THE
SUMMIT TIMESTHE
SUMMIT TIMESAN ANSWER TO BRUMBERG'S SLANDER OF POLAND IN "FOREIGN AFFAIRS"
by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
The Council on Foreign Relations publishes Foreign Affairs Magazine in which it defines the acceptable range of policy alternatives for the government of the United States. The reasons for its dominant position is its continuity over decades, and its membership of the most highly intellectual and experienced scholars and diplomats in the US.
Since World War II the council selected every secretary of state, some of them not even previously known to the President of the United States. It is significant that the September - October 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine includes a Poland-bashing article, "Poles and Jews," by Abraham Brumberg, in which he approvingly quotes J. T. Gross: "the criminal reflexes of Polish society directed against Jews were not incidental occurrences..." Here the two writers are parroting Hitler's remarks about the Jews being a "congenitally criminal race" -- merely changing the object of venom.
The inclusion now of the slanderous anti-Polish article means that the policies of the United States towards Poland have not been influenced in a positive direction by the recent visit of Mr. Kwasniewski in Washington, and his very familiar and congenial discussions with President Bush, as shown on TV.
The racist attitude of Brumberg towards the Poles is similar to that of the Nazis towards the Jews during World War II. In "Poles and Jews," as in his previous article "Murder Most Foul" Brumberg (London Times Literary Supplement, 3/2/2001), is trying to condemn the Polish nation and its proud traditions of tolerance and struggle for independence. He is trying to present the Polish nation as a bunch of degenerates whose major purpose in life was to torment Jews.
This is similar to Nazi attempts to present all Jews as degenerates whose major purpose in life was to hurt the Aryan race. Blumberg's article is racist and it is filled with hate. Gross's pamphlet and Blumberg's article will inflame passions rather than encourage people to unite and commemorate in dignity the injustices and crimes of the past.
The Council on Foreign Relations determines the direction of American foreign policy and has more influence on the relations of the United States with all foreign countries than either the Congress or the President. The purpose of publication now of such a contemptuous and slanderous attack on Poland indicates a determined support for the shakedown of Poland after Switzerland by the World Jewish Restitution Organization of the World Jewish Congress.
The World Jewish Restitution Organization collected huge sums from Germany and then obtained $1,250,000,000 from Swiss banks on the original claim valued at $32,000,000 by the Volker Commission. The huge size of the payment was partially a ransom paid by the Swiss banks under the threat of a boycott of all Swiss banks' activity in New York. More recently nearly one half of all the money from the German slave labor compensation fund was collected by Jewish organizations to the dismay of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish survivors of German slave labor. Now, in order to continue functioning, the movement for property claims must find other people guilty of the Holocaust. Poland is next in line as a new NATO partner on the verge of admission into the European Union.
Prewar Jewish properties in Polish real estate will soon be worth many times more than they are worth now. The acquisition by the World Jewish Restitution Organization of this fabulous wealth will be possible when under the international pressure the Polish parliament or the president, by a presidential agreement, would authorize these international Jewish organizations to find and take over all prewar Jewish properties in Poland. In support of these claims the Zionist lobby has already used threats by members of the US Congress, Senator Hilary Clinton prominent among them. Polish parliamentarians who wanted to place limits on the amount of compensation were accused by the World Jewish Congress of "anti-Americanism" - something that Poland can ill afford when it is so greatly dependent on American goodwill. Ironically, Poland is the most pro-American member of NATO at the present time as implied by President Bush, when recently he introduced Mr. Kwasniewski, the President of Poland.
The wealth here under consideration represents some fifteen to twenty percent of the total Polish national wealth reaching more than one hundred billion dollars. This involves more units of property by far then there are surviving Jews living in Poland today. If it is centrally administered by the World Jewish Restitution Organization, it would became the strongest financial and political entity in Poland, capable of putting the country on the road of becoming a vassal state of Israel. Thus, Poland is on the verge of becoming a victim of a shakedown. Probably, after Poland the next will be the other former Soviet satellites such as Hungary and Slovakia, and then Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia -- when these former Soviet republics recover economically (and some of them will be able to join NATO and the European Union).
