As we approach May 8, the 73rd commemoration of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies, many Jews – and many Poles – need to be reminded of both groups’ significant battlefield contributions to the Allied victory.
Andrzej Zybertowicz, a professor of sociology at Nicholas Copernicus University and an adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, recently said that Israel’s reaction to Poland’s “Holocaust Law” stems from a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.’” He is just the latest to subscribe to the pernicious “myth of Jewish passivity” during World War II.
In fact, 1.5 million Jews fought in the Allied armed forces – including 550,000 Jews in the American army, 500,000 in the Soviet army, and at least 100,000 in the Polish army. The remaining 350,000 Jewish uniformed combatants served in the armed forces of Great Britain (including 30,000 from Palestine), France, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and the other Allied nations.
The late Benjamin Meirtchak, a Jewish-Polish World War II veteran who immigrated to Israel in 1948, wrote a five-volume history of Jewish battlefield contributions and sacrifices in the Polish war effort. While Meirtchak was honored in 1999 by the Polish government for his World War II service and for his documentation of the bravery and sacrifices of Jewish-Polish soldiers, the current Polish government and its advisers seem to have forgotten the number of Jews who fought for Poland during World War II.
Also forgotten, though, among some is the Poles’ heroic effort in fighting Hitler. According to A War To Be Won: Fighting The Second World War (2000), by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, Poland suffered 123,000 military deaths during the war. More than 100,000 Polish soldiers joined General Karol Swierczewski’s Second Polish Army and General Zygmunt Berling’s First Polish Army, which fought on the Eastern Front from September 1943 until May 1945, suffering heavy casualties during the capture of Berlin. The Second Polish Army entered combat in January 1945 and fought valiantly in the Prague Offensive in early May 1945 and other battles.
Another group of Polish soldiers and citizens, which included future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin, joined General Wladyslaw Anders’ Army of 80,000 soldiers. They were transferred to British-controlled Palestine, beginning in mid-1942 and fought in the Tunisia campaign in early 1943 and thereafter in the Italian Campaign. In addition, at least 750,000 Polish Americans served in World War II. Indeed, Polish-American GIs arguably hated the Nazis as much as the Jewish-American GIs.
In 2011, Professor Gerhard Weinberg, the 90-year-old dean of American World War II historians, published an article, “Some Myths of World War II,” in which he gently chided most writers about the Holocaust for not paying “sufficient attention to the way the military developments of the war impacted the subject they study.” Sadly, during the second decade of the 21st century, many Holocaust historians ignore, or misrepresent, the actual fighting in the bloodiest war in history, in which more than 60 million people perished, including more than 20 million uniformed personnel.