The German occupation of Poland not only brought unprecedented violence, destruction, and genocide to the country’s once multicultural and diverse population but also profoundly changed the relations and power structure within the occupied society. The first issue of the official gazette, published on October 26, 1939 by the German occupation administration announced the establishment of the General Government (GG), a semi-colonial entity covering roughly one-fourth of prewar Poland and 35 per cent of its population.Footnote 1 The same issue also announced the re-establishment of administrative structures in the Polish territories.Footnote 2 While the Nazis replaced the Polish central administrative apparatus with the General Governor, Hans Frank, and the government structure under his leadership, as well as new district and county authorities, the lower levels of the former Polish administration were absorbed into the new framework. Former Polish low-ranking clerks became employees of the Nazi apparatus ruling the occupied territory, including numerous village heads throughout the GG. In this essay I explore the position of these lowest level clerks present in every Polish village during the German occupation, the pressure they experienced, and how they navigated between conflicting interests of their communities and that of the German occupier in a reality marked by brutal military occupation and the unfolding Nazi genocide.
I focus here not on the relatively rare cases when village heads openly engaged in long-term collaboration with the Nazi regime (willingly supporting Nazi ideology and working to attain its goals). What specifically interests me is the liminal position of headmen as manifested in concessions made both to their communities or the occupying power, and the opportunities that working as a village head created as they became proxies of the German administration while retaining much of their agency. The work of village heads serves as a prime example of how individual members of the occupied society accommodated to extraordinary conditions inflicted upon them by the occupation. In fact, while adjusting to these conditions they also shaped them to some extent. This sheds light on how the German occupier outsourced management of the occupation to the local population of a conquered territory and used pre-existing administrative structures and traditions for its own interest.
After the war, some of the village heads were investigated and put on trial in accordance with the decree “On the Punishment of Fascist-Hitlerite Criminals Guilty of Killings and Mistreatment of Civilians and Prisoners of War as well as of Traitors to the Polish Nation,” issued by the Polish Committee of National Liberation on August 31, 1944, known as the August Decree.Footnote 3 Most of the trials revealing the scope of local participation in Nazi atrocities served no purpose for state propaganda; therefore, they were not politicized. Since the early 2000s, historians have been utilizing postwar trial documentation as one of the primary sources for studying the Holocaust in Poland. However, the vast amount of information about life in the occupied country that these sources contain has not yet been explored. Although one needs to approach the early postwar trial materials with caution like any sources of this kind, the documentation of these legal proceedings provides insight into the reality that the village officials actively shaped. This article is based on early postwar investigation and trial documentation as well as wartime village community records originating primarily from central Poland, the area which during the German occupation constituted the GG’s Radom District. This is not, however, an in-depth case study of one particular village official or area. Instead, I explore here a situation many village heads found themselves in during the German occupation of Poland and the various ways they responded to it. In the absence of sufficient historical sources originating from the Radom District, I utilize documentation from other regions. I also use memoirs and testimonies by Polish-Christian villagers as well as by Polish Jews to supplement court and communal sources.
Village Heads in Poland before WWII
Traditionally, one of the central figures in a Polish village was a village head (sołtys).Footnote 4 Before WWII the village head and his deputy (podsołtys) were elected for three-year terms by villagers themselves. The candidates came from among the most respected dwellers of the locality. Since 1936, Polish law had required that the candidate be a Polish citizen residing in the village, either a man or a woman, at least 30 years old and fluent in spoken and written Polish.Footnote 5 The last requirement prevented members of Poland’s multiple national and ethnic minorities from taking control over the administration of villages. The village head and his deputy (it seems there were very few women in these positions, if any at all) held the executive power in a village. They administered communal property and managed the community on a daily basis. They fulfilled many duties: registered new dwellers of and visitors to the locality; collected information necessary for taxation or military conscription; reported any illegal activity, including the presence of beggars or drifters in a village; controlled roads near a village and fixed minor damages; informed villagers about new regulations and ensured they were being obeyed. In addition, the village head also controlled his villagers’ activities, including building with appropriate permits, hunting and fishing in accordance with regulations, and even ensuring that young men bathed before meeting a military conscription committee.Footnote 6 Village heads not only took care of the daily administration of a village but also often enjoyed a level of informal authority within the community, which allowed them to resolve minor conflicts. Village heads were important figures for the village internally but also externally as they represented the village before the higher administration officials and had to provide them with any necessary assistance. Chosen from among the villagers and by the villagers, village heads were part of the lowest level of self-governance present in the Polish administrative system before WWII. However, they were not employed by the government. The relatively small payments they received came from the funds of the community. These were compensation for expenses incurred in connection with the office rather than a proper salary. As an additional benefit, village officials could cultivate village land reserved for them.
