Poland Study Guide POLAND STUDY GUIDE POLAND STUDY GUIDE Table of Contents Why Poland? In 1939, following a nonaggression agreement between the Germany and the Soviet Union known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Poland was again divided. That September, Why Poland Germany attacked Poland and conquered the western and central parts of Poland while the Page 3 Soviets took over the east. Part of Poland was directly annexed and governed as if it were Germany (that area would later include the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz- Birkenau). The remaining Polish territory, the “General Government,” was overseen by Hans Frank, and included many areas with large Jewish populations. For Nazi leadership, Map of Territories Annexed by Third Reich the occupation was an extension of the Nazi racial war and Poland was to be colonized. Page 4 Polish citizens were resettled, and Poles who the Nazis deemed to be a threat were arrested and shot. Polish priests and professors were shot. According to historian Richard Evans, “If the Poles were second-class citizens in the General Government, then the Jews scarcely Map of Concentration Camps in Poland qualified as human beings at all in the eyes of the German occupiers.” Jews were subject to humiliation and brutal violence as their property was destroyed or Page 5 looted. They were concentrated in ghettos or sent to work as slave laborers. But the large- scale systematic murder of Jews did not start until June 1941, when the Germans broke 2 the nonaggression pact with the Soviets, invaded the Soviet-held part of Poland, and sent 3 Chronology of the Holocaust special mobile units (the Einsatzgruppen) behind the fighting units to kill the Jews in nearby forests or pits. It was also in occupied Poland that the Nazis first experimented with Page 7 killing Jews using gas vans. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gas vans were hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment. Use of gas vans began after Einsatzgruppe members complained of battle The Final Solution: Estimated numbers fatigue and mental anguish caused by shooting large numbers of women and children. Page 14 Gassing also proved to be less costly. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) gassed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and mentally ill people. Within occupied Poland, the Germans built six of the most notorious death camps, Warsaw Chełmno, Sobibór, Bełżec, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz was in an area of Poland that was completely annexed and ruled by the German government Page 17 as part of Germany). By 1942, Poland was the focus of the Nazis’ first factory-style killing plan, although by the time the death camps were operational, large numbers of Polish Jews had already been murdered. By the winter and spring of 1945, when Soviet and Allied Krakow troops liberated the country, Poland’s once-thriving Jewish population was decimated; by 1950, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were only Page 21 about 45,000 Jews left in Poland. The actual number of Jewish survivors was higher, but postwar killings and pogroms convinced many Jews to leave. Scholars suggest that between 40,000 and 60,000 of the Jews who survived were rescued by Poles. The Kielce Pogrom However, the majority of the Polish population was under the brutal control of the Nazis and Page 23 was not in a position to help. While 6,532 Polish rescuers have been honored at Yad Vashem, the most of any country, many more Poles were simply trying to survive, while others collaborated or were complicit with the German occupiers. Recent scholarship has revealed several instances in which Polish civilians massacred Jews without German participation. POLAND STUDY GUIDE POLAND STUDY GUIDE 4 5 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-concentration-camps-in-poland-and-lithuania POLAND STUDY GUIDE POLAND STUDY GUIDE “We Germans fight a twofold fight today. With regard CHRONOLOGY OF THE to the non- Jewish peoples we want to accomplish HOLOCAUST our vital interests. We respect them and conduct a chivalrous argument with them. But we fight world JANUARY 30, 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. Jewry, as one has to fight a poisonous parasite; we encounter in him not only the enemy of our people, FEBRUARY 27–28, 1933 The German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down under mysterious but a plague of all peoples. The fight against Jewry circumstances. The government treated it as an act of terrorism. is a moral fight for purity and heath of god created FEBRUARY 28, 1933 humanity and for a new more just order in the world.” Hitler convinced President von Hindenburg to invoke an emergency clause in the Weimar Constitution. The German parliament then passed the Decree of the Reich Hitler’s War Against the Jews: A Young Reader’s Version of President for the Protection of Nation (Volk) and State, popularly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree suspended the civil rights provisions in the existing German 6 The War Against the Jews 7 constitution, including freedom