Crime and Pillage. How the Germans Cover Up the Truth About Themselves - Wojciech Polak, Sylwia Galij-Skarbińska

Genocide

1 See: R. Wojtyszyn, "Faszyzm i nazizm w myśli Ludwiga von Misesa oraz Friedricha Augusta von Hayeka," Studia nad Faszyzmem i Zbrodniami Hitlerowskimi 31 (2009), pp. 27-28; H. Olszewski, "Nazizm," Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN, https://sztetl.org.pl/pl/slownik/nazizm (accessed 24 May 2019). For more, see: M. Maciejewski, Ruch i ideologia narodowych socjalistów w Republice Weimarskiej, Warsaw-Wrocław, 1985; M. Maciejewski , Niemieckie elity a hitleryzm, Wrocław, 1994; M. Maciejewski, Pod znakiem swastyki, Cracow, 2005; E. Jäckel, Hitlera pogląd na świat, Warsaw, 1974; E. Jäckel, Panowanie Hitlera, Wrocław, 1989; H. Olszewski, Nauka historii w upadku. Studium o historiografii i ideologii historycznej w imperialistycznych Niemczech, Warsaw, 1982; F. Ryszka, Państwo stanu wyjątkowego. Rzecz o systemie państwa i prawa w Trzeciej Rzeszy, Wrocław, 1985.

2 Cited after: L. P. Lochner, What About Germany? New York, 1943, p. 2.

3 Prime Minister Winston Churchill's radio broadcast of 24 August 1941 regarding his meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, available at: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1531966 (accessed 10 December 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library.

4 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Washington, 1944, p. 79.

5 Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland, 1927, no. 21, item 161, Konwencja dotycząca praw i zwyczajów wojny lądowej [Convention relating to the laws and customs of war on land].

6 M. Gałęzowski, "Polska w czasie II wojny światowej," in Od niepodległości do niepodległości. Historia Polski 1918-1989, http://polska1918-89.pl/niemiecka-polityka-okupacyjna-na-ziemiach-polskich,29.html (accessed 1 July 2019).

7 "Więcej niż grabież," idziemy.pl, 21 November 2017, http://www.idziemy.pl/kultura/wiecej-niz-grabiez/2/ (accessed 9 July 2019).

The unique, unprecedented military operation that eventually brought us liberation from National Socialism.

Statement by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on 5 June 2019 regarding the Normandy landings of June 1944.

Polish-German relations have rarely been smooth and amicable. From the very beginning of its existence in the tenth century, the Polish state had to contend with intense pressure from the Germans, who regarded the Slavic territories of Central Europe as their own sphere of influence. In later centuries, long, hard wars were fought between Poland and the Teutonic Order. These ended in the order's defeat on the battlefield of Grunwald in 1410 and during the Thirteen Years' War (1454-1466). Those victories were not exploited to the full by the Polish side. After another war provoked by the order in 1519-1521, a Protestant secular state known as the Duchy of Prussia was established in 1525 and the order's grand master, Prince Albert Hohenzollern, became its ruler. Although the Duchy of Prussia was a vassal state formally subordinate to the First Republic of Poland, it passed into the hands of the Brandenburg branch of the Hohenzollerns in the seventeenth century, gaining its sovereignty in 1657.

In 1701, Brandenburg-Prussia became the Kingdom of Prussia, which pursued a policy of animosity and hatred toward Poland. It was this country that was the main initiator of all three partitions of the First Polish Republic. In 1871, Prussia completed the unification of Germany, which had previously consisted of many smaller states. In both the Kingdom of Prussia and the united states of the Second German Reich, a combative policy toward Polishness and the Poles continued throughout the whole of the nineteenth century. This took the form of brutal Germanization, and even terror, camouflaged by a particularly German approach of the 'rule of law'. It was largely German militarism and a desire for world domination that led to the outbreak of the First World War. This ended in defeat for the German Reich, the dissolution of its Empire and the establishment of what became known as the Weimar Republic. The three partitioning powers' collapse in 1918 enabled the Poles to regain their independence after 123 years of partition. Within the borders of the restored Republic were territories that had previously been forcibly incorporated into the German state: almost all of Greater Poland, the greater part of Gdańsk Pomerania, and part of Upper Silesia. For the Germans, this all constituted an insult too heavy to bear.