Village heads played a dual role, representing their village before the village mayor (wójt—an official governing a gmina, a commune comprised of several villages) and the county authority (starosta), while at the same time serving as the lowest representative of executive power of the Polish state administration in every village throughout the country. Before the war and during the German occupation of Poland village heads remained members of the village elite. The Ringelblum Archive, the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved a letter sent in early 1942 by a young Jewish woman who worked as a farmhand on a farm owned by a headman in a village of the GG’s Lublin District. She briefly described the position of the owners in her letter by referring to a headman and his family as the local “aristocracy.”Footnote 7
Under Foreign Rule
From the outset of the German occupation, the circumstances of village heads changed profoundly. The German authorities liquidated the self-governance of Polish village communes and villages in the GG, but left the old structures working to the occupier’s benefit.Footnote 8 While the Nazi authorities had oftentimes replaced prewar village mayors with loyal ethnic Germans or Poles who proved themselves trustworthy, most ethnic Polish village heads were left at their posts, though now subordinated to Nazi authority.Footnote 9 According to occupation law, they became non-German employees of the administration. When we consider that in early 1943, in the four districts of the GG inhabited predominantly by ethnic Poles, virtually each one of the 14,343 villages had a village head, we get a sense of the scale of the phenomenon under examination.Footnote 10 Thousands of Polish village heads served as proxies for the occupation. It was through these people that the occupier communicated with the conquered society and implemented its policies in the villages.
The conduct of village heads during the German occupation tends to come up increasingly in recent research on the Holocaust in provincial Poland. Jan Grabowski points toward village heads as an important part of the “complicated, but deadly efficient, system” working to the detriment of the Jews struggling for survival in rural areas.Footnote 11 A village head and his conduct during the Holocaust was also in the center of a three-year-long court litigation recently launched in Poland by a niece of the village official (with significant facilitation by the state) against scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski. Although in 2021 the court dismissed the case, arguing that courts should not intervene in academic freedom, the discussion of the role of the lowest village officials during the Nazi genocide went beyond academic forums.Footnote 12
Hardly ever, though, have historians analyzed the village heads as anything other than accessories to murder during the Holocaust. The most comprehensive study of these village officials fulfilling their duties in the GG has been offered in an article by Tomasz Frydel. Using categories proposed by Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus, Frydel places village heads at the meso-level of the Nazi genocide in Poland: on a level between the Nazi state and that of individual villagers; at the level of regions and the local communities populating them.Footnote 13 Frydel places the village officials at the center of the process that turned multiple Polish village communities into a social environment extremely hostile to Jews hunted by the Nazis. He argues that regardless of their limited agency, the village heads as the central figures in the meso-level had a fundamental role in what he calls a community-making process. Essentially, they were important for the process of creating social networks, forming allegiances, and negotiating identities in the communities they headed, which involved also the radical alienation of the Other: the Jews. Frydel suggests that such local dynamics “in effect transformed violence driven by existential fears and dilemmas into political violence.”Footnote 14 Therefore, he places village heads at the core of Polish villagers’ accommodation to the unfolding Nazi genocide of the Jews. This seems convincing for analysis of the Holocaust (especially its third phase) in western Galicia, the Kraków District of the GG in particular, which was examined by Frydel (and earlier also by Grabowski). There, the village heads managed a complicated system of night watches, hostages, and voluntary fire fighters.
The Holocaust, however, constituted only a small part of village heads’ wartime activity. For most of German-occupied Poland, it seems that the community control system was less organized, more fluid, and as a consequence village heads were often rather solitary actors constantly navigating between the conflicting interests of their Nazi superiors and those of their own village communities, groups, and individuals. While many actions undertaken by village heads during the German occupation also involved other actors—gendarmes, policemen, firefighters, ordinary peasants, and sometimes even whole village communities—the authority of a village head was nested in rural traditions the German occupier adapted to its law and practice. When one examines the liminal position of a village head in Poland during the German occupation (not focusing exclusively on the Holocaust), a concept of indirect rule appears as a more accurate frame of analysis.Footnote 15 The Nazi apparatus in the occupied Polish countryside had limited resources at its disposal; therefore, it made use of local village officials who already possessed authority in their communities and who had knowledge of the people and the area.Footnote 16 The Nazis had incorporated structures and power relations originating from prewar Polish society into a new administrative framework designed to serve the needs of the occupation. In the GG, especially outside of the cities, in small localities with only low-level administration offices, the majority of clerical positions, apart from a few German managers, were staffed by ethnic Poles.Footnote 17 Such policies, together with the extraordinary conditions of life under occupation, resulted in a situation where numerous Polish citizens faced serious, often intractable dilemmas regarding working for or alongside the occupation authorities.
