In October 1938, about 17,000 Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany were arrested and expelled. These deportations, termed by the Nazis Polenaktion ("Polish Action"), were ordered by SS officer and head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich. The deported Jews were initially rejected by Poland and therefore had to live in makeshift encampments along the Germany–Poland border.
From 1935 to 1938, Jews living within Germany had been stripped of most of their rights by the Nuremberg Laws, and faced intense persecution from the state. As a result, many Jewish refugees sought rapidly to emigrate out of the Reich. However, most countries, still feeling the effects of a global depression, enacted strict immigration laws and simply would not address the refugee problem. According to a census conducted in 1933, over 57 percent of the foreign Jews living in Germany were Polish. [1] Following the German annexation of Austria on 13 March 1938, the Polish government became worried that it would face a large-scale return of Jewish citizens of Poland that had been living in Austria. On 31 March 1938, the parliament approved legislation enabling the revocation of Polish citizenship if the person had been living abroad for more than five years since the establishment of Poland in 1919. [2] The German government, which did not want to be stuck with tens of thousands of stateless Jewish Poles, passed legislation in August that allowed it to deport any foreigner who had lost their citizenship from their home country. Additionally, a confidential directive was issued to not allow any new residence permits to be issued to Jews. [3] [4]
On October 6, 1938, the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs announced an ordinance requiring that Polish citizens living outside Poland obtain an endorsement stamp on their passports before October 30. Any passport without the stamp would become void and the owner of the passport would have his citizenship rights revoked. [5] When thousands of Polish Jews in Germany presented their passports at Polish consular offices, they were denied the necessary stamp for various reasons. [1] By enacting this decree and denying the stamp to Jews, the Polish Government made it clear that they had no interest in taking in Jews from the Reich, even those who were Polish citizens.
The Polish decree did not please the German Government. In 1938, Nazi policy regarding the Jews was heavily centered on emigration from the Reich rather than the mass extermination that would arise in 1942 during World War II. Thus, Nazi officials saw the Polish decree as a hindrance to their attempts at forcing Jewish emigration. [6] In a letter to Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Werner Best wrote:
On the 6th of October 1938, the Polish Government issued and on the 15th of October published a decree whereby all passports must bear a control stamp in order to remain valid. Passports which do not have this stamp no longer can be used for entry into Polish territory. With this decree the Polish Government obviously intend to make it impossible for numerous Polish Jews living abroad – particularly in Germany – to return to Poland. This would mean some 70,000 Polish Jews in the Reich Territory would have to be tolerated permanently in Germany. [7]
Fearing the prospect of thousands of Polish Jews unable to legally emigrate from the Reich, the German Government felt that it had to act. As head of the Gestapo, Heydrich ordered that Polish Jews be expelled from the Reich. [1]
From October 27 until October 29, the day before the Polish decree regarding the eligibility of passports was set to take effect, state authorities in Germany arrested approximately 17,000 Polish Jews and cancelled their German permits of residence. [8] The Gestapo was easily able to locate those arrested through registration data and census files.
After being arrested, thousands of Polish Jews were stripped of any personal property or money and put on trains. These trains brought the deportees to the Germany–Poland border. The Polish border authorities were overwhelmed at first by the unexpected influx of people and during the first day of expulsions they allowed thousands of Polish Jews entry into Poland. However, the Polish Government quickly responded by closing the border down and denying any further access. [9] In the city of Leipzig, 1,300 Polish Jews were able to find refuge in the Polish consulate, assisted there by the Consul General Feliks Chiczewski.
By October 30, thousands of homeless Jews resided in no-man's land along the border. Historians estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 Jews were deported between the southern towns Bytom (then Beuthen) and Katowice, 1,500 were placed near the northern town of Chojnice, and 8,000 were sent to the town of Zbąszyń (source 2 pp. 123). In Zbąszyń a large refugee camp was established as an attempt to give shelter to those deported. For months, refugees in Zbąszyń slept in poorly constructed barracks with very few provisions. [10] The severity of the conditions within the camp was witnessed by Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum who described the hopelessness of the refugees in a letter to a colleague.
I do not think any Jewish community has ever experienced so cruel and merciless an expulsion as this one. The future is envisaged in desperate terms. People in the camp have received notices that they have lost their Polish citizenship […] Zbaszyn has become a symbol for the defenselessness of Polish Jews. Jews have been humiliated to the level of lepers, to fourth class citizens and as a result we are all affected by this terrible tragedy. Zbaszyn was a heavy moral blow to the Jewish population of Poland. [11]
As a result of the Polenaktion of October 1938, most of the 17,000 expelled Jews would remain in refugee camps on the border for almost a year. It was not until just prior to the German Invasion of Poland in 1939 that the refugees of the Polenaktion gained access to Poland's interior.
Among those deported on October 27 in Hanover, Germany was the family of Sendel Grynszpan. Grynszpan described police coming to their home on Thursday October 27, demanding that they go to the nearest precinct with their Polish passports. When they arrived, hundreds of people were waiting for further instructions. The police notified the crowd that they were to sign papers and present their passports. After doing so they were placed in police vans, taken to a train station, and forced onto the cars. On Saturday October 29, the Grynszpan family arrived in Zbąszyń, confused and scared. [12]
On October 31, Sendel Grynszpan's daughter Berta was able to send a post card from Zbąszyń to her brother Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. The post card, which detailed the cruelty and tragedy of the family's forced relocation reached Grynszpan. Horrified and distressed by the plight of his family and the thousands of other Polish Jews, Grynszpan took it upon himself to enact revenge. [12] Purchasing a pistol, he went to the German Embassy in Paris on November 7. There he shot and ultimately killed First Secretary of the Reich, Ernst vom Rath.
