During the German occupation of Poland, citizens of all its major ethnic groups collaborated with the Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary. Collaboration in Poland was less institutionalized than in some other countries and has been described as marginal, a point of pride with the Polish people. During and after the war, the Polish government in exile (a member of the Allied coalition that fought Nazi Germany) and the Polish resistance movement punished collaborators and sentenced thousands of them to death.
Background
Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler sought to establish Poland as a client state, proposing a multilateral territorial exchange and an extension of the German–Polish non-aggression pact. The Polish government, fearing subjugation to Nazi Germany, instead chose to form an alliance with Britain (and later with France). In response, Germany withdrew from the non-aggression pact and shortly before invading Poland, signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union, safeguarding Germany against Soviet retaliation if it invaded Poland, and prospectively dividing Poland between the two totalitarian powers.
On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. The German army overran Polish defenses while inflicting heavy civilian losses, and by 13 September had conquered most of western Poland. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east, conquering most of eastern Poland, along with the Baltic states and parts of Finland in 1940. Some 140,000 Polish soldiers and airmen escaped to Romania and Hungary, and later many soon joining the Polish Armed Forces in France. Poland's government crossed the border into Romania, and later formed a government-in-exile in France and then in London, following the French capitulation. Poland as a polity never surrendered to the Germans.
Nazi authorities annexed the westernmost parts of Poland and the former Free City of Danzig, incorporating it directly into Nazi Germany, and placed the remaining German-occupied territory under the administration of the newly formed General Government. The Soviet Union annexed the rest of Poland, incorporating its territories into the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics. Germany's primary aim in Eastern Europe was to expand Germany's Lebensraum, in the name of which elimination or deportation of all non-Germanic ethnicities, including Poles in the areas controlled by the General Government was to make them "free" of Poles within 15–20 years. This resulted in harsh policies which targeted the Polish population, in addition to Nazi Germany's explicit goal of exterminating Polish Jews, which was carried out in the occupied Polish territories.
Individual collaboration Estimates of the number of individual Polish collaborators vary according to the definition of "collaboration". According to Klaus-Peter Friedrich estimates range from as few as 7,000 to as many as several hundred thousand (including Polish officials employed by the German authorities; Blue Police officers, who were required to serve; compulsory "labor service" workers; members of Poland's German minority; and even Poland's peasantry, which on the one hand was subject to food requisitions by the Germans, and on the other collaborated and benefited financially from the wartime economy and the removal of Jews from the Polish economy for much of the war. Post-war communist Polish propaganda painted the entire non-communist Polish resistance, in particular the Home Army, as "Nazi collaborators".
Czesław Madajczyk estimates that 5% of the population in the General Government actively collaborated, which he contrasts with the 25% who actively resisted the occupation.Czesław Madajczyk, Kann man in Polen 1939-1945 von Kollaborationsprechen, okupation und Kollaboration 1938-1945. Beitrage zu Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen Okkupationspolitik, Berlin, Heidelberg, W. Rohr, 1994, p. 140. Historian John Connelly writes that "only a relatively small percentage of the Polish population engaged in activities that may be described as collaboration, when seen against the backdrop of European and world history." However, he criticizes the same population for its indifference to the Jewish plight, a phenomenon he terms "structural collaboration" (see more below).
Political collaboration
Unlike the situation in most German-occupied European countries where the Germans successfully installed collaborationist governments, in occupied Poland there was no puppet government. The Germans had initially considered the creation of a collaborationist Polish cabinet to administer, as a protectorate, the occupied Polish territories that had not been annexed outright into the Third Reich. At the beginning of the war German officials contacted several Polish leaders with proposals for collaboration, but they all refused. Among those who rejected the German offers were Wincenty Witos, peasant party leader and former Prime Minister; Prince Janusz Radziwiłł; and Stanisław Estreicher, prominent scholar from the Jagiellonian University.
In 1940, during the German invasion of France, the French government suggested that Polish politicians in France negotiate an accommodation with Germany; and in Paris the prominent journalist Stanislaw Mackiewicz tried to get Polish President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz to negotiate with the Germans, as the French defenses were collapsing and German victory seemed inevitable. Three days later the Polish Government and Polish National Council rejected discussing capitulation and declared they would fight on until full victory over Nazi Germany. A group of eight low-ranking Polish politicians and officers broke with the Polish Government and in Lisbon, Portugal, addressed a memorandum to Germany, asking for discussions about restoring a Polish state under German occupation, which was rejected by the Germans. According to Czeslaw Madajczyk, in view of the low profile of the Poles involved and of Berlin's rejection of the memorandum, no political collaboration can be said to have taken place.Czeslaw Madajczyk "Nie chciana kolaboracja. Polscy politycy i nazistowskie Niemcy w Lipcu 1940", Bernard Wiaderny, Paryz 2002, Dzieje Najnowsze 35/2 226-229 2003
The Nazi racial policies and Germany's plans for the conquered Polish territories, on one hand, and Polish anti-German attitudes on the other, combined to prevent any Polish-German political collaboration. The Nazis envisioned the eventual disappearance of the Polish nation, which was to be replaced by German settlers."Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, 'Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?'... Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by [German] pioneer farmer-soldier families." Alex Ross, "The Hitler Vortex: How American racism influenced Nazi thought", The New Yorker, 30 April 2018, pp. 71–72. In April 1940 Hitler banned any negotiations concerning any degree of autonomy for the Poles, and no further consideration was given to the idea.
