Jewish leaders in Communist Poland

[Excerpt from the Holocaust chapter (18) about Jewish communist leaders in Poland]:

World War II Polish anti-Nazi leader Stephan Korbanski writes that
          "To realize his plan of seizing total control of Poland, Stalin formed
          two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the
          other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish
          communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who
          knew Stalin well.
          The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which
          exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of
          Poland's independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites,
          whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their
          residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73]

          The principal instrument of Berman's power was his total control of
          the Ministry of State Security, which began -- under Stalin's
          instructions -- to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often by
          simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland's
          independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]

Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an important ('although not exclusive') role in the apparatus of oppression." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94] With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]

In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism." [SCHATZ, p. 100]

Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski -- in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions, "became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary." [SCHATZ, p. 206] "All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63] As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now "due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]

Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty: "Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's 'friend' Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race." [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]

Stephan Korbanski also notes that the Soviet Communist secret police

     "team assembled by Berman [whose brother Adolf was chairman of
      the Jewish Committee in Poland till 1947, when he immigrated to Israel]

      [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 85] at the beginning of his rule were all
      Jewish -- Vice Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman
      Romkowski) [who once interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials
      like General Julius Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security
      police chief Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), 'Colonel
      Czaplicki,' and Zygmut Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials
      who oppressed Poles in the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a
      member of the Communist Council of State, has stated that 'it was
      unfortunate that all the department directors in the Ministry of State
      were Jews.'" [KORBANSKI, p. 78]

"Jacek Rozanski," notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was "director of the Investigative Department of the Polish State Security Ministry" and was "sentenced in 1955 to five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957 sentenced him to fifteen years]" for "using inadmissible means of persuasion during interrogations ... Son of a prominent Warsaw Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist 'Hajnt'), Rozanski was a dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until the end." [BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] "All the detainees described [Rozanski] as an exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture prisoners needlessly," notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, "... Rozanski's Jewish origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his Polonized name." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]

The aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head of the "Tenth Department of the Polish State Security Ministry -- the special unit answerable to the Party First Secretary and concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and he] was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to twelve years' imprisonment." [BORKOWICZ, p. 344]

Jewish author Michael Checinski notes the post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov who

      "held the relatively modest post of head of Soviet advisers in Poland.
      But no serious operational decisions on any question pertaining to
      political provocations or police terror could ever be taken without
      Davidov's consent. On the one hand, Davidov and his personal
      network supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in all the
      mainstays of real power in Poland (the armed forces, security
      service, party apparatus, state administration, and industry). But
      he also was responsible for overseeing the entire Polish apparatus
      of terror." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]

Abel Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds that

         "The archetype of the Jew during the first ten years of the Polish
         People's Republic was generally perceived as an agent of the secret
         political police. It is true that under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to 1948)
         the key positions in the Ministry of State Security were held by Jews or
         persons of Jewish background. It is a fact which cannot be
        overlooked, little known in the West and seldom mentioned by the
         Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk about Stalin's anti-Semitism ....
      The machinations of communist terror functioned in Poland in a matter
         [sic] similar to that used in other communist ruled countries in Europe.
         What requires explanation is why it is operated by Jews. The reason
         was the political police, the base of communist rule, required personnel
         of unquestionable loyalty to communism. These were people who had
         joined the Party before the war and in Poland they were predominately
         Jewish. "    [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

"The feeling that Jews are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many westerners," wrote Stanislaw Krajewski, under his own name. "The only sense it has derives from the Jewish participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did not look favorably at such a scenario. World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts -- in the West against the Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.

Even a Jewish scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by "Jewish characteristics," concedes that

          "After the Polish communist seizure of power in 1948 there were
           indeed a number of Jews like Jakob Berman, Hilary Minc, and
            Roman Zambrowski, who did play key roles in the party, the
           security services, and economic planning. No doubt they were
           considered by Moscow as being less susceptible than the Catholic
           majority to Polish nationalist feelings, though in the eyes of many
           Poles they were little better than agents of a foreign, semi-colonial
           power ... the anti-communist underground was convinced that
           Jews were deliberately betraying Poland." [WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]

In another, related, example of the usual sharp double standard of Jewish morality and responsibility, in an article entitled, "Lithuania May Charge Jews for Crimes Against Humanity," in December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the Lithuanian response to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States Congressmen to the president of Lithuania, insisting that he "put suspected [World War II] criminals on trial." Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor general of Lithuania, "alarmed local Jewish leaders" by announcing that his office "would not only study the massacres of Jews committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the war, but also crimes committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the country was under Soviet control." "Of course there were Jews who suffered from Lithuanians," said Pednycia, "But there were also just the opposite cases, and we all know that." "The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police," noted JTA reporter Lev Krichevsky, "has prompted many Lithuanians to share the sentiments expressed by the prosecutor general." The chairman of the Jewish community in Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the prosecutor's comments about Jews by declaring them "absolutely false," "non-ethical," and "historically wrong." [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16]

