The deliberate and gradual shifting of German crimes onto the shoulders of those who lived under German terror.

One of the most troubling trends in contemporary Holocaust historiography is not the study of difficult or uncomfortable subjects, but the subtle relocation of responsibility, the gradual shifting of German crimes onto the shoulders of those who lived under German terror.

This problem is laid bare in the recent scholarly review by Damian Sitkiewicz of Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s book Polnische Bürgermeister und der Holocaust (Polish Mayors and the Holocaust: Occupation, Administration, and Collaboration), now available in English and German. The review exposes not simply methodological weaknesses, but a deeper narrative agenda that raises serious ethical and historical concerns.

As Sitkiewicz notes, Rossoliński-Liebe’s account “serves a single purpose: to shift the narrative of responsibility for actions against Jews as far as possible from German perpetration.” From the opening pages, the book frames Polish mayors under German occupation not as coerced functionaries operating under a regime of terror, but as alleged “partners” in genocide, an assertion that collapses the fundamental distinction between occupier and occupied, between executioner and hostage.

This framing is not a matter of interpretation at the margins. It represents a structural distortion of historical reality. Polish mayors were not autonomous actors. They operated under constant threat of arrest, torture, deportation, or execution. They had no sovereignty, no control over German policy, and no authority over the machinery of extermination. To treat them as equivalent moral agents alongside the German state is to erase the defining conditions of occupation.

Such scholarship does not merely misread individual cases; it reverses the moral geometry of the Holocaust. The German occupation system was built on violence, racial law, and absolute domination. Jews were targeted for annihilation. Poles were subjected to mass executions, forced labor, deportations, and the destruction of their elites. Any administrative role assigned to Poles existed within a framework designed to break resistance and enforce German will, not to share power or responsibility.

Sitkiewicz correctly identifies the consequences of this approach:
– the falsification of Polish history
– the equation of enslaved populations with their occupiers
– the selective distortion of Holocaust responsibility

This does not deny that individuals under occupation could act immorally, betray others, or commit crimes. No serious historian claims otherwise. But to construct a thesis that systematically blurs coercion, terror, and structural power, while minimizing German agency – is not critical scholarship. It is narrative engineering.

The danger here extends beyond Poland. If occupation itself can be reframed as collaboration, then no victim society is safe from retroactive guilt. Terror becomes choice. Survival becomes complicity. Genocide becomes a shared enterprise rather than a state-directed crime.

Historical honesty demands precision. The Holocaust was planned, organized, and executed by Nazi Germany. Others may appear in the margins of that story, but responsibility cannot be reassigned without doing violence to truth itself.

To remember the Holocaust accurately is not to simplify it. It is to refuse narratives that dissolve perpetration into ambiguity and shift crimes from those who designed and carried them out to those who lived under the boot.

Truth matters. Distinctions matter and history must not be rewritten at the expense of those who suffered twice, first under occupation, and later under false accusation.

Edward Reid

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