The criminal Adolf Hitler's political career, the Weimar Republic's transformation into the Third Reich, and the unleashing of the Second World War were all largely provoked by the anti-Polish obsession shared by Germans of the time, whose outlook was being steered by the Nazi party, or NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The cataclysmic consequences of the war launched in 1939 amounted to more than the sum of the genocide the Germans perpetrated against Polish citizens, the slave labor that millions of Poles were subjected to, their suffering in camps and dungeons, and the enormous material losses inflicted on this nation, for Poland also ended up being subjugated to the Soviet Union, which introduced a communist system in Poland - the dictatorial system of a people answerable to another criminal, Joseph Stalin. After 1945, the newly declared 'People's' Poland was a country stripped of vast expanses of borderlands seized by the Soviet Union. It did, however, receive compensation in the form of the Western and Northern Territories that it was granted at Potsdam on the basis of a decision taken by the Great Powers. Nevertheless, when the Republic's pre- and post-war boundaries are compared, Poland's total territory shrank from 389,000 to 312,000 square kilometers.

Of course, in the long history of Polish-German relations, which stretches over a thousand years, there have also been brighter moments. We remember to this day the German King and Holy Roman Emperor, Otto III, who treated the Poles with such respect that he placed his imperial diadem on the head of Bolesław I the Brave. For him, Poland was a vital component of the universalist empire he was rebuilding, which he envisioned as a Christian union of equal nations. It is worth recalling the intertwining, over many centuries as neighbors, of cultural and artistic influences, intellectual and culinary trends and customs, or remembering the people of the small German states who enthusiastically welcomed the November insurgents* heading into exile in France.

Unfortunately, despite the positive elements in Poland and Germany's shared history, the historical balance of Polish-German cooperation over the centuries is not to Poland's advantage. That has a negative bearing on today's relations between the two peoples and states.

Many of today's Poles view Germany through the prism of the Second World War, as they are unable to forget the overbearing arrogance displayed by the Germans of that period and the contempt that the inhabitants of the Third Reich showed toward the peoples they conquered. A reserved stance toward the Germans is typical of the first generation of Poles brought up after World War II, especially in those families that experienced atrocities at the hands of that nation's representatives. The memory continues to live on in Polish families in terms of the wartime fate of parents and grandparents as well as those who never returned from the war. During the Second World War, the Germans committed unspeakable crimes against the Poles: they murdered nearly 5.2 million of its citizens and deported millions deep into the Reich for the purposes of forced labor, where they were treated worse than animals. They terrorized and humiliated its citizens, incarcerating and torturing them in concentration camps and police prisons, and destroyed hundreds of Polish cities and towns and thousands of villages. They plundered Poland's national treasures, works of art, bank assets, and industrial plants. They deported 200,000 Polish children to the Reich to Germanize them. They deliberately burned down many Polish historical and cultural monuments and treasures and the largest archives and libraries. Those crimes were never adequately punished. Only a small number of the criminals were arraigned before the courts of the Federal Republic of Germany, and those that did face charges usually received minor sentences that were not always fully enforced. The murderers of many thousands of people emerged from behind bars after only a few years, released for health reasons. Many of the plundered works of art and archival records remain in German collections to this day, and Polish appeals for their return are met with cynical refusals. Poles who were deprived of their health and property through the heinous acts of German soldiers, policemen, and officials have either only received token compensation (for example, the former inmates of German concentration camps), or none at all. Poland has received almost no reparations from Germany, either for material losses (most of which resulted from looting on a gigantic scale and deliberate damage), or for the murder of millions of Polish citizens and the unpaid labor forced upon millions of others.

The Germans quickly expunged their guilt for the crimes they had committed against Poland, Poles, and other peoples of Europe from public consciousness by pursuing a historical policy in such a way as to shift the entire burden of responsibility for all the wartime injustices inflicted on the peoples of Europe onto unspecified 'Nazis' (who, contrary to the truth, are not identified with the Germans at all) and onto Poles. In this way, the blame for the devastation and genocide they had perpetrated was purposefully diluted and covered up, a policy that was deliberately pursued by one German government after another. This resulted in the paradoxical situation that the absurd term 'the Polish death camps' became increasingly common in international parlance, suggesting that the blame for the Holocaust lay with Poland, on whose territory the concentration camps were located, and not with the Germans, who had occupied Poland and attempted to exterminate the Polish nation. It is an elementary moral principle in civilized societies that guilt for a committed crime always requires an act of contrition and a request to the victims for forgiveness followed by an act of reparation. The well-known journalist Ewa Polak-Pałkiewicz has written:

