“Faithful German Servants” or “Good Polish Citizens”? Violence, the Village Head, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland, 1918–1944

Author

Miranda Brethour, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

History

Advisor

Dagmar Herzog

Advisor

Elissa Bemporad

Committee Members

Benjamin Hett

Jan Grabowski

Subject Categories

European History | History | Holocaust and Genocide Studies | Jewish Studies

Keywords

The Holocaust in Poland; Polish-Jewish relations; collaboration; World War II

Abstract

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Holocaust in Poland have revealed the attitudes and behavior of Christian neighbors as decisive in the German genocidal project against European Jews between 1939 and 1945. Recent research has drawn particular attention to the issue of collaboration; exposing how residents supported and facilitated mass violence against their Jewish neighbors during the German occupation. Inspired by such shifts in the historiography, this dissertation considers what the history of rural communities and their leadership can tell us about the origins of collaboration in anti-Jewish violence during World War II. Employing the institution of the village head as a case study, this project follows rural relations between Jews and Poles in the Lublin region of Poland from the establishment of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, through the German occupation, to the early postwar years of the Polish People’s Republic. A central contribution of this dissertation is in exposing the persistent reverberations of earlier patterns of interethnic hostility as well as how the authority and power exerted by local leadership influenced the behavior of villagers towards their Jewish neighbors. This project confirms the crucial role of institutions like the village head in the Holocaust. Remobilized by the German occupiers in 1939 to serve the new administration, village heads were implicated in the process of constructing ghettos, limiting the movement and residence of Jews, organizing forced labor, and participating in deportations to the death camps. Such violence was perpetrated in small communities – villages and towns – where the intimacy of Polish-Jewish relations imbued collaboration with an additional layer of significance, as extreme brutality frequently took the familiar face of neighbors, colleagues, and local leaders.

Recommended Citation

Brethour, Miranda, "“Faithful German Servants” or “Good Polish Citizens”? Violence, the Village Head, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland, 1918–1944" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6355