Village Heads Living through the Occupation: A Time of Extreme Liminality
While some Poles, making a conscious decision to collaborate, willingly entered the German apparatus and found some form of accommodation within it, others had to make choices on a daily basis in order to live their lives under the occupation. That was the situation faced by numerous village heads, who throughout the German occupation remained in the lowest positions of power in the countryside. They had been ordered to do so by the newly established Nazi administration. Stepping down from the post of village head without authorization could even have been treated as an act of sabotage.Footnote 18 This does not mean, however, that headmen did not attempt to leave their jobs, but they were required to offer a sufficient reason for vacating their post. Nazi authorities rarely accommodated such requests and any decisions were arbitrary; even chronic illness limiting mobility did not merit retirement from the office.Footnote 19
In many localities where the position of village head had become vacant, often the villagers themselves continued to elect the headmen as they had before the war. However, now their choice had to be approved not by a Polish village mayor but a Nazi-appointed head of the respective county (Kreishauptmann). (Before the war it was a Polish village mayor). The level of agency given by Nazi authorities to local communities and village mayors, however, varied in different counties (Kreise) and perhaps also at different times. It also depended on the particulars of a situation and the Kreishauptmann’s individual style. For example, in Kreis Miechow (Kraków District) the head of the county issued a circular notification to all village mayors within his jurisdiction asking them to file appeals for the dismissal of those village heads who were not fluent enough in writing or calculating. At the same time, he asked village mayors to present two candidates from among whom the Kreishauptmann could choose a replacement for each dismissed village head. The Kreishauptman explained that those put forward as replacement candidates should be selected from among the younger, energetic, thoughtful, literate, and numerate villagers.Footnote 20 In some cases it may have been left to the village mayors to decide how they selected these candidates and whether they consulted the communities in the affected villages. Nonetheless, it was the head of the county who made the final decision about the appointment. Local Nazi authorities often had great leeway in shaping the occupation in the areas they managed, as was manifested also by the level of agency given to village mayors or local communities.
One could say that village heads filled the same place in the system (that is, between the village and the authority) as before the war. With the German occupation, however, their position became profoundly liminal. They belonged at the same time to both the village community and the Nazi administration, and yet they did not fully belong to either of the two. While there had been conflicting interests between that of the village and the state administration in the prewar period, it was during the German occupation that the two worlds in which headmen had to operate became almost completely separate and oftentimes utterly hostile to each other. Both worlds had serious expectations concerning the village heads’ desired conduct. On the one hand, the German authorities expected village heads to strictly follow orders and act as instruments of occupation policy. On the other, local communities from among which the village heads had been elected counted on headmen securing their villages’ existence and advocating for the interests of their compatriots.
Conflicting Interests: German Expectations toward Village Heads
German expectations regarding the role of village heads in the occupied countryside were clear. While remaining in their old positions, village heads had to ensure that the populations of the villages obeyed all laws and duties imposed on them by the occupier. The county authorities kept an open line of communication with all the village mayors residing in the county. Every village mayor convened regular briefings with the heads of villages located in the commune. The exact frequency of these meetings may have differed, most likely depending on local situations and times. In the commune of Duraczów (Radom District) in the first half of 1940 the briefings took place every other week. Village heads were obliged to attend meetings called by the authorities and could face punishment if they failed to show up.Footnote 21 It was usually the village mayor who briefed the village heads he supervised, but occasionally the police authority or the Kreishauptmann himself called for such meetings. The main goal of these briefings was to inform village heads about new regulations, requirements, and expectations that were to be met by them or by dwellers of their villages. It was a headman’s responsibility to pass along to his villagers the knowledge he acquired at these meetings. The briefings covered a wide range of topics concerning the daily operation of villages, including management of livestock, crops, health, disease control, and taxes. In this way village heads were not only messengers but very efficient instruments for ruling the conquered areas. Most likely new demands and duties imposed on the occupied population faced less resistance if they were announced to the villagers by one of their own. The regular and frequent meetings of village heads at the village mayor’s office also served for controlling the lowest officials and gathering information. It was through village heads that the Nazi authorities obtained registers of people designated for forced labor in Germany.Footnote 22 In rural areas it was also village heads who announced to the local Jews that they were obliged to wear white armbands with a Star of David. By using village heads as their proxies, German authorities were certain their messages would be delivered—if not, there was a person who could be held accountable.