The World Jewish Restitution Organization generates enormous amount of publicity, which in fact becomes a powerful free advertising campaign for its cause. Thus, for example, it was known for years that in June 1941 the German government decided to make propaganda claims that its invasion of the USSR had been welcomed by the people who were earlier terrorized by the Soviets. Thus, the mass murders of the communists and Jews were to be presented to the world as local acts of revenge. In order for German propaganda to succeed, the German government ordered the eradication of all traces of the presence of German personnel at the execution sites. Taking souvenir pictures was forbidden, and no daily reports of the activities of units of executioners were to be made.
This absence of German documentation relating to the execution sites permitted the recycling of Nazi propaganda which blamed the local populations for German murders. But this time such propaganda was done by the Zionists of the property claims movement, and their supporters who work hard to make Poland appear to be guilty of the Holocaust.
A great uproar in the Polish media started when a fictional version of the events of July 10 in Jedwabne was promulgated by the supporters of the World Jewish Restitution Organization as a proof of Poland's national guilt in the Holocaust. This preposterous notion was rebutted by authentic witnesses of the events in Jedwabne and in neighboring towns. The net result of the recent "media battle of Jedwabne," to use the expression coined by Dr. Jozef Wieczynski in correspondence with me on that subject, was an enormous amount of free publicity for the Zionist property claims movement throughout the world (Dr. Wieczynski is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe and chief editor of the fifty volume encyclopedia on Russian history).
It is obvious that this media battle will remain inconclusive until a complete and rigorous forensic study is performed of the two mass graves containing the basic evidence of the number of victims and the cause of death of each. At the present time practically all the forensic evidence remains buried. Under these circumstances the only remedy is to complete the forensic exhumation of the two graves and the surrounding area in order to properly document the murders at Jedwabne as indicated by Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski, a forensic authority, and the only American member of the French Academy of Medicine.
Unfortunately in the present post-communist government of Poland, both the president and the prime minister, found it expedient to follow the lead of the Zionists of the World Jewish Restitution Organization. They were so eager to please the Zionists that they even used the "politics of apology and contrition" to blame the Polish people for such German crimes as that of Jedwabne where the locals played very secondary roles at most. However, it should not be forgotten that the national memory of all the postwar satellite states preserved a recollection of the central role, and disproportional representation, of the Jewish minority in Stalin's security apparatus, which used bloody terror and mass murders to enforce the communization of their native lands. This historical fact was acknowledged in print by no less of an authority than the world's most prestigious Jewish newspaper, the New York Times.
The absurdity of the deceitful versions of J. T. Gross and Abraham Brumberg stories was dignified by the publication in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs (a bi-monthly magazine), which disseminated to the world the wild, unsubstantiated, and tendentious allegations, and presented them as historical truth. This requires refutation with historical facts as they are presently known -- but perhaps not wanted by those authors.
It was on July 10, 1941, that German executioners collected Jews of Jedwabne in the town square and drove them by physical violence to the site of their murder. First they shot some 50 Jews and then burned alive, possibly as many as 250 others (not 1600 or 1800 as inaccurately reported in the American press on the basis of false information published by J. T. Gross who ignored Soviet and other sources, as well as German archives, in his book Neighbors).
The executioners of the Einsatztruppen enlisted the help of several ethnic Germans living in Poland (the "Volksdeutche", known also as traitors and spies), and a group of primitive and illiterate criminals, both local and from out of town, as well as possibly a few "avengers." The latter must have believed that they and their relatives had suffered murderous persecution by Soviet security officers or deportation to the Gulags -- because they were betrayed by some of the Jews living in Jedwabne. German executioners forced an additional number of Poles, at gunpoint, with blows of rifle butts, and with threats, to help bring Jewish victims to the town square (the marketplace) ostensibly to clean the pavement.
