Poland in World War II
The German Army, without a declaration of war and on the pretense that Poland was infringing on German territory, invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Within the week the Polish Army was virtually defeated. On September 17, Russia, having signed a nonaggression pact with Germany on August 23, 1939, invaded Poland from the east. Two days later the German and Russian forces met near Brest Litovsk. On September 17 Warsaw surrendered and the next day Germany and Russia divided Poland. By the end of the month a Polish government-in-exile was established in Paris and it eventually transferred to London.
Danzig was annexed and incorporated into the Greater Reich as well as 32,000 square miles of territory between East Prussia and Silesia. Western Poland was divided into districts: Danzig- West Prussia under Gauleiter Albert Forster and Warth under Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. The rest of German-occupied Poland was designated as Generalgouvernment of Poland and placed under German civil administration headed by Governor General Hans Frank, headquartered in Cracow.
The Nazi occupiers set about subjugating the Poles. First they exterminated many political, intellectual, and religious leaders, and sent many to Germany as slave laborers. To create new living space for Germans, many Poles were resettled (being pushed into Generalgouvernment from the incorporated areas) and German families moved into the emptied lands, and took control of Polish business establishments. Thousands of other Poles, including Jews, were sent to concentration camps and some 50,000 Polish children were sent to Germany to be adopted by German families.
After the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Russian-occupied portion of Poland was brought into German control. This meant that the Germans had acquired over 150,000 square miles, over 35 million people, and access to great wealth. The German occupiers brutally exploited Poland's economic resources, confiscating a significant amount of Poland's wealth. By the spring of 1942, it was estimated that 230,000 Polish firms, industrial and commercial, and 187,000 urban properties (urban real estate) had been expropriated in the incorporated area of Poland. In addition, some 2 million Poles were sent to Germany as slave laborers.
During the early stages of occupation, some 3 million Polish Jews were forced into approximately 400 newly established ghettos. Large number of Jews were also deported from other countries, including Germany, to ghettos in Poland and German-occupied territories further west. Many of these ghettos provided a forced labor pool for the Germany. In 1942, the Germans began a policy of eliminating most of the Ghettos and sending the Jews to extermination camps.
This process began in December 1941, when Jews in the Wartheland began being deported to Chelmno for extermination. This was followed in March 1942, when Jews of Lublin began being deported to Belzec. From July to September 1942, over 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. Extermination centers were also established at Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. By war's end approximately 3 million Polish Jews, some 90 percent of the pre-Final Solution population were exterminated during the war.
Russian forces entered eastern Poland in July 1944 and a provisional Polish Government was established. German forces were finally expelled from Poland early in 1945.
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