Szmalcownik

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Szmalcownik (IPA: [ʂmal 'ʦɔv ɲik]) is a pejorative Polish slang word used during World War II that denoted a person blackmailing hiding Jews or blackmailing Poles who protected Jews during the Nazi occupation^[1]. The Polish Secret State considered szmalcownictwo an act of collaboration with the German occupiers. Armia Krajowa punished it with the death sentence as a criminal act of treason. Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego by his decree of August 31, 1944 also condemned this act as collaboration with Nazi Germany. This decree is still a valid law in Poland and person who during the war committed an act of szmalcownictwo faces life imprisonment. After the war there were very few trials as most witnesses had already been dead or left the country.^{[citation needed]} It is assumed that the majority of szmalcowniks have peacefully lived until old age.^{[citation needed]}

Blackmailers (szmalcowniks) were plentiful in Warsaw, sometimes gangs of them. Gunnar S. Paulsson estimates that their total numbers, however, were relatively small, "1 or 2 percent" of all Warsaw Poles (p. 113). The damage that these criminals did, however, was substantial. Most were interested in money. By stripping Jews of assets needed for food and bribes, harassing rescuers, raising the overall level of insecurity, and forcing hidden Jews to seek out safer accommodations, blackmailers added significantly to the danger Jews faced and increased their chances of getting caught and killed. Jews who lived on the Aryan side were more afraid of szmalcowniks than the Germans because Polish blackmailers were experts in distinguishing Jewish facial features. At the beginning of German oppression, szmalcowniks were satisfied with a few hundred zlotys extortion but after the death penalty for hiding Jews was introduced the sums rose to several hundred thousands zlotys.

Paradoxically, Germans sometimes treated szmalcowniks as criminals and exerted punishments on them. The reason was that szmalcowniks bribed also German officials and policemen - after the denunciation of a rich Jew, szmalcowniks and corrupted Germans shared the robbed money.

The blackmailers were both of Polish and German ethnicity.