Andrew Kornbluth's The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland is a major contribution to the history of postwar war crimes trials and the politics of memory. It is a powerful account of postwar justice—and injustice—in Soviet-occupied Poland (and the Polish People's Republic), which tells an important story about the manipulation of history to serve a Polish nationalist agenda.
From 1944 to 1956, Poland tried more than 32,000 individuals for war crimes in keeping with the August Decree of 1944 (“On the Punishment of Fascist-Hitlerite Criminals as well as of Traitors to the Polish Nation”). The book examines the mechanics of these trials (carried out initially by Special Courts convened expressly for this purpose), the details of the case records, and how the active participation of Poles in the murder of Jews was ultimately covered up.
Kornbluth reminds us that Polish nationalism and antisemitism went hand in hand in pre-war Poland, with the Polish government speaking of a “Jewish problem” that could only be “solved” with “the voluntary emigration of all Jews” (13). Then came the war, with the invasion, occupation, and partition of Poland. The Nazis confined Poland's Jews to ghettos before deporting them to death camps. The majority of Jews who remained (some 160,000–250,000 people) escaped to the countryside, where they found themselves at the mercy of the Polish peasantry. What ensued was the often-enthusiastic participation of the Polish population in what Kornbluth calls “the remaining workaday business of genocide” (47).
Kornbluth also reminds us that the actions of Poles toward their Jewish neighbors during and after World War II has been a subject of contention in Poland since the 2000 publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors, which documented the massacre of Jews by Poles in the town of Jedwabne. More recently, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance has actively worked to suppress any information that challenges the heroic narrative of Polish resistance to Nazism. In 2018, the Polish government made it a crime to attribute “to the Polish Nation or Polish state co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich” (1).
The case files for the August Trials, available since the early 2000s and a key focus of Kornbluth's book, paint a brutal picture of co-responsibility between German occupiers and Polish communities for the murder of Jews. They show that Polish crimes against Jews were “German-inspired” but “locally directed” (18). Entire communities took a coordinated part in the detention, transport, and murder of Jews, motivated by “a mixture of racial hatred and greed” (77). The Blue Police (the Polish police in German-occupied Poland) executed Jews with “little oversight or instructions from the Germans” (66). The Polish Underground, known for its heroic acts of anti-German resistance, “also killed Jews, massacring them in groups or picking them off individually” (77). The Catholic Church remained silent, acquiescing in these crimes.
Given the mass of evidence in the case files, why were so many Poles given light sentences for their crimes against Jews—or let off the hook entirely? This is a primary question Kornbluth asks in his study. He looks to the judges and the witnesses, and their motivations, for answers. The professional judges in the August cases, many of whom had been part of Poland's prewar judiciary, viewed the mandatory death sentences for murder, capture, and blackmail as an attack on their independence and pushed back. The lay judges (there were two assigned with one professional judge to every case) and the Polish witnesses frequently viewed even the most horrible crimes against the Jews “through the prism of the perpetrator” (118). Witnesses blamed Jewish victims “for carelessness or passivity” (140). Polish defendants were said to have acted “under duress, performing the bare minimum required of them by the occupier” (140).
Everyone, Kornbluth argues, wanted to deflect attention away from Polish involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Everyone except the Jews, of course. And there were too few of them left in Poland after the war to make a difference.
The role of the Soviet-influenced Polish government in all this is one of the most interesting parts of the story. Kornbluth argues that the Polish government was dissatisfied with the leniency of the verdicts in these cases, but that its response was shaped by its goal of maintaining power. The new state's “weakness, lack of popularity, and dependence on prewar technocrats” (104) greatly limited its room to act. Rather than risk further alienating the ethnically Polish population (the overwhelming majority), it conspired in the cover-up of Polish responsibility for the murder of Jews. The heroic narrative about Polish resistance during World War II became a part “of the compact between the communist state and citizens” (227). Poles could be martyrs and heroes, but not perpetrators of genocide.
Kornbluth's book deserves a wide readership. Its information and insights about the Holocaust in Poland will be of interest to historians, students, and general readers. Its details about the August Trials and the Polish judiciary make it an invaluable resource for scholars of European and international law. Its discussion of memory laws and the politics of history could not be more timely—and gives us much to think about in the current political environment.
