Understanding an Occupation Unlike Most Others

by Edward Reid

Only in German Occupied Poland?

When people speak about occupied Europe during the Second World War, they sometimes imagine that every nation experienced German rule in roughly the same way.

They did not.

German occupation differed greatly from country to country. Policies were shaped by German racial ideology, military objectives, economic interests, and the future Germany envisioned for each population.

Poland faced something fundamentally different from the occupation imposed upon much of Western and Northern Europe.

Germany did not intend merely to control Poland, exploit its resources, or govern it temporarily. The long term objective was to destroy the Polish state, eliminate the nation’s educated and leadership classes, dismantle Polish culture, seize Polish territory, reduce much of the population to forced labor, and eventually remove, Germanize, or destroy large portions of the Polish nation.

This does not mean that other countries did not suffer or resist. It means that occupied Poland must be understood within the extraordinary circumstances imposed upon it.

Poland Never Accepted German Rule

Poland was overwhelmed militarily in September 1939 after being invaded by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east.

Individual Polish military formations were eventually forced to capitulate, but the Polish state never signed a general act of surrender and never accepted German rule.

The lawful Polish government continued abroad, first in France and later in London. Polish military forces were rebuilt and continued fighting beside the Allies on land, at sea, and in the air.

Poles fought from the first day of the war until the defeat of Germany in May 1945.

No Polish government was established to govern the country on Germany’s behalf. Germany also failed to create a national Polish Waffen SS division comparable to those recruited from several other European populations.

There were isolated individuals who served German interests, as there are under nearly every occupation, but this was not representative of Polish society. Collaboration remained limited, was widely despised, and could be punished by the Polish Underground State.

The overwhelming attitude of Poles toward the Germans was one of hatred, rejection, and resistance.

Poland had been invaded, partitioned, terrorized, and marked for destruction. The Germans were not regarded as legitimate rulers. They were regarded as occupiers and enemies.

The Polish Underground State

Polish resistance was not limited to scattered groups hiding in forests.

The Poles created an extensive clandestine state that remained loyal to the Polish Government in Exile. It included civil administration, courts, schools, universities, political institutions, intelligence services, welfare organizations, publishing networks, and armed forces.

The Polish Underground State was extraordinary in its size, organization, and connection to the lawful Polish government.

Its principal military force, the Home Army, Armia Krajowa, became one of the largest resistance organizations in occupied Europe.

Its members came from nearly every part of Polish society. They were professional soldiers, workers, teachers, students, farmers, doctors, priests, nurses, scouts, couriers, women, and teenagers.

Many fought in civilian clothing, identified only by white and red armbands. They faced German troops equipped with tanks, artillery, aircraft, machine guns, and flamethrowers, often with little more than captured rifles, pistols, homemade grenades, and limited ammunition.

Yet they continued to fight.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Polish servicemen fought outside occupied Poland. Polish airmen defended Britain. Polish sailors protected Allied convoys. Polish soldiers fought in Norway, France, North Africa, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Poland had been conquered and divided, but it never stopped fighting.

A German War Against the Polish Nation

The German occupation of Poland was not ordinary military rule. It was a racial and colonial campaign directed against the continued existence of the Polish nation.

From the beginning, German authorities deliberately targeted Poland’s educated and leadership classes.

Professors, teachers, priests, physicians, lawyers, judges, officers, officials, writers, artists, landowners, and community leaders were arrested, imprisoned, deported, and murdered.

The purpose was to leave Poland without people capable of preserving its culture, educating its children, organizing resistance, or rebuilding an independent state.

Polish schools and universities were closed or severely restricted. Secret education therefore became an act of national resistance.

Libraries, museums, archives, churches, monuments, and cultural institutions were looted or destroyed. Polish books were banned. Works of art and historical treasures were carried into Germany.

Children considered racially suitable were taken from Polish families and subjected to Germanization. Other children were treated as a future source of labor or as lives without value.

Entire Polish communities were expelled so that German settlers could seize their homes, businesses, farms, and land.

Countless Polish civilians disappeared into prisons, concentration camps, forced labor camps, and execution sites.

Roundups, Hostages, and Public Executions

Street roundups occurred in other occupied territories, but in Poland the łapanka became a particularly widespread and feared instrument of terror.

German forces surrounded streets, railway stations, markets, churches, cinemas, and entire neighborhoods, seizing civilians without warning.

