Special 2019 Edition
Special 2019 Edition
Foreword
The note “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland” from 10 December 1942 is one of the most important efforts of the Polish state to highlight the crimes committed by Nazi Germany on Jews in occupied Poland during the Second World War. Not only was it the first official report informing the Allies and the West of the Holocaust in Europe, but it also became a testimony and a warning of the kind of atrocities that human beings driven by an extreme ideology are capable of – a vital lesson for future generations if a tragedy such as this is to never happen again. The document was issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Polish Government-in-Exile, the legitimate successor of the pre-war government of the Republic of Poland which was formed after the country suffered invasion at the hands of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939. Despite the occupation of Poland by hostile powers, the government-in-exile exerted considerable influence back home during the war through the structures of the Polish Underground State and the Home Army resistance movement, as well as over Polish military units abroad.
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Post-war, together with the community of Polish exiles who could not come back to Poland dominated by communists, the Polish President and Government-in-Exile recreated the Poland they knew from before the war, with all her political institutions, a school system, and even cultural life. Though it suffered from lack of international recognition when the communist regime was imposed, the legitimate Polish state survived the post-war period to hand over, in 1990, the presidential insignia to Lech Wałęsa, Poland’s first freely elected president after the war. The note of Polish Foreign Minister Edward Raczyński – also Poland’s ambassador and later its president – was one of the most significant documents of the Polish Government-in-Exile. It states that in Poland, Germany was “carrying out the systematic extermination of Polish citizens and of citizens of Jewish origin of many other European countries”, with the total number killed running into “many hundreds of thousands”. This was preceded by the separation of Jewish citizens from the rest of the population, placing them in the Warsaw ghetto, where “mortality due to exhaustion, starvation and disease (…) increased on an unprecedented scale”. After the decision about the ghetto’s liquidation Jewish intellectuals inside it became the target of German police, with “hundreds of educated” and “better dressed” Jews being “killed on the spot”. Those being deported to extermination camps “were suffocating for lack of air” in cattle trucks, “the very method of transport” being “deliberately calculated to cause the largest possible number of casualties among the condemned Jews”. An image of unimaginable horror, despair and barbarism. Raczyński’s Note was significant because it helped the world to see the truth about the desperate situation of the Jewish population in occupied Poland. The creation of the note was closely linked to the arrival in London in November 1942 of Jan Karski, the secret emissary of the Polish Underground State. Karski’s first-hand accounts detailed the tragic conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and the genocide being committed on Jews in extermination camps in occupied Poland. Raczyński handed over the information to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 1 December 1942, proposing the organisation of a multilateral conference to spread the information further. The Polish government sent the note to the signatory states of the United Nations Declaration, calling not only for the condemnation of the murders and the punishment of the guilty parties, but also appealing for measures that would stop the mass extermination.
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The note met with widespread press commentary, and the reaction of Allied governments was the announcement on 17 December 1942 of a special declaration in which a pledge of severe punishment of the guilty was made. The declaration was read to the House of Commons by Anthony Eden and published on the front page of many newspapers, including The New York Times. Politicians around the world were alarmed by the report. Allied radio stations, including the BBC, broadcast information about the conditions, extermination and SS intentions at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the basis of reports sent to London from occupied Poland. News delivered to London from Poland was collected with a view to carry out post-war trials. On 3 June 1944, the Polish government submitted a charge sheet to the United Nations War Crimes Commission which outlined the crimes that took place at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Majdanek and Oświęcim (where Auschwitz was located). The information later helped to prosecute the perpetrators of these war crimes. The effort of the Polish diplomats to fight the brutal Nazi crackdown during the Second World War, however, was not limited to London. The Bernese Group of Polish and Jewish diplomats and activists, for example, initiated in Switzerland a system of illegal production of Latin American passports aimed at saving European Jews from being sent to concentration camps. Centred around the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Bern, the group was founded by Polish vice-consul Konstanty Rokicki who was responsible for acquiring and issuing the fake passports, working under the instructions of Ambassador of Poland Aleksander Ładoś, and his deputy Stefan Ryniewicz. Ryniewicz also played a part in forging passports and ambassador Ładoś defended the whole procedure when he met with the Swiss foreign minister. He also initiated a widespread intervention by Polish embassies, after which Paraguay and some other countries recognised the illegal documents. The owners of the documents were able to prove they were foreigners and that the Holocaust ‘laws’ did not apply to them. Many of them were interned by the Nazis rather than sent to death camps. Passports helped many survivors to avoid mass deportations and to go into hiding. It is estimated that the Bernese Group managed to forge travel documents for at least 10,000 people, with anywhere from 682 to a few thousand surviving the
