A hundred and twenty-three years were to pass before a sovereign Polish state reappeared. Poland had 'descended into the grave', as the Romantic poets were to put it, but it was an unquiet grave. Poland was not dead, and it was not only the Poles who tried to resurrect her.

France, at war with all Europe, did not abandon the Polish cause, though ruthless calculation was as important as fraternal emotion in French actions. Napoleon allowed General Jan Henryk Dabrowski to raise two legions of Polish exiles in Italy (their 'March, march, Dabrowski' song became Poland's national anthem) and another legion was organised in Germany. They served France loyally, in part by helping to combat the national insurrection in Spain, and in 1807 Napoleon established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a satellite state carved out of the Polish territories annexed by Prussia which soon included not only Warsaw but Kraków and a part of the Austrian zone.

But with Napoleon's defeat, Poland again left the map. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 changed the Partition boundaries: the Prussians fell back some way to the west, Kraków became a 'free city' in practice subject to the partitioning powers, and most of the old Grand Duchy of Warsaw, including the capital, became a semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire, the so-called 'Kingdom of Poland'.

Abroad, all those who opposed the Holy Alliance, the block of three reactionary powers which not only suppressed Poland but seemed to threaten liberty throughout Europe, gave at least sentimental support to the Polish cause. It was the sense of belonging to a 'liberal international' that encouraged a series of Polish national conspiracies, especially in the Congress Kingdom.

Matters came to a crisis in 1830; the July Revolution in France spread waves of democratic unrest and turbulence across the Continent, while the Tsar prepared to send Russian troops (with Polish regiments) to suppress the new and liberal state of Belgium.

The November Rising began on the night of 29 November 1830 when a small party of officer-cadets attacked the Belvedere Palace, residence of the Russian viceroy, and another group captured the Arsenal with the assistance of the Warsaw population. The rising rapidly developed into a national insurrection, and the armies of the Congress Kingdom fought Russian troops in open warfare for almost a year before going down to defeat. But the leadership of the rising, ill-prepared, proved divided and confused; the liberal nations of the West, Britain and France, did not come to Poland's aid, although thousands of Poles secretly crossed frontiers to join the insurrection; and the strategy of the generals did not match the courage and professionalism of their soldiers. Warsaw was recaptured by the Russians in September 1831, and by late October organised resistance was over.

The consequences of the November Rising were grim and long-lasting. General Paskievitch in the Kingdom and General Muraviev in lithuania carried out their own versions of 'pacification': hundreds were executed, and some 180,000 Poles were deported, many in irons to Siberia. The civil service was purged, and the Kingdom lost its relative autonomy, to be ruled by decree. Polish institutions like the Bank, the army, the Sejm and the Commission for National Education were systematically abolished.

Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki wrote verse and drama, mystical and moral and yet intensely political, that still suffuse and inform the Polish imagination; Joachim lelewel wrote Poland's history; Frederic Chopin composed; Cyprian Kamil Norwid developed a new poetry whose innovation and genius was only recognised in the following century.

This was a Romantic culture. Neither the old Age of Reason nor the optimistic, liberal mood of the contemporary West could answer the questions the Poles now put to themselves: why had Heaven allowed the martyrdom of their country when it sought only justice, and how - when - could it be resurrected from the tomb? Against the background of intense Catholic faith, there developed the haunted idea of Messianism which - in its extreme form presented Poland as the collective Christ, crucified to redeem the nations, one day to be resurrected by a new embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

At home, the earth continued to heave over the buried nation. Another national rising was planned for 1846, but ended in multiple disaster. In Prussian Poland, the leaders were arrested; Krakow rose, but the rebellion was rapidly crushed by Austrian and Russian troops. In Galicia, the portion of southern Poland held by Austria which stretched from Krakow eastwards to the fortress city of Lwow and on into the Ukraine, 1846 did not just fail but turned into a slaughter of Poles by Poles. In this overcrowded province, nearly five million Polish and Ukrainian peasants worked the lands of a tiny class of great landowning magnates. As the rising began, the Austrians were able to provoke a peasant rebellion against the landlords which turned into a massacre; some two thousand estate owners and their families were murdered, and their manors burned down.

The fiasco of 1846 was a turning-point in the history of the Partitions. From Kosciuszko's rising onwards, Polish leaders had been able to rely on peasant support, promising an end to rural servitude in return for military service. Now, after Galicia, the Powers saw that they could cut off this source of strength by exploiting social divisions in Polish society. In 1848, Count Franz von Stadion, the Austrian governor of Galicia, offered the peasants possession of their own land and the abolition of feudal labour services. The Russians took a similar course in 1864.

As a result of the failure two years before, the Polish national leaders were too demoralised and disorganised to take a major part in the liberal revolutions which blazed across Europe in 1848. Minor rebellions in Kraków and Lwów were bombarded into surrender by the Austrians. In Prussian Poland, a National Committee sprang up in Poznań seeking autonomy within Prussia, but the movement was suppressed a few months later as the Hohenzollern monarchy regained control in Berlin. But Polish exiles fought 'for your freedom and ours' in almost every other nation in Europe during 1848-9. The poet Mickiewicz raised a legion in Italy, General Ludwik Mierosławski (who had led the ill-fated 1846 rising in Poznań) fought in Sicily and in southern Germany, General Henryk Dembiński and the legendary General Józef Bem commanded armies in the Hungarian national revolution. In the 1848 'springtime of nations', European sympathy with the Polish cause - rising all through the idealistic and revolutionary movements of the first half of the century - reached a peak, from which it then declined. Europe now entered a period of huge wars between empires and of internal class struggle, in which the fate of a 'failed' nation-state seemed steadily less relevant.

O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

 O Holy Maid, who Czestochowa's shrine
Dost guard and on the Pointed Gateway shine
And watchest Nowogrodek's pinnacle!
As Thou didst heal me by a miracle
(For when my weeping mother sought Thy power,
I raised my dying eyes, and in that hour
My strength returned, and to Thy shrine I trod
For life restored to offer thanks to God),
So by a miracle Thou 'lt bring us home.
Meanwhile, bear off my yearning soul to roam
Those little wooded hills, those fields beside
The azure Niemen, spreading green and wide,
The vari-painted cornfields like a quilt,
The silver of the rye, the whetfields' gilt;
Where amber trefoil, buck-wheat white as snow,
And clover with her maiden blushes grow,
And all is girdled with a grassy band
Of green, whereon the silent peear trees stand.

 Such were the fields where once beside a rill
Among the birch trees beside a hill
There stood a manor house, wood-built on stone;
From far away the walls with whitewash shoe,
The whiter as relieved by the dark green
Of poplars, that the autumn winds would screen.
It was not large, but neat in every way,
And had a mighty barn; three stacks of hay
Stood near it, that the thatch could not contain;
The neighbourhood was clearly rich in grain;
And from the stooks that every cornfield filled
As thick as stars, and from the ploughs that tilled
The black earthed fields of fallow, broad and long,
Which surely to the manor must belong,
Like well-kept flower beds -- everyone could tell
That plenty in that house and order dwell.
The gate wide open to the world declared
A hospitable house to all who fared.

English translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie
Based on the bilingual (Polish-English) edition 
of Pan Tadeusz by The Polish Cultural Foundation, London, 1986.

The Austrian Partition - Galicia and Austrian Silesia - was the most lenient. Here the ever-changing efforts of a multinational empire to reach a stable relationship with its subjects - Germans, Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Poles and Ukrainians, to name only the larger population groups - allowed the Poles to acquire considerable autonomy in Galicia where they numbered about three million, almost half the population of the province. They - or rather the highly conservative Polish landowners - ran their own internal affairs, fostered Polish culture without much hindrance, and for much of the period used Polish as an official language. As the Empire was itself Catholic, Polish religion raised no problems. Galicia was economically backward and rural, and the Polish nobility, nervous both about peasant radicalism and the rise of the Ukrainian minority (about forty-one per cent of the province's population in 1880), relied on the Austrians to protect them and became thoroughly nervous about ideas of national resurrection.

In Prussia, by contrast, the Poles - just under three million of them - were a minority. Up to the 1848 crisis, they had been handled with tolerance. But in the second half of the century, as the policy of Germanisation set in, they were treated increasingly as a threat.

Their position became far more exposed in 1871, when Germany united into an empire under Prussian leadership. Bismarck, who had been the chief minister to the Prussian King, now became the first Chancellor of the Hohenzollern Empire. Within a few years, the Prussian Poles were embroiled in the Kulturkampf - Bismarck's attempt to break the influence of the Vatican and bring the Catholic Church throughout the German dominions under the control of the state. Bismarck did not launch the Kulturkampfsimply to break the national spirit of the Catholic Poles - though he certainly hoped for such a result. Neither did he attack the Church simply because he, like the rest of the Prussian ruling class, was a Lutheran Protestant. His central purpose was to destroy or at least disable any institution which challenged the absolute authority of the German state. But the effect of Bismarck's onslaught against their church, coupled with his violent contempt for the very idea of Poland, faced the Poles in Prussia with the most serious danger to their cultural survival that they had yet encountered.

They became the target of campaigns not only against their faith but against their education and finally against their land. Government-financed waves of German farmer-colonists were sent east to buy out the Poles and settle. On all three fronts the Poles of the Poznań region and West Prussia successfully defended themselves through a generally defiant Catholic leadership (Cardinal Ledóchowski was imprisoned for two years ), and through a network of self-help organisations which not only blocked the German colonisation plans but in some areas bought back farms that had been purchased from Poles.

Bismarck regarded Poland as a 'seasonal state', a sort of sandbank which appeared in times of international crisis but which had no title to be considered a nation. The keystone of his European strategy was the maintenance of peace between the German and Russian Empires through their common interest in the partition of Poland. After his fall in 1890, when he was succeeded by Chancellor Caprivi, German policy changed towards a hostility to Russia that was to reach its climax in 1914, but this brought no relief to the Prussian Poles, now regarded as a security risk in a military frontier zone.

Of all three fragments of Poland, the Russian partition was easily the most oppressive. It contained the largest block of Poland's former population: there were over five million Polish subjects of the Tsar, of whom about 4.3 million lived in the 'Kingdom of Poland' and the remainder either in the old lithuanian territories or in the eastern Ukraine.

After 1831, the Kingdom was in effect under military occupation. Polish culture was treated as subversive, and the Catholic religion was regarded as a disqualification from official employment. The modest political liberty allowed in Prussia and still more in Galicia was unthinkable in Russian Poland. Polish politics, to the extent that there were any beyond an unfocused hatred of anything Russian, could only develop as conspiracies prepared to use violence to maintain themselves and armed revolution to achieve their ends. Between the Russian tradition of total, utterly centralised and despotic authority and Poland's history of free speech and limited power, no stable compromise was possible.

After the Russian setback in the Crimean War (1854-6), conspiracies were formed among the thousands of Polish students studying at Russian universities and there was a new restiveness in the Kingdom. The new Tsar Alexander II, who had come to the throne in 1855, warned the Poles that they would win no concessions, but in 1860 patriotic demonstrations took place in Warsaw, followed by more in the following year which were crushed by the gunfire of Russian troops. Plans were laid for another national insurrection, which exploded prematurely in January 1863.

The odds, however, were hopeless. Feeble attempts by France, Britain and Austria to mediate with the Tsar were ignored. As in 1830, thousands of Poles came from Austria and Prussia and from all the emigrations in the west to fight and die, but the Rising itself did not spread beyond the Russian partition. After fifteen months of desperate courage, the insurrection crumbled away, and its last leadership, headed by Romuald Traugutt, was hanged outside the w arsaw Citadel.

The January Rising failed mainly because, without the intervention of a foreign power , partisans could not defeat a Russian army which came to number nearly 350,000 men. But its collapse was hastened by a clever stroke of politics. The underground 'government' had - as usual - promised the peasants full ownership of their land and an end to labour duties for the landlord. But in March 1864, Alexander II proclaimed a version of these reforms as his own, on behalf of the Russian government, depriving the Rising of much of its appeal to the rural poor.

Under the Partitions, two broad strategies were open to patriotic Poles. One was the Romantic tradition of armed insurrection, a course which turned out to be hopeless in practical terms unless there was full-scale support from other European nations - which never materialised. The other was to preserve and build up the cultural and economic strength of the nation, which involved a degree of compromise and collaboration with the partitioning Powers.

This second strategy, known as 'Organic Work', dominated the decades after the failure of the 1863 Rising. In Galicia, the agrarian slum of Europe, there was little industrial development before the end of the century. In Prussian Poland, the self-help policies of the Poles, combined with the economic dynamism of Germany, gave them a prosperous farming interest and useful experience in finance and industry . But it was in Russian Poland, in spite of ferocious political and cultural suppression, that the most vigorous changes took place.

Polish society there had been shattered as much by the land reforms of 1864 as by the defeat of the Rising. The easy-going old life of the rural gentry came abruptly to an end, with the loss of unpaid labour. A part of the petty nobility left the land and moved to Warsaw where - barred from any responsible post they became the embryo of the turbulent, independent Warsaw intelligentsia that survives today. Others, however, went to Russia itself, to study, to work as managers and - often - to encounter the new Russian generation of revolutionary conspirators. Professor Leslie records that the Polish population of St Petersburg rose from 11,000 in 1864 to 70,000 by 1914.

In 1851, the tariff barrier between Russia and the Kingdom had been abolished; in the years after 1863, Russia's protectionist policies cut off the supply of industrial goods from the West. This was the opportunity for Russian Poland, still economically far more advanced than the rest of the Empire. There were few Polish capitalists, but German investment poured in to finance industrial development; large-scale industry appeared not only in the boom town of Lódź, whose textiles clothed all Russia, but in the coal and iron basin of the Dabrowa and in Warsaw in the form of heavy and light engineering.

By 1900, Poland accounted for an eighth of all Russian production. Organic Work, at a first glance, seemed to be paying off. But in fact it was already a discredited creed.

There were two reasons for this. One was social: the new Polish working class was underpaid and atrociously housed, and - in Russian Poland - almost totally deprived of trade union protection until 1906. Revolutionary socialist ideas spread rapidly , accelerated by the slump at the end of the century. On the land, the end of serfdom and land reform had only created further problems as a rural population with a soaring birth rate tried to fend off starvation on tiny plots of soil. Many gave up the struggle and emigrated, from Prussian Poland to the United States and to the Ruhr in western Germany, then from the old Kingdom, and finally in an enormous exodus from overcrowded Galicia which took over one million - Poles, Jews and Ukranians - abroad, mostly to the Americas, between l870 and 1914.

The second reason for the fading of the Organic Work strategy was political. If it was not to degenerate into mere opportunism, only making life easier for those with money and position, it had to show returns - an appreciative readiness of the partition Powers to allow the Poles to run their own affairs. But the opposite was true: in Russia and Germany, above all, imperialist russianising and germanising policies were growing rapidly more oppressive.

Józef Piłsudski was born in a country manor in Lithuania, to a family of the Polish squires who had dominated that country for centuries, only four years after the suppression of the last great Polish insurrection which began in January l863. He grew up in a land helplessly exposed to the Russian vengeance that followed the January Rising: executions, torturings, arrests, deportation to Siberia, the confiscation of estates, the suppression of Polish culture and language, and the persecution of the Catholic Church. At school, Piłudski's teachers were Russians who sneered at his Polishness and treated him as an alien in his own country. Józef Piłsudski acquired a hatred and fear of Russia which never left him. The Polish gentry in Lithuania were little affected by the doctrines of compromise, of a sort of patriotic adaptation to foreign rule, which became widespread in other parts of the divided nation in the years after l863. They remained true to the older tradition of romantic conspiracy, which looked to yet another armed insurrection to liberate Poland. (...)The situation at the turn of the century was a strange one. Poland had lost its independence just over a hundred years before, and remained partitioned between Russia, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, which had inherited the conquests of Prussia. On the one hand, the profound discouragement which had fallen upon the Poles after the failure of the January Rising in 1863 was rapidly wearing off. The sober doctrines which gained support in the decades after the Rising, suggesting that the true patriotism was to avoid head-on conflict with the occupiers and build up the economic and cultural strength of the nation by hard work, agricultural improvemem and social organisation - this cautious approach was out of fashion. Political parties were being founded, some operating openly in the relatively tolerant conditions of the Austrian partition, others underground. Higher education, some of it clandestine, was reviving even under the Russians. In the Prussian partition, a vigorous and quite successful struggle was being waged on the land to resist German colonisation. The economic turn-down at the end of the century, which had reached the dimensions of a severe slump in Russia, was spreading bankruptcies and unemployment and undermining the case for patient, constructive work. The new generation, which had not experienced the devastating consequences of 1863, was disinclined to be patient.

1914, the novelist Joseph Conrad decided to take his family on a continental holiday. He wanted to show his English wife and children the city of Kraków, where he had grown up and where he had buried his father, the revolutionary Apollo Korzeniowski. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, successor to the imperial Austro-Hungarian throne, had been shot at Sarajevo a few weeks before. Like most ordinary Europeans, Conrad paid little attention to this. As a result, the outbreak of the First World War caught the Conrads in Krakow, in what was now the enemy territory of Austria-Hungary, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they managed to escape internment and make their way back to Britain.

On the night of the general mobilisation, as army cars rushed hooting through the streets and crowds of unwilling young men slouched to the barracks to have their hair cut off and their uniforms fitted, Conrad and a group of Polish friends gathered in the smoking-room of his hotel and contemplated the future.

'The big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation.' Conrad, recalling the scene a year later, wrote: 'I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: Ruin - and Extinction. (Joseph Conrad, Notes on Lifes and Letters, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1921, p. 229, P.238)

Four years later, Poland regained her independence. The war which seemed to promise only ruin and extinction led to the collapse of all the three partitioning empires. But there are lessons in that memory of Conrad's which should never be forgotten. Only hindsight or the bravest contemporary guess could identify those baleful days of 19l4 with the beginning of Poland's resurrection. Only the most absurd nationalism could attribute that resurrection to the actions of the Poles themselves. There was nothing inevitable about Poland's revival in 1918, which was the result of an incredible stroke of fortune. In 1914, there was no lack of Polish politicians struggling for the independence of their country, openly or underground, at liberty or in prisons. But Conrad in that Kraków hotel, like most Poles, shared only their aspirations, not their optimism.

(...)

In the gap between the end of the war and the beginning of Versailles, the new Polish frontiers were already being set. Fighting had broken out between Poles and Ukrainians at Lwów in November 1918, ending with all Galicia under Polish control seven months later. In December 1918, there was a victorious Polish rising in the German province of Poznań. The Lithuanian capital of Wilno was taken first by the Bolsheviks and then by the Poles. Czechs and Poles fought each other in the Cieszyń region, the small industrial area which had been Austrian Silesia. That struggle ended in July 1920 when the Allied powers enforced a partition - a solution never accepted by the 140,000 Poles who found themselves on the Czechoslovak side of the frontier.

(...)