According to eyewitnesses still living today, uniformed Germans committed this wartime atrocity. They forced some 300 Jews to march in a mock-funeral procession while carrying a concrete head of Lenin that had been removed from a monument.
The Germans of the Einsatztruppen divided the marchers into two groups. The first group consisted of some 50 Jews, men strong enough to put up a fight. The second group was formed from the remaining Jews, mostly old people, women, and children.
While the second group was held back, the first group was directed into a 62 by 23 foot wooden barn. The keys to the barn were confiscated a day earlier by uniformed Germans, who removed agricultural machinery from it and prepared it for the execution of the Jews next day. (The daughter of the owner of the barn repeatedly testified about this fact, most recently on CBS "60 minutes" on March 24, 2002.)The able-bodied Jewish men were ordered to dig a large grave inside the barn, ostensibly for burying Lenin's concrete head. (J. T. Gross wants his readers to believe that the head of Lenin was buried in the Jewish cemetery.) As the diggers stood near the grave, the Germans shot them and then ordered several Poles to drag into the shallow grave the bodies of the Jews, some slain and some wounded but possibly still alive. Lenin's concrete head was placed on top of the victims in grave #1. The German executioners then ordered the second, more defenseless, group into the barn, which moments later would be turned into a gigantic funeral pyre.
Stefan Boczkowski, Roman Chojnowski and five other eyewitnesses reported seeing the following: A small German military truck loaded with soldiers and gasoline canisters quickly pulled up to the barn crowded with Jews. Some of the soldiers jumped down from the truck, and those soldiers staying in the truck handed them the canisters, whose contents they poured on all outer walls of the barn. The flames engulfed the barn at once. Pyrotechnic analysis indicates that the Germans used approximately 100 gallons (over 400 liters) of gasoline to soak some 1000 square ft. of walls of the barn in order to engulf all of it with fire, burn it, and in process suffocate the victims (by inhalation of the hot smoke). Later (reportedly the next day) the Germans ordered Poles at gunpoint to bury the partly burned bodies emanating a horrible odor. Remains of at most 250 victims were buried in grave #2, located along the barn (the high content of water in human bodies requires temperature of some 800 degrees Centigrade for more than thirty minutes in order to obtain a complete cremation).
At that time there was no gasoline available to the local population of Jedwabne (only a small amount of hydrocarbons in form of kerosene for lamps was available to the rural population). Such a small amount of kerosene (as mentioned by J. T. Gross) with its flashpoint of about 50 degrees Centigrade could not produce a sudden fire to engulf the entire barn at once.
In the 2001 investigation by the Polish government, bodies of the victims of the July 10, 1941, massacre were found buried in graves #1 and #2. Thorough search and drilling some 170 test cores in the vicinity found no other graves of the 1941 massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne. However, at the request of an Orthodox Rabbi who objected, rigorous forensic studies and full exhumation of all victims and the determination by autopsy of causes of death of every one of them was prematurely terminated. Thus, only an approximate number of victims could be estimated by the size of the two graves, which could be as low as one hundred sixty, ten percent of the wild figure cited by Gross and Brumberg. Unfortunately these unanswered questions inevitably discredit the veracity of the final report of the official investigation by the Polish government's agency, the Institute of National Memory (IPN).
Eventually the truth will become known -- even if this is very inconvenient to those presently enjoying influence. It is tragic, however, that in the meantime the false accusations initiated by Gross and disseminated by Brumberg and the Council for Foreign Relations will create much bitter strife between Polish patriots on the one hand and the Jewish restitution movement and its supporters on the other.
September 2002
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Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, a survivor of 5 years of Gestapo prisons and Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, is the author of "Poland, an Illustrated History" (Hippocrene Books, New York, 2000), "Jews in Poland, a Documented History" (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1993), "Poland, a Historical Atlas" (Hippocrene Books, 1987).
© Copyright 2002 by Andrzej M. Salski