The Historiography of the Holocaust

War, Occupation and the Holocaust in Poland 91
a multifaceted interpretation, integrating the role of Soviet occupation. The
milestone for research was published in 1970: Madajczyk’s two-volume history
of the German occupation. In the 1980s he added a broader interpretation,
comparing all German (and Italian) occupations in Europe during the war. 7
These works still count among the most important, but they have been
challenged over the years: Madajczyk devotes only minor parts of his books to
the Holocaust, which affected Poland more than any other country, and he
tends to see collaboration as having only marginal significance.
Western syntheses had a more limited approach, like that of Martin Broszat
who, as early as 1961, outlined German policy in Poland, and Richard Lukas,
who concentrated on the suffering of the Poles. 8 Although there has been
a good deal of research on society under occupation and resistance, it was not
until 1993 that Czeslaw Luczak, the leading historian of the occupation’s economic
policy, tried to synthesize all aspects of the war, including the Soviet
occupation and the exiled Poles. 9 Eugeniusz Duraczynski, in a rather oldfashioned
approach, concentrated on the political history of the Poles, the
resistance and the government-in-exile. 10 In a combined effort, Polish and
German historians have recently tried to summarize the state of research on
German–Polish relations during the war and immediately afterwards. 11
War
The war on Polish soil, in 1939 and then again in 1944/45, was dealt with quite
early on, but was seen almost exclusively as a German–Polish and only later as
a Polish–Soviet conflict. Since the 1980s a broad re-evaluation of the Soviet role
has taken place.
Most of the inquiry was devoted to the diplomatic crisis caused by Hitler’s
war plans during the summer of 1939. 12 Since the opening of the Russian
archives, nearly all the important aspects of the crisis have been dealt with, even
though major syntheses were published without these sources. 13 The so-called
Hitler–Stalin pact has been discussed in-depth since the 1980s, and in the CIS
and the Baltic states since the 1990s.
While studies on the German campaign in September 1939 are almost
exclusively older, 14 recent years have brought forward several new publications
on the Soviet entry into the war on 17 September and the immediate cooperation
of both powers immediately after the fall of Poland. 15
Aspects of the war other than political and operational ones – like the fate of
Polish POWs – were not dealt with extensively. 16 The Jews among them were
treated far worse than their non-Jewish comrades. 17 Research concentrates here
on the murder of Polish POWs (and civilians) by the Soviet NKVD in 1940,
especially in Katyn, Kalinin and Kharkov. 18 With regard to POWs in German
captivity, one has to rely on studies of individual camps. Nothing substantive