Polish Victims

Poland suffered the highest proportional losses of any country in the Second World War. Of Poland’s pre-war population of approximately 35 million, between 5.6 and 5.8 million were dead by 1945. Approximately 3 million of those were Jewish Poles, murdered in the Holocaust. The remaining 2 to 2.8 million were non-Jewish Polish civilians killed through execution, starvation, forced labour, and the deliberate destruction of Polish society. Poland did not simply suffer the collateral damage of war. It was the laboratory and the primary intended victim of a German colonial programme whose ultimate aim was to erase the Polish nation and replace it with German settlers.

The ideological basis: Poles as Untermenschen

Nazi racial ideology classified Slavic peoples, including Poles, as Untermenschen, subhumans, racially inferior to Germans and destined by nature to be ruled, exploited, and ultimately replaced. Poland’s territory was coveted as Lebensraum, living space for German expansion eastward. The Poles themselves were an obstacle to be removed: too numerous to enslave entirely, too racially “impure” (in Nazi terms) to be Germanised in significant numbers, and too culturally distinct to be absorbed. The conclusion the Nazi leadership drew was that Poland as a nation had to be destroyed. Its people would be killed, deported to Siberia, worked to death as slave labourers, or reduced to a remnant helot population serving German agricultural estates. The land would be German.

Hitler articulated this vision clearly and repeatedly. In March 1941 he stated that the General Government territory, German-occupied central Poland, was to become “a purely German area” within fifteen to twenty years. The fifteen million Poles living there would be gone; four to five million Germans would take their place. The region would be “as German as the Rhineland.”

The killing of Polish leadership: Intelligenzaktion

From the first days of the invasion in September 1939, German forces executed a pre-prepared plan to destroy the Polish intellectual, cultural, professional, and political leadership. The programme, known as Intelligenzaktion, was based on lists prepared before the invasion identifying Polish teachers, professors, priests, lawyers, doctors, engineers, landowners, politicians, and civil servants who were to be arrested and killed. The logic was explicit: a nation without its educated class is a nation without the capacity to resist, organise, or perpetuate its culture.

Operation Tannenberg and the subsequent AB-Aktion in 1940 killed approximately 60,000 Polish intellectuals and professionals in the first year of the occupation. The Palmiry Forest outside Warsaw was one of dozens of execution sites where Poles were shot in secret and buried in mass graves. Professors at Jagiellonian University in Krakow were arrested on 6 November 1939 under the pretext of attending an academic lecture, 183 academics were taken to concentration camps. Catholic priests were arrested and killed in large numbers: by 1945 approximately 3,000 Polish Catholic clergy had been killed.

The destruction of Polish culture

The systematic destruction of Polish cultural life ran alongside the physical killing. All Polish universities, secondary schools, and cultural institutions were closed. Polish-language publishing was banned. Polish art, archives, and libraries were looted: German forces removed approximately 2.5 million volumes from Polish libraries and archives to Germany, destroyed what could not be taken, and confiscated art collections of incalculable value. The Polish language was banned from official use in the annexed territories. Polish place names were Germanised. The cultural memory of Poland was being erased in preparation for the territory’s transformation into German land.

Mass executions of civilians

Throughout the occupation, German forces conducted mass reprisal executions of Polish civilians in response to resistance activities. The standard ratio was ten to one hundred Poles shot for every German killed. Villages suspected of sheltering partisans were burned and their populations killed. The Wola massacre during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 killed between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians in a single week. The Pawiak prison in Warsaw was a centre of execution: approximately 37,000 Poles were killed there over the course of the occupation. Auschwitz was built in 1940 primarily to imprison and kill Polish political prisoners; the first mass execution at Auschwitz was of 348 Polish political prisoners on 22 November 1940, before the camp was adapted for the genocide of the Jews.

Forced labour

Between 1.5 and 2.5 million Polish civilians were deported to Germany as forced labourers over the course of the occupation. They worked in German factories, farms, and households under conditions that caused significant deaths and that were explicitly designed to be exploitative and degrading. Polish workers in Germany were required to wear identifying badges, were paid at lower rates than German workers, were forbidden from using public transport or entering restaurants, and were subject to criminal penalties including death for sexual relations with Germans.

See also

Sources

  • Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939, 1944, Hippocrene, 1986
  • Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918, 1947, McFarland, 1998
  • Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2008
  • Czesław Madała, Polacy w niemieckich obozach koncentracyjnych, Wydawnictwo Polonia, 2001
  • Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw, Macmillan, 2003
  • Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), Warsaw, archives on the Polish wartime losses
  • USHMM, Poland, Holocaust Encyclopedia