If one has committed a grave offense, a crime - in the case of the Germans, that was the murderous invasion of a neighboring state and the perpetration within its borders of ideologically motivated genocide - then it is one's duty to carry out an examination of one's conscience. An examination during which one becomes aware of the source and nature of the committed wrong. One acknowledges it, recognizes one's personal shortcomings, the weakness (or blunder) that one fell prey to, the trap into which one fell, and then one apologizes. One apologizes to God, regrets one's act, asks forgiveness of the person one has wronged. And one accepts one's penance and repairs what one has broken, insofar as it is in one's power to do so. One makes amends for the harm caused. Without this, one cannot attain spiritual equilibrium. In Germany, the participants in the murderous invasion of Poland have never undergone a genuine spiritual cleansing, and neither have all those who supported them and exonerated them from their war guilt.

If one is satisfied with one's successes - one's history, one's civilizational achievements, one's politics - one is able to give expression to that. One exudes peace and conviviality. One can talk about one's errors without embarrassment. One is generous. One wants others to share one's delight in one's victory over oneself and in one's achievements. Rather than being jealous, one is full of grace.

The poor German nation is not at peace with itself.

The Germans are not content! The proof of that is deeply ingrained in the culture of that country, which never tires of provoking the Poles despite them not posing any threat at all to Germans - from both a political and economic perspective, we are weaker.1

In recent decades, the Federal Republic of Germany's policy toward Poland, now that Poland is free, has been ruthless and cynical. The Germans have decimated some branches of the Polish economy that they regarded as competition (for example, much of the Polish sugar, electronics, and shipbuilding industries; they are also attempting to decimate its coal mining industry) and taken over control of others. They are treating Poland in a neo-colonial spirit, only investing in weakly-developed areas of Polish industry and endeavoring to extract the largest revenue possible from the country, regardless of the social and ecological costs. German aspirations to gradually reclaim the Western and Northern Territories are being realized through the promotion of the principles of multiculturalism in Poland as well as their own version of the history of these lands. The maintenance of Poland's political subservience is further aided by a new gas pipeline (the Nord Stream) constructed (with Russia's assistance) at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, making the energy blackmail of Poland a real possibility.2 Germany's political elites brutally interfere in Poland's domestic affairs by taking advantage of European Union institutions and numerous Polish-language media outlets that are German-owned.

Poles living in Germany are treated contemptuously and they are yet to be recognized as a national minority even though the Polish state has recognized the Germans as a minority, even granting it two seats in the Polish Sejm. In addition, a policy is consistently enforced that involves children being taken away from Polish families by agencies set up to supposedly promote child welfare, the so-called Jugendamt. These children are then subjected to Germanization.

In addition to the Federal Republic of Germany applying that ruthless policy line so inimical to Poland, the mass media in Germany employ a specific sugar-coated newspeak, for which such terms as 'reconciliation,' 'partnership,' and 'cooperation' serve as narrative loci. Unfortunately, that newspeak was adopted by the Polish administration during the coalition government of the Civic Platform (PO) and the Polish People's Party (PSL), and the mass media outlets attached to that alliance. There are also several organizations (subsidized by the German government) that cultivate this specific form of 'reconciliation' by appealing on a very shallow level to emotionality and folklore. The activists of these organizations react in an allergic manner to the raising of any more serious topic concerning Polish-German relations. In such cases, accusations are leveled (usually at Poles) of 'nationalism,' 'succumbing to stereotypes,' and 'the loss of European values.'

The political scientist Prof. Krzysztof Szczerski has bluntly and wittily described that hypocrisy in Polish-German relations as follows:

The primary source of the mystification problem in Polish-German relations is that those relations are fundamentally dissociated from reality, whereas the primary basis of any relationship between two states should be a factual recognition of common interests and equalities. This mystification relies on the use of sugar-coated 'grand narratives' in place of a genuine balance sheet of costs and benefits.

This mystification is mainly fueled by a supposition that the unequal status of the two partners' actions is the natural order of things. According to that conviction, Poland is the poor, ugly maiden, while her neighbor is a wealthy, stable, mature, and responsible man who has deigned, for some obscure reason, to show an interest in a plain Jane like us, so we should be grateful for that interest, yet we are also afraid that it may disappear one day, so we do all we can not to discourage him.

