German Anti-Semitism à la Polonaise

Anti-Semitism was a widespread phenomenon in Europe at the turn of the century. It was also present in Imperial Germany, even though anti-Semitic ideas played a relatively insignificant role in German public life. ¹ Imperial Germany was unlike either Tsarist Russia, with its Jewish pogroms, or the French Third Republic with its Dreyfus Affair. German Jews were well assimilated, expressed themselves in their native German language, and fruitfully participated in German culture. While a “Judeo-German symbiosis” was never truly achieved, they nonetheless strove to become German citizens of the Israelite faith, just like German Catholics or Protestants. ² In the face of their high level of assimilation, German anti-Semites found it easier to attack Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, whom the German public considered highly disagreeable. ³ Most of these immigrants came from Tsarist Russia’s Congress Poland and Belarus, as well as from Galicia, a province of the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. The prejudice against Eastern Jews was particularly strong in Prussia, which was the only land of Germany directly bordering with Congress Poland and Galicia. Inevitably, the Polish majority of the Prussian province of Poznania was also affected by this prejudice. The effects can be seen after the fall of Imperial Germany, when Poznanian troops joined the Polish army to take part in the 1919 summer offensive against the Soviets in Belarus. Many a Polish officer found the Poznanian soldier’s behavior toward local Jews not only appalling but also quite different from that displayed by other Polish troops. The appended report of the Commander of the so-called Lithuanian-Belarusian Front, General Stanisław Szeptycki, to the Commander in Chief, Józef Piłsudski, substantiates this idea.

Already in the 1880s, Prussian and German government officials routinely depicted Eastern Jewish immigrants as deserters, renegades, and traitors. Bismarck himself portrayed them as backward, prone to political subversion, and motivated by financial gain. After the Russian revolution of 1905, many Germans saw Eastern Jewish immigrants not only as “pushy beggars” but also as “conspirators.” Government officials assumed they carried diseases and epidemics into Germany. Accordingly, Eastern Jews had to undergo delousing on their entering the country, and the train carriages that had carried them were steamed afterwards. Outbreaks of epidemics in German cities were routinely blamed on them. Prussian police officials asserted that Eastern Jewish immigrants regularly engaged in haggling and avoided respectable work, while other government officials saw in them “the culturally and economically lowest Jewish element.” As Jack Wertheimer emphasizes, Prussian officials “sincerely believed that Eastern Jews constituted a menace and were unsavoury characters.” Most tellingly, the officials “did not invent these stereotypes; rather, they drew upon existing perceptions and fears.” ⁴

These prejudices were so widespread that they even affected the German Jewish community, including the Jews of Poznania. While willing to help Eastern Jewish immigrants, they nonetheless tried to prevent their settlement in Germany, patronized them, and often looked on them with disdain. For example, German Jews would presumptuously admonish their “Russian brothers” to stand “on the side of the law and the forces of order.” ⁵ German Jewish organizations widely regarded the traditional Eastern Jewish school, the heder, as morally and physically debilitating. Special attention was given to the rather acute problem of prostitution among Eastern Jews, viewed in its “half-Asian” context. ⁶ Many saw the caftan and side-locks-wearing Eastern Jews and their “old ghetto air” with a mixture of fear and repulsion. ⁷ Most were embarrassed and ashamed that “these dirty, shabbily dressed beggars were also Jews.” German Jewish newspapers complained about the pushy, loud, and indiscreet manners of the Eastern Jews and even branded their arrivals as “the Russian disease.” ⁸ As Stephen E. Aschheim shows, the German Jews saw the difference between themselves and the Eastern Jews as cultural in nature, perceiving the latter’s culture “as ‘ghetto’ culture which by definition was backward and underdeveloped.” ⁹ It is thus clear that the entire population of Germany, including even the German Jews, looked upon Eastern Jews with contempt and viewed them as backward.

