title: Sixth Crusade

text: The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229), also known as the Crusade of Frederick II, was a military expedition to recapture Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land. It began seven years after the failure of the Fifth Crusade and involved very little actual fighting. The diplomatic maneuvering of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick II, resulted in the Kingdom of Jerusalem regaining some control over Jerusalem for much of the ensuing fifteen years as well as over other areas of the Holy Land.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The Fifth Crusade ended in 1221, having accomplished nothing. Despite numerous promises, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, never joined the campaign, despite his vow to do so. The forces he sent to Egypt arrived too late to make a difference in the debacle, partially due to the lack of effective leadership. They would have to wait for many more years for Frederick's actions. When Pope Innocent III died in 1216, his successor Honorius III did not immediately hold Frederick to his vow, but reminding him that the Christian world had waited for his action. Gregory IX, the successor to Honorius, becoming pope in March 1227, would not be so kind to the emperor. In Syria and Egypt, the Ayyubids were engaged in basically a civil war, pitting the sultan al-Kamil against many of his brothers and other relatives. Yet the sultan's offer of territory for peace made during the Fifth Crusade remained on the table, and Frederick would be the one to take advantage of it.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The failure of the Fifth Crusade was a devastating blow to Christendom. Of all the European sovereigns, only Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was in a position to regain Jerusalem after the loss. Frederick was, like many of the 13th-century rulers, a serial "crucesignatus". When he was formally crowned as King of Germany at Aachen on 15 July 1215, he astonished the crowd by taking the cross and calling upon the nobles present to do the same. Twenty years separated the crusader vows of the emperor Henry VI of Germany and his son Frederick and it is unclear whether the father's German Crusade of 1197 impacted the son's objectives for the Fifth Crusade.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The emperor again took the vow when he was re-crowned in Rome by the pope on 22 November 1220. At the same time, Frederick's oldest son Henry VII of Germany took the title of King of the Romans, and Constance of Aragon was crowned empress. A year later, Honorius III reminded Frederick that he had not fulfilled his vow, and in December 1221, sent Nicola de Chiaromonte, cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, to confer with Frederick. They returned to Veroli in April 1222 to confer with the pontiff. A strategy meeting for the next Crusade did not happen until March 1223 at Ferentino and included the pope and emperor, plus John of Brienne, Latin patriarch Raoul of Mérencourt, the masters of the military orders, and many others. Frederick again vowed to go on Crusade in addition to signing an agreement with the errant Thomas of Celano, negotiated by Thomas of Aquino. But neither this nor the one signed two years later at San Germano assured Frederick's departure.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: A new date was set for the expedition of 24 June 1225. At the same time, Frederick, widowed since June 1222, planned a strategic wedding. After the retreat of the Crusaders from Egypt in 1221, John of Brienne returned to Acre. He hoped to find a suitable husband for his daughter Isabella II of Jerusalem, then just 9 years of age. Leaving Odo of Montbéliard as "bailli" of the kingdom, he travelled to Italy, accompanied by patriarch Raoul of Mérencourt and Hospitaller master Guérin de Montaigu. In Apulia, he met with Frederick II and arranged for the marriage of Isabella II to the emperor. The pope gave his blessing, and it was John's understanding that he remain regent until 1226. When John left Italy, marrying Berengaria of León in 1224, he entrusted Hermann of Salza to conclude the arrangements for the wedding of his daughter.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Once again, preachers were sent throughout Europe to gain support for a new crusade, this time to be led by Frederick. Despite readying transport ships, the situation did not look good to meet the target date. Hermann of Salza and Raoul of Mérencourt were sent to the pope to apprise him of the situation. That would be one of the patriarch's last official acts, as he died in late 1224, succeeded by the bishop of Valence, Gérold of Lausanne. Honorius III sent cardinal bishop Conrad of Porto as papal legate to Germany, urging the clergy there to continue to pursue the crusade. The pope also urged Louis VIII of France to join Frederick, and to resolve his quarrel with Raymond VII of Toulouse. None of these efforts were fruitful and all were convinced that the timetable set at Ferentino was unachievable. The pope while at Rieti agreed to a delay on 18 July 1225, just days before the deadline and ten years after Frederick had originally committed to a crusade.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The Agreement of San Germano of 25 July 1225, signed at present day Cassino, was between Frederick II and Honorius III. A Dominican named Guala de Roniis was responsible for the negotiations. Frederick promised to depart on the Crusade by 15 August 1227 and remain for two years. During this period, he was to maintain 1000 knights in Syria, provide transport for additional forces, and provide Rome with 100,000 ounces in gold in the care of Hermann of Salza, John of Brienne and the patriarch. These funds would be returned to the emperor once he arrived at Acre. If, for any reason (including his death), he did not arrive, the money would be employed for the needs of the Holy Land. He also promised that if he went on Crusade that he would lead. After the agreement was signed, Guala became Bishop of Brescia. Based on the terms of the agreement, Frederick's forces ceased to occupy portions of the pontifical states. Moreover, all papal possessions in the Kingdom of Sicily were to be restored to the pope.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick attested to the terms at the high altar with his hand on the Gospels. Apostolic legate Rainald of Urslingen, the duke of Spoleto, swore "on the soul of the emperor" that the agreement would be upheld under the pain of excommunication. In a letter to the pope, Frederick reiterated the terms and accepted the ban in the event the Crusade did not happen. He had committed himself beyond all retreat.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: After agreeing with Honorius to launch a Crusade before 1228, Frederick summoned an imperial Diet at Cremona, the main pro-imperial city in Lombardy. The main arguments for holding the Diet would be to continue the struggle against heresy, to organize the crusade, and to restore the imperial power in northern Italy, long usurped by the numerous communes located there. Those assembled responded with the reformation of the Lombard League, which had already defeated the emperor Frederick I in the 12th century, and again Milan was chosen as the league's leader. The Diet was cancelled as well as the Truce of Constance. The situation was stabilized only through a compromise reached by Honorius between Frederick and the league. During his sojourn in northern Italy, Frederick also invested the Teutonic Knights with the territories in what would become East Prussia, starting what was later called the Northern Crusades.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick II desired to go to the Holy Land as king of Jerusalem. He married John of Brienne's daughter Isabella II by proxy in August 1225 at Acre, presided over by Giacomo, the bishop of Patti. In accordance with her father's wishes, she was crowned queen of Jerusalem a few days later at Tyre. Frederick sent fourteen galleys for her, under the command of admiral Henry of Malta, pardoned since his role at the disaster at Mansurah during the Fifth Crusade. They were formally married at Brindisi on 9 November 1227.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: John and Frederick's relationship became frayed, as Frederick claimed the kingship of Jerusalem. John had allegedly been given assurances that he would be king of Jerusalem for the rest of his life. According to one version, John got into a disagreement with his new son-in-law because Frederick seduced a niece of Isabella who was her lady-in-waiting. In the other version of the chronicle, John often chastised his son-in-law, concluding that John wanted to seize Sicily for his nephew Walter IV of Brienne. Frederick declared that John had lost his claim to the kingdom when Isabella married him. He proclaimed himself king of Jerusalem for the first time in December 1225, taking the crown at a special ceremony at Foggia.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: John of Brienne left for Rome, where Honorius sympathized with him, and ignored Frederick's claims. Balian of Sidon, Simon of Maugastel, the archbishop of Tyre, and the other Jerusalemite lords who had escorted Isabella to Brindisi acknowledged Frederick as their lawful king. Notably, these did not include the Ibelins. Nevertheless, the law––the Assizes of Jerusalem––required that the monarch be a resident of the kingdom. Frederick's first royal decree was to bestow new privileges upon Hermann of Salza and the Teutonic Knights, placing them on equal footing as the Templars and Hospitallers. Thomas of Aquino, the emperor's long-time advisor, replaced Odo of Montbéliard as "bailli" of the kingdom.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: In November 1222, John of Brienne arrived at Brindisi, the first king of Jerusalem to visit Europe, with multiple objectives. The treasure of the kingdom was depleted and additional funds were badly needed. He also wanted to ensure that future crusades were not hampered by the divided leadership shown in Egypt, and that the kingdom would lead such efforts. John's pleas for support in England and Spain were for naught, and the pledge he received from Philip II of France on his death-bed was from an account already allocated to the Holy Land. Henry III of England did eventually implement a levy but it is not clear that much was made from the voluntary contributions.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The conciliar decree "Ad Liberandam" published at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 formed a system of public financing of Crusades. The disbursements from the papal camera formed essential aid to the crusade movement, although the monies collected by individual "crucesignati" remained important. While some of these funds went directly to local Crusaders, by 1220, Innocent III had consolidated distribution. Frederick did not benefit from this, and from 1221 to 1228 there was limited ecclesiastical impost directed toward his planned Crusade. The funds for this imperial Sixth Crusade would have to be raised by the emperor. The gold sequestered after San Germano was quickly spent due to the delay of the crusade, and Frederick implemented a levy on Sicily beginning in 1228. He also gained financial support from Cyprus and as his new role as king of Jerusalem, but the lack of funds contributed to the small size of the Crusader army.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The defeat of the Crusaders in the Fifth Crusade was a joint effort of the brothers al-Kamil, al-Mu'azzam and al-Ashraf. After 1221, al-Mu'azzam returned to Damascus, suspicious of his brothers and their motivations. In June 1222, he conducted an expedition against Guy I Embriaco to enforce the truce, and unsuccessfully attacked his cousin al-Nasir Kilij Arslan, emir of Hama, and later occupying Ma'arrat al-Numan and Salamiyah. Al-Mu'azzam was forced to halt his siege of Hama and to surrender his other conquests by order of al-Kamil. He then formed an alliance with Gökböri, a former general of Saladin's, possibly at the request of the sultan al-Nasir, against his brother al-Ashraf.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Another brother, al-Muzaffar Ghazi, had been installed at Mayyafariqin and Akhlat, losing Akhlat to al-Ashraf after revolting against him. Ghazi joined the rebellion of al-Mu'azzam's, which was quickly suppressed by al-Ashraf and the Alleppine forces. Again attacking at Homs, al-Mu'azzam was restrained by threats from al-Kamil. Now opposing both of his well-positioned brothers, al-Mu'azzam reached out to disaffected members of the sultan's Egyptian forces, challenging the sultan to come to Syria if he dared. Against al-Ashraf, he enlisted the aid of the Khwarazmians under the shah Jalal al-Din Mangburni to attack Diyar Bakr.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: In 1226, al-Mu'azzam again moved on Homs, while Gökböri attacked Mosul and al-Jazira. Al-Ashraf stopped his brother at Homs and called on the Seljuk Sultan of Rûm, Kayqubad I, to help him with Gökböri. In the end, both al-Ashraf and Badr al-Din Lu'lu', ruler of Mosul, succumbed to al-Mu'azzam, but not before Jalal had invested himself in Akhlat and later Azerbaijan. His suzerainty over Akhlat was recognized by al-Mu'azzam, who also held al-Ashraf at Damascus. At this point, al-Kamil began exploring peace with the West, dispatching the emir Fakhr ad-Din ibn as-Shaikh to meet Frederick II (see below).


