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In the Shadow of the Holocaust

In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged

Germany’s ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the
Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecu-
tion. Focusing on Poland’s engagement with the United Nations War
Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish
Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an
Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jur-
ists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contribu-
tions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid
attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship
between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the
authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer
of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new
lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.

michael fleming is a historian based in London. His publications

include Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944–1950
(2010), Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (2014) and,
as editor, Essays Commemorating Szmul Zygielbojm (2018). He is a recipi-
ent of the Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, and the Aquila
Polonica Prize.
In the Shadow of the Holocaust
Poland, the United Nations War Crimes
Commission, and the Search for Justice

Michael Fleming
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009098984
DOI: 10.1017/9781009106719
© Michael Fleming 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-009-09898-4 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Acknowledgements page vi
List of Abbreviations vii

Introduction 1
1 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World 16
2 Seeking a Response: Polish Diplomacy (Sensu Stricto) 48
3 Polish Soft Diplomacy: Attempts to Shape the Discursive
Environment 79
4 War Crimes and the Path towards the UNWCC 113
5 The UNWCC, Law, and Inter-Allied Politics 144
6 The Polish Government in Exile’s War Crimes Office 172
7 Pursuing Justice across the Iron Curtain 201
8 Poland, the UNWCC, and the Cold War 231
Conclusion 268

Bibliography 283
Index 303

v
 Acknowledgements

In researching and writing this book, I am indebted to landmark scholar-

ship by Arieh Kochavi, Dan Plesch, Gabriel Finder, and Alexander
Prusin, among others. I have also benefitted from discussions with col-
leagues in Britain, Germany, Poland, and the United States. I am espe-
cially thankful to Krista Hegburg and the participants of the 2019 New
Findings on Poland and Its Neighbors workshop at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC; Jochen
Böhler and the participants at the regular history seminar at Kertész
Kolleg, Jena; and the participants of the twentieth-century Polish history
seminar at the Polish University Abroad, London, for stimulating discus-
sions and incisive questions.
In addition, I am indebted to colleagues and archivists who, during the
COVID-19 pandemic, helped source documentation and found time in
their busy schedules to respond to my queries. I am particularly thankful
to Dan Plesch, Antony Polonsky, Sarah Patton, Rose Spijkerman,
Andrzej Suchcitz, Jadwiga Kowalska, Grzegorz Perzyń ski, Louisa
McClintock, Graham Cox, Adrian Kelly, Lukasz Krzyzanowski,
Wojciech Rappak, Wojciech Klas, Sara Kimble, Colin Clarke, and
Anna Taborska. I also thank the reviewers commissioned by Cambridge
University Press, who provided helpful comments.

vi
 Abbreviations

AALC Archive of Adam and Lidia Ciołkosz

AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (New Documents Archive)
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
CAB Cabinet Office
CAC Churchill Archive Centre
CAME Conference of Allied Ministers of Education
CIAD Central Institute of Art and Design
CROWCASS Central Register of War Criminals and Security
Suspects
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council
FO Foreign Office
FRPS Foreign Research and Press Service
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
FSUA Florida State University Archives
GKBZN Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich
w Polsce (Main Commission for the Investigation of
German Crimes in Poland)
HIA Hoover Institution Archives
IAIC Inter-Allied Information Committee
ICPRD International Commission for Penal Reconstruction
and Development
IISH International Institute of Social History
IMT International Military Tribunal
IPN Instytut Pamię ci Narodowej (Institute of National
Remembrance)
KRN Krajowa Rada Narodowa (Homeland National
Council)
LCWIO Liaison Committee of Women’s International
Organisations
LIA London International Assembly
LNU League of Nations Union
LSE London School of Economics and Political Science
vii
viii List of Abbreviations

MBP Ministerstwo Bezpieczeń stwa Publicznego (Ministry

of Public Security)
MID Ministry of Information and Documentation
MSW Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnę trznych (Ministry of the
Interior)
MSZ Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych (Ministry of
Foreign Affairs)
NA National Archives (Kew)
NKVD Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh D’el (People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
NSZ Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (National Armed Forces)
PISM Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum
PKWN Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish
Committee of National Liberation)
PPR Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party)
PPS Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party)
PSIB Polish Social Information Bureau
PSL Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (Polish Peasant
(People’s) Party)
PUMST Polish Underground Movement (1939–1945) Study
Trust
RIIA Royal Institute of International Affairs
SA Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment)
SS Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron)
UN United Nations
UNIO United Nations Information Organisation
UNWCC United Nations War Crimes Commission
WHL The Wiener Holocaust Library
WJC World Jewish Congress
WRB War Refugee Board
YVA Yad Vashem Archive
 Introduction

On 3 January 1945, the Polish War Crimes Office in London submitted

an indictment to the United Nations War Crimes Commission that
charged Adolf Hitler and twenty-three other German leaders with war
crimes.1 Though it was not the first to charge Hitler – three weeks earlier
the Czechoslovak Office had filed charges – the indictment was the
extraordinary result of over five years of debate, in various fora, on the
nature of war crimes, on who could be charged, on the laws that could be
applied, and on jurisdiction.2 In a manner that complemented Raphael
Lemkin’s thinking on genocide in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
(released seven weeks earlier in the United States), the indictment
explained and theorised German policy against Jews.3
For Lemkin, genocide was not restricted to the physical extermination
of a group, though that was its most radical manifestation. Rather, the
neologism signified a range of acts that aimed at the ‘disintegration of the
political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings,
religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruc-
tion of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of
the individuals belonging to such groups’.4 In Lemkin’s formulation, the
end point was the liquidation of a group, but that liquidation was not
necessarily physical. The Polish indictment explained how Jews, through
the issuance of laws and decrees by the accused, were legislated to the
status of ‘capitis deminutio’, which had the ultimate goal of the ‘biological

1
WHL, UNWCC Archive, Reel 14 (0968). Charge Files, Poland vs Germans. Charge File
34, 5 January 1945. (The file was registered by the UNWCC on 5 January.) Also see Reel
41. Poland: Correspondence with National Offices, Litawski to Secretary General
3 January 1945. The twenty-four accused were charged with violating the 1907 Hague
Convention IV.
2
Dan Plesch first highlighted that Hitler had been charged with war crimes at the UNWCC.
The front page of the Czechoslovak indictment against Hitler and four other German
leaders is reprinted in Plesch, Human Rights, 159.
3
Also see Lemkin, Genocide. Available at www.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1945apr-00039/
4
Lemkin, Axis Rule, 79.

1
2 Introduction

extermination of Jews in Poland’.5 By referring to Roman Law and

framing German policy as condemning Jews to civil death, the indictment
sought to show that Germany’s incremental anti-Jewish actions had
a singular aim.6
The difficulty in finding an appropriate language to describe German
anti-Jewish policy was one which only fully emerged once that policy was
officially recognised. For much of the early part of the war, the scope and
scale of German atrocities against Jews were either marginalised in or
omitted from the dominant war narrative on both sides of the Atlantic.7
This marginalisation was punctured in late June and early July 1942 and
again in late November and December 1942 when reports mainly, but not
exclusively, from the Polish Underground State were disseminated in
London. The 17 December 1942 UN Declaration against German atro-
cities publicly and officially recognised the German programme of exter-
mination of Europe’s Jews. The struggle to ensure that those who
committed war crimes would face justice at the end of the war, required,
in the first instance, for those war crimes to be recognised as such, for
evidence to be gathered and for witnesses to submit depositions.
The notion of war crimes at the start of the global conflagration was
underdeveloped. The UNWCC did not define ‘war crimes’, as to do so
would require ‘limitation and exclusion’, but over the course of the war,
different jurists offered definitions, including Hersch Lauterpacht,
Marcel de Baer, and Manfred Lachs.8 The lack of an authoritative defin-
ition allowed jurists to think innovatively in relation to existing inter-
national law, most notably the 1907 Hague Conventions, and in regards
to the statements and declarations of senior Allied leaders. This lack of
a definition provided scope for jurists to contest the restricted conceptu-
alisation of war crimes favoured by Foreign Office officials, but also raised
the practical problem of how the accused should be charged and under
what law. The ‘Versailles list’ of war crimes developed by the Inter-Allied
Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on
Enforcement of Penalties in 1919 provided a guide on the practical level
but did not solve the conceptual problem of defining war crimes in an
abstract, universal manner.9 The issue of defining war crimes was

5
WHL, UNWCC Archive, Reel 14 (0968). Charge Files, Poland vs Germans. Charge File
34, 5 January 1945.
6
The Charge File makes arguments that prefigure Giorgio Agamben’s contentions in Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
7
There is a voluminous literature on the marginalisation of the Holocaust in the wartime
narrative. See inter alia Shapiro, Press Shout, Leff, Buried, Fleming, Auschwitz.
8
UNWCC, History, 12. Lauterpacht’s and de Baer’s definitions are discussed in Chapter 4.
Lachs’s definition is considered in Chapter 6.
9
The ‘Versailles list’ can be found in UNWCC, History, 34.
 Introduction 3

debated in (unofficial) Allied fora from the autumn of 1941, by represen-

tatives of exiled governments in the Inter-Allied Commission on the
Punishment of War Crimes in 1942 and 1943, and in the UNWCC
from autumn 1943.
Although total war posed formidable challenges to international law,
responding to those challenges in order to ensure the establishment of an
effective regime of post-war justice was not a pressing concern for Britain
or the United States in the early war years. The experience of the post–
First World War war crimes trials in Leipzig, the failure to bring the
Kaiser to trial, and a political determination to ensure that Britain was
not saddled with a commitment to try large numbers of Germans post-
war, guided thinking within the British Foreign Office and beyond.10
A further complicating factor encouraging the British stance of reserve
and caution in relation to war crimes was the strategic commitment not to
estrange the second state that invaded Poland in September 1939, the
Soviet Union. Britain may have entered the war on 3 September 1939 to
honour its guarantee to Poland, but it was not prepared to sanction
a power which in the fullness of time may come to serve the British
determination to defeat Germany.
This political situation, in which Poland was at war with both Germany
and the Soviet Union, and Britain and France were at war with only
Germany, put strain on Anglo–French–Polish relations during the first
years of the war.11 It continued to impact on how the war was narrated in
the West and, importantly, on the discussion of war crimes. Whereas the
deportation of population from western Poland was clearly a war crime
according to the ‘Versailles list’, the deportations of Polish citizens from
eastern Poland were something that was best not discussed. In theory,
war crimes were to be defined without reference to place and were free

10
See Schabas, Trial; Kochavi, Prelude.
11
Neither Poland nor the Soviet Union formally declared war on each other. The Soviet
invasion was denounced as a ‘flagrant act of aggression’ by Poland and resisted by force of
arms. To rationalise its invasion, the Soviet Union falsely asserted that the Polish State
had ceased to exist. In 1938, legal scholar Clyde Eagleton noted that ‘the declaration of
war seems to be regarded by some as an anachronism to be discarded’ and that inter-
national lawyers seem to accept that the ‘legal status of war may exist in the case of
hostilities without a declaration’. In failing to declare war prior to invading, the Soviet
Union violated Article 1 of the 1907 Hague Convention (III) (Convention Relative to the
Opening of Hostilities). (But see Eagleton’s criticism of Hague Convention (III).) Polish
military action against the invading forces continued until early October 1939. See
Eagleton, Form and Function, 19, 35; ‘Red Army in Polish Territory’, The Times,
18 September 1939, 6; Sanford, Katyn, 22, 39. Also, see Moorhouse, First to Fight.
The 1907 Hague Convention (III) is available at https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INT
RO/190?OpenDocument
4 Introduction

from geopolitical calculations. In practice, war crimes referred to those

committed by the Axis powers alone.
The Polish Government in Exile recognised the political necessity of
adhering to this convention, but it had a significant cost, which the Polish
Government had no choice but to bear. First, it meant that Soviet war
crimes, including deportation, murder, ill-treatment of civilians and pris-
oners of war, as well as currency debasement, were marginalised or
unreported. As a result, when the Germans released news of the Katyń
graves (the graves of thousands of Polish officers executed by the Soviet
Union in 1940) in April 1943, pro-Soviet arguments denouncing the
Polish Government’s claims that the Soviet Union was responsible gained
traction in Britain.12 The Soviet Union sought maximum advantage and
used its faux outrage to break diplomatic relations with Poland, which
had only been re-established in the summer of 1941.
Second, in allocating a liminal status to a third of Poland which the
Polish Government saw as an integral part of the Polish State, Polish
politicians and jurists were obliged to maintain a dual sensibility. Crimes
committed by one belligerent were of some interest to the international
community. The crimes committed by the second belligerent were not.
For some Polish jurists, this training in looking only at that which was
deemed important by more powerful partners was a skill that became
useful when they returned to Poland after the war. Britain, militarily,
came late to the Second World War and, like France, limited engagement
with the enemy during the so-called Phoney War.13 Similarly, Churchill’s
famous ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech at Fulton came almost three years after
commencement of the Polish Government in Exile’s Cold War, initiated
by the Polish–Soviet split of April 1943.14 But throughout the war Polish–
Soviet tensions shadowed the Polish pursuit of post-war justice.
This book makes two basic contentions. First, by supplying informa-
tion (derived from the intelligence activities of the Polish Underground
State), the Polish Government in Exile played an important role in
putting war crimes on the Allies’ political agenda. Through its publica-
tions and diplomacy, it sustained pressure, mainly on Britain, to respond
to the outrages taking place. Second, Polish jurists contributed to, and
helped shape, legal debates in a range of fora including the London
International Assembly and the International Commission for Penal
Reconstruction and Development (both established in the autumn of

12
On Katyń , see Sanford, Katyn; Cienciala and Lebedeva, Katyn; Maresch, Katyn 1940.
13
France’s Saar Offensive achieved little, with withdrawal complete by 17 October 1939.
14
Churchill’s speech in which he refers to an ‘Iron Curtain’ descending across Europe is
available at www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-
speech.html
 Poland and Debates on War Crimes 5

1941), as well as within the United Nations War Crimes Commission

(established in October 1943). In doing so, Polish jurists helped to lay the
foundations for the regime of post-war justice.
In addition, the East–West tensions which characterised relations
between the Allies in the fight against the Axis powers found expression
in Allied debates about the future of Poland. Poland was the fulcrum both
of the German imperial vision of Lebensraum and racial ordering and of
the Soviet vision of communist hegemony in East-Central Europe. As
debates in the UNWCC in 1944 and 1945 considered German ‘crimes
against humanity’, ‘human rights’, ‘war of aggression’, and the corruption
of the legal profession, Soviet Armies fought the Wehrmacht west across
Poland, often arresting Poles who had resisted the German occupiers in
the structures of the Polish Underground State. The bold promise of
a new world of justice and peace rang increasingly hollow for many
Poles in London as a Soviet-sponsored Polish proto-government was
formed in Moscow, arriving in Lublin in July 1944. Those jurists con-
nected with the Polish War Crimes Office were aware of developments in
Poland, and of Soviet ambitions, but remained focused on the task of
bringing German war criminals to justice. They were also cognisant that,
at some point, they would be forced to make a decision: remain loyal to
the Polish Government in Exile and its vision of a post-war Poland, or
accept the emerging reality of Soviet Empire and, through it, attempt to
secure justice for the millions murdered. The latter choice demanded that
those who did return to Poland continued to develop the dual sensibility
that had been encouraged in war-time London.