The Polish inhabitants of the Prussian province of Poznania were naturally affected by these widespread prejudices and stereotypes, especially since they were bilingual to a high degree, which facilitated transfer of ideas. One ought to consider, however, that their perception of Eastern Jews must have been even more negative because of their very unfavorable view of the Jews of Poznania. Indeed, the Poznanian Poles’ traditional antipathy toward Poznanian Jews ¹⁰ turned into hostility as a result of the latter’s emphatic pro-German stance. ¹¹ Since the Polish inhabitants of the province, who were its native population, had to fight for their national survival threatened by Germanization, they regarded the Jewish stance as treachery. Their leading political party, the National Democratic movement, fought for Poznanian Poles’ national interests against those of both the Germans and Poznanian Jews. The Poles boycotted both Christian and Jewish German businesses. ¹²

In December 1918, an anti-German Polish uprising in Poznania broke out, and the local Poles formed a military force to fight the Germans. Once a truce was reached between the two sides, a part of this force known as the Poznania Operational Group ¹³ was sent to Poland to help in its war against the Soviets. In this way, the Poznanians found themselves participating in the Polish summer offensive of 1919 in Belarus, thus coming into direct contact with local Eastern Jews. Having fought in the recent uprising, they came to Belarus with a baggage of hostility toward the Jews of Poznania who had sided with the Germans. This hostility would now be transformed, as a result of the prejudices and stereotypes shared by all the inhabitants of former Imperial Germany, into an active hatred of the unfamiliar and strange Eastern Jews. In this the Poznanians would be quite different from other Polish soldiers who, although likely not free from anti-Semitism, would see nothing strange or unfamiliar about Eastern Jews.

These ideas are confirmed by the aforementioned Polish military report, sent by the so-called Lithuanian-Belarusian Front, operating mainly in Belarus, to the Commander in Chief of the Polish army in September 1919. ¹⁴ The report was prompted by numerous cases of misconduct committed by the rank-and-file soldiers of the Poznania Operational Group. It describes the Poznanians’ mistreatment of the local Jewish population, culminating in a major pogrom after the capture of Minsk on 7 August 1919, when dozens of Jews were killed. The report clearly suggests that the underlying cause of the abuses committed by Poznanian troops lay in their particularly prejudiced mindset.

In light of the report, the nature of the prejudice among the rank-and-file soldiers of Poznania was a special kind of anti-Semitism. It was not shared by most Polish soldiers who tended to subscribe to a more traditional form of anti-Semitism, manifesting itself mainly in antipathy toward Jews. Indeed, the report contrasts Poznanian troops with “those formed in Congress Poland and Galicia.” The Poznanians were different—actively hostile toward Jews and contemptuous of Congress Poland and Galicia as less developed and “Jew-ridden.” They held the non-Poznanian units of the Polish army in similar contempt. The Poznanians believed that “there is nothing to be found in Poland [as opposed to Poznania], no one there knows anything, they are ruled by Jews etc.” In their opinion, non-Poznanian officers “were Jewish and deserved nothing but contempt.” They also disregarded their non-Poznanian fellow soldiers and looked with disfavor at anything coming from other parts of Poland. They were “arrogant and conceited.” To make matters worse, the bulk of Poznanian officers recruited from newly promoted NCOs who likely shared their men’s prejudices, and lacked enough respect to counteract them in any event. As a result, those officers of non-Poznanian units who intervened against the abuse of Jewish civilians were themselves beaten and abused.

The factual side of the report appears to be credible. While the author was a junior officer who spent only two weeks among Poznanian troops, one would expect a liaison officer of the Front Staff to be a bright and observant individual. Indeed, the way the report is written indicates that the author was educated and intelligent. Judging by his rare last name, Juracki—which appears to be of Westland ¹⁵ gentry origin—the author was an ethnic Pole from that region. ¹⁶ This is not to argue that he shows no bias at all; for example, the only good thing he has to say about the officer corps of this elite unit is that its officers from the German army “are characterized by a truly clockwork precision in discharge of their duties,” thus damning them with faint praise. Some of his suppositions also appear to stand on weak ground. ¹⁷ Nonetheless, the report’s factual accuracy can hardly be doubted, considering that its title was handwritten by the Front Commander, General Szeptycki, ¹⁸ who must have read it, agreed with its content, and thought it important to bring it to the attention of the Commander in Chief. The latter, in turn, underlined two phrases emphasizing the prejudices of Poznanian troops, which shows that he considered the report credible and treated it seriously. Thus, we have no choice but to accept basic facts given by the report as established. Its contention that the Poznanians’ prejudice against Eastern Jews was unusual, as viewed from a general Polish perspective, appears to be reliable.