title: Sixth Crusade

text: By May 1227, al-Kamil was concerned for his sultanate, feeling increasingly boxed in. The arrival of the Crusaders began, and he was again considering his offer of Jerusalem made to Frederick II in 1226, that appearing to him as the only viable option. However, by May 1227, al-Ashraf had been released from Damascus, and the emirs al-Nasir Kilij Arslanat Hama and al-Mujahid at Homs turned against al-Mu'azzam. Fearing the Crusaders gathering at Acre, al-Mu'azzam began, as he did in the Fifth Crusade, to dismantle the defences of his fortresses, including Jerusalem.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Al-Mu'azzam died on 12 November 1227, and was succeeded by his son an-Nasir Dā’ūd, with al-Kamil's approval. Peace among the Ayyubids did not last long. Dā’ūd refused his uncle's request to abandon Krak de Montreal. Then, yet another brother, al-Aziz Uthman of Banyas, attacked emir Bahram Shah of Baalbek. Ordered to stand down by Dā’ūd, al-Aziz persisted and al-Kamil responded by taking Jerusalem and Nablus in July 1228. Al-Ashraf was summoned to Damascus and he met al-Kamil at Tall al-Ajul. There it was decided that al-Ashraf would take Damascus, leaving Dā’ūd with al-Jazira. Al-Kamil remained in Jerusalem to conduct negotiations with Frederick II.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: By 1226, it was clear that the Sixth Crusade would, in fact, happen with an invasion of Syria and Palestine with the objective of conquering Jerusalem. Frederick II was to lead the Crusade, essentially boxed in by the terms of San Germano. After the death of Honorius III in 1227, the new pope Gregory IX entered the curia with determination to proceed and a long-held dislike for Frederick.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The initial phase of the Crusade was a complex endeavour involving multiple deployments, negotiations with the Ayyubids, a delay of the departure of Frederick due to illness, a subsequent excommunication, and, finally, arrival of the emperor at Acre. The key points in the timeline are:


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The new role of Frederick also affected the objective of the Crusade. In 1224, the plans to invade Egypt required suitable ships able to enter the Nile delta. Now, the emphasis was a campaign to focus on Jerusalem, with men from Germany and finance from Sicily. Oliver of Paderborn, so effective in recruiting for the Fifth Crusade, participated in the recruitment and even joined the army gathering in Italy, but was not as successful. His diminished role was replaced by bishop Conrad of Hildesheim. The landgrave Louis of Thuringia took the cross in 1226 and with Walran of Limburg inspired hundreds of Thuringian and Austrian knights to join. They also drew significant support from Cologne, Lübeck and Worms. Many prelates and "ministeriales" also joined, including the poet Freidank. The numbers and prowess of the German crusades provided hope to the expedition planners.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Henry III of England took the cross upon his coronation in May 1220 and had planned a crusade after Louis IX of France's failures. In 1223, Honorius III appealed to Henry to assist in the Holy Land. But, like his father John Lackland before him, crises closer to home took precedence. Nevertheless, there was to be significant English participation in the Sixth Crusade.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: William Briwere, the bishop of Exeter, participated in the Crusade as a proxy for his uncle William Brewer, who died before he was able to fulfill his crusading vows. Brewer had taken the cross in 1189, but was excused because of administrative duties. Briwere went on the Crusade with Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. An army of other Crusaders accompanied them to the Holy Land, although whether they were English or mercenaries recruited on the Continent is unclear. The contingent left from Brindisi in August 1227.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The bishops were influential advisors to Frederick II. As the pope had ordered that no one collaborate with the excommunicate Frederick, both bishops ignored the papal orders and worked closely with Frederick. The financial resources both bishops brought were especially appreciated by the crusaders. The fortifications of Caesarea and Jaffa were implemented with their money. Both witnessed the treaty signing in February 1229 with al-Kamil.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: As described above, the sultan al-Kamil was in a desperate civil conflict in 1226. Having unsuccessfully tried negotiations with the West beginning in 1219, he again tried this approach. The sultan sent the emir Fakhr ad-Din ibn as-Shaikh to Frederick asking him to come to Acre for discussions, offering return of much of the Holy Land to Christian control in exchange for military support against his brother al-Mu'azzam at Damascus. Fakhr ad-Din reportedly was somewhat amazed when he reached Palermo and discovered that Frederick spoke Arabic, had admiration for Muslim society and contempt for Rome.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick responded by sending his "bailli" and trusted advisor Thomas of Aquino and Berardus de Castacca, archbishop of Palermo, to meet with al-Kamil. Other than an exchange of gifts, nothing was accomplished. The bishop is reported to have continued on the Damascus to negotiate with al-Mu'azzam who, rejecting the overture, attempted to make peace with the younger Ayyubid brother al-Ashraf. The negotiations would continue in the autumn of 1227, after Frederick's excommunication, as described below.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The port of Brindisi was designated as the departure point and by mid-summer 1227, large numbers of Crusaders had arrived. The crowded conditions and high heat contributed to general discontent and disease among the assembled troops. Many returned home, leaving some transports unused. Others died, including Siegfried von Rechberg, the bishop of Augsburg.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The first contingents of Crusaders sailed August 1227 and arrived in Syria early October. The included Germans under the command of Thomas of Aquino and Henry of Limburg, and French and English under the command of the bishops Peter des Roches and William Briwere. Arriving at Acre, they joined with forces of the kingdom and fortified the coastal towns of Caesarea and Jaffa. They forced the Muslims of Damascus out of Sidon and fortified the island of Qal'at al-Bahr. The Germans rebuilt Montfort Castle, northeast of Acre, for the Teutonic Knights.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The emperor and his contingent were delayed while their ships were refitted. They sailed on 8 September 1227, but before they reached their first stop of Otranto many, including Frederick, were struck with the plague. Louis of Thuringia had, in fact, died. Frederick disembarked to secure medical attention. Resolved to keep his oath, he sent a fleet of twenty galleys on to Acre. This included Hermann of Salza, Gérold of Lausanne, Odo of Montbéliard and Balian of Sidon. The Crusade was now under the command of Henry IV, Duke of Limburg.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: In February or March 1228, al-Aziz Uthman of Banyas ambushed a group of crusaders near Tyre, killing or capturing some seventy horsemen.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick II sent his emissaries to inform Gregory IX of the situation. These included Rainald of Spoleto, Nicolò dei Maltraversi, the bishop of Reggio, and Marino Filangieri, the archbishop of Bari, but the pope refused to meet with them, and would not listen to Frederick's side of the story. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was excommunicated on 29 September 1227.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The pope did not know, or care, about Frederick's illness, just that he had not lived up to his agreement. His letter to the emperor of 10 October 1227 laying out conditions for his rehabilitation referred less to the crusade than to infractions in Sicily. In his circular letter announcing the excommunication, Frederick was branded a wanton violator of his sacred oath taken many times, at Aachen, Veroli, Ferentino, and San Germano, and was held responsible for the deaths of Crusaders at Brindisi. He was accused of feigning his illness, relaxing at Pozzouli, rather than in the Holy Land. Frederick's response was more factual, and included an appeal for more to take the cross.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: In November 1227, the sultan's emissary Fakhr ad-Din ibn as-Shaikh was again sent to meet with the emperor. It is here that it is believed the Fakhr ad-Din was knighted by Frederick, as described by Jean de Joinville, chronicler of the Seventh Crusade."" The negotiations were conducted in secret, causing concern among the German Crusaders. Even the amiable poet Freidank, positively disposed towards the emperor, expressed his sorrow. Shortly after Fakhr ad-Din had departed, the emperor's negotiator Thomas of Aquino sent word that al-Mu'azzam had suddenly died on 12 November 1227. This revelation changed the balance of power, and Frederick dispatched Richard Filangieri, marshal of the Kingdom of Sicily, to Syria with 500 knights to augment to force already there as he prepared for a departure in the spring of 1228.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick made his last effort to be reconciled with Gregory, sending Albert I of Käfernburg, the archbishop of Magdeburg, and two Sicilian justiciars to speak with the pope. It had no effect and Frederick sailed from Brindisi on 28 June 1228. The fleet was under the command of admiral Henry of Malta, and clergymen Berardus de Castacca, Nicolò dei Maltraversi, Marino Filangieri, and Giacomo of Patti, now archbishop of Capua, accompanied him. He had only a small force with him, since the main force had sailed in August 1227 and reinforcements in April 1228. Guérin de Montaigu, master of the Hospitallers who had helped convince the pope to break the truce with the Muslims, refused to accompany Frederick as an excommunicate. He was replaced by Bertrand de Thessy, who embarked with the emperor.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The route of Frederick's fleet can be traced day-by-day. On 29 June 1228 it stopped in Otranto, whence it crossed the Adriatic Sea to the island of Othonoi on 30 June. It was in Corfu on 1 July, Porto Guiscardo in Cephalonia on 2 July, Methoni on 4 July, Portocaglie near Cape Matapan on 5 July, Cerigo on 6 July and it reached Souda Bay on Crete on 7 July. The fleet moved slowly along the Cretan coast, pausing for a whole day at Heraklion before crossing the Aegean Sea to Rhodes during 12–15 July. They sailed along the Anatolian coast to Phenika, where they stayed on 16–17 July replenishing their water supplies. The fleet then crossed the sea to Cyprus, arriving at Limassol on 21 July.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The Kingdom of Cyprus had been an imperial fief since the emperor Henry VI, Frederick's father, had accepted the homage of Aimery of Lusignan and made him king on the eve of the German Crusade in 1196. Hugh I of Cyprus had ruled the island kingdom since the death of his father Aimery in 1205. Upon his death, his wife Alice of Champagne became regent of the young king Henry I of Cyprus. Alice was the aunt of the empress Isabella II and had attended her coronation in Tyre. In the meantime, John of Ibelin, the Old Lord of Beirut, had been appointed regent without the knowledge of either Alice or Frederick.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The emperor arrived with the clear intent of stamping his authority on the kingdom and was treated cordially by the local barons. Frederick claimed that the regency of John of Ibelin was illegitimate and demanded the surrender of John's mainland fief of Beirut to the imperial throne. Here he erred, for John pointed out that the kingdoms of Cyprus and Jerusalem were constitutionally separate and he could not be punished for offences in Cyprus by seizure of Beirut. This would have important consequences for the crusade, as it alienated the powerful Ibelin faction, turning them against the emperor.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick sailed to Acre from Famagusta on 3 September 1228. He was accompanied by the king Henry I of Cyprus, John of Ibelin, and many Cypriote nobles. He left the Cypriote baron Amalric Barlais as "bailli" of Cyprus, supported by Gavin of Chenichy.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick II arrived in Acre on 7 September 1228 and was received warmly by the Templars, Hospitallers and clergy, but denied the kiss of peace due to his excommunication. He yielded to pressure and made overtures to the pope, sending Henry of Malta and archbishop Marino Filangieri to announce his arrival in Syria and to request absolution. Rainald of Spoleto was named Frederick's regent in Sicily authorized to negotiate with Rome. But Gregory IX had already made up his mind, sending word to the Latin patriarch and masters of the military orders that the emperor's ban still held, despite his arrival.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: When Frederick and his companions arrived at Acre, John of Ibelin went immediately to Beirut to ensure that the city could withstand an imperial attack, returning to face the "Haute Cour." Frederick did not immediately take action as Acre was split in its support for Frederick. Frederick's own army and the Teutonic Knights supported him, but the Templars, the patriarch and the Syrian clergy followed the hostile papal line. The Pisans and Genoese supported the emperor and the English vacillated, first for Frederick, shifting to the pope, then back. He gave nominal commands to faithful adherents–Hermann of Salza, Odo of Montbéliard, Richard Filangieri–in order for Crusaders to avoid jeopardizing their positions in the eyes of the curia. Once news of Frederick's excommunication had spread, public support for him waned considerably. The position of the Hospitallers and Templars was more complicated. They refused to join the emperor's army directly, but they supported the Crusade once Frederick agreed to have his name removed from official orders. The Outremer barons greeted Frederick enthusiastically at first, but were wary of the emperor's history of centralization and his desire to impose imperial authority. This was largely due to Frederick's treatment of John of Ibelin in Cyprus, and his apparent disdain for their constitutional concerns.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick's army was not large. Of the troops he had sent under duke Henry of Limburg in 1227 had mostly returned home out of impatience or of fear of offending the Church. The few who had sailed East under the patriarch Gérold of Lausanne remained as did the knights under Richard Filangieri. Even augmented with the forces available in Outremer, he could not muster an effective army capable of striking a decisive blow on the Muslims. Further, he got word that his regent Rainald of Spoleto had failed in his attack on the March of Ancona and that Gregory IX was planning to invade his own kingdom. He could neither afford nor mount a lengthening campaign in the Holy Land. The Sixth Crusade would be one of negotiation.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: After resolving the internecine struggles in Syria, al-Kamil's position was stronger than it was a year before when he made his original offer to Frederick. He likely did not know that Frederick's force was a mere shadow of the army that had amassed when the Crusade had originally been called. Frederick realised that his only hope of success in the Holy Land was to negotiate for the return of Jerusalem as he lacked the manpower to engage in battle. He sent Thomas of Aquino and Balian of Sidon to inform the sultan of his arrival in the Holy Land. Al-Kamil was friendly but non-committal. In reply, Frederick received the ambassadors of the sultan, including Fakhr ad-Din ibn as-Shaikh, at the Hospitaller camp at Recordane, near Acre. The sultan relocated from Nablus to Hiribya, northeast of Gaza, and Thomas and Balian were sent to resume negotiations.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick hoped that a token show of force, a threatening march down the coast, would be enough to convince al-Kamil to honor a proposed agreement that had been negotiated some years earlier. The masters of the Templars and Hospitallers, Pedro de Montaigu and Bertrand de Thessy, accompanied the emperor, at a distance behind as he was excommunicate. In January 1229, Frederick received notice that John of Brienne, serving the curia as rector of a Patrimony of Saint Peter, had taken San Germano and was threatening Capua. This placed Frederick in an awkward position. If he delayed in the Holy Land too long, he could lose his empire. If he left without results, he would be dishonored. He directed Henry of Malta to send twenty galleys to Syria by the following Easter. Fortunately, al-Kamil was occupied with a siege in Damascus against his nephew an-Nasir Dā’ūd. He then agreed to cede Jerusalem to the Franks, along with a narrow corridor to the coast.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The treaty was concluded on 18 February 1229, and also involved a ten-year truce. The English bishops Peter des Roches and William Briwere were witness to the signing. No complete copy of the treaty has survived, either in Latin nor Arabic. In it, al-Kamil surrendered Jerusalem with the exception of some Muslim holy sites. Frederick also received Bethlehem and Nazareth, part of Sidon district, and Jaffa and Toron, dominating the coast. Other lordships may have been returned to Christian control, but sources disagree. It was, however, a treaty of compromise. The Muslims retained control over the Temple Mount area of Jerusalem, the Jami Al-Aqsa, and the Dome of the Rock. The Transjordan castles stayed in Ayyubid hands. Whether Frederick was permitted to restore Jerusalem's fortifications was unclear, although the Crusaders did in fact restore Jerusalem's defensive walls.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The agreement, known sometimes as the Treaty of Jaffa, also included the agreement signed by the different Ayyubid rulers at Tell Ajul near Gaza, of which, from al-Kamil's perspective, the treaty with Frederick was just an extension, which allows this agreement to be also called the Treaty of Jaffa and Tell Ajul. Frederick seems to have pledged his support to the sultan against all enemies, including Christian ones. The other Crusader states––Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli––would receive no support in the event of war with the Muslims. The strongholds of the Hospitallers and Templars were left "in statu quo", and aid was not to be provided from any source. Prisoners from this conflict and the previous crusade were to be released. The provisions for the military orders and the possessions of Bohemond IV of Antioch likely reflect their lack of support provided to Frederick.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The patriarch and the masters of the military orders––Gérold of Lausanne, Pedro de Montaigu and Bertrand de Thessy––all felt betrayed by the treaty and its concessions making the protection of the Holy city near-impossible. Hermann of Salza approached Gérold with a proposal of reconciliation, but the patriarch saw only deceit, trying to prevent Frederick's entry into Jerusalem by threatening excommunication of the army and placing the city under interdict. He sent archbishop Peter of Caesarea to meet the army, but he was too late.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick entered Jerusalem on 17 March 1229 and received the formal surrender of the city by al-Kamil's agent. He went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the next day and placed the crown on his own head. Hermann of Salza read the emperor's statement, blaming his excommunication not on the pope, but his advisors. It is unknown whether he intended this to be interpreted as his official coronation as King of Jerusalem; the absence of the patriarch rendered it questionable. There is evidence to suggest that the crown Frederick wore was actually the imperial one, but in any case proclaiming his lordship over Jerusalem was a provocative act. Legally, he was actually only regent for his son with Isabella, Conrad II of Jerusalem, who had been born shortly before Frederick left in 1228. Conrad's maternal grandparents were Maria of Montferrat and John of Brienne.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Still wearing his crown, Frederick proceeded to the palace of the Hospitallers were he met with the English bishops and members of the military orders to discuss the fortifications of the city. Not until the morning of 19 March 1229 did Peter of Caesarea arrive to enforce the interdict, which he wisely chose not to do. At any rate, Frederick's interest in Jerusalem was waning, as he was planning to immediately leave. While Frederick was on his way to the harbour he was pelted with dung and entrails by the unappreciative people of Acre. Odo of Montbéliard and John of Ibelin quelled the unrest.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: On 1 May 1229, Frederick departed from Acre, landing at Cyprus to attend the wedding by proxy of Henry I of Cyprus to Alice of Montferrat, with the bride later transported to Cyprus by the emperor's supporters. He arrived at Brindisi on 10 June 1229, and it was a month before the pope was aware that he had left the Holy Land. By the autumn, he had regained full possession of his empire. Frederick obtained from the pope relief from his excommunication on 28 August 1230 with the Treaty of San Germano, and he returned to the Hospitallers and the Templars the goods confiscated in Sicily.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The results of the Sixth Crusade were not universally acclaimed. Two letters from the Christian side tell differing stories. In his correspondence to Henry III of England, Frederick touts the great success of the endeavor. In contrast, the letter to the "all the faithful" by the patriarch Gérold of Lausanne paints a darker picture of the emperor and his accomplishments. On the Muslim side, al-Kamil himself was pleased with the accord, but Arabic sources referred to the treaty as "one of the most disastrous events of Islam," laying the blame solely with the sultan. The Muslim historians expressed equal disdain for the sultan and the emperor.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The ten-year expiration of Frederick's treaty with al-Kamil caused Pope Gregory IX to call for a new crusade to secure the Holy Lands for Christendom beyond 1239. This initiated the Barons' Crusade, a disorganized affair which wound up with relatively limited support from both Frederick and the pope, but which nevertheless regained more land than even the Sixth Crusade.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Frederick had set a precedent, in having achieved success on crusade without papal involvement. He achieved success without fighting since he lacked manpower to engage Ayyubids. This was due to the engagement of Ayyubids with the rebellion in Syria. Further crusades would be launched by individual kings, such as Theobald I of Navarre (the Barons' Crusade), Louis IX of France (the Seventh and Eighth Crusades), and Edward I of England (the Ninth Crusade), effectively demonstrating an erosion of papal authority.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: In the Ayyubid camp, the treaty allowed the sultan al-Kamil and his brother al-Ashraf to focus their energies into defeating their nephew an-Nasir Dā’ūd, emir of Damascus, capturing his capital city in June 1229. An-Nasir, was left subordinate to al-Kamil and in possession of Kerak.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: A partial list of those that participated in the Sixth Crusade can be found in the category collections of and .