The assassination of vom Rath stunned the Nazi regime. On November 9 and 10 Jewish businesses, properties, and synagogues were destroyed, burned, and looted across the Reich, with the assassination being used by the Nazis as a pretext. This event, often referred to as Kristallnacht is often seen by historians as a key moment of significance in the formulation of the Holocaust. [13]
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt]lit. 'crystal night') or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced[noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə] ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot and killed the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. The Nazis used this assassination as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the Fall of France and brought to Germany; his further fate remains unknown.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a member of the German nobility, a Nazi Party member, and German Foreign Office diplomat. He is mainly remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, which provided a pretext for Kristallnacht, "The Night of Broken Glass". Historians consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
The Holocaust in Poland was the ghettoization, robbery, deportation, and murder of Jews, simultaneously with other people groups for identical racial pretexts, in occupied Poland, organized by Nazi Germany. Three million Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau extermination camps, representing half of all Jews murdered during the Europe-wide Holocaust.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Zbąszyń is a town in western Poland, in Greater Poland Voivodeship, in Nowy Tomyśl County. It is the administrative seat of Gmina Zbąszyń.
Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of an ongoing historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918 and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives that were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. To a large degree, the debate has been settled by acknowledgement of both centralized planning and decentralized attitudes and choices.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
Several Catholic countries and populations fell under Nazi domination during the period of the Second World War (1939–1945), and ordinary Catholics fought on both sides of the conflict. Despite efforts to protect its rights within Germany under a 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty, the Church in Germany had faced persecution in the years since Adolf Hitler had seized power, and Pope Pius XI accused the Nazi government of sowing 'fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church'. The concordat has been described by some as giving moral legitimacy to the Nazi regime soon after Hitler had acquired quasi-dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act of 1933, an Act itself facilitated through the support of the Catholic Centre Party. Pius XII became Pope on the eve of war and lobbied world leaders to prevent the outbreak of conflict. His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, called the invasion of Poland an "hour of darkness". He affirmed the policy of Vatican neutrality, but maintained links to the German Resistance. Despite being the only world leader to publicly and specifically denounce Nazi crimes against Jews in his 1942 Christmas Address, controversy surrounding his apparent reluctance to speak frequently and in even more explicit terms about Nazi crimes continues. He used diplomacy to aid war victims, lobbied for peace, shared intelligence with the Allies, and employed Vatican Radio and other media to speak out against atrocities like race murders. In Mystici corporis Christi (1943) he denounced the murder of the handicapped. A denunciation from German bishops of the murder of the "innocent and defenceless", including "people of a foreign race or descent", followed.
During the Holocaust, the Catholic Church played a role in the rescue of hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered by the Nazis. Members of the Church, through lobbying of Axis officials, provision of false documents, and the hiding of people in monasteries, convents, schools, among families and the institutions of the Vatican itself, saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated the figure at between 700,000 and 860,000, although the figure is contested.
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
The Holocaust in the Sudetenland resulted in the flight, dispossession, deportation and ultimately death of many of the 24,505 Jews living in the Reichsgau Sudetenland, an administrative region of Nazi Germany established from former Czechoslovak territory annexed after the October 1938 Munich Agreement. Due to harassment and violence, including during Kristallnacht, ninety percent of the Jews had already left the Sudetenland by mid-1939. The remaining Jews were subject to property confiscation and eventually deportation. During the later years of the war, tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews were forced laborers in a network of concentration camps in the Sudetenland.
From 4 to 7 November 1938, thousands of Jews were deported from Slovakia to the no-man's land on the Slovak−Hungarian border. Following Hungarian territorial gains in the First Vienna Award on 2 November, Slovak Jews were accused of favoring Hungary in the dispute. With the help of Adolf Eichmann, Slovak People's Party leaders planned the deportation, which was carried out by local police and the Hlinka Guard. Conflicting orders were issued to target either Jews who were poor or those who lacked Slovak citizenship, resulting in chaos.
The Holocaust in Germany was the systematic persecution, deportation, imprisonment, and murder of Jews in Germany as part of the Europe-wide Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. The term typically refers only to the areas that were part of Germany prior to the Nazi regime coming to power and excludes some or all of the territories annexed by Nazi Germany, such as Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
During the Holocaust, the German government was more lenient with Jews who were married to non-Jews. Generally, Jewish spouses in "privileged mixed marriages" were partially exempted from anti-Jewish legislation, and, until early 1945, were largely spared from being deported to ghettos, concentration camps, or extermination camps. The Nuremberg Laws, which forbade Germans from intermarrying with Jews, did not dissolve the marriages of existing German–Jewish couples, though they still came under immense pressure from the Nazi Party, which urged them to divorce in order to end the Jewish partner's legal protection. With a survival rate greatly exceeding that of other Jews, over 90% of intermarried Jews in Germany and German-occupied Europe were able to avoid being murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
The Holocaust in Austria was the systematic persecution, plunder and extermination of Jews by German and Austrian Nazis from 1938 to 1945. Part of the wider-Holocaust, pervasive persecution of Jews was immediate after the German annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss. An estimated 70,000 Jews were murdered and 125,000 forced to flee Austria as refugees.
Like other areas under Nazi Germany, Jews were persecuted in the northernmost German state Schleswig-Holstein. Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, an estimated 1,900 Jews lived in Schleswig-Holstein, mostly in Lübeck and Kiel. By the time of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, many of Schleswig-Holstein's Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Media related to Polenaktion (1938) at Wikimedia Commons