All that we know from other historical sources seems to corroborate the report’s findings. Poznanian troops were indeed involved in a disproportionately large number of cases of anti-Jewish excesses as compared to Polish troops from Congress Poland and Galicia. ¹⁹ Relevant data show Polish forces relatively little tainted by anti-Jewish pogroms. For example, they committed by far the lowest number of pogroms from among several military forces, including the Red Army, operating in Ukraine in 1919-1920. ²⁰ Clearly then, troops from Congress Poland and Galicia must have been unlikely to carry out a pogrom, while the Poznanians were very likely to do so, at least during the 1919 summer campaign in Belarus.

One should also note that Polish soldiers participating in pogroms usually explained them as spontaneous outbreaks of rage after they had been shot at during capture of a town or city by snipers from the Jewish quarter. ²¹ An authority on the issue, Jerzy Tomaszewski, agrees that in many instances shots were in fact fired by Jewish Communists, although the supposedly retaliatory plunder of Jewish shops affected, ironically, their capitalist owners whose anti-Bolshevik sentiments were pretty evident. ²² In the case of the Poznanians, however, the report makes it very clear that the pogroms were completely unprovoked. Indeed, it does not even mention any kind of activity or attitude on the part of the Jewish population that could possibly provoke any such abuses. The widespread cutting off of the Jews’ beards by the Poznanians – which foreshadowed the same kind of abuse by the Germans during World War II – was completely unprovoked. So was the bullying of, and other outrages over, peaceful citizens of Jewish extraction. The plunder of the Jewish shops after capture of towns was “a regular occurrence” having clearly nothing to do with the behavior and attitudes of the local Jews. It is clear then that there was a significant difference in behavior toward Jews between the soldiers from Poznania and from both Congress Poland and Galicia.

One important factor contributing to that difference must have been the Poznanians’ unfamiliarity with the shtetl, or urban settlement of Eastern Jews. As a result, the Poznanians, just like the German soldiers of the Great War a couple of years earlier, must have felt “a sensation of distaste and shock” upon entering the shtetls of Belarus. They had never seen a Jewish population as unassimilated, impoverished, and numerous, since the Jews of Poznania, just like other German Jews, were thoroughly assimilated, ²³ enjoyed relatively high standards of living, and made a small proportion of the population. ²⁴ Indeed, the shtetl appeared to be “a totally different world” whose inhabitants looked “radically different from Europeans.” A great majority of them wore traditional clothing, while men sported long beards and often sidelocks, which made them look very strange, perhaps even uncivilized, to the unaccustomed Poznanian eye. ²⁵ By the same token, the locals appeared to be much more Jewish than their thoroughly Germanized coreligionists in Poznania, thus irritating the Poznanians still more. The latter would likely have agreed with the German soldiers that the inhabitants of the Jewish shtetl seemingly “did nothing but business,” many of them apparently “practicing usury on a defenceless . . . peasantry.” Most of the Germans, and likely Poznanians, regarded them as “dirty, profiteering, crooked, [and] immoral.” ²⁶ It must have upset the Poznanians that this strange and repelling—from their perspective—kind of Jews made up an absolute majority of the urban population of Belarus. ²⁷ In fact, every urban settlement had a large Jewish quarter where Yiddish and Russian were predominantly spoken. The former must have struck the Poznanians as a particularly corrupt form of German, ²⁸ and they did not understand the latter.

