Terror in Occupied Poland

The occupation of Poland brought a dramatic change in the life of Jews and non-Jews in this country. Now we have to remember that this is a true watershed in the history of Poland as well in the history of the Jews of Poland, and there are many reasons for that. One of the important things that we should realize is that a part of the anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany there was a ideological policy of Nazi Germany towards Poland. and Nazi Germany didn't think Poland has any right to exist as a political power and it saw its inhabitants as people who are from a lower race and thus don't deserve all the rights as others. Now this means that, as soon as the country was occupied all its other organizations which existed in the countries were dismantled and many people found them itself in a truly new reality. Now in this reality we're talking of Poles who are taken to forced labor the force labor was not only for Jews but for Poles as well. We have a hundreds of thousands of Poles who are sent to Germany for forced labor even in the first years and we have of course a specific repression of of the intelligentsia of Poland and of its political leaders as well as its religious leaders. So we can see how Nazi Germany tried to destroy the Polish society in general and that means we have to remember that those things started from the very early days of the occupation and became even intensified since 1943 when the SS had much more power within occupied Poland. Every aspect of the daily lives of Poles changed with the occupation of Poland and we are talking of a very difficult occupation regulation for those Polish citizens. It differed between the two territories which were annexed to Germany the ones in which the General Government was established and those who were occupied first by Soviet Russia and only later by the Nazi Germany but in each one of those different parts all the rights of the Poles were taken and they were subjected to a cruel and very brutal regime that means that executing Poles was something that happened on a daily basis in many of the parts it's true mainly in the large cities in which there were much more Nazi forces but it happened in rural places as well and we have to remember that at the same time the Germans demanded the Polish society not only to work for them but also to bring them supplies and many other things. One of the problem is that Poles could not really obey all those orders and still survive and have the meaning of their own livelihood and this of course brought to a situation in which the society as a society started to collapse and this is true in many different parts even before specific regulation and operations against Poles as we could see in Zamość area in late 1942 and other places. Now we have to remember that unlike other countries in which Nazi Germany gave some rights to the citizen and so on, this is not what happened in Poland, and Poland was under a very harsh occupation from the very beginning and draconic laws. One of the additional problem is it was not only those laws that took over property and many other things that we just referred to but also the fact that any Nazi German soldier could take anything he wanted from the Poles. Now all of this is very important but I must say that from the very beginning we should remember that alongside the harassment of the Poles and there is of course harassment of the Poles during the Nazi occupation there is an "unequal victimhood". This is a term made by Gutman and Krakowski years ago "unequal victimhood" of the Jews. If we can talk about the destruction of the political, social and personal life of Poles during the Nazi occupation in the Jewish aspect we're talking of the destruction of the life as they were and only a prior to what will become later on and that of course is a mass-murder and the "Final Solution".

Channel: Yad Vashem

Views: 84,289

Keywords: Yad Vashem, Holocaust, Shoah, Jewish life, yt:cc=on, World War II, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Nazis, Nazism, Final Soulution, Camps, Death, Gas, Hatred, Antisemitism, Anti-Semitism, Forced labor, Germans, Jews, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Zyklon B

Id: Feojhxxzaw4

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023