The expulsion of Poles by Germany was a prolonged anti-Polish campaign of ethnic cleansing by violent and terror-inspiring means lasting nearly half a century. It began with the concept of Pan-Germanism developed in the early 19th century and culminated in the racial policy of Nazi Germany that asserted the superiority of the Aryan race. The removal of Poles by Germany stemmed from historic ideas of expansionist nationalism. It was implemented at different levels and different stages by successive German governments. It ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.[3]
The partitions of Poland had ended the existence of a sovereign Polish state in the 18th century. With the rise of German nationalism in mid 19th century, Poles faced increasing discrimination on formerly Polish lands. The first mass deportation of 30,000 Poles from territories controlled by the German Empire took place in 1885. While the ideas of expelling Poles can be found in German political discourse of the 19th century, these ideas matured into nascent plans advocated by German politicians during the First World War, which called for the removal of the Polish population from Polish territories first annexed by the Russian Empire during partitions and then by Germany.[4] Before and after the 1939 invasion of Poland the Nazis exploited these ideas when creating their Lebensraum concept of territorial aggression.[4] Large-scale expulsions of Poles occurred during World War II when Nazi Germany started the Generalplan Ost campaign of ethnic cleansing in all Polish areas occupied by, and formally annexed to Nazi Germany. Although the Nazis were not able to fully implement Generalplan Ost due to the war's turn, up to 2 million Poles were affected by wartime expulsions with additional millions displaced or murdered.
Background
Poles had constituted one of the largest minorities in the German Empire since its creation in 1871. This was a result of the earlier acquisitions made by Prussia, the state that initiated the Unification of Germany. The Electorate of Brandenburg (later Kingdom of Prussia), with its capital in Berlin after 1451, acquired historic lands with significant Polish population in a series of military operations,[4] and, in the second half of the 18th century, had seized western territories of the Polish Kingdom by taking part in the Partitions of Poland and the Silesian Wars with Austria.
Plaque commemorating the expulsion of 50,000 Polish citizens of Gdynia during the German "aktion Gotenhafen" in World War II
The idea of pan-Germanism, demanding the unification of all Germans in one state, including the German diaspora east of the imperial border, grew out of Romantic nationalism. Some pan-Germanists believed that Germans were ethnically superior to other peoples — including Slavs, whom they viewed as inferior to the German "race" and culture. The Nazi concept of Lebensraum in turn demanded "living space" for German people, claiming overpopulation of Germany and alleged negative traits of heavy urbanisation in contrast to agricultural settlement. The desired territories were to be taken particularly from Poland. Both pan-Germanism and Lebensraum theory viewed Poles as an obstacle to German hegemony and prosperity as well as future expansion of the German state.[4]
In the territories annexed during the Partitions of Poland, German authorities sought to limit the number of ethnic Poles by their forced Germanisation and by a new wave of settlement by German colonists at their expense.[4] Beginning with the Kulturkampf, laws were enacted to restrict Polish culture, religion, language, and rights to property. Bismarck initiated the Prussian deportations of 1885–1890, which affected some 30,000 Poles and Jews living in Germany who did not have German citizenship. This is described by E.J. Feuchtwanger as one of the precedents to modern policies of ethnic cleansing.[5] In 1887 Bernhard von Bülow, the future Chancellor of the German Empire, advocated expelling Poles by force from territories which were Polish-inhabited and slated to become part of Germany.[6]
In 1908, Germany legalized the eviction of Poles from their properties under pressure from pan-German nationalist groups who hoped this law would be used to reduce the number of Poles in the East.[4]
World War I
