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Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

Polish Jews were targeted as Jews, but non-Jewish Poles were not targeted in the same way (i.e., the Germans were brutal occupiers, but Catholic Poles were not targeted for extermination).

However, there is a modern historical myth in Poland about extermination camps targeting non-Jewish Poles. For many years, there was a Wikipedia article about a fictional extermination camp for Poles. That theory is now discussed in a subsection of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Disc....

The idea behind these theories is to draw an equivalence between what the Germans did to Catholics and Jews in occupied Poland, something that is popular among modern Polish nationalists.

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It's true that there's a nationalist movement exploiting that notion, and especially after the war, there's been a lot of mangling with numbers of victims (plenty of the so-called Polish historians, especially the ones tied to the Soviet-installed government, tried to elevate the number).

On the part that non-Jewish Poles were not targetted - while I think we agree the fictious concentration camp is part of what I mentioned above, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles from both modern day Poland and modern day Germany have been victims of organized killings (take note, I don't necessarily mean concentration camps and holocaust as commonly understood). I can agree that catholic Poles were not targeted in the same way - there were numerous differences - nevertheless, the goal of Germany was to eradicate Poland as a country and Poles as a nation through either killings (which materialized in war casualties and through mass extermination), or germanization.

The Germans did terrible things in Poland and had even more terrifying plans for Poland after the war, but there was no Holocaust against non-Jewish Poles. The way that Jewish and non-Jewish Poles were treated was worlds apart. About 90% of Polish Jews were killed (a majority of all Polish deaths during the war, despite making up only 15% of the pre-war population).

Edit: The people trying to draw an equivalence between what happened to Jewish and non-Jewish Poles are largely aligned with right-wing, strongly Catholic Polish nationalists, and are not in and way fond of the Soviet era. This is mostly a post-Soviet phenomenon.

I think we directionally agree; about the post-Soviet phenomenon - I know for fact that this phenomenon started immediately after the war and was part of consolidating power by the Soviets. The communist Poland was, in a weird way, quite nationalistic. But you are right that this phenomenon has its reneissance, or even reinforced version now as we're speaking.

I don't fully understand what specifically do you mean by saying that there was no holocaust to non-Jewish Poles, but thousands of them died in concentration camps all around territories occupied by Germans and often shared identical fate to those who were of Jewish origin.

If I understood you correctly, you use term "holocaust" to describe mass extermination of Jews and Jews only, and as long as you acknowledge there's been other mass killings during the war, I'm completely fine with that.

e: it's not how I was taught history at school - e.g. teachers would include non-Jewish Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Romas, Sinti, and other nationalities that were sent to death camps too - I think by holocaust they basically meant death camps (regardless on who was killed in there) rather than the bigger scheme of killing all the Jews.

> I don't fully understand what specifically do you mean by saying that there was no holocaust to non-Jewish Poles

There was no systematic extermination of Catholic Poles. To be a Jew in occupied Europe was to be hunted. 90% of Jews in Poland were killed. You basically had to have a miracle to survive. There's very little in modern history like this.

> Polish Jews were targeted as Jews, but non-Jewish Poles were not targeted in the same way (i.e., the Germans were brutal occupiers, but Catholic Poles were not targeted for extermination).

What are you talking about? The Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate Catholic Poles (and other Slavs). Murdering Jews was higher priority, but had the Nazis won there wouldn't be too many Slavs around in Eastern Europe today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

And despite losing the war the Germans together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, still managed to exterminate a huge fraction of the Polish elite in a targeted fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

> What are you talking about?

The fact that the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jews in Poland, and almost succeeded. They killed 90% of the Jewish population.

There were horrific plans for most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe for after the war (Generalplan Ost, which you've linked to), but they were never put into operation. Catholic Poles were not subject to anything near the level of persecution as Jewish Poles.

> together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets

The Germans and Soviets weren't "erstwhile allies." The Soviets were defined as enemy #1 by the Nazis. The Soviets were aware of this, and tried to organize an anti-German military alliance with France and to save Czechoslovakia. France refused, and Poland, which itself wanted to get a piece of Czechoslovakia, refused to allow Soviet troops to transit its territory into Czechoslovakia. After Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets decided to make a dirty deal with the Germans, in order to delay the German attack for as long as possible. Not a shining moment, but calling the Soviets "erstwhile allies" of the Germans is a gross distortion of history, particularly given that it's the Soviets who made the largest contribution to the defeat of the Nazis.

This doesn’t change the fact that Russians and Germans were allies, started the war together, and German tanks all ran on Russian fuel. Exactly how it was beneficial for them to become allies is secondary.

The Soviet Union did not start the war, and was not allied with Germany.

Germany quite clearly started the war with its invasion of Poland, and without that decision, there would have been no war.

They two countries had a non-aggression pact, and an agreement not to interfere with each other's spheres of influence. The Soviets knew full well that the Germans planned to invade the USSR, and the point of the non-aggression pact was to delay that invasion until the Red Army was capable of fighting a war.

The whole notion of equivalency of evil is actually pernicious, as it is more of a contest of victimhood: "they did worse to us, so we are better". Arguing about numbers abstracts from the reality that even one person being killed for such an inhuman regime is already too many.

I think it would be sufficient to condemn the evil that was committed rather than make a certain group better because "They suffered more". So many suffered from that evil regime that we don't need a contest to see who is better. The Catholic clergy were in fact terribly persecuted in German and Poland by the Nazi regime, hundreds of priests being killed in Dachau alone. This doesn't take away the horrors that others suffered nor allow us to somehow abstract from them just because "our tribe suffered more".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp

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