World War II crimes in Poland

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This article details the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against ethnic Poles during World War II. Three million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, most of them civilians, killed by the actions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

From the start, the war against Poland was intended as a fulfillment of the plan described by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf. The main axis of the plan was that all of Eastern Europe should become part of the greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). The German Army was sent, as stated by Adolf Hitler in his Armenian quote: "with orders for them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language".

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[edit] Terror and crimes against intelligentsia and clergy

During the German invasion of Poland (1939), special action squads of SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed in the rear, and arrested or killed civilians caught offering resistance against the Germans or considered capable of doing so, as determined by their position and social status. Tens of thousands of government officials, landowners, clergy, and members of the intelligentsia — teachers, doctors, journalists, and others (both Poles and Jews) — were either murdered in mass executions or sent to prisons and concentration camps. German army units and "self-defense" forces composed of Volksdeutsche also participated in executions of civilians. In many cases, these executions were reprisal actions that held entire communities collectively responsible for attacks on German forces or the murder of ethnic Germans. More than 20,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in Operation Tannenberg alone.

The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in Wartheland more harshly than elsewhere: churches were systematically closed; most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents and persecuted monks and nuns. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were murdered (in all of Poland); of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps (787 of them at Dachau). One hundred and eight of them are regarded as blessed martyrs, Maximilian Kolbe as a saint.

[edit] Cultural genocide and the preparations for the final solution

As part of a wider effort to destroy Polish culture, the Germans closed or destroyed universities, schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories. They demolished 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 after a few years of elementary education.

"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,"

Himmler wrote a memorandum in May 1940. In it he promised to deport all Poles to the east [Russia]. In other statements, he mentioned the future killing fields for all Poles in the Pripet Marshes. Plans for mass transportation and slave labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made. All were intended to die during the cultivation of the swamps. A bitter note is Hitler's remark that the Poles should be exterminated where they originated in the early medieval age.

In the Wartheland, the Nazis' goal was complete Germanization: to assimilate the territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. Germans closed elementary schools where Polish was the language taught. Streets and cities were renamed so that Łódź became Litzmannstadt, for example. Tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, were seized without payment to the owners. Signs posted in public places warned: "Entrance forbidden for Poles, Jews, and dogs."

[edit] Extermination of psychiatric patients

Main article: Nazi eugenics

In July 1939, a Nazi secret program called T-4 Euthanasia Program was developed with the intention of exterminating psychiatric patients. During the German invasion of Poland, the programme was put into practice in the occupied Polish territories. Initially, it was implemented according to the following plan: a German director took control over the psychiatric hospital; under the threat of execution, no patient could be released from the hospital; and all patients were counted and transported by trucks to an unknown destination. Each truck was accompanied by armed soldiers from special SS detachments who returned without the patients after a few hours. The patients were said to be transferred to another hospital, but evidence showed that they had been killed. The first action of this type took place in Kocborowo, at a large psychiatric hospital in the Gdańsk region on September 22, 1939. Along with their patients, six hospital employees, including a deputy director, were murdered by a firing squad. Overall, between 1939-1944, 2,562 of Kocborowo’s patients were killed. Similar exterminations took place in October 1939 in a hospital in Owińska, near Poznań, where 1,000 patients (children and adults) were killed.

In addition to the executions by firing squad, other methods of mass murder were also used. Patients at a psychiatric hospital in Owińska were transported to a military fortress in Poznań where, in Fort VII bunkers, they were gassed by carbon monoxide, approximately 50 persons at a time. Other Owińska hospital patients were gassed in sealed trucks by the carbon monoxide of the exhaust fumes. The same method was performed in Kochanówek Hospital near Łódź where, between March-August 1940, 2,200 persons were killed. This was the first "successful" test of mass murder using gas poisoning and this "technique" was later used and perfected on many other psychiatric patients in occupied Poland and Germany and, starting in 1941, on inmates of the extermination camps. The total number of psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in occupied Poland between 1939-1945 is estimated to be more than 16,000, with an additional 10,000 patients who died of malnutrition. Additionally, approximately 100 out of 243 members of the pre-war Polish Psychiatric Association, met the same fate as their patients. Nazi terror was aimed at the complete reconstruction of society. Jews were to disappear; Poles were to become slaves of Greater Germany. Therefore the leadership of Poles: political, economic and religious, were to be murdered, while the bulk of the population were stripped of any rights and given no education or health care. To explain the policy of terror for German society at home and abroad, some pretext was necessary. Some of the alleged causes were revenge for Bloody Sunday, reaction to Polish resistance activities and the political agenda of the fanatical Nazi leadership.-->

[edit] Forced labour

Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour, against their will. Many were teenage boys and girls (see also: Forced prostitution in German armed forces). Although Germany also used forced labourers from Western Europe, Poles, along with other Eastern Europeans viewed as inferior, were subject to especially harsh discriminatory measures. They were forced to wear identifying purple P's sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew, and banned from public transport. While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, Polish laborers as a rule were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than Western Europeans and, 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 with them were considered "racial defilement", punishable by death. During the war, hundreds of Polish men were executed for their relations with German women.