title: Sixth Crusade

text: The historiography of the Sixth Crusade is concerned with the "history of the histories" of the military campaigns discussed herein as well as biographies of the important figures of the period. The primary sources include works written in the medieval period, generally by participants in the Crusade or written contemporaneously with the event. The primary Western sources of the Sixth Crusade include several eyewitness accounts, and are as follows.


title: Sixth Crusade

text: Many of these primary sources can be found in Crusade Texts in Translation. German historian Reinhold Röhricht also compiled two collections of works concerning the Sixth Crusade: "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüg" (1888), "Geschichte der Kreuzzüge im Umriss" (1898), and "Die Kreuzfahrt Kaiser Friedrich des Zweiten (1228–1229)" (1872). He also collaborated on the work "Annales de Terre Sainte" that provides a chronology of the Crusade correlated with the original sources.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holocaust.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Holocaust in Poland was marked by the construction of death camps by Nazi Germany, German use of gas vans, and mass shootings by German troops and their Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries. The extermination camps played a central role in the extermination both of Polish Jews, and of Jews whom Germany transported to their deaths from western and southern Europe.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Every branch of the sophisticated German bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, from the interior and finance ministries to German firms and state-run railroads. Approximately 98 percent of Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust were killed. About 350,000 Polish Jews survived the war; most survivors never lived in Nazi-occupied Poland, but lived in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during 1939 and 1940, and fled or were evacuated by the Soviets further east to avoid the German advance in 1941.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Following the 1939 invasion of Poland, in accordance with the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland into occupation zones. Large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany. Some 52% of Poland's territory, mainly the Kresy borderlands—inhabited by between 13.2 and 13.7 million people, including 1,300,000 Jews—was annexed by the Soviet Union. An estimated 157,000 to 375,000 Polish Jews either fled into the Soviet Union or were deported eastward by the Soviet authorities. Within months, Polish Jews in the Soviet zone who refused to swear allegiance were deported deep into the Soviet interior along with ethnic Poles. The number of deported Polish Jews is estimated at 200,000–230,000 men, women, and children.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Both occupying powers were hostile to the existence of a sovereign Polish state. However, Soviet possession was short-lived because the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, signed earlier in Moscow, were broken when the German army invaded the Soviet occupation zone on June 22, 1941 "(see map)". From 1941 to 1943, all of Poland was under Germany's control. The semi-colonial General Government, set up in central and southeastern Poland, comprised 39 percent of occupied Polish territory.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living mainly in cities: about 10% of the general population. The database of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews provides information on 1,926 Jewish communities across the country. Following the conquest of Poland and the 1939 murder of intelligentsia, the first German anti-Jewish measures involved a policy of expelling Jews from Polish territories annexed by the Third Reich. The westernmost provinces, of Greater Poland and Pomerelia, were turned into new German "Reichsgaue" named Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland, with the intent to completely Germanize them through settler colonization ("Lebensraum"). Annexed directly to the new "Warthegau" district, the city of Łódź absorbed an initial influx of some 40,000 Polish Jews forced out of surrounding areas.<ref name="jewishgen/timeline"></ref> A total of 204,000 Jewish people passed through the ghetto in Łódź. Initially, they were to be expelled to the "Generalgouvernement". However, the ultimate destination for the massive removal of Jews was left open until the Final Solution was set in motion two years later.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Persecution of Polish Jews by the German occupation authorities began immediately after the invasion, particularly in major urban areas. In the first year and a half, the Nazis confined themselves to stripping the Jews of their valuables and property for profit, herding them into makeshift ghettos, and forced them into slave labor. During this period, the Germans ordered Jewish communities to appoint Jewish Councils ("Judenräte") to administer the ghettos and to be "responsible in the strictest sense" for carrying out orders. Most ghettos were established in cities and towns where Jewish life was already well organized. In a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains, all Polish Jews had been segregated from the rest of society in dilapidated neighborhoods ("Jüdischer Wohnbezirk") adjacent to the existing rail corridors. The food aid was completely dependent on the "SS", and the Jews were sealed off from the general public in an unsustainable manner.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The plight of Jews in war-torn Poland could be divided into stages defined by the existence of the ghettos. Before the formation of ghettos, the escape from persecution did not involve extrajudicial punishment by death. Once the ghettos were sealed off from the outside, death by starvation and disease became rampant, alleviated only by the smuggling of food and medicine by Polish gentile volunteers, in what was described by Emanuel Ringelblum as "one of the finest pages in the history between the two peoples". In Warsaw, up to 80 percent of food consumed in the Ghetto was brought in illegally. The food stamps introduced by the Germans, provided only 9 percent of the calories necessary for survival. In the two and a half years between November 1940 and May 1943, around 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto by forced starvation and disease; and about 40,000 in the Łódź Ghetto in the four-and-a-quarter years between May 1940 and August 1944. By the end of 1941, most ghettoized Jews had no savings left to pay the "SS" for further bulk food deliveries. The 'productionists' among the German authoritieswho attempted to make the ghettos self-sustaining by turning them into enterprisesprevailed over the 'attritionists' only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The most prominent ghettos were thus temporarily stabilized through the production of goods needed at the front, as death rates among the Jewish population there began to decline.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: From the first days of the war, violence against civilians accompanied the arrival of German troops. In the September 1939 Częstochowa massacre, 150 Jewish Poles were among the circa 1,140 Polish civilians shot by German Wehrmacht troops. In November 1939, outside Ostrów Mazowiecka, around 500 Jewish men, women and children were shot in mass graves. In December 1939, around 100 Jews were shot by Wehrmacht soldiers and gendarmes at Kolo.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Following the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Himmler assembled a force of some 11,000 men to pursue a program of physical annihilation of Jews. Also during Operation Barbarossa, the "SS" had recruited collaborationist auxiliary police from among Soviet POWs and local police which included Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Volksdeutche. The local "Schutzmannschaft" provided Germany with manpower and critical knowledge of local regions and languages. In what became known as the "Holocaust by bullets", the German police battalions ("Orpo"), "SiPo", Waffen-SS, and special-task "Einsatzgruppen", along with Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, operated behind front lines, systematically shooting tens of thousands of men, women, and children. The Wehrmacht participated in many aspects of the Holocaust by bullets.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Massacres were committed in over 30 locations across the formerly Soviet-occupied parts of Poland, including in Brześć, Tarnopol, and Białystok, as well as in prewar provincial capitals of Łuck, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Wilno (see Ponary). The survivors of mass killing operations were incarcerated in the new ghettos of economic exploitation, and slowly starved to death by artificial famine at the whim of German authorities. Because of sanitation concerns, the corpses of people who had died as a result of starvation and mistreatment were buried in mass graves in their tens of thousands. Gas vans became available in November 1941; in June 1942 the Polish National Council's Samuel Zygelbaum reported that these had murdered 35,000 Jews in Lodz alone. He also reported that Gestapo agents were routinely dragging Jews out of their homes and shooting them on the street in broad daylight. By December 1941, about one million Jews had been murdered by Nazi "Einsatzgruppen" in the Soviet Union. The 'war of destruction' policy in the east against 'the Jewish race' became common knowledge among the Germans at all levels. The total number of shooting victims in the east who were Jewish are around 1.3 to 1.5 million. Entire regions behind the German–Soviet Frontier were reported to Berlin by the Nazi death squads to be ""Judenfrei"".


