The Holocaust saw the ghettoization, robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany. Over three million Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps, who made up half of the Jewish Holocaust victims.
During Nazi occupation, the country lost 20% of its population, or six million people, including three million Jews (90% of the country's Jewish population). In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland while the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. In German-occupied Poland, Jews were killed, subjected to forced labor, and forced to move to ghettos. Some 7,000 Jews were killed in 1939, but open mass killings subsided until June of 1941. The Soviet Union deported many Jews to the Soviet interior, where most survived the war. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began the systematic murder of Jews. 1.8 million Jews were killed in Operation Reinhard, shot in roundups in ghettos, died during the train journey, or killed by poison gas in the extermination camps. In 1943 and 1944, the remaining labor camps and ghettos were liquidated. Many Jews tried to escape, but surviving in hiding was very difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. Only 1 to 2 percent of Polish Jews in German-occupied territory survived. After the war, survivors faced difficulties in regaining their property and rebuilding their lives. Especially after the Kielce pogrom, many fled to displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany.
Background
Jews have lived in Poland since the twelfth century. Many Polish Jews settled on noble estates where they were offered protection in exchange for the economic benefits they could provide. An estimated 3 million Jews lived in Poland in 1933, around ten percent of the population. Due to historical restrictions on what occupations Jews were allowed to have, they became concentrated in trades such as commerce and craftsmen. Many lived in small towns called shtetls. After the foundation of the Second Polish Republic simultaneously with the armistice of 11 November 1918 ending World War I, Jews suffered from institutionalized discrimination and many were poor.
Anti-Semitism became a state ideology in Germany after the Nazis gained power, but even before that, Eastern European Jews, called in Germany Ostjuden held a particularly low position in German perception. Jews in Germany tended to be secularized and largely assimilated into German society, while most Polish Jews lived in traditionalist religious communities, speaking Yiddish and distinguishing themselves in dress and customs from their surroundings. Prejudice was intensified during World War I, when many Jews from the occupied eastern territories moved to Germany. They were accused by antisemitic press and politicians of criminal activity, lack of hygiene, spreading disease, speculation, trafficking of women, spreading revolution, and were eventually blamed for Germany's defeat in the war and interwar economic problems faced by Germany. Soon, especially in the Nazi press, the term Ostjude began to be used as a slur, and as a synonym for Bolshevik and Communist. In the interwar period Polish Jews in Germany faced also legal persecution. In 1918, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior banned Polish Jews from entering the country on the pretext of their unwillingness to work, low morals, physical uncleanliness and the spread of typhus by them. In 1923, the Bavarian government ordered the deportation of Jews with Polish citizenship as undesirables.
In Poland, after the beginning of the Great Depression and the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the situation of Polish Jews worsened. The Endecja faction waged a campaign against Jews consisting of economic boycotts, limitations on the number of Jewish students at universities, and restrictions on kosher slaughter. The Polish government stated its intention to "settle the Jewish problem" by the emigration of most Polish Jews. In 1938, after Poland passed a law to denaturalize Jews living abroad, Germany expelled all Polish Jews in October 1938. Because Poland refused to admit them, these Jews were stranded in no-man's land along the border.
Invasion of Poland
The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the United Kingdom and France. During the invasion of Poland as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war may have been shot by the German invaders; there was also a great deal of looting. Special units known as Einsatzgruppen followed the army to eliminate any possible resistance. Already during the hostilities, the Germans carried out pogroms against the Jewish population, for example, 600 people were murdered in Przemyśl, 200 in Częstochowa, and 200 were burned in a synagogue in Będzin. Thousands of Jews were chased away to areas occupied by Soviet troops. 6,000 Polish soldiers of Jewish descent were killed and 60,000 were taken prisoner.
Germany gained control of 1.7 million Jews in Poland. Parts of western and northern Poland were annexed into Germany and incorporated into the administrative structure of the German Reich as Zichenau, Danzig–West Prussia, the Wartheland, and East Upper Silesia—while the rest of the German-occupied territories were designated the General Government. Around 50,000 Polish leaders and intellectuals were arrested or executed, especially in West Prussia, with fewer victims in the Wartheland and fewer still in the General Government. Polish Jewish intellectuals and community leaders were not spared. Around 400,000 Poles were expelled from the Wartheland to the General Governorate occupation zone from 1939 to 1941, and the area was resettled by ethnic Germans from eastern Europe.
The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September pursuant to the German–Soviet pact. Approximately 1.6 million Polish Jews came under Soviet rule, 250-300,000 of whom were refugees or expellees from the German occupation zone. Of the refugees, 35-40,000 people were forced in late autumn 1939 to go deep into Ukraine and Belarus to work. The Soviet Union deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to the Soviet interior in four big deportations. The Jews were particularly affected by the third one, which began on 28/29 June 1940, which affected refugees willing to return to the area under German rule, but to whose return the Germans did not agree. More than 77,700 Jewish refugees were deported at this time, representing 84% of the total deportees. The fourth deportation included 7,000 Jews from the Vilnius region. Although most Jews were not pro-communist, some accepted positions in the Soviet administration, contributing to a pre-existing perception among many non-Jews that Soviet rule was a Jewish conspiracy. Some 10,000 Polish Jews had left the USSR for Palestine, the Middle East and the West by June 1941.
