One prominent example of editors warping the historical record appears in the Wikipedia article ‘Rescue of Jews by Poles During the Holocaust,’ which inflates the number of Polish victims and saviors.²⁷ ‘Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II,’ claims the article, ‘thousands were executed by the Germans solely for saving Jews.’²⁸

Both figures are false. The estimate of 3 million non-Jewish Polish victims of World War II was pulled out of thin air in 1946 by Jakub Berman, head of the Polish security apparatus, in order to establish Polish and Jewish losses on par.²⁹ According to historian Gniazdowski, officials at the time presented ‘an equal proportion of losses among Poles and Jews, although according to the contemporary, and to subsequent estimates, Jewish losses were higher.’ Evidently, he explained, they were ‘fearful of issuing an official estimate which would indicate that Poles were ‘less impacted’ by war than the Jews.’³⁰ It was one of the first examples of a phenomenon which historians today call ‘Holocaust envy.’³¹

In contrast, the 1945 official Polish estimates put the number of Polish victims of World War II at 1.8 million. [Still a very serious number. — Anbol] The most recent estimates put the ethnic Polish losses at closer to 2 million, still well below the Wikipedia claim.³² Moreover, the number of Poles executed by the [Third Reich] solely for helping the Jews was not in the thousands, as the Wikipedia page claims. Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the number of Polish victims killed for aiding Jews was closer to 800.³³ More recently, historians reevaluated these estimates downward still.³⁴

In order to shore up the argument about the alleged thousands of Poles killed for rescuing Jews, the Wikipedia article cites Richard C. Lukas’s 1989 book Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust, a book that has been heavily criticized by experts. Page thirteen of this book estimates that ‘a few thousand to fifty thousand’ Poles were killed by [Fascists] for rescuing Jews. Yet, Out of the Inferno comprises little more than an anthology of short testimonies collected, edited, and introduced by Lukas.

[…]

Wikipedia also downplays the scope and nature of Polish collaboration with the [Third Reich]. The Wikipedia article ‘Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust’ claims that ‘less than one tenth of 1 percent of native Poles collaborated, according to statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission.’ Historians have no way of making such an estimation, which depends on how one defines ‘collaboration.’ Some early work by the Israeli government estimated the number of people directly and institutionally engaged in organized killings, but the number of individuals who contributed indirectly to the Jewish catastrophe remains unknown.³⁶

‘The History of the Jews in Poland’ Wikipedia article similarly states, ‘Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, there was little collaboration with the Nazis by its citizens.’³⁷ This claim has no footnote or truth to it; we know from voluminous research that betrayal of Jews by Poles was common.³⁸

The Wikipedia article ‘Collaboration with the Axis powers’ provides still more errors of this sort. ‘Shortly after the German Invasion of Poland,’ says the article’s section on Poland, ‘the Nazi authorities ordered the mobilization of prewar Polish officials and the Polish police (the Blue Police), who were forced, under penalty of death, to work for the German occupation authorities.’ The [Fascists] did indeed impose severe punishments on those refusing to serve in the new police force, but not the death penalty, and no documented case exists of a Polish officer being executed for such refusal.

‘While many officials and police reluctantly followed German orders,’ continues the article, ‘some acted as agents for the Polish resistance.’ This phrasing suggests Polish collaborators were at most reluctant, never willing; in fact, some police and civil administration officials served the [Third Reich] with zeal and devotion.³⁹ The article claims that

the Polish Underground State’s wartime Underground courts investigated 17,000 Poles who collaborated with the Germans; about 3,500 were sentenced to death. Some of the collaborators—szmalcowniks—blackmailed Jews and their Polish rescuers and assisted the Germans as informers, turning in Jews and Poles who hid them, and reporting on the Polish resistance.

This excerpt implies that the Polish underground was preoccupied with penalizing the blackmailers of Jews. In reality, no more than seven out of thousands of the people involved in this activity were actually sentenced to death and executed, despite desperate pleas made by the Committee to Aid Jews (Żegota) to the underground decision-makers to pay more attention to fighting the szmalcowniks.⁴⁰

[…]

In another case of exaggerating Polish suffering and heroism, the Wikipedia article states,

after the end of the war Poles who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation very often became the victims of repression at the hands of the Communist security apparatus, due to their instinctive devotion to social justice which they saw as being abused by the government.⁵²

This quote is credited to Jan Żaryn, a fervent nationalist, a darling of Polish right-wing populists, and the current chief of the newly established, government-funded Roman Dmowski Institute of National Thought (Dmowski was a prewar Polish politician, an unrepentant antisemite, and a great admirer of Adolf Hitler). Żaryn’s assertion is simply wrong. After the war, Polish rescuers of Jews were not afraid of communist authorities as much as they were afraid of right-wing anticommunist militias for whom rescuing the Jews was tantamount to national treason.

Examples of Polish rescuers killed or threatened by Polish nationalists surface in many Polish and Jewish accounts from the post-1944 period. Perhaps the best known is the case of Antonina Wyrzykowska from the Jedwabne area who managed to rescue a group of several Jews in her house. Soon after the liberation she and her husband were severely beaten by a group of Polish nationalists furious at her for having saved Jews.

In a second case, righteous Jozefa Gibes (who saved a Jewish family of four) died soon after the war. Her body, lying in a coffin in the church, was sprayed with bullets by members of the underground as retribution for her help to the Jews.⁵³ The list goes on of rescuers punished by either the anticommunist and antisemitic underground, or by Polish neighbors. Alfreda and Bolesław Pietraszek from Czekanów, Anna Wasilewska and her family from Zucielec, and the Danieluk family from Solniki, were all intimidated, wounded, or killed by the underground after the end of the war for having sheltered Jews under [Fascism].⁵⁴

A Polish rescuer of a Jewish infant shortly after the war wrote the following to the Central Committee of Polish Jews: ‘Two weeks ago, a band of native fascists broke into my house and smashed everything to pieces. They beat and kicked me and cut my wife’s and daughters’ hair, shouting: “that is for the Jewish child.”’⁵⁵ Similar reports were filed from practically all areas of occupied Poland where significant numbers of Jews survived in hiding.

[…]

The theme of Polish innocence resurfaces in the Wikipedia article on the July 1946 Kielce pogrom. The deadliest pogrom in postwar Europe, this event claimed the lives of 42 Polish Jews, the majority Holocaust survivors, when a Polish mob enraged by tales of ritual murder attacked their neighbors.

Misleadingly, over a fifth of the Wikipedia article comprises a subsection entitled ‘Evidence of Soviet Involvement,’ which suggests that the Kielce pogrom was somehow planned by the Soviets. This theory has been roundly rejected by all serious scholars and today finds an audience only among fringe Polish nationalists and conspiracy theorists wishing to prove that Communist Soviets, not Polish antisemitic masses, bore responsibility for the massacre.

Tellingly, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s Pod Klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego (Under the curse: the social portrait of the Kielce pogrom), winner of the 2019 Yad Vashem International Book Award, the definitive study which put the Soviet involvement thesis to rest, is completely absent from the Wikipedia article. Instead, readers again encounter references to Piotrowski’s Poland’s Holocaust.⁶³

(Emphasis added.)

While this article has a few eyeroll-inducing statements (‘a country brutally occupied by the Soviets’), and I am reluctant to accept the claim that the Polish People’s Republic had a ‘vicious 1968 antisemitic campaign orchestrated by the communist authorities’ at face value, this research is overall too important to overlook.

See also: Antisemitism on Wikipedia: Distorting the History of the Holocaust. Here is one Wikipedian’s response to all of these serious accusations:

Fortunately, nobody cares anymore about this rambling conspiracy theory.