If Grandma is grumbling about the olden days, we shoo her away from the kitchen when Mr. Neighbor comes to visit. If Mr. Neighbor is so gracious as to take a fancy to a trinket in our room, it is an honor for us to give him possession of it and even advise him that it has really been his all along. If Mr. Neighbor receives a visit from Friend Bear and they then club together to do some mischief in our garden, then not a word passes our lips; on the contrary, we consider that we have been rightfully punished for not being in contact for three days, when we invited round our girlfriends and were crocheting something or other together in the evening.3

There is a real need for Polish-German reconciliation. The base conditions of such a rapprochement would require various commitments from Germany. The first condition would be the disclosure of the whole truth about German crimes during the Second World War and why the perpetrators of those crimes went unpunished after it ended. The second would be to compensate Poland for those offenses by paying reparations both to the country as a whole and to the wronged citizens and their descendants. This second condition would also entail returning plundered cultural and art treasures and the collections of libraries and archives. The third condition would be the cessation of the aggressive policy aimed at vassalizing Poland by means of political and economic subjugation, as well as stopping its policy of disregard and contempt for Poles, the installation of agents of influence in Poland, and the formation of economic and political alliances against Poland's interests.

Polish-German reconciliation, if it is to amount to more than the pretense it has been up to this point, has to be based on the three conditions mentioned above. This book aims, on the one hand, to present the historical baggage of Germany's guilt toward Poland, especially that engendered by the crime of genocide committed against the Polish people, which is almost beyond the grasp of the younger generation of Poles' perception and imagination. On the other hand, we refer to German policy towards Poland today. We write directly, without resorting to empty platitudes or diplomacy. We believe that too many empty words have already been uttered on the issues under discussion.

Germany is Poland's neighbor, so we should establish relations based on a partnership of equals. There is a pressing need for talks and diplomatic negotiations on economic, political, and cultural matters, as well as on issues relating to the situation of the Polish population living west of the Oder and their lack of recognition as a Polish minority in Germany, and on the spread of anti-Polish sentiment in Germany. The only realistic starting point for such discussions is the real state of affairs rather than an illusion built on hypocrisy. We describe this starting point in our book.

The Poles have repeatedly extended their arms to the Germans in a gesture of reconciliation, offering calm but substantive dialogue. Usually, these gestures have not had any effect. On 18 November 1965, the Polish bishops sent a famous letter to the German bishops inviting them to jointly celebrate the Millennium of the Baptism of Poland. The letter included the following words of reconciliation:

"In this most Christian but also very human spirit, we stretch out our arms to you, as you sit here on the Council benches as proceedings draw to a close, grant you forgiveness and ask of you the same. And if you, German bishops and Council Fathers, fraternally embrace our outstretched arms, only then will we be able with a serene conscience to celebrate our Millennium in a most Christian manner."4

The letter was supposed, in accordance with the Polish bishops' intentions, to break an impasse in Polish-German relations; it was also supposed to bring to the German side's attention that the Recovered Lands were an integral part of Poland and homeland for millions of young Poles. However, the response from the German episcopate, while cordial and full of important affirmations, was so vague that it could not have formed the basis for further meaningful dialogue.

The signing of a treaty between the Polish People's Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany on 7 December 1970, under which Germany in principle recognized the Oder-Lusatian Neisse border, led to a thawing of relations between the two states. It should, however, be remembered that once Germany had ratified the treaty with Poland in 1972, the German Constitutional Court stated that the German Reich continued to exist within its borders as of 1937, but was unable to function as such. On the other hand, the communist authorities of the Polish People's Republic made no attempt to seek fair reparations from Germany or adequate compensation for the victims of Hitlerism. Instead, they contented themselves with modest gestures from the Germans (a small sum of money for some victims of the Third Reich, including those who were subjected to criminal medical experiments) and the granting of loans to Edward Gierek's government to aid the country's economic development.

History took such a course that Germany ended up incurring another moral debt to Poland. German unification only became a real possibility following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the destruction of that symbol of the Cold War, which had divided Germany into two states - West Germany and the pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic (hereinafter GDR), which was in turn only possible thanks to the Polish democratic opposition's struggle against the communist regime between 1976 and 1989, the creation of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union 'Solidarity' in 1980, and the actions of the Polish Pope, John Paul II.

