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==[[Concentration camp]]s== |
==[[Concentration camp]]s== |
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Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp in the extensive concentration camp system in |
Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp in the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland] and the [[Reich]]. A major [[labor camp]] complex at [[Stutthof]], east of [[Gdansk|Danzig]], existed from [[September 2]], 1939, to war's end, and an estimated 20,000 Poles died there as a result of executions, hard labor, 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, victims in the tens of thousands were executed or died in the thousands of other camps-including special children's camps such as at [[Łódź]] and its subcamp, at Dzierzan — and in prisons and other places of detention within and outside Poland. |
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===[[Auschwitz]]=== |
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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. 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, victims in the tens of thousands were executed or died in the thousands of other camps-including special children's camps such as at [[Łódź]] and its subcamp, at Dzierzan — and in prisons and other places of detention within and outside Poland. |
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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 [[Tarnow]]. 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 prisoners of war, 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. |
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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. |
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===[[Warsaw concentration camp]]=== |
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Between 1943 until 1944, the ''Konzentrationslager Warschau'' worked as a [[death camp]] to exterminate the Polish population of [[Warsaw]]. |
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During its existance, estimated 200,000 people were killed there, most of them Polish citiziens of the city. Some of them were shot in a publicised reprisal executions of [[hostages]], but most of them were secretly gassed in the giant [[gas chamber]] in an underground tunnel. |
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==[[Warsaw Uprising]] atrocities== |
==[[Warsaw Uprising]] atrocities== |
Revision as of 14:54, 24 March 2006
This article details the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against ethnic Poles during the World War II. 3 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, most of them civilians, killed by the actions of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union.
The war against Poland was from the start 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 the source of the power for Germany, so called German Lebensraum (living space). The German Army was sent, as stated by 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".
Terror and crimes against intelligentsia and clergy
During the 1939 German invasion of Poland, special action squads of SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed in the rear, arresting or killing those civilians caught resisting the Germans or considered capable of doing so as determined by their position and social status. Tens of thousands of wealthy landowners, clergymen, and members of the intelligentsia—government officials, teachers, doctors, dentists, officers, 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 instances, these executions were reprisal actions that held entire communities collectively responsible for the killing of Germans. More than 20,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in the Operation Tannenberg alone.
The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in Wartheland more harshly than elsewhere, as they systematically closed churches there; most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents, persecuting 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.
Cultural genocide and a preparations of the final solution
As part of wider efforts 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 Polish children's schooling 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 in his May 1940 memorandum. In the same document he promised to deport all Poles to the east. In other statements he mentioned the future killing fields for all Poles in the Pripjet Swamps. Plans for mass transportation and slave labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made. All should die during the cultivation of the swamps. A bitter note is Hitler`s remark, that they should be exterminated where the Poles in the early medivial age originated.
In the Wartheland, Nazis' goal was complete Germanization to assimilate the territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. Germans closed even elementary schools where Polish was the language of instruction. They renamed streets and cities so that Łódź became Litzmannstadt, for example. They also seized tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, without payment to the owners. Signs posted in public places warned: "Entrance is forbidden for Poles, Jews, and dogs."
Extermination of psychiatric patients
In July 1939 Nazi Germany established a secret program for the extermination of the psychiatric patients called T-4 Euthanasia Program. Already during the Polish Campaign, the program was carried over into the occupied Polish territories. Initially it was implemented according to the following plan: a German director was taking control over the psychiatric hospital; under the threat of death penalty no patient could be released from the hospital; all patients were counted and transported by trucks to the unknown destination. Each transport 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 circumstances 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. At the same time as patients six hospital employees, included a deputy director, were murdered by a firing squad. Overall, between 1939-1944, 2,562 Kocborowo’s patients were killed. Similar exterminations took place in October of 1939 in a hospital in Owińska, near Poznań where 1,000 patients (children and adults) were killed. In addition to the executions by a firing squad, other methods of mass murder were also used. Patients of 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 also gassed by carbon monoxide in sealed trucks. The same method was performed in Kochanówek hospital near Łódź (in the period March-August 1940, 2200 persons were killed). This first "successful" of Nazi Germany’s testing of mass murder by gas poisoning was later used against other psychiatric patients in occupied Poland and Germany and, starting from 1941, against inmates of the extermination camps.
The total number of murdered by German Nazis psychiatric patients in occupied Poland between 1939-1945 is estimated to be over 16,000, with an additional 10,000 patients who died of malnutrition. Additionally, out of 243 members of the pre-WWII Polish Psychiatric Association, approximately 100 met the fate of their patients.
Forced labor
Between 1939 and 1945 at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for labor, most of them against their will. Many were teenage boys and girls. Although Germany also used forced laborers 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 transportation. While the actual treatment accorded 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 lived 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.
Concentration camps
Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp in the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland] and the Reich. A major labor camp complex at Stutthof, east of Danzig, existed from September 2, 1939, to war's end, and an estimated 20,000 Poles died there as a result of executions, hard labor, 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, victims in the tens of thousands were executed or died in the thousands of other camps-including special children's camps such as at Łódź and its subcamp, at Dzierzan — and in prisons and other places of detention within and outside Poland.
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 Tarnow. 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 prisoners of war, 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.
Warsaw concentration camp
Between 1943 until 1944, the Konzentrationslager Warschau worked as a death camp to exterminate the Polish population of Warsaw.
During its existance, estimated 200,000 people were killed there, most of them Polish citiziens of the city. Some of them were shot in a publicised reprisal executions of hostages, but most of them were secretly gassed in the giant gas chamber in an underground tunnel.
Warsaw Uprising atrocities
During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising German forces committed numerous atrocities against Polish civilians. Most of them took place in Wola district where, at the beginning of August 1944, civilians (men, women, and children) were methodically rounded-up and executed by Sonder- and Einsatzkomando of Sicherheitspolizei operating within the SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth group under overall Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski command. Executions in the Wola district, sometimes called Wola massacre, also included the killings of both the patients and the personnel of local hospitals. Victims’ bodies were then collected by the organized German members of the so-called Verbrennungskommando comprised of selected Polish men and burnt. Other similar massacres took place in the areas of Sródmieście (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. Exhumations conducted after the war recovered 11,529 tons of the human ashes from these locations.
Until the end of the September 1944, 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, remaining 7,000 seriously wounded hospitals’ patients were executed or burnt alive often with caring for them medical staff. 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.
Neither Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski nor Heinz Reinefarth were ever tried for their Warsaw Uprising atrocities.
See also
- AB Action
- Generalplan Ost
- German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
- Massacre of Poles in Volhynia
- Łapanka (round-up)
- Murder of Lwów professors
- World War II evacuation and expulsion
- World War II atrocities
- Bombing of Frampol in World War II
- Bombing of Wieluń in World War II
- Selbstschutz
- Pacification Operations in German-occupied Poland
- Polonophobia
- Medallions - a book based on true accounts of witnesses
- Nazi crimes in Warmia
- Potulice concentration camp