The Historiography of the Holocaust

96 Dieter Pohl
inside (the post-war borders of) Polish territory was put together, a considerable
addition to the directory of memorials. 59
A main precondition for the investigation of Nazi crimes is a broad knowledge
of the police apparatus, the main executor of policies and violence in the east.
Long before western historians started to investigate the German police in depth,
Polish historians had published regional and branch studies of the German
occupation police. 60 The main interest was, of course, in the Gestapo, which
was responsible for organizing and implementing persecutions and mass
murder. Several regional and local studies have been published, but as yet no
synthesis. 61 Western research on the Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) still
excludes the occupied Polish territories for the most part.
During the early occupation, a specific terror apparatus emerged, the ethnic
German Selbstschutz, which was to a large extent responsible for the first mass
murders of Poles. 62 The main target of Nazi extermination in that period was
the so-called ‘Polish intelligentsia’, which included teachers, university personnel
and clerics, but also members of political organizations and participants of
the 1921 Silesian Uprisings. The victim groups were extended as retaliation for
alleged Polish crimes against ethnic Germans. During this period, the annexed
territories, especially western Prussia, became major sites of mass murder. 63 The
intelligentsia in central Poland was heavily affected by mass arrests, as with the
infamous incident with the Cracow professors, which in Polish national
consciousness has almost equal status with the massacre at Katyn. 64 In spring
1940 mass murder also struck the Polish intelligentsia in the Generalgouvernement,
in the so-called Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion. 65 Later, mass arrests were
frequent, for example, during the so-called Asozialenaktion at the beginning
of 1943.
Alleged resistance or violations of any occupation rules resulted in trials in
the infamous Sondergerichte (special courts) or in direct deportation to the
camps. The special courts were most active in the annexed territories, based on
the specific Polenrecht and, until early 1942, against the Jews. 66 Their activity
was almost unknown in the West for a long time. 67 But most of the persecuted
Poles were sent to concentration camps, mostly to Dachau and Mauthausen,
where they constituted a major inmate group.
The variety of camps on Polish soil has been dealt with nearly exclusively by
Polish historians, who put together an encyclopaedia of camps and internment
places (inside current Polish borders), which lists no fewer than 5,800: camps,
their branches, ghettos and prisons. 68 Regional studies show the camp density
in more detail. 69 Of course, the large concentration camps on Polish soil have
attracted most attention. The Auschwitz State Museum published a five-volume
history of the camp and an impressive camp chronology; 70 there is intensive
research, especially by the Museum staff and in its journal, 71 but also by historians.
72 On a smaller scale, the same can be said for Majdanek, which was at one