There have also been aspects of Polish-German relations over the last few decades that have aroused hope. However, those should be largely credited to the actions of individuals and various organizations, including churches. The decision to channel humanitarian aid to Poland in the 1980s was a handsome and noble act on Germany's part.5 On the other hand, it is worth recalling at this juncture the aid that Poles provided to Germans fleeing the GDR in 1989 to take refuge in Poland. There also are many examples of personal bonds of friendship. However, it must be stressed that the event that recently opened the eyes of millions of Poles to Germany's true intentions was the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline along the Baltic seabed. This joint German and Russian investment was perceived as an act of hostility towards Poland. And it needs to be stated loud and clear - this was indeed an act that was extremely hostile towards Poland. The only real justification for the construction of such a gas pipeline (the investment, which followed the seabed to bypass Poland and the Baltic States, cost five times more than if it had been carried out on land) was to create an opportunity to instigate energy blackmail against Poland, as well as its neighbors.

The fact that the Germans were prepared to shell out more than a dozen billion euros to secure this opportunity simply makes clear that they are ready to pursue a resolutely anti-Polish policy in partnership with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. For many Poles, this came as a shock, but also sent a clear message about Germany's true intentions toward Poland. It also provided a bitter lesson in the form of political realism that is, unfortunately, far removed from our noble wishes and imaginings.

Fortunately, there is also no shortage of people in Germany who are not in alignment with the German government's official policy and are able, against political correctness, to take the side of Poland and the Poles. In this book, we frequently cite the opinions of Germans who really care about the quality of Polish-German relations. Fortunately, they are many in number, as was the case with "the Muscovite friends" about whom Adam Mickiewicz once wrote. Thanks to the example set by such distinguished people as Jochen Böhler, Dieter Schenk, Daniel Brewing, Stephan Lehnstaedt, Karl Heinz Roth, Christoph Schwarz, or the Mayor of Westerland, Petra Reiber, we can harbor hopes of a solid and fruitful dialogue with Germany. Let us hope that this will happen one day.

This book comprises three main parts. In the first of these, we discuss the crimes committed by the Germans against Polish citizens during the Second World War. Although a synthetic approach is taken, the text is illustrated with vivid examples. A comprehensive presentation of the topic would require an enormous multi-volume work to be created. Nevertheless, even though we are only presenting a sketch, it will contain enough detail to enable the reader to fully gauge the scale of the cruelty and savagery exhibited by Germans during the occupation of the Polish lands.

In the text, we cite numerous testimonies provided by those who were directly affected by the hell of war, because they best convey what the program driving the Nazi drive for 'living space' (Lebensraum) actually entailed. We sourced some of the memoirs contained in this book from the Chronicles of Terror online database,6 which was created within the framework of a project undertaken by the Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor. Chronicles of Terror is a digitized collection of the testimonies of civilians of occupied Europe that has been made available online. Those materials are drawn from the resources of the Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.

Particular attention is paid in the first part of the book to the fate of children during the Second World War. The scale of their extermination and the methods the Nazis employed to carry out that crime are unprecedented in the history of humankind. As the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg emphatically stated, the cruel crimes "did not spare any victims from among women and children, whom, up to that point, a ruthless, barbarous enemy regarded as its duty to protect."7 We recognize that Poland fell victim in 1939 to two invaders, Germany and the Soviet Union, which represented two different totalitarian systems: Nazism and Communism. Although both states and both systems were based on different ideological principles, there was little to choose between them in terms of their criminality. Nonetheless, in this book, we deal exclusively with German crimes against the Polish state and its citizens and the consequences of those crimes, in full awareness that the historical legacy of Poland's relations with the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, is a topic that would need to be considered separately in some depth. In the second part, we describe the numerous post-war measures taken by the Federal Republic of Germany to rescue war criminals from facing appropriate punishment, to cover up the memory of German crimes, and to create a false historical policy that shifts responsibility for the genocide perpetrated by Germans onto vaguely defined 'Nazis.' We also discuss German efforts to pass responsibility for the Holocaust onto other nations, including the Poles.

The third part of the book examines German policy toward Poland both today and in recent years. The main objective of that ruthless and brutal policy is Poland's political subservience and economic exploitation. The second and third chapters of this part are based on numerous published sources, academic papers, news pieces and opinions. Use has also been made of analyses from websites. We have not hesitated to use examples and quotations, as we are keen to ensure that everything included in this book-length study is well-founded and thoroughly documented.

In the concluding section - entitled "Future Prospects as Neighbors" - we draw attention to the principles we should adhere to if we are to ensure that Polish-German relations are completely equitable.

We would like to thank all those people who offered us their support while we were writing this book, and also those Poles and Germans struggling to hold Germans fully accountable for their war crimes and to secure adequate compensation for their victims.

