Poland полностью

Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were determined to destroy Polish society. They therefore imported onto the multiethnic and socially diverse territory of Poland methods of racial, social and political manipulation they had developed in their own countries. It was these that tipped the realities of the war in occupied Poland into a circle of hell far below that reached in any other country.

The Germans’ first priority was to decapitate Polish society through the removal of all political, intellectual, spiritual and social leadership. The second was to divide it up into its racial components. All Polish citizens of German origin were classified as Germans and granted commensurate privileges. Polish citizens with German-sounding names who looked the part were encouraged to declare themselves to be Volksdeutsch and claim the same privileges. The Jews were segregated and destined for extermination. Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalists were encouraged to come forward and define themselves against their Polish neighbours.

When, in 1941, the Germans moved into the eastern areas of Poland hitherto under Soviet occupation, they used the same techniques to implement ethnic cleansing, thereby unleashing not only an orgy of horror, but also a self-perpetuating spiral of hatred and violence. What made their behaviour so deeply destructive in the long run was that in these areas the Germans were generally admired and considered to be more advanced and civilised than the Poles, and certainly than the Russians, and this lent them an authority that passed a civilising mantle to any local they chose to employ.

In the Generalgouvernement, the Germans generally removed all Jews from the community and took them to special camps for extermination. East of the Ribbentrop-Molotov line, they played on residual anti-Semitic feelings among the peasants and got locals to do the dirty work for them. The well documented case of Jedwabne, a Polish village occupied by the Soviets in 1939, provides a useful example. The invading Soviets had been warmly greeted by young Jewish communists, some of whom were then involved in the provisional administration and the ‘Sovietisation’ of the area. All Polish landowners, priests, teachers, doctors, policemen, postal and state functionaries had been murdered or deported by the Soviets, along with many humbler pillars of the community. When the Germans came, they encouraged the remaining inhabitants to take their revenge on the entire Jewish community, who were duly rounded up in a barn and burnt to death.

The picture was even uglier in south-eastern Poland. Soviet occupation had completely decapitated civil society, making it easier for extremists and criminals to operate, leading to a great deal of low-level violence between the Polish and Ukrainian communities. When the Germans crossed the Ribbentrop-Molotov line in 1941, Ukrainian nationalist activists came out into the open. The Germans armed them and gave them the task of murdering all the Jews in the area, which they carried out with enthusiasm. The lesson they learnt from this was that the easiest way of dealing with undesirable elements in their midst was to wipe them out, and they turned their weapons on their Polish neighbours.

In 1942, OUN, which had now superseded the more tractable UNDO, created the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), which set about cleansing Volhynia, where Poles and Ukrainians had hitherto cohabited amicably. Over the next year it would kill up to 60,000 Poles, mostly peasants living in out-of-the-way villages, in bestial ways refined on the Jews. They also liquidated Ukrainians with communist or Polish sympathies.

Young Poles who managed to survive ganged up in partisan units and fought back, some even joining the German police special battalions in order to get hold of arms. Soon a regular civil war was raging between the Ukrainians and Poles of the area, tacitly encouraged by the Germans, who preferred to see both groups butchering each other than engaging in partisan warfare against them. The battle lines were often unclear. Both communities spoke each other’s language fluently, and since some bands on both sides often posed as partisans of the opposing side in order to winkle out alien elements, they sometimes ended up murdering their own kith. German policy changed after the defeat at Stalingrad, and they began recruiting Ukrainians into the SS Galizien Division, whose principal task was to act against Polish partisans and selfdefence groups in Galicia.