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: On January 20, 1942, during the Wannsee conference near Berlin, State Secretary of the Government General, Josef Bühler, urged Reinhard Heydrich to begin the proposed "final solution to the Jewish question" as soon as possible. The industrial killing by exhaust fumes had been tested over several weeks at the Chełmno extermination camp in the then-Wartheland, under the guise of resettlement. All condemned Ghetto prisoners were told they were going to labour camps, and asked to pack a carry-on luggage. Many Jews believed in the transfer ruse, since deportations were also part of the ghettoization process. Meanwhile, the idea of mass murder by means of stationary gas chambers was developed by September 1941 or earlier. It was a precondition for the newly drafted Operation Reinhard led by Odilo Globocnik who ordered the construction of death camps at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. At Majdanek and Auschwitz, the work of the stationary gas chambers began in March and May respectively, preceded by experiments with Zyklon B. Between 1942 and 1944, the most extreme measure of the Holocaust, the extermination of millions of Jews from Poland and all over Europe was carried out in six extermination camps. There were no Polish guards at any of the Reinhard camps, despite the sometimes used misnomer Polish death camps. All killing centres were designed and operated by the Nazis in strict secrecy, aided by the Ukrainian Trawnikis. Civilians were forbidden to approach them and often shot if caught near the train tracks.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Systematic liquidation of the ghettos began across General Government in the early spring of 1942. At that point, the only chance for survival was escape to the "Aryan side". The German round-ups for the so-called resettlement trains were connected directly with the use of top secret extermination facilities built for the SS at about the same time by various German engineering companies including HAHB, I.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, and C.H. Kori GmbH.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Unlike other Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners from all across Europe were exploited for the war effort, German death campspart of the secret Operation Reinhardtwere designed exclusively for the rapid and industrial-scale murder of Polish and foreign Jews, subsisting in isolation. The camp's German overseers reported to Heinrich Himmler in Berlin, who kept control of the extermination program, but who delegated the work in Poland to SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik of the Lublin Reservation. The selection of sites, construction of facilities and training of personnel was based on a similar (Action T4) "racial hygiene" program of mass murder through involuntary euthanasia, developed in Germany.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Holocaust trains increased the scale and duration of the extermination process; and, the enclosed nature of freight cars reduced the troop numbers required to guard them. Rail shipments allowed the Nazi Germans to build and operate larger and more efficient death camps and, at the same time, openly lie to the worldand to their victimsabout a "resettlement" program. An unspecified number of deportees died in transit during Operation Reinhard from suffocation and thirst. They were not supplied with food or water. The "Güterwagen" boxcars were only fitted with a bucket latrine. A small barred window provided little ventilation, which often resulted in multiple deaths. A survivor of the Treblinka uprising testified about one such train, from Biała Podlaska. When the sealed doors flew open, 90 percent of about 6,000 Jewish prisoners were found to have suffocated to death. Their bodies were thrown into smouldering mass grave at the "Lazaret". Millions of people were transported in similar trainsets to the extermination camps under the direction of the German Ministry of Transport, and tracked by an IBM subsidiary, until the official date of closing of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in December 1944.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Death factories were only one means of mass extermination. There were secluded killing sites set up further east. At Bronna Góra (the Bronna Mount, now Belarus) 50,000 Jews were murdered in execution pits; delivered by the Holocaust trains from the ghettos in Brześć, Bereza, Janów Poleski, Kobryń, , Antopol and other locations along the western border of "Reichskommissariat Ostland". Explosives were used to reduce the time taken by digging. At the Sosenki Forest on the outskirts of Równe in prewar Wołyń Voivodeship, over 23,000 Jewish adults and children were shot. At the Górka Połonka forest "(see map)" 25,000 Jews forced to disrobe and lay over the bodies of others were shot in waves; most of them were deported there via the Łuck Ghetto. The execution site for the Lwów Ghetto inmates was arranged near Janowska, with 35,000–40,000 Jewish victims murdered and buried at the Piaski ravine.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: While the Order Police performed liquidations of the Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland, loading prisoners into railcars and shooting those unable to move or attempting to flee, the collaborationist auxiliary police were used as a means of inflicting terror upon Jews by conducting large-scale massacres in the same locations. They were deployed in all major killing sites of Operation Reinhard (terror was a primary aim of their SS training). The Ukrainian Trawniki men formed into units took an active role in the extermination of Jews at Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka II; during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (on three occasions, see Stroop Report), Częstochowa, Lublin, Lwów, Radom, Kraków, Białystok (twice), Majdanek, Auschwitz, the Trawniki concentration camp itself, and the remaining subcamps of KL Lublin/Majdanek camp complex including Poniatowa, Budzyń, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa, and also during massacres in Łomazy, Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations, augmented by members of the SS, SD, Kripo, as well as the reserve police battalions from Orpo (each, responsible for annihilation of thousands of Jews). In the north-east, the "Poachers' Brigade" of Oskar Dirlewanger trained Belarusian Home Guard in murder expeditions with the help of Belarusian Auxiliary Police. By the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, over 90% of Polish Jewry perished.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Chełmno extermination camp () was built as the first death camp following Hitler's launch of Operation Barbarossa. It was a pilot project for the development of other extermination sites. The killing method at Chełmno grew out of the 'euthanasia' program in which busloads of unsuspecting hospital patients were gassed in air-tight shower rooms at Bernburg, Hadamar and Sonnenstein. The killing grounds at Chełmno, from Łódź, consisted of a vacated manorial estate similar to Sonnenstein, used for undressing (with a truck-loading ramp in the back), as well as a large forest clearing northwest of Chełmno, used for the mass burial as well as open-pit cremation of corpses introduced some time later.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: All Jews from the "Judenfrei" district of "Wartheland" were deported to Chełmno under the guise of 'resettlement'. At least 145,000 prisoners from the Łódź Ghetto were murdered at Chełmno in several waves of deportations lasting from 1942 to 1944. Among those were also approximately 11,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechia and Luxembourg murdered in April 1941 and close to 5,000 Roma from Austria, murdered in January 1942. Almost all victims were murdered with the use of mobile gas vans ("Sonderwagen"), which had reconfigured exhaust pipes. In the last phase of the camp's existence, the exhumed bodies were cremated in open-air for several weeks during Sonderaktion 1005. The ashes, mixed with crushed bones, were trucked every night to the nearby river in sacks made from blankets, to remove the evidence of mass murder.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest of the German Nazi extermination centers. Located in the Gau Upper Silesia (then part of Nazi Germany) and west of Kraków. The overwhelming majority of prisoners deported there were murdered within hours of their arrival.<ref name="auschwitz.org/jews"></ref> The camp was the location of the first permanent gas chambers in March 1942. The extermination of Jews with Zyklon B as the killing agent began in July. At Birkenau, the four killing installations (each consisting of coatrooms, multiple gas chambers and industrial-scale crematoria) were built in the following year. By late 1943, Birkenau was engaged in industrial-scale murder, with four so-called 'Bunkers' (totaling over a dozen gas chambers) working around the clock. Up to 6,000 people were gassed and cremated there each day, after the ruthless 'selection process' at the "Judenrampe". Only about 10 percent of the deportees from transports organized by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) were registered and assigned to the Birkenau barracks.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz.<ref name="piper/museum"></ref> One million of them were Jews from across Europe including 200,000 children. Among the registered 400,000 victims (less than one-third of the total Auschwitz arrivals) were 140,000–150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 25,000 others. Auschwitz received a total of about 300,000 Jews from occupied Poland, shipped aboard freight trains from liquidated ghettos and transit camps, beginning with Bytom (February 15, 1942), Olkusz (three days of June), Otwock (in August), Łomża and Ciechanów (November), then Kraków (March 13, 1943), Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria were blown up on November 25, 1944, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of mass-murder, by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Designed and built for the sole purpose of exterminating its internees, Treblinka was one of only three such facilities in existence; the other two were Bełżec and Sobibór. All of them were situated in wooded areas away from population centres and linked to the Polish rail system by a branch line. They had transferable "SS" staff. Passports and money were collected for "safekeeping" at a cashier's booth set up by the "Road to Heaven", a fenced-off path leading into the gas chambers disguised as communal showers. Directly behind were the burial pits, dug with a crawler excavator.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Located northeast of Warsaw, Treblinka became operational on July 24, 1942, after three months of forced labour construction by expellees from Germany. The shipping of Jews from the Polish capital – plan known as the "Großaktion Warschau" – began immediately. During two months of the summer of 1942, about 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates were exterminated at Treblinka (by some other accounts, at least 300,000). On arrival, the transportees were made to disrobe, then the menfollowed by women and childrenwere forced into double-walled chambers and murdered in batches of 200, with the use of exhaust fumes generated by a tank engine. The gas chambers, rebuilt of brick and expanded during August–September 1942, were capable of murdering 12,000 to 15,000 victims every day, with a maximum capacity of 22,000 executions in twenty-four hours. The dead were initially buried in large mass graves, but the stench from the decomposing bodies could be smelled up to ten kilometers away. As a result, the Nazis began burning the bodies on open-air grids made of concrete pillars and railway tracks. The number of people murdered at Treblinka in about a year ranges from 800,000 to 1,200,000, with no exact figures available. The camp was closed by Globocnik on October 19, 1943, soon after the Treblinka prisoner uprising, with the murderous Operation Reinhard nearly completed.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Bełżec extermination camp, established near the railroad station of Bełżec in the Lublin District, officially began operation on March 17, 1942, with three temporary gas chambers. Later, they were replaced with six made of brick and mortar, enabling the facility to handle over 1,000 victims at one time. At least 434,500 Jews were murdered there. The lack of verified survivors however, makes this camp little known. The bodies of the dead, buried in mass graves, swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction making the earth split, which was resolved with the introduction of crematoria pits in October 1942.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Kurt Gerstein from "Waffen-SS", supplying Zyklon B from Degesch during the Holocaust, wrote after the war in his Gerstein Report for the Allies that on August 17, 1942, at Belzec, he had witnessed the arrival of 45 wagons with 6,700 prisoners, of whom 1,450 were already dead inside. That train came with the Jewish people of the Lwów Ghetto, less than a hundred kilometers away. The last shipment of Jews (including those who had already died in transit) arrived in Bełżec in December 1942. The burning of exhumed corpses continued until March. The remaining 500 "Sonderkommando" prisoners who dismantled the camp, and who bore witness to the extermination process, were murdered at the nearby Sobibór extermination camp in the following months.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Sobibór extermination camp, disguised as a railway transit camp not far from Lublin, began mass gassing operations in May 1942. As in other extermination centers, the Jews, taken off the Holocaust trains arriving from liquidated ghettos and transit camps (Izbica, Końskowola) were met by a member of SS dressed in a medical coat. "Oberscharführer" Hermann Michel gave the command for prisoners' "disinfection".