Resettlement plans
As a result of expulsions and escapes, about 500,000 Jews lived in the lands incorporated into the Reich at the beginning of the German occupation. The Germans planned to deport all Jews from these territories by the end of 1940, by which time the plan was to place them in ghettos. They tried to concentrate Jews in the Lublin District of the General Government. 45,000 Jews were deported by November and left to fend for themselves, causing many deaths. Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of Hans Frank, the appointed head of the General Government, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews. Overall, between 80-90,000 Jews were deported to the General Government from Wartheland in that time. At the same time, escapes, expulsions and murders continued unabated. As a result of these, only 1,800 Jews lived in the province of West Prussia in February 1940. In the Wartheland, their number dropped to 260,000. Deportations to the General Government resumed in January 1941, but only 2140 Jews and 20,000 Poles were deported from Wartheland.
At this point, efforts to concentrate Jews in a compact territory were abandoned, the focus was on separating and enclosing Jews in ghettos. However, such plans were not completely dropped. After the conquest of France in 1940, the Nazis considered deporting Jews to French Madagascar, but this proved impossible. The Nazis planned that harsh conditions in these areas would kill many Jews. After the attack on the Soviet Union, plans were made to remove the Jewish population to the swampy areas of Polesia. In the fall of 1941, any such plans were abandoned.
Ghettoization
During the invasion, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews fled or were expelled into the Soviet occupation zone. Various anti-Jewish regulations were soon issued. In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Government were required to perform forced labor. In November 1939 they were ordered to wear white armbands. Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. When Jews were forced into ghettos, they lost their homes and belongings.
The first Nazi ghettos were established in the Wartheland and General Government in 1939 and 1940 on the initiative of local German administrators. The largest ghettos, such as Warsaw and Łódź, were established in existing residential neighborhoods and closed by fences or walls. In many smaller ghettos, Jews were forced into poor neighborhoods but with no fence. Forced labor programs provided subsistence to many ghetto inhabitants, and in some cases protected them from deportation. Workshops and factories were operated inside some ghettos, while in other cases Jews left the ghetto to work outside it. Because the ghettos were not segregated by sex some family life continued. A Jewish community leadership (Judenrat) exercised some authority and tried to sustain the Jewish community while following German demands. As a survival strategy, many tried to make the ghettos useful to the occupiers as a labor reserve.
The Warsaw ghetto contained more Jews than all of France; the Łódź ghetto more Jews than all of the Netherlands. More Jews lived in the city of Kraków than in all of Italy, and virtually any medium-sized town in Poland had a larger Jewish population than all of Scandinavia. All of southeast Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece – had fewer Jews than the original four districts of the General Government.
The plight of Jews in war-torn Poland could be divided into stages defined by the existence of the ghettos. In Warsaw, up to 80 percent of food consumed in the ghetto was brought in illegally. The food stamps introduced by the Germans provided only 9 percent of the calories necessary for survival. Most ghettos were not fully sealed from the outside world and although many Jews suffered from hunger, fewer died from it because they were able to supplement their rations from the black market. The 'productionists' among the German authorities – who attempted to make the ghettos self-sustaining by turning them into enterprises – prevailed over the 'attritionists' only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The most prominent ghettos were thus temporarily stabilized through the production of goods needed at the front, as death rates among the Jewish population there began to decline.
Ghettos were established both in the territory incorporated into the Reich and in the General Government. Characteristic of the Wartheland were the so-called "rural ghettos," which encompassed several contiguous villages. The Germans also set up ghettos in areas of eastern Poland occupied as a result of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Most were established in the Galicia district and the Białystok District. In the fall of 1942, there were more than 400 ghettos on Polish soil.
Extermination of Jews in Eastern Poland
Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Around 100,000 Polish Jews fled deep into the USSR from German soldiers. The Wehrmacht was followed by four special groups (Einsatzgruppen) which perpetrated mass executions of the Jewish population. From September 1941, entire Jewish communities were liquidated. The General Government was expanded by adding Galicia District; the Białystok District was administered separately. During the invasion, local inhabitants carried out at least 219 pogroms, killing around twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand Jews. The pogroms were extremely violent with many Jews beaten, raped, stolen from, and brutally murdered. Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial. According to political science research, pogroms were most likely to occur "where political polarization was high, where the Jewish community was large, and where Jews pressed for national equality in the decades before 1941".
Parallel to Operation Reinhard, which was organised in the General Government, the final mass murder of the Jewish population was organised in eastern Poland in the spring and summer of 1942. Jews from the Galicia district were transported to the extermination centres at Belzec and Sobibor, among them some 150,000 Jews deported to Galicia by the Romanian authorities.