Information about Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles

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Main article: Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)

This article regards the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against ethnic Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Some three million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, over two million of whom were ethnic Poles (the remainder being mainly ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians). The vast majority of those killed were civilians, mostly massacred during special-action operations of Nazi Germany.^{[1] [2]}

From the start of the war against Poland, German crimes were intended as the fulfillment of the plan described by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf. The aim of the plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany from within the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). The SS units were sent, as stated by Adolf Hitler in his Armenian quote: "with orders for them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language".

1939 September Campaign

Main article: Invasion of Poland (1939)

About 150,000 Polish civilians were killed during the one-month September Campaign, characterised by the indiscriminate and often deliberate targeting of civilians by the invading forces of Nazi Germany and its allies.

Many of the targets were killed in the Luftwaffe's terror bombing operations, including in incidents such as the bombing of Frampol and the bombing of Wieluń, where massive air raids attacked towns devoid of any military targets. Also notorious were attacks by German fighter and dive bomber aircraft on refugee columns.

The round-ups and executions of Poles started from the first day of the war, and actually had already commenced by August in Germany. Several thousand Polish POWs were also murdered.

Crimes against intelligentsia and Catholic clergy

Already during the 1939 German invasion of Poland, special action squads of SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed behind the front lines, arresting and killing civilians considered capable of offering help towards resistance efforts against the Germans, as determined by their position and social status.

Tens of thousands of government officials, landowners, clergy, and members of the intelligentsia — teachers, doctors, journalists, and others (Poles as well as Jews) — were either murdered in mass executions or sent to prisons and concentration camps. More than 20,000 political leaders and members of the intelligentsia were murdered in the September 1939 Operation Tannenberg alone, and 7,000 more in the mid-1940 AB-Aktion (including the massacre of Lwów professors and in executions in Palmiry forest).

The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland more harshly than elsewhere: churches were systematically closed, and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents, and persecuted monks and nuns elsewhere in Poland; in Pomerania, all but 20 of the 650 priests were shot or sent to concentration camps. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps (787 of them at Dachau). In the city of Wrocław, 49% of its priests were killed; in Chełmno, 48%. One hundred eight of them are regarded as blessed martyrs, with Maximilian Kolbe also canonized as a saint.

Concentration camps

Main article: Nazi concentration camps

Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. An estimated 30,000 Poles died at Mauthausen-Gusen, 20,000 at Sachsenhausen and 20,000 at Gross-Rosen. Seventeen thousand died at Neuengamme and 10,000 at Dachau, while about 17,000 Polish women died at Ravensbrück.

In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or found their deaths in the dozens of other camps, including special children's camps such as the Potulice concentration camp, and in prisons and other places of detention inside and outside Poland.

A major concentration camp complex at Stutthof, east of Danzig, existed from September 2, 1939, to the end of the war, where an estimated 20,000 Poles died as a result of executions, hard labor, and harsh conditions. Some 100,000 Poles passed through the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, which was doubling as a death camp for Jews.



Auschwitz became the main concentration camp for Poles on June 14, 1940. By March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them Poles. In September 1941, 200 ill prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet POWs, were killed in the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz's prisoner population became much more diverse, as Jews and other "enemies of the state" from all over German-occupied Europe were deported to the expanding camp. The Polish scholar Franciszek Piper, the chief historian of Auschwitz, estimates that 140,000 to 150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000 to 75,000 died there as victims of executions, of human experimentation, and of starvation and disease.

According to modern research, the Warsaw concentration camp was used as a death camp in an attempt to exterminate the Polish population of Warsaw in the years 1943–1944. The gentile population of Poland was a target of the łapanka policy, in which the German forces rounded up civilians on the street. Between 1942 and 1944, there were approximately 400 victims of łapanka in Warsaw daily, and it is estimated that at least tens of thousands of people were killed in mass executions, including est. 37,000 people killed at the Pawiak prison complex run by the Gestapo and still-unknown numbers of people in other areas.

Cultural genocide

As part of a wider effort to destroy Polish culture, the Germans closed or destroyed universities, high schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories, and demolished hundreds of monuments to national heroes.

To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that the schooling of Polish children should end with elementary education. In a May 1940 memorandum, Heinrich Himmler wrote:

"The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable."

Expulsion of Polish population

Main article: Expulsion of Poles by Germany

Germany planned to completely remove the Polish population from Poland and settle the country with German colonists. During the occupation, more than one million Poles were expelled by German authorities, including 923,000 Poles ethnically cleansed from territories Germany annexed into the Reich. According to the Lebensraum ideology, their place was to be taken by the German military and civilian settlers.

Extermination of psychiatric patients

Main article: Action T4

In July 1939, a Nazi secret program called Action T4 was developed with the intention of exterminating psychiatric patients. During the German invasion of Poland, the program was put into practice on a mass scale in the occupied Polish territories. Typically, all patients, accompanied by armed soldiers from special SS detachments, were transported by trucks to the killing sites. The first action of this type took place in Kocborowo, at a large psychiatric hospital in the Gdańsk region, on September 22, 1939. Similar extermination actions took place in October 1939 in a hospital in Owińska, near Poznań, where 1,000 patients (children and adults) were killed. The total number of psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in occupied Poland between 1939–1945 is estimated to be more than 16,000, with an additional 10,000 patients who died of malnutrition; approximately 100 out of 243 members of the pre-war Polish Psychiatric Association met the same fate as their patients.

