The August Trials

By Andrew Kornbluth

Harvard University Press, £32

Reviewed by Mark Glanville

In August 1944, a series of trials was initiated in Poland to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice. Polish resistance to Nazi occupation had been brave and ferocious. But in Neighbors, his 2000 study of the immolation of 400 Jews in Jedwabne by their gentile neighbours in July 1941, Jan T. Gross cast doubt on Poland’s official version of wartime events. Further revelations followed about Jedwabne in particular. Now, Andrew Kornbluth’s forensic examination of August trials documents, only recently made available for scrutiny, confirms that the Jedwabne pogrom was not an isolated event.

While Jews in towns and cities were being herded into ghettos and death camps by Germans, those in the countryside were at the mercy of peasant neighbours who, with German authorisation, had carte blanche to continue butchery that had begun in 1935 and extended beyond the war. Polish-led pogroms during the Second World War appear to have been a kind of parallel holocaust, part of a continuous process to rid the country of its Jews.

As a result of actions taken by Germans and Poles during this period, 90 per cent of Poland’s 3.5 million Jewish population was exterminated.

Kornbluth’s detailing of cases makes difficult reading. Many Jews were simply captured and delivered to the Nazi-sponsored Blue Police for execution. Others were put to death in sadistic, brutal fashion by axe, hoe and pitchfork, tools of their peasant tormentors.

The August trials began with no knowledge of the Final Solution. Conducted in a serious and responsible manner, their revelations discomfited judges who frequently shared the antisemitic views of the accused, not least because, under the trials’ terms, the penalty for murder was death, a sentence Polish justice had previously been disinclined to impose.

Many of the murders involved collusion, rendering the crime collective. Laws relating to the August trials mutated during their years of operation, eventually allowing such collusion to be criminalised. This led to a larger number of people being brought to trial. Flustered judges doled out lenient sentences. Cases were frequently dismissed altogether on appeal. Two Poles who took the children of concerned Jewish parents to “safety” on a train for thousands of zlotys, would jump off, sending them to their deaths, but instead of the death penalty they received a 12-year sentence —it was impossible to ascertain officially that the children had died.

In 1956, Poland received a significant degree of sovereignty. The unpopular August trials were wound down and a process of de-Stalinisation ensued.

In pardoning acts of resistance to Stalinism and war-time murders of Jews simultaneously, the government created a sense that the two phenomena were connected, not least because, in the minds of many Poles, Jews and Communism were inextricably linked.

The destruction of both Poland’s Jewry, by the Nazis and their collaborators, and later the country’s Stalinist landowners and mercantile class, opened the way for a new, ethnically Polish middle-class. In 2018, an “Amendment to the Law on the Institute of National Remembrance” decreed up to three years in prison for anyone who “attributes to the Polish Nation or Polish State… co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.”

Modern Poland was, arguably, born in blood, under the baleful influence of foreign invaders. No wonder the country’s dominant Party of Law and Justice is keen to suppress scholarship that reveals malign aspects of its history.

Mark Glanville is a writer and critic