Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles

Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles

The Nazi-German crimes against ethnic Poles committed by military personnel during the course of World War II claimed over 2.8 million lives. The non-Jewish Polish citizens were being killed in addition to about 2.9 million Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust (mostly during Operation Reinhard). Among the victims were two million ethnic Poles with the remaining 500,000 mainly from ethnic minorities living in Poland. The majority of those killed by Nazi Germany were civilians (exceeding military deaths nearly 10 to 1). The remainder perished at the Soviet hands.

See also: Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), World War II crimes in Poland, and The Holocaust in Poland

From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan laid-out by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his 1926 book Mein Kampf. The aim of this plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). Nazi ideology had viewed Slavs as a racially inferior group. On August 22, 1939, on the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language." Genocide was conducted systematically against Polish people: on September 7, 1939 Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy and Jews are to be killed, on September 12 Wilhelm Keitel added intelligentsia to the list, at the end of 1940 Hitler demanded liquidation of "all leading elements in Poland" and on March 15, 1940, Himmler stated All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.

Read more about Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles:  1939 September Campaign, Einsatzgruppen Killings, Terror and Pacification Operations, Cultural Genocide, Sexual Slavery, Plans For The "final Solution", Expulsion of Polish Population, Concentration Camps, Indiscriminate Executions, Extermination of Hospital Patients, Forced Labor in Germany, Germanization, Crimes Against Children, Persecution of Catholic Clergy, 1944 Destruction of Warsaw, See Also

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