Toruń, 15 July 2019

* November Uprising 1830-1831

Genocide

On 1 September 1939, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Poland, thereby enacting the secret protocol of the German-Soviet treaty better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which provided for the dismemberment of Eastern Europe and the liquidation of the Polish state. The objectives of the leader and chancellor of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, were clearly specified: the violent liquidation of the independent Polish state by means of the annexation and occupation of its territory and the biological destruction of the Polish nation, which the pseudo-scientific criteria of Nazi racial policy regarded as 'inferior.' The Polish nation was to be stripped of its intellectual elite and thereby reduced to a mere servile mass from which the Reich was to extract labor.

National Socialism - or Nazism - appeared in Germany after the First World War, at a time when the country's military defeat spelled the end of its erstwhile hegemonic foreign policy. Nazism was rooted in opposition to the Versailles order and a crisis that paved the way for the rise of the German left, which wove together a patchwork of different ideas that attacked liberalism, Marxism and communism, the multi-party system, and parliamentarism. The underlying conception for the formation of the Nazi movement was most fully developed by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, which referred to the Old German principle of purity of blood and the warrior spirit. Nazism propagated the cult of the de facto founder of the First Reich - Henry I the Fowler, King of Germany (876-936) - and alluded to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart (which was an aberration). The founders of the Nazi movement regarded themselves as continuators of the ideas of Romanticism, referred to ideas of nationhood, and demanded the union of all Germans with a view to implementing a program enabling them to reclaim their rightful 'place in the sun' - their living space (Lebensraum). Nazism, drawing on Social Darwinism, recognized the cult of force and struggle as a fundamental social law. Referring to both Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's philosophy of force and struggle and the militaristic and geopolitical notions of Heinrich von Treitschke and Karl Haushofer, it adopted racism as an underpinning for its worldview and considered the 'Aryan race' to be destined for dominion and the Semitic race (the Jews) to be a threat to humanity, and Germany in particular.1

Everything was carried out in accordance with principles created by Hitler. A few days before the invasion of Poland, on 22 August 1939, he spoke as follows at a special briefing of the command staff at his Alpine residence Berghof located on the slope of the mountain retreat, Obersalzberg:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality [...]. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad - that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation [Totenkopfverbände, SS-TV. Unlike the Wehrmacht, rather than being subject to military command, they took orders directly from the party. From 1929 until the end of the war, the SS was led by Reichskommissar Heinrich Himmler - editor's note] in readiness - for the present only in the East - with orders to them to kill mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) that we need.2

From the very beginning, this was meant to be an extremely aggressive war of extermination specifically targeting the Polish nation and the other peoples of Europe. Various forms of extermination lay along the path to the conquest of that living space. Lebensraum: crimes against all age groups perpetrated against a civilian population, summary and public executions, 'roundups,' the pacification of towns, villages and settlements, crimes perpetrated against prisoners of war, the extermination of people in concentration camps, extermination through grueling forced slave labor, forced resettlement, the theft of children, the destruction of national and ethnic identities, Germanization, and the plundering and purposeful destruction of cultural and national assets.

These were a consequence of the German program of mass crime, or "crime without a name," as the distinguished politician and prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill (1874-1965) characterized it a year after the German Nazis attacked Great Britain in July 1940: "Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century [sic - Churchill misspoke, should be thirteenth century - ed.], there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name."3

It was Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a distinguished Polish and American lawyer, who introduced the notion of 'genocide,' which he laid out in a monograph published in 1944 in New York entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Rather than confining himself to identifying the origins and forms of that crime, he also proposed solutions that were supposed to aid its prevention in the future. Lemkin conceived of genocide as the annihilation of a nation or of an ethnic, racial, and religious group. He put it this way:

[Genocide is] a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national sentiment, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.4

The most important element on which Lemkin based his reasoning was the actual 'concept' behind the crime - all criminal actions and deeds were supposed to be directed against specific individuals on the mere basis of their belonging to a specific ethnic or national group.