The toughest problem on the western borders was Upper Silesia. With its concentration of coal-mines, many producing high-grade coking coal, and its iron and steel mills, this was the most valuable industrial area in central Europe. Under German rule, its population had become a dense mixture of Catholic Poles and Catholic German Silesians under a crust of Prussian Lutheran administrators and industrial capitalists who were usually German or German-Jewish. Many 'Germans' were of Polish descent and had relations who considered themselves Polish. .
About the only problem modern Poland has been spared is regionalism. Minorities of other nationalities are a different matter; the Poles themselves share a remarkably uniform culture. The exception was - and to some extent still is - Upper Silesia, separated from the Polish state long before the Partitions and conscious of a distinct identity. The Polish mining villages had given their hearts to the charismatic Wojciech Korfanty, who had represented them in the German Reichstag and who was to be the only politician in independent Poland with a local support so strong that he could defy the influence of Warsaw. Korfanty belonged to the Christian Democrats, a Catholic party formed in 19°2 to block the advance of socialism in the working class.

Nobody was going to abandon Upper Silesia without a fight. The economy of central and eastern Germany depended on it; but without Upper Silesia, Poland would be a poor rural country lacking a primary industrial base. After two Polish insurrections in the region, the Allies intervened and held a plebiscite. This produced a German majority of votes, inflated but not decided by trainloads of Germans ferried in for the poll. The result, on 3 May 192 I, was a third Polish rising led by Korfanty and helped by the passive support of the French occupation troops, which ended after several months of savage fighting with the Poles in possession of most of Upper Silesia. The League of Nations drew a final partition line in October, giving the best part of the industrial districts to Poland.

These fights around the frontier were overshadowed by the Polish-Soviet war of 1920-21, an event which for a brief but terrifying moment seemed to threaten the whole of Europe and whose baleful consequences were to determine not only the nature of the Polish state but the fate of the next generation.

Here, Piłsudski was the moving spirit. It is still often said that he attacked Russia in order to suppress Bolshevism, that he acted as  mere tool of Britain and France who had already intervened on the White side in the Russian civil war. But this is a false account both of what happened and of Piłsudski' s motives. Paderewski in Paris had once suggested that Polish armies could be used to overthrow Lenin, but nothing had come of it. Piłsudski' s aim, in contrast, had always been to restore something akin to the old Common-wealth, by detaching the Ukraine from Russia and bringing it into a federation with Poland. He failed to reach any agreement with the Whites, who could see no point in helping Poland to demolish the empire they hoped to restore.

Ever since the Armistice, the Germany army stranded in the east had formed a buffer between Poland and Russia. In February 1919, it finally withdrew, and Polish and Bolshevik units began to collide. Slowly the old Commonwealth outlines began to reappear, as Polish troops took Wilno in April 1919 and Minsk, the main city of Byelorussia, in August. The Bolsheviks, preoccupied with the civil war, we re ready to be flexible over frontiers with the Poles, but talks between the two sides broke down in December. Meanwhile, the Allies were becoming alarmed by Piłsudski's march to the east. They had no love for Bolshevik Russia, but neither had they expected Poland to turn into the enormous revival of historical dominions, which was now taking shape.

Piłsudski turned his attention to the Ukraine, which had a precarious government of its own under the Hetman Petlura. He was able to force Petlura to agree that eastern Galicia - in spite of its Ukrainian majority in population- should be merged into Poland, in return for Polish protection for Petlura's authority in the rest of the Ukraine. But t e deal did not stick; most Ukrainian patriots rejected the surrender of Galicia as unpardonable treachery. However, Polish troops supported by Petlura's forces went ahead with their attack on the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, on 8 May 1920.

By now the Bolsheviks saw the Polish advance as a threat to the survival of the Revolution itself. A huge army was assembled, and in the summer of 1920 a double counter-offensive, led by Budyonny's cavalry army in Galicia and the talented young General Tukhachevsky in the north, burst through Piłsudski's defences and poured westwards towards Poland.

It seems to have been Lenin, normally the coolest of men, who decided -against the, opinions of his colleagues, including Trotsky and Stalin - that this offensive should go forward until it carried the Revolution into the heart of Europe. Tukhachevsky proclaimed: 'Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration.' By August, the offensive was nearing Warsaw; Cossack cavalry crossed the Vistula north of the capital, and the Bolsheviks we re approaching the German frontiers of East Prussia. If Poland fell, the way to Berlin would be open. ,

Confident of victory, the Soviet government had set :up a revolutionary committee, the nucleus of a Polish government, at Białystok under Julian Marchlewski, a Polish Communist who had been one of the SDKPiL leaders. 

(...)

Tukhachevsky's armies surging across northern Poland were leaving an undefended flank, and the Poles -outmanoeuvred but not defeated - took their chance. A strike force was hastily put together, and on 13 August it tore across Tukhachevsky's rear and cut him off. A hundred thousand prisoners were taken, and the Soviet armies fled out of Poland with Piłsudski's men at their heels.

Marian Żebrowski was a young cavalry officer; his regiment headed the Polish counter-offensive as it hit the left flank of Tukhachevsky's advance. 'Army people know what it means when one is attacked across the line of one' s advance. That means the complete destruction of an offensive - and that's just what happened. The third and fourth squadrons destroyed everything ahead of them. The second squadron rode round the right wing, crossed a bridge and covered our right. The first squadron was sent to deliver a cavalry charge on the left, where larger groups of the enemy had been seen. In the last phase of its attack, the squadron got into some marshland and in this marshy ground there we re small units of the enemy. Our men fired on them, but the horses began to sink into the soft ground and the charge came to a standstill. The enemy redoubled their fire, and the squadron took heavy casualties . . . My friend, an officer-cadet called Suchodolski - his horse was killed and he fell, and was stabbed seven times with a bayonet. I helped to carry him to the ambulance cart and he just said to me: "Marian, we won such glory today, though I won't see the results of it . . .'"

This was the battle of Warsaw, or the 'Miracle on the Vistula'. It was one of the most dazzling operations in European military history. It saved Poland' s independence, and it forced Soviet Russia to abandon for ever the idea that November 1917 had been only the prelude to world revolution; from now on, Lenin was to adopt a more defensive policy which was to end in Stalin's formulation of 'socialism in one country'. Many people, then and now, have concluded that in 1920 Poland saved Europe from Communism. It would be more prudent to say that the 'Miracle' probably saved Germany from Soviet invasion. The revolutionary tide in Germany was ebbing fast by the summer of 1920, and any Red Republic established there by Soviet troops would have been swept away by the combined armies of the West.

(...)

Germany occupied all Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Simultaneously, the Germans issued an ultimatum to Poland over Danzig, and Poland responded by moving troops up to the frontier.

(...)

On 31 March the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that Britain would guarantee Polish independence in the event of attack. Beck flew to London, and the guarantee was made formal in April. Hitler retorted by renouncing his 1934 pact with Poland. 

On 23 August, to the stupefaction of the world, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression. A secret protocol to the pact provided for the partition of Poland and the Baltic States between Germany and the Soviet Dnion. Once again, the main dish at the feast of friendship between Poland' s historic enemies proved to be Poland's independence. A few days later, Britain signed a more specific alliance, making it clear that a German attack would lead to war with Britain as well as with Poland. 
On 1 September 1939, with no deelaration of war, German troops crossed the Polish frontier. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Precisely a fortnight later, on 17 September, the Red Army entered Poland from the east.

The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following agreement: 
ARTICLE I
Both High Contracting Parties obligate, themselves to desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other powers.
ARTICLE II
Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third power. 
ARTICLE III
The Governments of the two High Contracting Parties shall in the future maintain continual contact with one another for the purpose of consultation in order to exchange information on problems affecting their common interests. 
ARTICLE IV
Neither of the two High Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of powers whatsoever that is directly or indirectly aimed at the other party. 
ARTICLE V
Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties over problems of one kind or another, both parties shall settle these disputes or conflicts exclusively through friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through the establishment of arbitration commissions. 
ARTICLE VI 
The present treaty is concluded for a period of ten years, with the provision that, in so far as one of the High Contracting Parties does not denounce it one year prior to the expiration of this period, the validity of this treaty shall automatically be extended for another five years.
ARTICLE VI
The present treaty shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin. The agreement shall enter into force as soon as it is signed. 

Done in duplicate, in the German and Russian languages. 

MOSCOW, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich: 

V. RIBBENTROP

With full power of the Government of the U.S.S.R.: 

V. MOLOTOV

On the occasion of the signature of the Nonaggression Pact between the German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the undersigned plenipotentiaries of each of the two parties discussed in strictly confidential conversations the question of the boundary of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions: 

1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party. 

2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San. 

The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. 

In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement. 

3. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares; its complete political disinterestedness in these areas. 

This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret. 

Moscow, August 23, 1939.

For the Government of the German Reich: 

V. RIBBENTROP

Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R.: 

V. MOLOTOV
 

Other countries put these ideas into practice. So it was with Blitzkrieg, the concept of waging offensive war with fast-moving columns of armour or motorised infantry, concentrating maximum force to punch through a minimum sector of enemy line. This theory came into the mind of a young French officer named, Charles de Gaulle as he witnessed the rapid thrusts of the Polish-Soviet War, utterly unlike the broad-front offensives which had gained so little at such hideous cost on the Western Front a few years before. What if those cavalry armies could be replaced by tanks built for speed?

But it was British and German military thinkers who developed the idea of mobile warfare, years before de Gaulle finally put his thoughts on paper. And itwas the Germans who first tested his theory, in the campaign against Poland in September 1939. Poland was attacked from three sides at once by Panzer divisions, and mobile units followed through the gaps they made. The German ranks outnumbered the Polish by at least ten to one, and with an airforce five rimes as large as that of Poland - the Germans immediately seized command of the air. 

It should have been an easy victory, but it was not. The Germans afterwards regarded it as a hard-fought campaign, and were disconcerted by the capacity of the Poles to keep fighting and regrouping in spite of such hopeless weriority in weapons. The casualties Germany took were heavier than in the longer campaign in France the following year.

(...)

The extraordinary thing about the Polish soldiers was the self-reliance: their capacity to reorganise into ever-smaller units, as all coherent command from above vanished, and to go on fighting. Part of the Polish navy had already escaped and reached British and French ports, ready to continue the war, and as resistance collapsed about a hundred Polish aircrat - all that remained - flew to Romania.

At 3.30 on the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish ambassador m Moscow was summoned from his bed and handed a 'Note'. The Soviet Union announced that as the Polish state had ceased to exist (which was not true) steps had become necessary to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussiai minorities in the 'former' Polish territories. An hour later, Soviet troops crossed the frontier.
At first, the incredulous Poles imagined that the Red Army might be come to their assistance. There was little resistance to the invasion, the eastern border being almost unprotected, but the truth became rapidly plain as the Soviet forces moved across eastern Poland to a demarcation line along the rivers Bug and San. A Fourth Partition of Poland was taking place.

The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. consider it as exclusively their task, after the collapse of the former Polish state, to re-establish peace and order in these territories and to assure to the peoples living there a peaceful life in keeping with their national character. To this end, they have agreed upon the following:
ARTICLE I.
The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. determine as the boundary of their respective national interests in the territory of the former Polish state the line marked on the attached map, which shall be described in more detail in a supplementary protocol.
ARTICLE II.
Both parties recognize the boundary of the respective nation interests established in article I as definitive and shall reject any interference of third powers in this settlement.
ARTICLE III.
The necessary reorganization of public administration will be effected in the areas west of the line specified in article I by the Government of the German Reich, in the areas east of this line by the Government of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE IV.
The Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. regard this settlement as a firm foundation for a progressive development of the friendly relations between their peoples.
ARTICLE V.
This treaty shall be ratified and the ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin as soon as possible. The treaty becomes effective upon signature.

Done in duplicate, in the German and Russian languages.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Reich:
J. RIBBENTROP.

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.:
W. MOLOTOV.

The Government of the U.S.S.R. shall place no obstacles in the way of Reich nationals and other persons of German descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction, if they desire to migrate to Germany or to the territories under German jurisdiction. It agrees that such removals shall be carried out by agents of the Government of the Reich in cooperation with the competent local authorities and that the property rights of the emigrants shall be protected.

A corresponding obligation is assumed by the Government of the German Reich in respect to the persons of Ukrainian or White Russian descent residing in the territories under its jurisdiction.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Reich:
J. RIBBENTROP

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.
W. MOLOTOV.

The undersigned plenipotentiaries, on concluding the German Russian Boundary and Friendship Treaty, have declared their agreement upon the following:

Both parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party. They will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this purpose.

Moscow, September 28,1939.

For the Government of the German Retch:

J. RIBBENTROP

By authority of the Government of the U.S.S.R.:

W. MOLOTOV
 
 

MR. CHAIRMAN: I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your letter of today, wherein you communicate to me the following:

"Implementing my letter of today about the formulation of a common economic program, the Government of the U.S.S.R. will see to it that German transit traffic to and from Rumania by way of the Upper Silesia-Lemberg-Kolomea railroad line shall be facilitated in every respect. The two Governments will, in the framework of the proposed trade negotiations, make arrangements without delay for the operation of this transit traffic. The same will apply to the German transit traffic to and from Iran, to and from Afghanistan as well as to and from the countries of the Far East.

"Furthermore, the Government of the U.S.S.R. declares that it is willing. in addition to the quantity of oil previously agreed upon or to be agreed upon hereafter, to supply a further quantity of oil commensurate with the annual production of the oil district of Drohobycz and Boryslav, with the proviso that one half of this quantity shall be supplied to Germany from the oil fields of the aforesaid oil district and the other half from other oil districts of the U.S.S.R. As compensation for these supplies of oil, the U.S.S.R. would accept German supplies of hard coal and steel piping."

I take note of this communication with satisfaction and concur in it in the name of the Government of the German Reich.

Accept, Mr. Chairman, the renewed assurance of my highest consideration.

VON RIBBENTROP
 
 

FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION 
THE compilers of the Concise Statistical Year-Book of Poland for 1939-1941 had a twofold aim in view : 
1. To give the statistical data concerning Poland as she was at the outbreak of the war. 
2. To give a correct picture of the rending of the living body of Poland into two, German-occupied and Russian-occupied, areas between September 1939 and June 1941. These data may help the reader to realize what Polish resources, human and material, were at that time at the disposal of each of the occupying powers. They will assist in forming a correct picture of the resources exploited and pillaged by the Germans, who are now in control of the whole territory of Poland. 
The tables of the last, 10th edition, of the Concise Statistical Year-Book of Poland published by the Chief Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Poland in June 1939, and which referred to the whole country, have been, in some instances, revised in such way that, beside the data referring to the whole of Poland, data for German-occupied and Russian-occupied Poland have been added. 
FOREWORD TO SECOND EDITION 
ON presenting the British public with the second edition of the Concise Statistical Year-Book of Poland, September 1939-June 1941, we ought to stress that many data contained in it relates to the period prior to 1940 and accordingly may appeal out of date to the general reader. It is thought, however, that this Year-Book is still of actual value and interest because it gives a picture of the territorial, demographic, administrative and economic state of the Republic of Poland at the time of the outbreak of the second world war and in the years following immediately upon the partition of Polish territory between Germany and Russia. 
GENERAL REMARKS 
IN the preparation of the tables dealing with Polish and International relations the only sources used have been the publication of the Chief Bureau of Statistics of Poland, namely, the Concise Statistical Year-Book of Poland, as also the " Statistics of Poland" Series (Statystyka Polski). The informations regarding the territorial division of Poland into Germany and U.S.S.R. since September 1939 to June 1941 are based on estimates. The data concerning Poland does not include the Zaolzie-Cieszyn district recovered in 1938, if not otherwise stated.
Ali weights and measures quoted in this Year-Book are, unless stated, in the metric system, thus : 
millimetre (mm) 
metre (m) = 1000 mm 
square metre (sq. m) 
cubic metre (cub. m) kilometre (km) = 1000 metres square kilometre (sq. km) hectare (ha) = WOOO sq. m litre (l) 
hectolitre (hl) = 100 l kilogramrne (kg) = 1000 gramrnes quintal (g) = 100 kg 
ton (t) = 1000 kg 
0•039 inch 39•371 inches 10•764 sq. feet 35•313 cub. feet 
0•621 statute mile 0•386 sq. mile 2•471 acres 
0•220 Imperial gallon 21•997 Imperial gallons 2•205 Ib. avoirdupois 220•462 Ib. avoirdupois 2204•621 Ib. avoirdupois 
For parity and bourse rates of Zloty (zl.) in relation to the various foreign currencies, see Section X, Table 20, page 103. 
The following symbols have been applied throughout in the tables in this Year-Book : 
Dash (-) denotes that the given subject was non-existent. Zero (O) is used to express values too. small to be noted, e.g. if production is expressed .in thousand tons, the use of this symbol indicates that the given output was below 500 tons. 
Dot ( . ) indicates either no data or no reliable data are available. 
Cross ( x ) is put into spaces which cannot be filled out owing to the composition of some tables. 
Decimal figures are preceded in the tables by a full stop (.) and not a comma. 
 

Section I
9. Area, population and density of population in the two enemy-occupied areas.

10. Urban and rural population in the two enemy-occupied areas

11. Area, administrative division and population in the two enemy occupied areas

12. Territorial changes in Europe in result of aggressive action during the period March 1938-May 1941

19. Population, by occupational groups, in urban and rural areas in the two enemy-occupied territories

20. Population, in percentage, by occupational groups, in urban and rural areas in two enemy-occupied territories

25. Population of tbe large towns

Section III
7. Dwelling-houses and dwellings in 1931, in the two enemy-occupied areas 30

8. War damage in Warsaw in September 1939

Section IV
2. Rural holdings, according to area of land utilizcd for agriculture in 1931 in the two enemy-occupied areas -  31

Europa als Lebensraum, Oktober 1942

Der Aufbau des Grossdetschen Reiches seit 1933

Die Gaueinteilung der NSDAP

CONTENTS 
I INTRODUCTION 1 
II Documents FROM POLAND 4 
(1) AFTER HIMMLER'S VISIT 4 
(2) TERROR AS A PROGRAMME 6 
(3) COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY 7 
(4) PRISONS AND CONCENTRATIO CAMPS  9 
PAWIAK - OSWIECIM - BOJANOW, STUTTHOF, DZIESIATA,DZIALDOWO, RAVENSBRUECK CAMP FOR WOMEN. 
(5) LETTERS FROM PRISON...  19 
(6) DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH POPULATION  21
(7) PUBLIC EXECUTIONS  22 
(8) THE TEN MARTYRS OF PRUSZKOW  26
III GENERAL SIKORSKI'S PROTEST SPEECH  31 
IV RESOLUTION OF THE POLISH NATIONAL COUNCIL 36 
V PRESS CONFERENCE AT THE MINISTRY OF INFOR MATION . 38 
VI JUSTICE WILL BE DONE: OFFICIAL STATEMENTS  AND DECLARATIONS  51 
 
 

On the basis of reports to the Polish Government received by the Prime Minister, General Sikorski, from Poland, both of a general and of a detailed nature, the Polish Government now has a very clear picture of the methods of government, i.e., the German persecutions and barbarities in Poland during the first six months of this year. It is a picture which freezes the blood in one's veins. After the brief period prior to the outbreak of war with Russia, while the Germans attempted to get the Polish nation to co-operate with them-towards which attempts Poland maintained her inflexible attitude of contempt and hatred for the criminal invaders - the terrible oppression has increased again, turning Polish life into one long execution, torment, slaughter, blood and tears. But it is also an unbroken manifestation of will to resistance, such as is almost without precedent in the thousands of years of world history, not excluding the martyrdoms of the early Christians. 
For that matter we know very well that the connection between all this intensified persecution and the Polish refusal to co-operate with the Germans against Russia is only a transient and subsidiary element. The immutable essence of it all is different. The Germans, after preparing for years to invade Poland as the gate- way and simultaneously the age-old obstacle to their drive Eastward, and after conquering Poland in their invasion, decided to strangle, to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation for ever. They openly proclaimed this intention. And for three years, amid the changes of circumstances and despite various swindling subterfuges and pretexts on this task of extermination day after day, hour after hour, and in this war have won their German knightly spurs as the most barbarous murderers in the history of the world. 
The latest reports from Poland confirm the sombre news. which has come in great detail during the last six months, and convey all the incredible dimensions of the crimes. It is no longer a case of hounding down only those putting up opposition or suspected of active resistance. It is a collective execution of a death sentence on a whole nation. The Germans continue to murder social, scientific and spiritual leaders, but they are also murdering tens and tens of thousands of people in prisons and concentration camps, continually filling these places with new victims. after exterminating the others. In addition to the torture camps for men, with Oswięcim as the chief, there are now torture camps for women, such as the one near Flirstenberg (Mecklenburg) known as Ravensbrueck. Examinations and investigations constitute one long chain of the most terrible tortures, and people are killed off in great droves, as has happened recently with hundreds of thousands of Jews, while millions are sentenced to starvation. 
There was a time when the human imagination dreamed legends of lands of abundance, serenity and happiness, but to-day reality has made of Poland in all the world's eyes a land of misery, torment, and death. 
Only yesterday I was struck by the sombre news from France. Hitherto the Germans there have taken hostages, and victims have been selected from these for execution, in the event of any attempt being made on a German. But yesterday it was, reported that arising out of anti-German activities near Boulogne fifty hostages have been taken to be sent to Poland, and a further fifty are threatened with arrest and exile to the same place. 
So the Germans themselves seek to terrify the nations of Europe with Poland, as though with one great concentration camp, and above its gates Dante's inscription 
above the gates of hell:  . 
"Abandon hope all ye who enter in." 

