Slavs Are to Work For Us

Jan Polak

”Pupils sit crammed together without necessary materials, and often without skilled teaching staff. Moreover, the Polish schools are closed during at least five months out of the ten months of the school year due to lack of coal or other fuel. Of twenty-thirty spacious school buildings which Kraków had before 1939, today the worst two buildings are used … Every day, pupils have to study in several shifts. Under such circumstances, the school day, which normally lasts five hours, is reduced to one hour.” – A German police memorandum of August 1943

Germany engaged in a concentrated effort to destroy Polish culture. Numerous cultural and educational institutions were closed or destroyed, from schools and universities, through monuments and libraries, to laboratories and museums. Many employees of said institutions were arrested and executed as part wider persecutions of Polish intellectual elite. Schooling of Polish children was curtailed to a few years of elementary education, as outlined by Himmler’s May 1940 memorandum: “The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one’s name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. … I do not think that reading is desirable.”

In the General Government, the remaining schools were subjugated to the German educational system, and the number and competence of their Polish staff was steadily scaled down. All universities and most secondary schools were closed, if not immediately after the invasion, then by mid-1940. By late 1940, no official Polish educational institutions more advanced than a vocational school remained in operation, and they offered nothing beyond the elementary trade and technical training required for the German economy.

Polish literature faced a similar fate in territories annexed by Germany, where the sale of Polish books was forbidden. The public destruction of Polish books was not limited to those seized from libraries, but also included those books that were confiscated from private homes. The occupying powers destroyed Polish book collections, including the Sejm and Senate Library, the Przedziecki Estate Library, the Zamoyski Estate Library, the Central Military Library, and the Rapperswil Collection. In 1941, the last remaining Polish public library in the German-occupied territories was closed in Warsaw.

German propaganda specialists invited critics from neutral countries to specially organized “Polish” performances that were specifically designed to be boring or pornographic, and presented them as typical Polish cultural activities – those were to be popularized to appease the population and to show the world the “real” Polish culture as well as to create the impression that Germany was not preventing Poles from expressing themselves.

German policies and propaganda also sought to create and encourage conflicts between ethnic groups, fueling tension between Poles and Jews, and between Poles and Ukrainians. In Łódź, the Germans forced Jews to help destroy a monument to a Polish hero, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and filmed them committing the act. Soon afterward, the Germans set fire to a Jewish synagogue and filmed Polish bystanders, portraying them in propaganda releases as a “vengeful mob.” This divisive policy was reflected in the Germans’ decision to destroy Polish education, while at the same time, showing relative tolerance toward the Ukrainian school system. As the Erich Koch explained, “We must do everything possible so that when a Pole meets a Ukrainian, he will be willing to kill the Ukrainian and conversely, the Ukrainian will be willing to kill the Pole.”

After the war, the Germans did everything they could to protect war criminals. They writhed away from all other responsibilities except the Holocaust. They invented a new term “culture of Remembrance” that was meant to prevent new wars, not to compensate old ones. With this concept, all they needed to do was remember their crime as a historical event: no one was responsible for anything. It was and is like “Shit happens”. This approach to dealing with the past no longer costs them anything. It is only part of a new culture of denunciation: They have become part of the common narrative of war, they are victims.

The Germans have only started looking for culprits in recent years because they know the time has passed. So Germany and the Germans themselves have decided how they want to deal with their crimes and they have decided to blame the “Nazis”. “Nazi” was no one’s grandfather, “Nazi” is nobody, “Nazi” is just an abstract creature that no one knew. For them, Poland is just a poor neighbor state that made the wrong choices, nothing more. They are unable or unwilling to understand causation and take responsibility. And then there are those who believe in the miraculous oblivion of forgiveness…

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