[edit] Concentration camps

Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. A major labour camp complex at Stutthof, east of Gdańsk/Danzig, existed from September 2, 1939 to the end of the war, where an estimated 20,000 Poles died as a result of executions, hard labour, and harsh conditions. Some 100,000 Poles were deported to Majdanek, and tens of thousands of them died there. An estimated 20,000 Poles died at Sachsenhausen, 20,000 at Gross-Rosen, 30,000 at Mauthausen, 17,000 at Neuengamme, 10,000 at Dachau, and 17,000 at Ravensbrück. In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or died in their thousands in other camps, including special children's camps such as in Łódź and its subcamp at Dzierżan, in prisons and other places of detention inside and outside Poland.

[edit] Auschwitz

Auschwitz became the main concentration camp for Poles after the arrival there, on June 14, 1940, of 728 men transported from an overcrowded prison at Tarnów. By March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them Poles. In September 1941, 200 ill prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet POWs, were killed in the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz. 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 camp. The Polish scholar 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, of cruel medical experiments, and of starvation and disease.

[edit] Warsaw concentration camp

From 1943 until 1944, the Warsaw concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Warschau) worked as a death camp to exterminate the Polish population of Warsaw. The Gentile population of Poland was a target of the łapanka policy, in which the forces of SS, Wehrmacht and police rounded up civilians on the street; between 1942 and 1944, there were approximately 400 victims of the łapanka in Warsaw daily. During the existence of the KL Warschau, it is estimated that tens of thousands (IPN [1]) of people were killed there, most of them Polish citizens of the city. Most of them were shot in publicised reprisal executions of hostages or died due to bad health conditions in the camp and a typhus epidemic; some were also gassed. Some historians, such as Maria Trzcińska, also postulate the existence of an enormous gas chamber in a railway tunnel at Bem Street; however, this claim is highly controversial. The very existence of the death camp part of the compound, had been a public secret during the era of Communist rule in Poland. The reason was to inflate numbers of victims of the Warsaw Uprising, initiated by the patriotic Polish Home Army against the Germans in 1944, which was followed by massive civilian casualties inflicted by the Nazis upon the city's population (see below).

[edit] Warsaw Uprising atrocities

During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, German forces committed many atrocities against Polish civilians, following the order by Hitler to annihilate the city and "turn it into a lake".

The most severe of them took place in Wola district where, at the beginning of August 1944, tens of thousands of civilians (men, women, and children) were methodically rounded-up and executed by Einsatzkommando of Sicherheitspolizei operating within the SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth group under the overall command of Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski. Executions in the Wola district, sometimes called the Wola massacre, also included the killings of both the patients and staff of local hospitals. Victims’ bodies were then collected by the members of the Verbrennungskommando, comprising selected Polish men, and burnt. Other similar massacres took place in the areas of Śródmieście (City Centre), Old Town, Marymont, and Ochota districts. In Ochota district, civilian killings, rapes, and looting were conducted by the members of Russian collaborators from SS-Sturmbrigade RONA. Until the end of the September 1944, Polish resistance fighters were not considered by Germans as combatants; thus, when captured, they were summarily executed. After the fall of the Old Town, during the beginning of September, the remaining 7,000 seriously wounded hospitals’ patients were executed or burnt alive often with the medical staff caring for them. Similar atrocities took place later in the Czerniaków district. A number of captured insurgents were hanged or otherwise executed after the fall of Powiśle and Mokotów districts as well.

Out of 450,000 surviving civilians, 90,000 were sent to labour camps, and 60,000 were shipped to a death and concentration camps. Neither Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski nor Heinz Reinefarth were ever tried for their Warsaw Uprising atrocities.

[edit] List of internment sites for Poles

Below is an incomplete list of sites, where Poles, detained, imprisoned, forced into slave labour, and exterminated were found both on Polish territory and outside it. This includes also concentration camps and camp complexes where persons of Polish nationality and citizens of Poland of other nationalities were detained as World War II combatants and victims of war and post-war repressions.

The article List of concentration camps for Poles contains the following lists:

  • Sites of internment camps of the Security police (UB)
  • Nazi concentration camps primarily for Poles (Polenlager)
  • Extermination camps for children younger than 14 years old

A significant number of Poles were detained in German concentration camps, see List of Nazi camps.

List of Gulag camps marks those that detained people of Polish nationality. Poles populated Gulag camps in three major waves, see Polish minority in Soviet Union article.

List of POW camps in USSR includes those associated with the Katyn Massacre.

[edit] List of places of mass executions in June/July 1941

[edit] Other

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

Five Million Forgotten. Five Million Forgotten - Non-Jewish Victims of the Shoah. Retrieved on 2006-03-28.

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