Poland and Debates on War Crimes

Hitherto, much scholarly attention has been paid to the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This work, with few exceptions, most
notably Francine Hirsch’s recent Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg, has
privileged the activities of western states and jurists and their role in
prosecuting the major German war criminals. Scholarship on the devel-
opment and flow of legal knowledge, on the debates about war crimes in
different Allied fora, and on the juridical concerns of the minor Allies
prior to the trials of the major war criminals at Nuremberg has had only
a limited impact on public understanding of post-war justice. The conse-
quence of this has been a skewed view of the path to Nuremberg and
a misapprehension of the contribution made by different jurists. Raphael
Lemkin, Hersch Lauterpacht, Murray Bernays, and Aron Trainin were
significant, but there were others who made important contributions to
the shape of post-war justice whose names and work are little known,
6 Introduction

including, among others, the Czechoslovaks Bohuslav Ečer and Egon

Schwelb; the Belgian Marcel de Baer; and the Poles Stefan Glaser,
Manfred Lachs, and Tadeusz Cyprian.15
Mapping the flows of legal knowledge and the networks that under-
pinned these flows helps contextualise the contribution of the more
celebrated jurists (i.e. Lauterpacht, Lemkin).16 From the beginning of
the war, the legal counsel to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Michał
Potulicki, sought, through the issuance of official Polish Government
publications, to inform publics in Allied and neutral states about what
was happening in Poland, and to frame the outrages with reference to
international law. German decrees and laws were translated and repub-
lished, and the German policy of extermination of the Polish nation (i.e.
the liquidation of the nation as a nation) was identified well before the
physical annihilation of Polish Jewry.
Lemkin’s analysis was an important breakthrough because it was able
to frame and name what was happening more effectively than had been
done previously. His expansive concept of genocide, especially when pre-
fixed by a qualifier such as ‘cultural’, ‘political’, or ‘social’, overcame the
inevitable linguistic slippage of terms such as ‘extermination’ that tended
to conflate the killing of people with the destruction of the imagined
community of the nation.17 Through the concept of genocide, Lemkin
also sought to overcome the limitations of the notion of ‘denationalisa-
tion’, which he considered to be inadequate as it failed to recognise the
biological destruction of a nation, did not indicate the imposition of the
‘national pattern of the oppressor’ on subjugated people, and was gener-
ally used to describe the deprivation of citizenship.18
15
Herbert Pell also contributed to shaping post-war justice through his work at the
UNWCC. See Cox, Seeking Justice.
16
See von Lingen, Legal Flows.
17
Given the shocking scale of killing during the September 1939 invasion and the frequency
of executions during the German occupation, the lack of conceptual clarity was neither
surprising nor of major significance. However, once the Germans turned to systematic-
ally killing Jews, the limits of the term ‘extermination’ were exposed. For example, when
the Polish Foreign Minister August Zaleski condemned the ‘German policy of extermin-
ation’ in his Note to Allied and Neutral Governments on 3 May 1941, he was speaking of
something quite different from when Anthony Eden condemned the Germans’ ‘bestial
policy of cold-blooded extermination’ on 17 December 1942 in the House of Commons.
At least in a small part, this linguistic legacy has contributed to ‘victim competition’ and
misunderstanding between Poles and Jews on the German occupation and the
Holocaust. See Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, German Occupation, 55. Also see
Hansard, House of Commons Debates 17 December 1942, volume 385, column
2082-7. Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1942/dec/17/
united-nations-declaration
18
Lemkin, Genocide, 39; UNWCC, History, 197. Lemkin was familiar with how the concept
of denationalisation was used in the early stages of the war by the Polish Government.
Axis Rule drew on the Polish second White Book and the first Black Book (discussed in
 Poland and Debates on War Crimes 7

In Axis Rule, Lemkin drew on similar material and described much the
same phenomena as had featured in August Zaleski’s 3 May 1941 Note
addressed to Allied and Neutral Powers. The major difference was that,
after June 1941, German policy towards Jews fixated on the physical
extermination of Europe’s Jews, first through the ‘Holocaust by bullets’
as Germany invaded Soviet-occupied and Soviet territory, and later,
beginning in December 1941, with the mass gassing of Jews at death
camps.19 Lemkin’s broad notion of genocide was able to accommodate
both the physical and non-physical extermination of groups. Yet, his idea
took time to circulate among the legal community looking at war crimes,
and it may have been as late as October 1945 that many of the represen-
tatives at the UNWCC were finally able to read his important book (the
first printing in the United States was exhausted by May 1945).
In contrast, work by the Soviet jurist Aron Trainin was presented to the
UNWCC by the Czechoslovak representative, Bohuslav Ečer, in
October 1944, and its call to ensure that not only German army com-
manders and Nazi leaders faced justice, but also industrialists and finan-
ciers, seems to have contributed to further emboldening of
representatives at the UNWCC to interpret the UNWCC’s remit in
a more expansive manner. Other ideas, such as ‘crimes against humanity’,
which had been in circulation before the war, were employed to break the
deadlock in relation to the legal challenge of prosecuting crimes commit-
ted by Germans against German citizens in Germany.20 The American

Chapter 1), both of which refer to denationalisation. Denationalisation was discussed

within the UNWCC in September and October 1945. The Czechoslovak jurist Bohuslav
Ečer referred to the crime of denationalisation as ‘killing the soul of the nation’. To some
extent, this paralleled the way Lemkin formulated aspects of genocide (when pre-fixed by
a qualifier such as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’). This was recognised in the report the UNWCC
submitted to the United Nations Economic and Social Council in May 1948. See
UNWCC, Document C.148, 28 September 1945, 2. Available at www.legal-tools.org
/doc/986ec4/. Also see ECOSOC, E/CN.4/W.19. ‘Information Concerning Human
Rights Arising from Trials of War Criminals’, 15 May 1948, 50. Available at https://dig
itallibrary.un.org/record/669294?ln=en. The notion of ‘denationalisation’ can be traced
to the Hague Convention of 1907. See Plesch, Human Rights, 173. I thank Dan Plesch for
highlighting a degree of parallelity between aspects of the concept of genocide and that of
denationalisation.
19
Christopher Browning demonstrated how ‘ordinary men’ of the German Order Police
were involved in the mass killing, via shooting, of Jews. See Browning, Ordinary Men. The
mass killing of Jews at Chełmno began on 8 December 1941. Also see Browning’s
discussion of the debate on when the decision for the ‘Final Solution’ was taken.
Browning argues that ‘the Final Solution emerged from a series of decisions taken
between spring and autumn 1941’. Browning, Decision-Making, 179.
20
An Allied declaration in May 1915 accused the Ottoman Empire of ‘crimes against
humanity and civilisation’ in relation to atrocities against Armenians. See FRUS 1915,
981, Sharp to Secretary of State, 28 May 1915. Available at https://history.state.gov/his
toricaldocuments/frus1915Supp/d1398
8 Introduction

representative Herbert Pell tabled a resolution on 16 March 1944 at the

UNWCC asserting that:
It is clearly understood that the words ‘crimes against humanity’ refer, among
others, to crimes committed against stateless persons or against any persons
because of their race or religion; such crimes are judiciable by the United
Nations or their agencies as war crimes.21

This radical statement claiming that the United Nations had the right
to intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state was not the
considered position of the State Department. US officials did not need
to look beyond the United States’ border to witness systemic and individ-
ual crimes committed against people because of their race. The resolution
cut straight to the heart of the difficult matter of securing justice for
German Jews and was conceived by Pell, who was not a lawyer, under
the influence of work by Sheldon Glueck, a Harvard criminologist.
Glueck’s article ‘Trial and Punishment of Axis War Criminals’ and an
editor’s note relating to Glueck’s forthcoming book were passed by
President Roosevelt to Pell prior to his departure from the United
States to London in late 1943. It seems that Pell ‘relied on Glueck’s
legal views regarding war crimes policy’.22 Glueck had advocated the
establishment of an international criminal court that would prosecute
crimes committed on Axis territory, and consider crimes against those
‘stateless’ and those who could not prove their nationality. Pell was
supported in advancing his agenda by Bohuslav Ečer and Stefan Glaser,
among others, who, like Pell, recognised the limits of the type of narrow
legalism advocated by the British Foreign Office and the United States
State Department on the question of war crimes. The journey that these
jurists took to that position was informed by close engagement with Soviet
legal thinking, and the experience of legal debate in the International
Commission for Penal Reconstruction and Development and within the
Polish Ministry of Justice respectively.
Glueck’s ideas were familiar to jurists at the UNWCC. Glueck had
served on the London International Assembly and, in late 1942, had
written a proposal on war crimes trials with Marcel de Baer.23 De Baer
chaired important committees both at the LIA and at the ICPRD, and
would later assume a similar role at the UNWCC. The flow of legal
knowledge, which was facilitated through journals and books, was

21
UNWCC, Committee II, ‘Resolution moved by Mr Pell on 16th March 1944’. Available
at www.legal-tools.org/doc/2aa8b6/pdf/
22
Cox, Seeking Justice, 90. Also see Glueck, Trial and Punishment. Available at www
.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1942nov-00138/
23
See Plesch, Human Rights, 161.
 Poland and Debates on War Crimes 9

enhanced by jurists’ engagement with unofficial Allied fora such as the

LIA and the ICPRD as well as within the official UNWCC. These pre-
Nuremberg entanglements provided a body of legal knowledge on war
crimes that was different from understandings earlier in the war, and
offered a departure point for innovative thinking about post-war justice
once victory was in view. As legal scholar Kerstin von Lingen has noted,
organisations like the UNWCC (but also the LIA and ICPRD) provided
‘a unique opportunity for members of smaller nations to voice their
concerns and concepts, and served as an agent to globalize legal concepts
and thus trigger ‘legal flows.’’24 The contribution of Polish jurists to the
development of legal ideas and these legal flows was an integral part of
the struggle to secure justice with respect to war crimes committed during
the Second World War.
Since Arieh Kochavi’s canonical Prelude to Nuremberg a generation ago,
two important publications, Bergsmo et al.’s Historical Origins of
International Criminal Law and a special issue of Criminal Law Forum,
both issued in 2014, have highlighted the significance of the UNWCC.25
Despite the promise of this important work, the general disinterest has
continued, in part because of the difficulty that scholars have faced in
accessing UNWCC material, as well as an under-appreciation by histor-
ians of Kochavi’s implicit invitation for more focused scholarship on the
organisation. Similarly, Kobierska-Motas’s scholarship from the early to
mid-1990s that engaged with UNWCC material in relation to Poland,
and her work on extradition from Germany to Poland, and Elżbieta
Rojowska’s concise article on Poland and the UNWCC, have remained,
until very recently, salutary exemptions to the general indifference in
Poland, as elsewhere, to the work of the UNWCC.
Through a series of books and articles, Dan Plesch has played an
important role in raising the profile of the UNWCC and elaborating its
importance both historically and in relation to the pursuit of justice today.
Through his intercessions, scholars have gained access to the documents
of the UNWCC at various research centres around the globe, and this has
contributed to efforts to situate the UNWCC within the broad context of
the pursuit for post-war justice. However, little attention has been paid to
the UNWCC as an institution which straddled the solidifying East–West
divide at the beginning of the Cold War. This book addresses that
lacuna.26

24
von Lingen, Legal Flows, 512.
25
See Bergsmo et al., Historical Origins; Criminal Law Forum, 25.
26
See Kochavi, Prelude; Kobierska-Motas, Ekstradycje and Rzą d Polski; Rojowska, Komisja;
Plesch, Human Rights.
10 Introduction

It is a mistake to view the UNWCC simply as one of several stepping

stones to the trials of the major war criminals at the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg. Debates within the UNWCC (and in the LIA
and ICPRD) certainly helped develop the discursive environment that
enabled many of the judicial steps taken when the London Charter was
negotiated in the summer of 1945. But the UNWCC also played a role as
states liberated from Germany prosecuted war criminals according to
their own domestic legislation. The UNWCC constituted an important
link between the emerging Soviet bloc and the West, and remained
a forum for debate as political tensions between East and West increased.
Today, consideration of the UNWCC offers a fresh vantage point from
which to survey the early years of the Cold War.
At the centre of the East–West tensions was Poland. There, ‘liberation’
was double-edged. The Germans may have been defeated, but Poles’
freedom to choose their own future was denied by Soviet troops on the
ground, a rigged referendum in 1946 and a rigged election in 1947.27 It
was no accident that the domestic legislation used to prosecute German
war criminals was also used to prosecute those that the new authorities in
Warsaw deemed as hostile, quislings, or collaborators.28 The definition of
quislings and collaborators was flexible enough to capture many of those
who were loyal to the Polish Underground State and the Polish
Government in Exile.29
The UNWCC was called on to review Charge Files (indictments) to
ascertain whether a prima facie case against an accused had been estab-
lished. In establishing such a case, and if the accused was extradited and
faced trial in Poland, the UNWCC provided those war crimes

27
Without assuming equivalence between the interventions of the US/UK and USSR in the
affairs of European states in the immediate post-war period, it is worth noting that
American and British actions in Italy (1948 election) and in the Greek civil war helped
to ensure that those countries remained within the Western ‘sphere of influence’.
Defeated communists from Greece found refuge in eastern Europe, including in
Poland. See Fleming, Greek ‘heroes’. At the Moscow Conference, on 9 October 1943,
Winston Churchill presented Stalin with his ‘naughty document’ (percentage agreement)
that allocated 90 per cent of influence in Greece to Britain/United States. NA.FO
800/414.
28
This is not to suggest that post-war justice can be reduced to the political and be seen
simply as a tool of the communists and their fellow travellers against opponents.
Historian Andrew Kornbluth explores different forms of collaboration and rightly distin-
guishes ‘Polish on Polish crime’ from ‘Polish on Jewish crime’ during the war. He argues
that while Polish on Polish crime was ‘atomizing’, Polish on Jewish crime was ‘solidariz-
ing’. Kornbluth notes substantial variation in the conviction rate for anti-Jewish crime
across different regions in the post-war period. See Kornbluth, Poland on Trial, 13, 121.
29
At the 4 December 1946 meeting of the UNWCC, Tadeusz Cyprian indicated that the
trials of ‘quislings’ in Poland was almost complete. See UNWCC, Minutes of Meeting
118, 4 December 1946, 8. Available at www.legal-tools.org/doc/813da4/pdf
 Information, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Justice 11

prosecutions in Polish courts with additional international legitimacy and

recognition. The trials of significant German war criminals prosecuted
both by the Supreme National Tribunal and district courts were
a triumph of international co-operation. Finder and Prusin, in their
landmark analysis of war crimes trials in Poland, note that the Supreme
National Tribunal ‘did not become a blind instrument of postwar retribu-
tive justice in a country in political turmoil’ and its adjudications of
German war criminals mirrored juridical processes in Western courts.30
The accused, including the former commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf
Hoess, were extradited, sent to Poland, tried, and found guilty. However,
when the same legislation and some of the same courts were used to
prosecute the state’s ‘political’ enemies, there was a danger that those
processes were glossed with legitimacy derived from the trials of German
war criminals. There was no easy solution for the UNWCC on this issue,
but it highlights that the pursuit of justice on either side of the Iron
Curtain had very different implications.

