Polish Resistance and Collaboration

Abstract

Poland stands out amongst the Nazi occupied countries of Europe in its apparent reluctance to collaborate with the Germans. Polish historians are very proud of the fact that the Poles did not supply the Germans with a Quisling government during the war. While this may be true in a general sense, it is a fact that a section of the Polish population did cooperate with the Germans in their plan to exterminate the Jews. The evidence presented in this study allows one to conclude that the degree of collaboration was not so much a result of Polish unwillingness to cooperate with the invader as of the German perception that they had no need of a Polish collaborationist government for their plans of exterminating the Jews: the Germans felt they had the tacit approval of the Polish population.