Editing Home Army (section)

====Holocaust====
From 1940 onward, the Home Army courier [[Jan Karski]] delivered the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust to the Western powers, after having personally visited the [[Warsaw Ghetto]] and a Nazi concentration camp.{{r|Baumgarten 2009|p=110–114}}<ref name="CherryOrla-Bukowska2007">{{cite book|author1=Robert Cherry|author2=Annamaria Orla-Bukowska|title=Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gUp7AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA119|date=7 June 2007|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers|isbn=978-1-4616-4308-1|pages=119–120}}</ref><ref name="Engel" />{{sfnp|Zimmerman|2015|p=54}} Another crucial role was played by [[Witold Pilecki]], who was the only person to volunteer to be imprisoned at [[Auschwitz]] (where he would spend three and a half years) to organize a resistance on the inside and to gather information on the atrocities occurring there to inform the Western Allies about [[The Holocaust|the fate of the Jewish population]].<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://time.com/5635746/the-remarkable-story-of-the-man-who-volunteered-to-enter-auschwitz-and-tell-the-world-about-it/|title=The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Volunteered to Enter Auschwitz|last=Ackerman|first=Elliot|date=26 July 2019|magazine=Time|access-date=9 December 2019|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230508130026/https://time.com/5635746/the-remarkable-story-of-the-man-who-volunteered-to-enter-auschwitz-and-tell-the-world-about-it/|archive-date= May 8, 2023}}</ref> Home Army reports from March 1943 described crimes committed by the Germans against the Jewish populace. AK commander General Stefan Rowecki estimated that 640,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz between 1940 and March 1943, including 66,000 ethnic Poles and 540,000 Jews from various countries (this figure was revised later to 500,000).{{sfnp|Zimmerman|2015|p=188}} The Home Army started carrying out death sentences for [[szmalcownik]]s in Warsaw in the summer of 1943.<ref name="Drzewieniecki2019">{{cite book|editor=Joanna Drzewieniecki|author=Jarosław Piekałkiewicz|title=Dance with Death: A Holistic View of Saving Polish Jews during the Holocaust|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-9W8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA256|date=30 November 2019|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=978-0-7618-7167-5|pages=256–257}}</ref>

[[Antony Polonsky]] observed that "the attitude of the military underground to the genocide is both more complex and more controversial [than its approach towards ''[[szmalcownik]]s'']. Throughout the period when it was being carried out, the Home Army was preoccupied with preparing for ... [the moment when] Nazi rule in Poland collapsed. It was determined to avoid premature military action and to conserve its strength (and weapons) for the crucial confrontation that, it was assumed, would determine the fate of Poland. ... [However,] to the Home Army, the Jews were not a part of 'our nation' and ... action to defend them was not to be taken if it endangered [the Home Army's] other objectives." He added that "it is probably unrealistic to have expected the Home Army—which was neither as well armed nor as well organized as its propaganda claimed—to have been able to do much to aid the Jews. The fact remains that its leadership did not want to do so."{{r|Cesarani & Kavanaugh|p=68}} Rowecki's attitudes shifted in the following months as the brutal reality of the Holocaust became more apparent, and the Polish public support for the Jewish resistance increased. Rowecki was willing to provide Jewish fighters with aid and resources when it contributed to "the greater war effort", but had concluded that providing large quantities of supplies to the Jewish resistance would be futile. This reasoning was the norm among the [[Allies of World War II|Allies]], who believed that the Holocaust could only be halted by a significant military action.{{r|Baumgarten 2009|p=110–122}}