In Nazi German terminology, Volksdeutsche were "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship". The term is the nominalised plural of volksdeutsch, with Volksdeutsche denoting a singular female, and Volksdeutscher, a singular male. The words Volk and völkisch conveyed the meanings of "folk".
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.
Operation Tannenberg was a codename for one of the anti-Polish extermination actions by Nazi Germany. The shootings were conducted with the use of a proscription list, compiled by the Gestapo in the two years before the invasion of Poland.
Działdowopronounced[d͡ʑau̯ˈdɔvɔ] is a town in northern Poland with 20,935 inhabitants as of December 2021, the capital of Działdowo County. As part of Masuria, it is situated in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Działdowo belonged previously to Ciechanów Voivodeship (1975–1998). The town is a major railroad junction connecting the capital city of Warsaw with Gdańsk and Olsztyn to the north.
Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia was an administrative division of Nazi Germany created on 8 October 1939 from annexed territory of the Free City of Danzig, the Greater Pomeranian Voivodship, and the Regierungsbezirk West Prussia of Gau East Prussia.
Ludolf-Hermann Emmanuel Georg Kurt Werner von Alvensleben was an SS functionary of Nazi Germany. He held positions of SS and Police Leader in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, and was indicted for war crimes including the killing of at least 4,247 Poles by units under his command.
Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures, was turned into a memorial museum.
Albert Maria Forster was a Nazi German politician, member of the SS and war criminal. Under his administration as the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Danzig-West Prussia during the Second World War, the local non-German populations of Poles and Jews were classified as sub-human and subjected to extermination campaigns involving ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and in the case of some Poles with German ancestry, forceful Germanisation. Forster was directly responsible for the extermination of non-Germans and was a strong supporter of Polish genocide, which he had advocated before the war. Forster was tried, convicted and hanged in Warsaw for his crimes, after Germany was defeated.
The AB-Aktion, was a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence during World War II aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic across the territories slated for eventual annexation. Most of the killings were arranged in a form of forced disappearances from multiple cities and towns upon the German arrival. In the spring and summer of 1940, more than 30,000 Polish citizens were arrested by the Nazi authorities in German-occupied central Poland, the so-called General Government. About 7,000 of them including community leaders, professors, teachers and priests were subsequently massacred secretly at various locations including at the Palmiry forest complex near Palmiry. The others were sent to Nazi concentration camps.
Solec Kujawski is a town in north-central Poland with 15,505 inhabitants, located in Bydgoszcz County in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. It is situated within the historic region of Kuyavia, around 14 kilometres (9 mi) southeast of Bydgoszcz. The town features Saint Stanislaus in its coat of arms.
Valley of Death in Fordon, Bydgoszcz, northern Poland, is a site of Nazi German mass murder committed at the beginning of World War II and a mass grave of 1,200–1,400 Poles and Jews murdered in October and November 1939 by the local German Selbstschutz and the Gestapo. The murders were a part of Intelligenzaktion in Pomerania, a Nazi action aimed at the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia in Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, which included the former Pomeranian Voivodeship. It was part of a larger genocidal action that took place in all German occupied Poland, code-named Operation Tannenberg.
From Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939, the Wehrmacht recruited from Poland's 2.2% ethnic German minority, while it did not enlist ethnic Poles on racist grounds. When Germany began losing the war 1943, the Wehrmacht forcibly conscripted ethnic Poles, who were commanded with racist policies against them.
History of Pomerania between 1933 and 1945 covers the period of one decade of the long history of Pomerania, lasting from the Adolf Hitler's rise to power until the end of World War II in Europe. In 1933, the German Province of Pomerania like all of Germany came under control of the Nazi regime. During the following years, the Nazis led by Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg manifested their power through the process known as Gleichschaltung and repressed their opponents. Meanwhile, the Pomeranian Voivodeship was part of the Second Polish Republic, led by Józef Piłsudski. With respect to Polish Pomerania, Nazi diplomacy – as part of their initial attempts to subordinate Poland into Anti-Comintern Pact – aimed at incorporation of the Free City of Danzig into the Third Reich and an extra-territorial transit route through Polish territory, which was rejected by the Polish government, that feared economic blackmail by Nazi Germany, and reduction to puppet status.
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 massacres in Piaśnica were a set of mass executions carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, between the fall of 1939 and spring of 1940 in Piaśnica Wielka in the Darzlubska Wilderness near Wejherowo. The exact number of people murdered is unknown, but estimates range between 12,000 and 14,000 victims. Most of them were Polish intellectuals from Gdańsk Pomerania, but Poles, Jews, Czechs and German inmates from mental hospitals from the General Government and the Third Reich were also murdered. After the Stutthof concentration camp, Piaśnica was the largest site of killings of Polish civilians in Pomerania by the Germans, and for this reason, is sometimes referred to as the "second" or "Pomeranian" Katyn. It was the first large-scale Nazi atrocity in occupied Poland.
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.
Special Prosecution Book-Poland was a list prepared by the Germans immediately before the invasion of Poland containing more than 61,000 members of Polish elites: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, actors, former officers, and prominent others. Upon identification, they were to be arrested and turned over to Nazi authorities following the invasion.
The Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz was an ethnic German self-protection militia, a paramilitary organization consisting of ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) mobilized from among the German minority in Poland. The Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz operated before, and during the opening stages of, World War II in the western half of Poland and were responsible for, and took part in, massacres of Poles, along with SS Einsatzgruppen. Selbstschutz counted circa 100,000 members, who formed greater part of German minority members "fit for action".
Ludolf Jakob von Alvensleben was a German SS-Standartenführer who during the Second World War served as a senior staff member of Operation Reinhard, by which Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler planned to systematically murder the Jews of Europe. Alvensleben ended the war as the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) for Adria-West in Northern Italy/South Tyrol. He avoided prosecution after the war and supposedly died in an automobile accident.
During the German occupation of Poland, some citizens of all its major ethnic groups collaborated with the Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary. Collaboration in Poland was less institutionalized than in some other countries and has been described as marginal, a point of pride with the Polish people. During and after the war, the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance movement punished collaborators and sentenced thousands of them to death.
