The Historiography of the Holocaust

98 Dieter Pohl
had been captured during the first year of ‘Operation Barbarossa’. Approximately
half a million Soviet soldiers died in POW camps in Poland, most of
them from neglect, but tens of thousands of ‘undesirables’ – Jewish soldiers or
commissars – were shot. 84 Polish historiography predominantly reconstructed
the history of those POW camps in areas that came under Polish rule only
in 1945. 85
The fate of Polish Romanies began to receive attention only in the 1990s.
Apparently there was no overall plan to kill all of them, but nevertheless
a genocide took place. Approximately 10,000 Romanies, especially those without
permanent residence, were killed by local police. Even more, deported from
central Europe, died in Auschwitz. 86
Soviet occupation
The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland constitutes a new field of research.
Despite some important first efforts, 87 nearly all source-based research has been
done since the 1990s, when the Russian archives were opened. This research
has reached a state which is in many respects similar to the historiography of
the Nazi occupation. It is not surprising that Polish historiography, especially
Albin Glowacki’s synthesis, concentrates on the Poles in the eastern territories, 88
while Ukrainian historians have focused on Volhynia and eastern Galicia with
its Ukrainian majority. 89
Soviet rule led to the Sovietization of these areas, a new political order and
the gradual expropriation of all major private property – business enterprises,
houses and farms. As in the German case, the outstanding feature was persecution,
mass arrests and four waves of deportation into remote areas of the Soviet
Union, some into the Gulag. Poles and Jewish refugees were among the main
targets of this repression. 90 In eastern Poland the NKVD hunted down alleged
resisters, many of whom were executed after secret trials. Finally, the NKVD
killed most of its political prisoners during the retreat from the advancing
Wehrmacht in June 1941. 91 Very few historians have dared to try comparative
approaches, especially for the years 1939–41, when both dictatorships ruled
Poland at the same time. 92
Holocaust
The Jews were the main victims of the Nazi occupation and the only group to
be the target of complete extermination from 1941 on. The majority of Polish
citizens who fell victim to German rule were of Jewish origin. Despite these
simple facts, for a long time the Holocaust did not play a central role in the
historiography of wartime Poland. Until 1968 the Jewish Historical Institute in
Warsaw regularly published solid reconstructions of the Jews’ fate, 93 summarized