Difference between revisions of "Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles"

Latest revision as of 09:58, 20 November 2008

In addition to about three million Polish Jews (mostly killed in Operation Reinhard), 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war. Over two million were ethnic Poles (the remaining 500,000 were mainly ethnic minority Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland). The majority of those killed by Nazi Germany were civilians (exceeding military deaths nearly 10:1).^[1][2]

From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan laid-out by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his 1926 book Mein Kampf. The aim of this plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). As stated by Hitler in his Armenian quote, the SS units were sent: "with orders for them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need."^[3]

1939 September Campaign[edit]

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 the Soviet Union. Many of the them were killed in the Luftwaffe's terror bombing operations (including the bombing of Frampol and Wieluń). Massive air raids were conducted on these towns which had no military infrastructure. Columns of fleeing refugees were systematically attacked by the German fighter and dive-bomber aircraft.

From the first day of the war, the round-ups and summary executions of Poles commenced. They had already started in Germany before the war had begun. Several thousand Polish POWs were also murdered (most, however, survived captivity, as the Germans generally treated captured Polish soldiers better than the occupied civilian population).

Einsatzgruppen killings[edit]

Execution of Poles by Einsatzkommando - Leszno, October 1939

Main article: Einsatzgruppen

See also: Operation Tannenberg and German AB-Aktion operation in Poland

During the 1939 German invasion of Poland, "special action squads" of the SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed behind the front lines, arresting and killing civilians considered, by virtue of their social status, to be capable of abetting resistance efforts against the Germans.

In September 1939, during Operation Tannenberg, tens of thousands of former government officials, military officers in hiding, landowners, clergy, and members of the intelligentsia, Poles as well as Jews, were either murdered in mass executions by death squads or sent to prisons and concentration camps. "Whatever we find in the shape of an upper class in Poland will be liquidated," Hitler had ordered.^[4] In the mid-1940s, the AB-Aktion saw several thousand more killed or imprisoned (including the massacre of Lwów professors and the executions in Palmiry forest). The Einsatzgruppen were also responsible for the murder of Jews and Poles during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Terror and pacification operations[edit]

During the occupation, communities were held collectively responsible for Polish attacks against German troops and mass executions were conducted in reprisal. 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). German army and paramilitary units composed of Volksdeutsche also participated in executions of civilians.^[5]

The Nazis took hostages by the thousands at the time of the invasion and all during their occupation of Poland. Hostages were selected from among the most prominent citizens of occupied cities and villages: priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, as well as leaders of economic and social organizations and the trade unions. Often, however, they were chosen at random from all segments of society and for every German killed a group of between 50 and 100 Polish civilians were executed. 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 were razed in these operations. Poland was 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 ruthless.

Cultural genocide[edit]

As part of a wider effort to destroy the Polish nation, the Germans engaged in cultural genocide, closing, destroying or taking over administration of universities, high schools, museums, libraries and scientific laboratories as well as demolishing 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." The Poles responded with the "Secret Teaching" (Tajne Nauczanie) a campaign of underground education.

Plans for the "final solution"[edit]

Main article: Generalplan Ost

In the same document, Himmler promised to eventually deport all Slavic Poles to Russia. In other statements, he mentioned the future killing fields in the Pripet Marshes where all were intended to die during the cultivation of the swamps. Plans for the mass transportation and creation of slave labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made. 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."^[6]

Expulsion of Polish population[edit]

Expulsion of Poles from villages in Zamość Region by SS in December 1942.

Main article: Expulsion of Poles by Germany

Germany planned to completely remove the indigenous population of Poland. According to the Lebensraum ideology, their place was to be taken by the German military and civilian settlers. 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.

Concentration camps[edit]

A Å‚apanka in Warsaw in 1941, possibly the one Witold Pilecki and 2,000 others were captured in

Main article: Nazi concentration camps

See also: German camps in occupied Poland during World War II

Hundreds of thousands of Poles were prisoners in the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. An estimated 30,000 Poles died at Mauthausen-Gusen; 20,000 each at Sachsenhausen and Gross-Rosen; 17,000 at Neuengamme and 10,000 at Dachau. About 17,000 Polish women died at Ravensbrück. A major concentration camp complex at Stutthof, east of Gdańsk, existed from September 2, 1939, to the end of the war, where an estimated 20,000 Poles died. Many Poles died in Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or found their deaths in the dozens of other camps, prisons and other places of detention inside and outside Poland. There were even special camps for children such as the Potulice concentration camp. According to some modern research, in the years 1943–1944, the Warsaw concentration camp was used as a death camp in an attempt to depopulate the Polish capital Warsaw.

Auschwitz I concentration camp

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 ailing prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet POWs, were killed in the first Zyklon-B gassing experiments. 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. 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, human experimentation, starvation and disease.