In August 1914 the German imperial army bombed and burned down the city of Kalisz, chasing out tens of thousands of its Polish citizens. However, during World War I, Germany had a frantic need for extra manpower in the East and hoped to tap into the reservoir of military volunteers among the Poles by making promises of a future independent Polish state. This initiative (led by Bethmann) failed, producing only "a dribble of volunteers" in 1916, but it was a commitment very hard to retract. There were numerous mistakes made, such as the Oath Crisis, caused by poor wording of the oath of the Polish soldiers, which caused consternation among many Polish volunteers. In general, opinions of the German occupiers were mixed, between those who hoped that the Germans would set up a new Polish state, and those who feared German domination. In any case, successful attacks by the Russian army, such as the 'Brusilov offensive', forced Germany to consider a quasi independent buffer state between the two empires, hopefully set up only in the former Russian Poland and linked to Germany by its own military means.[7] The idea of reconstituting Congress Poland for the Poles after the war, was a cynical ploy which stemmed from a desire to push Russia's frontiers further East with the least amount of German effort.[8] In reality, Germany planned to annex about 30,000km2 from former Congress Poland for German colonisation.[4] Most of the Polish population of those territories (about 2,000,000 people) was to be expelled into a small Polish puppet state.[4] The remaining population was to be used as agricultural labour for new German colonists.[4]
With the occupation of Poland following the German invasion of the country, Nazi policies were enacted upon its Polish population on an unprecedented scale. According to Nazi ideology Poles, as Untermenschen, were seen as fit only for slavery and for further elimination in order to make room for the Germans. Adolf Hitler had plans for extensive colonisation of territories in the east of the Third Reich. Poland, itself, would – according to well documented German plans – have been cleared of Polish people altogether, as 20 million or so would have been expelled eventually. Up to 3 or 4 million Polish citizens (all peasants) believed to be descendants of German colonists and migrants and therefore considered "racially valuable" would be Germanised and dispersed among the German population.[9] Nazi leadership hoped that through expulsions to Siberia, famine, mass executions, and slave labour of any survivors, the Polish nation would be eventually completely destroyed.[10]
World War II expulsions took place within two specific territories: one area annexed to Reich in 1939 and 1941, and another, the General Government, precursor to further expansion of German administrative settlement area. Eventually, as Adolf Hitler explained in March 1941, the General Government would be cleared of Poles, the region would be turned into a "purely German area" within 15–20 years and in place of 15 million Poles, 4–5 million Germans would live there, and the area would become "as German as the Rhineland.[11]
Expulsions from Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany
The Nazi plan to ethnically cleanse the territories occupied by Germany in Eastern Europe during World War II, was called the Generalplan Ost (GPO). Germanisation began with the classification of people suitable as defined on the Nazi Volksliste.[12] About 1.7 million Poles were deemed Germanizable, including between one and two hundred thousand children who were taken from their parents.[13] For the rest, expulsion was carried out.
These expulsions were carried out so abruptly that ethnic Germans being resettled there were given homes with half-eaten meals on tables and unmade beds where small children had been sleeping at the time of expulsion.[14] Members of Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were assigned the task of overseeing such evictions to ensure that the Poles left behind most of their belongings for the use of the settlers.[15] According to Czesław Łuczak, Germans expelled the following numbers of Poles from territories annexed to the Reich in the period of 1939–1944:
Expulsion Warrant from Sosnowiec 1942 with stamp Pole.
Combined with "wild expulsions", in four years 923,000 Poles were ethnically cleansed from territories Germany annexed into the Reich.[17]
Expulsions from General Government
Within the territories of the German protectorate called General Government there were two main areas of expulsions committed by the German state. The protectorate itself was seen as temporary measure, and served as a concentration camp for Poles to perform hard labour furthering German industry and war effort. Eventually it was to be cleared of Poles also.
Some 116,000 Poles were expelled from the Zamość region as part of Nazi plans for establishment of German colonies in the conquered territories. Zamość itself was to be renamed Himmlerstadt, later changed to Pflugstadt (Plough City), which was to symbolise the German "Plow" that was to "plough" the East. Additionally, almost 30,000 children were kidnapped by German authorities from their parents for potential Germanisation.[17] This led to massive resistance (see Zamość Uprising).
