Real History and Polish war crimes

Posted Sunday, December 3, 2000

London, Sunday, December 3, 2000

Polish man accused of 'war crimes' against the Germans

By Justin Sparks
in Prague

THE trial of a 78-year-old Pole accused of killing thousands of German civilians in the aftermath of the Second World War is set to become the first of a series of court cases in which Germans are seen as the victims instead of the perpetrators of Nazi-related crimes.

The trial, scheduled to begin early next year in the Polish city of Opole, has created a furore over a part of Poland's recent history which it would like to ignore. Czeslaw Geborski, the accused, is said to have systematically raped, tortured and murdered German civilians while serving as commandant at the Lambinowice concentration camp in Silesia, where Germans living in the region were interned after the war.

Frantiszek Lewandowski, one of the prosecutors in the case, said:

"The main charge we are bringing against him is that he ordered a building in the camp to be burned down, killing 48 people. As people tried to escape the flames, he personally shot them or had them flung back inside."

The concentration camp was initially built by the Nazis to house Allied PoWs. For most Poles it is inextricably associated with wartime atrocities committed by the Germans.

The trial is set to reverse those roles and portray a Pole as the villain, something simply unacceptable to many who lived through the German occupation and the death of an estimated three million civilian Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles through bombings and in concentration camps. Piotr Radziwinowicz, a 72-year-old pensioner whose father was killed during the occupation said:

"The trial should be stopped. In view of what the Nazis did on Polish soil it was inevitable that some German civilians would be killed in revenge. It was chaos at the end of the war, but we never did anything like the Nazis. They killed millions of Poles."

A museum at the Lambinowice concentration camp commemorates the many Poles and Allied PoWs who died there at the hands of the Nazis, but makes scant mention of the thousands of Germans who subsequently suffered the same fate.

In the decades following the Allied victory, the communists erased such events from their history, and young Poles today know little or nothing of the acts of retribution meted out to German civilians in Silesia and the former East Prussia. Dr Maruska Svasek, a Central European specialist at Queen's University, Belfast, said:

"Hundreds of thousands of German civilians across Central Europe were raped, tortured, killed, or died due to terrible conditions after the war, but communist historiography was simply anti-Nazi and pro-communist, and disregarded the truth about postwar anti-German crimes."

Werner Scholz, a German Silesian who was sent to the camp aged only eight, along with his grandmother and sister, neither of whom survived, believes real reconciliation can never take place between Germans and their Central European neighbours until the "criminals" are brought to justice. He said:

"Everywhere you looked in the camp there were people dead or dying. If a person wasn't beaten to death, then he simply died of typhus, dysentery or starvation. A cold would be enough to finish him off. These were crimes, like Nazi crimes, and they should be treated in the same way and perpetrators brought to justice."

The recollections of German camp survivors bear witness to the harshness of the camp regime. In one instance a man was sealed in a barrel in which nails had been hammered through the side. The barrel was then rolled around the camp until he bled to death. Another survivor claims people were forced to lie on top of each other forming a huge pyramid, until those at the bottom were crushed. Lambinowice was just one of hundreds of Nazi concentration camps throughout Central Europe which exchanged its Jewish and Allied PoWs for German soldiers and civilians once the war had ended.

In all, around 10 million Germans were expelled from their homes in the region, and it is estimated that in Poland alone, between 400,000 and 1.2 million were killed in revenge attacks, during forced labour, transportation, or in concentration camps.

Konrad Badenhauer of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft said:

"The case of Lambinowice is just one of many. There were hundreds of people like Geborskis. In the Czech Republic, for example, we have the names and addresses of many such criminals whose crimes are well documented and who are still at liberty."

The prospect of Lambinowice creating a precedent for the prosecution of postwar acts of retribution has provoked widespread unease. Witold Kulesza, of the Central Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, said seven more trials are being prepared in Poland. Crimes against German civilians were not limited to hard core "communist" criminals, but were widespread.

In many cases German farms were taken over by Poles and previous owners were either killed or kept on as slave labour. Inevitably, all such cases are a fight against time as those involved are now nearing the end of their lives. Czeslaw Geborski's trial which involves 40 volumes of evidence and more than 300 witnesses is likely to last up to a year, and it may well be that the opportunity for such prosecutions has already been missed.