Hotel Polski affair

Around late 1941, two Jewish organizations from Switzerland and Polish diplomats, working with honorary consuls from certain South American countries, started sending documents to the Warsaw Ghetto, hoping to allow Jews in the ghettos to emigrate (as Germans were more lenient towards individuals who could prove to be nationals of neutral countries). However, in many cases the holders of these affidavits and passports were already dead by the time those documents arrived in occupied Poland.

Many of those documents ended up in the hands of Jewish Gestapo collaborators from Gestapo-operated Żagiew network (most prominently, Leon Skosowski and Adam Żurawin).

The Warsaw Ghetto was liquidated by May 1943 but thousands of Jews survived in Warsaw, hiding outside the ghetto. The Germans and their Jewish collaborators came up with a plan to lure them out. (Skosowski’s involvement in the plan was very significant, and he has been referred to as a co-organizer of the Hotel Polski plan). Another Jewish Gestapo collaborator allegedly involved in the Hotel Polski affair was the singer Wiera Gran. Collaborators spread the rumor that Jews holding foreign passports of neutral countries were allowed to leave the General Government, and that documents from countries such as Paraguay, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru and Chile, in the names of Jews who were no longer alive, were sold (at high prices, estimated in extreme cases to equal over a million US dollars) in Hotel Royal at 31 Chmielna street, and later at Hotel Polski. Unknown to the buyers, many such documents were improperly prepared or forged.

Hotel Polski became a gathering place for Jews who hoped they would soon be allowed to leave Nazi-occupied Europe, as rumors also suggested it would be safe ground. Around 2,500 Jews (estimates range as high as 3,500) came out of their hiding places and moved to Hotel Polski. The Polish underground warned Jews that this was probably a trap, but many ignored the warnings. Starting May 21 1943, Jews from Hotel Polski were transferred in small groups by Nazi German authorities to Vittel, a spa resort town in German-occupied France, which was supposed to be their transit point; later transports only made it to Bergen-BelsenKonzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen - German concentration camp existing in 1940–1945 in the Third Reich near the city of Bergen. The camp was established in the first half of 1940 as a camp for prisoners of war. The prisoners were kept in the open air, so during the first winter 14,000 of them died of hunger and cold, as well as the typhus epidemic. concentration camp in Germany. On 15 July 1943, the 420 Jews remaining in the Hotel without foreign passports were executed by the Germans at [Pawiak] prison. By September 1943, the Germans revealed that most of the documents of the individuals in the transit camps were forged, and the South American governments refused to recognize most of the passports. Therefore, instead of being transferred to South America, the Jews were sent to Auschwitz(German: Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers and crematories; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of extermination of Poles and the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. concentration camp in May 1943 and October 1943. A few hundred Jews who held Palestinian documents survived, having been exchanged for Germans imprisoned in Palestine. (Jewish Historical Institute cited the number of survivors at 260; Agnieszka HaskaAgnieszka Haska - PhD in anthropology, currently works at the Holocaust Research Center. Together with Jerzy Stachowicz, she is the author of the book "Merciless. The Most Cruel Women of the Interwar Period" and the "Disgrace! Tales of Polish Betrayal" published in WAB. estimates the number of survivors at about 300, noting that due to incomplete documentation it is not possible to precisely estimate the number of victims or survivors.)