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: New arrivals were forced to split into groups, hand over their valuables, and disrobe inside a walled-off courtyard for a bath. Women had their hair cut off by the "Sonderkommando" barbers. Once undressed, Jews were led down a narrow path to the gas chambers which were disguised as showers. The victims were murdered with carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust pipes of a gasoline engine removed from a Red Army tank. Their bodies were taken out and burned in open pits over iron grids partly fueled by human body-fat. Their remains were dumped onto seven "ash mountains". The total number of Polish Jews murdered at Sobibór is estimated as at least 170,000. Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp dismantled following a prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943; one of only two successful uprisings by Jewish "Sonderkommando" inmates in any extermination camp, with 300 escapees (most of them were recaptured by the SS and killed).


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Majdanek forced labor camp located on the outskirts of Lublin (like Sobibór) and closed temporarily during an epidemic of typhus, was reopened in March 1942 for Operation Reinhard; initially, as a storage depot for valuables stolen from gassed victims at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, It became a place of extermination of large Jewish populations from south-eastern Poland (Kraków, Lwów, Zamość, Warsaw) after the gas chambers were constructed in late 1942. The gassing of Polish Jews was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the killing facilities. According to witness's testimony, "to drown the cries of the dying, tractor engines were run near the gas chambers" before they took the dead away to the crematorium. Majdanek was the site of the murder of 59,000 Polish Jews (from among its 79,000 victims). By the end of Operation "Aktion Erntefest" (Harvest Festival) conducted at Majdanek in early November 1943 (the single largest German massacre of Jews during the entire war), the camp had only 71 Jews left.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: A popular misconception exists that most Jews went to their deaths passively. 10% of the Polish Army which fought alone against the Nazi-Soviet Invasion of Poland were Jewish Poles, some 100,000 troops. Of these, the Germans took 50,000 as prisoners-of-war and did not treat them according to the Geneva Convention; most were sent to concentration camps and then extermination camps. As Poland continued to fight an insurgency war against the occupying powers, other Jews joined the Polish Resistance, sometimes forming exclusively Jewish units.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Jewish resistance to the Nazis comprised their armed struggle, as well as spiritual and cultural opposition which brought dignity despite the inhumane conditions of life in the ghettos. Many forms of resistance existed, even though the elders were terrified by the prospect of mass retaliation against the women and children in the case of anti-Nazi revolt. As the German authorities undertook to liquidate the ghettos, armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Soviet border of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland. Uprisings erupted in 5 major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps. Significantly, the only rebellions in Nazi camps were Jewish.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Nieśwież Ghetto insurgents in eastern Poland fought back on July 22, 1942. The Łachwa Ghetto revolt erupted on September 3. On October 14, 1942, the Mizocz Ghetto followed suit. The Warsaw Ghetto firefight of January 18, 1943, led to the largest Jewish uprising of World War II launched on April 19, 1943. On June 25, the Jews of the Częstochowa Ghetto rose up. At Treblinka, the "Sonderkommando" prisoners armed with stolen weapons attacked the guards on August 2, 1943. A day later, the Będzin and Sosnowiec ghetto revolts broke out. On August 16, the Białystok Ghetto uprising erupted. The revolt in Sobibór extermination camp occurred on October 14, 1943. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the insurgents blew up one of Birkenau's crematoria on October 7, 1944. Similar resistance was offered in Łuck, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Pińsk, Poniatowa, and in Wilno.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Polish nationals are the largest group by nationality with the title of Righteous Among the Nations, as honored by Yad Vashem. In light of the harsh punishments imposed by the German on rescuers, Yad Vashem calls the number of Polish Righteous "impressive". According to Gunnar S. Paulsson it is probable that these recognized Poles, over 6,000, "represent only the tip of the iceberg" of Polish rescuers. Some Jews received organized help from Żegota (The Council to Aid Jews), an underground organization of Polish resistance in German-occupied Poland. In his work on Warsaw's Jews, Paulsson demonstrates that under much harsher conditions of the occupation, Warsaw's Polish citizens managed to support and hide a comparable percentage of Jews as the citizens of Western countries such as Holland or Denmark.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: According to historian Doris Bergen, there are three traditional interpretations of relations between Christian Poles and Jews during World War Two. The first one, Bergen refers to as the "Poles as arch-antisemite" theory which sees Poles as participating in the Holocaust. Bergen dismisses this approach by saying that while it may sometimes be "emotionally satisfying", it neglects the brutality of the German occupation directed at the Poles themselves. At the other extreme Bergen puts the "all Poles were victims of the Holocaust" school of thought, which emphasizes the fact that about as many non-Jewish as Jewish Poles were murdered during the war. This approach argues that Poles "did all they could (...) under the circumstances" to help Jews and tends to see Christian Poles as victims as much as Jews. Bergen observes that while this scholarship has produced valuable work regarding the suffering of non-Jewish Poles during the war, it sometimes achieves this by minimizing the suffering of Jews or even repeating some Antisemitic canards. The third interpretation is the "unequal victims" theory, which views both Polish gentiles and Jews as victims of Nazi Germany but to a different extent; while equal numbers of each group were murdered, the 3 million non-Jewish Poles comprised 10% of the respective population, but for Polish Jews, the 3 million murdered constituted 80% of the pre-war population. Bergen says that while this view has some validity, too often it ends up engaging in a "competition in suffering" and that such a "numbers game" does not make moral sense when talking about human agony. In response to these three approaches, Bergen cautions against broad generalizations, she emphasizes the range of experiences and notes that the fates of both groups were inexorably linked in complicated ways.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Polish antisemitism had two formative motifs: claims of defilement of the Catholic faith; and Żydokomuna (Jew-communism). During the 1930s, Catholic journals in Poland paralleled western European social-Darwinist antisemitism and the Nazi press. However, church doctrine ruled out violence, which only became more common in the mid-1930s. Unlike German antisemitism, Polish political-ideological antisemites rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Joseph Stalin's occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls "the institutionalization of resentment", whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles. There was an upsurge in the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as Communist traitors; it erupted into mass murder when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. A group of at least 40 Poles, with an unconfirmed level of German backing, murdered hundreds of Jews in the racially aggravated Jedwabne pogrom. There was a rash of other massacres of Jews across the same formerly Soviet-occupied region of Łomża and Białystok around the same time, with varying degrees of German death squad incitement or involvement: at Bielsk Podlaski (the village of Pilki), Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzcianne, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, and Wizna.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The vast majority of Polish Jews were a "visible minority" by modern standards, distinguishable by language, behavior, and appearance. In the 1931 Polish national census, only 12 percent of Jews declared Polish as their first language, while 79 percent listed Yiddish and the remaining 9 percent Hebrew as their mother tongue, although the census may have undercounted those whose primary language was Polish. Ability to speak Polish was a key factor in managing to survive, as were financial resources to pay helpers.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: On 10 November 1941, capital punishment was extended by Hans Frank to Poles who helped Jews "in any way: by taking them in for a night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any sort", or "feeding runaway Jews or selling them foodstuffs." The law was publicized with posters distributed in all major cities. Similar regulations were issued by the Germans in other territories they controlled on the Eastern Front. Over 700 Polish Righteous among the Nations received that recognition posthumously, having been murdered by the Germans for aiding or sheltering their Jewish neighbors. Toward the end of the ghetto-liquidation period, some Jews managed to escape to the "Aryan" side, and to survive with the aid of their Polish helpers. During the Nazi occupation, most ethnic Poles were themselves engaged in a desperate struggle to survive. Between 1939 and 1945, from 1.8 million to 2.8 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered by the Nazis, and 150,000 due to Soviet repressions. About a fifth of Poland's prewar population perished. Their deaths were the result of deliberate acts of war, mass murder, incarceration in concentration camps, forced labor, malnutrition, disease, kidnappings, and expulsions. At the same time, possibly a million gentile Poles aided their Jewish neighbors. Historian Richard C. Lukas gives an estimate as high as three million Polish helpers; an estimate similar to those cited by other authors.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Thousands of so-called Convent children hidden by the non-Jewish Poles and the Catholic Church remained in orphanages run by the Sisters of the Family of Mary in more than 20 locations, similar as in other Catholic convents. Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence, the survival rate among the Jewish fugitives was relatively high and by far, the individuals who circumvented deportation were the most successful.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: In September 1942, on the initiative of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and with financial assistance from the Polish Underground State, a Provisional Committee to Aid Jews ("Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Żydom") was founded for the purpose of rescuing Jews. It was superseded by the Council for Aid to Jews ("Rada Pomocy Żydom"), known by the code name Żegota and chaired by Julian Grobelny. It is not known how many Jews, overall, were helped by Żegota; at one point in 1943 it had 2,500 Jewish children under its care in Warsaw alone, under Irena Sendler. Żegota was granted nearly 29 million zloty (over $5 million) from 1942 on for relief payments to thousands of extended Jewish families in Poland. The Polish Government in Exile, headquartered in London, also provided special assistance – funds, arms, and other supplies – to Jewish resistance organizations such as the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Polish Jews survived in hiding. Some rescuers faced hostility or violence for their actions after the war.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Polish Government in Exile was the first to reveal the existence of German-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews. The genocide was reported to the Allies by Lieutenant Jan Karski; and by Captain Witold Pilecki, who deliberately let himself be imprisoned at Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence, and subsequently wrote a report of over 100 pages for Poland's Home Army and the western Allies.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The phenomenon of Polish collaboration was described by John Connelly and Leszek Gondek as marginal, when seen against the backdrop of European and world history. Estimates of the number of individual Polish collaborators vary from as few as 7,000 to as many as several hundred thousand. According to John Connelly "only a relatively small percentage of the Polish population engaged in activities that may be described as collaboration, when seen against the backdrop of European and world history." The same population, however, can be accused of indifference to the Jewish plight, a phenomenon which Connelly calls "structural collaboration". Szymon Datner claims that while fewer Poles murdered Jews from material greed or racial hatred than those who sheltered and aided them, the first group was more effective in doing so.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Some Polish peasants participated in German-organized "Judenjagd" ("Jew hunt") in the countryside, where according to Jan Grabowski, approximately 80% of the Jews who attempted to hide from the Germans ended up being murdered. Poles and Ukrainians also committed wartime pogroms, such as the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom and the Lviv pogrom. According to Grabowski, the number of "Judenjagd" victims could reach 200,000 in Poland alone; Szymon Datner gave a lower estimate - 100,000 Jews who "fell prey to the Germans and their local helpers, or were murdered in various unexplained circumstances."


