People & Histories
1939–1945

The Holocaust in German-Occupied Poland

Nazi Germany murders about three million Polish Jews, nine in ten of the largest Jewish community in Europe, in ghettos, mass shootings and death camps it built on occupied Polish soil.

  • Polish Victims — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
  • The number of victims — Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
  • POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews: 1000 Years of History — POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, POLIN Museum
  • Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
  • Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland — Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (eds), Indiana University Press / Yad Vashem (2022)

Well established genocidetraumamemorycommunity

In 1939 about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, around a tenth of the population and the largest Jewish community in Europe. In cities such as Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and Vilnius, and in hundreds of small market towns (shtetls), Jewish life in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish was rich and varied.

Ghettos, shootings and camps

After the invasion, the German occupiers forced Jews into ghettos, the largest in Warsaw, where more than 400,000 people were crowded into a small district and tens of thousands died of hunger and disease. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units shot Jews in mass graves across the eastern borderlands. From late 1941 the Germans built death camps on occupied Polish territory: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and gas chambers at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Jews from all over Europe were deported there.

  • Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
  • Polish Victims — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
At Auschwitz alone about 1.1 million people were murdered, about a million of them Jews, alongside Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

In the summer of 1942 about a quarter of a million Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Treblinka. In April 1943 the remaining fighters launched the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt of the war. By 1945 about 90% of Polish Jews, roughly three million people, had been murdered.

Non-Jewish Poles under occupation

German policy also aimed to destroy Poland as a nation. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 1.8 to 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were killed by the Germans. The Institute of National Remembrance estimates that 5.6–5.8 million Polish citizens of all backgrounds died in the war, about half of them Jews.

  • Polish Victims — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
  • Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami — Wojciech Materski and Tomasz Szarota (eds), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (2009)
This is why many Poles feel their own suffering has been overlooked abroad, and why the phrase “Polish death camps”, for camps built and run by Germans, causes such anger.

Rescue and complicity

Helping Jews in occupied Poland was punishable by death, often for whole families. Thousands of Poles took that risk, and the underground Council to Aid Jews (Żegota), founded in 1942, helped thousands more. Yad Vashem has recognised more than 7,000 Poles as Righteous Among the Nations, more than from any other country.

There was also complicity. In July 1941 in Jedwabne, Polish residents, encouraged by the newly arrived Germans, herded their Jewish neighbours into a barn and burned them alive. The state Institute of National Remembrance concluded in 2002 that at least 340 people were killed and that about 40 local Poles took an active part. In 2001 President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologised at the site.

  • The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland — Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic (eds), Princeton University Press (2004)
  • Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland — Jan T. Gross, Princeton University Press (2001)
More recent research, notably the study Night Without End edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, argues that many Jews who escaped the ghettos and tried to hide in the countryside were betrayed or killed with the involvement of local Poles.
  • Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland — Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (eds), Indiana University Press / Yad Vashem (2022)

Memory wars

After the war about 300,000 Polish Jews survived, most of them in the Soviet Union. Many who returned met hostility; in July 1946 a pogrom in Kielce killed 42 Jews and pushed many survivors to leave. A communist “anti-Zionist” campaign in 1968 drove out most of those who remained.

  • The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland — Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic (eds), Princeton University Press (2004)
  • The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom — Andrzej Paczkowski, Pennsylvania State University Press (2003)

Since 1989 Poland has opened up this history in remarkable ways, from the POLIN Museum in Warsaw to annual Jewish culture festivals in Kraków. It has also fought over it. In 2018 a law made it an offence to attribute Nazi crimes to the “Polish nation”; after an outcry in Israel, the US and among historians, the government removed the prison penalties within months.

Most Poles and most historians agree on the core facts. What they argue about is emphasis: how much weight to give rescue and how much to complicity, and who gets to tell the story.

For the Holocaust as a whole, across Europe, see the Holocaust (the Shoah).

How it's seen
Polish national-conservative view

Poles were themselves victims of German genocidal policy, and in occupied Poland, unlike in Western Europe, helping a Jew could mean death for the helper's whole family; yet Poles make up the largest national group among the Righteous Among the Nations. Phrases such as "Polish death camps" falsely shift German guilt onto Poland.

  • Names of Righteous by Country — Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem
  • Polish Victims — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
  • Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami — Wojciech Materski and Tomasz Szarota (eds), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (2009)

Many Holocaust historians, Polish and Jewish

Germany planned and carried out the Holocaust. But research since Jan Gross's "Neighbors" (2001) shows that some Poles also denounced, robbed or killed Jews, especially those in hiding, and that rescuers often feared their own neighbours as much as the Germans. Both the rescuers and the complicity have to be remembered.

  • Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland — Jan T. Gross, Princeton University Press (2001)
  • Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland — Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (eds), Indiana University Press / Yad Vashem (2022)
  • The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland — Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic (eds), Princeton University Press (2004)

Many Jewish survivors and their families

Many survivors remember hostility from Polish neighbours before, during and after the war, such as the 1946 Kielce pogrom, alongside individual Poles who saved them. They often bristle at narratives that stress Polish suffering in ways that seem to blur the specific fate of the Jews.

Why it matters today

Poland

The destruction of Polish Jewry ended a thousand years of shared history and left Poland, once the centre of the Jewish world, almost without Jews. How Poles behaved, as rescuers, bystanders or sometimes perpetrators, is the most painful and politically charged question in Polish memory, and it still shapes relations with Israel and with Jewish communities worldwide.