The Poznanians’ looking down upon Congress Poland, Galicia, and especially Belarus was likewise not without reason. Poznania was the most developed of the four regions in many respects, and enjoyed by far the highest standard of living. This was so-called Poland A, with the highest grain yields, livestock population, and density of railroad network, as well as the lowest percentage of illiteracy. ²⁹ By contrast, Congress Poland and Galicia were seen as Poland B, while the Polish part of Belarus counted clearly as Poland C. Thus, the Poznanians must have held in particular contempt what they saw as backward territories of Belarus and their semi-barbaric natives, including especially Jews. ³⁰ Since the percentage of Jews among the urban populations of these regions—the highest in Belarus, still high in Congress Poland and Galicia, and by far the lowest in Poznania ³¹ —was inversely correlated to their level of development, the prejudiced Poznanian soldiers likely interpreted it as proof of the pernicious influence of Jews. Only in this context it is possible to understand the Poznanians’ allegation that “there is nothing to be found in [the rest of] Poland, no one there knows anything, [and] they are ruled by Jews.”

There were also reasons for the Poznanians’ sense of superiority over troops from Congress Poland and Galicia. During the Great War, the German army had performed overwhelmingly better than either the Russian or the Austrian army. In fact, the Germans defeated the Russians, who in turn would have defeated the Austrians if not for the Germans. Poznanian Poles had served in the German army during the Great War and thus won bragging rights over Poles from both Austrian Galicia and the Russian partition. Moreover, the Poznanians considered themselves the victorious side in the anti-German uprising of December 1918–February 1919. Most importantly, the Poznania Operational Group was arguably the most formidable unit on the Polish side. ³² Even the highly critical author of the report grudgingly admits their combat training to be “impeccable,” their combat discipline “excellent,” and their efficiency in marching “truly German,” in other words, unsurpassed. While he criticizes Poznanian troops for not using maneuver, they likely felt no need to employ it, since they were able to break Soviet defensive lines by frontal assault “before the enemy even knew it.” Unquestionably, very few units of the Polish army could compare favorably with the Poznania Operational Group. One should also consider that the Poznanians had just recently joined the Polish army. ³³ There had been little time, then, for brotherhood of arms to develop, given especially that their air of superiority over the rest of Polish troops did not facilitate making such ties. Finally, even the fact that the Poznanians wore different hats, and different military rank insignia, did not help to create an atmosphere of unity.

It is well known that the Polish army was very poorly equipped and even experienced food shortages. ³⁴ According to the quartermaster of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Front, during the Polish offensive of 1919 in Belarus “to resupply equipment, there was only one way—capture from the enemy. Taking Bolshevik positions, the soldier . . . could count on capturing a coat, boots, and underwear.” ³⁵ As an alternative to this rather dangerous way of resupplying, Polish soldiers would sometimes conduct unlawful requisitions which, in case of determined resistance by the owners, might turn into pogroms. Such requisitions, as is clear from the report, would affect not only Jews but also the rest of the local population, including even Catholics; however, since in Belarusian towns Jews owned a vast majority of the shops, they would naturally be the primary target. As Tomaszewski points out, “it is hardly surprising that the starving, poorly clad and shod soldiers, who risked their life and limb, had no respect for private property, regardless of the owner’s nationality or creed.” ³⁶ The opinion expressed in the report that the Poznanians were “the most vulnerable to Bolshevism in the army” likely signifies that they showed even less respect for private property than other Polish troops. It stands to reason that while the rank-and-file soldiers from Congress Poland and Galicia, accustomed to lower standards of living, were more likely to tolerate various shortages, the Poznanians found them particularly vexatious and consequently tried to find quick fixes. This may explain why many Poznanian officers regarded the plundering of Jewish shops “not as an evil but as a benefit to their troops.”

Moreover, one may safely assume that in the Poznania Operational Group there were no Jewish officers whatsoever. As mentioned, German Jews identified with Germany and would not be willing to join a military force that had originated in an armed uprising against it. There were no Jews, either, among so-called Dowbor’s men, a group of senior officers in the Poznania Operational Group who hailed from the Polish 1st Corps, formed in 1917 as part of what remained of the Russian Imperial army. ³⁷ That army had practically no officers of Jewish extraction, and they would hardly have been willing to join a Polish national unit in any event. By contrast, Jews were not uncommon among those officers of the Polish army who derived from both the former Austrian army and the Polish Legions that had fought on the Austrian side during the Great War. The officers of the Polish Legions in particular had no regard for differences of religion or social and ethnic origin, and not a few among them were of Jewish origin. ³⁸ The officers deriving from those two formations made up two-thirds of all non-Poznanian officers in the Polish army. ³⁹ Their actual role may have been even greater than their numbers, since the Commander in Chief and the Ministry of War tended to favor former Polish Legions officers, ⁴⁰ while quite a few among the former Austrian officers were highly qualified staff officers. ⁴¹ The officers who tried to defend the Jewish population from the Poznanians’ abuses must have hailed from either of these two formations, ⁴² and may even have been Jewish themselves. Only in this context one can understand why the Poznanian soldiers maintained that non-Poznanian officers “were Jewish.” Although a vast majority of these officers were ethnically Polish, the Poznanians regarded them as tainted because they treated their Jewish colleagues as brothers in arms.

