German Troops In Warsaw, Poland

Few nations suffered during the Second World War as much as the Polish under the German occupation. Almost immediately after invading Poland, Germany began implementing its goals of racial dominance over the Jewish and Slavic people of Europe. Hitler ordered executions, coupled to programs aimed at depopulating huge swaths of the Polish countryside in preparation for German settlement.

For example, on September 4th, German firing squads lined up and killed 1,000 people from the town of Bydgoszcz. This atrocity represented only the beginning. Killing, rape, and looting became frequent occurrences within days of the War's beginning, running the gamut from crimes committed by individual German soldiers, police, SS, running all the way up to regimental size atrocities committed by German army units. German leaders such as Reinhard Heydrich openly voiced their beliefs Germany quickly needed to kill "members of the Polish aristocracy, Catholic Clergy and Jews." Himmler and Heydrich's SS soldiers and police wasted little time in implementing Hitler's orders.

Adolf Eichmann, a former drifter and salesman in the 1920s, and in 1939 an SS officer working on Jewish emigration in Prague and Vienna, arrived in Berlin in September 1939 to lead the new office of Jewish Affairs. Eichmann's office quickly became the central organization responsible for first persecuting the Jews, and then only one year later; annihilating them. Hitler and Heydrich led the volkstumskampf, ethnic struggle, and Heydrich's Security Police, Einsatzgruppen, immediately began 'ethnic cleansing'.

By 1945, Hitler and his minions in Poland had murdered 45 percent of the pre-war population of doctors, 57 percent of the lawyers, and 40 percent of Poland's professors. Poland suffered 6 million dead during the War - including 3 million Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust. The city of Warsaw, in enduring approximately 700,000 dead during the War, lost more people than the Americans and British combined. By 1945, one fifth of Poland's 35 million strong pre-war population was dead, killed in modern human history's greatest crime.

Picture Courtesy US National Archives, local identifier no. SFF-SFF-52