Contents
The Black Book is a collection of authenticated documents, depositions, eye-witness accounts, and Ministerial summaries, describing and illustrating with photographs, the Nazi crimes against the Polish nation and War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II committed in mere two years: including massacres, tortures, expulsions, forced colonization, persecution, destruction of culture, and humiliation of a nation. [1]
The book is a sequel to The German Invasion of Poland compiled by the Polish government-in-exile and published in 1940, [1] sometimes considered as the first volume of this publication series. The original volume deals with the war crimes of the September 1939 invasion of Poland. The Black Book by G.P. Putnam's Sons of New York (or the 'second volume' of The Black Book of Poland) was published in London by Hutchinson under a different title: The German New Order in Poland, with only 585 pages and 61 plates. [3] The Black Book is composed of nine sections, preceded by an Introduction titled 'Hora Tenebrarum'. All sections include long Appendices. [1]
Book sections
- Part I. Massacres and Tortures
- Part II. The Expulsion of the Polish Population from its Land
- Part III. The Persecution of the Jews, and the Ghettos
- Part IV. The Robbery of Public and Private Property
- Part V. The Economic Exploitation of Polish Territories under German Occupation
- Part VI. Religious Persecution
- Part VII. Humiliation and Degradation of the Polish Nation
- Part VIII. The Destruction of Polish Culture
- Part IX. Violations by the Reich of International Law. [1]
August Hlond, SDB was a Polish Salesian prelate who served as Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno and as Primate of Poland. He was later appointed as Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and was made a cardinal of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1927.
Pruszków is a city in east-central Poland, situated in the Masovian Voivodeship since 1999. It was previously in Warszawa Voivodeship (1975–1998). Pruszków is the capital of Pruszków County, located along the western edge of the Warsaw urban area.
Around six million Polish citizens are estimated to have perished during World War II. Most were civilians killed by the actions of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian Security Police, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its offshoots.
Arthur Karl Greiser was a Nazi German politician, SS-Obergruppenführer, Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of the German-occupied territory of Wartheland. He was one of the persons primarily responsible for organizing the Holocaust in occupied Poland and numerous other crimes against humanity. He was arrested by the Americans in 1945, and was tried, convicted and executed by hanging in Poland in 1946 for his crimes, most notably genocide.
Szmul Mordko Zygielbojm was a Polish socialist politician, Bund trade-union activist, and member of the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile.
The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews. The ghetto was later used as a staging area for separating the "able workers" from those to be deported to extermination camps in Operation Reinhard. The ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, with most of its inhabitants deported to the Belzec extermination camp as well as to Płaszów slave-labor camp, and Auschwitz concentration camp, 60 kilometres (37 mi) rail distance.
Lipno is a town in Poland, in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, about 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Toruń. It is the administrative seat of Lipno County and of Gmina Lipno. Its population is 14,791 (2010).
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.
In the early modern era, European Jews were confined to ghettos and placed under strict regulations as well as restrictions in many European cities. The character of ghettos fluctuated over the centuries. In some cases, they comprised a Jewish quarter, the area of a city traditionally inhabited by Jews. In many instances, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and during periods of population growth, ghettos had narrow streets and small, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system. Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving at those times.
Służewo is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Aleksandrów Kujawski, within Aleksandrów County, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, in north-central Poland. It lies 4 kilometres (2 mi) south-west of Aleksandrów Kujawski and 21 km (13 mi) south of Toruń. It is located in Kuyavia.
Theodor Schieder was an influential mid-20th century German historian. Born in Oettingen, Western Bavaria, he relocated to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1934 at the age of 26. [p. 56] He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. During the Nazi era, Schieder became part of a group of German conservative historians antagonistic towards the Weimar Republic. He pursued a racially-oriented social history (Volksgeschichte), and warned about the supposed dangers of Germans mixing with other nations. During this time, Schieder used ethnographic methods to justify German supremacy and expansion. He was the author of the "Memorandum of 7 October 1939", calling for Germanization of the recaptured Polish territories after the Invasion of Poland. His suggestions were later incorporated in the German Generalplan Ost. After the war, he settled in West Germany and worked at the University of Cologne.
Radom Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto set up in March 1941 in the city of Radom during the Nazi occupation of Poland, for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of Polish Jews. It was closed off from the outside officially in April 1941. A year and a half later, the liquidation of the ghetto began in August 1942, and ended in July 1944, with approximately 30,000–32,000 victims deported aboard Holocaust trains to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.
The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations was the first formal statement to the world about the Holocaust, issued on December 17, 1942, by the American and British governments on behalf of the Allied Powers. In it, they describe the ongoing events of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Piotr Szarek was a Polish Catholic clergyman, member of the Congregation of the Mission, publicly murdered by the Nazis on the ninth day of the Second World War.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Stanisławów Ghetto was a ghetto established in 1941 by Nazi Germany in Stanisławów in German occupied Poland. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the town was incorporated into District of Galicia, as the fifth district of the General Government.
In October 1938, about 17,000 Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany were arrested and expelled. These deportations, termed by the Nazis Polenaktion, 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.
The Black Book of Polish Jewry is a 400-page report about the progress of the Holocaust in Poland published in 1943 during World War II by the American Federation for Polish Jews in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Refugees and Immigrants from Poland. It was compiled by Jacob Apenszlak with Jacob Kenner, Isaac Lewin and Moses Polakiewicz, and released by Roy Publishers of New York with an introduction by Ignacy Schwarzbart from the National Council of the Polish Republic. The book was sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, US Senator Robert Wagner, and other high-ranking community leaders. Historian Michael Fleming suggests it downplayed the true scale and manner of the Holocaust in an effort to elicit the empathy of its readership.
The Polish White Book is a semi-official name of a series of comprehensive reports published during World War II by the Ministry of Information of the Polish government-in-exile in London, England, dealing with Polish-German relations before and after the 1939 German-Soviet aggression against Poland.
The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland was a brochure published by the Polish government-in-exile in 1943 to disseminate the text of Raczyński's Note of 10 December 1942. It was the first official information to the Western general public about the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland.