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Some locals benefited materially from persecuting the Jews. Several thousand Szmalcowniki - blackmailers - operated in Poland.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Polish Underground State strongly opposed this sort of collaboration, and threatened Szmalcowniki with death; sentences were usually given and carried out by the Underground courts. Jewish property, taken over by Poles, was a factor behind the beating and murdering of Jews by Poles between summer 1944 and 1946, including the Kielce pogrom.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: In addition to peasantry and individual collaborators, the German authorities also mobilized the prewar Polish police as what became known as the "Blue Police". Among other duties, Polish policemen were tasked with patrolling for Jewish ghetto escapees, and in support of military operations against the Polish resistance. At its peak in May 1944, the Blue Police numbered some 17,000 men. The Germans also formed the "Baudienst" ("construction service") in several districts of the General Government. "Baudienst" servicemen were sometimes deployed in support of "aktion"s (roundup of Jews for ), for example to blockade Jewish quarters or to search Jewish homes for hideaways and valuables. By 1944, "Baudienst" strength had grown to some 45,000 servicemen.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Polish right-wing National Armed Forces ("Narodowe Siły Zbrojne", or "NSZ") – a nationalist, anti-communist organization, widely perceived as anti-Semitic – also collaborated with the Germans on several occasions, killing or giving away Jewish partisans to the German authorities, and murdering Jewish refugees.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The Republic of Poland was a multicultural country before the Second World War broke out, with almost a third of its population originating from the minority groups: 13.9 percent Ukrainians; 10 percent Jews; 3.1 percent Belorussians; 2.3 percent Germans and 3.4 percent Czechs, Lithuanians and Russians. Soon after the 1918 reconstitution of an independent Polish state, about 500,000 refugees from the Soviet republics came to Poland in the first spontaneous flight from persecution especially in Ukraine (see, Pale of Settlement) where up to 2,000 pogroms took place during the Civil War. In the second wave of immigration, between November 1919 and June 1924 some 1,200,000 people left the territory of the USSR for new Poland. It is estimated that some 460,000 refugees spoke Polish as the first language. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Some one million Polish citizens were members of the country's German minority. Following the 1939 invasion, an additional 1,180,000 German-speakers came to occupied Poland, from the Reich ("Reichsdeutsche") or ("Volksdeutsche" going ""Heim ins Reich"") from the east. Many hundreds of ethnically German men in Poland joined the Nazi "Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz" as well as "Sonderdienst" formations launched in May 1940 by "Gauleiter" Hans Frank stationed in occupied Kraków. Likewise, among some 30,000 Ukrainian nationalists who fled to "polnischen Gebiete", thousands joined the "pokhidny hrupy" as saboteurs, interpreters, and civilian militiamen, trained at the German bases across "Distrikt Krakau".


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The existence of "Sonderdienst" formations was a grave danger to Catholic Poles who attempted to help ghettoized Jews in cities with sizable German and pro-German minorities, as in the case of the Izbica, and Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghettos, among many others. Anti-Semitic attitudes were particularly visible in the eastern provinces which had been occupied by the Soviets following the Soviet invasion of the "Kresy". Local people had witnessed the repressions against their own compatriots, and mass deportations to Siberia, conducted by the Soviet NKVD, with some local Jews forming militias, taking over key administrative posts, and collaborating with the NKVD. Other locals assumed that, driven by vengeance, Jewish communists had been prominent in betraying the ethnically Polish and other non-Jewish victims.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Many German-inspired massacres were carried out across occupied eastern Poland with the active participation of indigenous people. The guidelines for such massacres were formulated by Reinhard Heydrich, who ordered his officers to induce anti-Jewish pogroms on territories newly occupied by the German forces. In the lead-up to the establishment of the Wilno Ghetto in the fifth largest city of prewar Poland and a provincial capital Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), German commandos and the Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions killed more than 21,000 Jews during the Ponary massacre in late 1941. At that time, Wilno had only a small Lithuanian-speaking minority of about 6 percent of the city's population. In the series of Lviv pogroms committed by the Ukrainian militants in the eastern city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), some 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the streets between June 30 and July 29, 1941, on top of 3,000 arrests and mass shootings by "Einsatzgruppe C". The Ukrainian militias formed by OUN with the blessings of the SS spread terror across dozens of locations throughout south-eastern Poland.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Long before the Tarnopol Ghetto was set up, and only two days after the arrival of the Wehrmacht, up to 2,000 Jews were killed in the provincial capital of Tarnopol (now Ternopil, Ukraine), one-third of them by the Ukrainian militias. Some of the victims were decapitated. The SS shot the remaining two-thirds, in the same week. In Stanisławów – another provincial capital in the Kresy macroregion (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine) – the single largest massacre of Polish Jews prior to "Aktion Reinhardt" was perpetrated on October 12, 1941, hand in glove by Orpo, SiPo and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (brought in from Lwów); tables with sandwiches and bottles of vodka had been set up about the cemetery for shooters who needed to rest from the deafening noise of gunfire; 12,000 Jews were murdered before nightfall.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: A total of 31 deadly pogroms were carried out throughout the region in conjunction with the Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Schuma. The genocidal techniques learned from the Germans, such as the advanced planning of the pacification actions, site selection, and sudden encirclement, became the hallmark of the OUN-UPA massacres of Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia beginning in March 1943, parallel with the liquidation of the ghettos in "Reichskommissariat Ostland" ordered by Himmler. Thousands of Jews who escaped deportations and hid in the forests were murdered by the Banderites.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The exact number of Holocaust survivors is unknown. Up to 300,000 Jewish Poles were among the 1.5 million Polish citizens deported from eastern Poland by the Soviets after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939, putting Jews deep in the USSR and thereby out of the range of the Nazi invasion of eastern Poland in 1941. Many deportees died in the Gulags, but thousands of Jews joined the Polish Anders Army on its journey from Soviet camps to the British Empire and thereby made Aliyah; thousands more joined the Polish Berling Army which fought its way back to Poland and on to the Battle of Berlin. Possibly as many as 300,000 Polish Jews escaped from German-occupied Poland to the Soviet-occupied zone soon after the war started. Some estimates are significantly larger. A very high percentage of the Jews fleeing east were men and women without families. Thousands in this group perished at the hands of OUN-UPA, TDA and Ypatingasis būrys during Massacres of Poles in Volhynia, the Holocaust in Lithuania (see Ponary massacre), and in Belarus.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The question regarding the Jews' real chances of survival once the Holocaust began is a subject of study among historians. The majority of Polish Jews in the "Generalgouvernement" stayed put. Prior to the mass deportations, there was no proven necessity to leave familiar places. When the ghettos were closed from the outside, smuggling of food kept most of the inhabitants alive. Escape into clandestine existence on the "Aryan" side was attempted by some 100,000 Jews, and, contrary to popular misconceptions, the risk of them being turned in by the Poles was very small. The Germans made it extremely difficult to escape the ghettos just before deportations to death camps deceptively disguised as "resettlement in the East". All passes were cancelled, walls rebuilt containing fewer gates, with policemen replaced by SS-men. Some victims already deported to Treblinka were forced to write form letters back home, stating that they were safe. Around 3,000 others fell into the German Hotel Polski trap. Many ghettoized Jews did not believe what was going on until the very end, because the actual outcome seemed unthinkable at the time. David J. Landau suggested also that the weak Jewish leadership might have played a role. Likewise, Israel Gutman proposed that the Polish Underground might have attacked the camps and blown up the railway tracks leading to them, but as noted by Paulsson, such ideas are a product of hindsight.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: It is estimated that about 350,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust. Some 230,000 of them survived in the USSR and the Soviet-controlled territories of Poland, including men and women who escaped from areas occupied by Germany. After World War II, over 150,000 Polish Jews () or 180,000 (Engel) were repatriated or expelled back to new Poland along with the younger men conscripted to the Red Army from the "Kresy" in 1940–1941. Their families were murdered in the Holocaust. Gunnar S. Paulsson estimated that 30,000 Polish Jews survived in the labor camps; but according to Engel as many as 70,000–80,000 of them were liberated from camps in Germany and Austria alone, except that declaring their own nationality was of no use to those who did not intend to return. Madajczyk estimated that as many as 110,000 Polish Jews were in the Displaced Person camps. According to Longerich, up to 50,000 Jews survived in the forests (not counting Galicia) and also among the soldiers who reentered Poland with the pro-Soviet Polish "Berling army" formed by Stalin. The number of Jews who successfully hid on the "Aryan" side of the ghettos could be as high as 100,000, according to Peter Longerich, although many were murdered by the German "Jagdkommandos". Dariusz Stola found that the most plausible estimates were between 30,000 and 60,000.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: The German surrender in May 1945 was followed by a massive change in the political geography of Europe. Poland's borders were redrawn by the Allies according to the demands made by Joseph Stalin during the Tehran Conference, confirmed as not negotiable at the Yalta Conference of 1945. The Polish government-in-exile was excluded from the negotiations. The territory of Poland was reduced by approximately 20 percent. Before the end of 1946 some 1.8 million Polish citizens were expelled and forcibly resettled within the new borders. For the first time in its history Poland became a homogeneous one nation-state by force, with the national wealth reduced by 38 percent. Poland's financial system had been destroyed. Intelligentsia was largely obliterated along with the Jews, and the population reduced by about 33 percent.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Due to the territorial shift imposed from the outside, the number of Holocaust survivors from Poland remains the subject of deliberation. According to official statistics, the number of Jews in the country changed dramatically in a very short time. In January 1946, the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP) registered the first wave of some 86,000 survivors from the vicinity. By the end of that summer, the number had risen to about 205,000–210,000 (with 240,000 registrations and over 30,000 duplicates). The survivors included 180,000 Jews who arrived from the Soviet-controlled territories as a result repatriation agreements. Another 30,000 Jews returned to Poland from the USSR after the Stalinist repressions ended a decade later.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: In July 1946 forty-two Jews and two ethnic Poles were murdered in the Kielce pogrom. Eleven of the victims died from bayonet wounds and eleven more were fatally shot with military assault rifles, indicating direct involvement of the regular troops. The pogrom prompted General Spychalski of PWP from wartime Warsaw, to sign a legislative decree allowing the remaining survivors to leave Poland without Western visas or Polish exit permits. This also served to strengthen the government's acceptance among the anti-Communist right, as well as weaken the British hold in the Middle East. Most refugees crossing the new borders left Poland without a valid passport. By contrast, the Soviet Union brought Soviet Jews from DP camps back to USSR by force, along with all other Soviet citizens irrespective of their wishes, as agreed to by the Yalta Conference.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Uninterrupted traffic across the Polish borders increased dramatically. By the spring of 1947 only 90,000 Jews remained in Poland. Britain demanded that Poland (among others) halt the Jewish exodus, but their pressure was largely unsuccessful. The massacre in Kielce was condemned by a public announcement sent by the diocese in Kielce to all churches. The letter denounced the pogrom and "stressed – wrote – that the most important Catholic values were the love of fellow human beings and respect for human life. It also alluded to the demoralizing effect of anti-Jewish violence, since the crime was committed in the presence of youth and children." Priests read it without comments during Mass, hinting that "the pogrom might have in fact been a political provocation."


