More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On 1 September 1939 the first of a grand total of sixty divisions of German troops crossed the Third Reich’s border with Poland.
William L. Shirer,
German–Soviet Pact on 24 August 1939
There were no parades or celebratory speeches in the capital, but the victory met with general satisfaction. ‘I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime,’ wrote Shirer in his diary, ‘who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland.’
Independent Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia in the eighteenth century and had only come into existence again as a sovereign state at the end of the First World War.
More than 11 million people lived in the General Government, which included the Lublin district and parts of the provinces of Warsaw and Cracow. It was not a ‘protectorate’ like Bohemia and Moravia, but a colony, outside the Reich and beyond its law, its Polish inhabitants effectively stateless and without rights.
At the very beginning of the war, Hitler
ordered the establishment of an Ethnic German Self-Protection militia in Poland, which soon afterwards came under the aegis of the SS.
Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, believed that ‘it’s the aim of the Leader and of Göring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish people’.34 On 19 September 1939 Halder recorded Heydrich as saying there would be a ‘clear-out: Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy’. 60,000 names of Polish professionals and intellectuals had been gathered before the war; they were all to be killed.
Hitler had announced before the war that he intended to clear the Poles out of Poland and bring in German settlers instead.
Aware
Music by Polish composers (including Chopin) was banned, and Polish national monuments were blown up or pulled down.107
Though
From Stalin’s point of view, what was being carried out in occupied Poland was a social revolution for the benefit of the majority; from Hitler’s point of view, what was being carried out in occupied Poland was an ethnic revolution for the benefit of a small minority,
Germany’s Jews shared all the central aspects of German culture,
Familiar acts of persecution by Poles they could deal with, but not the inhumanity of the Germans:
Hunger
Most of the 11,000 Jews who survived the war in the Polish capital owed their lives to Polish helpers. The Poles who aided Jews in this, and many other ways, were a small minority, however,
Jewish Culture League,
Reich Association of Jews in Germany,
Yet Hitler’s declared intention of ridding the Reich of all its Jews and Gypsies was in no sense abandoned. Its full realization could only be a matter of time.