But for us Poland is our country, our sole country in the world, our beloved land, our great Motherland, and it is the Poland to which Słowacki cried: 
"For we have created of Thy name 
A prayer that weeps and lightnings that flame." 
And so it is: not only the prayers that are weeping today, but the lightnings which will strike to-morrow. 
The Germans are raging. They are satiating their age-old lust for domination, they are swimming in the blood of the defenceless and luxuriating in the torments of their victims. Their delirium adds to their fury when they see that the victory which they thought certain and which seemed close at hand is continually fleeing farther from them, is now definitely unachievable. They wade aberrantly through crime. 
And they do not see that from the place where to-day the prayer of suffering is weeping, from tormented Poland, from tortured Europe, from the world infuriated to its depths, will fall the lightning of punishment tomorrow. 
In connection with the solemn assurances by President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden that the German crimes in the lands affected by the German invasions will be punished, and in connection with the preparatory labours of the Governments of the eight European States affected by the German invasions, in order to assure the meting out of just punishment after the war, a legislative project has been laid before the Polish Government for the punishment of wartime crimes committed in Poland since August 31st, 1939, by German troops, officials, and citizens. 
Not one German will escape punishment in the court in which he will hear the words: 
"You have killed, you have tortured, you have stolen, you have instigated, you have sat privileged in other people's property, while Polish children went hungry." 
Not one German will escape his full responsibility. 
(From a speech broadcast on July 1st, 1942, by Prof. Stronski, Polish Minister of Information.) 

The information on acts of savagery committed by the Germans in Poland, which we give hereafter, brings the story down to the latest possible date. For much of it relates to the situation at the beginning of June, about two months ago. And it confirms that the terror which the Germans unleashed in Poland three years ago, and which has, raged there ever since, is still continuing in all its violence and inhumanity. 
All the documents following originate from the General Gouvernement area of German-occupied Poland and are taken from reports received by the Polish Government in London direct from Poland. 
We let the documents speak for themselves. 

(1) AFTER HIMMLER'S VISIT
Ever since the spring the whole of the General Gouvernement has been in the grip of a terror far exceeding anything previously achieved during the German occupation. In the general view this is linked up with Himmler's visit to the General Gouvernement last spring, during which he is said to have confronted the General Gouvernement administration with a number of urgent tasks, the chief being: 
1. The liquidation of the Polish secret organizations. 
2.    The liquidation of the ghettoes.  . 
3. The crushing of illegal trade. 
4. The supply of a million workers to Germany_ 
All the activities of the occupant authorities since that time have been directed towards the realisation of these postulates, and frequently steps are taken which cover more than one. 

After Himmler's visit there was a revival of the mass mall-hunts and round-ups in the streets of the larger towns. Following are a number of the more extreme instances of these activities: 
In Warsaw the entire staff and all the customers in the cafe Dana at Bracka Street, No. 18, were arrested. This arrest was preceded by the following characteristic circumstance. For some months previously the cafe had had a regular visitor, who was very free with his drinks, spent large sums, entered into conversation with other visitors and passed on all kinds of secret information. Thus he came to be well known and well liked by the staff, and also by the other visitors to the cafe. On the day of the arrests two police cars drove up to the door and at the head of the detachment was this same regular visitor, with a revolver in his hand. One of the waitresses., who recognized him, called out to him in Polish, to which he replied: “Schweigen Sie, ich verstehe nicht polnisch.”) (Shut up, I don't understand Polish.) In the confusion one of the Poles present saved himself by running through the kitchen to the back stairs, and up into the loft. 
Another round-up occurred in Kerceli Square, in Warsaw, in April. Along one of the streets leading into the square came a large detachment of troops, singing, as though marching to exercise. Suddenly it halted and immediately ran to take up points of vantage, surrounding the square and market halls. Through a megaphone it was announced that no one was to stir from where he stood. Then followed a detailed search of all those caught in the cordon, which went on till late in the evening. Under the pretext of arresting persons alleged to have hidden in the houses around the square, a number of permanent residents of these houses were also arrested. Altogether it is estimated that between two and three thousand people were arrested that day. All goods and money were confiscated. 
Apart from these round-ups and street arrests, arrests are also made of named persons, these usually being reserve officers and young people. It is estimated that between twelve and fifteen thousand people altogether have been arrested in Warsaw during a few days, and another five thousand in Cracow. 
To illustrate the atmosphere in which Warsaw lives, we cite the following facts: 
In the middle of April, a certain woman was informed that she was to go immediately to Wlochy, near Warsaw, to receive the remains of her son. He had left his home only a few hours previously. When she arrived at Wlochy she found her son with several bullets in the back of his head, lying with other bodies on the floor of' a room. From the neighbours she learned that this room was the meeting-place of twelve young people who probably belonged to some secret organization. One of them came out on to the balcony, and a minute or two later there was the sound of shots from a Gestapo detachment which attacked the house. The person on the balcony, generally considered to have been an agent-provocateur, hid behind the door of the balcony and escaped.
Another example is of the unexpected arrest of two women. Having sat rather late with their neighbours they wanted to go back to their home in the next house, after the curfew hour. At that moment a police car drove up, they were forced into it, and together with others who were arrested before and after them, were carried to the neighbourhood of the Gdansk railway station. This was in January last, and on the track was a train full of wounded German soldiers, who had died of the cold during the journey. The arrested persons had to spend the whole night carting the bodies out of the train. The women had to remove the uniforms and bandages, the men dug trenches, and buried the bodies. 

(2) TERROR AS A PROGRAMME
Not only have recent months seen a further development of the German terror, but they have witnessed a far more open proclamation of terror as a programme by representatives of the German occupant authorities. and the ostentatious, public application of terrorism. 
Greiser's statement that anyone in the Polish Western provinces who dares to resist the Germans or even to be refractory will quickly become "a child of death" has been followed by other German speeches and public statements of the same kind, especially in connection with the introduction of the new criminal code for Poles, which itself laid down the principles of the ruthless application of terror. In particular the Poznan newspaper Ostdeutscher Beobachter regularly writes of the necessity to apply the most ruthless and harshest methods against Poles, when justifying the monstrous sentences of the special tribunals. 
In the General Gouvernement a good example of this new development was the public announcement by the Warsaw governor Fischer that 100 Polish political prisoners had been executed on March 2nd, and that further acts of terror of this kind would follow. This announcement was preceded by a talk between Fischer and several Polish public figures. In the course of this conversation Fischer forecast that all attempts at Polish political activity would be drowned in torrents of blood. But it is significant that the mass murders of March 2nd were organized by Fischer on the pretext of police suppression of banditry in Warsaw and Anin, which has nothing whatever to do with Polish political activities. 

(3) COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
The Germans are more and more openly proclaiming that they intend to apply the principle of collective responsibility to the Poles, and more and more Poles are being executed in application of this principle, the executions frequently taking place in public. 
One Eugen Petrull, writing in the Ostdeutscher Beobachter on February 4th on the new criminal code for Poles, said, inter alia: 
"The persecution of Germanism has burdened the Poles with a terrible and inexpungeable guilt, which is directly borne by the Polish nation as a whole." 
The linking up of this principle of the responsibility of "the Polish nation as a whole" with the alleged persecution of Germans is obviously a hypocritical attempt to provide a moral justification for the increasing application of the principle of collective responsibility. 
Among the facts and cases based on this principle which have come to knowledge so far are the following mass murders: in KALISZ county, 60 people; in SULMIERZYCE, Wielun county, 10 persons; in ZGIERZ, 100 persons; in LOMZA, 24 persons. 
German judges have applied the same principle in their mass sentences of Poles to death or to punitive camps for taking part in alleged anti-German acts of violence. Three hundred persons were also executed at SZCZEPANOW, in Poznania. 
The principle of collective responsibility has also been applied in the General Gouvernement, in fulfilment of Fischer's declaration. The following cases are known: 16 persons executed in STRUZA, Radomsk county; a large number in CRACOW county; 100 persons from the Warsaw prison executed at TREBLINKA on March 2nd, as announced by Fischer; 214 persons in LUBARTOW county; a couple of hundred young peasants in ZWOLEN, Radom county; 18 persons in BOCHNIA; 210 persons at JANOWIEC, Kozienice county. 
The principle of collective responsibility is also applied in economic and social measures, for instance, the imposition of punishment on an entire village because one of the villagers fails to provide the assigned quota; the punishment of groups of workers or employees for crimes alleged against one member of the group, and so on. 
But the most frequent excuse for the application of the principle and for the organization of public executions is alleged attacks on Germans, committed by persons who as a rule go undiscovered, and more rarely for charges of participation in Polish freedom activities. 

(4) PRISONS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

PAWIAK
In Warsaw the victims of German arrests are taken mainly to the Pawiak prison, where they are examined. This examination, and all their stay in Pawiak, is accompanied by tortures which in a number of cases cause death immediately or after a few days. For instance, recently, on May 25th, a woman named Gillewicz was arrested together with her husband, a lawyer. She was alleged to have been giving Polish children secret lessons. Her husband died on the fourth day after arrest, while she committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell at Pawiak, in consequence of her sufferings. 
From Pawiak the prisoners are transported either to work in Germany or to the concentration camp at Oswięcim. 
The existence of 23 concentration camps where Poles are confined, is known to us. These are their names: 
Belzec, Buchenwalde, Ciechanow, Dachau, Dobrzyn, Dyle, Dzialdowo, Dziesiąta, Flossenburg, Gross - Rosen, Grudziadz, Hamburg, Hohenbrueck, Labiau, Mauthausen, Nasielsk, Oranienburg, Oswięcim, Plonsk, Ravensbrueck, Sierpc, Stutthof, Treblinka. (See map on pages 28 and 29.) 

OSWIECIM
Further batches of prisoners are continually being sent to Oswięcim concentration camp from all the prisons in Poland. In the second half of March a couple of hundred persons were sent from Warsaw to the camp; among them were several Polish warders of the Warsaw prison. In April several hundred more prisoners, women as well as men, were sent from Warsaw. News is continually being received of deaths in Oswięcim of prisoners who are unable to stand up to the rigours of the camp. 
Large parties of Oswięcim prisoners go to work every day on the building of a synthetic petrol works which is being erected in the vicinity. The mortality among prisoners is indicated by the following details. Of a party of 40 prisoners transferred to the camp from Milanowek in July, 1940, three have returned home, two are still in the camp, and 35 have died. Of a group of 12 workers in the former Warsaw Committee for Social Self-help, taken to Oswięcim in July, 1941, only one remains; the others have all died in Oswięcim. 
One of the favourite tortures in Oswięcim is to seize the victim by the arms and legs and swing him against a post until his back is broken. But the "scientific" method of killing off prisoners is by injections which work slowly on the internal organs, especially on the heart. It is universally believed that the prisoners are used for large-scale experiments in testing out new drugs which the Germans are preparing for unknown ends. A case was. known of a certain young and healthy man who was arrested and taken to a camp near Tarnow. After some months his wife was informed that her husband was dying and that she could visit him before his death. She was able to arrive two hours before his last moment, and the dying man managed to tell her that all the prisoners have a band of some material sewn into their clothing around the neck, which they are not allowed to remove. After wearing the band around the neck for some days the part becomes red and inflamed; this soon passes off, but throat trouble develops and quickly progresses (the informant called it "throat consumption"), causing speedy death. 
Among the other experiments being tried on the prisoners is the use of poison gas. It is generally known that during the night of September 5th and 6th last year about a thousand people were driven down to the underground shelter in Oswięcim among them seven hundred Bolshevik prisoners of war and three hundred Poles. As the shelter was too small to hold this large number, the living bodies were simply forced in, regardless of broken bones. When the shelter was full gas was injected into it, and all the prisoners died during the night. All night the rest of the camp was kept awake by the groans and 
howls coming from the shelter. Next day other prisoners had to carry out the bodies, a task which took all day. 
Recently the situation in Oswięcim has worsened, in consequence of the formation of a women's section. The women are put on those few lighter jobs (scrubbing potatoes, cleaning, etc.) which previously were performed by a number of the men, who thus escaped heavier labour. Now the men are used exclusively for heavy physical labour, and are divided into categories according to their strength. It is estimated that the Oswięcim camp can accommodate fifteen thousand prisoners, but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals. 
In addition to the main camp, built near Oswięcim, there is an additional camp near by, in which the brutalities are so terrible that people die there quicker than they would have done in the main camp. The prisoners call this supplementary camp "Paradisal" (presumably because from it there is only one road, that leading to Paradise). The crematorium here is five times as large as the one in the main camp. The prisoners of both camps are finished off in three main ways: by excessive labour, by torture, and by medical means. The prisoners of the "Paradisal" camp especially have very heavy work to perform, chiefly in building a factory for artificial rubber production near by. The tortures, which are in accordance with the well-known German methods have, the effect of driving a number of prisoners every day to despair. Some of them fling themselves against the wire surrounding the camp. The wire is guarded by guards with machine-guns, and the prisoners are shot down. 

BOJANOW, STUTTHOF, DZIESIATA
Recently 40 Polish priests were transferred from the camp at Dachau to the camp at Bojanow, where they are being employed in a works turning out aeroplane parts. A large number of nuns formerly held in the Bojanow camp for nuns have been transported to forced labour in Germany. 
The concentration camp for Poles which was set up at STUTTHOF, near Danzig, in September, 1939, is steadily losing its prisoners as they die off. 
A new type of concentration camp for Poles has been started recently near Dziesiąta, a suburb of Lublin. Originally it was intended for Bolshevik prisoners of war, some 1,200 of them being taken there at the end of last year. Now, after numerous shootings and as the result of the terrible conditions in the camp, only a couple of hundred are left. For some months past a camp for Polish prisoners has been in being close to the barracks for Soviet prisoners. The Poles have been transferred from the prison in Lublin Castle, which is gradually being emptied, and is destined in future to accommodate only Polish political prisoners. At Dziesiąta 100 Polish prisoners are employed on heavy punitive labour. The barracks are built of thin boards which do not properly meet, and in the wintertime the cold inside was intense. Altogether 250 barracks are to be erected at Dziesiąta.

DZIALDOWO
(An escaped prisoner's report.)

I spent five days in Dzialdowo, a camp set up in former military barracks, though other prisoners had spent as much as several weeks in this camp, which is used as a transitional point. Even during the reception, for which, as in Dachau, prisoners waited for many hours, we were made familiar with the entire system of torture which is applied to prisoners. We were ordered to stand first with our backs to the buildings, then the other way round. An S.S. man walked continually up and down in front of the prisoners, amusing himself with taking aim at the windows (as though at prisoners alleged to be or in fact looking out of the windows) and fired more than once at the windows. The camp commandant, a real brute in features and behaviour, also walked about with a whip in his hand and held conversations with the S.S. man on the following lines: "Why didn't you kill him? You must aim straight," etc. Presumably this was for the benefit of the prisoners. Women also stood with the other prisoners; it was forbidden to move, and there was no food or drink. The courtyard is a large one, provided with a tower with a machine gun set up inside and guards with rifles at the ready. As we stood awaiting the reception, we saw S.S. men driving prisoners out of a building and chasing them at a run across the yard, shouting: "Faster, faster!" and using their whips. After a moment we realised that the prisoners were being driven out to the closets, this procedure taking place three times daily. Not, strictly speaking, to closets, but to a hole beside the closets, in a state which is unmentionable. During this procedure no one was allowed to stop even for a moment, so the prisoners could not perform the function of evacuation normally, but dirtied their clothes, boots, etc. Women were also driven out, in a separate party; in Dzialdowo the women en route for concentration camps are kept in separate halls. 
We also witnessed other things: while we were waiting another party from another part of Poland was received; a young man without a hat was taken aside and punished mercilessly. Later, from our cell windows we saw three Poles executed; on the word of command they were shot and then finished off with revolvers. During our reception, which took place only at dusk, each of us was driven along a corridor in order to be registered, to hand over our things, etc., and many of us were beaten in the course of this procedure. My knowledge of German and close observation of the steps which had successively to be taken enabled me, by taking the head of the queue during the reception of my group, to save myself and my comrades from getting more than the normal amount of maltreatment. After the reception we were given small numbers. which we had to sew on our clothes. It was night when we were driven off to the rooms for sleep. I found myself in a smaller room, for 20 people, and had a couple of my comrades with me ; it transpired that there were also people from Ostrolęka there. The cell was littered with dirt and old straw, it was dark, and only by the light from the window did I discern forms rising from the floor, an older face with a beard, and heard the question: "What news is there? Has America come in yet?" It transpired that in this cell there were a mayor, the assistant head of a county, an architect, a doctor, and so on. 
It must be mentioned that during the reception of prisoners at Dzialdowo all valuables and money are taken away; Polish money is thrown into a case, on the ground that it is valueless: a large sum was collected in the case. Rings were torn from our fingers. I left there a gold watch and a silver pencil, and everything was lost; at Dachau the prisoners are told that everything left at Dzialdowo will be returned to them; this is a deliberate lie. for at Dzialdowo everything was stolen.
After the maltreatment, the worst torment at Dzialdowo was the complete absence of water (apparently the pipes had burst). There were prisoners in Dzialdowo who had been in the camp for several weeks without a drop of water. So there could be no thought of washing. The coffee in the morning (half a billycan for two) was also used for cleaning our teeth. With the coffee we had black bread. At noon there was soup, sometimes with a bone or a scrap of meat. The billycans were never washed or even rinsed out. In the evening there was coffee or soup again. Meals were always immediately after the turnout for the closets (several thousand people being involved). During this turnout a machine-gun was trained on us, while S.S. men with revolvers and sticks accompanied us. The prisoners fetched their own food in tubs. Three times each day (at the time of the turnout for lavatories) we were allowed to bring our buckets out of the cells. The buckets were always too small, always full to overflowing. It was strictly forbidden to look out of the window. When the camp authorities entered a cell all the prisoners had to sit down at once in their sleeping places and remain seated; only the senior was allowed to stand. and he reported the number of prisoners to the authorities. Often the Gestapo men came into the cells for the purposes of blackmail: they would come in and alarm the prisoners with the news that everything in the nature of small articles that the prisoners had been left was to be taken away from them, and thus they forced the prisoners to give up any small things they had managed to retain. There were no examinations in Dzialdowo. Departures for other camps were organized every five days, batches of 1,200 prisoners being made up and marched to the station, the guards carrying rifles with bayonets fixed and turned towards the prisoners. It was announced that for one man attempting to escape 200 would be shot, but if anyone escaped from the trucks three would be shot. No one ever escaped, but several died in the train. 

