The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive.
At least 40 ethnic Poles carried out the killing; their ringleaders decided on it beforehand with Germany's Gestapo, SS security police or SS intelligence, and they cooperated with German military police. According to historian Jan T. Gross, "the undisputed bosses of life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," who were "the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews." In 1967, the Regional Commission for Research of Nazi Crimes in Białystok began another investigation in the case.
Knowledge of the massacre did not become widespread until 1999–2003. Polish filmmakers, journalists, and academics, in particular Jan Tomasz Gross's history Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) raised public interest. In 2000–2003 Poland's Institute of National Remembrance conducted a forensic murder investigation; it confirmed that the direct perpetrators were ethnic Poles. The country was shocked by the findings, which challenged common narratives about the Holocaust in Poland that had focused on Polish suffering and heroism, and that non-Jewish Poles had little responsibility for the fate of Poland's Jews.
In a 2001 memorial ceremony at Jedwabne, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized on behalf of the country, an apology that was repeated in 2011 by President Bronisław Komorowski. With the Law and Justice (PiS) party's rise to political power in 2015, the subject again became contentious. The PiS has a controversial "history policy"; President Andrzej Duda publicly criticized Komorowski's apology.
Background
Jedwabne
thumb|upright=1.35|The [[Jedwabne Synagogue accidentally burned down in 1913.]]
The Jewish community in Jedwabne was established in the 17th or 18th century. In 1937, 60 percent of the population were ethnic Poles and 40 percent Jewish. In 1939 the total population was around 2,720 to 2,800. At the time about 10 percent of the 35 million strong population of Poland was Jewish; it was the largest Jewish population in the world.
Many in the region supported the National Party branch of the National Democracy movement, a right-wing and antisemitic bloc which sought to counter what it claimed was Jewish economic competition against Catholics and opposed the Polish socialist government of Józef Piłsudski and his successors. Prewar Polish-Jewish relations in the town were relatively good before 1939. At their most tense, when a Jewish woman was killed in Jedwabne and a Polish peasant in another town was killed a few days later, a rumor began that the Jedwabne Jews had taken revenge. Jews anticipated a pogrom, but the local priest and rabbi stepped in and addressed the matter together.
According to Polish journalist Anna Bikont, residents of Jedwabne knew of the 1933 Radziłów pogrom in nearby Radziłów, organized by National Democracy's far-right Camp of Great Poland (OWP) faction. The organization referred to the violence as a "revolution" against the Polish state, which it saw as a protector of Jews. One Jew was killed by the pogromists, and four pogromists were killed by the Polish police; the OWP was then banned by Poland's government for anti-state and racist activities. Archival documents show Poland's government at this time was hostile to the Polish nationalist movement, because of the latter's attacks on Jews as well as its opposition to the Polish state; the government felt responsible for Jews and tried to protect them – arresting violent nationalists – and perceived Jews as trying to show loyalty to the Polish state.
World War II
World War II in Europe began on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Later that month, the Soviet Red Army invaded the eastern regions of Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans transferred the area around Jedwabne to the Soviets in accordance with the German–Soviet Boundary Treaty of 28 September 1939. Anna M. Cienciala writes that most of the Jews understandably welcomed the Soviets as the "lesser evil than the Germans", though the Orthodox Jewish majority rejected their ideology, and businesspersons and the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia did not trust their intentions; and soon enough the Soviets had moved against the Jewish intelligentsia, arrested leaders of the Jewish Bund, and nationalized private businesses. According to NKVD (Soviet secret police) documents about Jedwabne and the surrounding area, "few Jews were involved as agents and informers, fewer in fact than Poles", Cienciala writes. Some younger Jews did accept roles within the lower ranks of Soviet administration and militia, for "they believed in the Communist slogans of equality and social justice, while also welcoming the chance to become upwardly mobile." Nevertheless, what stuck in Poles' minds was "the image of Jews welcoming the Soviets", and the collaboration of some communist Jews with the NKVD.
