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Poland German and Soviet Rule
For the next five years, Poland endured the most severe
wartime occupation conditions in modern European history.
Initially, Germany annexed western Poland directly,
establishing
a brutal colonial government whose expressed goal was to
erase
completely the concept of Polish nationhood and make the
Poles
slaves of a new German empire. About 1 million Poles were
removed
from German-occupied areas and replaced with German
settlers. An
additional 2.5 million Poles went into forced labor camps
in
Germany.
Until mid-1941, Germany and the Soviet Union maintained
good
relations in the joint dominion they had established over
Poland.
Moscow had absorbed the eastern regions largely inhabited
by
Ukrainians and Belorussians. By 1941 the Soviets had moved
1.5
million Poles into labor camps all over the Soviet Union,
and
Stalin's secret police had murdered thousands of Polish
prisoners
of war, especially figures in politics and public
administration.
The most notorious incident was the 1940 murder of
thousands of
Polish military officers; the bodies of 4,000 of them were
discovered in a mass grave in the Katyn forests near
Smolensk in
1943. Because Soviet authorities refused to admit
responsibility
until nearly the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Polish
opinion
regarded the Katyn Massacre as the ultimate symbol of
Soviet
cruelty and mendacity
(see Soviet Union and Russia
, ch.
4).
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,
all the
Polish lands came under control of the Third Reich, whose
occupation policies became even more bloodthirsty as the
war
continued
(see
fig. 10). Hitler considered Poland to be an
integral part of German Lebensraum, his concept of German
domination of the European continent. Eastern Europe would
be
purged of its population of putative racial inferiors and
prepared as the hinterland of a grandiose Germanic empire.
This
vision fueled the genocidal fanaticism of the conquerors.
Reduced
to slave status, the Poles lived under severe restrictions
enforced with savage punishment. As the principal center
of
European Jewry, Poland became the main killing ground of
the Nazi
Holocaust; several of the most lethal death camps,
including
Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, operated on Polish
soil. The
Germans annihilated nearly all of Poland's 3 million Jews.
Roughly as many Polish gentiles also perished under the
occupation.
Data as of October 1992
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