German propaganda during the Second World War

German propaganda during the Second World War leaned heavily on racial ideology and worked relentlessly to portray Poles as Untermenschen, or sub-humans. In 1940, Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, stated openly to German officials that Poland should be treated as a colony and that Poles were born only to serve. German-controlled media abroad contributed to this effort by presenting Poles as anti-Semitic peasants and opportunists in order to deflect attention from Germany’s own genocidal policies.

At the same time, the Soviets promoted a different but equally damaging narrative. Stalin’s press branded the Polish state as fascist and reactionary, while the Polish Home Army was smeared as “White Poles” who allegedly preferred fighting communists to fighting Germans. Soviet accounts of major events such as the Warsaw Uprising downplayed or erased the reality of Polish resistance and instead depicted it as reckless nationalist folly. In 1945, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg claimed that Polish reactionaries did not fight for freedom but for the estates of landlords. This distortion misrepresented Polish motives and helped excuse Soviet inaction during the Uprising.

After 1945, these narratives migrated into Western media, stripped of their ideological origins but retaining their anti-Polish tone. Hollywood films and popular novels recycled wartime propaganda and presented Poles as inept, provincial, or morally questionable. Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which circulated as Holocaust literature, drew upon such stereotypes and depicted rural Poles as grotesque and cruel despite the fact that Kosinski’s own family was saved by Polish rescuers. Films such as Escape from Sobibor and Playing for Time placed stories in Polish settings while showing villagers as hostile or indifferent. Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah further reinforced this image by framing Polish interviewees in ways that implied complicity, while omitting any acknowledgement that aiding Jews in occupied Poland was punishable by death for entire families. Even Schindler’s List added false scenes that strengthened antagonistic depictions of Poles.

By the 1970s and 1980s, American popular culture embraced anti-Polish stereotypes as a form of humor. The so-called Polish joke became a fixture of late-night comedy, sitcoms, and variety shows. Although presented as harmless entertainment, these jokes were built on the same propaganda tropes introduced during the war, normalizing ideas designed to humiliate and dehumanize an occupied ally. This treatment is especially unjust when one considers the deep Polish respect for the dead. Each year on All Saints’ Day, cemeteries across Poland glow with candles as families gather to honor their loved ones. This national tradition reflects a culture of reverence, dignity, and memory that stands in stark opposition to the caricatures created by foreign propaganda.

During the Cold War, Poland had no voice in the West capable of countering these portrayals. Soviet censorship silenced the country for decades, and although Polish-Americans were numerous, they lacked unified institutions strong enough to defend Poland’s reputation. What began as deliberate wartime lies intended to justify invasion and occupation evolved into convenient stereotypes and comedic shorthand in Western storytelling. This process erased the truth of Poland’s wartime experience as a nation that fought from the first to the last day of the conflict and resisted both German and Soviet domination. When such stereotypes are repeated today, whether in jokes or popular entertainment, they echo frameworks originally created by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Norman Davies has observed that the tragedy of Poland lies not only in its defeat during the war but in the way that defeat was misrepresented and misunderstood. To confront stereotypes, whether they appear in propaganda, films, or humor, we must first recognize that they did not emerge accidentally. They were crafted with intent, deployed for political purposes, and have outlived the regimes that invented them. With access to archives, scholarship, and global communication, Poland finally has the ability to challenge these narratives and speak back with historical truth.

Edward Reid on Facebook