Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles - Einsatzgruppen Killings

Einsatzgruppen Killings

Main article: Einsatzgruppen See also: Operation Tannenberg, German AB-Aktion operation in Poland, and Intelligenzaktion

During the 1939 German invasion of Poland, "special action squads" of the SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed behind the front lines, arresting and killing civilians considered, by virtue of their social status, to be capable of abetting resistance efforts against the Germans.

Soon after the German invasion of Poland, lasting from the fall of 1939 till the spring of 1940, in the first action of mass killings known as "Intelligenzaktion", tens of thousands of former government officials, military officers in hiding, landowners, clergy, and members of the intelligentsia according to the "enemies lists" - Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen were killed. Action was a part of Operation Tannenberg - an early measure of the Generalplan Ost. Poles, as well as Jews, were either murdered in mass executions by death squads or sent to prisons and concentration camps. "Whatever we find in the shape of an upper class in Poland will be liquidated," Hitler had ordered. Only in "Intelligenzaktion Pommern" – regional action in Pomeranian Voivodeship was killed 23 000 of Poles, It was continued by the German AB-Aktion operation in Poland. In the mid-1940s, the AB-Aktion saw several thousand more killed or imprisoned (including the massacre of Lwów professors and the executions in Palmiry forest). The Einsatzgruppen were also responsible for the murder of Jews and Poles during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.