In addition to executions by firing squad, other methods of mass murder were also used. Patients of a psychiatric hospital in Owińska were transported to a military fortress in Poznań; there, in the bunkers of Fort VII, they were gassed by carbon monoxide, approximately 50 persons at a time. Other Owińska hospital patients were gassed in sealed trucks, using the carbon monoxide of the exhaust fumes, and the same method was performed in Kochanówek Hospital near ŁÃ³dź, where 2,200 persons were killed in 1940. This was the first "successful" test of mass murder of prisoners using poison gas, and this technique was later used and perfected on many other psychiatric patients in occupied Poland and Germany — and starting in 1941, on inmates of the extermination camps.

Forced labor

Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour, against their will. Many were teenage boys and girls (see also: Forced prostitution in German armed forces).

Although Germany also used forced laborers from Western Europe, Poles, along with other Eastern Europeans viewed as racially inferior, were subject to deeper discriminatory measures. They were forced to wear identifying purple tags with P's sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew, and banned from public transportation. While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, Polish laborers as a rule were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than Western Europeans — and, in many cities, they were forced to live in segregated barracks behind barbed wire. Social relations with Germans outside work were forbidden, and sexual relations ("racial defilement") were punishable by death.

Germanization

In the Reichsgau Wartheland, the Nazis' goal was complete Germanization: to assimilate the territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. Germans closed elementary schools where Polish was the language of instruction. Streets and cities were renamed (ŁÃ³dź became Litzmannstadt, etc). Tens of thousands of Polish enterprises — from large industrial firms to small shops — were seized from their owners, and signs posted in front of the establishments warned: "Entrance forbidden for Poles, Jews, and dogs."

The Nazi regime was somewhat lighter regarding the Kashubians in the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. Everywhere, however, thousands of people were forced to sign the Deutsche Volksliste, while almost 30,000 children were kidnapped by German authorities from their parents for potential Germanisation.

Plans for the "final solution"

Main article: Generalplan Ost

In the same document, Himmler promised to eventually deport all non-Germanised Poles to the east (Russia). In other statements, he mentioned the future killing fields for all Poles in the Pripet Marshes. Plans for mass transportation and slave labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made — all were intended to die during the cultivation of the swamps. A bitter note is Hitler's remark that the Poles should be exterminated where they originated in the early medieval age. According to Himmler,

"All Poles will disappear from the world.... It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles." [1]

Terror and pacification operations

During the occupation, mass executions were conducted in reprisal for the Polish attack against Germans. Entire communities were held collectively responsible. In the area in and around Bydgoszcz, about 10,000 non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered in the first four months of the occupation (see Bloody Sunday).

The Nazis took hostages by the thousands at the time of the invasion, and especially during their occupation of Poland. As a rule of thumb, the hostages were selected from among the most prominent citizens of occupied cities and villages: priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, leaders of economic and social organizations and the trade unions. Often, however, they were chosen at random from all segments of society — for every German soldier killed, a group of between 50 and 100 Polish civilians were to be executed. German army and paramilitary units composed of Volksdeutsche also participated in executions of civilians.^[3]

About 20,000 villagers, some of whom were burned alive, were killed in large-scale punitive operations targeting the rural settlements suspected of aiding the resistance or hiding Jews and other fugitives. Seventy-five villages, in these punitive operations, were destroyed completely.

Poland was also the only country in occupied Europe where the penalty for hiding a Jew was death for everyone living in the house. Other laws were similarly draconic.

Warsaw atrocities

During suppression of the 1944 uprising in Warsaw, German forces committed many atrocities against Polish civilians, following the order by Hitler to literally level the city. The most severe of them took place in Wola district where, at the beginning of August 1944, at least 40,000 civilians (men, women, and children) were methodically rounded-up and executed by Einsatzkommando of Sicherheitspolizei operating within the SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth group under overall Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski's command.

Other similar massacres took place in the areas of Śródmieście (City Centre), Stare Miasto (Old Town), Marymont, and Ochota districts. In Ochota district, numerous civilian killings, rapes, and lootings were conducted by the members of Russian collaborators from SS-Sturmbrigade RONA and the criminals from the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger. Until the end of the September 1944, Polish resistance fighters were not considered by Germans as combatants; thus, when captured, they were summarily executed. After the fall of the Old Town, during the beginning of September, the remaining 7,000 seriously wounded hospitals’ patients were executed or burnt alive, often with the medical staff caring for them. Similar atrocities took place later in the Czerniaków district and after the fall of Powiśle and Mokotów districts.

Between 150,000 and 180,000 civilians, and thousands of captured insurgents, were killed in the suppression of the uprising. One hundred sixty-five thousand surviving civilians were sent to labour camps, and 50,000 were shipped to concentration camps.[2] Neither Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski nor Heinz Reinefarth were ever tried for their crimes committed during the suppression of the uprising.

See also

• Anti-Polish sentiment
• Katyn massacre (1940-1941)
• Massacres of Poles in Volhynia (1943-1944)
• Holocaust victims
• Medallions by Zofia Nałkowska.
• World War II evacuation and expulsion
• Consequences of German Nazism
• Racial policy of Nazi Germany

References

External links

• Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era
• Detainment of Poles related to WWII
• Five Million Forgotten: Non-Jewish Victims of the Shoah