There were, however, ways other than briefings through which the authorities communicated with village heads. Traces of correspondence between village mayors and village heads exist in the archives. The authorities issued circulars containing information to be distributed among the villagers (about mandatory blackout of windows, removal of dead fruit trees and planting new ones, care for sanitary conditions in villages, rules on purchasing building materials, taxes for dog and bicycle owners, inventorying horses and carts).Footnote 23 The village heads were not only responsible for passing along the information but also for their villagers’ adherence to the rules. The occupying power held village heads accountable for any breach of regulations that occurred in the villages they headed. Although how these measures were administered most likely depended on decisions by local Nazi authorities, in many places a collective responsibility principle was eventually introduced in one way or another. For example, village heads were ordered to designate several affluent farmers who would vouch for the proper protection of communal property, reporting strangers and suspicious behavior to the police. The selected villagers had to put their life and property on the line, becoming hostages; headmen were among them.Footnote 24 In this way the occupier imposed a tight self-control system on the villages.
One of the most important duties of village heads was ensuring that farmers were delivering the food quotas.Footnote 25 The higher authorities outlined the quotas for a whole village but the village head was responsible for assigning individual farmers their share. The quotas applied not only to crops and livestock, but also fodder or other animal feed. A complicated system of economic control and exploitation developed with the settling in of Nazi authorities. The village heads were crucial workers in this apparatus, as they knew the villages in which they worked. When certain farmers did not deliver their quotas on time, the village heads had to report them to the authorities.Footnote 26 In addition, the locally-based officials also collected taxes.
The headmen also had to fulfill the village commune authorities’ requests for labor. This included providing men who would perform agricultural work on estates located in the area as well as carters with horses and wagons to provide transportation for the Polish Blue Police (Polnische Polizei im Generalgouvernement; force subordinated to the German Ordnungspolizei and created by the Nazis on the basis of the Polish prewar law enforcement officers) or the German gendarmerie. In case the village heads failed to adhere to these demands, they could face arrest under the deadly suspicion of sabotage.Footnote 27 In addition to providing labor for locally performed works, village heads also played an important part in recruiting forced laborers for work in Germany. Depending on place and time, the headmen acted as messengers distributing correspondence from the Arbeitsamt (Labor Office) but also took on a more active role by designating people for forced labor. For some village officials this created an opportunity to take revenge on villagers with whom they had conflicts, and also to profit by accepting bribes to not notice infractions or to cross someone’s name off the list.Footnote 28
Conflicting Interests: Villagers’ Expectations toward Village Heads
Even though village officials carried out orders issued by their Nazi superiors, the communities they headed continued to perceive them as representatives of their village. In most cases, prior to September 1, 1939, these very same individuals had represented their villages before the Polish state authorities. Furthermore, the relatively small remuneration received by headmen from the German authorities did not act as a buffer between the village officials and their own communities.Footnote 29 The allowances the headmen received did not cover basic living expenses and must have been thought of as a bonus rather than a main source of income. Hence, just as before the war, they had to remain active farmers. Working the land in addition to fulfilling their duties as officials made village heads even more connected with the people whom they administered and controlled on behalf of the German occupiers. Remaining closely connected with their communities and at the same time being the only representative of the occupying power in the village placed a heavy burden on the headmen. The villagers expected that the local official would advocate for his community, turn a blind eye on their illegal activities, and protect them from the Germans.
A feature central to the work of a village head in German-occupied Poland was serving multiple masters, perhaps a rather unusual situation for low-level clerks of the state, and definitely not a comfortable one for the individuals in question. Many village heads were aware that their office placed them in a difficult position. A headman’s professional but also physical survival largely depended on his ability to negotiate and navigate between the environment of his own village, the German occupier, and oftentimes a third player—partisans who were active in the vicinity. One of the principles of successful negotiation is that no party ever gets everything they want; that same principle prevailed in the strategies pursued by many village heads.