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war. The activities of the group recently came to light after it was discovered that the production of the Paraguayan passports, which had started earlier than thought before, encouraged consuls of other countries to extend similar help. It was also
the vital Polish efforts, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London is publishing Raczyński’s Note sent to Anthony Eden. Inside, the reader will also find a close examination of the significance of the note by British historian Michael Fleming and excerpts from the documents accompanying the note in the brochure “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland”. This publication is all the more poignant coming in the year of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, when, in just 17 days, Poland suffered invasion and comprehensive damage at the hands of two totalitarian regimes, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It is, therefore, also a way of remembering the heroic defence of the homeland by the Polish soldiers, who, despite many painful defeats, were the only ones in Europe who fought from the first to the last day of the Second World War. It is my utmost wish and hope that this publication will serve as a reminder of the important actions taken to help save citizens of a country which lost the most during the Second World War; that from the start, Poland, despite the most difficult of circumstances, strived relentlessly and continuously to stop the inhumane and murderous acts being committed on its soil. Let this document be a tribute to those who chose to fight for their fellow countrymen when they needed it.
47 Portland Place: the seat of the Polish Government-in-Exile during the Second World War
revealed that the Polish wartime Ministry of Finance secretly financed the Ładoś passports. In recognition of his actions, Consul Rokicki was recently recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations and joined nearly 7,000 other Polish people who constitute the largest national group of the 27,362 brave and selfless individuals recognised by Yad Vashem for helping Jews. It is worth adding that at liberation, there were around 50,000 Jewish survivors on Polish soil. Without the actions of the Polish Government-in-Exile and Polish diplomats, the impact of Nazi terror would have been much more widespread, and the ways in which we remember the victims today could have been different. To commemorate
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Arkady Rzegocki Polish Ambassador to the Court of St James’s
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Analysis On 10 December 1942 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Polish Government-in-Exile, based in London, issued a note that formally informed the governments of the United Nations of the extermination of Jews by Germany in Germanoccupied Poland. This document drew on information sent by the Polish Underground State, which was overseen by the Polish government. Much of the information contained in the note already circulated in London and had been reported in the press – it was viewed as “a good summary of existing information from Polish sources” by the British Foreign Office. As an official communication from one government to others, the note was diplomatically and politically significant. It detailed the German annihilation of Jews in occupied Poland and called on the governments of the United Nations to condemn the crimes, punish the criminals and find the means to restrain Germany “from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination”. Through this note, the Polish government played an important role in encouraging the United Nations, on 17 December 1942, to make a declaration on Germany’s “bestial policy of coldblooded extermination”. The issuance of the note was not the result of the German policy of murdering Jews becoming known for the first time. News that the Germans were killing Jews on a mass scale had reached British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the summer of 1941 through the interception of German radio messages, and information about the German treatment of Jews in German-occupied Poland was sent regularly by the Polish Underground State via radio and courier from Warsaw alongside other reports detailing the German occupation. This information was disseminated by the Polish government. In June 1942, following the receipt in London, via Polish intelligence channels, of the Bund Report, which revealed that 700,000 Polish Jews had been killed, Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski stated, in a BBC broadcast, that under German occupation,
