Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
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.
"Polish Holocaust" redirects here. Not to be confused with The Holocaust in Poland.Date
1939–1945
ethnic Poles, Polish Jews
Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS, Orpo, Selbstschutz, Trawnikis, Sonderdienst, BKA, TDA
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]