Information, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Justice

The development of post-war justice takes on an altered appearance when
attention is focused on Poland and the UNWCC rather than on Anglo-
American activities and the trials of the major war criminals at Nuremberg.
Though a conception of the future weighed heavy on the activities of the
LIA, ICPRD, and UNWCC – they were, after all considering post-war
justice, their activities merit consideration without just being seen as
a prelude to something else. In short, in relation to these organisations, it
is important to determine how information about atrocities was transformed
into knowledge about war crimes, and how, exactly, did that knowledge
motivate juridical reflection, learning, and innovation.31
It cannot be assumed that reports of outrages inevitably led to concern
about war crimes. Initially, information about atrocities had to be trans-
formed into knowledge. This process was not straightforward. Revisionist
accounts of the First World War, such as Arthur Ponsonby’s 1928 book
Falsehood in War-Time, which argued that news of atrocities in that conflag-
ration was propaganda, had a substantial following and influenced reception
of the terrible news from occupied Europe in the early stages of the Second
World War.32 For British officials with access to a wide variety of source

30
Finder and Prusin, Justice, 130.
31
For a discussion of the problems of transforming information about the Holocaust into
knowledge, see Bauer, The Holocaust, 18.
32
For a discussion of news of atrocities in the First World War and the problems with
Ponsonby’s account, see Gregory, Last Great War, 44.
12 Introduction

material, news of atrocities raised troubling policy issues regarding

a response, especially since the possibility of actually stemming German
violence militarily was not in Britain’s gift. As the war progressed, strategic
scepticism towards information about atrocities, especially atrocities against
Jews, was a stance adopted by officials in order not to act.33
In this context, it was profoundly difficult for news of German outrages,
and outrages against Jews in particular, to gain sufficient traction among
different publics and officials in Britain, but also in the United States, to
motivate action. As late as 1944, Arthur Koestler’s essay on disbelieving
atrocities was relevant when it was first published in January of that year in
New York, despite an abundance of information about German outrages
circulating.34 The fundamental problem was that the framing of that
news in newspapers (usually buried in the inside pages), and the failure
of Allied leaders to fully imprint their authority on such news, allowed
different constituencies to ignore or reject the information.
From its arrival in France, and later in Britain, the Polish Government
in Exile sought to overcome two challenges – scepticism about news of
atrocities and scepticism about the wisdom of trying war criminals. This
book gives due consideration to the three modalities of Polish efforts to
communicate German atrocities to the Allies, neutrals, and different
publics, and to motivate the Allies to act. The actions demanded included
the issuance of Allied statements condemning the atrocities, calls for
retaliation, and the application of pressure to secure post-war justice.
Chapter 1 explores official Polish publications, including the important
White Books and Black Books that highlighted the fact that German
actions transgressed international law, in particular the Hague

33
Strategic scepticism was a stance which provided the Foreign Office with flexibility and
enabled it to delay any proactive response to information which it felt would have an
adverse impact on British foreign policy. News of German atrocities, which at the moral
level called for the most determined response, was a particular case in point, especially if
atrocities were committed against Jews specifically. In relation to such atrocities, the
Foreign Office was keen not to give the impression that it recognised a Jewish nationality,
not to provoke problems in the Middle East by being seen as a staunch defender of Jews
and, like the Home Office, was concerned that attention given to Jews could stimulate
antisemitism in Britain. No doubt, among some officials, there was real scepticism –
a position encouraged by a series of publications published in the late 1920s and 1930s
critical of ‘atrocity stories’ in the First World War, but for those officials at the nexus of
information flow – senior Foreign Office officials, such as Frank Roberts, the volume of
information from trusted allies that they had access to and the sophistry employed not to
act indicates that their scepticism was strategic. For a discussion of the way the Foreign
Office sought to inhibit Geoffrey Mander asking a parliamentary question in
September 1942 that referred to the use ‘of gas to murder a large number of Jews in
Poland in mobile gas chambers’, see Fleming, ‘Intelligence’.
34
Koestler, The Nightmare, 5. The essay was later published as ‘Disbelieving Atrocities’ in
Koestler’s 1945 book Yogi and the Commissar.
 Information, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Justice 13

Convention IV of 1907 (Laws and Customs of War on Land). Chapter 2

discusses Polish diplomacy in the strict sense and demonstrates the
significance of Polish interventions in transforming discussion of
German outrages into a discussion of German war crimes. The Polish
Government in Exile achieved two particularly significant diplomatic
successes. The first saw the minor Allies sign the St James’s Palace
Declaration on Punishment for War Crimes on 13 January 1942;
the second led to the important 17 December 1942 United Nations
Declaration which condemned Germany’s policy of exterminating
Europe’s Jews. The Polish Government was also instrumental in fostering
co-operation between exiled governments in war-time London through
its championing of three inter-Allied bodies, including the Inter-Allied
Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes.35
Chapter 3 completes the analysis of Polish information strategy by
exploring the operation of Polish soft diplomacy. This diplomacy
included attempts to influence different constituencies and organisations,
including the Churches, women’s organisations, and the Left. The broad
aim of soft diplomacy was to help shape the discursive environment so
that Polish messaging, in different forms, was more effective. If support
for Polish goals could not be secured, soft diplomacy worked to limit the
traction that views opposed to Polish policy could gain. The bid to
transform information about atrocities into knowledge about war crimes
and knowledge about war crimes into inter-Allied commitments to post-
war justice was part of a broader discursive struggle about the narrating of
the war, the conduct of the war (demands for retaliation), and the shape of
post-war Europe.
Chapter 4 focuses on how war crimes were considered in different fora,
including the ICPRD and the LIA, but also in other organisations such as
the International Committee of the Central Institute of Art and Design,
the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education, and the Inter-Allied
Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes. The chapter also exam-
ines debates within the Polish Government in Exile on war crimes legis-
lation, which resulted in the issuance of the War Crimes Responsibility
Decree in March 1943. The work done in these fora, inter alia, provided
a firm foundation for discussions about war crimes in the UNWCC.

35
In addition to the Inter-Allied Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes, the Polish
Government in Exile supported the Inter-Allied Group for the Study of the Activities of
the Germans and their Satellites, and the Inter-Allied Committee for the Study of the
Armistice. Through the Inter-Allied Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes, the
signatories to the 13 January 1942 Declaration at St James’s Palace continued their co-
operation on the question of war crimes.
14 Introduction

Many of those who debated in the ICPRD and LIA continued their
deliberations in the official forum of the UNWCC.
Chapter 5 focuses on the development of the UNWCC from late 1943
and its position at the nexus of inter-Allied debates on war crimes and
demands for post-war justice. The chapter considers the flow of legal
ideas through the organisation, and how those ideas, Allied inter-
relations, and knowledge of war crimes encouraged several representa-
tives at the UNWCC to adopt a more expansive conception of the
organisation’s role than that initially conceived by the Foreign Office.
This is followed, in Chapter 6, by a detailed exploration of the engage-
ment of the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish
Government in Exile with the UNWCC. It is shown that through the
Office’s Charge File submissions, the establishment of a special section
dealing with German war crimes against Jews specifically, and the
involvement of the Polish representative in debates within the
UNWCC, the Office made a significant contribution to the work of
the UNWCC during 1944 and the first half of 1945. The submission of
Charge Files was coordinated and strategic with the aim of capturing the
scale and scope of German war crimes, including the German programme
of mass extermination of Jews. Indicatively, a Charge File naming the
accused submitted on 2 June 1944 referred to the mass slaughter at
Oświę cim (Auschwitz). Submitted indictments also referred to sexual
violence and gender-based war crimes, the destruction of cultural heri-
tage, and crimes against the clergy and intellectuals.36
Chapter 7 provides an examination of the period of transition following
the withdrawal of American and British diplomatic recognition of the
Polish Government in Exile in July 1945 and the recognition of the
government in Warsaw. In late June 1945, the major Allies convened in
London and, in August, signed the London Charter establishing the
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. During the summer of
1945, however, Poland was unrepresented at the UNWCC, an absence
which Polish jurists believed led to insufficient attention being paid to
Poland in the major Allies’ indictment against the major war criminals in
Nuremberg. Consideration is given to the attempts to ensure that a Polish
voice was heard at Nuremberg through the composition of an indictment,
provision of information, and liaison with the Soviet prosecutor. The

36
Dan Plesch notes that until recently it had been thought that ‘the first-ever prosecution
for rape as a war crime occurred during the tribunal in the former Yugoslavia’. The
‘rediscovery’ of the UNWCC material relating to sexual violence can inform debate on
the prosecution of such crimes that take place in contemporary conflicts. See Plesch,
Human Rights, 5.
 Information, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Justice 15

chapter also discusses Charge File submissions to the UNWCC during

1946.
Following the rigged election of January 1947 and the consolidation of
power by the Soviet-backed Polish Workers’ Party, the work of the Polish
War Crimes Office in London (under the authority of the government in
Warsaw) intensified. Chapter 8 shows that the rate of Charge File sub-
missions increased exponentially as the Polish War Crimes Office sought
to ensure that as many war criminals as possible were prosecuted and,
importantly, to make sure that the authoritative lists of war criminals
produced by the UNWCC reflected, to some degree, the breadth and
depth of German criminality in occupied Poland. The chapter also dis-
cusses the War Crimes Office’s pursuit of ‘collaborators’ and how rising
East–West tensions impacted on the work of the Office. In late 1947 and
early 1948, the number of suspected war criminals extradited to Poland
from Allied-occupied Germany and elsewhere reduced drastically, and,
as is shown, the practices of Allied authorities in Germany did not always
align with the guidance provided by the UNWCC.
In regard to sources, the book draws on material from a range of archives,
including the Hoover Institution (Stanford), the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), the National Archives (London),
the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum (London), the Wiener Holocaust
Library (London), the Institute of National Remembrance (Warsaw), Yad
Vashem (Jerusalem), among others. As a result of the efforts of scholar Dan
Plesch, the Legal Tools Database provides access to a great deal of
UNWCC documentation, including minutes of the plenary and sub-
committee meetings, research reports, and bulletins. UNWCC documents
are also available on a website developed as part of a research project on the
UNWCC led by Plesch.37 Some of this material is available at the National
Archives in London in the Foreign Office and Treasury Solicitor files.
Where documentary material is available online, the stable URL, rather
than the National Archives reference, is provided.38 Some significant docu-
mentation, including the Charge Files submitted by the Polish War Crimes
Office is currently only available in situ in archives. Nevertheless, the acces-
sibility of much material on the UNWCC should assist scholars and the
interested public to better appreciate the role that this organisation played in
the development of international justice.

37
See www.legal-tools.org/ and www.unwcc.org/unwcc-archives/. The Legal Tools data-
base was developed with the assistance of the European Union.
38
Indicatively, the minutes of UNWCC meetings can be found at NA.TS 26/67, 68, 74,
NA.TS 74. Additionally, meeting minutes for 1946 can be found at NA.FO 371/59597,
59598, 59599.
1 Invasion and Occupation
(Officially) Informing the World

On 1 September 1939, German forces crossed the Polish border. Over

the next month, these forces engaged in often ferocious violence against
non-combatants. Neither the words of support from Poland’s British and
French allies nor these allies’ declaration of war against Germany on
3 September 1939 was of much practical assistance as Poland’s military
desperately sought to slow and repel the invaders. The German army
committed an average of more than sixteen massacres per day, and it is
estimated that around 200,000 Polish citizens were killed during the
Germans’ September campaign.1 On 17 September, the Soviet Union
invaded from the east, sealing the Polish defeat. In line with the secret
protocol of the Ribbentrop–Molotov agreement, Poland was split
between the victors.
Following the Soviet invasion, and in accordance with the Polish
Constitution, the Polish President Ignacy Mościcki signalled his intent
to resign. At the end of September 1939, in Paris, Władysław Raczkiewicz
was sworn in as president of the Polish Republic. Władysław Sikorski was
appointed prime minister and later commander-in-chief of the Polish
Armed Forces. Tens of thousands of Poles, including officials, politicians,
military personnel, and civilians, escaped occupied Poland through
Hungary and Romania and made their way to France, where the Polish
Government in Exile had been established, based initially in Paris and
later in Angers. These escapees brought reports of German and Soviet
outrages.
Over the course of the Second World War, the Polish Government in
Exile attempted to develop a coherent response to the flow of information
about the occupation of Poland in relation to Allied sensibilities and
concerns, first in France and later (from June 1940) in Britain. The
Polish Government’s criticism of the Soviet Union was not particularly
welcomed by its French or British hosts. Neither France nor Britain
declared war on the Soviet Union following the 17 September 1939
invasion. The British considered that the Polish–British agreement of

1
Moorhouse, First to Fight, 265.

16
 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World 17

August 1939 referred only to Germany and were calculating that the
Germany–USSR alliance would not last. From the very beginning of
the war, Soviet war crimes were parenthesised and, as the war progressed,
especially after the German invasion on 22 June 1941 of USSR-
controlled territory, the Sikorski–Maisky agreement of 30 July 1941,
and the co-option of the USSR to the broad Allied cause, reports of
Soviet misconduct were distinctly unwelcomed by Poland’s Western
allies. This was also the case in regard to the German revelation of the
Katyń graves in April 1943.2
Despite the limitations of exile, the Polish Government sought to exert
pressure on allies in three overlapping ways to ensure that the toll of the
German occupation of Poland was understood in the West and to encour-
age an adequate Allied response to German actions. First, information
and news about conditions in Poland under occupation were released by
the Polish Government. Second, Polish representatives engaged with
allies and issued statements, sometimes in concert with others, to focus
attention on the German occupation and to call for responses to it. Third,
the Polish Government acted to shape the broader discursive context on
how the German occupation of Poland, and the war more broadly, was
understood in the West. It did this by attempting to influence possible
responses to German actions through participation in different official
international organisations, engaging with a range of non-government
associations to advance a Polish perspective, and informing different
constituencies of the situation in Poland. Polish politicians and officials
also made use of the statements made by senior politicians of Allied
nations in publications, debates, and speeches in order to support the
Polish Government’s agenda.
Poland’s allies, likewise, sought to impress on others their particular
concerns and understandings. It is therefore helpful to frame wartime
discussions about conditions in occupied Europe, and German conduct,
as part of a discursive struggle within the Allied camp. The success of
different governments in advancing their specific agenda depended on the
relative power of participants; their skill in articulating their concerns in
a manner which might resonate with allies; and their ability to cooperate
on issues of mutual concern, to nudge debate in different fora to their
advantage, and to develop positive synergies with a range of partners.
After the fall of France in June 1940, the British Government’s position

2
In March 1940, over 20,000 Polish officers captured by the Soviet Army during the Soviet
invasion of Poland were summarily executed on the orders of Stalin. For decades, this fact
was denied, but in 1990 the release of Soviet documentation confirmed what had long
been known. See Sanford, Katyn; Maresch, Katyn 1940. On British reactions to Katyń and
documentation, see Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Katyn.
18 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

was further strengthened through its financial and diplomatic support of

governments in exile based in London, its influence on the press and
control of the airwaves, its censorship policy, and its support – whether
active, tacit, or reluctant – of various organisations that considered the
Allied response to German actions. Consequently, to advance their agen-
das, governments in exile sought to avoid direct confrontation with
British sensibilities – and when this did occur (for example, in relation
to: Katyń in April and May 1943, the eastern border of Poland (on several
occasions), Wilno (Vilnius) in summer and autumn 1942, and broadcast-
ing in the Ukrainian language on the BBC in December 1942), little
concrete progress was made.3 At their best, governments in exile worked
to broaden the spectrum of acceptable knowledges and policy options,
but, as we shall see, the pace of change was slow. The search for some
form of inter-Allied agreement on the war narrative, war crimes, atroci-
ties, justice, and retaliation continued through the first years of the war.