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“the Jewish population in Poland is doomed to annihilation”. Bundist and member of the Polish National Council (the Polish Government-in-Exile’s quasi-parliament) Szmul Zygielbojm was particularly active in promulgating this news from Poland. On 9 July, Zygielbojm, alongside Minister of the Interior Stanisław Mikołajczyk and the moderate Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart, took part in a conference at the British Ministry of Information hosted by Brendan Bracken which highlighted the German atrocities against Jews. That same month, the official press organ of the Polish Government-inExile, The Polish Fortnightly Review, published information on the killing taking place at Chełmno, Sobibór and Bełżec. At the end of July 1942, the first reports of the Great Deportation from the Warsaw ghetto sent by the Polish underground reached London. Zygielbojm continued to distribute information and, alongside other figures from the broad Labour movement, took part in a protest meeting against German atrocities organised by the British Labour Party at Caxton Hall on 2 September. The following day, Stanisław Mikołajczyk delivered a broadcast on the American radio station CBS which reported that 7,000 Jews a day were being deported from the Warsaw ghetto. In addition, news received in London from Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress, based in neutral Switzerland, which reported that the Germans sought to exterminate all Jews under their control at one blow reached diplomats and Jewish representatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, on 29 October, the Board of Deputies of British Jews hosted a conference at the Albert Hall at which Prime Minister Sikorski spoke of the “ruthless mass persecution and extermination of Jews in Poland”. The Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz, referred to the difficulty in Britain of publicising news of German atrocities. The arrival of an important tranche of reports on 13 November 1942 from the Polish underground in occupied Poland, detailing the scale of German atrocities against Jews, had a significant impact on the Polish government and its allies. From 24 November, British newspapers reported on the killing (albeit generally on the inside pages), and at an important meeting of the Polish National Council on 27 November 1942, Szmul Zygielbojm spoke forcefully about the atrocities. The Polish National Council issued a resolution which highlighted the German mass murder of Jews, and The Polish Fortnightly Review of 1 December 1942 was devoted to news of Jews in occupied Poland. It published information from reports that arrived on 13 November.
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In late November 1942 and December 1942, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Edward Raczyński, engaged with British counterparts in order to elicit an Allied response to the crimes taking place in occupied Poland. The British, in turn, liaised with the Soviet Union and the United States. In Washington D.C. senior Jewish representatives met President Roosevelt on 8 December 1942 and handed over a memorandum outlining German atrocities against Jews (including a brief reference to the slaughter of Jews at Oświęcim (Auschwitz)). The memorandum pointed out that a United Nations’ victory may not come in time to save Europe’s Jews from “complete annihilation”. The Polish government’s 10 December 1942 Note to the Governments of the United Nations was a key part of diplomatic and civil society efforts to respond to Germany’s mass murder of Jews. The note was put together in London under the direction of Minister Raczyński, using data sent by the Polish Underground State. Although the note contained some inaccuracies, for instance, the reference to electrocution, and to Chełm rather than Chełmno, it provided a powerful account of German atrocities against Jews in occupied Poland, mentioning the killing centres at Bełżec, Sobibór and Tremblinka [sic]. The note also informed the text of the 17 December United Nations Declaration which referred to Poland as “the principal Nazi slaughterhouse”. The note constituted a relative success for Polish diplomacy in its efforts during November and December 1942 to focus Allied attention on the situation of Jews in occupied Poland. The data that arrived in November 1942, the development during 1942 of Allied policy in relation to war crimes and the determination of a variety of actors (Polish government, Polish-Jewish representatives, Jewish representatives in Britain and the United States) to ensure that some action was taken was sufficient, on this occasion, to encourage the United Nations to highlight Germany’s extermination of Jews. Indeed, British Foreign Office official Frank Roberts reminded colleagues on 14 January 1943 “that the origin of the declaration [17 December United Nations Declaration] was Polish rather than British”. Although in 1943 news of the heroic stand of the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto was disseminated, the Allies did not issue a further formal declaration or put into practice robust policies to save the perishing. Increasingly marginalised following the discovery of the Katyń graves in April 1943, the Polish government continued to pass on information about the Holocaust to
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allies and the press. But even the dozens of reports highlighting the systematic killing of Jews at Auschwitz, which arrived through 1943 and 1944, did not precipitate action. The issuance of the note, in part, reflects the particular configuration of relations between the Allies at the end of 1942, and remains an important symbol of attempts to respond to the Holocaust in an often difficult British context.
