Socio-Political Assessment of the Nature of World War II in the Warsaw Ghettos Underground Press

The article looks at the assessment of the socio-political nature of ongoing war in the underground press of the Warsaw Ghetto. The subject matter was in the centre of disputes particularly before the German attack against the Soviet Union, when two approaches to these problems evolved among the Jewish Left underground. The proponents of the one approach invoked the Communist concept of intra-imperialist war (to which the workers' movement should respond with the so-called revolutionary defeatism), while the advocates of the other school of thought saw the war as a clash between a camp of totalitarian fascist regimes and Western democracies. One additional contribution to the dispute, which went beyond that division, was the approach expounded in the press by anti-Stalinist Communists invoking Leon Trotsky's ideals, who formulated the theory of the so-called Jacobin war as the recommended groundwork of the activities of the workers' movement in democratic countries.