German Crimes in Poland
by Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes of Poland
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Book Summary Information
Author: Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes of PolandEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1981-06
ISBN: 0865273367
Number of pages: 168
Publisher: Howard Fertig
Book Reviews of German Crimes in Poland
Book Review: Early Studies on the Extermination of Jews and the Ongoing Extermination of Poles
Summary: 4 Stars
This work is a summary of the first investigations of German Nazi crimes in Poland, conducted immediately after the war. Because of this, it is free of much of the ideological baggage that has subsequently followed.
A cataloguing is made of street executions of Poles by the Germans, but it is acknowledged to be incomplete. For example, secret executions cannot be included in this tally. A rather chilling chapter is devoted to German atrocities against Polish civilians during the Warsaw Uprising.
It has been said that virtually every family in Poland lost someone during WWII. This is borne out by statistics. SS Obergruppenfuhrer Koppe mentioned that the shooting of 200 Poles means that 3,000 Poles (the nearest family) were actually affected. (Vol. 2, p. 26). At this 15:1 ratio, it is easy to see that the 2-3 million gentile Poles murdered by the Germans directly affected the remainder of the entire Polish gentile population.
A fair amount of attention is devoted to the German concentration camps and their atrocious conditions. Consider Oswiecim (Auschwitz): "The Jews and [Polish Catholic] priests were set to do the hardest work...Those who fell from exhaustion were killed under the blows of this executioner's stick. He murdered in this way nearly all the priests and numerous Jews." (Vol. 1, pp. 52-53).
The commission carefully investigated the German genocidal program against Poles of the Zamosc region. The Poles were to be all forcibly removed and replaced with German colonists. Some of the Poles were deemed to be of German descent, and attempts were made to re-Germanize them. Able-bodied Poles were deported for forced labor. Invalids and children were sent either to slow deaths in the concentration camps or to rapid deaths in the death camps. For instance, evidence is presented of the murders of Polish Zamosc children at Auschwitz by lethal injection (Vol. 2, p. 84), and by gassing at Majdanek (Maidanek) (Vol. 2, pp. 84-85) and at Chelmno (Kulm) (Vol. 1, p. 111). Sensing the fact that their fate was to be comparable to that of the Jews, the Poles in the villages surrounding Zamosc fled their homes, hid in the forests, and opposed the Germans with guerilla warfare.
Accusations have sometimes been made against Polish agencies for not setting apart the Jewish victims of the Nazis. This is patently untrue. In this two volumes bound as one set, a clear distinction is made between Poland's Jewish and gentile victims of the Germans. For example, much detail is devoted to the extermination camps and their predominantly-Jewish victims. It is instructive to learn how the death tolls were arrived at. For instance, consider Treblinka. Railway records were consulted for the number of trains arriving at this death camp. At an assumed average of 50 wagons per train, it is calculated that over 7,800 wagon-loads of victims arrived at Treblinka. Since each wagon carried 100-150 people, it is easy to see that the total death toll at Treblinka was in the 0.7-1.0 million range (Vol. 1, pp. 103-104). Comparable calculations were made for all of the other death camps.
The modern view that Poles and Jews were "unequal victims" was not shared, at least not fully, by SS Brigadefuhrer Dr. Schongarth, who commented: "...Such an oppression as is being borne by the Polish people has never been borne by any other nation." (Vol. 2, p. 28).
Finally, the investigative commission recognized the fact that Poles as a whole were also eventually slated for extermination: "The Jews were to be completely extirpated before the end of the war; while the Poles were intended to do slave work for the Germans before sharing their fate." (Vol. 1, p. 14). Also: "Simultaneously with the program for the destruction of a larger number of Slavs (according to testimony of witnesses at the Nuremberg Trial, Hitler planned the destruction of 30,000,000 Slavs), the Nazi authorities purposed the total extirpation of the Jews. (Vol. 1, p. 132).
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