of speech, assembly, and press, and formed the basis for By David A. Altshuler the incarceration of potential opponents of the Nazis without benefit of trial or judicial proceeding. MARCH 22, 1933 The SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler’s “elite guard,” established a concentration camp outside the town of Dachau, Germany, for political opponents of the regime. MARCH 23, 1933 The German parliament passed the Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler to establish a dictatorship in Germany. APRIL 1, 1933 The Nazis organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. Many local boycotts continued throughout much of the 1930s APRIL 7, 1933 The Nazi government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews and political opponents from university and governmental positions. Similar laws enacted in the following weeks affected Jewish lawyers, judges, doctors, and teachers. POLAND STUDY GUIDE POLAND STUDY GUIDE MAY 10, 1933 AUGUST 1–16, 1936 Nazi party members, students, teachers, and others burned books written by Jews, Athletes and spectators from countries around the world attended the Summer Olympic political opponents of Nazis, and the intellectual avant-garde during public rallies across Games in Berlin, Germany. The Olympic games were a propaganda success for the Nazi Germany. state. The Nazis made every effort to portray Germany as a respectable member of the international community and soft- pedaled their persecution of the Jews. They removed JULY 14, 1933 anti-Jewish signs from public display and restrained anti-Jewish activities. In response to The Nazi government enacted the Law on the Revocation of Naturalization, which pressure from foreign Olympic delegations, Germany also included Jews or part-Jews on deprived foreign and stateless Jews as well as Roma (Gypsies) of German citizenship. its Olympic team. The Nazi government enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary MARCH 12–13, 1938 Diseases, which mandated the forced sterilization of certain physically or mentally German troops invaded Austria, and Germany incorporated Austria into the German impaired individuals. The law institutionalized the eugenic concept of “life undeserving Reich in what was called the Anschluss. of life” and provided the basis for the involuntary sterilization of the disabled, Roma (Gypsies), “social misfits,” and black people residing in Germany. NOVEMBER 9–10, 1938 In a nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), the Nazis JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1934 and their collabo- rators burned synagogues, looted Jewish homes and businesses, and In what came to be called “the Night of the Long Knives,” on Hitler’s orders members killed at least 91 Jews. The Gestapo, supported by local uniformed police, arrested 8 of the Nazi party and police murdered members of the Nazi leadership, army, and others. approximately 30,000 Jewish men and imprisoned them in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, 9 Hitler declared the killings legal and necessary to achieve the Nazi party’s aims. Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. Several hundred Jewish women also were imprisoned in local jails. AUGUST 2, 1934 German President von Hindenburg died. Hitler became Führer in addition to his position SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 as chancellor. Because there was no legal or constitutional limit to Hitler’s power as German troops invaded Poland, marking the beginning of World War II. Führer, he became absolute dictator of Germany. SEPTEMBER 3, 1939 JUNE 28, 1935 Britain and France fulfilled their promise to protect Poland’s border and declared war on The German Ministry of Justice revised Paragraphs 175 and 175a of the criminal code to Germany. criminalize all homosexual acts between men. The revision provided the police broader means for prosecuting homosexual men. OCTOBER 1939 Hitler initialed an order to kill those Germans whom the Nazis deemed “incurable” SEPTEMBER 15, 1935 and hence “unworthy of life.” Health care professionals sent tens of thousands of The Nazi government decreed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection institutionalized mentally and physically disabled people to central “euthanasia” killing of the German Blood and Honor. These Nuremberg “racial laws” made Jews second- centers where they killed them by lethal injection or in gas chambers. class citizens. NOVEMBER 12, 1939 JULY 12, 1936 German authorities began the forced deportation of Jews from West Prussia, Poznan, Prisoners and civilian workers began construction of the concentration camp Danzig, and Lodz (also in annexed Poland) to locations in the General Government. Sachsenhausen at Oranienburg near Berlin. By September, German authorities had imprisoned about 1,000 people in the camp. POLAND STUDY GUIDE POLAND STUDY GUIDE NOVEMBER 23, 1939 SEPTEMBER 3, 1941 German authorities required that, by December 1, 1939, all Jews residing in the General At the Auschwitz concentration camp, SS functionaries performed their first gassing Government wear white badges with a blue Star of David.