We should emphasize that the Germans' annihilation of the Poles as a national group entailed more than their physical extermination. It also involved depriving them of most of their rights. The Polish territories occupied by Germany were divided into two zones. The first of these comprised territories directly incorporated into the Reich (by a decree of Adolf Hitler issued on 8 October 1939), notably: Pomerania, Greater Poland, Upper Silesia, the part of Łódź Voivodeship that incorporated the city of Łódź itself, the Dąbrowa Basin, the western poviats of Cracow Voivoidship, and the northern part of Mazovia and the Suwałki region. Overall, approximately 93,000 square kilometers inhabited by some ten million people were directly annexed to the Reich. The remaining German-occupied areas formed (by a decree of Hitler issued on 12 October 1939) what was known as the General Governorate, which was divided into the Cracow, Lublin, Radom, Warsaw, and Galicia districts (the latter from 1 August 1941). The General Governorate (GG) was a structure totally subordinated to the Reich and largely controlled by police authorities exercising judicial, executive, and even partial legislative powers. Some areas of life continued to be governed by the Polish legal order in place before 1939, but many other matters were regulated by radically anti-Polish directives of the German authorities.

As the Germans were creating a new administrative entity, it became necessary to appoint someone to head the General Governorate. The eventual appointee was the fanatical Nazi, Hans Frank (1900-1946), who made Wawel Castle in Cracow his residence.

Both the incorporation of the Polish territories into the Reich and the proclamation of the General Governorate contravened the Hague Convention (IV) of 1907 respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Article 42 et seq.) and were therefore illegal actions.5 Consequently, any German performing any role on behalf of the German state within the territories incorporated into the Reich or within the General Governorate was a criminal under international law (recognized, among other nations, by Germany).

The worst situation within the lands incorporated into the Reich was faced by the Polish population. A historian affiliated to the Institute of National Remembrance, Dr. Marek Gałęzowski, has written:

German place and street names were introduced, among others, Bromberg (for Bydgoszcz) and Litzmannstadt (for Łódź). Poles were denied their civil rights and ordered to bow to Germans on the street and give them priority of passage; those who refused to comply were beaten and detained. Poles were forbidden to change their place of residence or use telephones. Signs were placed at the entrances to public facilities - such as parks - that prohibited entry to Poles and dogs (in Kalisz, while permission was granted for dogs to be walked on leashes, Poles were strictly forbidden from entering a park). It became difficult to access health care. For example, in Łódź, Poles could only use a single hospital. An exception was only made in the event of a woman requesting an abortion [...].

Another prime target of persecution was the Catholic Church, in which the leading role (after the Primate of Poland, August Hlond, left the country) was informally played by Archbishop Adam Sapieha, Metropolitan of Cracow. The most brutal repressions befell the clergy in the lands incorporated into the Reich. All bishops were arrested, and then either transported to concentration camps or deported to the General Governorate (repressions against such high-ranking hierarchs were not imposed in any of the other occupied countries). In Greater Poland, 97 percent of parish priests were forced to leave their parishes, many of whom were deported to concentration camps, above all to Dachau, where some perished. More than 1,200 priests - mostly from the lands incorporated into the Reich - died during the war at the hands of the Germans, which roughly equaled 18 percent of the total number of pre-war Polish prieds. The Protestant Church of the Augsburg Confession also faced persecution. Nearly half of its pastors were arrested, some of whom were later murdered, with one of the first victims being the eighty-year-old Juliusz Bursche, who was particularly hated by the Germans due to his openly confessed Polish patriotism and the proclamation he directed at pastors betraying Nazi views shortly before the war broke out:

'You can create your own Church; there is no place for you in my Church.' When Pastor Zygmunt Michalis was asked to declare that he was German, he replied: 'If I even had German blood in my veins, your prison bedbugs would have already sucked it out of me long ago. I am a Pole, and I want to remain one until my dying day.' From among the religious leaders of non-Christian faiths, the Germans murdered almost all the rabbis - the Jewish clergy.6

It is worth adding that in the territories incorporated into the Reich it was forbidden to use the Polish language (including in churches) or publish printed matter in Polish. Moreover, the Polish education system was dismantled, Polish libraries, archives, and museums were destroyed or plundered, all traces of Polishness were erased, historical monuments were demolished, and Polish properties and factories were confiscated. From 1941 onwards, a section of the Polish population was forced (using various brutal and perfidious methods) to adopt the so-called German nationality list - or Volkslist. That led to Polish citizens (375,000 in total) being forcibly conscripted into the German army and to the deaths of thousands of Poles on various fronts. A total of some 90,000 Poles who either deserted the Wehrmacht or were taken prisoner by the Allied Forces crossed sides to the Polish Armed Forces in the West and fought against the Germans.