Indiscriminate executions[edit]

The gentile population of Poland was targeted by the Å‚apanka policy which German forces utilized to indiscriminately round up civilians off the street. In Warsaw, between 1942 and 1944, there were approximately 400 daily victims of Å‚apanka. It is estimated that tens of thousands of these victims were killed in mass executions, including an estimated 37,000 people at the Pawiak prison complex run by the Gestapo, and thousands of others killed in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Extermination of hospital patients[edit]

Main article: Action T4

In July 1939, a Nazi secret program called Action T4 was implemented whose purpose was to effect the extermination of psychiatric patients. During the German invasion of Poland, the program was put into practice on a massive scale in the occupied Polish territories. Typically, all patients, accompanied by soldiers from special SS detachments, were transported by trucks to the extermination sites. The first action of this type took place on September 22, 1939, at a large psychiatric hospital in Kocborowo (Gdańsk region). The total number of psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in occupied Poland between 1939–1945 is estimated to be more than 16,000. An additional 10,000 patients died of malnutrition. Approximately 100 of the 243 members of the Polish Psychiatric Association met the same fate as their patients.

Beyond execution by firing squad, more heinous methods of mass murder were also employed. In October 1939, 1,000 patients of a psychiatric hospital in Owińska were transported to a military fortress in Poznań; there, in the bunkers of Fort VII, children as well as adults were gassed with carbon monoxide. Other Owińska hospital patients were gassed in sealed trucks using carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes of vehicles. The same method was utilized in the Kochanówek hospital near Łódź, where 2,200 persons were killed in 1940. This was the first "successful" test of the mass murder of prisoners using poison gas. This technique was later perfected on many other psychiatric patients in Poland and Germany; starting in 1941, the technique was widely employed in the extermination camps. Nazi gas vans were also first used in 1940 to kill Polish mentally ill children.^[7]

In 1943, the SS and Police Leader in Poland, Wilhelm Koppe, ordered more than 30,000 Polish patients suffering from tuberculosis to be executed. They were killed mostly in Chelmno extermination camp.

Forced labor in Germany[edit]

Main article: Forced labor in Germany during World War II

See also: Forced prostitution in German armed forces

Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich into forced labor, many of them teenage boys and girls. Although Germany also used forced laborers from Western Europe, Poles and other Eastern Europeans who were viewed as racially inferior were subjected to intensified 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, most Polish laborers were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than Western Europeans. 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 considered a capital crime punishable by death.

Germanization[edit]

See also: Kidnapping of Polish children by Nazi Germany

In Reichsgau Wartheland, the annexed territories of Greater Poland, the Nazis' goal was complete Germanization: assimilation 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 (Łódź became Litzmannstadt, etc). Tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, were seized from their owners. Signs posted in front of those establishments warned: "Entrance forbidden for Poles, Jews, and dogs." The Nazi regime was less stringent in their treatment of the Kashubians in the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia. Everywhere, however, many thousands of people were forced to sign the Deutsche Volksliste a racial documentation which the Nazis used to identify and give priotity to people of German heritage in occupied countries. At least 20,000 children in occupied Poland were also kidnapped by the Nazis to be subjected to German indoctrination.^[8]

Persecution of Catholic clergy[edit]

Maximilian Kolbe statue (left), Westminster Abbey

The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in the 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 persecuting monks and nuns throughout Poland. In Pomerania, all but 20 of the 650 priests were shot or sent to concentration camps. Between 1939 and 1945, 2,935 members^[9] of the Polish clergy (18%^[10]) were killed in concentration camps. In the city of Wrocław (Breslau), 49% of its Catholic priests were killed; in Chełmno, 48%. One hundred eight of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Among them, Maximilian Kolbe was canonized as a saint.

1944 destruction of Warsaw[edit]

Civilians executed in Warsaw

Memorial to the Wola massacre

Main article: Warsaw Uprising

During the suppression of the 1944 uprising in Warsaw, German forces committed many atrocities against Polish civilians, following the order by Hitler to level the city. The most notorious occurrence 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 the Einsatzkommando of the Sicherheitspolizei under Heinz Reinefarth's command and the amnestied German criminals from Dirlewanger. Other similar massacres took place in the areas of Śródmieście (City Centre), Stare Miasto (Old Town) and Marymont districts. In Ochota district, an orgy of civilian killings, rape and looting was carried out by Russian collaborators of RONA. After the fall of Stare Miasto, during the beginning of September, 7,000 seriously wounded hospital 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. Until the end of September 1944, Polish resistance fighters were not considered by Germans as combatants; thus, when captured, they were summarily executed. One hundred sixty-five thousand surviving civilians were sent to labour camps, and 50,000 were shipped to concentration camps,^[11] while the ruined city was systematically demolished. Neither Reinefarth nor Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski were ever tried for their crimes committed during the suppression of the uprising. (The Polish request for extradition of amnestied Wilhelm Koppe from Germany was also refused.)

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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