“Don’t go to the village meeting because if you go, they might elect you a village head and you will regret that. You know what kind of people we have here,” warned the wife of Józef Chustecki in the summer of 1941. However, the meeting was vital for the village. In his memoir, Chustecki remarked that later on he cursed that day and his own stubbornness.Footnote 30 He became the village head of Prudno in Bezirk Bialystok. The wife of Jan Chmielewski, who served as a deputy village head in Szyszczyce near Chmielnik in GG’s Radom District described a similar concern. During the postwar trial of her husband, the woman explained the situation to the Prosecutor of the Kielce District Court: “In 1944 my husband was elected a deputy village head. Nobody else wanted to accept the vote, so my husband made a sacrifice and accepted this responsible duty.”Footnote 31 While this might have been a convenient line of defense, it is also possible that the explanation was genuine. Becoming a village head imposed duties and obligations that potentially placed an official in conflict with his own community, although it also created opportunities which many headmen eagerly took advantage of. Some collected more food quotas than required and kept the surplus for themselves; others abused their power over villagers or asked for various favors, including sexual ones.Footnote 32
Many of the village heads, however, were aware that they were walking a tight rope and might face serious consequences if they became overzealous. In drastic cases, they could have become targets of violent attacks by partisans or the villagers themselves.Footnote 33 Even though an attack against a headman could have resulted in a death penalty for an assailant, most likely that possibility provided only illusory security.Footnote 34 Usually, Germans were not stationed in the villages and could not provide village officials with round-the-clock protection. In the end, they were on their own. Villagers dissatisfied (justly or not) with their village head could have accused the official in front of the German authorities. In some cases such allegations of criminal activity or supporting the underground could have been completely false but still triggered the arrest of the headman. In one of the analyzed cases such a false accusation led to a village head’s imprisonment in Auschwitz concentration camp and his eventual death. Two men responsible for plotting against that village head admitted after the war their intent had been to replace the official and thereby avoid delivering their assigned food quotas.Footnote 35 This case illustrates how villagers could sometimes use the German occupier to solve internal village conflicts and get rid of an unwanted headman. It seems that in many more cases, however, village heads and their deputies faced informal sanctions. These could also be painful when inflicted by their own community with whom they were closely connected by longstanding ties as neighbors, friends, or even family. Headmen realized that they were being perceived as the prime culprits by their communities. As Chustecki noted in his postwar memoir: “People thought that anything bad that happened in the village was the village head’s fault.”Footnote 36
The Partisans and Consequences of Navigation Errors
In some areas of Poland, such as in the southern part of Radom District, especially toward the end of the war, village heads were not only caught between the Nazi administration and their own communities. There was also a third actor that put village heads under pressure and requested services which made their situation even more complex: the partisans. If they required room or board from the villages, they expected the headmen to comply. The underground also monitored the behavior of village officials and did not refrain from punishing them when they harmed the Polish Christian population by overzealously fulfilling German orders.Footnote 37 Ethnographic research conducted by Dionizjusz Czubala in the 1970s in the southern part of the former Radom District shows that some villagers perceived disciplining those headmen whose cooperation with the occupation authority went too far to be a primary goal of the local partisans. Czubala’s informers mentioned several instances of village officials being lashed by partisans. At least in one of these cases pressure applied by the underground was effective and the village head changed his behavior.Footnote 38 There is, however, evidence that the disciplining of headmen by the partisans was more systematic and exceeded the few cases uncovered by Czubala’s research. A bulletin published by the underground peasant movement announced in May 1944: “The action of the underground organizations has largely changed the situation in the countryside. A village head has ceased to be a Hitlerite ruler of his village. Feeling justice on his own skin, the communal official has begun to take into account even the ‘dull peasant.’”Footnote 39 The tone of this information might be too optimistic, but it testifies to the fact that disciplining village officials by partisans was not a phenomenon limited to one region: the bulletin, published in Warsaw, covered the entirety of German-occupied Poland.
In addition to real actions undertaken against overzealous headmen by different underground units, some of their propaganda efforts focused on creating an atmosphere of pressure around Poles working in the occupier’s administration, making them believe that the underground was closely monitoring their behavior. One of the organizations distributed a leaflet that informed Polish city mayors, village mayors, and village heads that their conduct was under constant surveillance. It also announced that those who harm their fellow Poles by working for the Germans would face serious consequences: “Any acts against Polish raison d’état will not go unpunished—the punishment will reach you soon enough. Those who will manage to escape punishment today will be dealt with immediately after the liberation. Your deeds and crimes are being meticulously recorded.”Footnote 40 The signature on the leaflet did not point toward any particular underground organization. Instead, it read: “social executive,” suggesting that society itself was scrutinizing the conduct of village officials, thereby blurring the boundary between the underground and society. Hence, with the rapid development of underground organizations toward the end of the war, village heads who harmed their own communities had to take into account not only informal social sanctions but also serious punishment that could be inflicted upon them by the partisans during the occupation or by the justice system after it.
