’s alleged horrific and genocidal crimes against humanity, and in so doing also explain away the genocidal destruction of almost every German city, which, for clarity, can never be justified. All we need do is try to determine what factors led the City to make such decisions back in 1939.

Germany’s Economic Prosperity

One such factor has already been mentioned in previous Party articles where we associated the City government’s lust for petrodollars to King Ibn Saud’s hatred of Jews and his opposition to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Another consideration may be found in Germany’s currency reform, which enabled a country whose gold reserves had been systematically detracted by way of the Versailles Treaty to reinvent its currency with no gold reserve at all and overtake every other western nation on the prosperity scale within just six to seven years, counting from 1933. This must have irked the likes of City bankers in London, fearful that their own capitalist system could be replaced by something better that would deprive them of immense income in favour of the common folk.

From the point of view of Germany’s relations with the Jews, we have seen that the Transfer Agreement brought about an economic rebound for the Jews of the Yishuv and for those Jews of the Diaspora willing to make the Aliyah, not only to settle in their ancestral homeland, but also to find work there with the prospect of a fair salary. It was as if Germany had extended the wand of economic prosperity among its own folk and again to the Jewish homeland by enabling the transfer of willing Zionist Jews and with them the value of their property held in Germany.

Within this context, we need now try to understand what issues were at hand that also soured relations between Germany and a part of the Jews, and we’ll do so by focussing attention on events in Poland where the Revisionist Zionist Jabotinsky had set up his power base. It should also become more evident that the post-war stereotype form of judgements of events have been not only biased against Germany, but unhinged. And if we consider that the main authors of WW2 are Stalin and Winston Churchill, one a maniacal Communist dictator and the other a City establishment figure linked to the City bankers’ plans for oil revenues from Al Saud’s oil fields, we might understand better the greater picture.

Jewish Population in Poland

The general consensus is that around three million Jews lived in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, including those arriving from Russia following the October Revolution. The exact figure is up for discussion as a number of Jewish people moved from Poland to Palestine, to North America or to other countries that accepted them, and tens of thousands even moved to Germany. One dispute that broke out between Germany and Poland in the late 1930s concerned precisely migration, as large numbers of Jews with Polish citizenship were making their way to Germany in search of better conditions, and Berlin’s government was not prepared to open up the borders to a transfer of the Polish Jewish population to Germany.

The Great Depression was hitting Poland hard, and there was also the introduction of new forms of retail, including the advent of the Kaufhalle, or supermarket, severely affecting the traditionally Jewish-dominated retail sector in Poland consisting of small family-owned shops. At the same time, factory production also started replacing the artisan handicraft economy, again inflicting losses on the Jewish population. To give an idea, it is thought that around 300,000 Jewish family-run workshops and retail shops were present in Poland, and as we can imagine, modernization was bound to have a very negative effect on these businesses from a financial perspective. Adding to this, riots and looting targeting Jewish shops and property were gradually becoming periodical, and although not sponsored by the Polish government, these frequent acts also harmed Jewish everyday livelihood.

The Boycott Dilemma

Another factor related to economic instability in the Jewish community in Poland was the Boycott Movement to damage Germany’s economy. This ongoing anti-German campaign was particularly significant in Poland owing to the sheer numbers of the Diaspora there, about half of central and eastern Europe’s estimated six million Jews being resident in Poland. Indeed, this policy to shun German imports had a profoundly negative effect both on Germany and on eastern European Jewry. German exports to Poland halved in the years following 1933 as a direct consequence of the boycott, causing German enterprises to lose out on business while at the same time inflicting heavy financial losses on the livelihood of many Jewish families in Poland. Jews were dominant in Poland’s retail sector, and by refusing to sell German products, their retail outlets were also depriving other Poles of access to items and goods that in the past had been commonly imported from Germany. As a result, more and more Polish people in turn boycotted Jewish shops and went to retail outlets run by their kinsmen who had no problem in selling German merchandise.

The damage caused by the Boycott Movement was not only harmful to both Jew and German financially, it also stoked up a deep resentment in German governing circles and to an extent at local level owing to the stubbornness in which it was perpetuated over the years, from 1933 onwards, oblivious to every attempt on Germany’s part to reason with the Jews in Poland. In fact, it was one of the underlying factors that led some German leaders to speak of a Jewish conspiracy against the German folk. Polish exports to Germany increased significantly during the same time span, leaving Germany at risk of running up a high trade deficit owing to the Jewish boycott movement in Poland and in other countries in eastern Europe.

In view of the limited scope of the present article, The Party will take a closer and more detailed look at the Jewish Boycott Movement in a future edition, and also mention the German protest against this campaign when on 1st April 1933, Jewish shops were made to stay closed for that one day.