Those captured could be interrogated, beaten, imprisoned, deported for forced labor, sent to concentration camps, or executed.

A person could leave home for work and never return.

German authorities publicly announced the shooting of hostages in retaliation for resistance activity. Prisoners were murdered in forests, prisons, city streets, and village squares.

Entire families and communities could be punished for suspected assistance to Polish resistance fighters or Jews.

Villages were burned. Civilians were executed. Children were murdered beside their parents.

German forces sometimes destroyed entire communities in acts of collective punishment intended to terrorize the population into submission.

Terror was not merely a reaction to Polish resistance.

Terror was the method of German government in occupied Poland.

Forced Labor and Expulsion

Millions of Polish citizens were exploited as forced laborers, both inside occupied Poland and within Germany.

They were torn from their families and forced to work on farms, in factories, mines, construction sites, and military industries.

Polish laborers in Germany were required to wear identifying badges and were subjected to discriminatory regulations, physical abuse, hunger, humiliation, and severe punishment.

Large regions of western and northern Poland were incorporated directly into Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were expelled to make room for German settlers.

Their homes, farms, businesses, possessions, and land were confiscated.

Under Generalplan Ost, German planners envisioned an even more radical future. Much of the Polish population, along with other Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, was to be expelled, enslaved, Germanized, reduced through starvation, or allowed to die.

Germany did not have enough time to carry out the entire plan.

That does not make the plan less real.

Many of its methods were already being implemented throughout occupied Poland.

The Destruction of Warsaw

Warsaw became the great symbol of Polish resistance and German vengeance.

When the Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, Polish resistance fighters rose to liberate their capital.

They faced tanks, artillery, aircraft, flamethrowers, and heavily armed German formations.

The insurgents included soldiers, students, workers, scouts, nurses, couriers, priests, women, and teenagers. Many possessed only captured weapons, homemade grenades, and a small supply of ammunition.

They fought for sixty three days.

German forces murdered tens of thousands of civilians during the suppression of the uprising. During the Wola massacre, men, women, children, hospital patients, doctors, and nurses were killed in mass executions.

After the uprising was defeated, the surviving population was expelled.

German demolition units then systematically destroyed Warsaw.

Homes, churches, libraries, monuments, archives, palaces, and historic buildings were burned or blown apart.

By the end of the war, approximately 85 percent of Warsaw had been destroyed.

Much of this destruction did not result directly from combat. It was carried out after the fighting, as a deliberate attempt to erase the capital of the Polish nation.

A Nation That Refused to Disappear

Poles were not naturally united on every political, religious, or social question. No nation is.

Yet German occupation produced an overwhelming rejection of German rule.

The Polish people understood that the occupiers did not intend to offer them a place within a German European order. They were marked as an inferior population whose state, culture, leadership, and future were to be destroyed.

That is why resistance took so many forms.

Some Poles carried weapons.

Some taught children in secret.

Some printed underground newspapers.

Some gathered intelligence.

Some hid fugitives.

Some carried messages.

Some protected Polish art, books, archives, and religious objects.

Some continued to pray, educate, write, and speak Polish when German policy sought to reduce their culture to silence.

Resistance was not only the act of firing a rifle.

In occupied Poland, preserving the nation itself became an act of resistance.

(https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1060491983160071&set=gm.1541334211002745&idorvanity=303196081483237)

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A photo that is painful to look at.

This photo below shows several German soldiers. Some of them are standing with their weapons aimed at innocent Poles lined up against the town hall wall waiting for an execution. The final seconds of their lives were captured by one of the Gestapo officers present there.

The execution was carried out in two or three groups. The photograph shows only a fragment of the firing squad, which consisted of sixteen soldiers in total.
As during many other German executions in occupied Poland, one of the Poles being led to his death shouted, “Poland has not yet perished!”
Once all Polish victims had been killed, the Germans ordered one of the gardeners to load their bodies onto a horse-drawn cart and transport them to the nearby cemetery.
Those Poles died beneath the town hall wall where one of the victims was also the mayor of the town.

The Germans treated him with exceptional cruelty. He was the only one who was not executed beneath the town hall wall. Instead, he was placed on the cart alongside the bodies of the murdered townspeople.
The sick and terrified mayor attempted to escape slowly crawling on his knees, but the Germans caught up with him and killed him by shooting him twice in the head..