Black Earth(49)

The Jews sent to the ghettos were met there by a melancholy parody of interwar Jewish authorities: the Judenrat, established by order of Governor-General Frank in November 1939. Under Pi?sudski, Poland’s Jews had been allowed to choose local self-governing authorities, known as kehillot or gminy. These bodies took responsibility for matters of religion, marriage, burial, ritual slaughter, and in some measure for social welfare and education. Jewish communal authorities were authorized to receive money from abroad to fund these activities. Under the Germans, these local authorities, generally the same people, became the Judenrat, responsible for the execution of German orders. They were in no reciprocal relationship with the Polish state, which no longer existed, and were henceforth prevented from maintaining connections with other Jewish communities around the world. It was simplest for Germans just to take the kehilla as it was, just as it was simplest to take the Polish local mayors and county commissioners as they were. What was usually decisive was the destruction of the Polish state and the character of German policy, not the character of these individuals. Those who did leave could always be replaced by others.

New Jewish police forces, armed with clubs, were technically subordinate to the Judenr?te, but in the crucial cases took orders from the Germans. The head of the two-thousand-strong Jewish police in the Warsaw ghetto was Józef Szeryński, who had served in the Polish police before the war. Young Jewish men from Betar, who had been trained in the use of weapons by the Polish state, also showed a certain inclination to join the Jewish police. Often Jewish policemen tried to resolve strife between Jews to prevent any recourse to German authority. From 1940, the Jewish police oversaw the mandatory labor required of all Jews. From 1941, they rounded up their fellow Jews for deportations from ghettos to labor camps; in 1942, to death facilities. The Jewish informers who offered their services to the Germans tended to be people who had a record as informers for the prewar Polish police. Naturally, they were now informing about different things.

The third fragmentation of the Polish state was the separation of a once-centralized institution from the shattered hierarchy: the Polish police. The regular Polish police had been a hierarchically organized institution subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the 1930s the Polish police were instrumental in defending Jewish life, commerce, and politics. Jewish tradesmen maintained friendly relationships, often by way of bribes, with the policemen charged with protecting town markets. The Polish police sometimes sided with Poles in fights between Poles and Jews, although Polish nationalists complained that policemen sided with Betar. Polish judges often found Jews guilty of provoking the violence that was directed against them. Yet on the whole, the Polish police were expected to prevent pogroms, and generally did so. In the Poland of the 1930s, a pogrom was a violation of public property and an attempt to demonstrate the weakness of the state. Most policemen, regardless of their views about Jews, understood their duties to the bourgeois order.

Then that order changed. A conventional state that sought to monopolize violence was destroyed by a racial regime that sought to channel anarchy. When the Polish state was destroyed in September 1939, its policemen no longer had superiors to instruct them. The highest authorities of the Polish state evacuated Warsaw, leaving policemen to decide their own course. It cannot be said that Polish policemen then sided with the Germans. Many policemen from throughout Poland chose to gather in Warsaw and fight the Germans as the Polish capital was besieged. After the capitulation, they faced the classical dilemma of forces of order. To leave their posts would provoke chaos and crime. To stay meant working for a foreign invader. Most Polish policemen chose the latter. The German Order Police then racialized the units that became the subordinate Polish Order Police (known as the Blue Police): Jews could not return to duty, and Poles could not arrest Germans. Whereas Germans were not usually punished for refusing orders to shoot civilians, Polish policemen could be shot. The Polish policemen were subordinated to a German structure that they could not at first hope to understand: to the German Order Police, which meant ultimately to Himmler. In coming years, some thirty thousand German Order Policemen would take part in the murder of Jews in Poland. The Polish police became, with time, a subordinate part of the German apparatus of racial war.

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The Polish state was to be destroyed because in 1939 Hitler was angry and impatient and had no better way of approaching the Soviet border than by obliterating the country that lay between. Hitler was equipped by ideology to envision the destruction of states in the name of nature and had at his disposal an imposing army and special task forces whose essential mission was the destruction of institutions to permit racial war. The SS and the Einsatzgruppen first killed on a large scale in Poland—but their main target was Polish elites, not Jews.