Jews in Academia

In the late 1920s. Jews made up around one fifth of Poland’s university students, but by the end of the 1930’s this figure stood at around 7.5%. Party research has found that about four fifths of Polish Jews spoke Yiddish – a dialect of German origin – as their first language, one tenth spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue, and the remaining ten percent spoke Polish as their common means of communication. This would lead one to assume that assimilation was not a priority among eastern European Diaspora Jews at that time. During the 1930s, Polish universities started to introduce the so-called ghetto benches, whereby Jewish students would be separated from the rest of the class. Whether the reasons for this were for linguistic considerations or due to other aspects, is not up for debate here, but Jews certainly had access to the means of higher education, although it would appear that access to universities for Jewish people was gradually decreasing in the years preceding the Second World War.

Ethnic Groups in Poland

In order to better understand the events taking place in Polish society in the latter part of the 1930s, we need to look at the more general attitude of the Polish government of the time and the transition that had taken place when a new political party replaced an older one. Russian-Ukrainian Slavs were one ethnic group, Germans were another, and Jews were yet another, all distinct from the ethnic Slavic Poles. The authorities in Warsaw initiated a policy of imposing Polish identity on some of these other ethnic groups at a cultural and patriotic level, starting with the Russian-Ukrainian population in the east. This included shutting down churches and schools preaching and teaching in the local language and imposing only Polish as the official tongue.

While the German minority was also on the radar of the central authorities in Warsaw, the Jewish component of Polish society was considered as being far too numerous. Consequently, it was not a case of abolishing Yiddish or Hebrew as a language, as was the case with the Russian speakers, but rather a campaign to constantly remind Jews that they were expected to emigrate, even if over a period of decades. It was within this context that the Polish government sought to entertain good relations with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionist Zionists and staunch supporter of the anti-German Boycott Movement among Jews.

Enter Ze’ev Jabotinsky … With His Evacuation Plan!

Although only a suspicion, it is certainly not exaggerated to think that perhaps Jabotinsky deliberately sabotaged German Jewish relations by way of his boycott movement precisely in order to impoverish Jews in Poland, many of whom relied on trade and retail for a living, so as to cultivate a perceived need among the Diaspora in Poland to emigrate to Palestine. What we do know for sure is that he had excellent relations with the Polish nationalist authorities that had taken over power, and that they relied on him to organise large-scale emigration to Palestine among Poland’s three million or so Jewish population. According to his Evacuation Plan, one and a half million Jews from eastern Europe were to emigrate to Palestine, at least half of them from Poland, over a ten year period, and the Palestine Clearing Agreement reached between Poland and the Yishuv would somehow emulate the German-Jewish Transfer Agreement to render the migration financially viable.

Yet the most alarming aspect of this relationship is not part of official history lessons as it would upset the apple cart of conventional WW2 history: the Polish government was planning to aid Ze’ev and his Irgun militia group to take part in an armed rebellion in Palestine against the British Mandate, and therefore against Britain and the British Empire. This was because the planned evacuation to Palestine was not going to get past the British Mandate authorities, in particular after the appearance of the 1939 White Paper to appease King Ibn Saud, owner of vast oil fields. 

By the summer of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of WW2, the Irgun’s depots in Warsaw alone contained some five thousand rifles and one thousand machine guns, and tens of thousands more rifles and other weaponry were stored elsewhere in Polish locations awaiting transport to Palestine. The Irgun is reputed to have recruited around forty thousand Jewish militia to take these weapons with them, and the Polish state had its own plans on how to transport men and weapons to Palestine.

As we have seen in a previous edition, the Jewish revolt in Palestine was planned for October 1939, and local Jewish militia of the Yishuv, both Irgun and Haganah, were expected to take part in it, as well as those who would arrive from Poland. Needless to say, the British secret services would have been informed on everything, for they were later to be the same people who would listen in to every single German radio communication during the Second World War, and who boasted how they had infiltrated the German secret services without the German government knowing. So yes, they knew alright what Warsaw and the Irgun and the Haganah were planning in the Summer of 1939, and they knew when the planned uprising was to take place, where, and with whose aid.

Once again, as mentioned in our last edition, what really happened leading up to World War 2 and what Westminster contrived so as to prevent the Jewish revolt that was planned for October 1939 from taking place, is a secret, probably locked up in a dark vault never to be made known. Going by the sums of future revenues tied up in the oil production in the Arabian peninsular, we may safely assume that there was no way Whitehall was going to allow the Jewish uprising in Palestine to go ahead. Which brings us to World War II. Stalin’s horrific crimes perpetrated against the Polish officers and other members of Polish society by way of mass executions – which he tried to blame on Germany – undoubtedly had the effect of silencing Polish equations as to how the war started in the first place. And all the while Churchill sat there and said nothing.

Our next publication is: Mandate for Palestine - Lying to the World