GENERAL GOVERNMENT
(GENERAL GOUVERNEMENT)
The General Government (General Gouvernement) refers to a part of the territories of Poland under German military occupation during World War II and that were a separate part of "Greater Germany".
In August 1941, former Polish districts of Eastern Galicia (now a Ukrainian territory) were added to the General Government by decree of Adolf Hitler. On 26 October 1939, Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied territories. In March 1941 Hitler made a decision to "turn this region into a purely German area within 15-20 years." He also explained that "Where 12 million Poles now live, is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as Rhineland".
In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were planned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944.
The Final Solution
In 1942, the Germans began the systematic extermination of the Jewish population. The General Government was the location of four of the six extermination camps with the most extreme measures of the Holocaust. The genocide by gassing of undesired "races", chiefly millions of Jews from Poland and other countries, was carried out between 1942 and 1944.
Overall, 4 million of the 1939 population of the General Government area had lost their lives by the time the Soviet armed forces had entered the area in late 1944.
The German Plans
It was German policy that a small number of (non-Jewish) Poles, like other Slavic peoples, were to be reduced to the status of serfs, while the rest would be deported or otherwise eliminated and eventually replaced by German colonists of the "master race".
Various plans regarding the future of the original population were drawn, with one calling for deportation of about 20 million Poles to Western Siberia, and Germanisation of 4 to 5 million; although deportation in reality meant that the population wouldn't be removed but all of its members put to death as happened to other groups in execution of similar plans. In the General Government, all secondary education was abolished and all Polish cultural institutions closed.
The End
As the Soviets advanced through Poland in late 1944 the General Government collapsed. Frank was captured by American troops in May 1945 and was one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. During his trial he converted to Catholicism. Frank surrendered forty volumes of his diaries to the Tribunal and much evidence against him and others was gathered from them. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and on October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on October 16.
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