RAVENSBRUECK CAMP FOR WOMEN

This camp consists of sixteen blocks, so arranged along the street that each pair of blocks, one on either side, forms a small, closed-in yard. Each block holds from 190 to 200 prisoners, sometimes even more, and has a washroom, with twenty basins arranged along two sides, and from six to ten footbaths along the middle. The beds are, as a rule, arranged in three tiers, but when the blocks are crowded straw-filled palliasses are spread on the floor. The pillows are also filled with straw. Baths are taken once a week, under warm showers, often three persons under one shower, but it is possible to wash. There is a medical attendant, but in point of fact no real medical treatment. is provided ; even those most seriously ill must stand for hours in the queue to see the doctor, who makes a very cursory examination and prescribes no treatment at all ; people are regarded as ill only when they drop. Small cupboards are provided in which the prisoners keep their personal articles; one cupboard to two prisoners. The camp clothing consists of grey-blue flannel skirts and overalls; slippers are provided, for use only in the blocks. In summertime and late into the autumn the prisoners have to go barefoot, through streets sprinkled with coarse gravel. In consequence many prisoners get sore and festering heels, but they have to go on walking barefoot. 
On their arrival at the camp the prisoners are lined up before the administration building, where they wait for several hours. They are photographed in three positions, and are usually taken one by one to a room where details of age, date of birth, etc., are taken. They then go on to a second room where they have to strip and hand over all their things except their shoes and small personal articles. Then they have to wait, naked, until there are sufficient to go to the bath-house; after the bath they again wait, naked, to have their heads and all hairy parts of the body examined. Not always because insects have been found, but often out of sheer brutality certain of the women are forced to have their hair cut and are then sent to special quarantine. Then clothing and linen are issued, and all are marched off to the ordinary quarantine building. It must be mentioned that during all the journey to the camp no food whatever is provided. Those who happen to have any food of their own are allowed to eat it, the others go hungry. 
The personal attitude of the guards and wardresses is always arrogant, bullying and threatening. After the bath the prisoners are addressed by a wardress, who tells them that they are Aus der Polakei (come from Poland) and they will be treated as they treated the German soldiers, they know that besides the camp there are other forms of punishment, imprisonment, for instance. The wardresses are completely void of all human feelings. There have been cases reported of Gestapo men having pity on women trying to shift an excessive load, but no cases have ever been known of wardresses doing so, so far as the reporter's observation went. The prisoners are abused as Polnische Schweine (Polish swine) at every step, and the wardresses, who are all German, are continually shouting, bullying, and swearing. Certain of the prisoners are chosen as "seniors" of the halls and blocks, and these are held responsible for seeing that the regulations are observed and, as the women chosen are usually of the very lowest type, they soon learn to imitate the German wardresses in their conduct towards the others. At night the prisoners have to fold up their clothing, and put it in a pile, with their number upward.
The prisoners are up at five or six a.m., according to the time of year; by seven or eight a.m. all must be washed and dressed, and the entire block cleaned and tidied. Everything is done in a hurry, the prisoners are driven, with shouts and insults. The daily diet is as follows: breakfast, coffee (substitute) without sugar, twenty dekagrammes (about three-quarters of an ounce) of bread per day; dinner, vegetable soup, with a minimum quantity of meat or fat in it; supper, also soup. Potatoes in their skins are also a frequent diet. In summer time raw vegetables are given for supper. Jam has been given only very rarely and in very small quantities. Although the regulations allow it, prisoners are not allowed to subscribe to newspapers. From time to time the "seniors" managed to get hold of a newspaper somewhere, but they would only share it with those whom they greatly trusted, for fear of the consequences. Although the prisoners can be sent ten marks monthly from outside, they can spend only one mark, and that on tooth powder or similar items. There is no possibility of buying food. 
Summary punishment, consisting of whacks and punches on the face, was not met with in the block in which the informant was confined. The principle of collective responsibility was applied: punishment consisted of standing for an hour or more in the yard, irrespective of the weather, and not necessarily only once; or deprivation of dinner, or supper, for so many days, together with standing for one to two hours, during the entire meal time; deprivation of dinner for several Sundays in succession; confinement in a dark cell, without bedclothes, usually for 42 days. At a later period the dark cell punishment was added to by beating with metal rods twice a week (even old women of seventy were given this punishment). The punishment consisted of twenty-five strokes with steel rods; sometimes the prisoner has the choice of 25 strokes or 42 days in the dark cell. The prisoner must be conscious during all the time of punishment by birching; a wardress holds the prisoner's pulse, and if she loses consciousness she is brought round before the punishment is continued. One case is known in which a teacher from Silesia, suffering from consumption, had a haemorrhage during the punishment. Another punishment consists of transference to the "punishment barracks," where degenerates are detained. If a Polish woman talks to a. Jewess she is punished with 42 days in the dark cell; another woman received the same punishment for using the ends of threads from her needlework to bind the soles of her slippers. When the camp drainage system became stopped up, the prisoners were punished by collective deprivation of dinner. Prisoners are always being punished. There is a roll-call twice daily, which sometimes means that prisoners have to stand for hours. If anyone is missing, all the prisoners in the block have to wait until she is found, and the roll-call of that block is made again when the others have had theirs. Prisoners are punished for attempting to justify themselves if they have violated the regulations, for coming out to the roll-call in their slippers instead of barefoot, for tying cardboard under their bare feet in winter-time, and so on. 
The first month of imprisonment in the camp is spent in quarantine, and during this period the prisoners are not allowed to do anything except keep their block tidy and bring the cauldrons of food. There are no books in the camp. The prisoners' sole reading is of the scraps of newsprint• in the closets, and they made playing cards from odd scraps of unused paper. 
At the end of the month's quarantine they are transferred to another block, and are then set to work. The work is allocated by the prisoners moving in single file past the camp authorities, who then assign them their respective tasks. For the kitchen, which is hard work starting at four a.m. and carried out in continual haste, accompanied by shouts and abuse, teachers are chiefly chosen. The kitchen workers have to carry the sacks of food from the lorries. Bu t they are not allowed to lift the sacks down; the sacks are flung down into the women's arms. and they have to catch them. This causes great pain in the arms, especially from the elbow downward. The other prisoners work in the camp, and last autumn and winter they were engaged on building houses for German officials, carrying bricks, sand, lime, and stones. This was some distance from the camp. As only an hour was allowed for dinner the prisoners had to do everything almost at the double, wash, eat their soup and hurry back to work. Those who were not engaged on these building activities worked in the camp, knitting gloves, sweaters, etc. Certain prisoners were deliberately left idle, as it had been noticed that they sought to find relief and distraction in work. 
The camp contains Polish women from Silesia, Poznania, Polish Pomerania and Suwalki; there were also Warsaw women, it was said, but these were kept so isolated that it was impossible to see or communicate with them. In addition to Polish women there are German, and also Dutch women, who were very sympathetic to the Poles. The Dutch had certain privileges, they could receive parcels and buy food. The prisoners were aged from sixteen to seventy. They were drawn from very varying walks of life; restaurant owners, shopkeepers, waitresses, office workers, teachers, factory workers, peasants. They all wear a coloured triangle on their shoulder and a number. The triangle is coloured according to the nature of their " crime": red is used for political prisoners.

(5) LETTERS FROM PRISON
I
x 
Prison. 
November 15th, 1941. 
Dear Parents. 
I am coming to the end of my torture, for sentence of death was passed on me the day before yesterday. To-morrow more than a dozen of us are to die. I believe this letter will reach you, and I would like you to know that my last prison was at ... , and the place of my execution will be ... near. . . . I do not know what death awaits me, but to-day I openly admit that it will be as nothing compared with the tortures that have been inflicted on me for the past six months and nineteen days. Forgive me all the trouble you have had on my account, and I know you will forgive me, for it is all for the future Poland. I ask you, dear parents, after the war to divide the six acres of land which are my property as follows: let dad sell two acres and pay the money to (here follows the name of a Polish organization), Marysia is to have three acres, and Franek one acre. But he is to take a handful of earth from . . . from a spot where there are no graves, and scatter it over that acre. Thus I shall feel that my dust is resting in my beloved native earth. It is not hard for me to die, for I have endured everything, and they got nothing out of me which could hurt any others. I am only sorry that I have not been allowed to see a priest before my death. I take farewell of you in this world, but you must live with faith in Poland and God. Say goodbye to Franek for me and tell him that as I take my farewell of him I believe that at the right moment he will avenge my sufferings and death, first. and foremost on those who betrayed me, and that without doubt he will guess who is the traitor. Know that I die with the words on my lips: "Long live Poland." 
Your son. 

II

... I am kept in isolation. I'm feeling pretty rotten. 
I'm dying of hunger. And death from starvation is the worst of all. I would not want to be shot or die of hunger . . . . Down to to-day I have been examined three times: January 20th, January 30th and February 20th. Depositions were taken during the tortures. The first time they stripped me to my shirt and beat me on the head with blunt instruments. I had contusions on the left side of my head. I was beaten all over my body with a rubber truncheon and a hammer. I lost consciousness again and again. There were nine torturers. I was beaten by them in turn for several hours, while they put forward all kinds of evidence .... The next time, January 30th, I was stripped naked and while I was beaten they repeated the questions of the first examination .... This time they beat me with rubber truncheons and a whip ending in small iron weights. . . . 

(6) DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH POPULATION
The first manifestation of the new repressive measures against the Jews took the form of mass shootings in Nowy Sącz, Mielec, Tarnow and Warsaw. A little later the ghetto at Lublin was wiped out. The German press reported that the ghetto had been transferred from Lublin to the village of Majdan Tatarski, but in fact almost the entire population was exterminated. 
For instance, it is generally known that a certain number of Jews from the Lublin ghetto were shut up in goods trucks, which were taken out beyond the town and left on a siding for two weeks, until all inside had perished of starvation. The majority of the Jews of Lublin were carried off over a period of several days to the locality of Sobibor, near Wlodawa, where they were all murdered with gas, machine-guns and even by being bayoneted. .It is an authenticated fact that Lithuanian detachments of szaulis, who have recently been brought into Poland, were used for these mass executions. The fetor of the decomposing bodies in Sobibor is said to be so great that the people of the district, and even cattle, avoid the place. One Pole working in Sobibor wrote a letter pleading to be granted a transfer elsewhere, as he could not remain in such conditions. 
Apart from the fortuitous slaughter of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and the firing at every Jew who left the ghetto (it is confirmed that a twelve-year-old lad and an old beggar, both Jews, found outside the ghetto, were shot) the mass of the Jews is still alive in the ghetto. It is known that Jews have been transported from the Reich to the Warsaw ghetto, and these generally arrived with baggage and other personal property. But the Warsaw Gestapo quickly robbed them of everything. It is also said that 12,000 Jews were transported from the Reich, only to be massacred when they reached Poland. 
In the Warsaw ghetto only a few comparatively affluent persons are still not badly off, and these carry on extensive trading activities on the occupant authorities' account. The supplies of several kinds of raw materials, etc., come into the ghetto in this way. But the mass of the Jews live in incredibly miserable conditions, the mortality is enormous, and it is an everyday phenomenon for dead bodies to be lying in the streets. 
The Germans have a particularly bestial method of choosing victims for execution, or rather, they force the heads of the Jewish community to provide lists of those to be executed. Then two Ruthenian and two Jewish police commanded by a German gendarme go to the houses where the condemned are living. If any of these attempt to escape they are found by the Jewish police. The victims, without their boots and outer clothing, which are left for those remaining behind, are then packed horizontally in a lorry, often in two layers one on top of the other; are covered with a tarpaulin, the Jewish police salute on completion of their part of the task, the Ruthenian police seat themselves on the nearest bodies, and the lorry passes slowly through the town, driven by a driver in German uniform, with the German gendarme sitting beside him. A little later a fresh layer of earth somewhere in the neighbourhood of Lwow covers a new party of people struck out of the lists of the living.
In the provincial towns of South-Eastern Poland Ruthenian organizations organize hunts after the Jews who are still hiding in numbers in the villages. The Ruthenian auxiliary police (Hilfspolizei) afterwards take the prisoners to the place of execution.

(7) PUBLIC EXECUTIONS 
Of recent months the Germans have resorted more and more to the method of carrying out executions in public. 
A number of terrible cases of this nature have recently been reported, chief among which is the mass public murder carried out at ZGIERZ on March 20th. The circumstances of this execution are as follows: 
On March 7th two Gestapo agents were shot by a Pole whom they were arresting. The Pole escaped. In revenge, on March 20th the German police organized a great round-up in Zgierz and the neighbouring villages, driving crowds of Poles to the square in Piątkowska Street in a suburb of the town to watch the execution. The square was then surrounded by party and police forces. Out of the people who had been driven into the square 100 Poles were selected at random ; then one of the local German police officials made the following speech to the condemned and to the silent crowds of Poles: 
”You will have a free spectacle. In 1939 for the murder of one German we shot 10 Poles ; to-day for the death of every German 50 Poles die, and any further incident of this kind will entail the death of 100 Poles for one German. The sentences will not be carried out haphazardly, but will aim at exterminating the Polish intellectual class, which is your leading class." 
Then the assembled crowd was called upon to hand over the man who had shot the Gestapo agents within two minutes. As the period passed without result, preparations were made to carry out the executions. Lorries filled with 100 political prisoners from the prison at Lodz drove up ; and the prisoners, who were tied in groups of 15, were thrown out so violently that they fell one on top of another, wounding and maiming one another. At the same time the 100 people chosen from the crowd were released. 
The execution then took place in front of the crowd, which numbered some 7,000 people. Fifteen of the condemned were ordered to kneel down, and were shot. After a salvo had been fired by the firing party, which numbered 30 men, those still alive were finished off with revolvers. Then the bodies were covered with straw and the next 15 dragged up and ranged before them. The crowd and the condemned people were silent throughout the executions, except that one woman as she faced the firing party cried out: "Poland was, is, and will be!" Ninety-six men and four women were shot, among them being two priests, several lawyers, several doctors, journalists, and other prominent Poles. 
After the execution the police and party forces turned on the assembled crowd and dispersed it with sticks and rifle-butts. 

At CIERLICK GORNY in Cieszyn county, Emil Trepa, a Pole aged 32 years, accused of escaping from a concentration camp and spreading foreign wireless news, was executed publicly before his own home. Polish miners from Karwina and Sucha were brought under police escort to watch the execution, and the local inhabitants were also driven out to watch. The Germans compelled Polish students, colleagues of the condemned man, to set up the gallows. When the prisoner, Trepa, dressed only in his shirt and trousers, was brought from the prison, he was tortured for two hours in public, among the crowd being his paralysed mother, placed specially in front of the house, and his father, brought from prison. Trepa behaved with dignity and restraint, and as he stood below the .gallows shouted: 
" Long live Poland! " 
At RUDA SlASKA (Polish Silesia) a gallows was prepared for Joachim Achtelik, of Ruda, while Kokot, of Bielszowice and Sergeant Nowak, of Godula, who were to be hanged in their own localities, were compelled to stand and watch their fellow Pole's death. Thousands of Poles and Germans were brought to watch the execution. 
Achtelik was a very interesting case. His father regarded himself as a Pole, but his mother brought up the young Achtelik as a German. The lad had artistic gifts, and funds for his education and training as a painter were raised by the Polish community. As he grew up he came to love Poland fervently and regarded himself as a Pole, and has now laid down his life for Poland. He died as he had lived. As he rode to the place of execution he carried his head high, but bowed low to the assembled Polish crowd, many of whom were sobbing. While the sentence was being read in German he took no notice, but called out to the crowd, asking questions about his mother. When the sentence was read in Polish he stood to attention. Before the noose was adjusted around his neck he asked God, in the words of Christ on the cross, for strength for himself, and forgiveness for his executioners. At this point all the crowd knelt down. Then the Germans gave orders for them to stand, enforcing their order with the rattle of carbines from the Hitler Youth. Achtelik died in fifteen minutes. 
The inhabitants of Ruda lit candles in their houses during the execution and said prayers for the dead. Although Achtelik asked for a priest, he was not allowed to see one. Nor were public prayers allowed for his soul, and although at first the body was to have been handed to his mother, the Germans were so afraid of demonstrations that they removed it for secret disposal. 
The other two men also died heroically. Kokot was hanged publicly in BIELSZOWICE, saying not a word, and Sergeant Nowak in Godula. Nowak was allowed to say good-bye to his wife and children. His last words were: 
"I was present at the death of my colleague, who asked forgiveness for his executioners. I cannot ask that. I ask God that my blood may raise up avengers. You, you Hitlerite bandits, remember that you wilt not escape vengeance, even in the tenth generation. Goodbye, wife, good-bye, children. Glory to Christ the King! 
 Long live Poland! "  . 
On March 18th, not far from the camp for political prisoners situated in the suburb of Dziesiata at Lublin, the Gestapo and the Lithuanian camp guard shot 140 prisoners. The other prisoners in the camp were driven out to watch the executions, and afterwards were compelled to bury the bodies. 
At JANOWIEC, Kozienice County, in revenge for the murder of two Volksdeutsehe by bandits, a special punitive expedition of German police shot 210 people. 
At ZWOLEN, near Radom, a riot broke out as the result of German pillaging and stealing; in revenge the Gestapo and German police shot a couple of hundred young peasants, before the eyes of their families and other inhabitants. 
At LOMZA recently, 24 Polish civil servants were shot because a telegraph line was broken during the transmission of German official telegrams. The executions were carried out without any preliminary investigation. 
At BOCHNIA, 18 persons accused of anti-German activities were recently shot at the local cemetery. 
It has only recently been possible to ascertain the place where the 100 Poles of WARSAW were executed and buried in a common grave on March 2nd on the order of Fischer, governor of Warsaw. The condemned were taken in lorries to TREBLINKA, near Sokolow, and there executed, while prisoners in Treblinka were compelled to bury the bodies. 