Michael Fleming The Polish University Abroad, London
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RACZYŃSKI’S NOTE
Edward Raczyński (1891-1993) was Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in London from 1934 until the withdrawal of recognition for the Polish Government-in-Exile by the British authorities in 1945. From 1941 to 1943, he was Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and from 1979 to 1986, he served as the President of the Republic of Poland in Exile. He was the longest-living (101), and the oldest-serving Polish president (from the age of 88 to 95).
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PHOTO GALLERY
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Cover of “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland”, a brochure issued by Poland’s Government-in-Exile on 10 December 1942, which contained within it Raczyński’s Note. It also featured the text of the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations of 17 December 1942, an excerpt of the statement of Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk on 27 November 1942 and the text of a broadcast by Edward Raczyński on 17 December 1942.
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Response to Raczyński’s Note from British diplomat Frank Roberts for Anthony Eden, UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as seen at The National Archives in London.
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Edward Raczyński: “The Polish Government – as the representatives of the legitimate authority on territories in which the Germans are carrying out the systematic extermination of Polish citizens and of citizens of Jewish origin of many other European countries – consider it their duty to address themselves to the Governments of the United Nations, in the confident belief that they will share their opinion as to the necessity not only of condemning the crimes committed by the Germans and punishing the criminals, but also of finding means offering the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination.”
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The second point of Raczyński’s Note included a reference to the conference of representatives of nine coalition states at St James’s Palace on 13 January 1942 regarding the punishment of those guilty of the atrocities perpetrated on civilians during the war. The picture shows the participants of the meeting, on the left behind the table are: the USSR Ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile Aleksander Bogomolov, the Chinese Ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile Wunz King, the US Ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile Anthony Biddle, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Anthony Eden, the Canadian High Commissioner in the United Kingdom Vincent Massey, the Australian High Commissioner in the United Kingdom Stanley Bruce, the New Zealand High Commissioner in the United Kingdom William Joseph Jordan, the South African High Commissioner Sidney Waterson and Edward Cavendish, Prince of Devonshire, Undersecretary of State for the Dominions. On the right, representatives of Belgium, the Free France Committee, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland (Ambassador Edward Raczyński and Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski), Norway, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (IPMS).
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Bibliography David Engel (1987) In the Shadow of Auschwitz, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Michael Fleming (2014) Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Walter Laqueur (1998 / [1980]) The Terrible Secret: The suppression of the final truth about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, New York: Henry Holt Adam Puławski (2013) ‘The Polish Government-in-exile, the Delegatura, the Union of Armed Struggle-Home Army and the extermination of the Jews’ in Jan Láníček and James Jordan, Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War, London: Vallentine Mitchell & Co, pp.111-34 Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1942) The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, London: Hutchinson Franciszek Ryszka (1982) Nuremberg: Prehistory and Aftermath, Warsaw: Czytelnik Dariusz Stola (1999) ‘Polish diplomacy and the Holocaust’ in The history of Polish diplomacy 1939-1945 vol. V, Warsaw: PWN Dariusz Stola (1997) ‘Early news of the Holocaust from Poland’ in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, pp. 1-27 Szmul Zygielbojm (1942) Stop Them Now: German mass-murder of Jews in Poland (foreword by Josiah Wedgwood), London: Liberty Publications
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© All rights reserved: Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London Texts: Arkady Rzegocki, Michael Fleming Editing: Marcin Bryszak, Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London Image credits: “The mass slaughtering of Jews in Poland. Code 18 file 61 (papers 12221 - 12567)”, reference FO 371/30924, The National Archives; Agnieszka Chmura; Edward Raczyński family archive; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland Publication financed by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London 47 Portland Place London W1B 1JH Tel: +44 (0) 207 2913 520 E-mail: london@msz.gov.pl Website: london.mfa.gov.pl/en/ @PolishEmbassyUK