Village Heads, the Nazi terror, and the Holocaust
In addition to managing the village on a daily basis, village officials occasionally assisted the German gendarmerie during arrests or searches carried out in the village. Some were more willing than others, but all had to comply at least to some extent. The consequences of disobeying German gendarmes could be deadly for the village head and/or his family. Headmen served as the village contact persons for gendarmes. The officials were expected to provide any necessary help and fulfil orders conveyed to them. They were charged with the task of burying victims killed in their villages by the Blue Police or the gendarmerie, especially when there were no relatives of the victim who could take care of a proper interment. Most often, this was the case for Jewish victims. A former village head of Damiany in Radom District testified after the war: “After some time the car parked near my house. A gendarme got out and came to my house ordering me to designate men to bury two Jews, a man and a woman who had been killed in the Moskorzew forest.”Footnote 41 Not only did the village head fulfill the order, he also accompanied the two men whom he designated and stayed to witness the burial. One of the men who buried the bodies later stated that the headman also allowed him to take the shoes one of the victims was wearing.Footnote 42
Village heads fulfilled a particular role in the persecution and extermination of Jews in the Polish countryside. In multiple villages Jews were not moved to the ghettoes at all or were moved just weeks or even days before the deportation to a death camp or an execution site. These people did experience different stages of Nazi persecution, such as restrictions on movement, payments to the Germans, or forced labor while still living in their own homes. Oftentimes, the village head was virtually the only representative of the occupying power whose decisions directly impacted the lives of the local Jews. It was the village head who, following German orders, dispossessed the local Jews, organized and supervised their forced labor in service for the village (such as clearing the snow). Sometimes, however, the village official received only general instructions and the way he implemented them depended on his own invention, thus giving him agency in shaping the fate of the Jewish population in the village he headed.Footnote 43
During Aktion Reinhardt in the localities with no ghettos it was the village heads who first received German police instructions ordering the concentration of Jews destined for deportation. The village heads communicated to the Jews the order to leave their homes and move to the nearest ghetto that at this stage, unbeknown to them, served as a concentration point before deportation to a death camp. Later, headmen delivered the order to prepare for deportation.Footnote 44 In some places where local ghettos were far away from railway lines, village heads were tasked by the Nazi authorities with supplying horse wagons and carters to assist in the deportations from the ghettos to trains destined to death camps.Footnote 45 Horse wagons and carters designated by village heads on occasion also transported Jews to mass execution sites in the vicinity of the ghettoes.Footnote 46 Their privileged position in the information chain provided headmen also with an opportunity to warn Jews about danger and some officials indeed made use of it.Footnote 47
Jan Grabowski argues that “the orders to initiate manhunts usually originated with the German police and reached village elders [i.e. village heads] through the office of the local voit [i.e. village mayor].”Footnote 48 There seems to be little doubt, however, that some village officials initiated searches on their own authority. Such manhunts claimed many victims especially in the aftermath of deportations from nearby ghettos. Occasionally, headmen rallied as many as three hundred of their villagers to participate.Footnote 49 Headmen played an instrumental role in managing these hunts and in detaining people that had been captured.Footnote 50 Some village officials, as the local individuals in power, even instigated and organized collective violence perpetrated against the Jews by firemen and other villagers.
Intermediaries of the Genocide
The village heads acted as intermediaries in killing Jews also on a more regular, one might say, daily or ordinary basis. After the majority of the ghettos had been liquidated and the following few weeks of organized manhunts ended in the GG in 1942, it was often village heads who played a pivotal role in the eventual death of the captured Jewish fugitives. Early postwar court documentation provides more than enough evidence to support this statement. Władysław Zięcik was a headman in the community of Pijanów (Kreis Konskie, Radom District). According to his testimony given during the postwar investigation, a man from Radwanów, the neighboring village, came to him on November 25, 1942 claiming there was an armed Jewish man in his house. He urged the village head to turn the Jew in to the gendarmes. The village official took two other villagers with him and went to Radwanów. Upon their arrival, they established that the Jewish man was not in the house of the person that brought forth the information but was staying with another villager. After confirming that the Jewish man had neither a weapon nor an ID on him, the village head took him to the headman’s house and later delivered to the nearest gendarmerie post in Radoszyce.Footnote 51 Although Zięcik testified he did not know what happened to the Jewish man, it is almost certain that he was shot by gendarmes soon after his arrival. All the Jews of Radoszyce had been deported and subsequently murdered in the Treblinka death camp three weeks earlier.Footnote 52