As the report revealed, the Poznania Operational Group, unlike the rest of the Polish army, suffered from a serious “shortage of officers.” The bulk of its officer corps consisted of newly promoted officers who were, “strictly speaking, good NCOs” and who, unsurprisingly, had the same attitudes and prejudices as their men. They wanted to stay on the best of terms with their troops and would never punish them for what from their perspective was mere resupplying by plunder. Sometimes they would even “share in the spoils.” The number of former German officers was low and included mainly junior officers, since few Poznanian Poles had been able to have successful careers in the German army. ⁴³ That, in turn, reflected adversely on their authority and corporate standing within the unit, and thus on their ability “to be educators to their soldiers,” as the report put it. Moreover, these officers shared their anti-Jewish prejudices not only with Poznanian Poles but also with the German officer corps. During the Great War, most German officers regarded the shtetls as “horrible dirty Jewish nests.” They complained at the “state of dirt and Unkultur” of the local Jews. Regarding Jewish traders as “ruthless usurers . . . some German officers gave their men permission to simply take the goods if they thought the Jews were overcharging.” ⁴⁴ Sharing these views, the former German army officers were unwilling to restrain their soldiers from abusing Belarusian Jews, even though such abuse undermined military discipline. As for “Dowbor’s men”—who included the commander of the Poznania Operational Group, General Daniel Konarzewski—these former Russian Imperial army officers were likely affected by its deep-seated anti-Semitism. In addition, being completely foreign to Poznania, and having led Poznanian troops for only a few months, they were reluctant to take measures unpopular with their men, such as punishing perpetrators of anti-Jewish excesses. This is likely what the author of the report meant by saying that often “the Poznanian officer is afraid of his soldiers.” At the same time, these senior officers with extensive experience in the Russian army realized that their Poznanian troops of the German school were, from the purely military point of view, the best troops they ever led. Therefore, as the report notes, they had a tendency to “idolize . . . their soldiers” and, as a result, would “fail to punish [them] for offences of that sort.” These attitudes of the Poznanian officer corps were radically different from the approach of the commander of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Front, General Szeptycki, who was a former Austrian army officer. According to the deputy head of the Polish civilian administration of Belarus, “Gen. Szeptycki . . . is unforgiving toward any wrongdoing. He has no hesitation in punishing outrages . . . by firing squad.” ⁴⁵ Obviously, such an approach could only be employed in an environment where any such outrages were the exception rather than the rule. The very fact that a junior officer of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Front was appalled by the Poznanians’ misbehavior and felt compelled to write a formal report on this matter is proof that he considered similar conduct by the soldiers of the Front to be unthinkable. The fact that his report was well received by the Front Commander, and sent to the Commander in Chief, confirms this notion.

To conclude, the blameworthy behavior of the rank-and-file Poznanians toward the Jewish population of Belarus resulted mainly from their peculiar form of German anti-Semitism. Their deep-seated prejudice against Eastern Jews, so characteristic of German anti-Semitism, was exacerbated by their hostility toward Poznanian Jews, with whom they had been in long-standing conflict. Experiencing a culture clash upon entering the shtetl, they regarded its inhabitants as very strange, far less civilized, and even more Jewish than their Poznanian coreligionists. This attitude was compounded by the Poznanians’ twofold sense of superiority. First, their home province was much more developed and contained a much smaller proportion of Jews than did Congress Poland, Galicia, and especially Belarus. Second, the Poznanians regarded themselves as the best unit of the Polish army and therefore looked down upon the units from Congress Poland and Galicia, and particularly on their officer corps, which they considered “Jew-ridden.” Many of these prejudices were shared by the Poznanian officer corps whose members, in any event, were reluctant to punish their men for anti-Jewish excesses because of their own sense of insecurity. As a result, the Poznanians were much more likely than other Polish troops to abuse Belarusian Jews.

