The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews: What Postwar Jewish Testimonies and Wartime Documents Reveal

The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to German exterminationist policies and to Polish blackmailers (szmalcownicy) during the Second World War is one of the most controversial topics in Polish-Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing between the 1970s and the early 2000s reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its role in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. These works, while produced by professional historians, avoided the question of the military underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews. When Jews were mentioned in these studies, the Home Army was portrayed as sympathetic and even eager to extend aid.

A new, critical historiography on wartime Polish-Jewish relations has appeared among Polish scholars since 2005, focusing on the dark, antisemitic elements of Polish society in general and of the Polish Underground in particular.

In this paper, I re-examine the Polish Underground’s attitude to Jews and the Holocaust using Holocaust survivor testimonies and official archival records of the Polish Underground. I argue that the bodies making up the Polish Underground were both pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish, friendly and hostile, helpers at best and murderers at worst.