| Part of Generalplan Ost and Germanisation in Poland (1939–1945) | |
 Memorial to the Wola massacre, the systematic killing of around 40,000–50,000 Polish civilians and enemy combatants by Nazi German troops during the Warsaw Uprising of summer 1944 | |
| Date | 1939–1945 |
|---|---|
| Location | Occupied Poland |
| Cause | Invasion of Poland |
| Target | ethnic Poles, Polish Jews |
| Participants | Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS, Orpo, Selbstschutz, Trawnikis, Sonderdienst, BKA, TDA |
| Casualties | |
Around 5.5 million[1] to 6 million killed[a][2]
Part of a series | |
| Part of a series on |
| The Holocaust |
|---|
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Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland,[3] along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II,[4] included the genocide of millions of Polish people, especially the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles.[b] These mass killings were enacted by the Nazis with further plans that were justified by their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, and especially Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen.
By 1942, the Nazis were implementing their plan to murder every Jew in German-occupied Europe, and had also developed plans to reduce the Polish people through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and extermination through labor, and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed "racially valuable". During World War II, the Germans not only murdered millions of Poles, but ethnically cleansed millions more through forced deportation to make room for German settlers (see Generalplan Ost and Lebensraum). These actions claimed the lives of 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and 1.8 to 2.77 million ethnic Poles, according to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance.[a][6][7] German occupation policies in Poland have been recognized in Europe as a genocide, characterized by extremely large death tolls compared to Nazi atrocities in Western European states.[8][9]
The genocidal policies of the German government's colonization plan, Generalplan Ost (GPO), were the blueprint for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Polish nation from 1939 to 1945.[10] The Nazi master plan entailed the expulsion and mass extermination of some 85 percent (over 20 million) of ethnic Poles in Poland, the remaining 15 percent to be turned into slave labor.[11] While the final objectives of Hunger Plan and GPO were always pursued by the Nazi regime, it could not complete these programmes due to German defeat in World War II.[12] In 2000, by an act of the Polish Parliament, dissemination of knowledge on World War II crimes in Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was entrusted to the Institute of National Remembrance.[13][14]
From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize Adolf Hitler's plan, set out in his book Mein Kampf, to acquire "living space" (German: Lebensraum) in the east for massive settlement of German colonists.[4][15] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial theories.[16] In the Obersalzberg Speech delivered on 22 August 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to murder "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language."[17][18]
Ethnic cleansing was to be conducted systematically against the Polish people. On 7 September 1939, Sicherheitsdienst head Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered.[19] On 12 September, Wehrmacht chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German volk consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task."[20] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland".[19]
- ^ J. Wiatr, Jerzy (2014). "17, 18". Polish-German Relations. Berlin, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers. ISBN 978-3-8474-0608-2.
- ^ Sources:
- R. Miller, Phyllis (1995). "Gdansk". In Ring, Trudy; Watson, Noelle; Schellinger, Paul (eds.). International Dictionary of Historic Places. Vol. 2 Northern Europe. New York, USA: Routledge. p. 293. ISBN 1-884964-01-X.
- East, Roger; Pontin, Jolyon (2016). Revolution and Change in Central and Eastern Europe (Revised ed.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. p. 41. ISBN 978-1-4742-8749-4.
- J. Goldberg, Harold (2019). Daily Life in Nazi-Occupied Europe. California, USA: ABC-Clio, LLC. pp. 16, 26. ISBN 978-1-4408-5911-3.
- ^ Kulesza 2004, PDF, p. 29.
- ^ a b Gushee 2012, pp. 313–314.
- ^ Kiernan, Ben; Lower, Wendy; Naimark, Norman; Straus, Scott, eds. (2023). "15: The Nazis and the Slavs - Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War". The Cambridge World History of Genocide. Vol. 3: Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108767118. ISBN 978-1-108-48707-8.
- ^ "Poland | www.yadvashem.org". poland-historical-background.html. Retrieved 25 May 2019.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties". www.projectinposterum.org. Retrieved 25 May 2019.
- ^ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010, pp. 411–12, 416
- ^ Kiernan, Ben; Lower, Wendy; Naimark, Norman; Straus, Scott, eds. (2023). "15: The Nazis and the Slavs - Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War". The Cambridge World History of Genocide. Vol. 3: Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108767118. ISBN 978-1-108-48707-8.
- ^ Kulesza 2004.
- ^ "Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). The Nazi evolution in German foreign policy. Documentary sources". Versions of the GPO. Alexandria, VA: World Future Fund. 2003. Resources: Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe. Ibid.
- ^ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010, pp. 416
- ^ IPN 2013, pp. 5, 21, Guide.
- ^ Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Iacob, Bogdan (2015). Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies. Central European University Press. p. 243. ISBN 978-963-386-092-2.
In April 1991, the Polish Parliament changed a statute in force since 1945 about the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland.
– "More important than the change of the name was that the activity of the [earlier] commission was... totally controlled by the communists." Jerzy Halbersztadt (31 December 1995). "Main Crimes Commission in Poland". H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online (Email list). Retrieved 5 October 2013.[unreliable source?] - ^ Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, "Hitler's War; Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe", 1961, in Poland under Nazi Occupation, Polonia Publishing House, Warsaw, pp. 7–33, 164–78.
- ^ Gordon 1984, p. 100.
- ^ Lukas, Richard C. (2013). Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. University Press of Kentucky. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8131-3043-9. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Moor-Jankowskiwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b Piotrowski 2007, p. 23.
- ^ Piotrowski 2007, p. 23. See also: Europa für Bürger original in the German language — 15. März (1940): Himmler spricht in Poznan vor den versammelten Kommandanten der Konzentrationslager. Eine seiner Aussagen: "Alle polnischen Facharbeiter werden in unserer Rüstungsindustrie eingesetzt. Später werden alle Polen aus dieser Welt verschwinden. Es ist erforderlich, dass das großdeutsche Volk die Vernichtung sämtlicher Polen als seine Hauptaufgabe versteht.".
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