Warsaw
In October 1940, 115,000 Poles were expelled from their homes in central Warsaw to make room for the Jewish Ghetto, constructed there by German authorities. (Jews were then expelled from their homes elsewhere and forced to move into the Ghetto.) When the Warsaw Uprising failed, 500,000 people were expelled from the city alone as punishment by German authorities.[17]
Demographic estimates
It is estimated that between 1.6 and 2 million people[18] were expelled from their homes during the German occupation of Poland. The Nazi German organized expulsions—by themselves—affected 1,710,000 Poles directly.[17] New estimates by Polish historians give the number of 2.478 million people expelled.[2] Additionally, 2.5 to 3 million Poles were taken from Poland to Germany as slave labourers to support the Nazi war effort.[10] These numbers do not include people arrested by the Germans and sent to Nazi concentration camps.[18]
In many instances, Poles were given between 15 minutes and 1 hour to collect their personal belongings (usually no more than 15 kilograms per person) before they were removed from their homes and transported east (see: deportations) On top of that about 5 million Poles were sent to German labor and concentration camps.[19] A total of about 6 million Polish citizens were killed during the war, of which approximately half were Jews or of Jewish descent.[20][21] All these actions resulted in significant changes in Polish demographics at the end of the war.[20]
1 2 Nowa Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2004, pages 811-812 (volume 8), s. 709 (volume 6). ISBN83-01-14179-4.
↑ Polska Akademia Nauk (Polish Academy of Sciences), Historia Polski, Vol. III 1850/1864-1918, Part 2 1850/1864-1900, edited by Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warsaw 1967.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Imannuel Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914-1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg, Hamburg/Lübeck 1960
↑ Herbert Arthur Strauss, "Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870-1933-39 Germany - Great Britain-France", Walter de Gruyter 1993
1 2 Wojciech Roszkowski, Historia Polski 1914–1997, Warsaw 1998
↑ Berghahn, Volker R. (1999), "Germans and Poles 1871–1945", Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences, Rodopi: 15–34, ISBN9042006889– via Google Books
↑ Dr Waldemar Grabowski, IPN Centrala (2009-08-31). "Straty ludności cywilnej". Straty ludzkie poniesione przez Polskę w latach 1939-1945. Bibula – pismo niezalezne. Retrieved February 20, 2013. Według ustaleń Czesława Łuczaka, do wszelkiego rodzaju obozów odosobnienia deportowano ponad 5 mln obywateli polskich (łącznie z Żydami i Cyganami). Z liczby tej zginęło ponad 3 miliony.
Maria Rutowska, "Wysiedlenia ludności polskiej z Kraju Warty do Generalnego Gubernatorstwa 1939-1941" Instytut Zachodni, Poznań 2003, ISBN83-87688-42-8
Czesław Łuczak, Polityka ludnościowa i ekonomiczna hitlerowskich Niemiec w okupowanej Polsce, Wyd. Poznańskie, Poznań 1979 ISBN83-210-0010-X
Czesław Łuczak, "Położenie ludności polskiej w Kraju Warty 1939 - 1945", Wydawnictwo Poznańskie 1987
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
The Heim ins Reich was a foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler before and during World War II, beginning in 1936 [see Nazi Four Year Plan; Grams, 2021]. The aim of Hitler's initiative was to convince all Volksdeutsche who were living outside Nazi Germany that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into Greater Germany, but also relocate from territories that were not under German control, following the conquest of Poland, in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet pact. The Heim ins Reich manifesto targeted areas ceded in Versailles to the newly reborn state of Poland, various lands of immigration, as well as other areas that were inhabited by significant ethnic German populations, such as the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the southeastern and northeastern regions of Europe after 6 October 1939.
The General Government, formally the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region, was a German zone of occupation established after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Slovakia and the Soviet Union in 1939 at the onset of World War II. The newly occupied Second Polish Republic was split into three zones: the General Government in its centre, Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany in the west, and Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union in the east. The territory was expanded substantially in 1941, after the German Invasion of the Soviet Union, to include the new District of Galicia. The area of the Generalgouvernement roughly corresponded with the Austrian part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795.