This tragic story of a Jewish fugitive is rather typical for the GG. After the summer or autumn of 1942, when the majority of the ghettos had been liquidated and their inhabitants murdered in the death camps during Aktion Reinhardt, countless Jews who sought refuge in the Polish countryside were handed over to the Polish Blue Police or German gendarmerie after they had been brought to the village head. Like Zięcik, other village heads delivered fugitives to the police posts themselves, designated individual villagers to do that, or simply called for the blue policemen or gendarmes, who came to the village and executed Jews on site. While researching the involvement of the Polish Blue Police in the Holocaust, Jan Grabowski encountered a document written by an officer from the village of Stanin, at that time in the Lublin District. The policeman listed heads of the villages in the vicinity of his station and the number of Jews these village officials delivered to the local jail.Footnote 53 It is likely that not all of the listed headmen themselves delivered Jews but designated villagers to do that on foot or in horse carts. Nevertheless, these village officials orchestrated the handing over of captives to the police. In fact, the role of headmen in delivering Jews or informing the executioners about captured Jews placed these village officials in the center of a number of postwar investigations examining Polish peasants’ involvement in the Holocaust. Furthermore, in some of the cases in which postwar investigations established beyond reasonable doubt the involvement of other villagers in the capture and denunciation of Jews, only the village heads were held accountable for collaborating with the Nazi regime.Footnote 54
In German-occupied Poland, a house of a village head often served as a liminal space in which the case of a captured Jew changed its character. From a private matter between the villagers and a captive (whom they may have known) it turned into a public matter. This was precisely the case in aforementioned Radwanów where the captured Jewish man had owned a shop in a nearby town and many villagers had been his clients. With the intervention of the village head, the capture of a Jewish fugitive became an official matter that involved the occupation authorities. In numerous similar cases leading to the ultimate death of Jews attempting to survive in the Polish countryside, the headman acted as an intermediary between the Polish villagers who captured Jews and the gendarmes or blue policemen who killed them. Why did the villagers bother to inform a village head instead of turning directly to the gendarmes or policemen? Presumably, the village head was a more familiar figure, his behavior more predictable, and contact with him was burdened with less risk. The village head, after all, had been elected from among the villagers. He was a neighbor, an acquaintance, or even a relative.
Occasionally, a village head could use his authority to the advantage of the Jews who were caught by the villagers. This was the case for Brandla Fajn, a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust near her home village in Lublin District. At some point in late 1942 or early 1943, she and her husband were caught by peasants patrolling the area and searching for Jews. “After an intervention of a village head who knew me since I was a child, I was released,” testified Fajn after the war.Footnote 55 One of the interviews recorded by Dionizjusz Czubala also reveals a story of rescue by a village head. The man was called to the barn where the villagers kept a Jew they had caught. The village head was asked to check whether the prisoner was circumcised. The official lied and thus saved the Jewish man’s life.Footnote 56
Sometimes village heads could themselves become hostage to their own villagers, who threatened to denounce them to the Nazis if they failed to act in accordance with German expectations.Footnote 57 Testimonies collected in the course of postwar investigations of Piotr Grzywnowicz, the former village head of Chlewice in Radom District support this argument all too well. In two separate events, Grzywnowicz, together with other villagers was involved in the capture and subsequent murder by gendarmes of five Jews attempting to survive in the village. In both cases it was not the village head who captured the Jewish fugitives, but he played a key role in handing over the victims to the police authority. Defending himself in court, Grzywnowicz explained that he was, or felt, threatened by the villagers who came to him and reported about the presence of Jews in the village.Footnote 58 He explained: “As head of Chlewice village, having seen that many people knew of the Jewish presence and as I was afraid that Jaworski or somebody else would inform the Germans that I did not want to intervene in this matter, I went to Jaworski’s barn [the place where Jews had been caught and detained] …”Footnote 59 Some of the witnesses at Grzywnowicz’s trial testified about open threats addressed to the village head. These threats were allegedly shouted out loud by someone who was in the crowd of villagers gathered around the captured Jewish family as they were escorted by Grzywnowicz: “If he just lets the Jews go, we will immediately report him to the Germans!”Footnote 60 Even if we acknowledge that describing his role in the investigated events as beyond his choice played to the benefit of the former village head accused of collaboration and therefore may have been exaggerated in court, it is impossible to ignore the existence of pressure, perhaps linked with strong social control and sometimes threats, that influenced the conduct of this headman.
