German AB-Aktion in Poland

AB-Aktion
A picture taken from a nearby house by the Polish Underground of the Nazi Secret Police dislodging condemned victims from the Polish intelligentsia at the Palmiry forest execution site near Warsaw in 1940
Also known asGerman: Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion
LocationPalmiry Forest and similar locations in occupied Poland
DateSpring–summer 1940
Incident typeMass murder with automatic weapons
PerpetratorsWehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen
Participants Nazi Germany
OrganizationsWaffen-SS, Schutzstaffel, Order Police battalions, Sicherheitsdienst
Victims7,000 intellectuals and leaders of the Second Polish Republic
DocumentationPawiak and Gestapo
MemorialsMurder site and deportation points
NotesLethal phase of the invasion of Poland

The 1940 AB-Aktion (German: Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion, lit.'Extraordinary Operation of Pacification'), a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence in Poland during World War II, aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic across the territories slated for eventual annexation by the German Reich.

Most of the killings were arranged in a form of forced disappearances from multiple cities and towns upon the arrival of German forces.[1] In the spring and summer of 1940 the Nazi authorities in German-occupied central Poland (the so-called General Government) arrested more than 30,000 Polish citizens.[2] About 7,000 of them, including community leaders, professors, teachers and priests (labeled as suspected of criminal activities), were subsequently massacred secretly at various locations - including at the Palmiry forest complex near Palmiry.[3][4] The others were sent to Nazi concentration camps.

  1. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust: ethnic strife, collaboration with occupying forces and genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland. p. 25. ISBN 0786403713.
  2. ^ Chapter "Hitler's Plans for Poland." Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents Archived 2013-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, p. 988.
  3. ^ AB-Aktion, Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies.
  4. ^ "Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era" at the "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum". Archived from the original on June 7, 2007. Retrieved 2013-05-24.