Jewish pre-eminence in communist terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine was the same. A Canadian of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a 1997 volume published in his homeland entitled "The Jewish Conquest of the Slavs." It was produced by Security Service of the Ukraine, today's state police agency. In tabulating the nationalities of 183 biographies in the volume of leading officials in the terrorist Soviet secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak notes, on average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This percentage doesn't include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish identities, a practice common in Eastern Europe. As Prytulak concludes,

     "One possible reason that Jews incessantly paint the false image of
     themselves as victims of Ukrainians is because of the reality that
     Ukrainians have been among the foremost victims of Jews ... A
     more thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism
     reveals many reasons for viewing it -- at least in some of its
     manifestations -- not as an irrational and unexplainable and
     gratuitous hatred, but as a natural and understandable antipathy
     from an acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior." [PRYTULAK]

Richard Rhodes notes the prominence of Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and future (Jewish) nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller's family there:

     "The leaders of the Commune and many among its officials were
     Jewish ... Max Teller warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming.

     Teller's mother expressed her fears more vividly. 'I shiver at what my
     people are doing,' she told her son's governess in the heyday of the
     Commune. 'When this is over there will be a terrible revenge.'"
     [RHODES, R., 1986, p. 111-112]

Bela Kun, notes Louis Rapoport,

     "a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in
     Hungary and later Stalin's chief of terror in the Crimea." [RAPOPORT,
     L., 1990, p. 56]

In Russia, the "home" of communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including the terrorist secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the same. [See details -- Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar Kaganovich, head of the "Apparatus of Terror," Jewish dominance of the Soviet concentration camp system, et al -- earlier] As Richard Pipes notes: "Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains concealed." [PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]

The following observation is written by a Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal Jewish framing of Russian perception about the subject as irrationally anti-Semitic:

     "There is a tendency in Russian intellectual circles "to view the
     Bolshevik Revolution as an essentially non-Russian phenomenon,
     which took place under the influence of the minority nations in the
     Russian empire, chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the
     political terror as a phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews
     (this element is to be found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate]
     Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and
     Valentin Kataev, the official writer). Such an attitude is also
     behind militant anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and
     in belles-lettres, portraying the Jews as plotters who, since Peter
     the Great, have sought to harm Russia and are now corrupting
     Soviet society. In this manner anti-Jewish pogroms and measures
     in the past are presented as protests against exploitations." [ETTINGER,
     p. 21]

In communist Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers in the dreaded OSS (the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much as 75% of the total) -- merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175] Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with Polish names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990, suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish. [SACK, p. 183]

In 1992, when Shlomo Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish authorities who were looking into his past as the commandant of a post-World War II communist concentration camp for Germans and nationalist Poles, "Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in Israel, asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took the first plane that he could to Tel Aviv," leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH, p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised him that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in the OSS "because it would increase anti-Semitism." [SACH, p. 169]

Surviving prisoners under Morel's rein had testified that:

      * "The commandant was Morel, a Hun in human form."

      * "The commandant was Morel, a Schweinehund without equal."

      * "The commandant, Morel, appeared. The clubs and the dog whips
           rained down on us. My nose was broken, and my ten nails were
           beaten blue. They later fell off."

       * "The commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw him with my own eyes kill
         many of my fellow prisoners." [SACK, p. 167]

After World War II, writes Richard Lucas, "Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed Red flags to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers, and filled administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One report estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the top administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and Luck were in Jewish hands during Soviet occupation ... The entire character of the University of Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the percentage of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent; Ukrainians 15 per cent; Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12 per cent, and 85 per cent, respectively." [LUCAS, p. 128]

"The evidence, "observed Jewish commentator Aleksander Smolar, "is overwhelming: large numbers of Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 50] "Thousands of Polish survivors' testimonies, memoirs, and works of history," notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski, "tell of Jewish celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish collaboration (denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles for deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded executions, of Jewish pro-Soviet citizens' committees and militias, and of the high rates of Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion of 1939." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]

Testimony to the Jewish Polish response to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following Jewish accounts, from the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in Israel:

     "When the Bolsheviks entered the Polish territories they displayed a great
     distrust of the Polish people, but with complete faith in the Jews ... they
     filled all the administrative offices with Jews and also entrusted them with
     top level positions." [from the town of Grodno]