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: Approximately 7,000 Jewish men and women of military age left Poland for Mandatory Palestine between 1947 and 1948 as members of Haganah organization, trained in Poland. The boot camp was set up in Bolków, Lower Silesia, with Polish-Jewish instructors. It was financed by JDC in agreement with the Polish administration. The program which trained mostly men 22–25 years of age for service in the Israel Defense Forces lasted until early 1949. Joining the training was a convenient way to leave the country, since the course graduates were not controlled at the border, and could carry undeclared valuables and even restricted firearms.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: After the war, the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland's Supreme National Tribunal concluded that the aim of German policies in Poland – the extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, and others – had "all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term."


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: There are many memorials in Poland dedicated to Holocaust remembrance. The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw was unveiled in April 1948. Major museums include the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the outskirts of Oświęcim with 1.4 million visitors per year, and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw on the site of the former Ghetto, presenting the thousand-year history of the Jews in Poland. Since 1988, an annual international event called March of the Living takes place in April at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex on Holocaust Remembrance Day, with total attendance exceeding 150,000 young people from all over the world.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: There are State museums on the grounds of each of the Operation Reinhard death camps, including the Majdanek State Museum in Lublin, declared a national monument as early as 1946, with intact gas chambers and crematoria from World War II. Branches of the Majdanek Museum include the Bełżec, and the Sobibór Museums where advanced geophysical studies are being conducted by Israeli and Polish archaeologists. The new Treblinka Museum opened in 2006. It was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum located in a historic Ratusz (see also the Siedlce Ghetto). There is also a small museum in Chełmno nad Nerem.


title: The Holocaust in Poland

text: According to a 2020 survey by researchers at the Jagiellonian University, only 10% of respondents were able to give the correct figure of the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust in Poland. Half believed that non-Jewish Poles suffered equally during the war, and 20% thought that non-Jewish Poles suffered the most.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: "A Boy Named Sue" is a song written by humorist, children's author, and poet Shel Silverstein and made popular by Johnny Cash. Cash recorded the song live in concert on February 24, 1969, at California's San Quentin State Prison for his "At San Quentin" album. Cash also performed the song (with comical variations on the original performance) in December 1969 at Madison Square Garden. The live San Quentin version of the song became Cash's biggest hit on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart and his only top ten single there, spending three weeks at No. 2 in 1969, held out of the top spot by "Honky Tonk Women" by The Rolling Stones. The track also topped the "Billboard" Hot Country Songs and Easy Listening charts that same year and was certified Gold on August 14, 1969, by the RIAA.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: Silverstein's own recording was released the same year as "Boy Named Sue", a single on the album "Boy Named Sue (and His Other Country Songs)", produced by Chet Atkins and Felton Jarvis.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The song tells the tale of a young man's quest for revenge on a father who abandoned him at three years of age and whose only contribution to his entire life was giving him a guitar and naming him Sue, commonly a feminine name, which results in the young man suffering from ridicule and harassment by everyone he meets. Ashamed of his name, he becomes a hard-hearted nomad as a young man; he swears that he will find and kill his father for giving him "that awful name".


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: Sue later locates his father at a tavern one summer day in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and confronts him by saying, "My name is Sue! How do you do? Now you're gonna die!" This results in a vicious brawl that spills outdoors into a muddy street. As the two pull their guns on each other, Sue's father smiles with pride and admits that he is the man ("son of a bitch" in the Johnny Cash version) that named him Sue. Because Sue's father knew that he would not be there for his son, he gave him the name as an act of tough love, believing (correctly) that the ensuing ridicule would force him to "get tough or die". Learning this, Sue makes peace and reconciles with his father. Sue closes the song conceding his father's point of view, but that if he ever has a son, he will name the boy "Bill, or George, any damn thing but Sue" because he "still hate(s) that name."


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The song has an unusual AABCCB rhyme scheme, broken only to mark the midpoint and ending. The song is performed mostly in the speech-like style of talking blues rather than conventional singing.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The term "son of a bitch" in the line "I'm the son of a bitch that named you Sue!" was bleeped out in the Johnny Cash version both on the single and the "At San Quentin" album, and the final line was also edited to remove the word "damn". Both the edited and unedited versions are available on various albums and compilations. The term "son of a bitch" was edited to "son of a gun" or altogether bleeped out in some versions. When performing the song live in later performances (such as in April 1970 at the White House and in 1994 at the Glastonbury Festival, for example), Cash would himself utter a bleep-censor sound in lieu of the word. The unedited version of the original San Quentin performance is included on later reissues of the "At San Quentin" album and on Cash's posthumous "The Legend of Johnny Cash" album. Silverstein does not utter any profanity in his original version, with Sue's father instead identifying himself as the "heartless hound" that named him Sue.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The core story of the song was inspired by humorist Jean Shepherd, a close friend of Silverstein, who was often taunted as a child because of his feminine-sounding name.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The title might also have been inspired by the male attorney Sue K. Hicks of Madisonville, Tennessee, a friend of John Scopes who agreed to be a prosecutor in what was to become known as the "Scopes Monkey Trial". Hicks was named after his mother, who died after giving birth to him.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: In his autobiography, Cash wrote that he had just received the song and only read over it a couple of times. It was included in that concert to try it out—he did not know the words and on the filmed recording he can be seen regularly referring to a piece of paper. Cash was surprised at how well the song went over with the audience. The rough, spontaneous performance with sparse accompaniment was included in the "Johnny Cash At San Quentin" album, ultimately becoming one of Cash's biggest hits. According to Cash biographer Robert Hilburn, neither the British TV crew filming the concert nor his band knew he planned to perform the song; he used a lyric sheet on stage while Perkins and the band improvised the backing on the spot. While another song, "San Quentin", was expected to be the major new song featured in the concert and subsequent album (so much so the album includes two performances of "San Quentin"), "A Boy Named Sue" ended up being the concert's major find.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: Cash also performed it on his own musical variety show, ending the song with the line, "And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him... John Carter Cash", referring to his newborn son. Cash also performed this variant at the White House in April 1970; in later years, however, he would restore the original "any name but Sue" ending, but change the wording to "if I ever have another son". When Cash performed with The Highwaymen in the 1980s and 1990s, he would end the song by saying "if I ever have another boy, I think I'm gonna name him Waylon, or Willie, or Kris." referring to bandmates Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: According to Shel Silverstein's biographer Mitch Myers, it was June Carter Cash who encouraged her husband to perform the song. Silverstein introduced it to them at what they called a "Guitar Pull," where musicians would pass a guitar around and play their songs.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: Silverstein later wrote a follow-up named "The Father of a Boy Named Sue" on his 1978 "Songs and Stories" in which he tells the old man's point of view of the story. The only known recording of the song by a major artist is by Shel Silverstein himself. Various cover artists have covered this song since then.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: Comedian Martin Mull wrote a parody titled "A Girl Named Johnny Cash" which was recorded in 1970 by Jane Morgan and reached No. 61 on Billboard's country charts.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: "MAD Magazine" issue No. 137 (September 1970) included a parody titled "A Boy Dog Named Lassie", based on the fact that the "Lassie" movies and TV series employed male Collies in the female title role.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: The gender-bending implications of the title have been adapted to explore issues of sex and gender, another use of the popular song title that goes beyond its original scope. The 2001 documentary "A Boy Named Sue" features a transgender protagonist and uses the song in the soundtrack. "A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music" is the title of a 2004 book about the role of the gender in American country music.


title: A Boy Named Sue

text: In Winston Groom's 1986 novel "Forrest Gump" and its 1995 sequel "Gump and Co.", the title character explores the world with a male ape named Sue, who had been a NASA test animal. The ape is never mentioned in the 1994 "Forrest Gump" movie.