Germany On Stamps: German Occupation of Poland at WWII

 POLAND

Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. It is a unitary state made up of sixteen voivodeships. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq. mi) and has a population of over 38 million people.

Poland is a member of the European Union, NATO, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Economic Area, International Energy Agency, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, International Atomic Energy Agency and G6.

History

The establishment of a Polish state is often identified with the adoption of Christianity by its ruler Mieszko I, in 966, over the territory similar to that of present-day Poland. The Kingdom of Poland was formed in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a long association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth ceased to exist in 1795 as the Polish lands were partitioned among the Kingdom of Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918.

Two decades later, in September 1939, World War II started with the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invasion of Poland. Over six million Polish citizens died in the war. Poland re-emerged several years later within the Soviet sphere of influence as the People's Republic in existence until 1989. During the Revolutions of 1989, 45-year long communist rule was overthrown and the democratic rule was re-established. That gave foundations to modern Poland, constitutionally known as the "Third Polish Republic".

Despite the vast destruction the country experienced in World War II, Poland managed to preserve much of its cultural wealth. There are currently 14 heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in Poland.

Since the end of the communist period, Poland has achieved a "very high" ranking in terms of human development.

THE SEPTEMBER CAMPAIGN

At the end of First World War Poland acquire several German provinces like West Prussia, Poznan and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles.

When Adolf Hitler rise to power in Germany pursued a rapprochement policy with Poland improving German-Polish relations, culminating with a non-aggression pact in 1934. With this pact he neutralize the possibility of France and Poland establish any kind of pact against Germany, before had a chance to rearm.

After dismembered the Czechoslovak state in March 1939, under no reaction from France and England, Hitler negotiate a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939.

The German-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which stated that Poland was to be partitioned between the two powers, enabled Germany to attack Poland without the fear of Soviet intervention.

With the invasion of Poland, Germany wants to conquer the so called "Polish Corridor", a territory located in the region of Pomelia, part of the West Prussia, with access to the Baltic Sea. This corridor divides the Germany from the Germany East Prussia and from the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk), an important port city with a predominantly German population, and split from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. From East Prussia and Germany in the North, German forces by the command of General Fedor Von Bock and from Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units by the command of General Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939. Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland's border, had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939.

The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. The demarcation line for the partition of German and Soviet occupied Poland was along the Bug River.

In October 1939, Germany directly annexed all territories near German's eastern border: West Prussia, Poznan, Upper Silesia, and the former Free City of Danzig.

The remainder of German-occupied Poland (including the cities of Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, and Lublin) was organized as the so-called "General Gouvernement" (General Government) under a civilian governor general, the Nazi party lawyer Hans Frank.

Nazi Germany occupied the remainder of Poland when it invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Poland remained under German occupation until January 1945.

GERMAN FORCES, PLANS, COMMANDERS AND ARMIES

The Forces

Germany had a substantial numerical advantage over Poland and had developed a significant military prior to the conflict. The Army had some 2,400 tanks organized into six panzer divisions, utilizing a new operational doctrine. It held that these divisions should act in coordination with other elements of the military, punching holes in the enemy line and isolating selected units, which would be encircled and destroyed. This would be followed up by less-mobile mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. The Luftwaffe (air force) provided both tactical and strategic air power, particularly dive bombers that disrupted lines of supply and communications. Together, the so-called "new" methods were nicknamed Blitzkrieg (lightning war).

The Luftwaffe forces consisted of 1,180 fighter aircraft: 290 dive bombers, 1,100 conventional bombers and an assortment of 550 transport and 350 reconnaissance aircraft.

In total, Germany had close to 4,000 aircraft, most of them modern. Due to its prior participation in the Spanish Civil War, the Luftwaffe was probably the most experienced, best trained and best equipped air force in the world in 1939.

The Polish Army had approximately a million soldiers, but less than half of them were mobilized by 1 September. The Polish military had fewer armored forces than the Germans, and these units, dispersed within the infantry, were unable to effectively engage the enemy.

Polish cavalry brigades were used as a mobile mounted infantry. The Polish Air Force was at a severe disadvantage against the German Luftwaffe, although it was not destroyed on the ground early on, as is commonly believed.

The Polish Air Force lacked modern fighter aircraft, but its pilots were among the world's best trained, as proven a year later in the Battle of Britain, in which the Poles played a major part.

Overall, the Germans enjoyed numerical and qualitative aircraft superiority.

There were also over a thousand obsolete transport, reconnaissance and training aircraft. However, for the September Campaign, only some 70% of those aircraft were mobilized. The tank force consisted of two armored brigades, four independent tank battalions and some 30 companies of tankettes attached to infantry divisions and cavalry brigades. The Polish Navy was a small fleet of destroyers, submarines and smaller support vessels.