The Germans came to realize that the Catholic Church was a bastion of Polish identity, which spurred them to destroy its structures, not only through the extermination of priests, monks, and nuns, but also by confiscating shrines and church property. The article "Więcej niż grabież" (More than plunder) offers the following description of those actions in the lands incorporated into the Reich:

The dramatic arrest of priests in Łódź was followed by the destruction and looting of churches. On 9 October 1941, the Gestapo stripped Łódź's cathedral bare, doing extensive damage to its interior and altars, cabinets, confessionals, and other church furnishings. German youth broke its stained-glass windows with stones. The cathedral building was converted into a military depot. Over a dozen cartloads of horse manure were dumped in the vaults and a mushroom farm was set up in the burial crypt. Stables were installed in the Bernardine church and the complex of monastery buildings including the Franciscan church in Łagiewniki were repurposed as a garage. On the night of 10/11 November 1939, the Monument to the Unknown Soldier was damaged and removed from Cathedral Square in Łódź. The wave of destruction did not spare the cemeteries. Tombs, gravestones, and crosses were destroyed. Iron fences were broken up as scrap. Nearly every church building was either shut down or repurposed as a warehouse, stable, or garage.

In Gniezno, the cathedral archives were stripped of their thousand-year-old parchments, ancient manuscripts, and valuable books. The same was done with the archives and museums belonging to the Poznań and Włocławek archdioceses. By 1944, almost 1,300 churches had been closed for worship; more than 500 had been turned into storage depots; the cathedrals in Gniezno, Poznań, and Włocławek had been converted into concert halls. Of the 318 churches in the Diocese of Włocławek, 300 were shut down and 17 demolished. The ratios were similar in the other two dioceses of [the German administrative region known as the] Wartheland. When the war broke out, the Diocese of Poznań possessed 361 parish churches and about 330 auxiliary churches and chapels, some of which were monastic. A total of 345, or 90 percent, of those parish churches were shut down, as were all auxiliary churches and chapels (with six of the auxiliary churches being demolished as well). Only 26 churches remained open for Poles - that is, one or two per poviat. For some time in Poznań, two parish churches were left for 200,000 Catholics.7

In the General Governorate, vocational primary and secondary schools were permitted to exist but were not allowed to teach history and Polish literature. Polish cultural institutions were shut down and library and museum resources were destroyed or plundered. The Germans also demolished many national monuments within the General Governorate. The newspapers that the occupying forces published in the Polish language were packed with blatant propaganda and labeled as gadzinówki (collaborationist rags) by the Poles, while Polish-language books were only to be thrillers or pulp fiction. Some Polish factories were not theoretically confiscated, but the owners still lost control over them. Poles were prohibited from owning radio sets under penalty of death. The Polish population was also forbidden from practicing sports. Ruinous compulsory quotas were imposed on farmers, and a food coupon system with rations set below the minimum biological human needs was introduced in the cities. The Germans were intent on ensuring that the Poles as a nation were relegated to the position of uneducated, primitive, and physically weak laborers who would work for the benefit of their 'German masters' and later, after the victorious war, would be deported to beyond the Urals, where they would slowly become extinct.

Another segment of Polish society subjected to persecution in the General Governorate were the clergy. Archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski (1858-1941), Ordinary of the Płock Diocese, was arrested by the Germans in 1940. After a period of confinement in Płock and its environs, he was placed in the German concentration camp in Działdowo, where he probably died on 28 May 1941 (in all likelihood, shot in the forest near Białuty). Another priest murdered at the Działdowo camp (probably on 10 October 1941) was the Auxiliary Bishop of Płock, known today as Blessed Leon Wetmański (1886-1941). At the German concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the Germans executed the Auxiliary Bishop of Lublin, Blessed Władysław Goral (1898-1945) in February 1945. All three hierarchs were among the 108 blessed martyrs of the Second World War, raised to the altar by Pope St. John Paul II in Warsaw on 13 June 1999. All the other beatified martyrs in this group are (with the exception of two laypeople) priests, monks, or nuns - all of whom were killed by the German occupying forces, often in a cruel manner after being tortured. The beatification process for a further group of Polish martyrs of the Second World War comprising 122 people is ongoing.

The vast majority of German actions in the occupied territories were of a genocidal nature. Below we give examples of the frequently horrific manner in which those actions were carried out. Genocide was defined legally for the first time in 1945 in the act of indictment issued against the Third Reich's principal war criminals standing trial at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The term 'genocide' entered legal parlance by way of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was signed on 9 December 1948 and drafted with the assistance of the aforementioned Raphael Lemkin.

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