Civilian population as victims of the occupiers

	Civilian population as victims of the occupiers

Due to the fact that the 1939 campaign was lost by the Poles, the territory of Poland fell under occupation. Both the Germans and the Soviets tried to captivate the Polish society, deprive them of the natural reflex of resistance. Such was the aim of activities of the terror apparatus.

As early as on 7 October 1939 Heinrich Himmler was nominated the Reichscommisaire for the Consolidation of the Germandom. The entire SS and police apparatus was subordinated to him. German police forces on the Polish ground numbered from 30.000 to 150.000 men. The police apparatus was supplemented by the judicial system, which granted the acts of terror the appearances of being legal. The military, special and immediate courts issued a giant number of death sentences.

The police-military terror had dimensions unheard of in the West European countries. For example: only until 26 October 1939 - during the period of military administration, Wehrmacht and the SS and police units subordinated to it carried out at least 7600 pacification actions; in Bydgoszcz around 1500 people were killed, 750 in Katowice, 300 in a small town of Dynów, 300 in Tułowice... Pacifications lasted throughout the entire occupation. In pacified villages large scale roberries were taking place, inhabitants were murdered.

Higher education institutions and secondary schools were closed. On 6 November 1939 in Kraków 183 scientific employees of the Yagiellonian University and the Mining Academy (AGH) were arrested and later sendt to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In May and July 1940, as a result of the "AB" action, aimed against educated Poles, the Germans murdered over 3500 people.
 

Public executions were carried out on a mass scale. They were to intimidate the Polish society. Inhabitants of the cities were caught on the streets in large groups, and then made forced labourers, transported to concentration camps or murdered within 24 hours (often as a kind of revenge).

All in all, as a consequence of the German terror, 5.384.000 Polish citizens died during the war.

Until the outbreak of the German - Soviet war in June 1941, over half of the Polish territory was under Soviet occupation. Pacification actions were also carried out there.

Soviet authorities put great emphasis on legitimization of the annexation of a part of the territory of Poland. To this end on 22 October 1939 they carried out political elections to the People's Assembly of the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus (that's how the occupied Polish lands were named).

Elections were held in an atmosphere of intimidating the unsubmissive, they were also faked. In the Hoover Institute in the USA there is a lot of evidence confirming this. Soon the elected delegates addressed the authorities of the USSR with a request to incorporate the occupied land into the Ukrainian and Belarussian Soviet republics.
 

On the lands occupied by the Soviets denouncing was spreading. The apparatus of the enemy exploited and fuelled national and social conflicts in this area, trying to antagonize various factions of the population, to make ruling easier. Atheisation was carried out on a mass scale. But first and foremost mass deportations of Polish citizens to the Soviet hinterland were particularly horryfying. They encompassed hundreds of thousands of people.

Also many thousand citizens of the Polish Republic were arrested. Some of them were sentenced to death and executed after investigations. Others were cept in prisons until the outbreak of the German invasion. According to data of 10th June 1941, as many as 39.600 prisoners were kept in the prisons of the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. After the outbreak of the German-Soviet conflict, only in the Western Ukraine over 6000 of them were murdered. Others were dying during evacuations to the east.

The above examples of the occupiers' actions on the Polish land do not exhaust the subject. Some aspects were signalled in a more detailed way in the further part of this book.
 

 

Polish lands under German occupation (1941-1944)