German plans, Commanders and German Armies

German units invade Poland from three directions:

• A main attack over the western Polish border. This was to be carried out by Army Group South commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from German Silesia and from the Moravian and Slovak border: General Johannes Blaskowitz's 8th Army was to drive eastward against Lodz, General Wilhelm List's 14th Army was to push on toward Krakow and to turn the Poles' Carpathian flank; and General Walter von Reichenau's 10th Army, in the centre with Army Group South's armour, was to deliver the decisive blow with a northeastward thrust into the heart of Poland.


• A second route of attack from northern Prussia. General Fedor von Bock commanded Army Group North, comprising General Georg von Küchler's 3rd Army, which was to strike southward from East Prussia, and General Günther von Kluge's 4th Army, which was to attack eastward across the base of the Polish Corridor.





• A tertiary attack by part of Army Group South's allied Slovak units from Slovakia.

From within Poland, the German minority would assist by engaging in diversion and sabotage operations through Selbstschutz units (paramilitary organisations created by ethnic Germans) prepared before the war.

All three assaults were to converge on Warsaw, while the main Polish army was to be encircled and destroyed west of the Vistula. Fall Weiss (a German strategic plan for the Invasion of Poland) as initiated on 1 September 1939, and was the first operation of the Second World War in Europe.

German attack progression

By 3 September when Günther von Kluge in the north had reached the Vistula river, Georg von Küchler was approaching the Narew River and Walther von Reichenau's armour was already beyond the Warta river. Two days later, his left wing was well to the rear of Lodz and his right wing at the town of Kielce and by 8 September one of his armoured corps was on the outskirts of Warsaw, having advanced 225 kilometres (140 miles) in the first week of war.

Light divisions on Reichenau's right were on the Vistula between Warsaw and the town of Sandomierz by 9 September while List, in the south, was on the river San above and below the town of Przemyśl. At the same time, Guderian led his 3rd Army tanks across the Narew, attacking the line of the Bug River, already encircling Warsaw.

All the German armies made progress in fulfilling their parts of the Fall Weiss plan. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated fragments, some of which were retreating while others were launching disjointed attacks on the nearest German columns.

 

  POLAND OCCUPATION DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939 – 1945)

The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War (1939 – 1945) began with invasion of Poland in September 1939, and formally concluded with the defeat of Nazism by the Four Powers in May 1945.

Throughout the entire course of foreign occupation the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR).

Before Operation Barbarossa, code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in summer-autumn of 1941, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences, where the occupants discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement and future destruction of Poland.

After a few years of fighting, the Red Army was able to repel the invaders: drive the Nazi forces out of the USSR and across Poland from the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.

About 6 million Polish citizens died between 1939 and 1945 as a result of the occupation, half of whom were Polish Jews.

I - OCCUPATION, ANNEXATION AND ADMINISTRATION

Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany

Under the terms of two decrees by Hitler, with Stalin's agreement (8 and 12 October 1939), large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany.

Creation of General Government

The remaining block of territory was placed under a German administration called the General, with its capital at Kraków.

Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of this occupied area on 26 October 1939. Frank oversaw the segregation of the Jews into ghettos in the largest cities, particularly Warsaw, and the use of Polish civilians as forced and compulsory labour in German war industries.

In April 1940 Frank made the morbid announcement that Kraków should become racially "cleanest" of all cities under his rule.

Significant border changes were made after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, and again in late 1944 and 1945, when the Soviet Union regained control of those lands and moved further west, eventually taking over all Polish territories.

Soviet administration zone

On the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, capturing the eastern regions of Poland (Kresy), with Galicia and Volhynia, facing little Polish opposition.

By the end of the Polish Defensive War against the two invaders, the Soviet Union had taken over 52.1% of the territory of Poland. All territory invaded by the Red Army was annexed to the Soviet Union, with the exception of Vilnius area, which was transferred to sovereign Lithuania. A small strip of land that was part of Hungary before 1914 was also given to Slovakia.

II - POLAND UNDER NAZI GERMAN OCCUPATION

From the beginning, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany was intended as fulfillment of the plan described by Adolf Hitler in his 1926 book "Mein Kampf".

The aim of this plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). On August 22, 1939, on the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language".

In contrast to the Nazi policy of genocide targeting all of Poland's 3.3 million Jewish men, women, and children for elimination, Nazi plans for the Polish Catholic majority focused on the elimination or suppression of political, religious, and intellectual leaders.

