Transitional Justice and the Holocaust in Poland

Abstract

The Communist seizure of power is generally regarded as the key context of the transitional justice that characterized the prosecution of Nazi criminals and collaborators in postwar Poland, which naturally affected trials related to the Holocaust. Some of the guiding questions of this scholarship have asked the following: Should postwar trials be understood as “real” trials as opposed to staged political trials? To what extent did they allow for an expression of the distinctiveness of the Holocaust? Did the trials help or inhibit the creation of a space for Jewish voices and agency? The current state of research points to two emerging stories of Polish judicial reckoning with the Holocaust “behind the Iron Curtain.” On the one hand, scholars increasingly agree that the trials were not politically orchestrated but were generally conducted in the spirit of the rule of law, comparable to those held in Western European courts. Further, the Polish contribution to the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators is regarded as exceptional and successful in delivering some measure of justice. On the other hand, research into trials of Polish grassroots perpetrators of anti-Jewish crimes points to a failure in reaching a meaningful judicial and societal reckoning.

Keywords

• nazi german occupation of poland
• holocaust
• people’s republic of poland
• postwar trials
• stalinism
• transitional justice