Long time lurker, first time poster. Hope I did it right.

So I was reading the wikipedia page called "The Holocaust in Poland" and it has this paragraph under the header "Antisemitism":

"Polish antisemitism had two formative motifs: claims of defilement of the Catholic faith; and Żydokomuna (Jew-communism). During the 1930s, Catholic journals in Poland paralleled western European social-Darwinist antisemitism and the Nazi press. However, church doctrine ruled out violence, which only became more common in the mid-1930s. Unlike German antisemitism, Polish political-ideological antisemites rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead.[a] Joseph Stalin's occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls "the institutionalization of resentment",[169] whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles There was an upsurge in the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as Communist traitors; it erupted into mass murder when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. A group of at least 40 Poles, with an unconfirmed level of German backing, murdered hundreds of Jews in the racially aggravated Jedwabne pogrom. There was a rash of other massacres of Jews across the same formerly Soviet-occupied region of Łomża and Białystok around the same time, with varying degrees of German death squad incitement or involvement: at Bielsk Podlaski (the village of Pilki), Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzcianne, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, and Wizna.[170]"

The text straight up blames Polish antisemitism and violence on Stalin and the Soviets. Obviously, this made me very suspicious. Does anyone know what it refers to, what the supposed evidence that the Soviets stoked antisemitic violence is, and have any alternative sources I can read?

Thanks!

EDIT: link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland#Antisemitism

  • Vncredleader
    ·
    2 years ago

    This is the paper I read to learn about the subject https://www.academia.edu/32895094/Local_Collaboration_in_the_Holocaust_in_Eastern_Europe

    Also by "stoked violence" I think they mean Jews opposed the antisemitic pro-nazi government, which thus made them more pro-Soviet. So from Polish nationalists POV the Soviets supporting Jews made them "have to" murder them.

    In explaining these local excesses at the start of "Operation Barbarossa" reference is frequently made back to the mass deportations conducted by Soviet forces a few days earlier and the alleged role of Jews in the NKVD and as informers. In particular, the warm welcome given by many Jews to the Red Army in 1939(mostly out of relief at escaping German occupation) served to reinforce German and local propaganda that accused all Jews of sympathizing with the communists. The work of Bogdan Musial has demonstrated the close links between the uncovering of victims of the Soviets in towns liberated by the Germans and the outbreak of local pogroms and massacres against the Jews, who were often rounded up to bury the corpses.^* There is a danger, however,that this explanatory schema can be used to 'excuse' the anti-Jewish actions as an 'understandable' revenge measure. The truth is that the vast majority of those Jews killed had nothing to do with Soviet atrocities. The perpetrators had mostly fled with the Soviet forces. Yet there was clearly an element of 'hotblood' in some of these early and improvised outbursts.

    This is essentially the attitude they have, and still have. That it was "defense" against Bolsheviks, Its the same line in Ukraine, and the Baltic states