Looting Fever

In the summer of 1945, Poland lived by looting.1 The Poles were either talking about it or doing it. We usually call this kind of collective emotions caused by the promise of quick riches a rush. “I daresay right now,” wrote a columnist in the Kielce-Radom daily Dziennik Powszechny in July 1945, “that . . . the huge majority of people in our society have already looted, are looting right now or intend to loot. People who are afraid to do it envy those who have already done it.”2 This postwar excitement to report on it is inversely proportional to what is written about looting today.3 Even though objects appropriated after the war embellish some homes to this day, people have mentally rejected looting. Its absence in the historical discourse is connected to a tangible shame and embarrassment that so many people took part in looting then. People try to reduce the resultant cognitive dissonance between actual behaviors and an idealized image of the Poles by explaining that looting was a kind of native revenge on the Germans for their crimes. It is true that an anti-German spirit and the wish to take revenge were forces driving the looting mobs in the Regained Territories, but not necessarily the most powerful ones. The most important questions to answer are: What motivated the Poles to loot? What was it like? What were its mental consequences?

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Looting both grew out of wartime demoralization and worsened it. The deputy commander of the Provincial Citizens’ Militia in Lower Silesia reported in November 1945:
 
“A person arriving in Lower Silesia is struck by the moral gangrene which has attacked everyone everywhere. It is there among prosecutors, starosts, in the provincial administration, on all levels of the administrative and court apparatus, and in all social strata. To this is added the wave of people who come here only to steal whatever they can and take it to central Poland. Bribery is a common phenomenon, as everything everywhere can be had for money. Looting, or actually the theft of public property, is virtually an element in the air people breathe here. People have completely lost their basic ethical sense.“4

Looting became an element of the air, of the postwar lifestyle. Outside official debates among the intelligentsia, few thought of looting as something bad. On the contrary, items acquired this way were a source of pride, and people showed them off to each other.5 Handing them out in the Regained Territories, as the formerly German territories were officially referred to, played a crucial role in building social ties, often of the patron-client kind.6 Furniture, apartments, horses, and all other needed items were given by the mayor to the Polish Workers’ Party secretary, by the Citizens’ Militia commander to the mayor, and by the mayor to the very necessary doctors and teachers, and the Soviet commander also got his share. Thus arrangements, constellations, and connections created society. In central Poland, successful escapades to the “Wild West,” as people like to call the Regained Territories, were viewed as evidence of manly resourcefulness and cleverness. Looting shaped the culture of daily life, its value system, material culture, and free time. A ditty to the tune of a mazurka went,
 
“One more looting today/We’ll fill the car/One more fur for Krysia/And on we go so far.“7

Looting undermined the purpose of work and corrupted people. Now it did not pay to work well or to work at all when it took only minor effort to live in relative affluence. Many civil servants in the Regained Territories walked out of their jobs: who wants to sit behind a desk as “looting fever” rages outside? Breathing the air with its looting element also weakened immunity to other crimes. The obvious question is: were looting not as widespread, would it have been possible for militia officers to barge into the Jewish community building on Planty Street in Kielce—launching a pogrom—with robbery as their focal goal? Were their colleagues in Lower Silesia not looting with impunity?
The “fever” was helped along by the passing front, followed by chaos and weakness of the controlling institutions. Germany’s surrender gave many Poles a feeling of victors’ impunity. The moment of suspension, relaxation, and interregnum guaranteed almost total anonymity. According to Philip Zimbardo, when all the members of a group cease to function as individuals, “their mental functioning changes: they live in an expanded-present moment that makes past and future distant and irrelevant. Feelings dominate reason, and action dominates reflection.”8 As a result, the situations that were observed during looting may have occurred more easily: people mindlessly wrecked buildings, madly competed for abandoned possessions, and dug up graves. “An amok reigned in those ‘Regained Territories.’ Even people who are not dumb destroyed everything. Maybe as revenge on the Germans, for the years of the occupation? I could feel myself that if I came upon a pretty German window, I would have to smash it,” a National Military Union man serving in the Olsztyn region remembered years later.9
The thirst for vengeance on the recent killers, even bordering on destructive madness, fueled looting, especially in its first stage. Jan Chodakowski, a prisoner of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, went to the nearby town of Linz with some friends on the day after US troops liberated the camp. “We walk to Linz, we cross a bridge, through the train station, we reach a shop. We look, it’s a deli, we immediately smash it, go in, take out the food, all outside, we steal what we can. We picked some, then I look and the Austrians are also coming and taking it. . . . We simply roamed around. Smashed warehouses, shops.”10 The spectacle of thousands of Poles clawing at others’ property can be explained by the moral downfall that had taken place during the war and occupation. Yet looting predates the Second World War and is born of chaos. It happened in Warsaw in September 1939 prior to the Germans’ arrival. It happened in Jedwabne and other small towns of the region and in the Eastern Borderlands in July 1941, before the German occupation could have its demoralizing effect. But on the other hand, we cannot ignore the importance of the five-year-plus education in thieving the Poles received. Its most important lesson was: there is a war, you are living outside the confines of good and evil, so switch off your ethics. The scale of the postwar “looting plague” should be explained with the earlier lessons of the plundering of ghettos in 1942. Red Army troops contributed to the education in looting.11 The “trophy mood” that Polish soldiers were the first to adopt inevitably also spread to the population. No one could avoid noticing the Soviet transports overflowing with German property heading east. A private letter reported on this in August 1945:

