I have to make statement here: I'm polish and I'm proud of it.
I'm not so die-hard fighter for polish honor as Orzel (which is Eagel in polish and our country emblem) and I don't like his manner of writting here in this forum which I find unacceptable. But on the other hand he made some valid points on Jason's post in the topic. Indeed Selbschutz was not polish - and that's it. As Orzel mentioned the wording is important, especially when somebody without some historical backgroud reads it.
I hope that Jason will admit that his wording was inapropriate.
I hope Orzel will start to control himself (as he already apologised for the manner of his posts).
I hope that this topic will be continued as it is titled i.e. Selbschutz in Poland.
And we can of course start new topic e.g. "Non-existent collaboration in Poland"
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
Here I would like to comment some posts:
Jason has some kind of fixation when it comes to polish "blue police". As it was mentioned it was not combat organisation. Secondly it was created on the base of pre-war police force. While it is true that it had to co-operate with Germans there were very little true "collaborationists" - policemen did not identified themselves with german rule. Polish underground movement was very strict about activity of those policemen and quite many of them was sentenced death penalty during the war becouse of theirs misdeeds. What's more Germans themselves purged blue police very often - it is estimated that at least 15% of policemen were releived and sentenced at least the labour camp sentences.
The most common, what does not mean numerous, crime of polish blue police was the co-operation in jews prosecution. While not directly involved in Holocaust the police force was supposed to find hiding jews, to protect jewish property which was taken over by germans, to control jews movement to ghettos etc. There were several reasons for that: rather strong antisemitism in Poland in pre-war period, "better them than us" or "they are going to die either way" or "we don't care about jews, we care about Poles" attitude, some of course wanted to get rich and inability to help (you can help an individual but not millions). But such behaviour was not rule. As a whole polish blue police helped Poles a lot while not actively collaborated with nazis.
On the other hand polish underground goverment (yes, yes government) created special organisation that was supposed to help jews live till the end of the war. It was only one INSTITUTION in occupied Europe created with only one goal - help jews. What may be of interest for you - almost half of trees in Yad Vashem are polish trees (tree is seed by two persons -jew that survived the Holocaust and the one who helped him/her to do it).
I don't know if Henrik belives in what he writes about polish "collaborationists" who signed the Volksliste. The first question is if they had any option? I don't think they had. Maybe lonely indyvidual can stick to his ideas and suffer, but what about families with little children or old parents? If one didn't sign the Volksliste he was deported to GG from the Reich with few suitcases, in case of farmers without any devices or animals. Would you Henrik let your family suffer in harsh 1939-40 winter if you had an option to sign Volksliste? Apart from that, civilian (of any nation) has one aim during the war - to survive and it doesn't matter how.
And the last thing: polish - ukrainian relationship which are getting better each year - very good prognosis for our future. The worst thing of it is that Ukrainians as well as Poles were manipulated by others (Russians, Soviets, Austrians, Germans) to fight each other. Foreign powers acted accordingly to the old roman rule divide et impera.
The hatered peaked during WWII and early after. Firstly 1941-43 Ukrainians cleansed western Ukraine of Poles (at least they tried very hard and were extremly brutal). After that in 1945-47 we - Poles (with help of mighty Soviet Union) dispearsed Ukrainians in northern Poland. It is estimated that those ethnic cleansings costed life of about 100.000 Poles and 25.000 Ukrainians.
Morden