Tadeusz Piotrowski

Tadeusz Piotrowski or Thaddeus Piotrowski (born 1940) is a Polish-American sociologist and author. He is a professor of sociology in the Social Science Division of the University of New Hampshire at Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Born in the region of Volhynia in occupied Poland, Piotrowski and his family left in August 1943. He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973.

Piotrowski's courses at the University of New Hampshire include the social history of the Holocaust and courses in anthropology.

Piotr Wróbel considers Piotrowski's works as "highly polemical and controversial", similar to those by Richard C. Lukas and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. Gifford Malone writes that the introduction of The Polish Deportees of World War II is useful, and that the rest of the book contains personal accounts of deportees. All together Malone considers the volume to be a well written and moving account.

Judith Olsak-Glass writes that Piotrowski's premise in Poland's Holocaust is that Poland's borders and sizable minorities were the main factors leading to the Holocaust in Poland. Piotrowski posits that the aspirations of Ukrainians for a "greater Ukraine", Belorussians for a "reunited Belarus", and Jews for a "Jewish state within the Polish one" were a smoldering issue in the Second Polish Republic. Piotrowski argues that at the outbreak of the war "radical members" of the minorities sided with the Nazis and Soviets. Piotrowski greatly widens the generally accepted bounds of the Holocaust so that it includes not only Jews but all Polish victims of Nazis and Soviets. The book is organized by collaboration of each ethnic group, blaming those who "colluded with the enemy to the detriment of the Polish state and the Polish people". Olsak-Glass sees the chapter on Jewish collaboration as provocative, though important, writing that while Piotrowski acknowledges some antisemitism in Poland he questions its extent and causes stating that some of the responsibility for antisemitism "must surely rest on the shoulders of the Jews themselves". The final chapter examines the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, is based on recent scholarship as well as personal recollection, and details savage barbarity that is not available in other English language books. Overall, Olsak-Glass considers the volume to be a valuable contribution to the field.

Klaus-Peter Friedrich considers the methodology in Poland's Holocaust to be questionable. Friedrich writes that the book is critical towards ethnic minorities in Poland and apologetic towards ethnic Poles. Overall, Friedrich considers the work to be "unbalanced" as Piotrowski "considers collaboration exclusively under ethnic terms as if it was ethnically determined". Lisiunia A. Romanienko considers Poland's Holocaust as an attempt at setting the record straight in the light of recent scholarship denouncing the role of Poles in World War II. In the book, Piotrowski attempts to redefine the Holocaust so that it is expanded to include all "systematic genocidal victims" of the war. The book is not organized chronologically but by cultural coordination/collaboration between ethnic groups, which Romanianko writes provides a refreshing departure inhibiting further ill feeling regarding the role of Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Belorussians in Holocaust on territory of Poland; although Piotrowski's research indicates that involvement of each group in victimising Polish Jews and Catholics was at times ubiquitous, heprohibits widespread censure of entire cultures. Romanianko states that Piotrowski's book is one of the most comprehensive and well documented, multi-methodological contributions to scholarly work in the area."

Piotrowski's major books include:

• Vengeance of the Swallows: Memoir of a Polish Family's Ordeal Under Soviet Aggression, Ukrainian Ethnic Cleansing and Nazi Enslavement, and Their Emigration to America (1995), McFarland & Company, ISBN 978-0-7864-0001-0
• Poland's Holocaust (1998, 2006), McFarland, ISBN 978-0-7864-2913-4, ISBN 0-7864-0371-3
• Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn (2000, 2009), McFarland, ISBN 978-0-7864-4245-4, ISBN 0-7864-0773-5
• The Indian Heritage of New Hampshire and Northern New England (2002, 2009), McFarland, ISBN 0-7864-4252-2, ISBN 0-7864-1098-1
• The Polish Deportees of World War II (2004, 2008), McFarland, ISBN 978-0-7864-3258-5, ISBN 0-7864-1847-8.

• The Cultural Achievement Award from the American Council for Polish Culture
• The Literary Award of the Polish Sociocultural Centre of the Polish Library in London
• Gold Medal Award for "promoting Polish history and culture", bestowed by the American Institute of Polish Culture at the 35th International Polonaise Ball in Miami.