Anna Bikont writes that under Soviet occupation the Poles and Jews of Jedwabne had differing experiences of the local militia, which provided the authorities with names of anti-communist and antisemitic National Party members: "Polish accounts repeated that [the militia was] made up of Jews. The Jews themselves talk about Jews who made themselves of service to the Soviets in this first period, but they emphasize that [those Jews] were the exception rather than the rule." Regardless of the extent of the collaboration, it "strengthened the widely held stereotype of Judaeo-communism promoted by right-wing parties before the war", write Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki. Krzysztof Persak writes that the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish Communism used by the National Party before the war conditioned the view of Jews as Soviet collaborators; the Soviet departure then triggered revenge: "Even though the Germans were in control of the situation in Jedwabne, there is no doubt that it was not hard to find dozens of willing participants of genocidal murder among the local Poles... After two years of cruel occupation, the local Poles greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators. They also felt a strong revenge reflex toward Soviet collaborators, with Jews viewed as such en bloc. The attitude to the latter was conditioned by anti-Semitism, which was widespread in the area... As a result of a combination of all those factors, German inspiration and encouragement in Jedwabne met with favorable conditions."
Following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, German forces again overran Jedwabne and other parts of Poland that had been occupied by the Soviets. American historian Christopher Browning writes: "Criminal orders from above and violent impulses from below created a climate of unmitigated violence.
Spate of pogroms
Shortly after the German invasion of Soviet-held Polish territory in late June 1941, Heinrich Himmler, the most powerful Nazi after Adolf Hitler, complained that pogroms had not broken out in the newly conquered Polish region where Jedwabne is located.
The complaint was responded to by Himmler's subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office commanding the German Security Police, or Sicherheitspolizei, which in turn controlled Germany's SS paramilitary death squads, or Einsatzgruppen. Heydrich issued orders on 29 June and 2 July 1941 applying to newly-captured Polish territory previously controlled by the Soviets. These were for German forces to support "self-cleansing actions" by local anti-Semitic activists and anti-communists against people alleged to have collaborated with the Soviet occupation — Polish communists and Jews. Instigation of massacres in the newly-conquered region were a part of the German extermination operation, and documents show a pattern of similarity between them.
Heydrich ordered: "No obstacles should be made for the efforts aimed at self-cleaning among anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories. To the contrary, they should be instigated without leaving a trace, and if need be—intensified and directed on the right track, but in such a manner so that the local ‘self-defense circles’ could not refer to the orders or political promises made to them."
Holocaust historian Peter Longerich wrote in 2007: "Even if the murders were carried out by local people - or more precisely by a group of forty or so men, distinct from other members of the indigenous population, mostly not from the town itself but from the surrounding area - closer analysis of the crime has now demonstrated that the pogrom was engineered by a unit of the German Security Police. This was probably a commando from the Gestapo office in Zichenau that had been assigned to Einsatzgruppe B as an auxiliary troop and which had organized several pogroms in the western part of the Voivodeship of Bialystok (in which Jedwabne was located); it had recruited local Poles as auxiliary 'pogrom police' for this purpose."
After the German occupation, Polish villagers participated in pogroms against Jews in 23 localities of the Łomża and Białystok areas of the Podlasie region, with varying degrees of German involvement. Generally smaller attacks took place 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. On 5 July 1941, during the Wąsosz pogrom, Polish residents knifed and beat to death about 150–250 Jews. Two days later, during the Radziłów pogrom, local Poles are reported to have murdered 800 Jews, 500 of whom were burned in a barn. The murders took place after the Gestapo had arrived in the towns.
Writing in 2011, historians Bert Hoppe and Hiltrud Glass observed that in all massacres in German-occupied territories, there are indications of the leading role of German units even where non-Germans were the murderers, such as in Jedwabne.
In the days before the Jedwabne massacre, the town's Jewish population increased as refugees arrived from nearby Radziłów and Wizna. In Wizna, the town's Polish "civil head" (wójt) had ordered the Jewish community's expulsion; 230–240 Jews fled to Jedwabne.