News/Information
The circulation of news in wartime Britain was subject to various forms of
control, exercised by the British Government mainly through the British
Ministry of Information. Allied governments also received advice from
the Foreign Office. The tightest control was exercised over access to the
airwaves. The BBC Home Service only occasionally highlighted the scale
of German atrocities in occupied Poland, while the European Service,
headed by Ivone Kirkpatrick, a senior Foreign Office official seconded to
the BBC, also placed limits on what could be broadcast to occupied
Europe in languages other than English.4 The broad British aim was to
ensure the development of a coherent war narrative which aided the
Allied cause (as determined by British officials).
In print media, the level of control directly exercised by the British was
less, but there was a general understanding that official publications
would adhere to a broadly understood framework. Publications which
had a lower profile, low circulation, or were directed to particular, limited
constituencies, or were not in English, enjoyed greater freedom. This
freedom came at a cost – such publications had less prestige and less
3
The Foreign Office sought to avoid offending Soviet sensibilities. In 1942, for example,
a special broadcast on the BBC’s European Service on Wilno was cancelled, and Polish
broadcasting in Ukrainian to Polish citizens was curtailed. The Foreign Office also
informed the Polish Government of the inadvisability of distributing a publication titled
The Story of Wilno (it was ultimately published by the Polish Research Centre with paper
obtained from an unofficial private source). NA.FO 371/31903 (26) (104–105). NA.FO
371/31903 (C9502).
4
See Milland, Some Faint Hope; Harris, Broadcasting the Massacres.
 News/Information 19

influence with Allied decision-makers and officials. Consequently, there

was a trade-off between news/information released via recognised, official
channels and that released in semi-official or independent publications.
In the context of war, official publications had greater authority, but they
were generally more constrained by the broad war narrative promoted by
the British. Semi-official or independent outlets had greater scope to
publish information that was marginalised in official publications, but
they had less influence on Allied decision-makers and the general public.
This cleavage had a deleterious effect on how news of German atrocities
against Jews in particular was understood by different constituencies
during the course of the war.5
Polish information policy in the British context was put into practice by
the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation with advice from,
on the one hand, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polish
Ministry of the Interior and, on the other, from the British Ministry of
Information and the Foreign Office. In order to ensure that allies were
informed of the atrocities taking place in occupied Poland, the Polish
Government in Exile continuously released information to officials, jour-
nalists, and the general public in a range of ways. Although news entering
Britain via newswires passed through British censorship control prior to
release to journalists, the Polish Government received a steady flow of
unintercepted information from the Polish Underground State, which
had consolidated over the course of 1940. This information arrived via
couriers and radio – from Warsaw, and from Polish representatives in
neutral Switzerland and Turkey, for example.6
The information available to different groups was not the same, with
British officials and journalists being better informed than the general
public.7 Various British officials received unpublished material from the
Polish Government, and journalists often had access to material which

5
Indicatively, The Polish Jewish Observer – a supplement to the East London Observer –
repeatedly drew on Polish intelligence to report on the systematic mass murder of Jews at
Auschwitz but, given its limited circulation, such reports had little impact on the wider
public. However, the newspaper was read by some British officials – it was referred to in
the authoritative Weekly Political Intelligence Summary that was circulated to around 500
members of the British ruling class in late 1942. For an overview of the Weekly Political
Intelligence Summary, see Child, Great Britain, v–xxiii.
6
For a discussion of Polish intelligence reaching Britain, see Engel, In the Shadow of
Auschwitz; Stola, Early News of the Holocaust; Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies; Puławski,
W obliczu Zagłady; Puławski, Wobec ‘niespotykanego w dziejach mordu’.
7
For example, information on Treblinka handed to the editor of the News Chronicle in
May 1943 was not published. See YVA M2 (772) Schwarzbart’s Diary (entry for
17 May 1943). In early 1944, journalists/editors ignored references to the mass killing of
Jews at Auschwitz received in London from the Polish Underground State. See Fleming,
Auschwitz, the Allies, 200; On Schwarzbart, see Stola, Nadzieja i Zagłada.
20 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

did not make it into print in either Polish or British publications. News
from Poland competed for the public’s attention and, given the British
press’s adherence to the British information policy which adopted
a cautious approach to news of atrocities, much information about the
situation in Poland, and especially about Jews, was omitted or
marginalised.
Polish officials and politicians attempted to ensure that information
about the nature of the German occupation reached different constituen-
cies through a range of news dissemination and publication initiatives.
Under the direction of the Polish Ministry of Information and
Documentation, the Polish Telegraphic Agency provided a continuous
stream of material to other news agencies and the press. It made use of
a range of sources during the course of the war, including information
received from the Polish Underground State. On 12 July 1940, the first
edition of Dziennik Polski was published in London. This official publica-
tion was the continuation of Głos Polski, which had been published in
France as the Polish Government’s official outlet while based in Paris and
in Angers. Dziennik Polski was initially edited by the socialist Jerzy Szapiro
and then, from August 1940 to July 1943, by Marceli Karczewski.8 Also
in July 1940, The Polish Fortnightly Review was launched. This paper was
the most significant regular, official English-language Polish publication
and attracted a broad readership in diplomatic London and among the
wider public. Over the course of 1942, the number of copies printed
increased from 4,000 to 5,000. For major thematic editions, including
the important 1 December 1942 edition on the ‘Extermination of Polish
Jewry’, 8,000 copies were printed.9
Over the course of 1942 and 1943, the Polish Ministry of Information
and Documentation also republished text from thematic editions of The
Polish Fortnightly Review in the form of stand-alone booklets in a series
titled Polish Studies and Sketches.10 These booklets, enclosed in an austere
tan cover, were designed to promote the Polish Government’s perspective
to a wider public than that reached by The Polish Fortnightly Review and
focused on issues of particular importance. In all, five such booklets were
released, and a sixth booklet, which was initially considered for the series,
was orphaned as a singular stand-alone publication. As a series, the
booklets offer some insight into how the Polish Government wished to
narrate the war and to focus attention on particular issues.

8
Wróbel, Dziennik Polski, 510.
9
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 7 (1237). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/
0/-/145/skan/full/HJcd38he9xvj_bx_0DekKQ
10
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 2 (240). Czerwinski to Judd, 29 July 1942. Available at
https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/skan/full/x1FZr86OzCb5sWCvEshd9Q
 News/Information 21

In the most part, Polish Studies and Sketches outlined the reality of the
German occupation, including German atrocities. A partial exception
was the 1942 booklet titled The Legal Position of Jews in Poland, which
was primarily an attempt to show that the Polish Government did not
discriminate against Jews in the wake of accusations to the contrary in
Britain. This booklet nevertheless highlighted that, in occupied Poland,
the Germans violated Articles 43 and 46 of the 1907 Hague Convention
IV (Laws and Customs of War on Land), which referred to the obligation
to respect the laws of the occupied country and to respect the rights of
individuals, private property, and religious conviction, respectively.11
The other titles in the series were The Polish Spirit of Freedom (1942),
The Martyrdom of Polish Professors (1942), The Protestant Church in Poland
(1943), and The Quest for German Blood: Policy of Germanization in Poland
(1943). The orphaned booklet, Bestiality . . . Unknown in Any Previous
Record of Human History was published in August 1942 and is discussed
below.
The Polish Government also established an organisation, the Polish
Research Centre, which could be presented as non-official, to float ideas
and to inform opinion-makers of the situation in Poland. Significantly,
one of the aims of the institution articulated in an early draft outline was to
collect information ‘on conditions in Poland under the German and
Russian occupations, and the policy and methods employed by the two
invaders’.12 This was later changed – the final, publicly circulated object-
ive was the far more anodyne ambition ‘to collect and prepare all neces-
sary documents, material and information which will be required for
a Peace Conference, and for the peace of the future’. The difference
between the two statements highlights the compromise that was necessary
in the British context.
The Polish Research Centre was first mooted as early as October 1939,
following Władysław Kulski’s (counsel at the Polish Embassy in London)
and Oskar Halecki’s (historian) conference with British colleagues associ-
ated with the British Foreign Research and Press Service quartered at Balliol
College, Oxford.13 The Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), under
the direction of Arnold Toynbee, delivered reports and advice on the
situation in Europe to the Foreign Office. Jan Baliń ski-Jundziłł was initially
11
MID, The Legal Position of Jews, 22.
12
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 105, Folder 6 (708). Polish Research Centre,
undated. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/105/skan/full/L91yrho
YdM25KQeFq8qJOw
13
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 105, Folder 5 (592). Kulski to Raczyń ski,
9 October 1939. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/105/str/1/6/100/iY
tdSDPyIQVmqRhz5TDytA/#tabSkany; also at www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/skan/-/s
kan/4818ea73252a97a92ed576afb2948e05a96bc80bc814d8e7a30464c2a0e467ea
22 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

appointed to liaise between the FRPS and the Polish Research Centre, and
became the deputy director of the Research Centre when it was officially
founded in April 1940. The Royal Institute of International Affairs provided
the Research Centre with premises, and the two organisations enjoyed close
relations. The governing body of the Centre was composed of leading British
and Polish personalities.14
The personnel of the Polish Research Centre undertook extensive
programmes of lectures and talks around Britain and at institutions
such as the British Army, Cambridge University, the Fabian Society,
Rotary Clubs, League of Nations Union, among others. It liaised with
various organisations in Britain, including those of the other Allies. For
example, the Research Centre had contacts with the Czechoslovak
Institute and the Institut Français. The Research Centre was also intim-
ately involved with other aspects of Polish soft diplomacy – it functioned
as the secretariat both for the Polish delegation to the London
International Assembly (discussed in Chapter 3) and for the Catholic
Committee for Poland.15 The Centre therefore occupied a nodal position
in the promulgation of Polish soft diplomacy and in the dissemination of
information about Poland, including the conditions being endured under
occupation.
In his address to officially open the Polish Research Centre, Baliń ski-
Jundziłł asserted that the ‘aggressors’ sought ‘not only the destruction of
the Polish State, but the annihilation of the Polish nation’, before briefly
describing the purpose of the Centre as providing ‘reliable, honest and
objective information’ on Polish problems and ‘on questions relating to
the future reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe’.16 Over the
course of the war, the Research Centre, in cooperation with the Polish
Ministry of Information and Documentation, released a series of booklets
that advanced Polish policy ideas. Indicatively, the Centre released
14
The Polish members were Ambassador Edward Raczyń ski, Kajetan Dzierżykraj-
Morawski (General Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), August Zaleski
(Minister of Foreign Affairs), Professor Bohdan Winiarski (President of the Polish
Bank), and Professor Adam Żółtowski. The British members were Lord Astor
(President of the Royal Institute of International Affairs), the Vice Chancellor of
Oxford University (George Stuart Gordon), Lord Moyne, Sir William Max-Müller,
and Dudley Ward. See HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 105, Folder 7 (993).
Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/105/skan/full/gCxaKVx
RUCNFhJPfg9i5lg
15
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 105, Folder 7 (996). Also see HIA MSZ,
Box 95, Folder 33 (658). Polish Research Centre Report, 5 February 1944. Available at
https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/42/0/-/95/skan/full/xW1KDU9W4V392vQtfBJ-Fw
16
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 105, Folder 6 (714). Baliń ski-Jundziłł opening
address. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/105/skan/full/tnm2zYytB7
j0ITbkYLbyIA; also at www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/skan/-/skan/306ecc6d85ed86a
24525f865f6bc508f089a97ba74395d75b3fe06106c1a3da4
 News/Information 23

Poland and Danzig in July 1941, Eastern Poland in December 1941, and
German Failures in Poland: Natural Obstacles to Nazi Population Policy in
November 1942. The latter included a section titled ‘A policy of exter-
mination’, which focused on the deportation of Poles to the General
Government and to forced labour in Germany. The section also referred
to discriminatory food rationing practices that reduced the nutritional
intake of the Polish population, particularly the youth. It did not mention
the extermination of Poland’s Jewish citizens, despite news of several
death camps being publicised in July editions of The Polish Fortnightly
Review.
In addition to these prestigious publications, the Polish Government,
mainly through the Ministry of Information and Documentation, provided
some subsidies to various Polish-language newspapers in Britain, released
pamphlets and bulletins, and passed on photographs of occupied Poland to
journalists. Not all Polish-language newspapers which received subsidies
were completely aligned with the Polish Government policy, pointing both
to the wider objective of the subsidy regime of supporting a spectrum of
groups and outlooks within the Polish community in Britain and to the
often intense political–ideological tensions within Polish milieux, including
within the Polish National Council – the government in exile’s quasi-
parliament. Just as the Allies competed in London to ensure their particular
perspective of the war was given a hearing, similar struggles took place
within different Allied communities based in London. For example, as
a result of its robust anti-Soviet stance, Dziennik Żołnierza was folded into
the more tightly controlled Dziennik Polski at the beginning of
January 1944. For Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Dziennik
Żołnierza’s stance was unhelpful to the policy he sought to advance. As
early as July 1943, the British Ministry of Information’s liaison officer to the
Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation, W. H. Turner, had
welcomed the proposed merger, indicating that the army paper ‘may not
always present the most responsible point of view’.17 The new paper,
Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza, was edited by Mieczysław Szerer
until November 1944. Szerer later assumed responsibility for the Polish
War Crimes office in London under the direction of the Provisional
Government of National Unity in Warsaw.
In addition to directing and supporting journalism and think tanks to
advance knowledge of the situation in Poland, the Polish Government
released a number of high-profile, official, and authoritative publications

17
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 9 (1082). Turner to Wojcicki, Sakowski et al., 8 July 1943.
Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/skan/full/C8vVhse6tZDTJKO
ZPM-Z9A
24 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

which aimed to inform and influence readers in a more formal, con-

sidered, and strategic way. The Polish Government’s White Book series
(two volumes) sought to develop deeper understanding among the Allies
of the Polish situation through the publication of diplomatic papers and
diplomatic notes, often enhanced by appendices of evidence (of occu-
piers’ crimes in Poland) and additional argumentation. This was supple-
mented by the Black Book series (two volumes), which relayed
information about the occupation through testimonies and, significantly,
through photographs. In early January 1943, the Polish Government
released The Mass Extermination of Jews in Occupied Poland, which
included the Government’s 10 December 1942 Note to the governments
of the United Nations and additional documentation. This text can be
understood to be the third White Book. These five texts represent the core
of the Polish Government’s official attempt through publishing to inform
the wider public of what was happening in Poland and to encourage
a response from Allied governments. In addition, the Polish
Government also released other books, three of which particularly com-
plemented the White Book series and the Black Book series. These were
Poland after One Year of War (1940), The German Fifth Column in Poland
(1941), and The Nazi Kultur in Poland (1945).18

The White Books and Black Books

The first ‘White Book’, Official Documents Concerning Polish–German
and Polish–Soviet Relations, 1933–1939, was published in London on
19 March 1940 by Hutchinson.19 It had been published a few weeks
earlier in French as Les Relations Polono-Allemandes et Polono-Soviétique
au cours de la periode 1933–1939: Recuil de documents officiels by the
Parisian publisher Flammarion.20 It was also published in German
and in Spanish.21 The volume presented, through official documents
and commentary, Polish–German and Polish–Soviet relations in the

18
Another book, published in June 1941, is worth mentioning: The Persecution of the Catholic
Church in German-Occupied Poland. This book detailed German actions against the
Church, including the execution of priests, the shutting of churches, and deportation of
clergy. The book included text from Vatican radio broadcasts, the Polish Primate August
Hlond’s reports to the Pope, and an introduction by Cardinal Hinsley. It provided
a devastating account of German violence against the Church.
19
As Rzepa notes, the governments in exile received their own allocation of paper, which
allowed publishers to continue operating even if their own paper quota had been
exhausted. See Rzepa, Publishing ‘Paper Bullets’, 228.
20
PISM, Ministry of Information and Documentation (MID) A 10 – 5/3. ‘Instrukcja
w sprawie akcji prasowo-propagandowej placówek polskich za granicą , 4 III 1940’.
21
HIA MSZ, Box 187, Folder 23 (485). Unsigned note, 4 January 1941. Available at https://
szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/42/0/-/187/str/1/5/100/-MhMVfkbc7gODkRF3oVc_w/#tab
 The White Books and Black Books 25

period 1933–1939 in order to demonstrate that the responsibility for the

current conflagration lay solely with those countries now occupying
Poland. It was, in part, a response to the robust propaganda campaign
by the German Government in the United States and elsewhere, and
a reminder to Poland’s British and French allies that Poland had been
invaded and occupied by two belligerent states.
In late 1939, the German White Book Documents Concerning the Last
Phase of the German–Polish Crisis was published and distributed by the
German Library of Information in New York. The enemy’s propaganda
material was not permitted to circulate in Britain. The volume asserted
that ‘Germany, again and again, made attempts to solve the differences
between the two countries in a friendly spirit’ and claimed that ‘the Polish
crisis was deliberately manufactured by Great Britain with the connivance
of Poland’.22 The German White Book aimed to excite public opinion in
the United States and in other neutral countries in which it was distrib-
uted, as well as to limit the impact of the British War Blue Book that was
published on 22 September 1939.
The British War Blue Book, titled Documents Concerning German–Polish
Relations and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany
on 3 September 1939, focused on British diplomacy in regard to German–
Polish relations and the outbreak of war. It included British diplomatic
correspondence, speeches given by a range of significant personalities
such as Churchill, the Pope, and the King of the Belgians. It also reprinted
documents relating to the Anglo–Polish relationship, as well as speeches
by Hitler.23 The British War Blue Book not only posed a challenge for
Germany but, by excluding consideration of the Soviet Union’s invasion,
also highlighted that the diplomacy of Britain and Poland was not fully
aligned.
Le Livre Jaune Français, published in Paris in autumn 1939, and in
English as The French Yellow Book: Diplomatic Documents 1938–1939 in
April 1940, considered the beginning of the war through the lens of
French diplomacy. The text, subtitled ‘Papers relative to the events and
negotiations which preceded the opening of hostilities between Germany
on the one hand, and Poland, Great Britain and France on the Other’, like
the British War Blue Book, excluded the Soviet invasion from consider-
ation. Although the French Yellow Book in its foreword noted that
‘Poland was encouraged to persevere in her attitude of moderation and

