The Polish Bar Association during WW2

Edward Reid

Winter, Warsaw, 1940, and the German occupation authorities, already deep into the systematic dismantling of Polish civic life, demanded that the Polish Bar Association disbar its Jewish lawyers, a decree that was presented as administrative but was in truth ideological, racial, and deliberately corrosive, designed to fracture the moral fabric of a conquered society from within.

The Board refused.

This refusal may be read as an episode of professional courage, and it was that, but it was also something larger, because what was being tested in that room was not only the integrity of lawyers as lawyers, but the integrity of Poles as a people under occupation, forced to decide whether they would internalize the racial logic of the regime that had invaded them.

By the winter of 1940, no Pole could reasonably claim ignorance of what German rule entailed. Arrests, executions, expulsions, and mass imprisonment had already begun. Teachers were gone. Priests were gone. Community leaders were gone. Ordinary families had seen neighbors disappear into Pawiak prison or transported east or west with little hope of return. The demand to disbar Jewish lawyers was not an isolated bureaucratic measure, but part of a broader strategy to break solidarity, to turn one segment of the population against another, and to normalize exclusion as a civic duty.

What makes the moment especially revealing is that some of the very men who refused had, before the war, been critical of what they considered the disproportionate presence of Jews in the profession. Prewar Poland, like much of Europe, had tensions and imperfections. Yet when the order came from an occupying power rooted in racial doctrine, those disagreements did not translate into collaboration. Whatever their earlier views, they would not allow an external regime to dictate who belonged and who did not within their national community.

They would not expel their Jewish colleagues at German command.

The names are recorded (say their name) Jan Nowodworski, Jerzy Czarkowski, Bolesław Bielawski, Jerzy Czerwiński, Ludwik Domański, Jan Gadomski, Władysław Młodzianowski, Leon Nowodworski, Stanisław Perzyński, Jan Podkomorski, Mieczysław Rudziński, Michał Skoczyński, Bogdan Suligowski, Feliks Zadrowski, Leopold Żaryn. They sat in a board meeting, but they acted within a national drama unfolding far beyond the legal profession.

Because this was not only about lawyers…

Across occupied Poland, ordinary people were being asked, in ways large and small, to participate in the reshaping of society along racial lines. Shopkeepers were expected to comply with segregation. Clerks were required to stamp documents that codified exclusion. Neighbors were pressured to look away. The occupation functioned not only through terror, but through the gradual normalization of division.

The refusal of the Bar Association thus becomes emblematic of something broader: the refusal to let Polish civic life be re-engineered as an extension of German racial policy. It was a declaration, quiet but unmistakable, that the occupier did not possess moral authority over the internal bonds of the nation.

The consequences were brutal. Many of those involved were arrested between July 10 and 12, 1940, imprisoned in Pawiak, and later deported to Auschwitz, from which hardly anyone returned. The state answered professional solidarity with incarceration and likely death. The message was clear: independence of conscience would be punished.

And yet this episode should not be confined to the category of “intellectual resistance,” as though the struggle to preserve Polishness belonged only to professors, lawyers, or officers. The same logic of coercion and the same moral CC C tests confronted factory workers, farmers, mothers, students, and priests. The effort to dismantle Polishness did not distinguish sharply between elite and ordinary. It sought to erode language, culture, faith, and trust at every level of society.

Occupation meant teaching a conquered population to police itself according to foreign racial doctrine. It meant persuading ordinary citizens that compliance was safer than solidarity. It meant transforming institutions into instruments of exclusion.

That winter meeting in Warsaw shows that, at least in that moment, the fracture did not occur.

Not because Poles were flawless, and not because society was free of tension, but because the attempt to impose racial hierarchy from outside encountered a boundary that many were unwilling to cross. The refusal was professional in form, but national in meaning.

In a century in which Polish suffering is often reduced to abstraction or subsumed within larger narratives, this event reminds us that the attempt to dismantle Polishness operated through countless pressures applied to everyday structures of life, and that resistance, whether in a courtroom, a parish, a workshop, or a home, was part of a wider refusal to let an occupier redefine who belonged to the nation and who did not.

It was not only the “intelligentsia” who were being tested.

Found on Facebook

(https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=934587995750471&set=gm.25872064299140396&idorvanity=3625556537551157)