Poles as ‘Untermenschen’

Edward Reid – na Facebook

German propaganda during the Second World War leaned heavily on racial ideology, casting Poles as Untermenschen—sub-humans. In 1940, Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, told German officials, “Poland shall be treated as a colony; the Poles are only born to serve.” German-controlled media abroad painted Poles as anti-Semitic peasants and opportunists, deflecting attention from Germany’s own genocidal policies.

The Soviets pursued a parallel but ideologically different narrative. In Stalin’s press, the Polish state was branded “fascist” and “reactionary,” while the Polish Home Army was smeared as “White Poles” who supposedly preferred fighting communists to fighting Germans. Soviet accounts of events like the Warsaw Uprising downplayed or erased Polish resistance, instead portraying it as reckless nationalist folly. As Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg declared in 1945, “The Polish reactionaries fight not for freedom, but for their landlords’ estates.” This distortion not only falsified Polish motives but also excused Soviet inaction during the Uprising.

After 1945, these narratives did not disappear. Many migrated into Western media, often stripped of their original ideological context but retaining their anti-Polish thrust. Hollywood films and novels, consciously or not, recycled elements of wartime propaganda, depicting Poles as inept, provincial, or morally suspect. The case of author Jerzy Kosiński is particularly telling. Saved as a child, along with his family, by brave Poles who risked their lives to shelter them during the German occupation, Kosiński repaid this rescue not with gratitude but with The Painted Bird—a novel that presented rural Poles as grotesque, primitive, and cruel. Praised in the West as a harrowing work of Holocaust literature, the book drew heavily on the very stereotypes propagated by both German and Soviet wartime disinformation.

This same approach appeared across film and television. Escape from Sobibor (1987) and Playing for Time (1980) placed their Polish settings amid villagers shown as hostile or indifferent. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) framed Polish interviewees as corrupt – they were specifically chosen and when they respond it’s in a way that implied complicity, omitting the brutal reality that aiding Jews in occupied Poland was punishable by death for entire families. Even Schindler’s List (1993)—portrayed Polish victims falsely – they inserted an implausible scene of a girl shouting “Goodbye, Jews!” from a balcony, and used Polish-speaking nurses and doctors in a manner reinforcing a secondary, antagonistic presence. Television docudramas and series—from NBC’s Holocaust (1978) to later BBC and PBS productions—have repeatedly cast Poles as stock villains, ignorant peasants, or passive bystanders. This bias persists into modern streaming-era documentaries, where archival Polish footage is frequently paired with narration echoing Cold War talking points.

By the 1970s and 1980s, American popular culture went further, turning anti-Polish stereotypes into punchlines. The so-called “Polish joke” became a staple of late-night comedy, sitcom banter, and variety shows. All in the Family used them as throwaway gags, and comedians like Johnny Carson repeated them to national audiences. While presented as harmless humor, these jokes were built on decades-old propaganda tropes, normalizing ideas originally crafted to humiliate and dehumanize an occupied ally. Historian John Radzilowski has noted, “The Polish joke in America is not a product of ancient ethnic rivalries, but a Cold War phenomenon rooted in wartime disinformation.”

What made this even more damaging was that Poles had virtually no way to respond. During the Cold War, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, its voice silenced by Soviet censorship. There was no effective Polish media presence in the West to counter these portrayals, no well-funded lobby, and no consistent cultural outreach. Polish-Americans, though numerous, were fragmented and lacked the coordinated institutions needed to challenge defamatory narratives in film, literature, and television. As a result, these slanders went unanswered, becoming embedded in public consciousness.

What began as deliberate wartime lies to justify invasion became, in the West, lazy shorthand for humor and “color” in storytelling. In both cases, the result was the same: the erasure of Poland’s true story as a nation that fought from the first to the last day of the war, suffered enormously under both German and Soviet occupation, and resisted both.

As Norman Davies reminds us, “The tragedy of Poland is not that it was defeated, but that its defeat was misrepresented and misunderstood.” To challenge stereotypes—whether in propaganda, films, or jokes—we must first remember they were never accidental. They were crafted with purpose, deployed for political ends, and have outlived the regimes that invented them. Only now, with free access to archives, scholarship, and global communication, does Poland finally have the chance to speak back.