Report on Poznanian Troops ⁴⁶

My stay with the Poznania ⁴⁷ Operational Group extended from 5 to 19 August of this [1919] year. I spent only two weeks in this environment, and right at the beginning I was struck by the significant contrast between these troops and those formed in Congress Poland and Galicia.

The soldier in the gray maciejówka hat [used by troops from the latter parts] is likeable due to his serene appearance and complete submission to the orders of his superiors. The soldier in the rogatywka hat [used by Poznanian troops], on the other hand, possesses some quality which compels one to reckon with him and hardly makes an officer relish the prospect of leading a squad of Poznanians.

The Poznanian soldiers are arrogant and conceited in their appearance and behavior. They shut themselves completely in their own company, and regard with disfavor anything that comes from Poland ⁴⁸ —and not from Poznań.

This tendency to treat with disregard soldiers in maciejówka hats, and their officers in particular, did not arise out of itself but rather must have had its origins in prejudiced upbringing ⁴⁹ . Apparently, they must have been inculcated with the ideas that there is nothing to be found in Poland, no one there knows anything, they are ruled by Jews, etc. Little wonder that occurrences resulting from the Poznanians’ disrespectful behavior toward our officers were aplenty wherever these two armies, formed under different local conditions, happened to meet.

That the Poznanian soldier does not salute our officers is not because he cannot make out ranks ⁵⁰ but because of unwillingness and disrespect. Their officers do not try to temper the resulting excesses but, on the contrary, are ready tacitly to support their soldiers and encourage further improprieties of that kind.

After a week of our stay with the Poznania Operational Group, its soldiers began apparently to consider and recognize us as superiors as well, since they started to salute us.

There were many cases where officers of non-Poznanian ⁵¹ formations, seeing blameworthy behavior of Poznanian soldiers, tried to intervene in their capacity as officers of the Polish army to prevent an outrage or to make them refrain from wrongdoing; often, however, they paid dearly for their zeal.

There had been several cases of beatings of our officers at railroad stations during the transport of Poznanians.

At the Mołodeczno station, a physician in the rank of captain, who intervened against the bullying of a local citizen of the Jewish faith, was beaten up, knocked down to the ground, and stripped of his clothing. I don’t recall the captain’s name but that reprehensible deed is still remembered by a great many eyewitnesses. As far as I know, this was not a single occurrence—it was repeated several times in Minsk during the plundering of shops by Poznanian troops on the first day of their stay in this city.

Knowing about these events and seeing the helplessness of Poznanian officers, I very often passed around the places where plunder was going on, so as to avoid any possibility of offering me an indignity as an officer.

Plunder of shops, robbery of the inhabitants, and outrages over them, followed the troops on their way from Poznań like a plague.

Cutting off of the Jews’ beards was an occurrence taking place repeatedly at every turn and everywhere. Abuses of that sort were sometimes not without a certain comicality. It will suffice if I describe one characteristic incident:

At the Lida station, the Poznanians had caught a Jew with a bushy beard and, while some were holding him and cutting his beard off with a knife, others forced him to cry “Long live Poland!” This was not a single occurrence but [such incidents] followed every detachment of Poznanian troops in their march across the land of Belarus.

Plundering shops during capture of towns was a regular occurrence; no one was surprised by it or tried to prevent it. The Poznanian officers apparently regarded this not as an evil but as a benefit to their troops.

Extortion of money from the inhabitants was a constant occurrence. In the village of Siniło on the Świsłocz [river] one of the soldiers complained to his comrades that he was short of money, and he made up his mind to get it. To achieve his aim, he went with a notebook and pencil in his hand to one of the village’s more affluent farmsteads and told the farmer to show him the horses which supposedly he had been ordered to register for requisitioning. At the same time he mentioned to the owner that in return for 300 rubles he would fail to register the horses, and hence they would not be requisitioned. Naturally, the Catholic-Belarusian [owner] managed to find 300 rubles and handed it to the soldier.