(8) THE TEN MARTYRS OF PRUSZKOW
On September 17th, 1941, from six o'clock in the morning, detachments of S.S. began to drive out the Polish inhabitants of Pruszkow (near Łask) village into the neighbouring forest. As no one knew what it all meant, there was considerable alarm. Children were also driven out, crying bitterly. The people were told that in a few hours they would be returning home, but the worst was expected. In a glade the people were drawn up in a half-circle, and the youngsters under eighteen and old people over sixty were allowed to go. To increase the feeling of solemnity the Germans forbade those who remained to light cigarettes or' to put their hands in their pockets. Behind the half-circle of Polish people were detachments of S.A., and, at intervals, fully armed police. Meantime, almost all the local German colonists had also gathered. Cars drove up with the local military commander, police commander, officials of the local council, and German middle class people from the county town of Łask. In front of the Poles the Germans built a kind of fence and covered it with straw. When this task was completed a lorry drove into the glade; it was covered with tarpaulin; out of it climbed an escort, who brutally dragged five condemned men. The Landrat (county head) stepped into the middle of the glade, and began to read out the sentence in German, while an interpreter translated it into Polish. The manner of reading the sentence was very unpleasant, and its contents loathsome and merciless: 
"Listen, Poles! On August 28th a German farm was burnt down at Dobroń, several ricks were set on fire in the country of Sieradz, a German estate near Lodz was burned. During the last few days ricks have been burnt in Marzenin. For all these crimes committed by a Polish band ten people of Marzenin will be executed by shooting. The Polish criminals are burning and destroying grain prepared for the German army, which is moving forward in a victorious campaign. By destroying this grain you want to strike it a blow in the back, but remember that that army will turn its anger against you and will punish you without mercy. The Polish bandits, the bands of brigands and incepdiaries will be crushed. Remember, Poles, that if you violate the German laws, if you do not submit to us in everything, the punishing German hand will fall on every one of you." 
When the Landrat had finished reading, the condemned were bound with ropes at the wrists and turned with their backs to the public. Not one of the condemned was recognised as among those who had been arrested at Marzenin for burning down the ricks. They were all strangers, young, and completely unknown in those parts. They went to the place of execution like automata. They looked like men who had been tortured and tormented, one of them could hardly walk at all, and staggered along. When the youngest realised what was about to happen to him he began to cry out: 
"People, rescue me, what am I dying for? I am innocent ! " 
The crowd remained passive, completely petrified. 
The firing squad fired a salvo and the five men fell. 
Then four more were dragged out of the lorry. They were elderly men, inclined to corpulence, looking well and without a trace of having been beaten up. Not one of these men either was recognised by any of the watchers. They were ordered to kneel down on the bodies of the previous five. One of them screamed piercingly in German: "Brothers, you are shedding your own blood. Brothers, I am perishing at your hands!" 
The salvo rang out and put an end to their lives. 
Then several Poles were summoned to remove the bodies. These men saw that several of the dead men had been badly and bestially maltreated again and again, and one body was putrefying and the flesh falling away. A tenth man was lying in the lorry, already half dead; he was finished off with rifle butts, and the other bodies flung in on top of him. It was stated that there were two Germans among the ten men, and that the man who had appealed to brotherhood was named Krause. Polish women began to swoon during the execution, and the members of the S.A. shouted: 
"Polish bandits, Polish savages, hell, this is good for you! Now you will learn that you can't destroy German grain." 
Only one remark came from the crowd; it was made by an old woman: 
"May God take you to himself, as martyrs." 
After the executions the Germans marched away singing their cheerful soldiers' songs. 
 
 

The wave of terror in Poland has assumed such vast dimensions in the spring of this year, after Himmler’s visit, that the Polish Government has again decided to call the attention of the Allied Nations to these crimes unheard of in history. On Saturday, June 6th, the Polish Gabinet debated the form of this protest, and it has been decided that General Sikorski shall give a protest speech on the radio to Poland. This protest has been made known to the world in a diplomatic note which the Polish Government has addressed to all Allied and Neutral Governments. 

General Sikorski said: 
Mass-shootings and torture of tens of thousands in concentration camps; confiscation of property and all means of production; expulsion from businesses; the deportation of over a million and a-half people; the systematic starvation of the Polish nation, and the banning of any assistance to the sick and feeble; the methodic and continuous destruction of Polish culture; the ruthless extermination of everything Polish in lands inhabited by Poles for a thousand years - all these continue without respite.  . 
For some time we did not bring this appalling state of affairs to the notice of the world, but confined ourselves to noting only the facts and their perpetrators, so that the hour of victory should also be the hour of stern retribution. However, when-under the influence of insane fear - the wave of terror assumed such vast dimensions in Poland in the spring of this year, that is to say, after Himmler's visit to our country, the Polish Government again decided to call the attention of the Allied Nations to these crimes, unheard of in history. 
This new wave of terror began in March of this year by mass arrests in Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin and other Polish towns, and by the deportation of the prisoners thus seized, including a large number of women, to concentration camps ill-famed for their cruelty. 
The professors of the University of Lwow, who were imprisoned after the Germans entered the city, have been deported to an unknown destination, and there is no trace of their whereabouts. 
The same happened in Wilno, where the Archbishop Monseigneur Jalbrzykowski, a great patriot, beloved by his flock, was also arrested, and with him the Canons of the Cathedral and the professors and students of the local seminary. 
In the prisons of Poznan a number of prominent local citizens were tortured to death. Additional victims who have been sentenced to death await execution. 
To smash the resisiance of the railwaymen in the Upper Silesian junctions, galIows have been erected in eighteen Silesian towns. Members of the educated classes, railwaymen and workers, are being hanged there, and simultaneously all the school children of Upper Silesia are herded there to watch this cruel spectacle. 
New concentration camps have been set up in which peasants are herded for their refusal to supply the occupying authorities with their quotas of agricultural produce. 
The German authorities, in deathly fear of a Polish rising, sent 1,200 officers of the reserve to concentration camps in the April of this year. Several scores of Polish war  prisoners were charged and tried, and as a rule sentenced to death or lifelong imprisonment. 
In February of this year special lecturers arrived in Poland from Germany, and in confidential German meetings they reviewed the general war situation, and explained the necessity for a policy of increased terrorism in the following words : 
"The war is nearing its end, and the final decision will soon be reached. 
"The Germans who came to the occupied countries must defend themselves on the spot, and must actively co-operate with the occupying armies, as the menace of the enemy is everywhere present. These Germans must rely on their own strength in the first resort, they must be the guardians of the German armies' rear. They must keep constant watch on their own houses and those of their neighbours. The front turns its eyes to them and requires sacrifices from them. The year 1918 cannot be repeated, and they are to see to this. The present war is not a war for territories or frontiers, but a struggle for the very existence of Germany." 
In accordance with this viewpoint, which betrays so significant a state of mind, military organisations have been formed to which all civilian Germans belong. They were given arms, they obtained the right to have their own court of law, and they were promised complete immunity for any acts of brute force which they might commit against the defenceless population. 
Once more, Germany is seizing hostages in mass from amongst well-known social and political workers, and every class of the nation. A month ago, in Warsaw, a hundred of them were shot as a reprisal for the shooting of one German, and in the Lublin district 400 were executed for the killing of one German henchman.
The Jewish population in Poland is doomed to die out in accordance with the slogan, "All the Jews should have their throats cut, no matter what the outcome of the war may be." Real massacres of tens of. thousands of Jews in Lublin, Wilno, Lwow, Stanislawow, Rzeszow and Miechow have been carried out this year. People are being starved to death in the ghettoes. Mass executions are held; even those suffering from typhus are shot. 
Finally, the German Reich, which is threatened by the gravest shortage of man-power, has committed the greatest possible outrage. In Western Poland, which was incorporated in the Reich against international law, the German authorities are forcibly enrolling Poles in their army. The number of Poles thus enrolled already amounts to 70,000 in Pomerania and to 100,000 in Silesia. In the so-called General Gouvernement the Poles are forced to serve in the auxiliary formations of the German army. Both these measures are not only a clear violation of the Hague Convention of 1907, and contrary to elementary international usage, they are simply criminal. The citizens of an occupied country are being compelled by brute force to spill their blood in the cause of the hated invader. They are being forced to fight against their brothers. The determined resistance to, and the mass desertions from, this pressgang conscription, unheard of in the 20th century, have already led to numerous death sentences in the Home Country. 
The Polish Government is bringing all these facts to the cognisance of the Allied Governments, and to the public opinion of the world. The German terror is also raging in other countries of Europe to-day. The perpetrators of these crimes must be brought to account, and this principle ought to become the guiding policy of the Allies. Only the announcement of retribution and the application of reprisals, wherever possible, can stop the rising tide of madness of the German assassins, and save hundreds of thousands of innocent victims from certain death. 
While I am paying my deepest homage to the memory of the murdered and tortured victims, I wish to assure my country on behalf of the Polish Government that the latter is fully aware of all these crimes, and will not omit any one of them from the final reckoning. 
Be certain of victory – endure - do not allow yourselves to be deflected by outbursts of despair - do not let yourselves be influenced by false suggestions. Maintain your discipline and determination as heretofore, those qualities which have evoked admiration and respect for the Polish nation throughout the world.

Germany has always worshipped brute force, and has stained her path with rivers of blood. The Germans will certainly not overturn the Nazi regime of their own free will, as this regime is ideally suited to their national character and given full play to their innate characteristics. Therefore, the year 1918 will not be repeated in this war. But Germany, who, as Goering has said, has been raised high by the genius of her Fuehrer, will fall into a bottomless abyss when the power of the German army and of the Nazi party have been broken. Germany cannot escape her defeat. This is clearly shown by the events of all war fronts, and by the gigantic raids of the Allied Air Force, which bring the German nation only a foretaste of the just and well-merited retribution she will undergo. 

On July 7th, 1942, at a special session dealing with the latest reports of German atrocities in Poland the Polish National Council unanimously adopted the following resolution:- 
The Polish National Council, after hearing the report by the Polish Minister for Home Affairs on the recent intensification of the crimes committed by the German occupants in Poland: 
1. Charges their Executive Committee to add to the proclamation of the National Council on June 10th to the Parliaments of all free nations the newly-revealed facts of the systematic destruction of the vital strength of the Polish Nation and the planned slaughter of practically the whole Jewish population; 
2. Supports the Government in all the steps it may take to strengthen more than at present the interest of the Allied Governments and Nations in the sufferings, without any exception, of the entire population of the Polish Republic, and in assuring the necessary punishment for these crimes; 
3. Appeals to the Government that, in co-operation with the Governments of States fighting in the common cause, particularly Great Britain and the U.S.A., it should find all possibilities and means of paralising now, by adequate retaliation while the war is still on, the terror being carried out by the Germans;
4. Expresses to the Polish people the deepest homage for their steadfast stand, in spite of the terrible persecutions, in the fight with the invader, and for their solidarity through mutual help, which surpasses all differences of religion and nationality, in holding out in the present immeasurable misfortune; 
5. Assures the people at home that the Polish Government, together with the High Command of the Polish Armies and the National Council, is striving for the most effective co-operation with the leaders of the war operations of the Allied States in their task and efforts for the speedy liberation of Poland from the German army of occupation; 
6. Sends to the people at home words of faith in the undoubted victory of the Allied States who, in freeing Poland, will bring plentiful compensation to the whole population for all the sufferings they are bearing at present. 
 
 

On July 9th a press conference was held in the British Ministry of Information) under the chairmanship of Mr. Brendan Bracken, the British Minister of Information, assisted by Mr. J. Brebner, the Director of the News Division. Mr. Mikolajczyk, the Polish Minister for Home Affairs, Prof. Stronski, the Polish Minister of Information, and Father Kaczynski, Mr. Kulerski, Dr. I. Schwarzbart and Mr. S. Zygielbojm, members of the Polish National Council, also took part. Below we give an extensive summary of the statements and reports presented to this conference. 

I realise that the facts you have in the report of our Minister of the Interior, Mr. Mikolajczyk, are so horrifying that one may ask if human beings can be degraded to 
such a brutality. Therefore, I want, first of all, to make this point clear: I was in Warsaw during the first six months of the German occupation. I wore the yellow badge all Jews are forced to wear. I myself lived in the ghetto when it started, when the Germans expelled tens of thousands of Jews, beaten and robbed of all their possessions, from their homes in Warsaw. I saw with my own eyes hundreds of acts of cruelty and murders that made one's blood curdle, and I have more than once seen the victims or these cruelties. 
Now reading the names of towns in which massacres are going on I can see not only the faces of hundreds of friends brutally murdered, but I can see also the figures and the faces of the Nazi henchmen, the Gestapo and the S.S. men doing their bloody job with a cynical smile. Therefore, I know that every word of the report is true. I was a member of the Jewish Community Council in Warsaw under the Gestapo control, and had to deal with hundreds of cruel orders of the Gestapo, such as to deliver to them ten thousand Jews for forced labour and numbers of Jews to be shot for imaginary individual crimes, as the Germans applied the principle of collective responsibility. More than once my friends and I had to defend ourselves against the mean German demands to deliver to them the authors of secret patriotic pamphlets under the threat of shooting hundreds of hostages. I also had to take care of thousands of Jewish victims deported from the parts of Poland incorporated in the Reich as well as of the families of Jews brutally murdered by the Germans. 
It is a nightmare which is still going on in Poland and we cannot yet give the exact number of the Jews who have been murdered. In the reports we have received from Poland, written at different times, the total amounts to many hundreds of thousands. 
Assuming that the occupant Germans are also using starvation as a means for exterminating the Jews of Poland we have to accept as probable the figure of 700,000 dead mentioned in one report from Poland. In the Warsaw ghetto alone 50,000 people died of starvation in 1941, and the death rate is now 6,000 a month. 
In any case, there is no doubt that in Poland a monstrous plan of extermination. of all the Jews is being ruthlessly executed. 
The mass slaughter of Jews is only a part of a general plan to destroy the whole Polish nation in order to make living space for the Germans. 

I can assure you that what you have learned from our information is the truth, but it is only part of the truth, because sending information in to Poland about what happens in the world, and getting information about what happens in Poland is not a simple and easy task. But, as you know, we Poles, for 150 years, have been not only the most studious scholars, but, łet me say, masters of conspiracy. When we are able one day, after this war, to write the full story of what was the information in Poland and from Poland, it will be a most interesting chapter of journalism. I trust you will remember that, whatever you can say and write about the German horrors in Poland will never be exaggerated. EVEN THE TERRIBLE FIGURE OF 700,000 JEWS, IF YOU CALCULATE NOT ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN DIRECTLY EXECUTED, BUT THOSE WHO HAVE LOST TREIR L1VES BY ANY K1ND OF PERSECUTION, S1NCE THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR, 1S CORRECT. This is only a part of the tragic truth about persecution of the whole Polish nation. Believe me, your appeal to world opinion is most necessary.

Innocent blood cries to heaven for vengeance; the Lord will reply in his own good time. We know, mark this, we know on the unimpeachable testimony of eyewitnesses, aye! on the evidence of authentic copies of Nazi documents, which ordered or recorded the brutalities that have doomed the millions of heroic Polish Christians and Catholics to extermination - we know, I say, what the Nazi New Order means for Poland. 
I have before me at this moment documents which prove beyond question the utter bestiality of German methods in the conquered but unvanquished land of Poland. Everything religious, whether Jewish, Catholic or Orthodox, is the target of the pagan hatred of the Nazi agents in Poland. Let me say a word to the Catholics of Germany. You have heard what Pius XI told you about the persecution of religion in your own once noble country (Mit brennender Sorge). Rear what Pius XII had to say about the same persecution by the same savage despots; he is declared to have been convinced of the trutth of the reports he has received - all too completely confirmed - on the martyrs' fate of Poland. The ferocity of the Nazi persecution is directed not only against the Polish Clergy or Polish religious life, but against religion in general. The proud materialism of race, as Cardinal Hlond writes, the materialism of race aims at blotting out the most essential spiritual elements of our civilization. Yes, blotting out every moral value in blood and ruin. Listen, Catholics of Germany, to this appeal from the Primate of Poland: "The Poles ask not to be forgotten; they ask the conscience of the people of the world not to sacrifice them to Nazi barbarism." 
I join with the Cardinal Primate of Poland and beg and pray that all Christian people everywhere, and you my fellow Christians of Germany particularly, may listen to the voice of reason and humanity and resist these black deeds of shame. To condone them, to excuse them, to pass them over in silence, would make a futile mockery of the prayer: "Deliver from blood guiltiness, O Lord." 

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Warsaw's 'President' (mayor), the much-loved Stefan Starzyński, finally agreed to surrender on 27 September. Incredibly, the small Polish garrison on the Hel peninsula near Danzig, now hundreds of miles behind the lines, held out until 2 October, and the last shots of the campaign were fired at Kock, in central Poland, on 5 October.

