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This article details the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity committed against Ethnic Poles during World War II. 3 million non- Jewish Polish Citizen s perished during the course of the war, most of them Civilian s, killed by the actions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union . The war against Poland was from the start intended as a fulfillment of the plan described by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf . The main axis of the plan was that all of Eastern Europe should become part of the greater Germany , the so called German Lebensraum (''living space''). The German Army was sent, as stated by Hitler in his Armenian Quote : "with orders for them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language". TERROR AND CRIMES AGAINST INTELLIGENTSIA AND CLERGY During the 1939 German Invasion Of Poland , special action squads of SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen ) were deployed in the rear, arresting or killing civilians caught in offering resistance against the Germans or considered capable of doing so as determined by their position and social status. Tens of thousands of wealthy landowners, clergymen, and members of the intelligentsia—government officials, teachers, doctors, dentists, officers, journalists, and others (both Poles and Jews)—were either murdered in mass executions or sent to prisons and concentration camps. German army units and "self-defense" forces composed of Volksdeutsche also participated in executions of civilians. In many cases, these executions were Reprisal actions that held entire communities Collectively Responsible for attacks on German forces or the murder of ethnic Germans. More than 20,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in Operation Tannenberg alone. The Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in Wartheland more harshly than elsewhere, churches were systematically closed; most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government . The Germans also closed seminaries and convents, persecuting monks and nuns. Between 1939 and 1945 an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were murdered (in all of Poland); of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps, 787 of them at Dachau . CULTURAL GENOCIDE AND THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION As part of a wider effort to destroy Polish culture, the Germans closed or destroyed universities, schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories. They demolished hundreds of monuments to National Hero es. To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that the schooling of Polish children should end after a few years of elementary education. "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable," Himmler wrote in a May 1940 memorandum. In the same document he promises to deport all Poles to the east. In other statements he mentioned the future killing fields for all Poles in the Pripjet Swamps. Plans for mass transportation and Slave Labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made. All were intended to die during the cultivation of the swamps. A bitter note is Hitler`s remark, that the Poles should be exterminated where they originated in the early medieval age. In the Wartheland, the Nazis' goal was complete . Germans closed elementary schools where Polish was the language instruction. Streets and cities were renamed so that Łódź became Litzmannstadt , for example. Tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, were seized without payment to the owners. Signs posted in public places warned: "Entrance forbidden for Poles, Jews, and dogs." EXTERMINATION OF PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS In July 1939 a Nazi secret program called detachments who returned without the patients after a few hours. The patients were said to be transferred to another hospital, but evidence showed that they had been killed. The first action of this type took place in Kocborowo, at a large psychiatric hospital in the Gdańsk region on September 22 , 1939. Along with their patients, six hospital employees, including a deputy director, were murdered by a firing squad. Overall, between 1939-1944, 2,562 Kocborowo’s patients were killed. Similar exterminations took place in October 1939 in a hospital in Owińska, near Poznań where 1,000 patients (children and adults) were killed. In addition to the executions by firing squad, other methods of mass murder were also used. Patients of a psychiatric hospital in Owińska were transported to a military fortress in Poznań where, in Fort VII bunkers, they were gassed by Carbon Monoxide approximately 50 persons at a time. Other Owińska hospital patients were gassed in sealed trucks by the Carbon Monoxide of the exhaust fumes. The same method was performed in Kochanówek hospital near Łódź where between March-August 1940, 2200 persons were killed. This was the first "successful" test of mass murder using gas poisoning and this "technique" was later used and perfected on many other psychiatric patients in occupied Poland and Germany and, starting in 1941 , on inmates of the Extermination Camps . The total number of psychiatric patients murdered by German Nazi's in occupied Poland between 1939-1945 is estimated to be over 16,000, with an additional 10,000 patients who died of malnutrition. Additionally, approximately 100 out of 243 members of the pre- WWII Polish Psychiatric Asociation, met the same fate of their patients. FORCED LABOR Between 1939 and 1945 at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for labor, most of them against their will. Many were teenage boys and girls. Although