| Treatment Of The Polish Citizens By The Occupants |
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In the beginning of the war (September, 1939) the territory of Poland was divided between the Nazi Germany and the USSR . By the late-1941 the Soviets Were Overrun By Nazi Germany over entire territory of the former Second Polish Republic but the 1944-1945 the Red Army 's offensive drove the Nazi forces out. Over one third of Polish citizens lost their life in the war, most of the civilians targeted by various deliberate actions. Both occupants wanted not only to gain Polish territory, but to destroy Polish Culture and nation. TREATMENT OF POLISH CITIZENS UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION See Also: Holocaust in Poland Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles It was German policy that the (non-Jewish) Poles were to be reduced to the status of Serf s, and eventually replaced by German colonists. In the General Government all education but primary education was abolished and so was all Polish cultural, scientific, artistic life. Universities were closed and many university professors, along with teachers, lawyers, intellectuals and other members of the Polish elite, were arrested and executed. In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were planned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944. The Polish civilian population suffered under German occupation in several ways. Large numbers were expelled from areas intended for German colonisation, and forced to resettle in the General-Government area. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Germany for forced labour in industry and agriculture, where many thousands died. Poles were also conscripted for labour in Poland, and were held in labour camps all over the country, again with a high death rate. There was a general shortage of food, fuel for heating and medical supplies, and there was a high death rate among the Polish population as a result. Finally thousands of Poles were killed as reprisals for resistance attacks on German forces or for other reasons. In all, about 3 million (non-Jewish) Poles died as a result of the German occupation, more than 10 percent of the pre-war population. When this is added to the 3 million Polish Jews who were killed as a matter of policy by the Germans, Poland lost about 22 percent of its population, the highest proportion of any country in World War II. Rather than through being sent to concentration camps, most non-Jewish Poles died through in mass executions starvation, singled out murder cases, ill-health or forced labour. Apart from Auschwitz, the main six "extermination camps" in Poland were used almost exclusively to kill Jews. There was also camp , 33,000 to the camp for women at Ravensbruck , 30,000 to Mauthausen and 20,000 to Sachsenhausen , for example. TREATMENT OF POLISH CITIZENS UNDER SOVIET OCCUPATION By the end of Polish Defensive War the Soviet Union took over 52,1% of territory of Poland (circa 200,000 km&2), with over 13,700,000 people. Although estimates vary the most throughout analysis gives the following numbers in regards to ethnic composition of these areas: 38% Poles (ca. 5,1 million people), 37% Ukrainians, 14,5% Belarussians, 8,4% Jews, 0,9% Russians and 0,6% Germans. There were also 336,000 refugees from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews (198,000) 1, also in ''Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie'', Wrocław, 1997 . Areas occupied by USSR were Annexed To Soviet Territory , with the exception of area of Wilno , which Was Transferred to Lithuania , although Soon Attached To USSR , when Lithuania became a Soviet Republic . While Germans enforced their policies based on Racism , the Soviet administration used slogans about Class Struggle , and Dictatorship Of The Proletariat 2, which in Soviet reality were equal to Stalinism and Sovietization . Immediately after their conquest of eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of Sovietization 3 4 of the newly-acquired areas. No later than several weeks after the last Polish units surrendered, on October 22 , 1939 , the Soviets organized staged elections to the Moscow-controlled Supreme Soviet s (legislative body) of ''Western Byelorussia'' and ''Western Ukraine'' 5. The result of the staged voting was to become a legitimization of Soviet partition of Poland 6 {Link without Title} . Subsequently, all institutions of the dismantled Polish state were being closed down and reopened with new mostly Russian directors and more rarely Ukrainian ones. Lviv University and many other schools were reopened soon but they were restarted anew as Soviet institutions. Lviv University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. The chairs of Russian Language and Literature chairs were opened, in adition to chairs of Marxism-Leninism , Dialectical and Historical Materialism were opened in order strengthen the Soviet ideology. Polish literature and language studies ware dissolved by Soviet authorities. Forty five new faculty members were assigned to it from Kharkiv , Kiev universities. On January 15, 1940 the university was reopened and started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula. 7. Simultaneously Soviet authorities attempted to remove the traces of recent Polish control of the area by eliminating much of what had any connection to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general. On December 21 , 1939, the Polish Currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly-introduced rouble, which meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life-time savings overnight8. All the media became controlled by Moscow. Soviet occupation implemented a political regime similar to Police State 9 10 11 12, based on terror. All Polish parties and organisations were disbanded. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist with organisations subordinated to it. All organized religions were persecuted. All enterprises were taken over by the state, while Agriculture was made Collective Encyklopedia PWN , "OKUPACJA SOWIECKA W POLSCE 1939–41", last accessed on 1 March 2006, online , Polish language. According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of ''former Poland'' 13, automatically acquired the Soviet citizenship. However, since actual conferral of citizenship still required the individual consent, residents were strongly pressured for such consent14 and the refugees who opted out were threatened with repatriation to Nazi controlled territories of Poland 15Jan T. Gross, op.cit., p.[http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&vid=ISBN0691096031&id=XKtOr4EXOWwC&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=1939+Soviet+citizenship+Poland&sig=9pD36P3bWRpeIyrHoQnJE3Z0ZPE 188 16. In addition, the Soviets exploited past ethnic tension between Poles and other ethnic groups, inciting and encouraging violence against Poles calling the minorities to "rectify the wrongs they had suffered during twenty years of Polish rule" was a justification of its dismemberment. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to perform killings and robberiesGross, op.cit., page 36 . The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown. Initially the Soviet rule gained much support, especially among the non-Polish population of the territories whose being subject to the nationalist policies of interwar Poland caused a substantial resentment against the Polish institutions and, sometimes, against the Poles in general. Much of the Jewish and, especially, the Ukrainian population initially welcomed the unification with the rest of Ukraine which Ukrainians failed to achieve in 1919 when their Attempt For Self-determination was Crushed By Poland .17 This was even strengthened by a Land Reform in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled " Kulak s" and dispossessed of their land which was then divided among poorer peasants. However, soon afterwards the Soviet authorities started a campaign of forced Collectivisation , which largely nullified the earlier gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state impose guotas. At the same time, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian peasants, who saw the Soviet power as an opportunity to start political or social activity outside of their traditional ethnic or cultural groups. Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all groups equally, regardless of their political stance 18. An inherent part of the Sovietization was a rule of terror started by the ) or sent to Gulag 20. Similar policies were applied to the civilian population as well. The Soviet authorities regarded service for the pre-war Polish state as a "crime against revolution" 21 and "counter-revolutionary activity" 22, and subsequently started arresting large numbers of Polish Intelligentsia , politicians, civil servants and scientists, but also ordinary people suspected of posing a threat to the Soviet rule. Among the arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia were former prime ministers Leon Kozłowski and Aleksander Prystor , as well as Stanisław Grabski , Stanisław Głąbiński and the Baczewski family. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January of 1940 the NKVD aimed its campaign also at its potential allies, including the Polish communists and socialists. Among the arrested were Władysław Broniewski , Aleksander Wat , Tadeusz Peiper , Leopold Lewin , Anatol Stern , Teodor Parnicki , Marian Czuchnowski and many others 23. The prisons soon got severely overcrowded with detainees suspected of anti-Soviet activities and the NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region . The wave of arrests led to forced resettlement of large categories of people ( 26, almost half of them were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941 . While the formal Polish sovereignty was almost immediately restored, in reality the country remained under the firm Soviet control as it remained occupied by the Soviet Army until 1952, when they received a formal permission to remian in Poland from the pro-Soviet government of People's Republic Of Poland . Soviet troops finally left Poland only in the 90s. To this day events of those and Following Years are one of the stumbling blocks in the Polish-Russian foreign relations. Polish requests for the return of property looted during the war or any demand for an apology for Soviet-era crimes are either ignored or prompt a brusque restatement of history as seen from the Kremlin , along the lines of "we freed you from Nazism: be grateful." {Link without Title} SEE ALSO REFERENCES |
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