For all their faults and errors in the past, the men who had governed Poland never contemplated an armistice. Poland had not ceased to exist and would not cease to fight simply because its armies had been defeated and its territory was occupied by the enemy. The problem was how to carry on the struggle; Romania, under extreme pressure from both Germany and the Soviet Union, had interned the Polish military and political leadership. However, the Romanians did not detain General Władysław Sikorski. As an old critic of the Sanacja regime, he had not held command in the September campaign and was allowed to leave Romania for  France, where the Polish ambassador in Paris - on his own authority - charged him with raising a new Polish army out of refugees and Poles living in France. From Romania, President Mościcki managed to send to Paris a message announcing his resignation. The group of Polish leaders who had already reached France accepted it, but rejected his ideas for a successor. They chose instead Władysław Raczkiewicz, a respected provincial governor who had not been tainted by too close an association with the Sanacja. Under the guise of a 'correct' transfer of power, a discreet revolution was now overthrowing the Sanacja. President Raczkiewicz took the oath in the Paris embassy on 30 September, and at once appointed Sikorski as prime minister. Kazimierz Sosnkowski reached France a few days later, sank old animosities and joined the new government. Finally, the absent Śmigły-Rydz was induced to resign in November, and Sikorski became commander-in-chief as well as head of the government in exile. 
France and Britain at once recognised the new administration, followed by the still-neutral United States. In some ways, this had all happened before. After the 1830 Rising, the Great Emigration had transferred Poland' s cultural and political capital to Paris. In the 1914-18 war, Roman Dmowski's National Committee had become a recognised government in waiting, also in Paris. Now again, with a deftness and confidence that only a nation accustomed to disaster and occupation could achieve, Poland had ensured its international survival.
Physical survival, for the Polish people at home, seemed less certain. The war had already cost the lives of 60,000 members of the armed forces and of many more civilians. Nearly half a million prisoners were in German hands and another 200,000 in Soviet camps. Much of Warsaw had been ruined, ani bombing had scorched the heart out of towns and villages along the track of the armies. And yet, as the fighting ended, the sufferings of Poland in the Second World War had scarcely begun.
In the Soviet-occupied zone, the policy of the conquerors was at first erratic. Many Poles, then and now, see the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the 'stab in the back' of 17 September as the realisation of a coldly planned design, a natural expression of Russia's attitude to the existence of an independent Poland ever since the Russian state had been bom. But in 1939 Stalin was probably less concerned with Poland itself than with Germany. Through the pact with Hitler, he had bought time and space. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland at least kept the Germans 600 miles frorn Moscow; if Stalin had left all Poland to Hitler, the Nazi tanks would be only 400 miles from the Kremlin.
The new 'demarcation line' - which Stalin intended to make a permanent frontier - pushed 'the imperialist West' several hundred miles further away. This corrected Lenin's frontier compromise with Pilsudski at the Treaty of Riga eighteen years before, which the Soviet Union had always intended to revise when it was strong enough. No doubt Stalin in 1939 shared traditional Russian suspicion of Poland as a country dedicated to the break-up of Russian empires whether Tsarist or Soviet. But a stronger motive was his concern to end the partition of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian populations between the USSR and a foreign state. He wanted those unlucky peoples all to himself.
The Soviet authorities carried out an immediate round of arrests and deportations, principally of Polish local leaders.Then there was a pause while the institutions of 'Sovietisation' were put in place. Rigged elections in November produced dummy assemblies of Ukrainians and Byelorussians who voted unanimously for their incorporation into the Soviet Union. There was some land reform, some nationalisation. Poles were everywhere removed from official posts.
By Soviet standards-, this initial phase was deliberately mild. Stalin did not occupy all the Polish territory offered to him by the Nazi-Soviet Paces secret protocol, but accepted instead 'influence' over, Lithuania. Soviet troops entered Polish Lithuania and took Wilno on 18 September, but then restored the city and its region to the Lithuanian state. For a few months more, the Poles in Wilno were able to organise themselves and live in relative freedom. In Byelorussia and the Ukraine, religious education in schools was forbidden and monasteries commandeered, but religion itself - Uniate or Catholic - was not suppressed. However, the Soviet Union made it elear that the events of September implied not only the end of Polish rule in western Byelorussia and Ukraine but the final, irreversible abolition of Polish independence. Molotov announced that 'nothing is left of Poland, that hideous offspring of the Versailles Treaty'. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed a further 'Friendship and Frontier Agreement', whose secret clauses committed each power to suppress Polish agitation against the other, and to inform one another about 'suitable measures' for dealing with the Poles. .
In late November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. Stalin intended a rapid campaign to push the Finnish frontier back from the approaches to Leningrad, but the 'Winter War' developed into a long, bloody struggle which disgusted the world and brought Britain and France to the verge of military intervention on the Finnish side. These setbacks may have prompted the Soviet Union to 'secure' its new western frontier.
In February 1940, there began the first of a series of huge and brutal deportations of Poles. Families in the occupied areas were driven from their homes and packed into unheated cattle-trucks, which headed slowly for Siberia and the Soviet far east while their occupants stifled, starved or froze to death. One survivor, Aleksandra Rymaszewska, recalls: 'We came to the long line of trains and the hordes and hordes of people being pushed into cattle trucks . . . there was nothing, just bunks from one wall to the other, a small barred window, the hole in the floor that was supposed to be our toilet. After a few days we were put in different trains which we re on wider tracks, and these tracks, we knew, were leading into the depths of Russia.'
The deportations lasted until July 1940, and were followed by another round-up in June 1941. Between one and a half and two million Poles were herded into the trains, to be employed as slaves or forced labourers in mines and lumber camps near the Arctic Cirele, or to be dumped in the steppes of Kazakhstan. No political distinctions were made, and Polish Communists from the abolished KPP (Communist Party of Poland) worked and perished alongside Catholic priests and university professors, farmers and railwaymen. Tens of thousands of Poles who had held official posts were 'tried' and consigned to long sentences in prisons or camps. No reliable figures exist on their fate, but it is estimated that anything between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead by the time of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. The 200,000 captured soldiers remained in Soviet custody, while.the officers we re segregated into separate camps. Some 10,000 of these Polish officers, held in camps in the Smolensk region, remained in intermittent touch with their families until about March 1940. Then all contact with them suddenly ceased.
After July 1940, another change came over Soviet policy towards the Poles under Soviet occupation. The three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were invaded in June and in July annexed to the Soviet Union. But in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the deportations were suspended, and cautious contact was made with some of the remaining Polish personalities in Lwów. The reason for this, fairly certainly, was Soviet alarm at the scale and ease of the Nazi victory over France and Britain in the west, beginning with the German offensive in May and end ing with the surrender of France and the evacuation of the defeated British in  June. Facing the possibility that Hitler would now tum his aggression eastward, the Soviet Union wavered between the existing policy of treating the Poles under Soviet control as a menace to security in a frontier region, and the need for allies where they could be found. A group of Polish officers, including Colonel Zygmunt Berling, was invited to discuss the possibility of raising a Polish division for the Red Army. Meanwhile Wanda Wasilewska, a Polish Communist who had survived in Lwów on her wits and through her connections with Stalin and his inner circle, was allowed to publish a magazine and to press for the restoration of a Polish Communist Party.
The treatment of the Poles by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 is still an unfamiliar story to foreigners. News of what was going on came only scantily to the West at the time, and later in the war, when Britain and the United States became the allies of the USSR, discussion of the episode was judged tactless and was discouraged. The true story emerged only in fragments during the post-war years, and was understandably overshadowed by the more spectacular and better-publicised savageries of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rest of Europe. Yet in its brutality and the sheer scale of its cold-blooded attempt to obliterate the Polish nation physically and culturally, this 21-month Soviet occupation far outdid all, the crimes committed against Poland during the century-and-a-quarter of Russian occupation under the Tsars.
The recent memory of Soviet behaviour in Poland was the greatest single obstacle facing the new Communist authorities in Poland after the war. They had to conciliate a people for whom a Soviet-backed government seemed to threaten not only the abolition of private property and farms, and the suppression of the Catholic faith, but transportation to almost certain death in Siberian labour camps, probably to be followed by yet another cancellation of Polish independence.
The Germans controlled the heartland of Poland, with a population of nearly twenty-two million. They made no secret of their intentions. Hitler who took the salute at a victory parade in Warsaw on 5 October 1939, spoke on the 'artificial' and 'unviable' Polish state which was the 'foster-child of Western democracy and deserved its fate: 'to be swept off the face of the earth'. A few days later, the whole of northern and western Poland, including Poznań, Danzig and its hinterland, and Polish Silesia, was annexed to the Reich. The rest of the German-controlIed area became the so-called 'General Government': in reserve under martial law to be exploited for its resources and labour without consideration for the consequences. Its 'capital' was at Kraków, Warsaw being designated for eventual destruction and replacement by a small German colony. Hans Frank, a senior Nazi jurist with a princely lifestyle, became Governor-General and established his court at Kraków in the ancient Wawel Palace.
The Germans lost no time in showing the Poles what their occupation would mean. Behind the advancing front-line troops came the Einsatzgruppen, special execution squads drawn from the SS and the police, whose task was not only to crush resistance and opposition in the civilian population but to slaughter whole categories - the political and intellectual elite, the mentally sick, the leaders of Polish communities - as potential sources of racial or political infection.
Sometimes they shot, sometimes they merely arrested and terrorised. The first great atrocity of the occupation ceńtred on the town of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg in German), where - the facts are still not established - a group of fanatical German civilians appear to have opened fire on retreating Polish troops during the September Campaign, leading to an outbreak of violence against Germans in which many lost their lives. An official German report in November 1939 wrote of some 5 400 German residents in Poland killed or missing in this and similar incidents elsewhere. In February 1940, the German press was instructed to revise this figure to 58,000. The Einsatzgruppen had already undertaken a reprisal for the Bromberg Massacre and had shot nearly 20,000 Poles.
In the regions annexed to the Reich, the Nazi intention was to carry through once and for all the colonisation policy which Prussian and German governments had failed to complete. The Polish inhabitants, numbering between eight and nine million, were to be removed and replaced by Germans. While this was being organised, these regions were subjected to a 'Germanisation' process: the Polish language were forbidden in public, special limited shopping hours were imposed on Poles, and all education over primary level and cultural activity were forbidden. In September 1940, a decree confiscated all Polish property in land or commerce. The Catholic Church was closely persecuted, and in October 1941 several hundred priests were arrested and sent to concentration camps, while only a handful of churches were permitted to remain open.
The colonisation programme began in December 1939 with a round-up of  90 000 Poles and Jews, mostly from the 'possessing classes', who were transported to the General Government - the Jews being sent to the newly established ghettos. The next category to suffer were the small farmers, often given less than an hour to leave their villages while SS men tore down the crucifixes and holy pictures from their walls. Most of them also went eastward to the General Government, though some were conscripted as forced labour for war industry in Germany. Meanwhile, as a part of the Nazi-Soviet understanding, the ethnic German groups living in the newly acquired territories of the USSR - the Baltic states, Volhynia, Bessarabia - were expelled 'home to the Reich' and resettled on the abandoned Polish farms.
For all its root-and-branch vigour, this colonisation project was not much more successful, even in the short-term, than its predecessors. Deportations were broken on in the spring of 1941 and never resumed. About half a million Poles had been removed, not much more than six per cent of the total in the annexed territories, while som e 350,000 Volksdeutschen from the east arrived to replace them. At the end of the war, alI were driven out of Poland for ever.
What was new about this episode of German repression was its almost unimaginable savagery and cruelty - an entirely new quality of method. Between 1939 and 1944, the Nazis murdered something like 330,000 Poles in these annexed regions alone. But the policies themselves were familiar to any Pole who had heard his father describe the Bismarck period: colonisation, expulsion, the simultaneous attack on the language and the Church. EqualIy familiar was the German assumption that the ruling class in Poland and above all the intelligentsia, were incurable patriots, to be dealt with only by force. The Prussians had been saying this back in the 1880s. The Nazis found their own solution to the problem of the Polish intellectuals: systematic extermination.
In the General Government, with a population of over twelve million, a few weeks of weird calm folIowed the arrival of the Germans; theatres reopened and the universities prepared for the new academic year. But things changed instantly when Hans Frank took office. Stefan Starzyński, President of Warsaw, was arrested; the professors of alI higher education in Kraków were  invited to a meeting, seized and sent to concentration camps where many of them were shot. Similar purges took place in all the cities, as the massacre of the intellectual class began. During the Nazi occupation, Poland lost half its doctors and more than half its lawyers, forty per cent of its university professors, half its engineers and eighteen per cent of its priests. Frank told a German police conference in Kraków: 'The Fuehrer has told me that the leading groups in Polish society already in our hands are to be liquidated, and whoever appears to replace them is to be detained and after an appropriate interval exterminated . . . Gentlemen, we are not murderers. But as National Socialist these times lay upon us all the duty to ensure that no further resistance emerges from the Polish people.'
The policy for the General Government was that this region, too, would eventually be Germanised. AlI education above primary and technical level was abolished; all museums and libraries were closed; cultural and artistic activities were forbidden; paintings and sculptures were removed to the Reich, and monuments to great figures in Polish history were demolished. An universal, indiscriminate reign of terror descended on the Polish population, while the Jews, many thousands of whom had already been tormented in public and shot out of hand, were herded into walled-off ghetto quarters in the principal towns. Factories and offices were placed under German direction, to serve the war effort, and wages were frozen. At the same time, a rapid inflation began, reducing the purchasing power of ordinary Poles to a fraction of its pre-war level. The food rationing system that was eventually introduced allowed 2,613 calories a day to a German, but a mere 669 to a Pole. This was a frankly genocidal policy. Like the Jews, but on a slower time scale, the Poles had been designated as an inferior, vermin race to be eliminated from physical existence.
Especially after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the General Government was used as a reservoir of forced labour for the war industries and to replace German manpower called up for military service from the farms. By 1942, about a million Poles had been deported to work in Germany. Growing resistance to the mass round-ups, which required increasing numbers of police and troops and drove thousands of young men and women to seek refuge with the partisan bands in the forests, persuaded Hans Frank to question the whole policy. But he was overruled by the SS, now becoming an autonomous empire within the Reich which not only ran the concentration camps but possessed its own army - the Waffen-SS - and its own industrial economy. Village after village was burned and their inhabitants murdered for real or imagined resistance; as the historian Norman Davies has pointed out, the famous tragedy at Lidice in Czechoslovakia, where a village was destroyed and its inhabitants massacred, was repeated in some three hundred Polish villages during the Nazi occupation.
In November 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuehrer of the SS, ordered that the colonisation policy should now be applied to the General Government. In the district of Zamość, near Lublin, some 40,000 Poles were driven from their villages, to be replaced by German settlers from Bessarabia. Their children were torn from them. A farmer' s daughter who was there, Wacława Kędzierska, saw how 'children up to the age of fourteen, even those as young as six weeks, were taken away. When their mothers didn't want to hand them over, the Germans hit the parents. And then they started to hit the children . . . a lot of the children we re thrown into the mud, even into the cesspit. They killed them. They took them by their legs and hit them against the corner of the barrack.'
The children were screened for Aryan characteristics. Those suitable for germanisation were held in SS orphanages where many died of hunger or disease, and most were never seen again. The parents were either sent to concentration camps or deported for labour to the Reich.
The Zamość action was foIlowed in early 1943 by a new series of manhunts in Warsaw and the main cities of the General Government. Streets were blocked, cinemas, streetcars or even churches surrounded, and all those caught within the cordon transported. This time their destination was the concentration camps. The SS had begun to exploit the unpaid labour of the camps, numbering many hundreds of thousands, by inviting German industry to settle in 'enterprise zones' around the camp peripheries. This was proving a great success, from the SS point of view, but the turn-over of labour was inconveniently rapid (the average life expectancy at Auschwitz, for those not at once sent to the gas chambers, was about twelve weeks) and needed constant replenishment.
On this occasion, one of the supreme officers of the SS, 'Gestapo' Muller, laid down a target of 35,000 prisoners for the round-ups in the Polish cities, but insisted that they must be fit for work, 'as otherwise and contrary to intentions the concentration camps will be overstrained'. In practice, chaos developed as German security forces grabbed everyone, fit or unfit, without papers or even with a German work permit, male or female, in order to filI Muller's quota. Those unfit for slave labour we re picked out in the camps themselves. 'Overstrain' usually came to mean overloading the crematoria with their corpses.
For the Poles, life in the cities of the General Government slowly developed its own rules and expectations. Physical survival was the issue. There was no safety from the haphazard nature of Nazi terror. At any moment, one might be seized for a labour round-up, arrested as a hostage, or shot in the countless street executions - the inhabitants ordered to stay away from the windows; the victims, their mouths often stuffed with plaster-of-paris to stifle their screams, hustled up against the wall and machine-gunned to death.
These places instantly became shrines. General Bór-Komorowski, later the commander of the Warsaw Rising, describes in his memoirs how his wife Renia, 'with her baby in the pram, passed Senatorska Street where an execution had just taken place. The corpses had already been taken away, but blood was splashed all over the pavement and bits of brains were sticking to the walls. People were kneeling all around, and in a few seconds the whole place was covered with red and white flowers and burning candles. Flowers were put in every bullet-hole in the wall. My sister stopped to pray. German police appeared and she made off. When she looked back, they were shouting and beating people up - all in vain, for after a moment the crowd was back again and new flowers and new candles had appeared.
To stay alive required not only luck but law-breaking, and most of the population was involved in black-marketeering, rackets in stolen German supplies, theft from German-run factories and offices, bribery and the forgery of every kind of document. The peasants were besieged by town dwellers seeking food in exchange for jewellery, gold or furniture. Władysław Baran, a small farmer, recalls: 'People started to come to me from Warsaw, on bicycles. They could carry fifty kilos on a cycle; they weren't well dressed, their cycles were falling apart, and they pushed them on foot from Warsaw. Each took a few kilo s of wholemeal flour or potatoes; they were a picture of poverty . . .'
The only Germans in close contact with the city Poles were the German carpet-baggers and fortune-hunters who flocked to the General Government. They sold precious supplies and identity papers, but they were always dangerous and unreliable. An intense solidarity developed among Poles, who devised elaborate alarm systems and code-words to warn each other of nearby Germans or of a lapanka (round-up) in the next street. The exception was the odious class of Jew-hunters, who made a living by spotting and blackmailing Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and were trying to pass themselves on as gentiles. The Resistance imposed a death penalty for this crime, but the trade thrived throughout the occupation.
The Poles remain proud that - alone in Nazi-occupied Europe - they produced no 'Quislings', no regime to coliaborate with the Germans. However, this was partly the result of German policy, oriented towards the genocide of the Polish nation rather than towards establishing any client state.
(...)
Lack of food and medicines, and the shortage of clothes and especially shoes (many families wore wooden clogs in winter and went barefoot in summer), led to a collapse of public health; deaths from tuberculosis, for example, rose almost fourfold in Warsaw between 1939 and 1941. Self-help committees, tolerated by the Germans but backed by the resistance, ran soup kitchens and relief centres. Cultural life survived as best it could. The Germans took over all cinemas - the resistance mounted a rather unsuccessful movie boycott - but underground theatres flourished in many towns. One of these, the Rhapsodic Theatre in Kraków, featured a young actor named Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II.
(...)
In the midst of these events, the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was taking place on Polish soil. The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem', the systematic annihilation of the Jews of Europe, took place partly in the Baltic states and Nazi-dominated Russia, where it was carried out by the firing-squads of the Einsatzgruppen. But the central horror, the extermination of millions of human beings by industrial methods, was carried out in the gas chambers of concentration camps built on the territory of the General Government.
Intermittent massacres of Jews had markedp the first months of Nazi occupation. There followed a series of decrees which stripped Jews of all human and economic rights, reduced their rations to starvation level and - in the course of 1940 - herded them into walled-off ghettos within the larger cities and towns. The penalty for leaving the ghettos or for sheltering Jews was death. The Jewish Councils (judenrate), set up by the Germans, struggled to protect the ghetto populations by a series of ever-retreating compromises with the German authorities, but their task was hopeless. By 1941, over 100,000 Polish Jews had died or been murdered. Nightmarish conditions existed in typhus-ridden ghettos like that of Warsaw, where skeletal children prowled the streets and the corpses of those who had died of hunger or disease lay about the pavements.
The exact 'when' - and even the 'why' - of Hitler's secret order to carry out the methodical murder of European Jewry is not known. The order seems to have been given in late 1941, and was only confirmed by the infamous Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942.
For all the screaming rhetoric of 'extermination' and 'wiping-out', Nazi policy towards the Jews was impromptu and erratic. The first idea, forced emigration, was frustrated by the 'closed-door' attitude of the West, especially of Britain in Palestine, and then by the outbreak of war. The next plan seems to have been the deportation of Europe's Jews to Asian territories conquered from the Soviet Union, where they would be separated by sex to prevent breeding and then worked to death. The massacres by the Einsatzgruppen, who killed over a million Jews behind the advancing German armies, were seen as a mere clearing of the ground for what was to follow.
It has been argued that the halting of the German armies before Moscow in December 1941 determined the final form that the 'Solution' took. There was now no prospect of a rapid conquest of vast and empty Soviet territories; the war in the east would be long and hardo Meanwhile, the conditions in the ghettos and camps where Polish and other European Jews were being dumped were growing so appalling that the orderly German mind was alarmed. The time, space and resources for a 'working to death' policy were no longer available. An end had to be put to the 'Jewish problem', quickly and on the spot. 
The first experiments in gassing were carried out at Chełmno in 1941. Early in the following year, extermination camps with gas chambers were constructed at Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, in the General Government, and in the winter of 1942-3 the concentration camp at Auschwitz, in Silesia, was extended to take a battery of immense gas chambers and crematoria which could - and did - slaughter and consume up to 15,000 people within twenty-four hours. Not only the Jews but the gypsy nation was condemned to genocide, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of others from almost every country in Europe. Auschwitz alone accounted for nearly 3 million dead. About 2.8 million Polish Jews perished in the extermination camps, with another million Jews brought to the gas chambers by train from all over the continent. Over 5 million Jews of all nationalities died in occupied Poland, in the camps or outside them.