Skany; also at www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/skan/-/skan/1ab38429052a43f86f11bab85f4

20d1340b9124ff103bbe15391bf734dacc56a
22
German Library of Information, German White Book, 3.
23
Foreign Office, The British War Blue Book. Available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/sub
ject_menus/blbkmenu.asp
26 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

patience in the face of German provocation’ and that ‘the German aggres-
sion of September 1 deliberately plunged Europe into war’, the insistence
that there was only one belligerent state posed a challenge for Polish
diplomacy and information strategy.
The Polish White Book, like the French Yellow Book, the British War
Blue Book, and the German White Book, was an attempt to shape
understandings of the recent past with a view to influencing the present
and future. In this discursive struggle, the different parties sought to fix
the meaning of inter-war diplomacy itself. Britain and France, due to their
longer-term geopolitical thinking in relation to the Soviet Union, framed
the beginning of the war as concerning Germany only. The British War
Blue Book showed that the British guarantee to Poland referred only to
Germany – a contention which the German White Book exploited as it
expounded the view that the guarantee ‘was merely a link in the British
encirclement chain’.24 These – often dry – collections of official docu-
ments with limited accompanying commentary were early contributions
to the propaganda battle which continued throughout the war, and which
the Polish Government worked hard to influence.
At the same time that the first White Book was being prepared, Michał
Potulicki, counsel to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who would
later play an influential role in developing the Polish response to German
war crimes, began gathering material for the first Black Book. Potulicki
mooted the idea of a Black Book in October 1939 and in November
concluded an agreement with René d’Uckermann, the literary director
of Flammarion – the French publisher of the first White Book.25 Over the
following months, the two men liaised to publish L’Invasion Allemande en
Pologne. On the Polish side, the book was put together in co-operation
with the Ministry of Information, at that point directed by Stanisław
Stroń ski. Around thirty people worked on the book. Editorial and stylistic
work was completed by Professor Paweł Kucharski. The book was
released on 1 April 1940 and formed an important part of Poland’s
‘propaganda’ effort. Over 50,000 copies were printed. 5,000 copies
were distributed outside France, including to Italy (800 copies),
Switzerland (1,000 copies), and the Balkans (1,000 copies). An agree-
ment with the London-based publisher Hutchinson was concluded on
30 April, and an English translation, The German Invasion of Poland, was

24
German Library of Information, German White Book, 3.
25
HIA MSZ, Box 187, Folder 23 (468). Letter from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the
Minister of Information and Documentation (Stanisław Stroń ski) 27 September 1940.
Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/42/0/-/187/str/1/5/100/E1ag174G2tOWE
s-3nQJkMQ/#tabSkany
 The White Books and Black Books 27

published on 15 August 1940.26 By January 1943, 13,500 copies of the

English-language edition had been printed.27
The documents and photographs in L’Invasion Allemande en Pologne
mainly came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Consul-General
Mieczysław Grabiń ski, and the Polish representative in Geneva whom
Potulicki knew personally, from Yugoslavian sources as well as from
American press agencies.28 L’Invasion Allemande en Pologne / The
German Invasion of Poland provided eyewitness reports on atrocities,
including executions and massacres, looting, deportations, and destruc-
tion of places of worship during the final months of 1939. But the volume
did not just seek to appeal to readers’ revulsion to the horrors of war.
Instead, it sought to frame German actions in relation to international
law. As was to become a common theme through several official Polish
publications, reference was made to the 1907 Hague Conventions,
including in relation to Opening Hostilities (III Convention) and on the
Laws and Customs of War on Land (IV Convention).29 In calling atten-
tion to German violation of these conventions, the volume sought to
position the German state as engaging in practices that were contrary to
international law – the implication being that legal redress would be
necessary.
L’Invasion Allemande en Pologne included a foreword by Édouard
Herriot, president of France’s Chamber of Deputies and member of the
centre-left Radical Party. Herriot made reference to the British War Blue
Book and the French Yellow Book. He noted that from 1 September 1939,
the massacres had begun and expressed horror at German barbarity.
Significantly, Herriot departed from French Government (at least its
Ministry of Foreign Affairs) policy and provocatively wondered whether
it was not the common taste for violence that brought Hitler and Stalin
together – in their carve-up of Poland.30 This reference was a minor coup
for Potulicki and his colleagues at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
but it was one that was rarely repeated.
The photographs included in the volume did not sanitise the reality of
war. Multiple photographs depicted those killed and injured, and the

26
HIA MSZ, Box 187, Folder 23 (482). ‘Sprawozdanie z rozmów w Paryżu 29.IV do 1.V. 1940
r. w sprawie Polskich ksią g’ by Michał Potulicki 1 May 1940. Available at https://szukajwarch
iwach.pl/800/42/0/-/187/str/1/5/100/ug8ILLlo_Cq45aq6nPCteg/#tabSkany
27
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 4 (610). Hutchinson to Witold Czerwinski, 7 January 1943.
Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/skan/full/Ulv8wW5K9Rh_
oXJpQXCT0g
28
Although the documentation does not provide the first name of the Consul-General, it is
almost certain that Potulicki was referring to Mieczysław Grabiń ski, who was the Polish
consul general in Munich until September 1939.
29
Polish Ministry of Information, L’Invasion Allemande, 16–17. 30 Ibid., 6.
28 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

massive destruction of property and cultural institutions. A harrowing

photograph of a distraught young girl kneeling over the corpse of her
sister, killed by German bombing, was strategically placed beneath
a small photograph of Hitler posing with his right arm raised and an
extract from his 1 September 1939 Reichstag speech in which he declared
that he did not want to make war on women and children. This juxtapos-
ition of images sought to demonstrate both the horror unleashed in
Poland and the lies of the Führer. The same photograph was placed on
the cover of the volume – this time to highlight the destruction of inno-
cents and the insoluble anguish of loss.31 The English language The
German Invasion of Poland was slightly different, but sought to achieve
the same purpose as the French text. It took into account British sensibil-
ities and information policy. The image on the cover was less emotive,
featuring a young woman lying at peace. Other photographs were recon-
figured or replaced, and an image of German propaganda had the
German text removed. The volume included a preface by the archbishop
of York, William Temple, in which he noted the ‘complete ruthlessness of
German methods’.32
A year later, the Polish Government published the second White Book.
German Occupation of Poland: Extract of Note Addressed to the Allied and
Neutral Powers provided allies with details of the German occupation from
the invasion to the tail end of 1940. The diplomatic Note was distributed
on Polish Constitution Day (3 May 1941). The volume was thematically
organised into four main sections – ‘Outrages against Persons’, ‘Outrages
against Religion’, ‘Outrages against Polish Culture’, and ‘Outrages
against Property’. The bulk of the volume was made up of appendices
which presented German ordinances, and eyewitness testimony, framed
against the backdrop of the 1907 Hague Convention IV. For the benefit
of its readers, the volume reprinted various articles from section III of
Convention IV, which referred to the responsibility of a ‘Military
Authority in the Territory of a Hostile State’. The subsequent documents
in the appendices demonstrated that the Convention was being system-
atically transgressed.
In his thematically organised introduction to the documents and testi-
monies collected in the volume’s appendices, the Polish Foreign
Minister, August Zaleski, pointedly emphasised the German violations
of the 1907 Hague Convention IV in relation to the suppression of Polish
legislation, the persecution and deportations, the imposition of collective
responsibility, acts of pillage, destruction of property, religious buildings,

31
Polish Ministry of Information, L’Invasion Allemande, 20.
32
Polish Ministry of Information, The German Invasion, 7.
 The White Books and Black Books 29

and art and science establishments. Zaleski also highlighted that the
German treatment of Polish prisoners of war was a violation of the 1929
Geneva Convention. The Foreign Minister noted that German actions in
Poland were ‘crimes’ and considered that the Polish Government was
obliged ‘to again protest against the German policy of extermination, and
to lay what facts it possesses before public opinion; well convinced of what
verdict the conscience of the civilized world will render’.33
In referencing the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Convention,
and in the use of the plural noun ‘crimes’ and the singular noun ‘verdict’,
Zaleski effectively showed that international law had been broken and
a consequence of this had to be for justice to be pursued. Though (the
court of) public opinion was appealed to, Zaleski not only provided robust
evidence of German criminal behaviour in occupied Poland, he also laid
important groundwork for German conduct in Poland and in occupied
Europe more generally to be considered in relation to legal norms.
The organisation of the volume pre-shadowed inter-Allied discussions
of subsequent years – how could German crimes be categorised? What
kind of evidence could substantiate a legal charge? What laws or conven-
tions could be appealed to in order to ensure that German actions were
understood by diplomatic London and by the broader public alike, and,
more importantly, could help inch inter-Allied debate to consider ways to
aid those suffering occupation as well as to shape a reckoning when the
time came?
A follow-up to the first Black Book (The German Invasion of Poland) was
published in London on 15 January 1942 under the title The German New
Order in Poland. The release of the book was timed to add momentum to
inter-Allied discussion on German war crimes and to sustain diplomatic
and public attention on German outrages taking place in Poland.34 Two
days earlier, the Allies had convened at St James’s Palace, where govern-
ments in exile signed the Inter-Allied Declaration (on the punishment for
war crimes) (discussed in Chapter 2). The initial print run of 10,000
copies was sold within six weeks, and a second printing took place in
April 1942.35
An expanded version of The German New Order in Poland was published
in the United States in late August of 1942 under the title The Black Book

33
Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, German Occupation of Poland, 55.
34
A galley proof of the book was prepared by the end of May 1941. At that point, Polish
officials were hoping that Winston Churchill would write an introduction to the volume.
See HIA MID, Box 104, Folder 3 (501). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/
41/0/-/144/skan/full/54Os3JOyiWdEl3uw7d-k4A
35
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 7 (1238). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/
0/-/145/skan/full/65zHKxGH9AM5vV1WoUmyIQ
30 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

of Poland.36 The arrangements for the American version of the book were
made by the Polish Information Center in New York. The Center had
operated from 1940, but was placed on a firmer footing following the
United States’ entry into the war in 1941. The Center was incorporated
within the Ministry of Information and Documentation in London and
became the main conduit of official Polish communications to the
American public. It arranged the issuance of official publications (with
American publishers) and assisted in bringing the publications of a range
of Polish organisations in Britain to the American market. The Center
played an important role in supporting the different modalities of Polish
diplomacy in the United States.37
The German New Order in Poland recorded Germany’s ‘black record of
barbarism’ from September 1939 to the end of June 1941. On
28 January 1942, in the House of Commons, the British Minister of
Information noted that material from the book had been used on the
BBC and assured the House that a copy would be made available in the
library of the House.38
The book was divided into four main sections: ‘Persecutions, Murders,
Expulsions’, ‘Pillage and Economic Exploitation’, ‘Struggle Against the
Polish Spirit’, and ‘German Lawlessness’. To some extent, this mirrored
the structure of the second White Book, German Occupation of Poland.
Extract of Note Addressed to the Allied and Neutral Powers released several
months earlier. However, rather than framing the contents of the volume
in relation to legal norms, as Zaleski had done in his introduction to
the second White Book, a summary consideration of the violation of
legal conventions was placed in the final section of the volume, though
reference to violations of international law occurred elsewhere in the text.
The main purpose of the second Black Book was to impart knowledge
of the German occupation in a manner that would viscerally impact on

36
New York Times, 5 September 1942, p. 4, ‘Polish ‘Black Book’ lists Nazi Crimes’. Also see
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 7 (1239). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/
0/-/145/skan/full/XFPdbXfOoYm9z2aovtfL-g. The book was also published in Swedish
under the title Polens Martyrium.
37
For example, the Center monitored American public opinion and provided the Polish
Government with regular summaries of the American press. It was closely involved with
Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski’s visit to the United States in late 1942 and the
attempts to win Jewish support for the Polish cause. In late 1940, ‘Polish leaders appear
to have begun to take greater interest in the role that the United States might play in
determining the political future of Eastern Europe, and they seem to have been convinced
that Jewish opinion could exert a decisive effect on the formation of U.S. public and
governmental attitudes’. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 81.
38
Hansard, House of Commons Debates, volume 337 column 712, 28 January 1942.
Available at https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1942-01-28/debates/be80fe07-6d
71-4efc-8fc0-9da724f5d4c7/PublicationGermanNewOrderInPoland
 The White Books and Black Books 31

readers, and this was achieved both through the structure of the volume
and through the generous reproduction of photographs from occupied
Poland. The volume included 185 photographs, including of executed
Polish citizens strung up on a lamp post and on scaffolding, images of
Jews engaged in forced labour and being humiliated through enforced
shaving of beards. Some of these images were derived from the German
press, which was being monitored by the Allies.
The second Black Book sought to be as comprehensive as possible,
with sub-sections on executions, deportations, the organised rape of
women, concentration camps, prisoners of war, the persecution of Jews
and ghettos, and destruction of universities and culture. In its final section
referring to law, the volume sketched how German conduct violated
international legal norms and, like the second White Book, referenced
the 1907 Hague Convention IV and the Geneva Convention of 1929. It
highlighted multiple examples of illegal activity and reproduced transla-
tions of German decrees which disregarded international law. Such
decrees later formed part of the evidence against German war criminals
in UNWCC Charge Files and in subsequent legal proceedings.
These four publications (the two White Books and the two Black
Books) were issued under the full authority of the Polish Government
and, through them, the Polish Government provided allies and the read-
ing public with official, accessible information and analysis of Polish/
German relations prior to the war, the German invasion and the
German occupation. It is noteworthy that although the French and the
British provided leeway for the Polish Government to present documents
on pre-war Polish–Soviet relations in the first White Book, neither the
French nor the British were prepared to acquiesce to extensive public
discussion of the Soviet invasion in the same way as the German
invasion.39
The compromise solution was for the Polish Ministry of Information to
publish Poland after One Year of War with the publisher George Allen and
Unwin (the favoured publisher for the most authoritative material was
Hutchinson). This short seventy-seven-paged text included six pages that
considered the Soviet occupation. It referred to the destruction of Poles’
liquid capital through the 12 December 1939 decree nullifying the Polish
zloty and the ongoing deportations of people to the Soviet Union. The
text stated that the Soviet–German pact was ‘the foundation-stone of
a policy of expansion of the two imperialisms, the Red and the Brown’
39
In November 1940, The Polish Fortnightly Review mentioned the Soviet occupation, but
planned books on the Soviet invasion, and on Polish-Soviet Relations between 1939 and
1943 were not published. The latter was ready for print and can be found at HIA MSZ,
Box 190, Folder 11. It was eventually released in 1946 in mimeograph form.
32 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

and that under such conditions in occupied Poland it was ‘very difficult to
say which of the two regimes is harder and more cruel’.40 The booklet
made only a brief mention of the persecution of Jews, stating that it
‘surpassed the worst excesses of the Middle Ages’, and directed readers
to the nominally independent fortnightly review, Free Europe.41 Poland
after One Year of War can be seen as complementary to the first White
Book and the first Black Book.
Despite the limitations of the British information regime, the Polish
Government continued to collect, organise, and prepare information
about the occupation, regardless of the occupier, and took the pragmatic
step of supporting non-official publications that discussed Polish–Soviet
relations, as well as making information available to publishers through the
Ministry of Information and Documentation.42 Free Europe published
a pamphlet titled ‘The Soviet Occupation of Poland’ in December 1940.
Written by Free Europe’s editor, the journalist Kazimierz Smogorzewski, the
pamphlet described the Soviet occupation, referring to forced labour, expro-
priation and wholesale deportation.43 It relayed the kind of information that
the Polish Government wished to publicise, but was diplomatically unable
and/or unwilling to do so. However, without the public imprimatur of
sanction from the Polish Government, limited circulation, and pro-Soviet
sensibilities in Britain, the pamphlet had (predictably) little impact.
The restrictions placed on the Polish Government in relation to the
Soviet occupation meant that the serious violations of international law
taking place were not subject to full public scrutiny. This provided space
for the articulation of views which proved difficult for the Polish
Government to counter in public. For example, in June 1942, the
Polish Government tabled a complaint with the Foreign Office about
a pamphlet published by Oxford University Press titled ‘An Atlas of the
USSR’. This publication was part of the Oxford series of pamphlets on
world affairs.44 In that pamphlet, Eastern Poland was described as