From 1939–1941, the Germans deported en masse about 1,600,000 Poles, including 400,000 Jews. About 700,000 Poles were sent to Germany for forced labor, many to die there. And the most infamous German death camps had been located in Poland.

Overall, during German occupation, 1939–1945, the Germans murdered 5,470,000–5,670,000 Poles, including nearly 3,000,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust (mostly during Operation Reinhard).

Altogether, 2,500,000 Poles were subjected to expulsions, while 7.3% of the Polish population served as slave labor.

Among the victims were two million ethnic Poles with the remaining 500,000 mainly from ethnic minorities living in Poland. The majority of those killed by Nazi Germany were civilians. The remainder perished at the Soviet hands.

"Generalplan Ost" and expulsion of Poles

"Generalplan Ost", essentially a grand plan for ethnic cleansing, was divided into two parts, the Kleine Planung ("Small Plan"), which covered actions which were to be taken during the war, and the Grosse Planung ("Big Plan"), which covered actions to be undertaken after the war was won. The plan envisaged differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanization, expulsion into the depths of Russia, and other gruesome fates, the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would take on an irrevocably German character.

In 10 years' time, the plan called for the extermination, expulsion, enslavement or Germanization of most or all Poles and East Slavs still living behind the front line.

By 1952, only about 3–4 million Poles were supposed to be left residing in the former Poland, and then only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist.

Operation Tannenberg

Operation Tannenberg (German: Unternehmen Tannenberg) was the codename for one of the extermination actions directed at the Polish people in September-October 1939.

Conscription lists, prepared by Germans before the war, identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, actors, former officers, and others, who were to be interned or shot.

In August 1939 about 2,000 activists of Polish minority organisations in Germany were arrested and murdered. By September 1, 1939, and ended in October, resulting in at least 20,000 deaths in 760 mass executions by Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary groups formed by Heinrich Himmler) special task units with some help from regular Wehrmacht (armed forces) units. In addition, a special formation was created from the German minority living in Poland called Selbstschutz, whose members had trained in Germany before the war in diversion and guerilla fighting. The formation was responsible for many massacres and due to its bad reputation was dissolved by Nazi authorities after the September Campaign.

Germanization and expulsion of Poles

In the territories which were annexed to Nazi Germany, the Nazis' goal was to achieve complete Germanization which would assimilate the territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich.

Nazis applied this policy most rigorously in western incorporated territories—the so-called Wartheland. There, the Germans closed even elementary schools where Polish was the language of instruction. They renamed streets and cities, and also seized tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, without payment to the owners.

The Germanization of the annexed lands also included an ambitious program to resettle Germans from the Baltic and other regions on farms and other homes formerly occupied by Poles and Jews. Only those Poles selected for Germanization were permitted to remain, and if they resisted Germanization, they were to be sent to concentration camps.

In October 1939, the SS began to expel Poles and Jews from the Wartheland and the Polish Corridor and transport them to the General Government.

Between 1940 and 1943, the SS carried out massive expulsions in the General Government. Families were torn apart as able-bodied teens and adults were taken for forced labor and elderly, young, and disabled persons were moved to other localities. Tens of thousands were also imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps.

The Nazis also kept an eye out for Polish children who possessed Aryan racial characteristics. Promising children were separated from their parents and sent to Łódź for further examination. If they passed the battery of racial, physical and psychological tests, they were sent on to Germany for "Germanization".

As many children chosen for Germanization were given German names, forbidden to speak Polish, and reeducated in SS or other Nazi institutions. Few ever saw their parents again. Many more children were rejected as unsuitable for Germanization after failing to measure up to racial scientists' criteria for establishing "Aryan" ancestry. These children were shipped to orphanages or to Auschwitz, where they were killed, most often by intercardiac injections of phenol.

German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste – DVL)

The German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste - DVL) classified Polish citizens into four categories:

• Category I - Persons of German descent who had engaged themselves in favour of the Reich before 1939;


• Category II - Persons of German descent who had remained passive;


• Category III - Indigenous persons considered by the Nazis as partly Polonized (mainly Silesians and Kashubs); refusal to join this list often lead to deportation to a concentration camp;


• Category IV - Persons of Polish nationality considered "racially valuable", but who resisted Germanization.
  

After registration in the List, individuals from Groups 1 and 2 automatically became German citizens.

Those from Group 3 acquired German citizenship subject to revocation.

Those from Group 4 received German citizenship through naturalization proceedings; resistance to Germanization constituted treason because "German blood must not be utilized in the interest of a foreign nation," and such people were sent to concentration camps.

