History has never been George Will's forte - baseball - maybe? He had to cheat when coaching a presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, by resorting to the use of a stolen classified Carter White House document. In his July 9, 2001 Newsweek column, he outdid himself when he commented upon a book written by a discredited scholar, Jan Gross, a former communist, now residing in the West, to insult an entire nation and emigres of Polish origin.

Mr. Gross, in a desperate struggle for recognition, revived a fictionalized report made in 1948 by a Soviet-controlled Polish Security Office (U.B. - Urzad Bezbieczenstwa) agent named Wasserstein, who, in order to arrest former members of the Polish underground, created a false report in which he charged that the former underground fighters helped the Nazis kill "Russian" Jews in the town of Jedwabne, Poland . Consequently, innocent Poles with no chance for defense were killed or incarcerated for many years. In those days an accusation made by a KGB agent was the proverbial "kiss of death."

Mr. Gross took the story one step beyond. He accused the entire town of Jedwabne of participation in the crime.

Mr. Will in his column willingly concealed this and other historic facts behind the incident to accentuate his support for Mr. Gross' unfortunate meanderings. Therefore, some history needs to be resurrected in order to illustrate what George Will was unwilling to discuss or reveal.

During the period of endangerment from the Nazis, 1933-1945, most European peoples and nations succumbed to fear and collaborated with Hitler or Stalin or both.

Jews collaborated with Stalin and Hitler - Poles did not.

Jewish collaboration with Hitler, destructive as it became, began in April of 1933 with a famous Memorandum supporting Hitler's anti-Semitism and was followed up by the August 27, 1933 Transfer Agreement signed by German Zionists-Revisionists and the Nazis. The agreement permitted affluent Jews to remove their wealth from the Nazi governed territories. These two acts guided Nazi-Jewish relations throughout the Nazi period in Germany, Poland and elsewhere, permitting wealthy Jews to escape the dangers of the occupation but exposing the vast majority of poor Jews to Nazi/Zionist-Revisionist manipulations, suffering and death.

The principals even opened emigration offices, staffed by Nazis and their Zionist-Revisionist proxies, in Vienna and Prague immediately after invasions of the respective countries.

On the eve of the signing of the infamous Ribbenthrop-Molotov Agreement on August 22, 1939, Hitler, meeting with his generals, issued an order to "liquidate Poland and Poles and make lebensraum for the Reichsdeutsche."

This order was issued for Poland and Poles not Jews, French, Danes or anybody else. It was the only order of its kind given by Hitler and it commanded all of the Nazi forces to liquidate the Polish nation and nobody else.

For Jews, even as late as the 1942 Wannsee meeting, the Nazis outlined expulsions as the "final solution", not liquidation.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler gave an additional order under Operation Tannenbaum - to kill Polish intellectuals immediately upon capture and forbade the inclusion of any Pole in any official organization - military or civilian.

Hitler rescinded this order only in August of 1944.

It is this order that makes Mr. Gross' lie and Mr. Will's naiveté so obvious and the proof of its significance is reflected in the recruitments for the Nazi SS in various countries. These numbers were provided by the German SS Pension office in 1993. This Office continues to pay out funds even today:

Holland 5,000 recruits for the SS.
France 5,000 recruits "
Belgium 4,000 recruits "
Denmark 2,000 recruits "
Norway 2,000 recruits "
England 100 recruits "
Poland None

Jedwabne and the Soviet Occupation.

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union came to aid the Nazis, whose campaign against the Poles was running out of steam. The Soviets captured 46.5% of the Polish territories and stopped the Polish military from regrouping and continuing their struggle, especially in the North where Polish troops had successfully arrested Nazi advances.

On September 28, the Nazis and Soviet Russia partitioned Poland. Each began to organize the territory to its political advantage.

Hitler divided his acquisition into three parts. One section, the northern sector, was absorbed into the Reich and cleared of any Poles immediately. The second part was converted into three protectorates for the Polish population and its two major ethnic groups representing at least 10% of the total population:

1) General Government, with its capital, Cracow, is designated for Poles,
2) Judenland, with its capital, Zamosc, for European and Polish Jews, and
3) Ukrainian Reserve for Polish Ukrainians.

Lastly, the Zakopane territory was given to Slovakia for its assistance in the attack on Poland.

The third ethnic group in Poland, which also composed 10% of the total population, was the Polish Germans. This group, like the Jews, began to collaborate with Hitler almost immediately, and by 1935 Hitler decorated its representatives with Iron Crosses, a military award for valor. Hitler referred to them as Volksdeutsche.

Jews collaborated with the Nazi invader through the Nazi approved Councils, Jewish Police and spy networks, such as the infamous Department 13 run by Nossig.

In the years 1939-1943, the Nazis set up 108 camps for the Polish - not Jewish - population.

