Morgenthau Report

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Morgenthau report was a report issued by the United States' commission led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Homer H. Johnson, Brigadier General Edgar Jadwin and from the British side, Sir Stuart M. Samuel concerning alleged misteatment of Jews by the Poles. The report was published on October 3, 1919.

Western public opinion has been increasingly aware of primarily newspaper reports of mistreatment of Jews in Eastern Europe, following the aftermath of the First World War and flare up of several local conflicts (such as Polish-Ukrainian War and Polish-Soviet War). Pressure for government action reached the point where President Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the matter. The Morgenthau commission was dispatched by United States to verify those reports.

It identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919, and estimated the number of victims at 200–300 Jews. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers; none were blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pińsk a Polish officer accused a group of Jewish civilians of plotting against the Poles and shot thirty-five of them (Pinsk massacre). In Lviv (then Lwów) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, including some seventy-two Jews. In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. Many other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as the New York Times, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine.^[1] The result of the concern over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty protecting the rights of minorities in Poland. In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance.

While critical of some local Polish authorities on scene, the commission also stated that in general the Polish military and civil authorities did do their best to prevent the incidents and their recurrence in the future. It concluded that the excesses were of political rather than anti-Semitic nature and that the term pogrom was inapplicable to the conditions existing within a war zone, particularly as Poles also died at the hand of Jews, significant portion of which supported the Soviets and formed militias to fight their Polish equivalents and regular army.^[2]

Possible bias of Morgenthau report has been discussed by some scholars. Neal Pease wrote: To protect Poland's international reputation against widespread, if exaggerated, accusations of mistreatment of her large Jewish minority, Washington dispatched an investigatory commission led by Henry Morgenthau, one of the most prominent American Jewish political figures. Morgenthau was selected for the job precisely because he was known to be sympathetic to Poland, and his report largely exculpated the Polish government, exactly as expected.^[3]

[edit] Notes