40
MID, Poland after One Year Of War, 32, 55.
41
Ibid., 46. Also see Free Europe The Persecution of Jews in German Occupied Europe, 1940.
The twenty-six-page booklet was published in December 1940. Free Europe received
some advice of a technical nature from the British Ministry of Information liaison officer,
W. H. Turner. Turner recognised that Free Europe was well placed ‘for the indirect
propagation of the Polish case’. HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 7, (1072). W. H. Turner
to Sakowski et al., 6 July 1943. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/
skan/full/n2Mq3pvYQOO1C8kjMDULqw.
42
HIA MSZ, Box 190, Folder 10 (239). Note to Minister 12 February 1943 https://szuka
jwarchiwach.pl/800/42/0/-/190/skan/full/yvjKMtOfAa6w9YYyiSNS7A.
43
The text of the pamphlet is available online – http://felsztyn.tripod.com/id15.html.
Smogorzewski had contacts with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had inter-
viewed Adolf Hitler before the war.
44
Stembridge, Atlas of the USSR.
 The White Books and Black Books 33

territory ‘re-occupied by the USSR’.45 For the Polish Government, this

was not only unacceptable but contrary to the information regime laid
down by the British. The counsel at the Polish Embassy, Antoni Baliń ski,
passed a memorandum detailing Polish concerns to Frank Roberts at the
Foreign Office in which it was asserted that:
The Polish Government are well aware of H.M Government’s desire to limit and
control public discussions of controversial and delicate subjects of the future
delimitation of European frontiers. In consequence of this desire the Polish
Government is expected to control all publications issued in Polish or under
Polish auspices. At the same time, they feel entitled to expect similar control to
be applied to publications inspired by Soviet influences and, still more, to those
the aim of which is to convey objective information to the British reader.46
Roberts assured Baliń ski, in a letter dated 20 July 1942, that the Oxford
pamphlets were ‘entirely unofficial’ and that the British Ministry of
Information had drawn Oxford University Press’s attention to the issue.
Roberts expressed the hope that any future edition would take into
account the concerns raised.47 This response did not speak directly to
the Polish complaint and misleadingly suggested that something could
only be done if a second edition of the pamphlet were to be published.
The Polish memorandum had indicated that Oxford University Press’s
pamphlets were ‘looked upon as a semi-official publication’ and, given
both the reputation of the university and the fact that the Foreign
Research and Press Service was based at Balliol College, such a view
was well founded.48 In this case (and others) Polish interests were under-
mined, but the Polish Government, as indicated by Smogorzewski’s

45
Following the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920, the Polish-Soviet border was agreed with
the signing of the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921. See Böhler, Civil War. Böhler’s
pathbreaking scholarship examines how the Polish state and nation were shaped and
reconstructed in war and civil violence from 1918 to 1921. Also see Davies, White Eagle.
46
HIA Polish Embassy to Great Britain, Box 115, Folder 1 (52). Memorandum passed to
Frank Roberts. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/115/skan/full/
izVSVAf1HMjV0vO7Gf8CXA
47
HIA Polish Embassy to Great Britain, Box 115, Folder 1 (49). Roberts to Baliń ski
(20 July 1942). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/115/str/1/1/100/5ji
Lj76uG-zMROeTH65Btg/#tabSkany
48
The Foreign Research and Press Service conducted research on a range of issues
relating to Poland, including on population transfers. It also provided reports for the
Political Intelligence Department (responsible for writing the authoritative Weekly
Political Intelligence Summary that was distributed to around 500 members of the
British ruling class – politicians and officials) and to the Political Warfare Executive that
was charged with formulating propaganda directed to enemy and enemy-occupied
countries. On the Foreign Research and Press Service, see Keyserlingk, Arnold
Toynbee’s. Also see Hansard, House of Commons Debates 23 July 1941 volume 373,
column 861–2, available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1941/
jul/23/foreign-research-and-press-service
34 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

pamphlet, could seek to challenge the British information regime by

assisting non-official publications. Nevertheless, as is shown in
Chapter 3, the efficacy of such attempts was far below that of official
interventions.
During the period 1940 to early 1942 when the White Books and the
Black Books were published, the Polish Government emphasised the suffer-
ing of Poland and the violations of international law. German crimes against
specific groups were referred to, and particular categories of crimes were
identified. The work done in this period – in collecting, organising, checking,
analysing, and structuring material in a coherent manner – provided
a foundation for subsequent Polish contributions to inter-Allied deliber-
ations on war crimes. But sustaining the interest of the British public,
officials and politicians in what was happening in occupied Poland proved
difficult – news of atrocities and violations of international law competed,
often unsuccessfully, with news of military engagements and with the policy
of the British Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office to narrate the
war in a manner that was deemed by the British as being congruent with
efforts to win the war as swiftly as possible. The Polish Government did not
publish any further volumes in the White Book or Black Book series, but did
release other publications which highlighted the situation in Poland, and
which augmented those official and authoritative volumes.

The German Fifth Column in Poland

Two months prior to the Polish Foreign Minister’s (August Zaleski) Note
to Allied and Neutral Powers – a Note that would form the basis of
the second White Book, officials at the Ministry of Information and
Documentation issued a book titled The German Fifth Column in Poland.
In November 1940, the Polish Embassy in London had contracted
Hutchinson to publish the volume, and it was released in February 1941
with a print run of 5,000.49 Polish officials hoped the publication would
achieve three objectives: first, to counter German propaganda regarding
the treatment of the German minority in interwar Poland; second, to
demonstrate that that minority had acted as a fifth column and had not
only destabilised the Polish Republic, but the wider post-Versailles peace
settlement in Europe; and third, to soften diplomatic and public opinion in
Britain prior to the release of Zaleski’s Note.50 The volume was advertised

49
HIA MID, Box 144, Folder 2 (220). ‘Polish publications March – April 1941’. Available
at: https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/144/skan/full/_Jqf1mo_M82qDbxpwtITtQ
50
German propagandists repeatedly asserted that the German minority in Poland had
fallen victim to Polish violence. See, for example, German Library of Information,
Polish Acts of Atrocity, published in 1940.
 The German Fifth Column in Poland 35

alongside the Black Book (The German Invasion of Poland) in early

February 1941 in two British press outlets – The Observer and the Sunday
Despatch.51
Almost a year earlier, in March 1940, a parcel addressed to the non-
existent Inter-State Commission for Polish Relief was delivered to the
Polish Embassy in London. Inside was a book allegedly published in
Geneva by the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme titled The
Heroic Battle of the Poles. The volume was framed as pro-Polish, but in
reality, it was a sophisticated piece of German propaganda. Through the
use of shocking photographs and text, The Heroic Battle of the Poles
accused members of the Polish public of atrocities against the German
minority. The book raised two important questions – How did such
a volume breach British censorship? And how should it be responded to?
The Polish ambassador Edward Raczyń ski instructed Stefan Litauer,
who liaised with the British Ministry of Information, to raise the issue with
Walter Monckton, the official responsible for censorship at that ministry.
Monckton advised Litauer that ‘various ingenious methods have been
used for getting past the censors, notably by “Return to sender” labels on
a packet purporting to be sent from England to Brussels, for instance,
which actually originated in Brussels’. Monckton admitted that the cen-
sors had been ‘caught out’, that damage had been done, but that the
experience would help the censors to ensure nothing similar occurred in
the future.52
As soon as Raczyń ski was made aware of the forgery, he took to the
airwaves and spoke with the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson.53 In
his subsequent letter to The Times, Raczyń ski stated that the book was
‘nothing but a most scurrilously slanderous pamphlet against Poland’ and
that it was ‘his duty to warn the British public against this latest display of
Germany’s unscrupulous methods of propaganda warfare’.54 Monckton
expressed the hope that these interventions minimised the ‘bad effects of
this revolting book’.55 Despite the rapid intervention of the ambassador,
which also included letters to various newspapers around Britain, concern
lingered about the impact of German propaganda. In the House of

51
Ibid.
52
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 114, Folder 9 (932). Monckton to Litauer
27 March 1940. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/114/str/1/10/100/B
jfuXK08umbb9P7tJpgTFw/#tabSkany
53
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 114, Folder 9 (897). Raczyń ski to Dawson,
15 March 1940. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/33/0/-/114/skan/full/
ePcJ9elFsuyn_4PfacjJOQ
54
Ibid.
55
HIA Polish Embassy in Great Britain, Box 114, Folder 9, Monckton to Litauer
27 March 1940.
36 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

Commons on 11 April 1940, the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson questioned

the Home Secretary, John Anderson, why more care was not exercised by
censorship to prevent ‘thinly-disguised German propaganda against the
Polish people’ entering Britain. Anderson, aware of the breach in censor-
ship, agreed that ‘all possible steps should be taken to stop this revolting
form of propaganda being sent into this country, and further inquiries are
being made.’56
The entry of The Heroic Battle of the Poles into Britain exposed
a weakness in the British censorship regime, and efforts were made to
limit the damage to Britain’s ally. Both British officials at the Ministry of
Information and senior politicians were embarrassed by the lapse, and
censorship checks of material coming from abroad were enhanced.
Nevertheless, the book had been circulated, and the Polish Embassy
deemed that it was necessary to publish material gathered together by
the Polish Government on the activities of the German minority in
Poland during the pre-war period and the early weeks of the German
occupation.
The German Fifth Column in Poland adopted a sombre tone and framed
the issue of fifth columnists in Poland as a warning to other nations. Over
the course of its six chapters, it highlighted the German minority abuse of
the protection that it enjoyed under Minority Clauses in the Treaty of
Versailles, offered evidence showing that the minority had acted as ‘spies
and diversionist agents’ for Germany, and considered the actions of the
German minority prior to, during and after the German invasion. The
Minority clauses, which provided the German minority in Poland with
the right to submit complaints to the League of Nations (the Polish
minority in Germany did not enjoy such a right), were argued to have
been abused by Berlin, becoming ‘a convenient instrument for the grad-
ual disintegration of the political relations which were to have constituted
the permanent basis of the Peace Treaty’.57
The early parts of the text, in accessible language, complemented the
first White Book on Polish-German relations and referred to many of the
same documents, including the 5 November 1937 Polish-German
Declaration on the subject of the treatment of Minorities.58 The third
chapter of The German Fifth Column in Poland sought to refute German
propaganda regarding the events in Bydgoszcz in the first days of
September 1939. Civilians, both German and Polish, lost their lives as

56
Hansard, House of Commons Debates 18 March 1940, volume 358, columns 1646–7.
Available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/mar/18/enemy-
propaganda#S5CV0358P0_19400318_HOC_254
57
MID, German Fifth, 16.
58
MID, German Fifth, 19. Also see Les Relations Polono-Allemandes, 63.
 Unknown in Any Previous Record of Human History 37

German irregulars attacked the Polish Army. Subsequent actions by the

German military resulted in further loss of life. Though much of German
printed propaganda did not reach Britain, some did, and it reached
neutral countries. The Polish Government was fully cognisant of how
damaging German propaganda could be and, in relation to Bydgoszcz,
sought to demonstrate the nefarious activities of a disloyal German
minority.
The volume concluded as it began, by reiterating that the problem of
German fifth columnists was one faced by many other countries – France,
Denmark, Norway, and also in Great Britain and in the United States. It
called on readers to take note of the Polish experiences as ‘in all the
diversionist operations carried out in various countries, Germany has
never advanced beyond the methods which were applied in Poland’.59
As well as seeking to highlight the perfidy of the German minority in
Poland, the volume discussed German crimes, generally in non-legal
language, and pointed to the inadequacy of the post–World War
I settlement. The German Fifth Column in Poland can be seen as a bridge
between the White and Black Book series, as well as offering arguments
for allies and neutral countries to connect with the Polish cause. In the
context of sustained anti-Polish German propaganda, the book was
a necessary response, and helped to create space within diplomatic and
public discourse for Zaleski’s Note of 3 May 1941.

Bestiality . . . Unknown in Any Previous Record of Human

History: The Orphaned Publication
The Black Book series, the White Book series, Poland after One Year of
War, and The German Fifth Column in Poland all drew on research and
documentation gathered by the Polish Government in Exile and worked
on by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of
Information and Documentation. All except Poland after One Year of War
were published by the Polish Government’s favoured publisher in
London – Hutchinson. The objective of these volumes was to present,
in a considered, coherent, and strategic way, the situation in Poland and
to advance the Polish Government’s policy to encourage appropriate
responses to German aggression from Allied and neutral countries. The
responses called for included retaliation, post-war justice, and a post-war
settlement that recognised the destabilising impact of German minorities
in various European countries. The parameters about what official Polish

59
MID, German Fifth, 147.
38 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

publications in Britain could refer to, and how, was limited by the British
information regime.
Although German atrocities against Poland’s Jewish communities were
referred to in the second White Book and in both Black Books, these
atrocities were often framed as part of a common pattern. The first Black
Book (The German Invasion of Poland) included brief references to German
violence against Jews. Zaleski in his Note to Allied governments that was
reproduced as the second White Book (The German Occupation), for
instance, drew attention to the occupying authorities’ ‘system of humiliat-
ing processes designed to abase the human and national dignity of Polish
citizens’ before referring to the German policy of forcing ‘citizens of Jewish
faith and all persons of Jewish origin to wear a star of David’. The text went
on to describe how Christians as well as Jews ‘have been obliged to salute,
by uncovering their heads, every German met in the streets’. The second
Black Book, however, provided an extensive account of German treatment
of Jews prior to the arrival of news of the death camps and recognised that
‘harsh and humiliating as was the treatment of the Poles in general, that of
the Jews was in most cases even worse’.60 The conclusion of the volume’s
section referring to Jews noted that in the German doctrine being enforced
in Poland, Poles were slaves while ‘the Jew is not a human being at all’. This
type of understanding, however, remained in tension with the more widely
accepted and promoted view that the persecution of Jews, while harsh, was
qualitatively similar to that of other Polish citizens. In late May 1942,
shocking news from the (General Jewish Workers) Bund in Poland arrived
via the channels of the Polish Underground State from Warsaw, which
challenged the ‘same-but harsher’ formula that was dominant among
Polish officials as well as across diplomatic London.
The Bund Report revealed that 700,000 Jews had been murdered by the
Germans in Poland and referred to the gassing of Jews at Chełmno. This
information was reported in the Daily Telegraph on 25 June and elsewhere
over the next few weeks. The suspension in the British information regime,
which occurred in opposition to the British Foreign Office, but was sup-
ported by the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, seems to have
caught Polish officials involved in producing officially sanctioned publica-
tions unprepared. On 3 July 1942, Witold Czerwiń ski of the Polish Ministry
of Information met with a representative of the publisher Hutchinson to
discuss a book titled The Jews under the New Order in Poland – over a month
after the news of mass killing arrived from Warsaw.61 The initial plan was to

