An important sentence in advance:
With the following article I do not want to relativize the actions of the Germans in the context of the Holocaust or to distract from the guilt of many, many Germans for the mass murder of the Jews of Europe!
But in Jedwabne others murdered!

And truth must remain truth.

On July 10, 1941, the inhabitants of the northwest Polish town of Jedwabne murder at least 400 of their fellow Jews!

After the military defeat of Poland in autumn 1939, the defeated country was divided between the German Rich and the Soviet Union due to the "Hitler-Stalin Pact".

Jedwabne fell to the Soviet Union - the Hitlerite force that had originally captured the city ...



... cleared it again.

The Soviet occupiers - like in the rest of Poland - immediately attempted to destroy the existing civil order as completely as possible.



The NKVD in particular used brutal violence against the old political and social elites: landowners, church people, bourgeois politicians and others were arrested, tortured, deported and in many cases shot straight away.

Like all members of religious communities, the Jews were persecuted - at the same time they, who had belonged to a maximally tolerated minority in old Poland, also had unexpected opportunities for advancement among the new lords if they denied their religion and were devoted to Stalin and the party.

Among the Catholic Poles, the word was circulated by the Jews as supposed beneficiaries of the Soviet rule.

On June 23, 1941, just one day after the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union, Jedwabne was occupied by units of the Hitler Army without a fight ...:



At first it remained quiet in the city - even though many Poles were already "revenge" on the Jews and spiritually stabbing the knives.

On July 10, 1941, the front shifted far to the east, leaving only a few German soldiers and a handful of police officers in Jedwabne.

On the morning of this day, the Poles violently rub together their Jewish citizens in the market square ...:








The first are beaten there and some are murdered.

The remaining Jews are driven into a barn outside the village ...



... locked up there - and burned alive ...:



Their property is then looted and taken over by Poland. Only a few Jews who had previously been able to hide survive the pogrom.

There are considerable disagreements about the number of victims of the massacre: some sources speak of 1,600 victims (especially the Communist-Polish information after 1945), others of "only" 300 to 400 deaths ...:



Nearly almost of the sources agree that the Germans only watched the pogrom (and made film and photo shoots of it), but otherwise remained completely passive.

After the war, the new Polish authorities charged 22 residents of Jedwabne with murder.

Karol Bardon: death penalty, converted into 15 years' imprisonment after Bolesław Bierut's appeal
Jerzy Laudański: 15 years in prison
Zygmunt Laudański: twelve years in prison
Władysław Miciura: twelve years in prison
Bolesław Ramotowski: twelve years in prison
Stanisław Zejer: ten years in prison
and Czesław Lipiński: ten years in prison
Władysław Dąbrowski: eight years in prison
Feliks Tarnacki: eight years in prison
Roman Górski: eight years in prison
Antoni Niebrzydowski: eight years in prison
Józef Zyluk: eight years in prison

On June 13, 1950, two of the convicts were acquitted by an appeals court.

As in the case of Katyn and other programs that took place at the same time as the events in Jedwabne, the masses were put in the shoes of the Germans!

In 1960 the city erected a memorial stone with the wording: “A martyrdom of the Jewish population occurred here. On July 10, 1941, the Gestapo and Hitler police burned 1,600 people alive. "





It was only 60 years after the events that someone dared to tackle this state-prescribed "truth":

The in the USA living Polish historian Jan Tomasz Gross ...



... published his book "Neighbors. The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne" in 2000, in which he revised the previous account of the Jedwabne massacre and exposed it as a falsification of history ...:



Gross was massively attacked for his book in Poland ...



... (and also threatened with death!), there were calls from various "intellectuals" who certified his book a "level below a master's thesis".

The then - still democratic - official Poland adopted Gross's perspective, supported by hundreds of irrefutable facts!

On the 60th anniversary of the incident, a commemoration took place in Jedwabne on July 10, 2001, at which Poland's President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (next center), in his and the name of those Poles whose conscience was stirred up by the crime, for forgiveness for the massacre asked ...:



A new memorial was also erected with the inscription: "In memory of the Jews from Jedwabne and the surrounding area, the murdered men, women and children, roommates in this area, who were burned alive at this point".



Although the inscription expressly does not identify anyone as a perpetrator, the residents of Jedwabne boycotted the event.

The local Catholic priest had the church bells ringing all the time while addressing the President to drown out President's speech as much as possible.

The memorial was subsequently covered with nationalist propaganda ...



... and finally badly damaged in 2011 ...:



To date, it has not been repaired.
Since 2017 there exists a new law in Poland, which - among other things - threatens anyone with a prison sentence of up to three years who claims that the Polish state or individual Poles participated in the murder of the Jews.
This law, as was expressly said in Parliament, was also created because of the controversy surrounding the Jedwabne massacre.

Hey Martin, thank you for this interesting historical piece. I was not previously aware of this massacre. If I may add:
1. In the photo of the commemoration service from 2001, you can see next to President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, standing the then Israeli ambassador, Professor Shevah Weiss (b. 1935), himself a holocaust survivor from Poland (he was born in a Boryslaw, then Poland, today Ukraine)
2. The Hebrew text on the memorial in the first picture also does not put the blame on anyone. It says (unfortunately, I don't speak Polish, and neither Yiddish, although written in Hebrew fonts): "To the memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and the area. Men, women and children, who lived among us on this land, and were murdered and burned alive here, July 10, 1941. July 10, 2001"
3. The Hebrew text on the next photo (a tomb, actually) goes: "An eternal resting place for the Jews of Jedwabne and the area, may they rest in piece. A mass-grave burial site for the holly souls of Jedwabne, may G-O-D take revenge upon their blood, that were killed and burned as martyrs on 15 of the month of Tamuz, year 5701"

Benny