Article by the Speaker of the House of Commons ignores Hitler’s genocide of Poles

An 11 December 2022 article in The Guardian written by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, is a glaring example of how a major omission of historical fact about Poland serves as an egregious insult to Poles in the United Kingdom and United States. In his article, After eighty years, there is no excuse to not know about the Holocaust, Mr. Hoyle contends “there is no excuse for not knowing that European Jews and Romany were victims of genocideâ€. Unfortunately, Mr. Hoyle overlooks the fact that Hitler also perpetrated genocide against Poles.

Below are a 19 December 2022 email from PASI EDU President Dr. Gene Sokolowski to Mr. Hoyle requesting a correction to the article, Mr. Hoyle’s inadequate reply on 20 December 2022, and Dr. Sokolowski’s second letter on 21 December 2022 asking again for a correction (to which no reply was received)

19 December 2022 email from Dr. Sokolowski

Subject: “After eighty years, there is no excuse to not know about the Holocaustâ€
Dear Mr. Hoyle,

I am writing in response to your 11 December 2022 article in The Guardian titled “After eighty years, there is no excuse to not know about the Holocaustâ€.

In the third to last paragraph, you state that there is no excuse for not knowing that European Jews and Romany were victims of genocide. Kindly note that Hitler also perpetrated genocide against Poles, an historical fact you overlook.

Nazism’s Racial Purity ideology decreed that the German race, which Hitler called the “Aryan raceâ€, was the master race, while Slavs, Romany, and Jews, were inferior races called “Untermenschen†(subhumans). For Hitler’s Aryan race to survive, racial purity was crucial because intermixing with the inferior races would contaminate it to the point of extinction. Aryans therefore had the duty to exterminate and enslave the inferior races, particularly those living in the territories that were to be conquered and colonized in accordance with Nazism’s Lebensraum ideology.

While Hitler’s policy for European Jews and Romany was comprehensive genocide, his policy for Poles was comprehensive genocide but over a longer period of time. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance calculates the deaths of Polish civilians at the hands of the Germans at approximately 2.8 million and the deaths of Polish Jews at approximately 2.9 million. For Poland, this loss of lives was a double holocaust. You might wish to review the definition of genocide as established by the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide and the five acts that constitute genocide. In doing so, you’ll find that all five acts were committed against Poles while four were committed against Jews and Romany. A review of the history will further confirm that Poles were victims of Hitler’s genocide well before Jews and Romany.

I appreciate your acknowledgment that Anthony Eden’s declaration was based on reports from the Polish government-in-exile. However, the report detailed the atrocities perpetrated against both Poles and Polish Jews, which were committed not by “Nazis†but by the Germans and their annexed Austrian partners in crime. As time goes by, the Germans continue to be eliminated from global awareness and replaced by abstract “Nazisâ€, who have no homeland or children; they evaporated in 1945. Even at its peak, the Nazi party had only 6.5 million members in a population of 69 million, while at least 20 million Germans were involved directly in the war and its associated repressions and mass murders. Supposedly, the rest of the German people “didn’t knowâ€. The operation of thousands of ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps, as well as the large German civil service, railroad system, heavy industry, and agriculture that employed thousands of slave laborers, could not have been accomplished with “Nazis†alone or without the families and lovers of the direct perpetrators knowing about it.

Mr. Hoyle, as Speaker of the House of Commons, it is most unfortunate that your article omits the genocide of Poles and I trust you’ll understand why this omission is offensive to Poles in the UK and the US. As the son of a Pole who survived the Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Natzweiler Struthof, and Neuengamme concentration camps, I would be pleased to assist you in writing a brief correction.

Cordially,

20 December 2022 reply from Mr. Hoyle
Dear Gene,

Mr Speaker has asked me to thank you for your email, the contents of which have been noted.

Mr Speaker appreciates you taking the time to write and sends his best wishes.

With kind regards,
Alessandra Dixon
Speaker’s Office Administrator Apprentice
Speaker’s Office, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA
parliament.uk

21 December 2022 reply email from Dr. Sokolowski

Dear Mr. Hoyle,

Thank you for your reply noting the contents of my email. Unfortunately, it is entirely insufficient. By way of comparison, in the D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944, American, British, and Canadian forces were the main combat units that stormed the beaches of Normandy. Publicly naming the forces of two countries while ignoring the third country would be an egregious insult to the third country as its soldiers also died fighting the Germans. As outlined below, please allow me to share with you compelling historical facts about Poland in World War II.

It’s important to note that Poland was the principal victim of Hitler’s and Stalin’s atrocities. Hitler and Stalin initiated World War II to apportion Eastern Europe between them and the secret protocol in their 1939 nonaggression pact prescribed the destruction of the Polish people and the annihilation of the Polish State. In the first two years of the war, Poles were the primary target of a coordinated German and Soviet extermination process designed to annihilate them on both sides of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line.