It is reasonable to consider that in many cases, it may well have been the pressure (real or assumed) of individuals, groups, or the entire community that made a village head act and deliver people to the German gendarmes or the Polish Blue Police. In this way, villagers dealt with the matter without spilling blood with their own hands, so to speak; after all, it was the headman who contacted the Nazi terror apparatus, not them. One can argue that the village head, as an intermediary figure, facilitated maintaining the integrity of the community. With a headman designated by popular vote as the “officially recognized” collaborator among them, the village as a whole did not have to cooperate with the Nazis. Examining the role of village heads in the deaths of countless Polish Jews hunted down by villagers throughout the GG proves one more thing: capturing Jews and handing them over to the killers was a social act involving numerous actors following certain scripts. That social dynamic and the involvement of village heads in their dual role as community members and workers in the Nazi administration is an important factor that has only recently come to researchers’ attention.Footnote 61
The documents of the postwar investigations, like any material of this kind, contain many often contradictory claims and explanations of actions undertaken by village heads. They shed light not only on the wartime events but also on how villagers perceived the role of the headmen and defined the limits of what they considered acceptable conduct during the occupation. After 1945, some of the villagers clearly sought someone to blame for their wartime suffering. The village head was most often the only person at hand from whom they could demand justice. The Germans had either fled or had been killed, and the Polish legal apparatus was preoccupied with prosecuting “more serious” war criminals whose trials could be used for solidifying communist legitimation. Hence, the village’s rage sometimes focused on the village head or his deputy. It is clear that for some individuals the simple act of carrying out German orders by village officials was sufficient grounds to demand their punishment after the war, while other villagers made more nuanced judgements of the wartime reality and conduct of the village officials. It was “zealous” and proactive behavior and not just simple obedience to orders that, according to them, warranted punishment. In this way, the courtrooms in the early postwar period became spaces in which the role and conduct of Polish workers in the Nazi administration were discussed and their meanings negotiated within village communities.
The case of the village heads illustrates a complex situation in which thousands of Polish citizens found themselves in Nazi-controlled territory, their work ruthlessly exploited by the occupier, and vital for maintaining the occupation. The headmen had functioned as the lowest-level representatives of the administration in prewar Poland, and during the German occupation that role did not change. The position of intermediary was embedded in the office of a village head long before September 1, 1939. But it was during the German occupation that it became profoundly liminal, situating the headmen in a difficult place, torn by multiple powers that pulled them in different directions. The German occupier expected them simply to implement Nazi policies in the communities they served. The communities expected their headmen would manage somehow to protect fellow villagers from the Nazis by acting as a buffer in contacts with the occupier. The partisans expected the village heads to comply with requests, facilitate clandestine activities, and remain loyal to their fellow Polish citizens. Each of the parties attempted to closely monitor the village heads’ behavior and placed them under strong pressure.
Judging from the evidence I have seen, it seems that most of the village heads responded to this situation by navigating and negotiating between these conflicting expectations. The same individuals could take different positions on different occasions. Sometimes they protected their villagers or assisted the underground, jeopardizing the occupier’s efforts to exploit and crush Polish villagers. At other times, they served as merciless tools of German policy and even manifested their own agency in shaping that policy against their own men and women. The village officials also played a crucial role in the deaths of countless Polish Jews who sought refuge in the countryside during the Holocaust. Villagers who caught these Jews often delivered them to the village head who then called in the executioners—the Polish Blue Police or the German gendarmerie. Such headmen contributed to the death of captives who, to be sure, were caught by others; by “ordinary” village people. Thus, by doing the job they were appointed to do, village heads acted as intermediaries of the genocide and at the same time played a useful role for both the German occupier and the non-Jewish Polish villagers. Traces of such activity are preserved in multiple files of investigations and trials conducted after the war in Poland.
Studying village heads in German-occupied rural Poland sheds light on the extremely hostile environment in which headmen functioned and the difficult choices they were forced to make. Furthermore, it allows us to question the extent to which collaboration (especially in its narrow legal meaning) proves to be useful as an analytical category for studying occupied local communities. Perhaps “accommodation” is a more accurate and, as the case of village heads manifests, an equally deadly category. Examining Polish headmen sheds light on a broader phenomenon: the everyday reality that occupied communities and their individual members not only lived in but also navigated, made choices about, and eventually shaped. Thus, it opens up for further analysis the question of agency in an occupied society and that of the individual historical actors within it.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was funded by a grant no. 2017/26/D/HS3/00717 received from the National Science Centre, Poland. The author would like to thank Madeline G. Levine and John-Paul Himka for their incisive reading of the draft of this paper and their comments. I also want to thank Julia Machnowska for her indispensable work as my research assistant, and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw for providing me with the work environment for completing this project and funds for publishing this article as open access.
Lukasz Krzyzanowski is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw (Claims Conference University Partnership in Holocaust Studies Lecturer) and head of the Public History team in the Institute of Central Europe in Lublin. He was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw until June 2024. His monograph Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City (trans. Madeline G. Levine, Harvard University Press 2020) received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize.
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