In July 1942, the Germans began to deport the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Against the prevailing mood of hopeless fatalism, a Jewish Fighting Organisation was set up, and managed to make contact with the Home Army outside. Bunkers and petrol bombs were prepared, and when the SS entered the almost empty ghetto for the final round-up on 19 April 1943, the Jewish resistance went into battle. It was a fight which the ghetto warriors knew they must lose; the odds were crushingly against them, and the Home Army and the Communist underground were able to do little to help. But this was a tight not for victory but for honour, and for the future of the Jewish people. The handful of men and women held out against tanks and artillery for almost a month, while the smoke of burning buildings and the stink of burning bodies drifted across Warsaw. Before he committed suicide with his comrades, Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Ghetto Rising, said: 'I have seen Jewish self-defence in all its glory.' Out of 3.35 million Polish Jews, about 340,000 were alive by the end of the war, most of them refugees in the Soviet Union. 
(...)
 

In July 1943, the hinge of the war began to turn. At the biggest tank battle in history, Hitler's offensive near Kursk was brought to a standstill and then driven back. The Red Army began to move westward, in a slow advance which was to end in Berlin almost two years later. In January 1944, the first Soviet troops crossed the line which had been the old Polish frontier in 1939.
Much had happened to the Poles, both to the London government and its resistance within the country. In April 1943, after the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyń forest, near Smolensk, the Polish government had accused the Soviet Union of their murder, and Stalin had broken off relations with Sikorski. A month later, he had begun to recruit a Polish army under Soviet command. In July, Sikorski had been killed in an air crash at Gibraltar. After his death, his combined powers were divided between two of his senior colleagues in London: Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Peasant Party leader, who became prime minister, and General Sosnkowski, who took command of Poland' s armed forces.
In Poland, Rowecki had been arrested and was succeeded as AK commander by Bór-Komorowski, a cavalry officer of conservative outlook. Meanwhile, the Communists and their allies were preparing for the arrival of the Red Army, and setting up what looked like the foundations for a pro-Soviet government.
The 'London' resistance clung on to the hope - or illusion - that Poland might be liberated from the west, or at least by Anglo-American and Polish forces arriving at the same time as the Red Army. In late 1943, however, the Warsaw leadership faced the growing possibility that this would not happen. If Poland were to be occupied by the Soviet Union alone, what should the resistance do to maintain and assert Poland' s independence, and to prevent the reduction of Poland to a Soviet protectorate?
Instructions arrived from London that the whole structure - the AK, the Government Delegate and all the rest - should stay concealed as the Soviet armies rolled over Poland and await further orders. Bór-Komorowski and his colleagues found this absurd and dishonourable. Instead, they planned an active policy. As the Soviet forces drew near, one AK unit after another would launch an insurrection against the disintegrating Germans, liberate its region, and meet the Red Army as 'host' in a manifestly free Polish state whose government would soon return from London.
This was 'Operation Tempest'. !ts weaknesses sprang from the ignorance of the underground leaders about the balance of power and priorities in the anti-Hitler coalition. In the first place, 'Tempest' assumed that the Soviet forces could be made to respect the pre-war frontiers. In fact, they had no intention of doing so, considering the lands acquired in September 1939 as integral regions of the USSR, while the British and Americans had shown that they would not risk a breach with Stalin by insisting that Poland should regain its old borders. Secondly, 'Tempest' was based on the belief that Stalin would accept the fait accompli of an anti-communist government in Poland with Western support. Again, this overlooked the Teheran meeting in November/ December 1943, at which Roosevelt and Churchill had extracted no guarantee from Stalin that he would recognise a post-war Polish government that refused to accept the new Soviet frontier along the 'Curzon Line' - roughly, the partition line between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.
So 'Tempest' ran its doomed course. In February 1944, the AK in Volhynia launched a local rising and joined forces with the advancing Soviet troops. At first, the Soviet officers were affable and cooperative, though they declined to make any political statements about frontiers. However, in April the new 'allies' we re defeated by a German counter-attack, and many of the Polish survivors were forced to enlist in the Soviet-commanded Polish army under General Berling. In July 1944, AK units helped the Red Army to drive the Germans out of Wilno, but a few days later their officers were arrested and their men either interned or drafted into the Berling army. Later in July, 6,000 AK troops joined Soviet forces in a stiff battle for Lwów. The outcome was much the same; the AK commander was to told that Lwów was a Soviet city and his men were given the choice of joining the Red Army or the Berling forces. When the pattern was repeated yet again near Lublin, within the Polish borders as the Soviet Union understood them, it was plain that 'Tempest' had failed. In military terms, the Home Army had fought well and gained glory. Politically, the attempt to make the Soviet commanders recognise its authority as the army of Poland's legal government was completely ineffective.
On 22 July, the authority of the London government over Poland had been formally challenged. The Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation issued its July Manifesto in Moscow, proclaiming a programme of democratic reforms and friendship with the Soviet Union. A few days later, it moved to newly liberated Lublin, and was reeognised by the USSR as the legitimate authority in Poland. Meanwhile, the forward troops of Marshal Rokossowsky's First Byelorussian Army reaehed the Vistula on 25 July. The guns of the approaehing Red Army eould be heard in Warsaw, where the Germans began a frantie evaeuation. It seemed obvious that Soviet forces would be in Warsaw within a few days. 
Bór-Komorowski and his offieers deeided for a rising in Warsaw. Indeed, given the wild exeitement boiling up in the eapital, they might not have been able to prevent one. All their calculations - about enemy strength, about relief by the Red Army, about Allied support, about the political effeets of the rising - proved quite wrong. There began on 1 August 1944 the biggest, the most heroic, and by far the bloodiest, urban insurrection that Europe has ever seen. It ended in disaster - a disaster in whieh not one of its survivors has ever regretted taking part.
In 1940, Winston Churchill broadcast to the Polish nation. He spoke from a Britain under siege, carrying on the war against Hitler alone - but not quite alone, for in the streets of London, between the German air raids, there could be seen soldiers in foreign uniforms, some of them wearing the 'Poland' shoulder-flash. He said: 'This war will be lon g and hard, but the end is sure. The end will reward all toil, alldisappointment, all suffering, in those who faithfulIy serve the cause of European and world freedom.'
No nation served that cause more faithfulIy than the Poles. They fought Hitler from the first day of war to the last, on land, at sea and in the air. Polish troops fought in Poland itself, in Russia and North Africa, in Norway, Italy, France and the Low Countries. They were in at the kill in Germany, and Polish troops helped to conquer Berlin. The Polish navy was in action, on the surface and in submarines, through the Battle of the Atlantic, in the North  Sea and the English Channel. Poland's airmen took part in the Battle of Britain, in the bombing offensive against Germany, and in the support of the armies over every front. One in five of the entire population of Poland perished in the conflict. They gave new meaning to the old slogan of the Polish exiles who fought in every revolution for democracy throughout Europe in the nineteenth century: 'For your freedom and ours!' But in the end it was true to say that, while no nation suffered so much, none gained so little.
The end of the war turned out a poor reward for 'all toil, all disappointment'. Poland in 1939 was an independent sovereign state. It was no longer a parliamentary democracy and the colonels' regime of the Sanacja after Pilsudski's death was disliked by most of the population, but these were private problems which the Poles intended to solve within the family. In 1945, a ruined and decimated Poland had regained its formal independence, but was tied closely to the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and controlled by Polish Communists whose ideology was alien to the great majority of Poles. 
Allies had withdrawn recognition from the legal government to which most Poles had given allegiance throughout the German occupation, and had forced upon the nation the loss of its eastern territories, granting in exchange the German provinces as far west as the rivers Oder and Neisse. A ruthless civil conflict was being waged between pro-Communist forces, aided by the Red Army, and the remnants of the wartime Home Army resistance in the hills and forests.
This was hardly the 'independence' that the British guarantee to Poland in 1939 had sworn to restore. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers in the West, who had for six years told themselves that every pace in their march through so many foreign countries was a step on the way home, now chose to stay abroad as exiles. )
Many things might have been different, but only in detail. The outlines of what was to happen to Poland became inevitable on 22 June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. This had two results, both inescapable. The first was to ensure the eventual defeat of Germany, which had broken the fundamental precept of German strategy: to avoid a war on two fronts. The second was to bring Russian power permanently in to the heart of Europe, something which statesmen had been trying to prevent for over a hundred years. Everything else followed. There was no chance that the armies of the West, weaker and led with less resolution than the Red Army, could liberate Poland before the Soviet Union. There was no chance that Britain and the United States would risk the collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition in the middle of the war by defying Stalin over the future of Poland - and even if they had dane so, no chance that their defiance would have been effective. Finally, although Stalin seems to have been at first flexible about the nature of the internal regime he preferred for Poland, there was no chance that he would permit the Polish state to regain the freedom of action it had possessed before the war.
In 1940, none of this was apparent. The Soviet Union was Hitler's ally, supplying him with trainloads of grain and oil. The United States was neutral, though hostile to Germany. In France, the British and French armies waited cautiously for the inevitable German offensive to begin. Their prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, still clung to the hope that the war might not last long, and could end in a negotiated peace.

With great difficulty, some 43,000 Polish officers and men, determined to carry on the war, had made their way to France from Romania and Hungary. Another 40,000 men were recruited from the large Polish community in France, mostly from the coal-mining regions of the north. Sikorski's army saw action in April 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark; a Polish brigade landed with the Aliied force near Narvik, only to be evacuated again a few weeks later.
On 10 May the German armies attacked in the west. Holland surrendered after five days, Belgium was rapidly overrun, and General von Rundstedt achieved complete surprise as his Panzer divisions thrust through the Ardennes, outflanked the Maginot Line defences and drove deep into France. Within ten days, the British had been cut off and were preparing to evacuate across the Channel through Dunkirk. The French in the north-east were in chaotic retreat.
The Poles were stationed further to the south. By the time they went into action, in early June, the campaign was lost. Though the Poles fought hard, they were driven into retreat as the French divisions around them fell to pieces. Some 13,000 men were forced back against the Swiss frontier; they beat off  German attacks, but - in a hopeless situation - decided to cross the border and seek refuge in neutral Switzerland. Other units retreated across France until they reached the Atlantic coast, where some were able to board ship for Britain. Out of his army of 80,000, Sikorski was left with about 25,000, counting the air force and the navy. Between a quarter and a fifth were officers; at the end of the September Campaign in 1939 many ordinary soldiers had chosen to stay in Poland rather than cross the borders into exile. The broken remains of the Polis h regiments were now sent to Scotland, where they prepared to defend the east coast against the expected German invasion.
Winston Churchill had become the British prime minister and formed an all-party government on the day that the German offensive began. Now he assured Sikorski of his full support, ordering the heads of his armed forces to give the Poles every assistance. The Polish government reassembled in London, setting up its General Staff in the Rubens Hotel.
In August 1940, the Battle of Britain opened, as the Germans began the air offensive against southern England and London which was intended to break the Royal Air Force and elear the way for a sea-borne invasion across the Channel. Eighty-one Polish pilots fought in the RAF, and two Polish fighter squadrons - 302 Poznań and 303 Tadeusz Kościuszko - took part in the battle. The Polish fighter pilots became a legend in wartime Britain for their ferocity, skill and recklessness, and accounted for one in six of ali German aircraft shot down in the four months of the Battle. But it was more than thirty years later that Britain revealed another, secret Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain and to eventual Aliied victory. By 1940, the British had broken the code of the German 'Enigma' enciphering machine and were able to read Nazi radio traffic. This was only made possible by a--'pre-war feat of Polish military intelligence, aided by a group of brilliant young mathematicians: they had worked out the 'Enigma' system, built a replica, and passed all its results to the French and the British.
As the threat of German invasion receded, the Poles in Britain were given a badly needed pause. In Scotland, the army trained and exercised, striking up a warm friendship with the Scottish people. General Sosnkowski regained contact with the underground in Poland, and from February 1941 couriers and agents were parachuted into the German-occupied areas. The only land fighting was in North Africa, where in December 1940 the British attacked and destroyed a far larger Italian army. The Polish Carpathian Brigade, composed of troops who had escaped from Romania, was nearby in Palestine, but did not take part in the offensive for the bizarre reason that Sikorski had forgotten to declare war on Italy. This was hastily remedied.
The European war became a world war on 22 June 1941, when German armies stormed across the demarcation line in Poland and attacked the Soviet Union. Churchill at once offered Stalin unconditional support. This put Sikorski in a delicate position, dependent as he was on British hospitality. He issued a statement rejoicing at the outbreak of war between Poland' s enemies and suggesting that any Polish-Soviet alliance should be conditional on Soviet recognition of the 1939 frontiers and the release of Poles in captivity within the USSR. Combined British and Soviet pressure, however, showed Sikorski that he would have to shelve the frontier problem, and on 30 July a Polish-Soviet agreement was signed in London. It was too much for several members of the Polish government, including Sosnkowski, who assumed that the Soviet Union would be rapidly crushed by Hitler and saw no reason to make concessions to Stalin. They resigned.
The agreement promised mutual support in the war, arranged for the formation of a Polish army under the London government on Soviet soil, and declared that Poles captive in the Soviet Union should receive 'amnesty' (although they had committed no crime save that of being Polish). On frontiers, the pact merely stated that territorial changes under the Nazi-Soviet pact were no longer valid. To comfort Sikorski, the British issued a declaration that they did not recognise changes in Poland's borders after August 1939.
Whatever its political shortcomings from the Polish point of view, the Polish-Soviet agreement was utterly justified in human terms. Slowly and reluctantly, the gates of the Siberian and Asian prison camps swung open, and hundreds of thousands of Poles - soldiers, women, officials, priests, even orphaned children - began to make their way towards the centres where the new Polish army was being gathered. Many had already died; many we re not released. But the rest set out on the journey by rail, sledge, river raf t, or on foot. In the chaos of wartime, the Soviet authorities gave them little assistance or food, and thousands perished on the way. Aleksandra Jarmulska was in an Arctic labour camp when the news came of the Polish-Soviet agreement. We slept in a communal hut just on wooden planks, and there was no cruelty: we were just told that we can't escape from there; we would be eaten by polar bears or die in the snows if we did, but if we worked and earned some money. we could survive.' When they were released, Aleksandra and her companion made a raf t for their river journey to find their army. 'The river started freezing at the banks, and sometimes the raft couldn't get through and we just had to cm pieces of the supports away to negotiate ourselves along. And sometimes the raft would stick in the shallows, and then whoever was on it had to get into the river to push.'
The army commander chosen by Sikorski, Genera1 Władysław Anders, had spent the last two years in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Energetic and aggressive, Anders was intensely anti-Russian, and was personally convinced that the Soviet Union was losing the war against Hitler. He set up his headquarters at Buzuluk, between the Volga and the UraI mountains. By December 1941, he had 40,000 Polish soldiers, and 70,000 by March 1942. This was hard to correlate with Polish records which showed that some 180,000 men had been taken prisoner by Soviet forces in 1939. Stranger still was the absence of officers. Only a few hundred arrived in the early months, although some 15,000 had been made Soviet prisoners-of-war.
On 30 November, Sikorski himself arrived in the Soviet Union, welcomed on the snowy airfield by Vyacheslav Molotov, the man whose signature on me Nazi-Soviet pact had condemned Poland to extinction. On 3 December, he and Anders met Stalin and were guests at a banquet the following day. There were arguments about the slow pace of the releases of Poles, about the missing officers, about inadequate rations and about the Polish frontiers. On all these problems Stalin was evasive. But before the newsreel cameras, Stalin and Sikorski signed a joint declaration proclaiming their intention to fight Germany to the end. Sikorski went on to Buzuluk, where he inspected the troops, confirmed to his satisfaction their impatience to get back into battle against the Germans, and saw the mass of Polish civilians and families around the camps being slowly fed and nursed back to health.
Many of those who had reached the Anders army were too far gone to recover. Aleksandra Jarmulska, who had made the journey from the Arctic by raft and train, found starvation even in the army camps.The civilians were still being denied Soviet food ration cards. 'One morning, I just woke up and couldn't wake my mother. And then I realised she had died in her sleep . . . There we re so many people dying there at that time and the soldiers who were assigned to the job of burying them were like the ghosts of an army. They just couldn't cope with it.'
Scenes like these, coupled with his impressions of the Soviet leaders, left Sikorski with no illusions about Soviet-Polish relations in the past and their problems for the future. But he remained convinced that there was no alternative to the pact with Stalin if Poland were to revive, victorious and independent, after the war. '
But the problems grew worse, not better. The Polish forces under Anders were moved eastward to new camps near the Caspian Sea. Their rations were cut by the Soviet authorities, and disease broke out. Early in 1942, Anders refused a Soviet request to send a division to the front on the plausible grounds that his men were under-armed and unfit. This refusal, later made much of by Soviet propaganda as evidence that the Poles were reluctant to fight the 'Hiderites', covered a serious disagreement now emerging between Sikorski and Anders.
Sikorski continued to stand by his agreement with Stalin that the Polish forces in the Soviet Union would fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Red Army. But Anders, whose distrust of Russians had grown even stronger, now pressed Sikorśki to allow his forces to be evacuated to Iran, which was under British control.
At first, Sikorski would not hear of this. He allowed Anders to evacuate those he could not feed because of the ration shortage. But he had three powerful reasons for keeping Polish troops in the Soviet Union. He would retain some leverage over Stalin, the army would continue to act as magnet and refuge for hundreds of thousands of Poles still missing, and - above all - a free Polish army under his command would help to liberate Poland from the east, frustrating any Soviet attempt to bring Poland under Soviet domination. Unfortunately, Stalin understood this last reason perfecdy well.
Stalin decided that this alien presence on his own soil was more trouble than it was worth; the German thrust at Moscow had been beaten on in December 1941, and his military situation was no longer desperate. He began to encourage Anders in his plans to leave. In London, Churchill - now desperate in turn for troops to stem the German offensive against Egypt, which began under General Rommel in June 1942 - also started pushing the Polish government to let Anders come out of Russia. Sikorski was in no position to defy this combined pressure, and in August 1942 ships carrying Polish troops set out across the Caspian Sea for the Iranian shore.
In all, Anders was able to lead some 115,000 soldiers and civilians out of the Soviet Union. In the safety of Iran, they were at last given sufficient food and clothing by the British, and the troops were issued with new weapons. At the last moment Anders had beaten on a Soviet objection to the departure of soldiers and their families who had Polish citizenship but not Polish 'nationality' - which meant Jews. They came tao. But over a million Poles remained in the Soviet Union. With the army gone, the Polish embassy in Moscow had little leverage to use in persuading Stalin to release them. The evacuation to Iran was seen by many Poles as a divine mercy, a flight from Babylonian captivity. For Sikorski, however, it was his worst diplomatic defeat, a calamity for his plans.
Deprived of a presence on the Eastern Front, the weakness of Sikorski' s position became steadily more painful. In Decemher 1942, he flew to the United States and urged Roosevelt to think seriously about an invasion of the Balkans. He hoped that an Anglo - American force could reach Poland through Jugoslavia and Hungary, and lay the foundations of a free Central European Federation before the Red Army arrived. Roosevelt gave him only vague answers. A few weeks later, in January 1943, the Soviet Union informed the Polish government in London that all Poles who had been living in the territories seized in 1939 were now Soviet citizens. This not only deprived the Polish embassy in Moscow of its right to help Poles left in the Soviet Union; it revealed beyond all doubt that Stalin intended to keep those territories after the war.
But all  Sikorski's efforts to preserve at least a working relationship with the Soviet Union were about to be smashed apart. On 13 April 1943, German radio announced the discovery of mass graves near the village of Katyń, in the district of  Smolensk. Katyń was Soviet territory, but it had been occupied by the Nazis since the summer of 1941. In the graves lay the bodies of Polish officers, their hands tied behind their backs, their skulls shattered by pistol-shots from behind. The first Nazi broadcast claimed there were 10,000 of them. In fact, some 4,300 bodies were finally dug up.
The Germans proclaimed that the Polish officers had been 'murdered by the Bolsheviks'. At first, the Poles hesitated. They instinctively rejected murder charges made by mass murderers like the Nazis. They could see the deadly diplomatic trap into which Nazi propaganda intended to push them. They found it hard to believe that even the Russians could have committed a crime so revolting. But the evidence was too strong. Papers found on the bodies, their condition and the degree of vegetation growth above them, left little room for doubt. These were the officers from Kozielsk, one of the three Soviet camps for officer-prisoners established in 1939, and they had been shot between April and early June 1940. Now the Poles recalled all their enquiries about the missing 15,000 officers in 1941 and 1942, whose letters had stopped so suddenly in the spring of 1940. They remembered Stalin' s queer, evasive answers to Sikorski and to Anders: 'They escaped to Manchuria', or just, 'Things sometimes happen. . .'
Two days later, Radio Moscow announced that the Germans had committed the atrocity in 1941, after capturing Smolensk. Nearly fifty years later, this is still the Soviet version of events. Almost nothing supports it; all the evidence accumulated since points even more directly at Soviet guilt. Few Poles, in Poland or abroad, believe anything different.
There had been about 5,000 officers in the Kozielsk 'special camp'. No trace has ever been found of the 4,000 officers in Starobielsk camp or of the 6,500 prisoners at Ostashkov. Both camps were 'wound up' in Apil l 940. After that, there is only silence and darkness. One account, circulating years later in  gulags, said that the Poles were locked inside barges which were deliberately sunk in the White Sea.

