A remarkable document which is part of the memoirs of Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin from 1933 to 1939, unwittingly provides the clue to the main motive: Poland was chosen because it shared with Germany as a national goal the elimination of the Jews from its midst.² This official document reveals in a few short sentences far more than what many volumes on the Polish participation in the Holocaust could express.³
In document 99, Ambassador Lipski transcribes for the Polish Foreign Minister Joseph Beck his conversation with Hitler in a meeting which took place in Obersalzberg on September 20, 1938, three months after the Evian Conference (June 6-15, 1938), where 29 nations had already made clear their unanimous unwillingness to grant asylum to the Jewish refugees.
Hitler, who was persuading the Poles to join Germany in his impending attack on Czechoslovakia, also referred to the Jewish problem. Speaking in his characteristic code language on “solving” the “Jewish question,” he told the Polish ambassador that: “he had in mind an idea for settling the Jewish problem by way of emigration to the colonies with an understanding with Poland, Hungary, and possibly also Rumania.”
The Polish ambassador was so impressed with Hitler's proposal on helping Poland get rid of its Jewish population that he responded enthusiastically, as described in the ambassador's own words: “I told him if he finds such a solution we will erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw.” Hitler knew very well that nothing would gladden the heart of his Polish interlocutor as his plans on the elimination of the Jews. After all, it was Poland, not Germany which had come up one year before with the plan to exile the Jews to Madagascar.⁴
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When [the Fascist bourgeoisie] felt the time was ripe to move ahead and invade Poland, [it] could feel assured that, regardless of how the Poles might react to the occupation of their homeland, they would be on [Berlin’s] side as far as the destruction of Jewry was concerned. In this they did not err.
In view of Poland's eliminationist stand, the [Fascists] could assume not simply the passivity, but the eternal gratitude of the Polish nation for doing for them what they wanted most—clearing Poland of its Jews, as Lipsky made it clear to him.
As the [Fascists] escalated by stages their extermination program in Poland they confirmed their assumptions far beyond their wildest expectations. Not only was there no danger that the Poles might join hands with the Jews to resist the [Fascist] occupation, but they cooperated willingly with the [Fascists] to exterminate the Jews.
That is why Poland was chosen as the main site to establish the [ethnocidal] machinery to annihilate European Jewry. Nowhere else could such a place be found where the Jews would find themselves totally isolated in a sea of mortal enemies who were bombarded day and night with the belief that their country would benefit immensely from the elimination of the Jews.
Thus could the [Fascists] slaughter before the eyes of millions of Poles their Jewish neighbors in the outskirts of all the towns of Poland, destroy ghetto after ghetto, and transport millions from all over Europe to their death in the Polish concentration camps, without the slightest opposition of the population and its underground army.
The annihilation of the Jews on Polish soil at the same time served as a demonstration to the Polish population of what lay in store for them, if they did not submit meekly to their [Fascist] masters.
Further reading: Guilty or Innocent?: Poland’s Relationship with Jews and the Holocaust