Persons ineligible for the List were classified as stateless, and all Poles from the occupied territory, that is from the Government General of Poland, as distinct from the incorporated territory, were classified as non-protected.

Concentration camps

Camps such as Auschwitz in Poland and Buchenwald in central Germany became administrative centres of huge networks of forced-labour camps. One of the most infamous of these camps was Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, which supplied forced labourers to a synthetic rubber plant owned by IG Farben, a chemical industry conglomerate. Prisoners in all the concentration camps were literally worked to death.

Auschwitz (Oświęcim) became the main concentration camp for Poles after the arrival there on 14 June 1940, of 728 men transported from an overcrowded prison at Tarnów. 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, has estimated that 140,000–150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000–75,000 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 Ravensbrueck. In addition, tens of thousands were executed or died in other camps and prisons.

Polish resistance movement

In response to the German occupation, Poles organized the largest underground movement in Europe with more than 300 widely supported political and military groups and subgroups. Despite military defeat, the Polish government itself never surrendered. In 1940, the Polish government in Exile was established in London.

The Polish resistance movement fought against the occupation by Nazi Germany. Resistance began almost at once, although there is little terrain in Poland suitable for guerrilla operations.

Officers of the regular Polish army formed an underground armed force, the "Home Army" (Armia Krajowa—AK).

The Home Army (in Polish Armia Krajowa or AK), loyal to the Polish government in exile in London and a military arm of the Polish Secret State, was formed from a number of smaller groups in 1942. From 1943 the AK was in competition with the People's Army (Polish Armia Ludowa or AL), backed by the Soviet Union and controlled by the Polish Workers' Party (Polish Polska Partia Robotnicza or PPR). By 1944 the AK had some 380,000 men, although few arms: the AL was much smaller, numbering around 30,000. By the summer of 1944 Polish underground forces numbered more than 300,000. The Polish partisan groups (Leśni) killed about 150,000 Axis during the occupation.

Resistance groups inside Poland set up underground courts for trying collaborators and others deemed to be traitors to Poland. The resistance groups also set up clandestine schools in response to the Germans' closing of many educational institutions.

When the arrival of the Soviet army seemed imminent, the AK launched an uprising in Warsaw against the German army on 1 August 1944. After 63 days of bitter fighting, the Germans quashed the insurrection. The Polish resistance received little or no assistance from the Soviet army.

The Soviet army had reached a point within a few hundred meters across the Vistula River from the city on 16 September, but failed to make further headway in the course of the Uprising, leading to accusations that they had deliberately stopped their advance because Joseph Stalin did not want the Uprising to succeed. The reasoning behind the allegation was that Stalin preferred to have the Polish resistance suppressed by the Nazis so as to weaken any forces that might resist Soviet domination after the war.

Nearly 250,000 Poles, most of them civilians, lost their lives in the Warsaw Uprising.

The Germans deported hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to concentration camps. Many others were transported to the Reich for forced labor. Acting on Hitler's orders, German forces reduced the city to rubble, greatly extending the destruction begun during their suppression of the earlier armed uprising by Jewish fighters resisting deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943.

Impact on the Polish population

The Polish civilian population suffered under German occupation in several ways. Large numbers were expelled from areas intended for German colonisation, and forced to resettle in the General-Government area. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Germany for forced labour in industry and agriculture, where many thousands died. Poles were also conscripted for labour in Poland, and were held in labour camps all over the country, again with a high death rate. There was a general shortage of food, fuel for heating and medical supplies, and there was a high death rate among the Polish population as a result.

Some three million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished during the course of the war, over two million of whom were ethnic Poles (the remainder being mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians). The vast majority of those killed were civilians, mostly killed by the actions of Nazi Germany.

About one fifth of Polish citizens lost their lives in the war, most of the civilians targeted by various deliberate actions.

III - POLAND UNDER SOVIET OCCUPATION

The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland, and had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion.

After signing the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, Polish areas occupied by Nazi Germany were either directly annexed to the Third Reich, or became part of the so-called General Government. Soviet Union, after rigged Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, annexed eastern Poland either to Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, or Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The first victims of the new order were approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland. As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status.

In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Many of them, captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were executed already during the 1939 campaign. The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated at least 150,000.

In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations from the Soviet territories, while in Poland the Nazis and their collaborators murdered ethnic poles who opposed German rule.

The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow.

The Polish government in exile operated in exile between 1939 and 1990, maintaining that it was the only legal and legitimate representative of the Polish nation. In 1990, the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski handed the insignia to Lech Wałęsa, signifying continuity between the Second and Third republics.

Posted in: GermanyOnStamps, Histories/Histórias