Shortly after the German occupation began, pro-German right-wing politician Andrzej Świetlicki formed an organization - the National Revolutionary Camp - and approached the Germans with various offers of collaboration, which they ignored. Świetlicki was arrested and executed in 1940. Władysław Studnicki, another nationalist maverick politician and anti-communist publicist, and Leon Kozłowski, a former Prime Minister, each favored Polish-German cooperation against the Soviet Union, but were both also rejected by the Germans.
Security forces
The main security forces in German-occupied Poland were some 550,000 soldiers and 80,000 SS and police officials sent from Germany.Czesław Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce, Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970, vol. 1, p. 242.
Blue Police
In October 1939 the German authorities ordered mobilization of the prewar Polish police to serve under the German Ordnungspolizei, thus creating the auxiliary "Blue Police" that supplemented the principal German forces. The Polish policemen were to report for duty by 10 November 1939 or face death. At its peak in May 1944, the Blue Police numbered some 17,000 men. Their primary task was to act as a regular police force dealing with criminal activities, but the Germans also used them in combating smuggling and resistance, rounding up random civilians (łapanka) for forced labor or for execution in reprisal for Polish resistance activities (e.g., the Polish underground's execution of Polish traitors or egregiously brutal Germans), patrolling for Jewish ghetto escapees, and in support of military operations against the Polish resistance.
Polish Criminal Police (Polnische Kriminalpolizei)
The Germans also created a Polnische Kriminalpolizei.. The Polish criminal police team was trained at the Security Police School and the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) in Rabka-Zdrój. It's estimated that there were between 1,790 and 2,800 ethnic Poles in the Polish Kripo units. The organization of the Polish Criminal Police was analogous to the organization of the German “Kriminalpolizei" and consisted of various police stations. Station 1 dealt with robberies, assaults, murders and sabotage; station 2 - with small thefts; station 3 - with burglary and house thieves; station 4 - moral crimes; station 5 - with internal service, search of Jews in hiding and other wanted persons; station 6 - with registration of wanted persons, station 7 - with forensic technique, and photographic laboratory.
Auxiliary police
The German General Government tried to form additional Polish auxiliary police units—Schutzmannschaft Battalion 202 in 1942, and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 107 in 1943. Very few men volunteered, and the Germans decided on forced conscription to fill their ranks. Most of the conscripts subsequently deserted, and the two units were disbanded. Schutzmannschaft Battalion 107 mutinied against its German officers, disarmed them, and joined the Home Army resistance.Józef Turowski, Pożoga: Walki 27 Wołyńskiej Dywizji AK, PWN, , pp. 154-155.
Some Poles also passed on the side of the Soviet partisanslike Mikołaj Kunicki, Kompanieführer in Schutzmannschaft 104. Poles also served in Byelorussian Auxiliary PoliceCezary Chlebowski, Reportaż z tamtych dni Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, Warszawa 1988, ss. 248-249 or in Ypatingasis būrysdue to the fact that part of Lithuania and Belarus was part of the Second Polish Republic.
In 1944, in the General Government, Germany attempted to recruit 12,000 Polish volunteers to "join the fight against Bolshevism". The campaign failed; only 699 men were recruited, 209 of whom either deserted or were disqualified for health reasons.
Poles in the Wehrmacht
Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, many former citizens of the Second Polish Republic from across the Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht in Upper Silesia and in Pomerania. They were declared citizens of the Third Reich by law and therefore subject to drumhead court-martial in case of draft evasion. Professor Ryszard Kaczmarek of the University of Silesia in Katowice, author of a monograph, Polacy w Wehrmachcie (Poles in the Wehrmacht), noted that the scale of this phenomenon was much larger than previously assumed, because 90% of the inhabitants of these two westernmost regions of prewar Poland were ordered to register on the German People's List (Volksliste), regardless of their wishes. The exact number of these conscripts is not known; no data exists beyond 1943.