During the initial years, Auschwitz was for Poles, not Jews.

Polish men, women, priests, nuns, children under 12 and children 12 to 16 were placed in specific camps to serve the "needs" of their new master - chief among them the murder of the leaders and deportation of Polish children who were endowed with Aryan features to the Reich.

The Jews organized themselves in ghettos led by Nazi-approved leaders such as Czernikow and others. The Ukrainians formed SS-Units such as the Galizien-SS or guard units like the "Trawnikimanner" to assist the Nazis in various operations. The Volksdeutsche, the Polish Germans, received their German citizenship upon signing a document and joined all levels of the Nazi killing machine. Some of the smaller ethic groups in occupied Poland such as Lithuanians and Latvians joined their national counterparts in servicing Nazi needs.

Despite all the pressure, Poles did not collaborate!

They organized themselves under the leadership of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London and fought their invaders - Nazis and Soviets, only to be betrayed by the British, French, Americans and in their own country their "neighbors" Jews, Ukrainians, Polish Germans and a host of smaller ethnic communities.

In the Soviet partition, immediately after September 17, 1939, one ethnic group began to collaborate with the Soviet invader - the Polish Jews. Of the 3.1 million Polish Jews, 1,222,000 lived in the territories taken over by Soviet Russia. Between September 17 and October 22, 1939, they helped the Soviets identify Polish civilian and military leaders and intellectuals and assisted with deportations of about 1.5 million Poles into the Soviet Union's Siberia as well as helped in the murder of at least 100,000 Poles on the spot.

Mr. Will does not dare to mention Jewish collaboration of the Jedwabne Jews or any other eastern community with Stalinist forces, but nevertheless this factor is the main cause of the Nazi action in that town.

Jewish collaborators, along with identifying their neighbors, Poles, for deportation or murder helped the Soviets organize and conduct a plebiscite. On October 22, 1939 the Soviets rammed through a plebiscite which overwhelmingly favored the annexation of Soviet-occupied Polish territories into the Soviet Union. A week later, the Soviets annexed 46.5% of Poland into the Soviet republics of Belarus and Ukraine. British journalists, who were present in the territories of Soviet occupation, in their reports to their respective journals confirmed the betrayal of Poles by their "neighbors" - the Polish Jews.

All inhabitants of the annexed territories instantaneously became citizens of the Soviet Union, the Polish currency, the Zloty, was declared worthless and all of the administrative jobs in the new Soviet territories were given to the collaborators. The persecution of ethnic Poles under the new administration intensified. After killing all of the Polish administrators and military men, the blood-thirsty collaborators started murdering old men, veterans of World War I and the Polish-Soviet War of 1921-22 in which Poland was victorious.

Families of those killed were deported to Siberia.

However, Hitler was running out of resources after his escapades in Western Europe, and the Soviet Union seemed to be the only easy target left for him. Rich in badly needed natural resources, it had to be taken immediately and he attacked it on June 22, 1941.

Plans were drawn up and on June 6, the organization of four Einsatztruppen (Security Troops) A, B, C, and D was approved. These units followed the military forces purging the German occupied territories of Soviet Commissars and other "aparatchiks."

Jedwabne was one of the towns which was occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939. In October, after the plebiscite, the Jewish collaborators purged the Polish administration, killing or deporting all of its leaders and were given their jobs as a reward.

As an expression of devotion to their Soviet masters, the Jewish collaborators erected a statue of Lenin in the town.

After the Nazi military machine rolled through the territories, the Einsatztruppen arrived. They gathered local communists and their sympathizers and began to destroy them in the manner they saw fit. They also demolished the Lenin monument.

Their crime, committed against the Jewish Soviet collaborators in 1941 was not any different than those which took place from September through December of 1939 and were previously committed exclusively against Poles. In many towns, Bydgoszcz and Leszno being chief among them, the German troops killed over 5,000 Poles.

In the same period, another 384 Polish towns and villages were completely destroyed - inhabitants and property.

Lastly, the documentation examined by scholars in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Warsaw, Poland and Stanford University in California show that the Einsatztruppen action taken against the Jewish collaborators was a Nazi responsibility. The Nuremberg Trial records, which contain the testimony of 22 Einsatztruppen commanders, clearly show a German pattern of murderous behavior.

Further, Hitler's order of September 1, 1939 is key in refuting the unfortunate claim by Mr. Gross and Mr. Will. No Nazi would disobey the Fuehrer.

No Pole committed any crime in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Mr. Will is just wrong.

On the other hand, a crime was committed by Mr. Will in his column. However, no punishment will erase what he did. He casually dismissed the suffering and martyrdom of 26 million Poles at the hands of Hitler and Stalin to sensationalize the tragedy that befell less than 100 collaborators.

It seem now, more than before, that Mr. Will's forte is baseball.