Observation and Infiltration

Abstract

The article consists of two sections: a study of desertions of Jewish soldiers from the Polish Armed Forces in the East, and five reports by the head of Polish military intelligence (Second Department of General Staff), Colonel Stanisław Gano, dated August and July 1944, on the effects of infiltrating the milieu of Jewish deserters. The first section shows the causes and course of desertions of Jewish soldiers from Polish units stationed in the Mandate of Palestine, primarily in the fall of 1943, as a backdrop for the cited documents. The source section presents intelligence reports produced by Office “T” of Polish military intelligence based in Jerusalem, later sent to London and forwarded to the Political Department of the Ministry of Defense that monitored issues of national tensions within members of the Polish Armed Forces. The documents show that a considerable number of Jewish deserters came into conflict with officials of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Palestine, who had previously urged them to leave the Polish troops. The root of the conflict was the deserters’ reluctance to serve in Jewish military units under British command or in the Haganah, or to do hard labor under harsh conditions in kibbutzim. What we can learn from these reports is that many deserters wanted to return to the ranks of the Polish Armed Forces in the East, but were unable to do so because of the actions of the officials of the Jewish Agency for Israel (such as the burning of their Polish identity documents). These documents prove that the Jewish Agency for Israel was abusing the argument of anti-Semitism, which was supposedly widespread in the Polish Armed Forces in the East, by exploiting it, often with cynical deliberation, to achieve its own ends.