Germany also used forced laborers from western Europe, Poles, along with other eastern Europeans viewed as inferior, were subject to especially harsh discriminatory measures. They were forced to wear identifying purple P's sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew and banned from public transportation. While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, Polish laborers as a rule were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than western Europeans and in many cities they were forced to live in segregated barracks behind barbed wire. Social relations with Germans outside work were forbidden and sexual relations with them were considered "racial defilement", punishable by death. During the war hundreds of Polish men were executed for their relations with German women. CONCENTRATION CAMP S Poles were prisoners in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. A major Labor Camp complex at Stutthof , east of Danzig , existed from September 2 , 1939 to the end of the war, where an estimated 20,000 Poles died as a result of executions, hard labor, and harsh conditions. Some 100,000 Poles were deported to Majdanek , and tens of thousands of them died there. An estimated 20,000 Poles died at Sachsenhausen , 20,000 at Gross-Rosen , 30,000 at Mauthausen , 17,000 at Neuengamme , 10,000 at Dachau , and 17,000 at Ravensbrück . In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or found their deaths in the thousands of other camps, including special children's camps such as in Łódź and it's subcamp at Dzierzan, in prisons and other places of detention within and outside Poland. Auschwitz Auschwitz became the main concentration camp for Poles after the arrival there on June 14 , 1940, of 728 men transported from an overcrowded prison at Tarnow . By March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them Poles. In September 1941, 200 ill prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet prisoners of war, were killed in the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942 , Auschwitz's prisoner population became much more diverse, as Jews and other "enemies of the state" from all over German-occupied Europe were deported to the camp. The Polish scholar Franciszek Piper , the chief historian of Auschwitz, estimates that 140,000 to 150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000 to 75,000 died there as victims of executions, of cruel medical experiments, and of starvation and disease. Warsaw Concentration Camp Between 1943 until 1944, the ''Konzentrationslager Warschau'' worked as a Death Camp to exterminate the Polish population of Warsaw . Gentile population of Poland was a target of the '' łapanka '' policy, in which the forces of SS, Wehrmacht and police rounded up civilians on a street; between 1942 and 1944 there were approximately 400 victims of łapanka in Warsaw daily. During the existence of the KL Warschau , estimated 200,000 people were killed there, most of them Polish citiziens of the city. Some of them were shot in a publicised reprisal executions of Hostages , but most of them were secretly gassed, including in the gigantic Gas Chamber built used a pre-existing railway tunnel. The very existence of the death camp part of the Complex had been a public secret during the era of Communist rule in Poland. The reason was to inflate numbers of victims of the Warsaw Uprising, initiated by the Nationalist Polish Home Army against the Germans in 1944, which was followed by a massive civilian casaulties inflicted by the Nazis upon the city's population (see below). WARSAW UPRISING ATROCITIES During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising German forces committed numerous Atrocities against Polish civilians, following the order by Hitler to annihilate the city and "turn it into a lake". Most severe of them took place in Wola district where, at the beginning of August 1944, tens of thousands of civilians (men, women, and children) were methodically rounded-up and executed by ''Sonder-'' and '' Einsatzkommando '' of Sicherheitspolizei operating within the SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth group under overall Erich Von Dem Bach-Zalewski command. Executions in the Wola district, sometimes called Wola Massacre , also included the killings of both the patients and the personnel of local hospitals. Victims’ bodies were then collected by the members of the so-called ''Verbrennungskommando'' comprised of selected Polish men and burnt. Other similar massacres took place in the areas of Sródmieście (City Centre), Old Town, Marymont, and Ochota districts. In Ochota district civilian killings, rapes, and looting were conducted by the members of Russian collaborators from SS-Sturmbrigade RONA . Exhumations conducted after the war recovered 11,529 tons of the human ashes from these locations. Until the end of the September 1944, Polish Resistance fighters were not considered by Germans as combatants thus when captured they were summarily executed. After the fall of the Old Town, during the beginning of September, remaining 7,000 seriously wounded hospitals’ patients were executed or burnt alive often with the medical staff caring for them. Similar atrocities took place later in the Czerniaków district. A number of captured insurgents were hanged or otherwise executed after the fall of Powiśle and Mokotów districts as well. Out of 450,000 surviving civilians, 90,000 were sent to a labour camps, and 60,000 were shipped to a death and concentration camps. Neither Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski nor Heinz Reinefarth were ever tried for their Warsaw Uprising atrocities. SEE ALSO
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