Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September. Within five weeks, Polish state existence had been ended and the country had been partitioned between the two invaders. Around 2 million Polish Jews now lived under German rule. Around 1.3 million more lived under Soviet rule. The Soviet-occupied Polish territories would themselves come under German rule in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, around 3 million Polish Jews were under direct German control. Most of them were dead by the end of 1943.
The invasion
The German army crossed the Polish border at multiple points before dawn on 1 September 1939. The campaign was conducted with the full Blitzkrieg doctrine that Germany had been refining throughout the 1930s. Polish forces, while well led in the field, were outnumbered, less mechanised, and rapidly enveloped. Warsaw was bombed from the first day. The Polish government evacuated south and then over the border into Romania. By 6 October 1939 the campaign was effectively over and Polish state forces had surrendered or been destroyed.
Behind the army came specialised SS killing units, the Einsatzgruppen of 1939, with orders to eliminate the Polish political and intellectual elite. They shot Polish priests, professors, lawyers, doctors, journalists and political activists. Around 60,000 Polish citizens were killed in these first weeks alone, before the wider German occupation regime had even been set up. The pattern of the German occupation was visible from the start: Poland was not to exist as a nation. Its educated class was to be destroyed. Its population was to be reduced to forced labour for the German economy. The Jewish part of the population was a separate and more lethal part of the same project, but the project itself was the dismantling of Poland.
The partition
The German part of Poland was further divided. The western and northern provinces (Pomerania, Poznan, Upper Silesia, the Polish part of East Prussia) were annexed directly to the Reich and the local Polish population was scheduled for expulsion or Germanisation. The remainder of the German zone, the central and southern provinces around Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin and Radom, became the Generalgouvernement, a colonial possession run by Hans Frank from a residence at Wawel Castle in Kraków. The Generalgouvernement was where most of the Polish Jewish population lived. It was also where most of the killing infrastructure was built.
The early measures
The German occupation imposed antisemitic measures on the Polish Jewish population from the first weeks. By the end of 1939 Polish Jews had been required to register, to wear a yellow Star of David armband, and to hand over their property and businesses to German trustees. They were excluded from the schools, from public transport, from the parks. Jewish religious observance was prohibited. Synagogues were burned in dozens of towns in the first months of the occupation. Beard-cutting of Orthodox Jewish men, in many cases by SS men carrying scissors as they walked through Jewish streets, was a public humiliation that became routine.
The first Polish Jewish ghettos were established in late 1939 in the smaller towns of the Warthegau, the annexed western Polish region. The Łódź Ghetto, in what was now the German city of Litzmannstadt, was sealed in April 1940. The Warsaw Ghetto was sealed in November 1940. The Kraków Ghetto was established in March 1941. By the end of 1941, the great majority of the Polish Jewish population was confined inside ghettos in the major cities, with smaller ghettos in the towns.
The conditions
The conditions inside the ghettos are covered in detail on the Ghettos in Detail page. The brief summary is that the rations were below survival level, the housing was overcrowded, the disease environment was lethal, and the German guards used routine violence to maintain order. Around 800,000 to 1 million Polish Jews died inside the ghettos between 1940 and 1942 from starvation, typhus and dysentery, before any of them were deported to the death camps. The slow death of the ghetto period is part of the Polish Jewish casualty figure that the standard Holocaust narrative sometimes overlooks.
The Soviet zone
The Polish Jews who lived under Soviet occupation between September 1939 and June 1941 had a different experience. The Soviet authorities were not friendly to the Jewish population specifically but were not deliberately murdering it either. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Polish Jews were deported by the Soviets to the Gulag during this period, mostly along with other categories of suspect Polish citizens. Many of the deportees survived the war in Soviet detention or in the Soviet interior, and they form a substantial fraction of the Polish Jewish post-war survivor population. They were saved by being sent to Siberia.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish Jews under Soviet occupation became, in a few weeks, Polish Jews under German occupation. The killing programme that had begun further west reached them within days of the German arrival.
What it became
By the end of 1941, the situation of Polish Jewry was already disastrous. Around half a million had died in the ghettos. The pre-killing programme of starvation and disease was running at full capacity. The deportations to the death camps had not yet begun, and the regime had not yet decided to begin them. When that decision was made in late 1941 and early 1942, the operation that followed would be the bulk of the Holocaust. The Polish Jewish population was, by then, already concentrated, registered, identified and held inside walled districts. The German occupation had made it ready for what was about to happen.
See also
Sources
- Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, Indiana University Press, 1989
- Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide, Cambridge University Press, 1992
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
- USHMM: Poland