Jews with Polish resistance fighters of the Home Army after the camp's liberation during the
Warsaw Uprising, August 1944 Home Army members' attitudes toward
Jews varied widely from unit to unit, and the topic remains controversial. The Home Army answered to the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile, where some Jews served in leadership positions (e.g.
Ignacy Schwarzbart and
Szmul Zygielbojm), though there were no Jewish representatives in the Government Delegation for Poland. Traditionally, Polish historiography has presented the Home Army interactions with Jews in a positive light, while Jewish historiography has been mostly negative; most Jewish authors attribute the Home Army's hostility to endemic
antisemitism in Poland. More recent scholarship has presented a mixed, ambivalent view of Home Army–Jewish relations. Both "profoundly disturbing acts of violence as well as extraordinary acts of aid and compassion" have been reported. In an analysis by
Joshua D. Zimmerman, postwar testimonies of Holocaust survivors reveal that their experiences with the Home Army were mixed even if predominantly negative. Jews trying to seek refuge from Nazi genocidal policies were often exposed to greater danger by open resistance to German occupation.
Aleksander Kamiński,
Stefan Korboński,
Henryk Woliński,
Jan Żabiński,
Władysław Bartoszewski,
Mieczysław Fogg,
Henryk Iwański, and
Jan Dobraczyński. However, Polish historian Ewa Kołomańska noted that many individuals associated with the Home Army, involved in rescuing the Jews, did not receive the Righteous title.
Daily operations A Jewish partisan detachment served in the 1944
Warsaw Uprising, The Home Army provided training and supplies to the
Warsaw Ghetto's
Jewish Combat Organization. This section collected data about the situation of the Jewish population, drafted reports, and sent information to London. It also centralized contacts between Polish and Jewish military organizations. The Home Army also supported the
Relief Council for Jews in Poland (
Żegota) as well as the formation of
Jewish resistance organizations.
Holocaust From 1940 onward, the Home Army courier
Jan Karski delivered the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust to the Western powers, after having personally visited the
Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi concentration camp. Home Army reports from March 1943 described crimes committed by the Germans against the Jewish populace. AK commander General Stefan Rowecki estimated that 640,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz between 1940 and March 1943, including 66,000 ethnic Poles and 540,000 Jews from various countries (this figure was revised later to 500,000). The Home Army started carrying out death sentences for
szmalcowniks in Warsaw in the summer of 1943.
Antony Polonsky observed that "the attitude of the military underground to the genocide is both more complex and more controversial [than its approach towards
szmalcowniks]. Throughout the period when it was being carried out, the Home Army was preoccupied with preparing for ... [the moment when] Nazi rule in Poland collapsed. It was determined to avoid premature military action and to conserve its strength (and weapons) for the crucial confrontation that, it was assumed, would determine the fate of Poland. ... [However,] to the Home Army, the Jews were not a part of 'our nation' and ... action to defend them was not to be taken if it endangered [the Home Army's] other objectives." He added that "it is probably unrealistic to have expected the Home Army—which was neither as well armed nor as well organized as its propaganda claimed—to have been able to do much to aid the Jews. The fact remains that its leadership did not want to do so." Rowecki's attitudes shifted in the following months as the brutal reality of the Holocaust became more apparent, and the Polish public support for the Jewish resistance increased. Rowecki was willing to provide Jewish fighters with aid and resources when it contributed to "the greater war effort", but had concluded that providing large quantities of supplies to the Jewish resistance would be futile. This reasoning was the norm among the
Allies, who believed that the Holocaust could only be halted by a significant military action.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising The Home Army provided the
Warsaw Ghetto with firearms, ammunition, and explosives, but only after it was convinced of the eagerness of the
Jewish Combat Organization (
Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) to fight, and after
Władysław Sikorski's intervention on the Organization's behalf. Zimmerman describes the supplies as "limited but real". Jewish fighters of the
Jewish Military Union (
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW) received from the Home Army, among other things, 2 heavy machine guns, 4 light machine guns, 21 submachine guns, 30 rifles, 50 pistols, and over 400 grenades. Some supplies were also provided to the ŻOB, but less than to ŻZW with whom the Home Army had closer ties and ideological similarities.
Antoni Chruściel, commander of the Home Army in Warsaw, ordered the entire armory of the
Wola district transferred to the ghetto. The number of supplies provided to the ghetto resistance has been sometimes described as insufficient, as the Home Army faced a number of dilemmas which forced it to provide no more than limited assistance to the Jewish resistance, such as supply shortages and the inability to arm its own troops, the view (shared by most of the Jewish resistance) that any wide-scale uprising in 1943 would be premature and futile, and the difficulty of coordinating with the internally divided Jewish resistance, coupled with the pro-Soviet attitude of the ŻOB. According to
Marian Fuks, the Ghetto uprising would not have been possible without supplies from the Polish Home Army. A year later, during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the
Zośka Battalion liberated hundreds of Jewish inmates from the
Gęsiówka section of the
Warsaw concentration camp. Attitudes towards Jews in the Home Army were mixed. A few AK units actively hunted down Jews, and in particular two district commanders in the northeast of Poland (Władysław Liniarski of Białystok and Janusz Szlaski of Nowogródek) openly and routinely persecuted Jewish partisans and fugitives; however, these were the only two provinces, out of seventeen, where such orders were issued by provincial commanders. The extent of such behaviors in the Home Army overall has been disputed; The perceived association between Jews and communists was actively reinforced by
Operation Antyk, whose initial reports "tended to conflate communists with Jews, dangerously disseminating the notion that Jewish loyalties were to Soviet Russia and communism rather than to Poland", and which repeated the notion that antisemitism was a "useful tool in the struggle against Soviet Russia".
Lithuanians ,
Wilno-region Home Army commander Although the
Lithuanian and Polish resistance movements had common enemies—Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—they began working together only in 1944–1945, after the Soviet reoccupation, when both fought the Soviet occupiers. The main obstacle to unity was a long-standing territorial dispute over the Vilnius Region. The situation escalated the next year when the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Українська повстанська армія, ''Ukrayins'ka Povstans'ka Armiya
, UPA), a Ukrainian nationalist force and the military arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Організація Українських Націоналістів, Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins'kykh Natsionalistiv'', OUN), directed most of its attacks against Poles and Jews.
Stepan Bandera, one of UPA's leaders, and his followers concluded that the war would end in the exhaustion of both Germany and the Soviet Union, leaving only the Poles—who laid claim to
East Galicia (viewed by the Ukrainians as
western Ukraine, and by the Poles as
Kresy)—as a significant force, and therefore the Poles had to be weakened before the war's end. OUN forces targeted Polish villages, which prompted the formation of Polish self-defense units (e.g., the
Przebraże Defence) and fights between the Home Army and the OUN. The Polish government-in-exile in London was taken by surprise; it did not expect Ukrainian anti-Polish actions of such magnitude. From February to April 1945, mainly in
Rzeszowszczyzna (the
Rzeszów area), Polish units (including affiliates of the Home Army) carried out retaliatory attacks in which about 3,000 Ukrainians were killed; one of the most infamous ones is known as the
Pawłokoma massacre. By mid-1944, most of the disputed regions were occupied by the Soviet Red Army. Polish partisans disbanded or went underground, as did most Ukrainian partisans. Both the Poles and the Ukrainians would increasingly concentrate on the Soviets as their primary enemy – and both would ultimately fail. ==Relations with the Soviet Union==