Following the Invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, nearly a quarter of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic was annexed by Nazi Germany and placed directly under the German civil administration. The rest of Nazi-occupied Poland was renamed as the General Government district. The annexation was part of the "fourth partition of Poland" by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, outlined months before the invasion, in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermenschen" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
The Province of Upper Silesia was a province of the Free State of Prussia from 1919 to 1945. It comprised much of the region of Upper Silesia and was eventually divided into two government regions called Kattowitz (1939–1945), and Oppeln (1819–1945). The provincial capital was Oppeln (1919–1938) and Kattowitz (1941–1945), while other major towns included Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg O.S., Neiße, Ratibor and Auschwitz, added in 1941. Between 1938 and 1941 it was reunited with Lower Silesia as the Province of Silesia.
Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, included the genocide of millions of Polish people, especially the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. These mass killings were enacted by the Nazis with further plans that were justified by their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, and especially Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen.
The flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland: including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland; despite acquiring territories from Germany, the Poles themselves were also expelled from the former eastern territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. Research by the West German government put the figure of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.
Polish culture during World War II was suppressed by the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom were hostile to Poland's people and cultural heritage. Policies aimed at cultural genocide resulted in the deaths of thousands of scholars and artists, and the theft and destruction of innumerable cultural artifacts. ''The maltreatment of the Poles was one of many ways in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes had grown to resemble one another", wrote British historian Niall Ferguson.
Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Koppe was a German Nazi commander. He was responsible for numerous atrocities against Poles and Jews in Reichsgau Wartheland and the General Government during the German occupation of Poland in World War II.
The Zamość uprising comprised World War II partisan operations, 1942–1944, by the Polish resistance against Germany's Generalplan-Ost forced expulsion of Poles from the Zamość region (Zamojszczyzna) and the region's colonization by German settlers.
Czesław Madajczyk was a Polish historian. His studies on the German occupation of Europe after 1938, and in particular on the occupation of Poland and on World War II Polish culture, are considered particularly important by the European scholarly community.
The Intelligenzaktion, or the Intelligentsia mass shootings, was a series of mass murders which was committed against the Polish intelligentsia early in the Second World War (1939–45) by Nazi Germany. The Germans conducted the operations in accordance with their plan to Germanize the western regions of occupied Poland, before their territorial annexation to the German Reich.
The Intelligenzaktion Pommern was a Nazi German operation aimed at the eradication of the Polish intelligentsia in Pomeranian Voivodeship and the surrounding areas at the beginning of World War II. It was part of a larger genocidal Intelligenzaktion that took place across most of Nazi-occupied western Poland in the course of Operation Tannenberg, purposed to install Nazi officials from SiPo, Kripo, Gestapo and SD at the helm of a new administrative machine.
The Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II was a massive operation consisting of the forced resettlement of over 1.7 million Poles from the territories of German-occupied Poland, with the aim of their Germanization between 1939 and 1944.
University of the Western Lands was an underground Polish university in occupied Poland during World War II. The faculty was composed mostly of the professors of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań who had been expelled by the Nazis, and included 17 different units, among them the faculty of medicine and surgery. It operated primarily in Warsaw from 1940 to 1944 and had branches in Kielce, Jędrzejów, Częstochowa and Milanówek.
The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945) began with the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it was formally concluded with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in May 1945. Throughout the entire course of the occupation, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), both of which intended to eradicate Poland's culture and subjugate its people. In the summer-autumn of 1941, the lands which were annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army drove the German forces out of the USSR and crossed into Poland from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.
The ethnic cleansing of Zamojszczyzna by Nazi Germany during World War II was carried out as part of a greater plan of forcible removal of the entire Polish populations from targeted regions of occupied Poland in preparation for the state-sponsored settlement of the ethnic German Volksdeutsche. The operation of mass expulsions from Zamojszczyzna region around the city of Zamość was carried out between November 1942 and March 1943 on direct order from Heinrich Himmler. It was preplanned by both Globocnik from Action Reinhard and Himmler, as the first stage of the eventual murderous ethnic cleansing ahead of projected Germanization of the entire General Government territory.
The Sochy massacre occurred on 1 June 1943 in the village of Sochy, Lublin Voivodeship in Zamość County, Lublin Voivodeship during the German occupation of Poland when approximately 181–200 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by the German Ordnungspolizei and SS in retaliation for the village's support for the Polish resistance movement.
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