The Poznanian soldier had received a prejudiced upbringing and, in my view, the fault is to be found not only with his misdeeds but also with their source—within Poznania where they apparently had no desire to inculcate the soldier with a favorable view of Poland, but rather with an unfavorable one. This calamitous attitude seeped in at the time when Poznanian troops were being formed, and now the psychology of all of Poznanian troops is [already] set.

Poznanian soldiers had been persuaded in their region that Polish officers were Jewish and deserved nothing but contempt. Consequently, when they encountered them they used every means to let them feel their hidden antipathy.

The Poznanian officer corps consists of three groups. The leading ones are so-called “Dowbor’s men” and the officers of the former German army, while the bulk of officers have been newly promoted from NCOs.

“Dowbor’s men” hold key commanding posts. They are usually ambitious men, looking to get awards and decorations. Nothing there is done out of sense of duty but in an effort to make one’s way up.

The German officers are few and far between. They are characterized by a truly clockwork precision in discharge of their duties. They are unable, however, to be educators to their soldiers, at least in this day and age when moral leadership ⁵² is required from officers, since they are wanting in this respect.

The newly promoted are, strictly speaking, good NCOs. They need to have demanding superiors who would not let them neglect their duties. They haven’t gotten yet used to being demanding in relations with their subordinates, and they are just becoming accustomed to their officer status and its requirements. Their being friendly with the soldiers is a regular occurrence, and their sharing in the spoils is not rare.

Generally, there is a shortage of officers.

I never saw a Poznanian officer reprimand soldiers for misdeeds toward the civilian population.

I had the impression that the officers idolize themselves and their soldiers. Therefore, not only do they fail to punish soldiers for offences of that sort, but also spiritually participate in their disorderly conduct.

In most cases, the Poznanian officer is afraid of his soldiers. As a result, during the plunder that took place in Minsk and smaller towns, he did not show up on the street. One would have looked for him in vain.

The Poznanian soldier is the most vulnerable to Bolshevism in the army.

According to their understanding, the idea of combat boils down to the gratification deriving from fighting the enemy, and to the material gain awaiting those who march forward as victors.

With three complete Poznanian divisions one could plunder all of Bolshevik Russia by selecting great cities as military objectives.

The combat discipline within the ranks of Poznanian troops is excellent. The camaraderie—extraordinary.

The combat training—impeccable.

These qualities one can appreciate only in action, observing individual detachments operating in the field.

The tactical leadership often leaves much to be desired. In action, Poznanian troops exhibit neither the mobility, so characteristic of the Polish soldier, nor the ability to maneuver. Everything is designed to tie down the enemy and break his defences in a frontal assault. And, indeed, they broke Bolshevik defensive lines before the enemy even knew it.

Separatism and sybaritism have developed to the highest degree in all circles within Poznanian troops. Judging from their conduct, any valuable resource ought to be allocated to them but what belongs to them cannot be given to anyone.

During one of the battles, the Poznanian field hospital accepted wounded Bolsheviks, since they were enemies whose hospitals had retreated. However, when a wounded soldier of the 2nd Legionary division was brought in, they refused to treat him, sending him instead to the hospital at his own division. In this case, the decision was made by doctors, the very men whose mission, one would think, is to give help to anyone who needs it; yet, one would be bitterly disappointed awaiting [their help].

The Poznanians’ efficiency in marching is truly German. They have everything with them—no little thing that may be needed [later] is left on the road after use; instead, it is put in its proper place on one of the wagons.

The Poznanian infantry is not suitable for garrison duty.

The artillery and the cavalry have shown, in general, little tendency to plunder and to shut themselves in their own company.

(-) Juracki

Lieutenant

of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Front Staff, detailed to serve as a liaison officer with the Poznania Operational Group (Gen. Konarzewski’s) for the duration of the operation against Minsk. ⁵³

[Stamp:]

Polish Army High Command

Adjutant General Office

Warsaw

Incoming no. 1588/91

30 Sep. 1919