In the first hall of the exhibition in the Gdańsk City Hall, you can see dozens of portraits of young men in German military uniforms: some smiling, others serious or downright sad. In fact, such photos should not be unusual, since between 1939 and 1945 a total of 17 million men served in the Wehrmacht. But these photos are more special: they show citizens of Nazi-occupied Poland dressed in the gray military uniform of Nazi Germany.
The exhibition entitled “Our Boys“ examines an uncomfortable topic in Poland that has long been taboo: that of Poles who served in Adolf Hitler's army. Right-wing conservative circles in Poland reacted with outrage to the opening of the exhibition in mid-July. The depiction of Third Reich soldiers as "our boys" is a "historical lie" and a "moral provocation," former President Andrzej Duda wrote on the X platform. "Poles as a nation were victims of the German occupation and German terror, not perpetrators or accomplices," Duda stressed.
The leader of the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, called the exhibition "a blow to Polish statehood that calls into question historical facts." PiS politicians demonstrated in front of Gdansk City Hall at the opening of the exhibition and held up a poster with the inscription "Traitors". A wave of hatred against the exhibition organizers arose on the Internet, which forced security measures to be tightened.
Only black and white
"Polish policy on historical memory recognizes only black and white, heroes or traitors. "We wanted to show the nuances: The tragic fates of people who were subjected to cruel pressure in 1939," Andrzej Gierszewski, one of the exhibition's curators, told DW.
After the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, large parts of Polish territory were illegally annexed to the German Reich - including Pomerania with Gdańsk, Western Poland with Poznan and Lodz, as well as Upper Silesia. In these annexed territories, representatives of the Polish elite - politicians, clergy, civil servants and teachers - were either liquidated or deported to concentration camps.
Terror, assimilation, forced mobilization
Tens of thousands of Poles became victims of the first wave of terror. In the course of "Germanization" The sections of the population classified as "superfluous" were deported. People who the German authorities had determined to be "subject to Germanization" were included in the so-called "list of the German people" in Poland ("Deutsche Volksliste"). This conferred certain privileges, including German citizenship, initially limited to ten years, but also certain obligations – and above all compulsory military service.
Only the German authorities decided who to accept on the "list of the German people", and everyone else was threatened with repression, including being sent to a concentration camp. By the end of the war, 2.9 million people in occupied Poland were included in the lists in question. The more the situation at the front worsened for the Wehrmacht - especially after the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 - the greater the need for new "cannon fodder".
Hide or wear a Nazi uniform?
Those drafted into military service had to make a choice between the plague and cholera: accept their fate, or refuse to serve and hide, which led to the most severe consequences for their families, including deportation to a concentration camp. Deserters who were captured were usually executed. On the Western Front, almost 90,000 Polish Wehrmacht soldiers managed to defect to the British and Americans and later fought in the Polish Allied forces against Nazi Germany.
After the war, Poles whose names were included in the German "people's list" were considered traitors to their country, and some of them were tried for collaboration with the Nazis. Therefore, former Polish Wehrmacht soldiers kept their pasts secret, hid incriminating documents or destroyed them.
20 years ago, the current Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk experienced the negative influence of the past: when he ran for president in 2005, the political camp of his opponent Kaczynski spread information that Tusk's grandfather had served in the Wehrmacht. In fact, the truth is this: Jozef Tusk was drafted into the army in 1944, but after only four months he deserted, joining the Western Allies.
Author: Jacek Lepiarz