Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Katyn tragedy - Holocaust vs Beheading of the Polish Nation

The hopes for grand reconciliation between the Polish and the Russians dimmed in the wake of the catastrophe of Polish presidential plane near the site of mass murder of Polish officers prisoners of war in 1941 by NKVD. Recently speaking about the Katyn tragedy professor Norman Davies of Oxford University explained to reporters from the Wall Street Journal that for the Poles the whole process of “beheading of the Polish nation” during WWII constituted the primary tragedy for the Poles, more important to them than the Holocaust, which is known to the Poles in greater detail than to other people.

Tragic comparison of the Holocaust with the planed prepared and executed beheading of the Polish Nation is a thankless task, so far avoided by the western media. While the tragedy of the Jews is very prominent, even in school programs, the public in the West knows very little about the cooperation of the Gestapo with the NKVD in the long prepared joint program of beheading of the Polish Nation by mass murdering its leadership community. Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia prepared long lists of educated and prominent Poles to be executed after the invasion of Poland, first by the Germans on September 1, 1939 and then by the Soviets on September 17, 1939.

On October 3, 1939 less than a week after the signing of treaty of friendship between Hitler and Stalin on Septenber 28, the NKVD started to select prominent Polish prisoners of war for the purpose of mass execution, which took place in the Spring of 1940 at the time when the Soviets organized mass deportation of the Poles to Kazakstan and other localities. During the 20-month of Hitler-Stalin partnership the Soviets deported some 1,700,000 people from Poland, mostly Catholics, of whom 900,000 were dead by October 1, 1942 including nearly 22,000 Polish army and police officers and members of Polish state administration captured during hostilities.

Extermination camp Auschwitz I was built by the Germans, primarily as the execution site of the Polish leadership community of which at that site 70,000 were murdered. Jewish tragedy took place later in 1943 at Auschwitz-Birkenau where hundreds of thousand of people were gassed. The victims were not members of Jewish leadership community. They were children, women old and young men – people who had no means to escape that were condemned to death as a preventive measure decided upon by the Nazis to prevent the so called Ost-Juden from exploiting German defeat. This horrible decision was announced on January 20, 1942 after the Germans lost the battle of Moscow and Hitler understood that Germany might loose the war.

One should mention that in 1940, when Hitler was in euphoria because of his victory in France, he ordered Eichmann to prepare “a four year plan to evacuate all Jews from German occupied Europe to a ‘super ghetto’ on the island on Madagascar.” The plan is well documented on the Internet. The defeated French navy, together with the defeated British navy, were to transport some 4,000,000 Jews from ports in Italy to the Island of Madagascar, which the French were to give to the Germans. With German defeat in the battle of Britain the plan of evacuating the Jews to Madagascar was abandoned by Hitler in the Fall of 1940.

While Jewish population suffered malnutrition and persecution in the ghettos the elite of the Polish nation was systematically murdered by Nazi and Soviet terror apparatus in occupied Poland. Up till the Summer of 1941 the Soviets with a massive help of leftist Jews killed a larger number of Polish citizens than did the Germans, according to Norman Davies professor at Oxford University. All told Poland lost 20% of its population of some 37,000,000 or about seven million people of which majority were Polish Catholics. The dimensions of the tragedy of the Christian population of Poland are not known in the shadows of the massive Holocaust information spread in schools and in the media in the West.

Most of the Jewish people in Poland either did not know how to speak it properly or did not understand Polish according to the Nobel Price winner for his contribution to literature in Yiddish. During the first years of war there was no Jewish resistance movement while the Poles were tying down many German divisions and interfered with German transport and occupation. As a result Gestapo tortured large number of Poles and did not do so with the Jews. When the war ended came the postwar terror decade by Jacob Berman in Soviet occupied Poland. The terror was directed against the Christian resistance to Communist takeover. As a result of German and Soviet terror in Poland in Polish national memory the mass murders of Polish leadership community is more important than is the Holocaust according to Professor Norman Davies, who states at the same time that despite this opinion Poles in general are not anti-Semitic.

23 kwietnia 2010 r. prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski

Blacksburg, US www.pogonowski.com