60
MID, The German New Order in Poland, 215.
61
See HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 2 (236). W.T Kimber to Czerwiń ski, 8 July 1943. Available
at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/skan/full/daMOBoyx2D6184BTQl7jAQ
 Unknown in Any Previous Record of Human History 39

print 6,000 copies and the Polish Ministry of Information would deliver the
final print-ready text at an unspecified date in the future. This text was never
published.62
On 9 July, Bracken hosted a conference at the Ministry of Information
(Senate House) in London, at which he reiterated that 700,000 Jews in
Poland had been murdered. The most senior Polish representative pre-
sent was the Minister of the Interior, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who indi-
cated that in excess of 200,000 Jews had been killed and that 200,000
non-Jewish Poles had also perished. He stated that the ‘wholesale exter-
mination of the Jews’ had commenced, and drew attention to the killing of
Jews at Bełżec. In suggesting a semblance of parity of death tolls,
Mikołajczyk publicly failed to lend his authority to the news that had
arrived in May. It is possible that he received some encouragement in this
from British officials, though there was some scepticism within Polish
milieux (especially on the Right of the political spectrum) as to the
accuracy of the Bund’s figures.63 The Bundist Szmul Zygielbojm also
spoke and emphasised the scale of German killing of Poland’s Jews.
Ignacy Schwarzbart, the second Jewish representative on the Polish
National Council, also addressed the audience. Significantly, no one
from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs or from the British Foreign
Office spoke. The conference was pitched at a lower, ‘non-diplomatic’
level, seeking to respond to the news and the concern expressed in the
media in late June and early July, but without giving the appearance of an
official inter-State event or project that the presence of Ministry of
Foreign Affairs/Foreign Office officials would inevitably imply.
Nevertheless, given the general marginalisation in Britain of news of
German atrocities against Jews, the 9 July conference was an important
recognition – even if it was not at the diplomatic level – of the German
policy of extermination. The proceedings of the conference, together with
additional material, were printed by St Clements Press in the summer of
1942 under the title Bestiality . . . Unknown in any previous record of human

62
In 1943, the Polish Government (Ministry of Information and Documentation) agreed to
provide a $3000 subsidy to The Black Book of Polish Jewry published by the American
Federation of Jews and edited by Jacob Apenszlak. The Polish Information Center in
New York supplied some of the photographs. The book was released in late 1943 and
detailed German crimes against Jews. See Fleming, Auschwitz, 190. Also see YVA, M2/
772, Schwarzbart Diary, 19 June 1943, 220.
63
Mikołajczyk met with Frank Savery from the British Embassy to Poland on 29 June 1942
and passed him Polish documents. Savery contributed to the Foreign Office’s Weekly
Political Intelligence Summary. Its 1 July 1942 edition (WPIS 143) informed its readers
(members of the British ruling class) that the 700,000 Jews reported as killed in the press
should be treated with caution, and suggested that 200,000 had been killed, while
400,000–500,000 had died in the ghetto ‘as the result of overcrowding, undernourish-
ment and lack of proper medical attention’.
40 Invasion and Occupation: (Officially) Informing the World

history. That additional material included the text of Sikorski’s 6 June

broadcast to Poland in which he referred to ‘mass-shootings’, concentra-
tion camps, deportations, as well as to the ‘massacres of tens of thousands
of Jews in Lublin, Wilno, Lwow, Stanislawow, Rzeszow and Miechow’,
and Cardinal Hinsley’s 9 July broadcast in which he stated that ‘the Nazis
have massacred 700,000 Jews’.64
The publication was initially conceived as being included in the Polish
Ministry of Information and Documentation’s pamphlet series ‘Polish
Studies and Sketches’, with a print run of 20,000.65 The normal print run
for such booklets was 3,000 to 5,000. However, the booklet was not
publicly incorporated into that series, despite being administered by the
same office and following the same publication protocols as other such
texts (including prior publication of the text in The Polish Fortnightly
Review).66 The available documentary material does not shed much
light on the process whereby the information that arrived in London
from Warsaw in May (and reports that arrived in June), and was initially
conceived as being worthy of inclusion in a text to be published by the
Polish Government’s favoured publisher for official and authoritative
texts (Hutchinson), was then passed to the Ministry of Information’s
pamphlet series, before, finally, being orphaned and released as a stand-
alone booklet.67 Bestiality was provided with a distinctive cover featuring
cartoonist David Low’s image of Hitler conversing with Himmler, with
five people hanging from gallows in the background. Ultimately 13,000
copies were printed and it was also distributed overseas.68 The paper
balance was reallocated in January 1943 to a pamphlet in the ‘Polish
Studies and Sketches’ series, titled ‘The Protestant Church in Poland’.69
Notwithstanding the important editions of The Polish Fortnightly Review
of 1 and 15 July, which mentioned the camps at Sobibór and Bełżec,
respectively, there was a tendency among senior Polish Government

64
MID, Bestiality, 33; 55.
65
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 2. (240). Czerwinski to Judd, 29 July 1942. Earlier pamph-
lets included ‘The Martyrdom of Polish Professors’ (1942) and ‘The Legal Position of
Jews’. Many of these pamphlets included material published earlier in The Polish
Fortnightly Review.
66
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 7 (1238). Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/
0/-/145/str/1/83/15#tabSkany
67
A tranche of reports from the Polish Underground State arrived on 23 June. Like the
Bund Report, the material was sent from Warsaw via Stockholm.
68
The booklet was distributed both in Britain and abroad. The Jewish Education
Committee in New York requested a copy in January 1943 and one was sent in
February. HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 4. Available at https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/
41/0/-/145/skan/full/FyS9SsUPMKq1savRVQF_rQ
69
HIA MID, Box 145, Folder 4. Czerwinski to Judd 14 January 1943. Available at https://
szukajwarchiwach.pl/800/41/0/-/145/skan/full/WSMbNCF5ltX9GLf3I3-jlg
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
“No,” said Cheriton; “nor, I sometimes fancy, if one went a
longer journey still!”

“But I hate it as it is now, and I shall come back when

you’re Lord Chancellor, and Jack, Head Master of Eton.”

“Well, Bob,” said Cherry, “wherever we may any of us go, or

whatever we may be, I think we cannot be really parted,
while we remember the old place, and all that belongs to it.”
 Chapter Thirty Nine.
The Dragon Slayer.

“Life has more things to dwell on

Than just one useless pain.”

There are few places where the charm of a bright June day
is felt more perfectly than in a London garden. The force of
contrast may partly account for this; but The Laurels, as the
Stanforths’ house was called, was a lovely place in itself,
dating from days before the villas by which it was now
almost surrounded. Within its old brown sloping walls
flourished white and pink acacias, magnolias, wisterias, and
quaint trees only found in such old gardens; a cork-tree,
more curious than beautiful; a catalpa, which once in
Gipsy’s memory had put out its queer brown and white
blossoms; and a Judas-tree, still purple with its lovely
flowers. The house, like the garden-walls, was built of
brown old brick, well draped with creepers; and Mr
Stanforth’s new studio had been so cunningly devised that it
harmonised wonderfully with the rest. That garden was a
very pleasant place in the estimation of a great many
people, who liked to come and idle away an hour there, and
was famous for pleasant parties all through the summer;
while it was a delightful play-place for the little Stanforths,
a large party of picturesque and lively-minded children,
who, in spite of artistic frocks and hats, and tongues trained
to readiness by plenty of home society, were very
thoroughly educated and carefully brought up. They were a
great amusement to Cheriton Lester, who was always a
welcome guest at The Laurels, and felt himself thoroughly
at home there.
Cheriton’s London life was in many ways a pleasant one. He
found himself in the midst of old friends and schoolfellows,
he could have as much society as he wished for, he was free
of his uncle’s house and of the ‘Stanforths’, and he had
none of the money anxieties which troubled many of those
who, like him, were beginning their course of preparation
for a legal life. He saw a good deal, in and out, of Alvar, who
had established himself in town, and was an exceedingly
popular person in society; and as the obligations of his
mourning, which he was careful to observe, diminished, was
full of engagements of all sorts, enjoyed himself greatly,
and thought as little of Oakby as business letters allowed.
Lady Cheriton thought that he ought to have every
opportunity of settling, “so much the best thing for all of
them,” and arranged her introductions to him accordingly;
but Alvar walked through snares and pitfalls, and did not
even get himself talked of in connexion with any young
lady. Cheriton was much less often to be met with; he found
that he could not combine late hours and anything like
study, and so kept his strength for his more immediate
object—an object which, however, was slowly changing into
an occupation. Cheriton soon found out that the pleasures
and pains of hard and successful labour were no longer for
him; that though he did not break down in the warm
summer weather, the winter would always be a time of
difficulty, and that his strength would not endure a long or
severe strain—in short, that though reading for the bar was
just as well now as anything else for him, and might lead
the way to interests and occupations, he could not even aim
at the career of a successful lawyer. Besides, London air
made him unusually languid and listless.

“Yes, he is a clever fellow, but he is not strong enough to do

much. It is a great pity, but, after all, he has enough to live
on, and plenty of interests in life,” said Judge Cheriton; and
his wife made her house pleasant to Cherry, and
encouraged him to come there at all hours, and no one ever
said a word to him about working, or gave him good advice,
except not to catch cold; while he himself ceased to talk at
all about his prospects, but went on from day to day and
took the pleasant things that came to him. And sometimes
he felt as if his last hope in life was gone—and sometimes,
again, wondered why he did not care more for such a
disappointment. But now and then, in these days that were
so silent and self-controlled, there came to him an
indifference of a nobler kind, an inward courage, a consoling
trust, the reward of much struggling, which a year ago he
could never have brought to bear on such a trial.

Mr Stanforth’s presence always gave him a sense of

sympathy, and he spent so many hours at The Laurels, that
his aunt suspected him of designs on Gipsy, though Jack’s
secret, preserved in his absence, was likely to ooze out now
that the end of the Oxford term had brought him to London
for a few days, previous to joining a reading party with
some of his friends.

The Laurels, with its pretty garden, might be a pleasant

resting-place for Cheriton, but it was a very Arcadia, a fairy-
land to Jack, when he found his way there late on one
splendid afternoon, so shy that he had walked up and down
the road twice before he rang the bell, happy,
uncomfortable, and conscious all at once, looking at Gipsy,
who had just come home from a garden party, in a most
becoming costume of cream colour and crimson, but quite
unable to say a word to her, as she sat under the trees, and
fanned herself with a great black fan, appealing to Alvar,
who was there with Cheriton, whether she had quite
forgotten her Spanish skill. Gipsy was very happy, and not a
bit shy as she peeped at her solemn young lover over the
top of the fan, and laughed behind it at Jack’s look of
disgust when Cherry remarked that he had grown since
Easter.

“Don’t be spiteful, Cherry,” said Mr Stanforth, with a smile.

“Shall we come and see the picture?”

Jack and Gipsy were left to the last as they came up

towards the house, and she made a little mischievous
gesture of measuring herself against him.

“Yes, I think it’s true!”

“Well,” said Jack gruffly, though his eyes sparkled, “I shall

leave off growing some time, I suppose. I say, are you
going to dine at my aunt’s to-morrow?”

“Yes,” said Gipsy. “Lady Cheriton has been here, and she
brought your sister. How handsome she is; but she was so
silent. I was afraid of her. I wonder if she liked me,” said
Gipsy, blushing in her turn.

“Shy with Nettie?” exclaimed Jack. “You might as well be

shy of a wild cat. She doesn’t like any one much but Bob
and her pets.”

“All, young ladies grow as well as young gentlemen,” said

Gipsy. “Next year—”

“Yes; next year—” said Jack; but Gipsy opened the studio
door, and ended the conversation.

Mr Stanforth’s studio was arranged with a view more to the

painting of pictures than to the display of curtains, carpets,
and china; but it was still a pretty and pleasant place, with
a few rare works of art by other hands than those of its
owner. There were few finished pictures of Mr Stanforth’s
there then; but one large canvas on which he was working,
and, besides various portraits in different stages, the
drawing of Mr Lester, which Jack had not hitherto seen. Mr
Stanforth brought it forward, and asked him to make any
comment that occurred to him. It was a fine drawing of a
fine face, and brought out forcibly the union of size and
strength with beauty which none of the sons fully equalled,
though there might be more to interest in all their faces.
For, after all, the little imperfections of expression, that
which was wanting as well as that which was present in the
coming out and going in, the pleasures, the duties, and the
failures, the changes of mood and temper, the smiles and
the frowns of daily life, had made the individual man, and
could not be shown in a likeness so taken. It was a picture
that would satisfy them better as the years went by. Indeed
Alvar thought it perfect, and Jack could hardly say that he
saw anything wanting; but Cherry, after many praises and
some hesitation, had said, “Yes, it is very like, but it is as if
one saw him from a distance. Perhaps that is best.”

After this picture had been put away, Jack began to look
round and to relieve the impression made on him by a little
artistic conversation, evidently carefully studied from the
latest Oxford authorities. He looked at the pictures on the
wall, found fault so correctly with what would have naturally
been pleasing to him, and admired so much what a few
months before he would have thought hideous, that
Cheriton’s eyes sparkled with fun, and Alvar, for once
appreciating the humour of the situation, said,—

“We must ask Jack to write a book about the pictures at

Oakby;” while Gipsy, seeing it all, laughed, spite of herself.

“Ah, Gipsy, he is carrying his lady’s colours, like a true

knight,” said Cherry softly, as Jack faced round and
inquired,—
“What are you laughing at?”

“Who lectures on art at Oxford, Jack?” said Cherry. “What a

first-rate fellow he must be!”

“Ah, he is indeed a great teacher,” said Alvar, “who has

taught Jack to love art.”

“A mighty teacher,” said Cherry, under his breath.

“Of course,” said Jack, “as one sees more of the world, one
comes to take an interest in new fields of thought.”

“Why, yes,” said Gipsy, recovering from Cherry’s words, and

flying to the rescue, “we all learned a great deal about art
at Seville.”

“My dear,” said Mrs Stanforth, “aren’t you going to show

them the knights?”

For she thought to herself that if a year was to pass before

Jack’s intentions could meet with an acknowledgment, his
visits had better be few and far between, especially in the
presence of Cherry’s mischievous encouragement. “Mr
Stanforth himself being as bad,” as she afterwards
remarked to him.

Now, however, Mr Stanforth turned his easel round and

displayed the still unfinished picture for which he had begun
to make sketches in Spain, when struck with the contrast of
his new acquaintances, and with the capabilities of their
appearance for picturesque treatment.

The picture was to be called “One of the Dragon Slayers,”

and represented a woodland glade in the first glory of the
earliest summer—blue sky, fresh green, white blossoms,
and springing bluebells and primroses, all in full and yet
delicate sunshine—a scene which might have stood for
many a poetic description from Chaucer to Tennyson, a very
image of nature, the same now as in the days of Arthur.

Dimly visible, as if he had crawled away among the

brambles and bracken to die, was the gigantic form of the
slain dragon, while, newly arrived on the scene, having
dismounted from his horse, which was held by a page in the
distance, was a knight in festal attire—a vigorous, graceful
presentment of Alvar’s dark face and tall figure—who with
one hand drew towards him the delivered maiden, a fair,
slender figure in the first dawn of youth, who clung to him
joyfully, while he laid the other in eager gratitude on the
shoulder of the dragon slayer, who, manifestly wounded in
the encounter, was leaning against a tree-trunk, and who,
as he seemed to give the maiden back to her lover, with the
other hand concealed in his breast a knot of the ribbon on
her dress; thus hinting at the story, which after all was
better told by the peculiar beaming smile of congratulation,
the look of victory amid strife, of conquest over self and
suffering—a look of love conquering pain, which was the
real point of the picture.

Jack stood looking in silence, and uttering none of his

newly-acquired opinions.

“Is it right, Jack?” said Mr Stanforth. “Yes, I know,” said

Jack briefly; and then, “Every one will know Alvar’s portrait.
And who is the lady?”

“She is a little niece of mine—almost a child,” said Mr

Stanforth; while Cheriton interposed,—

“It is not a group of photographs, Jack. Of course the object

was the idea of the picture, not our faces.”
“Well, Cherry,” said Mr Stanforth smiling, “your notion of
sitting for your picture partakes of the photographic. You did
not help me by calling up the dragon slayer’s look.”

“That was for the artist to supply,” said Cherry; “but it

seems to me exactly how the knight ought to have looked.”

“For my part,” said Alvar, “I should not have liked to have

been too late.”

“It is very beautiful,” said Jack; “but I don’t think I approve

of false mediaevalism. At that date these fellows would
have fought, and the best man would have had the girl.”

“Pray, at what date do you fix the dragon?” said Cherry.

“Jack is as matter-of-fact as the maiden herself,” said Mrs

Stanforth, “who will not be happy because her uncle will not
tell her if the knight got well and married somebody else.”

“No—no, mamma,” said one of the Stanforth girls, “he did

no such thing; he was killed in King Arthur’s last battle. We
settled it yesterday—we thought it was nicer.”

“You don’t think he gave in to the next dragon?” said

Cherry, half to tease her.