According to various accounts, Persak writes, the Germans had set up a Feldgendarmerie in Jedwabne, staffed by eight or eleven military police. The police reportedly set up a "collaborationist civilian town council" led by a former mayor, Marian Karolak. Karolak established a local police force, whose members included Eugeniusz Kalinowski and Jerzy Laudanski. The town council is reported to have included Eugeniusz Sliwecki, Józef Sobutka, and Józef Wasilewski. Karol Bardon, a translator for the Germans, may also have been a member.
Persak writes that the area around Łomża and western Białystok was one of the few Polish-majority areas that had, since 1939, been experiencing the cruelty of Soviet occupation. Thus, when the Germans arrived in 1941, the population saw them as liberators; together with historical antisemitism, this created conditions ripe for German incitement.
Jedwabne pogrom (1941)
10 July 1941
There is general agreement that German secret police or intelligence officials were seen in Jedwabne on the morning of 10 July 1941, or the day before, and met with the town council. Szmuel Wasersztajn's witness statement in 1945 said that eight Gestapo men arrived on 10 July and met with the town authorities. Another witness said four or five Gestapo men arrived and "they began to talk in the town hall". "Gestapo man" was used to refer to any German in a black uniform, Persak writes. The witnesses said they believed the meeting had been held to discuss murdering the town's Jews.
According to the IPN's report, on 10 July 1941 Polish men from nearby villages began arriving in Jedwabne "with the intention of participating in the premeditated murder of the Jewish inhabitants of the town".
The town's Jews were forced out of their homes and taken to the market square, where they were ordered to weed the area by pulling up grass from between the cobblestones. While doing this, they were beaten and made to dance or perform exercises by residents from Jedwabne and nearby. 40–50 Jewish men were forced to demolish a statue of Lenin in a nearby square and carry part of the statue on a wooden stretcher to the market square then to a nearby barn, Polish government investigators found this grave during a partial exhumation in 2001. It held the remains of about 40 men, a kosher butcher's knife, and the head of the concrete Lenin statue.
Most of Jedwabne's remaining Jews, around 300 men, women, children and infants, were then locked inside the barn, which was set on fire, probably using kerosene from former Soviet supplies.
According to a memorial book first published in Hebrew in 1963, "The Jews who came from the towns told us terrible things. Rywka Kurc [who had managed to escape from Jedwabne (and is] now in Australia) told us that in Jedwabne, the S.S. enclosed all the Jews in a hayloft—men, women, children and old people, among them her husband and two children. They set fire to the building and everyone was burned alive." According to another former Jedwabne resident who, shortly after the massacre, met Jews who had fled Jedwabne, they "told us when the Germans first entered their town, they had herded all the Jews into a barn and set it ablaze. Anyone who tried to get out was cut down by machine-gun fire."-->
Survivors
thumb|upright=1.35|Jewish children with their schoolteachers, [[Jedwabne, 1933, including three boys who survived the war by hiding on Antonina Wyrzykowska's farm. Back row, second left: Szmul Wasersztajn (who gave a statement in 1945); third, Mosze Olszewicz; and fourth, Jankiel Kubrzański.]]
The IPN found that some Jews had been alerted by non-Jewish acquaintances the evening before that "a collective action was being prepared against the Jews". Despite a very "aggressive attitude from Polish neighbours" and inspections by German personnel, the Wyrzykowskis managed to hide the group until the Red Army liberated Janczewko from the German occupiers in January 1945. Shortly after, the Wyrzykowskis were beaten by a group of Polish nationalists for having helped Jews; the couple had to leave the area and eventually moved to Milanówek, near Warsaw.
Early criminal investigations, 1949–1965
1949–1950 trials
After the war, in 1949 and 1950, 22<!--or 23?--> suspects from the town and vicinity were put on trial in Poland, accused of collaborating with the Germans during the pogrom. None of the defendants had a higher education and three were illiterate. Twelve were convicted of treason against Poland and one was condemned to death.<!--Add: put in an archive with a note to destroy after 30 years; find source--> Some of the men confessed after being tortured during interviews with the Security Office (UB). The confessions were retracted in court and the accused were released.