Hitler imprisoned virtually all of Poland’s Jews in German-operated ghettos. The Germans immediately established Jewish Councils (Judenräte), who viewed the war with Germany as a Polish matter and ceased all contact with Polish authorities. The Judenräte negotiated the conditions of Jewish governance of the ghettos, gathered up Jews from small towns, and concentrated them in the ghettos of the larger cities. They further kept ghetto Jews convinced they were being deported to work in Germandesignated areas in the East. Beginning in early 1942, they directed the Jewish Ghetto Police to forcibly round up ghetto Jews and load them onto the trains destined for the death camps. While nearly all of Poland’s Jews were imprisoned in the ghettos, Poles were in a day-to-day struggle for survival because of the brutalities and severe conditions exacted by the occupiers. The Germans imposed near-starvation rations, enforced onerous quotas on farmers, confiscated crops and livestock, conducted daily executions to terrorize the populace, randomly arrested and tortured Poles to extract intelligence on the Polish underground, and conducted recurrent round-ups for deportation to concentration and labor camps. Over two million Poles were sent to the camps while up to 200,000 Polish children were abducted for Germanization under Himmler’s Lebensborn program and most never returned.

Only in occupied Poland did the Germans maintain a standing order that anyone aiding a Jew would be executed together with immediate family. Despite this death penalty, Poles rescued thousands of Jews. Israel’s Yad Vashem honors those who saved Jews from the Germans and the number of Poles, over 7,100, is far more than any other country. Two Polish organizations that secretly rescued tens of thousands of Jews in German-occupied Poland were Żegota and the Polish Catholic Church. Żegota provided safe houses, food, medical care, money, and false documents so that Jews would be identified as Poles. An estimated 50,000 Jews were aided by Żegota. Up to 20,000 Żegota members are estimated to have been executed by the Germans. Irena Sendler of Żegota’s Children’s Bureau rescued about 2,500 Jewish children and placed them with Polish families. The Polish Catholic Church rescued Jewish children on a massive scale by hiding them in convents, orphanages, and rectories. Two-thirds of Polish nunneries took part in the rescue of Jewish children.

The Polish government-in-exile in London was the first to expose the Germans’ atrocities. Through the press and diplomatic channels, it tried constantly to inform the Allies, neutral countries, and the international community about what was happening in Auschwitz and other camps as well Hitler’s killing of Poles and Jews. Sadly, the U.S. and Britain chose not to intervene, which enabled Hitler to continue his campaign of mass murder.

The Red Army committed war crimes on thousands of Poles in a wave of arrests and summary executions. Stalin deported more than 500,000 Polish citizens to the gulags and slave labor camps, where many died due to the privations suffered during the deportations in cattle cars and from the harsh conditions of the camps. Stalin also executed 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn Forest, a genocidal war crime that was suppressed and ignored by the Allies at the Nuremberg Trials.

Poland was a key contributor to the Allied victory over Germany. Breaking the German encryption machine Enigma was perhaps Poland’s greatest contribution. In the Battle of Britain, Polish RAF fighter squadrons weren’t allowed to fly until the midway point. Nevertheless, the 303rd Kosciuszko Squadron was the highest scoring unit and shot down 126 German planes in 6 weeks. The Polish 2nd Corps defeated the Germans at Monte Cassino, which enabled the Allies to advance northward to Rome. It then went on to liberate the Italian cities of Loreto, Ancona, Faenza, and Bologna. The Battle of Falaise Gap was the final battle of Normandy and was key to the liberation of France. By defeating much larger German forces, the Polish 1st Armoured Division collapsed the German position in France. It then advanced eastward and liberated the Belgian cities of Ypres, Oostnieuwkerke, Roeselare, Tielt, Ruislede, and Ghent, and the city of Breda in the Netherlands. The Polish Navy fought the German Navy alongside the Allied navies in Norway, the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Polish naval vessels participated in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, the landings in Normandy during D-Day, and the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk.

Poles developed a number of technological innovations that were crucial to the success of various Allied military operations. These included a land mine detector selected by the British Army over their own prototype, a tank periscope renamed the Vickers Tank Periscope, an aircraft bomb release system used in various British bombers, and a high frequency direction finder engineered for the Royal Navy that was highly effective in finding and sinking U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. Poland’s underground Home Army gave the British crucial information on Germany’s secret-weapons projects, including the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which enabled the British to set these programs back by bombing the launch sites. The Home Army also recovered a V-2 rocket from a test launch and secretly shipped it to Britain.

Mr. Hoyle, I’ve presented two key facts about Poland in World War II. Poland was not only the war’s foremost victim; it also played a prominent role in the Allied defeat of Germany. In light of the above facts, I again ask you to issue a brief correction pointing out that Hitler committed genocide against the Poles.

Cordially,