     "I must note that, from the very first, the majority of positions in the
      Soviet agencies were taken by Jews." [from the town of Lwow]

     "The Russians rely mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,
      segregating, naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat." [from the
      town of Zolkwia]

     "A Jewish doctor recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed
      themselves into a 'komsomol,' toured the countryside, smashing
    Catholic shrines." [near the town of Jaworow]

      "Whenever a [pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some
       other sort of joyful event took place, the visual effect was always the
      same -- Jews." [from the town of Lwow]
      [PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 - As Piotrowski notes, these comments have
        been edited out of an English translation of the source volume,
       originally published in Polish]

"The victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by his Jewish subordinates," says Stephan Korbanski,

     "during the first ten years of the war numbered tens of thousands.
     Most of them were Poles who had fought against the Germans in
      the resistance movement. The communists judged, quite correctly,
      that such Poles were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet
      rule and were therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned
      to the Jews because they were thought to be free of Polish patriotism,
      which was the real enemy." [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

Korbanski then goes on to name and detail 29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned) of the communist elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism. But political winds in the communist world shifted drastically. Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist officials were purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to Israel's 1967 military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs and Jewish Russian loyalties -- per Israel -- were put into question. [KORBANSKI, p. 85]

"In places like Gleibwitz," writes John Sack, "the Poles stood against the prison walls as Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, 'Ready! Aim! Fire!,' shot them, and told the Polish guards, 'Don't talk about this.' The guards, being Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office's brass [of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots ... Stalin ... had hired all the Jews on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security, his instrument in the People's Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles went to war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation, and Imprisonment." [SACK, p. 139]

All this, of course, including the Poles own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews in the brutal communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional self-imposed Jewish estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi rule is part of the unscholarly "gutter literature" that the likes of David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.

In 1984, a Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the despised Jewish former "Minister of State Security" in post-war communist Poland:

       Berman: "I was against too large a concentration of Jews in certain
        institutions ... it wasn't the right thing to do and it was a
        necessary evil that we'd been forced into when we
     [communists] took power when the Polish intelligentsia
         was boycotting us...

        Q: In 1948-49 you arrested members of the [Polish] Home
         Army Council of Aid to Jews, the 'Zegata' ... Mr. Berman!
         The security services who were all or nearly all Jews arrested
         Poles because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi]
          occupation, and you say the Poles are anti-Semites. That's
         not nice.

        Berman: ... It was wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong ...
         It was a small group, but very dedicated, and it took
         enormous risks to look after Jews during the war."
        [TORANSKA, p. 321]

Toranska also talked to Roman Werbel, a prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish communist journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality wrought by Jewish security officers upon Poles in fomenting anti-Semitism:

       "Beating causes degradation not only in the person who is beaten,
        but in the person doing the beating as well. So it's better to shoot
       someone than to beat him ... There are principals you have to
      stick to in beating, however Johnny has to be beaten by Johnny
      and not Moshe ... I can see now that there were too many Jews in
        the security services." [TORANSKA, p. 109]

Jewish apologist Michael Checinski (whose world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent anti-Semitism model, whereby even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are themselves considered victims of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an anti-Semitic communist regime) argues that

     "while by coincidence or evil design, Jewish officials were often placed
     in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for
     all the regime's crimes ...[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62] ... Jews -- and
     especially those with Jewish names or striking Semitic features -- could
     be placed in the most controversial posts (for example, those dealing
     with Church affairs or the campaign against the political underground)
    and thus deflect antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This policy was
     implemented not only in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe, where
     the new [communist] governments, ruling only with the military support
     of the Soviet army, were seen by their own peoples as puppets."
     [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 63]

In 1999, the government of Poland was still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now living in England), who in the post-World War II communist regime was Poland's chief military prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem Report, say "that Brus ... played a key role in the trial and execution of a hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf ... The anti-Communist Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an intelligence officer in the underground Polish Home Army in World War II." [WINNER, D., p. 37]

In 1994, the New York Times discussed the case against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary critic who had emigrated from Poland. "He was forced to admit his involvement with the Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950," says Carol Oppenheim, "after his name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw newspaper publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive." [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

"Hundreds of Jews," writes Jewish author John Sack, "were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany ... [SACK, p. 6] ... Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names   ... [SACK, p. 39] ... The talk was in Yiddish, mostly ... About three out of four of the officers -- two hundred rowdy boys -- in the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland's large industrial city] were Jews ... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that belonged to a [Polish prisoner]." [SACH, p. 40]

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When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish pre-eminence in America
2,000 page scholarly work featuring approximately 10,000 citations from about 4,000 bibliographic sources.
The most thorough investigation to this day on Jewish power and influence in the USA and the world.