“Theft and bribery are thriving from top to bottom. . . . Over 5 years people have got used to stealing with impunity, so they are stealing from each other, and this is called looting. . . . They take others’ rags en masse. . . . In the areas taken from the Germans the local Poles and the new settlers are also being harmed.“12

Without a doubt, poverty was one of looting’s most important driving forces. Were it not for the shortages of shoes, clothes, sewing machines, bicycles, furniture, and radios, no one would have undertaken these risky expeditions. No one would have ripped handles out of doors, pulled windows out of their frames, or demolished ovens to get at their racks. The wartime and postwar looting was a specific reaction of those who were excluded during the 1930s crisis, condemned to living in dark cellars, and persistently unemployed, and then during the war reduced to the role of Untermenschen. And in the postwar economic instability, with unemployment and starvation wages, plunder was the only available means of support for thousands of people. The expression frequently used then and in all the earlier “gold rushes” was that this would be the only time in a person’s life when they could get rich quickly, to “catch up” and to “make a deal.” Stanisław Łach adds another interpretation, this one in the crowd psychology of irrational behavior, which is sometimes summarized as: you cannot hesitate, because the hungry hounds will catch up with you.15 The looters seemed to be operating under the motto “don’t stop, don’t wait, just steal.”16
The sphere of the imagination was also important, as the legends making the rounds about Poland’s “Canada”—that is, the Regained Territories—included stories about swift climbs from homeless to millionaire. The new regime’s propaganda also contributed to the myth of the Regained Territories as the land of plenty; it promoted the successful settling of the Regained Territories as a solution to most social problems and to give itself legitimacy. Newspaper stories about abandoned towns filled with a wealth of goods and of farms impatient for new owners acted as a magnet. An inspector noted that the expectations set off by this, which could not come true for everyone, pushed people to steal. He reported in August 1945: 

“The propaganda presented Lower Silesia as a land of milk and honey, it shouted that there are fully furnished and equipped luxury villas waiting with open doors for those who will be so kind as to take possession of them, that there is plenty of everything, one need only go and take it. And people went to this Wonderland with this attitude—and they were disappointed. Yes, there are villas, but they are occupied by germans [sic], there is food but in cafeterias. They wanted to have everything, straight away, because the press articles were promising it to them, but instead . . . this is why people started to loot, so as not to go home empty-handed, and this is how it started. The germs of looting lie in the bad, unsophisticated propaganda.“17

Or there is the interpretation inspired by nature. After a fire, according to nature’s ancient rhythm, you have to return to life, make things right after the destruction. This is what people said then. Could the rush to loot to some degree come from the rush to life?
The “looting fever” began to come down in the spring and summer of 1946. People continued to loot but much less. The progress of the settlement process was the cure. It became more and more difficult to find living quarters that were not already occupied by Poles. The sources of looting began to dry out. The authorities’ roundups at train stations had been effective,18 as had been the combing through squares and markets, confiscating looted items and punishing arrested looters, which included sending them to work camps. In the autumn of 1945, Wrocław was cordoned off and guards were placed at the city gates to search everyone leaving town. Objects that were not accompanied by “red cards,” special government permits, were confiscated, and those carrying them landed in a “concentration camp for looters.” The authorities threatened to put drivers carrying the wares in them, too, and to confiscate their drivers’ licenses and cars, regardless of who owned them.19 Since acquiring the necessary documents in corrupt postwar Poland was easy20 despite these sanctions, in March 1946 Minister for Regained Territories Władysław Gomułka reduced the group of people issuing permits to himself.21 Clearly, he did not trust even his closest colleagues, at least on this matter. In May 1946, he decided that the stick alone was not enough and produced a carrot, a ruling to reward those who contributed to uncovering possessions illegally exported from the Regained Territories.22 Transporting furniture to central Poland became more difficult. Corrupt civil servants were now penalized. To use a metaphor, the government began to put in windows. But the looting tradition did not die out. Justyna Kowalska-Leder is right to argue that the looting that started in 1939 formed the Poles’ lack of respect for others’ property, especially state property, teaching people to accept wheeling-dealing or laying their hands on hard-to-get goods, which was often ordinary theft, all without burdening their conscience.23 Taking virtually anything that could be useful or have any value home from work on a mass scale is evidence of the long afterlife of the culture of looting.