Those Who Justify Genocide

Michael McManus asks what remains of morality in the face of genocide.

- Michael McManus

“I made the effort to shoot only children… it was soothing to my conscience to redeem children unable to live without their mothers.”

– Member of a Nazi police death squad

Israel recognises 6,620 Poles for their sacrifices, sometimes of their lives and their children’s lives, in helping Jews during WWII. The figure far exceeds the number of heroes in France, or in fifty other countries listed at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust (one exception is the Netherlands). Some of the Polish heroism is described in Code Name: Zegota (2010) by Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski. It is therefore a tragedy that Poland briefly brought in penalties for anyone speaking of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, for complicity there was. Poland could instruct us all on the complexity of morality under enemy occupation, but foolish leaders have chosen instead to ally themselves with those who deny their history – such as the manipulators who rule Turkey and deny Turkish responsibility for the genocide of Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1922.

In 1992 Christopher Browning published an in-depth study of the Police Battalions operating as death squads in Poland. He titled it