“No, indeed, that knight never gave in. Did he, papa—did
he?”

“My dear Minnie, I am not prepared with my knights’

history. There they are, and I leave them to an intelligent
public, who can settle whether my object was to paint
sunlight on primroses, or a smile on a wounded knight’s
face—very hard matters both.”

“Don’t you really like it?” said Gipsy aside to Jack.

“Oh, yes,” said Jack uneasily, “I have seen him look so. I
know what your father means. But I hate it. I’d rather have
had a picture of him as he used to be, all sunburnt and jolly.
Yes, I know, it’s the picture, not Cherry; but I don’t like it.”

Gipsy demurred a little, and they fell into a long talk in the
twilight garden. Jack kept his promise, he did not “make
love” to her, but never, even to Cheriton, had he talked as
he talked then, for if he might not talk of the future, he
could at least make Gipsy a sharer in all his past. When
Cheriton came out upon them to call Jack away, they looked
at him with half-dazzled eyes, as if he were calling them
back from fairy-land.

The dinner-party at Lady Cheriton’s offered no such

chances, though it was a gathering together quite
unexpected by some of the party. Lady Cheriton, when the
question of a school for Nettie had been discussed, had
renewed her offer of having her to share the studies of her
younger daughters; and Cheriton, who thought that Nettie
in a London boarding-school would be very troublesome to
others and very unhappy herself, had succeeded in getting
the plan adopted. So here she was, dignified and polished,
in her long black dress, and bent, so said her aunt, in a
silent and grudging fashion, on acquiring sufficient
knowledge to hold her own among other girls. She was
wonderfully handsome, and so tall that her height and
presence marked her out as much as her intensely red-and-
white complexion and yellow hair. There, too, were Virginia
and her brother Dick, Cherry being guilty of assuring his
aunt that there was no reason why Alvar should not meet
them. For Dick’s examination had at length been
successfully passed, and an arrangement had been made
that he should board with some friends of Mr Stanforth’s,
and Virginia had availed herself of an invitation from Lady
Cheriton to come to London with him.
“You did not tell me she was coming,” said Alvar angrily to
Cheriton.

“It is impossible that you should avoid so near a neighbour,”

replied Cherry.

“I do not like it,” said Alvar; and the effect on him was to
shake his graceful self-possession, make him uncertain of
what he was saying, and watch Virginia as she talked to
Cherry of Dick’s prospects, with a look that was no more
indifferent than the elaborate politeness of Jack’s greeting
to Miss Stanforth. She was more self-controlled, but she
missed no word or look. But if Cheriton had played a trick
on his brother, he himself received a startling surprise when
Mr and Mrs Rupert Lester were announced. “You cannot
avoid meeting your cousins” was as true as his excuse to
Alvar; but he could not help feeling himself watched; and as
for Ruth, her brilliant, expressive face showed a
consciousness which perhaps she hardly meant to conceal
from him as she looked at him with all the past in her eyes.
Ruth liked excitement, and the situation was not quite
disagreeable to her; but while her look thrilled Cheriton
through and through, the fact that she could give it, broke
the last thread of his bondage to her. She made him feel
with a curious revulsion that Rupert was his own cousin,
and that she had tried to make him forget that she was his
cousin’s wife; and as, being a man, he attributed far too
distinct a meaning to the glance of an excitable, sentimental
girl, it repelled him, though the pain of the repulsion was
perhaps as keen as any that she had made him suffer. He
did not betray himself, and it was left to Jack to frown like a
thunder-cloud.

When Cheriton came out of the dining-room, Nettie pursued

him into a corner, and began abruptly,—
“Cherry, I want to speak to you. When Jack went to Spain
did he tell you anything about me?”

“Nothing that I recollect especially,” said Cherry, surprised.

“Well, I am going to tell you about it. Mind, I think I was

perfectly right, and Jack ought to have known I should be.”

“Have you and Jack had a quarrel, then?”

“Yes,” said Nettie, standing straight upright, and making her

communication as she looked down on Cherry, as he sat on
a low chair. “I taught Dick to pass his examination.”

“You!”

“Yes. You know he wouldn’t work at anything, and I used to

make him come and say his lessons to me—the kings of
England, you know, and the rivers, and populations, and
French verbs. Well, then, if he didn’t know them, I made
him learn them till he did. But of course he didn’t wish any
one to know, so we had to get up early, and sit in the hay-
loft, or down by the bridge. I could not help the boys
knowing that Dick and I went out together, and at last Jack
found us in Clements’ hay-loft. Dick ran away, but Jack was
very angry with me, and insulted me; and Cherry—he went
and told papa, and they sent me to London. But I never told
the reason, because I had promised Dick. Now, Cherry,
wouldn’t it have been very wrong to give up the chance of
doing Dick good because Jack chose to be ridiculous? It just
made him succeed, and perhaps he will owe it to me that he
is a respectable person, and earns his living. You would
have helped him, wouldn’t you?”

“Why, yes,” said Cherry; “but that is not quite the same
thing.”
“Because I am a girl. Cherry, I think it would be mean to
have let that stop me. But now he is through, I shall never
do it again, of course; and, Cherry, indeed I meant it just as
if he had been a ploughboy.” Here Nettie hung her tall head,
and her tone grew less defiant.

“But, after all, Nettie, you should not have done what you
knew granny and father would not like,” said Cherry, much
puzzled what to say to her.

“It was because papa never knew that I told you,” said
Nettie rapidly.

Cheriton asked a few more questions, and elicited that

Nettie had, very early in their intimacy, taken upon herself
the reform of Dick, and had domineered over him with all
the force of a strong will over a weak one. Nettie had acted
in perfect good faith, and had defied her brother’s attack on
her; but as the lessons went on, her instinct had taught her
that Dick found her attractive, and came to learn to please
himself, not her. The girl had all the self-confidence of her
race, and having set her mind on what she called “doing
good” to Dick, she defied her own consciousness of his
motives, having begun in kindness dashed with considerable
contempt. But lazy Dick had powers of his own, and by the
time of her quarrel with Jack, Nettie had felt herself on
dangerous ground. “I shan’t marry—no one is like our
boys,” she said to herself; but there was just a little
traitorous softening and an indefinite sense of wrong-doing
which had made her seek absolution from Cheriton, and
with the peculiar absence of folly, which was a marked
characteristic of the slow-thinking twins, she gave herself
the protection of his knowledge.

Cheriton’s impulse was to take up Jack’s line and give her a

good scolding, but he was touched by her appeal, and had
learned to weigh his words carefully. He said something
rather lame and inadequate about being more particular in
future, but he gave Nettie’s hand a kind little squeeze, and
she felt herself off her own mind. It had been a curious
incident, and had done much to make Nettie into a woman
—too much of a woman to look on her protégé with
favouring eyes. Dick, too, was likely to find other interests,
but Nettie had helped to give him a fair start, and her scorn
of his old faults could never be quite forgotten.
 Chapter Forty.
A New Suggestion.

“Once remember
You devoted soul and mind
To the welfare of your brethren
And the service of your kind,
Now what sorrow can you comfort?”

Soon after the scenes recorded in the last chapter, Alvar

received a letter from Mrs Lester, in which she thanked him,
in a dignified and cordial manner, for his proposal that the
home at Oakby should go on as usual, but said she did not
consider that her residence there would be for the
happiness of any one. During her son’s married life she had
lived in a house at Ashrigg, which was part of the Lester
property, and was called The Rigg. This was now again
vacant, and she proposed to take it, making it a home for
Nettie, and for any of her grandsons who chose so to
consider it. The great sorrow of her dear son’s death would
be more endurable to her, she said, anywhere but at Oakby.
The neighbourhood of the Hubbards would provide friends
for herself and society for Nettie, who would be very lonely
at Oakby in her brothers’ constant absences. Alvar was
sincerely sorry. He was accustomed to the idea of a family
home being open to all, and did not, in any way, regard
himself as trammelled by his grandmother’s presence there,
while Cheriton was utterly taken by surprise, and hated the
additional change and uprooting. He did not think the step
unwise, especially as regarded Nettie, but he marvelled at
his grandmother’s energy in devising and resolving on it. He
had expected a great outcry from Nettie, but she proved not
to be unprepared, and said briefly, “that she liked it better
than staying at home now.”

“But you will not desert me?” said Alvar. “Shall I drive you
too away from your home?”

“No,” said Cherry. “No, I’ll come home for the holidays, and
the boys, too, if you will have them; though I suppose
granny will want to see us all sometimes.”

“I wish that I could take you home now,” said Alvar. “I think
you are tired with London—you see too many people.”

Cheriton coloured a little at the allusion, but he disclaimed

any wish to leave London then, shrinking indeed from
breaking through the externals of his profession. It ended
by Alvar going down to meet his grandmother at Oakby,
and to make arrangements for the change, during which he
proved himself so kind, courteous, and helpful to her, that
he quite won her heart; and Nettie, on her return, was
astonished at hearing Alvar’s judgment deferred to, and
“my grandson” quoted as an authority, on several
occasions.

Jack, after a few days in London, joined a reading party for

the first weeks of the vacation; and Bob, on his return from
the gentleman who was combining for him the study of
farming and of polite literature, joined Nettie in London, and
took her down to Ashrigg; so that the early part of August
found only Cheriton and Alvar at Oakby.

Cherry liked this well enough, for though the house could
not but seem forlorn and empty to him, daily life was
always pleasant with Alvar, and he would have gladly helped
him through all the arrears of business that came to hand.
These were considerable, for Mr Lester’s subordinates had
not been trained to go alone, and none of them had been
allowed universal superintendence. Cheriton thought that
Alvar required such assistance, and that he ought to have
an agent with more authority; but oddly enough he did not
take to the proposal, and in the meantime he made
mistakes, kept decisions waiting, failed to recognise the
relative importance of different matters, and, still worse, of
different people.

One afternoon, towards the end of August, Cheriton went

over to Elderthwaite. What with business at home,
expeditions to Ashrigg, and a great many calls on his
attention from more immediate neighbours, he had not
seen very much of the parson, and as he neared the rectory
he beheld an unwonted sight in the field adjoining, namely,
some thirty or forty children drinking tea, under the
superintendence of Virginia and one of the Miss Ellesmeres.

“Hallo, Cherry,” said the parson, advancing to meet him;

“where have you been? Seems to me we must have a grand
—what d’ye call it?—rural collation before we can get a sight
of you.”

“As you never invited me to the rural collation, I was not

aware of its existence,” said Cherry laughing, as Virginia
approached him.

“Oh, Cherry, stay and start some games,” she said. “You
know they are so ignorant, they never even saw a school-
feast before.”

“Then, Virginia, I wonder at you for spoiling the last traces

of such refreshing simplicity. Introducing juvenile
dissipation! Well, it doesn’t seem as if the natural child
wanted much training to appreciate plum-cake!”

“No; but if you could make the boys run for halfpence—”
“You think they won’t know a halfpenny when they see
one.”

“Do have some tea!” said Lucy Ellesmere, running up to

him. “Perhaps you are tired, and Virginia has given them
beautiful tea, and really they’re very nice children,
considering.”

So Cherry stayed, and advanced the education of the

Elderthwaite youth by teaching them to bob for cherries,
and other arts of polite society, ending by showing them
how to give three cheers for the parson, and three times
three for Miss Seyton; and while Virginia was dismissing her
flock with final hunches of gingerbread, the parson called
him into the house.

“Poor lassie!” he said; “she is fond of the children, and

thinks a great deal of doing them good; but it’s little good
she can do in the face of what’s coming.”

“How do you mean?” said Cheriton. “Is anything specially

amiss?”

“Come in and have a pipe. A glass of wine won’t come

amiss after so much tea and gingerbread.”

They went into the dining-room, and the parson poked up

the fire into a blaze, for even August afternoons were not
too warm at Elderthwaite for a fire to be pleasant, and as
he subsided into his arm-chair, he said gravely,—

“Eh, Cherry, we Seytons have been a bad lot—a bad lot—

and the end of it’ll be we shall be kicked out of the country.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said Cherry, quite sincerely. “What is the

matter?”
“Well, look round about you. Is there a wall that’s mended,
or a plantation preserved as it ought to be? Look at the
timber—what is there left of it? and what’s felled lies rotting
on the ground for want of carting. There’s acres of my
brother’s hay never was led till the rain came and spoiled it.
Look at the cottages. Queenie gets the windows mended,
but she can’t make the roofs water-tight. Look at those
woods down by the stream, why, there’s not a head of
game in them, and once they were the best preserves in
the country!”

“Things are bad, certainly,” said Cherry.

“And yet, Cherry, we’ve loved the place, and never have
sold an acre of it, spite of mortgages and everything. Well,
my brother’s not long for this world. He has been failing and
failing before his time, and though he has led a decent life
enough, things have gone more to the bad with years of
doing nothing, than with all the scandals of my father’s
time.”

“Is Mr Seyton ill?” said Cheriton.

“Not ill altogether; but mark my words, he’ll not last long.
Well, at last, he was so hard up that he wrote to Roland—
and I know, Cheriton, it was the bitterest pill he ever
swallowed—and asked his consent to selling Uplands Farm.
What does Roland do but write back and say, with all his
heart; so soon as it came into his hands he should sell
every acre, house and lands, advowson of living and all, and
pay his debts. He hated the place, he said, and would never
live there. Sell it to the highest bidder. There were plenty of
fortunes made in trade, says he, that would give anything
for land and position. So there, the old place’ll go into the
hands of some purse-proud stranger. But not the church—
he shan’t go restoring and improving that with his money.
I’m only fifty-nine, and a good life yet, and I’ll stick in the
church till I’m put into the churchyard!”

Cherry smiled, it was impossible to help it; but the parson’s

story made him very sad. He knew well enough that it was
a righteous retribution, that Roland’s ownership would be a
miserable thing for every soul in Elderthwaite, and that the
most purse-proud of strangers would do something to mend
matters; and yet his heart ached at the downfall, and his
quick imagination pictured vividly how completely the poor
old parson would put himself in the wrong, and what a
disastrous state of things would be sure to ensue.

“I’d try and not leave so much ‘restoration’ for any stranger
to do,” he said.

“Eh, what’s the good?” said the parson. “She had better let
it alone for the ‘new folks.’”

“Nay,” said Cherry, “you cannot tell if the ‘new folks,’ as you
call them, will be inclined for anything of the sort, and all
these changes may not take place for years. It doesn’t quite
pay to do nothing because life is rather more uncertain to
oneself than to other people.”

Cheriton spoke half to himself, and the parson went on with

his own train of thought.

“Ay, I’ll stick to the old place, though I thought it a heavy

clog round my neck once; and if you knew all the ins and
outs of that transaction, you’d say, maybe, I ought to be
kicked out of it now.”

“No, I should not,” said Cherry, who knew, perhaps, more of

the Elderthwaite traditions than the parson imagined.
“Things are as they are, and not as they might have been,
and perhaps you could do more than any one else to mend
matters.”

The parson looked into the fire, with an odd, half humble,
half comical expression, and Cherry said abruptly,—

“Do you think Mr Seyton would sell Uplands to me?”

“To you? What the dickens do you want with it?”

“Why—I don’t think it would be a bad speculation, and I

should like, I think, to have it.”

“What? Does your brother make Oakby too hot to hold

you?”

“No, indeed. He is all that is kind to me,” said Cherry

indignantly. “Every one misconstrues him. But I should like
to have a bit of land hereabouts, all the same.”

“Well, you had better ask my brother yourself. He may think

himself lucky, for I don’t know who would buy a bit of land
like that wedged in between the two places. Ah, here’s
Queenie to say good-night. Well, my lassie, are you pleased
with your sport?”

“Yes, uncle; and the children were very good.”

Cheriton walked a little way with Virginia, beyond the

turning where they parted from Lucy Ellesmere. He found
that she was unaware of the facts which the parson had told
him, and though somewhat uneasy about her father, very
much disposed to dwell on the good accounts of Dick and
Harry, and on the general awakening in the place that
seemed to demand improvements. Oakby offered a ready-
made pattern, and other farmers had been roused by Mr
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