The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland. Andrew Kornbluth

This outstanding study is really two books in one. The first part is a history of Polish collaboration in Nazi crimes during World War II; the second is a history of the so-called August Trials (named after the August 1944 decree authorizing them) designed to prosecute and punish that collaboration. In less deft hands, this sort of divided attention could be a recipe for disaster. Kornbluth, however, does a masterful job of integrating the two strands of his analysis. The key to this balancing act is the fact that the documents used to tell the story of Polish collaboration are the trial records generated by the criminal proceedings discussed in the second half of the book. This is a seamless story of crime and (limited) punishment, and the same witnesses and documents convey both halves of the story.

The story that Kornbluth tells about Polish collaboration is not entirely novel, though it is sure to be deeply controversial in Poland itself. He largely confirms the findings of other historians, such as Jan Grabowski, Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka, and others. At its most basic, Kornbluth argues, Polish collaboration with the Germans was far more widespread than the myths created in postwar Poland allowed. He differentiates between collaboration in Nazi crimes against Jews and crimes against non-Jewish Poles.

Polish collaboration in crimes against non-Jews was, “for the most part, the crimes of people seeking some temporary advantage in desperate straits, like shipwreck victims fighting over space in a lifeboat” (p. 18). Such collaboration was opportunistic and isolated, not systematic. There was little ideological affinity with the German occupiers when it came to atrocities against ethnic Poles. These collaborators were often marginal individuals operating on their own for material rewards. The consequences for these collaborators, if their actions became known, tended to be fatal; it was not uncommon for such individuals to be assassinated by the Polish underground during the war, or for them to be convicted by postwar courts and sentenced to death.

On the other hand, collaboration in Nazi crimes against Jews, that is collaboration in Jewish genocide, was a different matter altogether. It was widespread, especially in the countryside, where many Jews lived prior to the war, and where those who escaped the Nazis generally fled to seek shelter. The collaborators were often locally prominent—village headmen, firemen or so-called “Blue Police.” These were often group efforts, as when village officials and safety officers captured Jews hiding in the area and turned them over to either the Blue Police or the local Germans. As Kornbluth writes, “Polish society, as it turns out, was not tormented by the fact of having witnessed the crimes of the occupiers or by the actions of a handful of native renegades—it was haunted by the active and popularly endorsed participation of a wide and socially prominent swath of the ethnic Polish population in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of their Jewish neighbors” (p. 39).

The extraordinary criminal violence of the Nazi occupation of Poland was a source of grave concern to all of the Polish political factions vying for leadership of both the resistance and postwar Poland. The Government-in-Exile in London had been pushing for a concerted Allied investigation and prosecution strategy since 1942 (if not earlier), while the communists in exile in the Soviet Union sought to get out ahead of the issue as they reentered their beleaguered homeland among the armored columns of the Red Army. On August 31, 1944, the Moscow sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation promulgated a decree, “On the Punishment of Fascist-Hitlerite Criminals Guilty of Killings and Mistreatment of Civilians and Prisoners as well as of Traitors to the Polish Nation,” commonly referred to as the “August Decree,” which formed the legal basis for more than thirty thousand trials of Germans and (mostly) their Polish collaborators.

The August Decree promised to punish the killing of civilians and prisoners of war (POWs), as well as “‘the capture or transport of persons sought or persecuted by the occupation authorities’” (p. 91). The sole penalty envisioned by the August Decree was death, a fact that led to a great deal of creative jurisprudence during the ensuing trials, as Polish judges sought to evade such a draconian minimum punishment. Subsequent iterations of the August Decree introduced mitigating circumstances that could lead to reduced punishments such as imprisonment.

According to Kornbluth, the “August Trials” were surprisingly professional and apolitical. The courts were comprised of professional judges and lay jurors, both of whom sought to conduct fair trials and follow reasonable due process procedures and evidentiary standards. Despite post-1989 assertions to the contrary, these were, for the most part, neither Stalinist show trials nor mere excuses for purging anti-communists. Rather, they were genuine attempts at achieving justice.

That said, the August Trials were also an integral part of postwar Polish self-mythologizing. The small number of Germans tried under the August Decree received fair trials as well, but the mandatory death sentence posed little problem for the courts in those cases. The courts, however, were often far more solicitous for Poles accused of collaborating with the Germans, especially in cases of crimes against Jews. According to Kornbluth, it was not uncommon to find “dubious interpretations of the evidence and laws—sometimes at striking variance with the facts—by professional and lay judges, courts of appeal, and even the government itself [that] materially affected sentencing or contributed to acquittal” (pp. 133–34). Poles who had, for instance, revealed the hiding places of Jews or who had even directly participated in their capture and transport to the Germans, were portrayed as victims of circumstance, where the Jews themselves were portrayed as bandits and thieves, whom the Poles had little choice but to denounce for their own survival. “To be certain,” argues Kornbluth, “this was not an all-out whitewashing of guilt—some accused were still sentenced to comparatively long prison terms—but the intention was clear: the cutting edge of the August Decree should be blunted and the rough edges of the wartime narrative should be smoothed over” (p. 134).

As with postwar trials elsewhere in Europe, the more time that passed between the end of the war and the actual legal sentencing, the milder the punishments became (in part because revisions to the August Decree increasingly allowed exceptions to the death penalty). But the impulse to exculpate many Polish collaborators, and, above all, to downplay Polish antisemitism, was apparent in the August Trials from the beginning. The August Trials helped foster a narrative of Poles as exclusively victims. The complex reality—that Poles very much were victims of the Nazis and at the same time, willing collaborators in the destruction of Polish Jewry—was largely and deliberately effaced.

These findings will not necessarily be altogether surprising for scholars of postwar Nazi trials, but Kornbluth presents them in such a thorough and thoughtful analysis that notions of “Stalinist” justice will no longer be tenable. It should also be impossible after reading Kornbluth to maintain the fiction that Poles had no role to play in the Holocaust beyond that of tragic bystanders. Whether Polish society will be willing to confront this difficult fact remains to be seen, recent changes in Polish politics notwithstanding.