Why? Nobody knows that either, outside the Kremlin. It looks like an act of selective genocide against a part of the Polish national elite, closely parallel to Hitler's order to exterminate the Polish intellectual class. For Stalin, this act have been a small affair compared to some of his other slaughters. Some think it was simply an error by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), was misunderstood an order to 'liquidate' the special camps.
The Polish government, in spite of Churchill' s warnings to Sikorski demanded a Katyń enquiry by the International Red Cross. For the first time an open split had appeared in the anti-Hitler coalition. German propaganda rejoiced over its triumph. On 24 April, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London, accusing it of a 'treacherosu blow to the USSR' and of trying to 'please Hitler's tyranny'.
Stalin now moved rapidly to set up a new and menacing Polish policy of  own. In May, the nucleus of a Polish army under Soviet command was formulated by Colonel General- Zygmunt Berling. Its political guidance  from the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP), a grouping of pro-Soviet Poles headed by Wanda Wasilewska. It was not long before volunteers began to pour into the Berling army's camps. Most of them were Poles who had not been able to reach the Anders army in time; they had no affection for the Soviet Union, but here, at least, was a chance both to return home and to fight the Nazis. They had to swear an oath to the Soviet Union as well as to Poland, but the Polish flag was flown, the national anthem sung, and there was even a priest to say Mass. By July 1943, they already numbered over 14,000. By early 1944 Berling and his second-in-command, General Karol Świerczewski, who had fought as the illustrious 'General Walter' in the Spanish Civil War, had nearly 44,000 men behind them. 
In the aftermath of the Katyń affair, while the British still reproached the Poles for provoking a breach in the alliance, Sikorski flew to the Middle East. He met General Anders and visited his troops, now in Iraq and about to be formed into the Second Polish Corps to take part in the invasion of Italy. He set oH home, and made a landing at Gibraltar. The next day on 4 July 1943, his aircraft took off from the Gibraltar airfield, at once lost height, and crashed into the sea. All but the Czech pilot died.
Władysław Sikorski's body was brought back to Britain and buried in the Polish mili tary cemetary at Newark, deep in the English countryside. A British enquiry found no traces of sabotage in the aircraft wreck, concluding that a rudder had probably failed. But in their grief the Poles fell prey to many suspicions: that Soviet agents or Sikorski' s political rivals or even Churchill had engineered his death. No serious evidence for any of these theories has emerged.
The death of Sikorski was both tragic and disastrous. Upright, austere, not without arrogance, Sikorski possessed a heroic authority which had held the exile factions together; only he would have been capable of forcing through a policy of alliance with the Soviet Union which broke with the Pilsudskian tradition of hostility to Russia and went against the deep emotional reactions of Poles to the events of 1939. Even after Katyń, he had been planning to overcome the breach with Stalin. Now the Polish leadership divided. General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, the restlessly suspicious officer who mistrusted both the Russian and Anglo-American intentions for Poland, took over Sikorski' s post as commander-in-chief. The office of prime minister went to Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the Peasant Party, a stubborn but radical politician who was determined to carry forward the ideas of his dead predecessor.
Sosnkowski and Mikołajczyk, never close, now become bitter adversaries. There were periods when the two leaders of Poland refused even to speak to one another, and diverted their energies into blocking each other's intentions. On the whole, though, Mikołajczyk prevailed. In the east, the Red Army was now on the offensive, heading towards Poland. Mikołajczyk knew that some relationship with the Soviet Union must be rebuilt. If he did not try to achieve that, he would be abdicating all responsibility for his country.
At the end of November 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Teheran. Their central purpose was to reach agreement on how to carry forward the war. Stalin and Roosevelt rejected Churchill' s argument for an invasion of the Balkans, which might have forestalled the Soviet liberation and occupation of at least part of eastern Europe, and it was agreed instead that the Americans and the British would land in northern France and fight their way towards Germany.

Near the end of the conference, there was a discussion on the future of eastern Europe. The Big Three accepted that there would be predominant Soviet influence in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the annexed Baltic states and Jugoslavia. Poland was more complicated. Stalin repeated his promise that he would establish a 'strong and independent' Poland, a promise which in his own way he kept: Polish fears that he intended to absorb the whole of Poland as a new republic of the Soviet Union were groundless. But the three men at Teheran decided, in secret and without consulting Mikołajczyk, that the Polish state would be moved bodily several hundred miles to the west. The Soviet Union would absorb the old eastern territories, in which Poles were a minority, and set its frontier along the 1920 Curzon Line. In the west, Poland would take over almost the whole of Germany east of the rivers Oder and Neisse: Silesia with its mineral wealth and industries and the great city of Breslau, Pomerania with a long stretch of Baltic coast including Danzig, and the southern part of East Prussia.
Churchill thought he could persuade the Polish government in exile to accept an outline of these terms. After all, they offered Poland a strong state which would be ethnically much more united - once the Germans had been expelled from their lost provinces - and economically stronger. Stalin had his doubts, and reserved the right to set up a government which would consent to these terms if the London Poles refused. Stalin was right. Mikołajczyk's government rebelled. They could hardly reject the offer of expansion to the west - an ambition harboured by many Poles before the war - but would not recognise the new Western Territories as 'compensation' for lands lost in the east. The Curzon Line was the sticking-point. There now followed months of wrangling over the frontier between the London Poles and an increasingly exasperated British government. The Poles suggested in February 1944 that (they could renounce some of the old eastern lands, but absolutely refused to give up the ancient Polish centres of Lwów and Wilno. Churchill and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden, obliged to spend precious hours and days arguing over 'obscure' place-names in eastern Europe, came to consider the London Poles as unrealistic and unreasonable.
There was a failure of imagination here. The British could not understand why the Poles seemed unable to divorce the two issues of independence and frontiers, which appeared to the pragmatic Churchill quite separate.
The problem was history: the history of the Partitions. Every loss of territory inflicted by Poland's neighbours had led at once to a reduction of Poland' s independence, and to an internal weakening of the Polish state. The Polish government in London and the Delegation and Home Army command in Warsaw were unanimous: a surrender of territory to Russia would mean that the future Poland would be a Soviet puppet, and 'compensation' elsewhere was irrelevant.
Mikołajczyk, however, refused to give up the struggle. He was determined to find a way of renewing relations with the Soviet Union which would be acceptable to his more obstinate colleagues in the Polish government, who now began to suspect him of 'pro-Soviet' weakness. In June 1944, he met Roosevelt once more, in the very days that the Allies were landing on the Normandy beaches. He was welcomed like a great statesman - Roosevelt had his eye on the Polish vote in the approaching election. The President, good-natured but evasive, told his guest that he would see that Poland kept the city of Lwów and much of Galicia after the war, but doubted whether Stalin could be persuaded to give up Wilno. This was a grass deceit on the part of Roosevelt, who at Teheran had agreed in secret talks that Poland' s frontier would be the Curzon Line - granting Lwów and eastern Galicia to the Soviet Union.
In Poland itself, events were beginning to slip out of Mikolajczyk's contra. The Red Army was closing on Warsaw, accompanied by the Berling army which had grown in size and prowess since its first hard-fought batde at Lenino in September 1943. 'Operation Tempest', the attempt by the Home Army to liberate regions of Poland before the Soviet troops arrived, was failing. The Communist-dominated Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) installed itself at Lublin in late July; if Mikolajczyk was to prevent the PKWN becoming the provisional government of Poland, he had little time left.
Churchill urged him to find some way of merging the London government with the PKWN, accepting a Communist element in the future Polish regime as the price for retaining some influence over events. On 29 July, Mikołajczyk and his foreign minister, Tadeusz Romer, flew to Moscow for a visit that lasted a fortnight. It was the last hope for the London government.
Two days after Mikołajczyk's arrival, the Warsaw Rising began. Taken by surprise and suspicious of its motives, Stalin reproached Mikołajczyk for not informing him in advance - although Soviet broadcasts to Warsaw had been calling for an insurrection for days before it broke out. He refused to consider any other eastern frontier than the Curzon Line, which put both Lwów and Wilno on the Soviet side of the border, and urged the Polish prime minister to talk to the PKWN. A meeting was arranged, and Mikołajczyk found himself facing some of the unknown men and women who were about to tak e power in his country: Wanda Wasilewska, Bolesław Bierut, a loyal supporter of Stalin and a Communist, and Edward Osóbka-Morawski, an obscure member of the Polish Socialist Party. They offered him a coalition government in which they would have fourteen seats in the Cabinet and London would have only four, although Mikołajczyk would become prime minister. Mikołajczyk, angry and agonised over Soviet reluctance to help the Warsaw Rising, turned them down and returned to London on l0 August.
By now, Polish soldiers on all fronts we re becoming aware of the outlines of the Teheran decisions, and of a proposed change of frontiers. For many of them, these changes meant that they would never see their homes again, unless they chose to become Soviet citizens after the war. The men of Berling's army, recruited from those imprisoned or deported in 1939, came almost entirely from the eastern territories. But so, for the same reasons, did the Polish Second Corps under General Anders, now fighting in Italy. And a large part of the Polish forces in Britain, who crossed the Channel to enter the Normandy baules in August 1944, were also easterners who had been with the regiments that took refuge in Romania and Hungary in 1939 or had been evacuated from me Soviet Union in 1942.
There was bitter talk, in the officers' messes and in the ranks. But the Poles, loyal to their alliance even when they saw that they were losing their country, fought on. In May 1944, the Second Corps - at an appalling cost in dead and wounded - succeeded where the British and Americans had failed and stormed the Italian monastery of  Monte Cassino. In France, the Polish First Armoured Division helped to inflict on the Germans the disastrous defeat at Falaise; under General Maczek, the divison drove on through the Low Countries and liberated the Dutch city of Breda in October. A Polish paratroop brigade commanded by General Sosabowski took part in the airborne landings at Arnhem in September 1944, a noble but avoidable failure.
Given a choice, they would all have preferred to be in Warsaw, fighting and dying with their own people. The Rising, intended to last only a few days before the Soviet forces arrived, went on for two months of desperate street fighting which cost about 200,000 lives and left most of the capital an uninhabited wilderness of ruins.
General Bór-Komorowski and his commanders had some 30,000 men and women in their forces, mostly from the Home Army but including formations from the NSZ and the Communist People's Army. They had no heavy weapons and just over 700 automatic weapons, including machine-pistols. For an action lasting less than a week, against the rearguard of a departing enemy, this might have been enough.
But everything went wrong, not always through the mistakes of the Rising's leaders. In the first days, in glorious festivals of patriotic rejoicing, much of the city was liberated. Meanwhile, however, the German retreat had stopped, and armoured divisions moved across the Vistula to inflict a sharp defeat on the Soviet forces approaching the city. The Red Army fell back, but even when it had reorganised itself, made no further move to come to Warsaw's rescue. The Soviet aircraft which had been seen over the city every day now suddenly vanished. German reinforcements arrived, closed a ring around Warsaw, and - with the help of units from General Vlasov' s renegade Russian army - began to fight their way back street by street.
The temporary setback before Warsaw does not explain the fact that the Soviet forces now sat passively in their trenches, week after week, while the Germans crushed the Rising. Stalin cabled Mikolajczyk that the Rising was a 'reckless adventure' which he would not assist. On 12 August, Roosevelt and Churchill asked him to permit Western aircraft dropping supplies to Warsaw to land on Soviet airfields. Stalin refused. Only on 12 September did he allow American bombers to land at Poltava in the Ukraine, and order some Soviet airdrops to the insurgents. By then, Warsaw was hidden by smoke and the insurgents had been driven back into a small perimeter; most containers of arms and supplies fell into German hands. Stalin dismissed the Rising as a 'mindless brawl mounted by adventurers'. But in fact he could read all too clearly the minds of those who had launched it, and knew that the Rising was intended to confront him with the accomplished fact of a free capital city controlled by the representatives of a non-Communist government. He had no intention of helping this design to succeed.
So the Poles in Warsaw fought and died at their barricades and cursed the Russians for doing nothing, while the German bombers - unchallenged - steadily reduced the town to rubble. A few days after the start of the Rising, the Germans counter-attacked with tanks and artillery and cut the liberated area into several pieces. As they advanced, they methodically drove civilians in to the courtyards, machine-gunned them and then set fire to the buildings. The siege of the Old Town lasted until 1 September, when the surviving defenders 
escaped through the sewers to another bastion of resistance in the modern centre of Warsaw.
The British and Americans had not been warned of the Rising any more than the Soviet Dnion. Six days before it broke out, General Bór-Komorowski appealed for the Polish Paratroop Brigade to be dropped into the city. Nobody had given serious thought to the reinforcement problems of a prolonged insurrection, and this idea was completely impractical; there was no way that an armada of slow-moving gliders and towing aircraft could reach Warsaw, even if they we re not shot down on the way. But the Allies made efforts to supply the Rising, even without the use of Soviet airfields. Polish, British and South African squadrons flew missions from Brindisi in Italy, a 1,700-mile return flight. Their losses in men and aircraft were suicidal, and - counting the later American mission - only 44 out of 149 parachuted containers reached the insurgents.
On l0 September, the Soviet forces to the east of the Vistula at last mounted an attack and reached the bank of the river in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. Among them were Polish troops of the Berling army, who could now see the burning city across the water and hear the noise of battle. Some Polish units managed to cross the Vistula, but the Germans now held the other shore in strength, and they were forced to give up their bridgeheads with heavy losses. The army group commanded by Marshal Rokossovsky, to which the Poles belonged, made no attempt at a full-scale river crossing.
District by district, the last pockets held by the Rising began to fall. The Germans drove unarmed Polish civilians before their troops as they advanced, to screen them from fire. The execution squads, somb from the SS, some composed of drunken Russian deserters, slaughtered their way from house to house. Home Army hospitals, when captured, were burned with patients, doctors and nurses still inside. Hungry, filthy, exhausted and almost without ammunition, the defenders felI back from cellar to cellar, women and children attacking German tanks with home-made petrol-bombs, the dead buried in gardens and bomb craters.
The final surrender did not come until 2 October 1944. The Home Army survivors were granted the status of combatants and made prisoners-of-war; the entire remaining civilian population was marched out of the city to internment camps. Hitler ordered the complete razing of Warsaw, so that no settlement would ever arise there again, and demolition squads set to work with flame-throwers and dynamite among the silent, gutted streets. When they had finished, ninety-three per cent of the city's buildings were destroyed or beyond repair.
The Warsaw Rising of 1944 is one of the supreme events of Polish history. It brought to an awful climax the romantic tradition of armed uprising which stretched back to 1794. It convinced most of the generation who took part in it that in modern conditions that tradition no longer had a place: after another such rising, there would be no Poland left. But the Warsaw Rising was also a time of freedom, a 63-day revelation of how Poles could act and feel and behave to one another, which left a hot residue of pride to keep the nation warm through the bleak years that followed.
The Rising was not just a military action, but a community of the people with their soldiers, a community with its own songs and newspapers, its radio and theatres, its own film unit and cinemas. Even children took a full part. All who took part remember with love the laczniczki, the girls who ran with messages for the insurgents and died in their hundreds and the Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), the boys and girls of the Scout movement who fought to the end. Like many Polish upheavals, the Rising also left a moral legacy behind it.
Many older citizens of Warsaw today still try to measure their own behaviour by the devotion, purity and generosity which they remember from the summer of 1944.
The best historian of the Warsaw Rising, Jan Ciechanowski, concludes that its political motives and its military motives could never have been reconciled. 'In view of the total absence of  liaison with the Russians, and the lack of reliable data concerning their deployment and intentions, the Home Army leaders were militarily unjustified in embarking on an insurrection against the Germans.' The predicament of Bór- Komorowski was this; 'to fight against the Germans successfully he had to cooperate with the Russians militarily, yet he was unable to do so wholeheartedly because he wished to oppose them politically.

The failure of the Rising was a fatal and decisive defeat both for the Home Army and for the Polish government in London. With its leadership dead or imprisoned, and the capital destroyed, much of the fighting spirit went out of the Home Army. Some units ceased active operations, allowing many of their men to bury their weapons and return home. A few prepared for a new armed struggle against Soviet forces and the Communist authorities. In the liberated areas, where the PKWN now announced conscription, many thousands of ex-Home Army soldiers allowed themselves to be drawn into the Berling army, which numbered 290,000 by the end of 1944.
Stalin's decision in September to give the Rising some assistance, though too little and too late, inspired Churchill to make one last effort to solve what he called, in moments of despair, 'the Polish imbroglio'. In London, General Sosnkowski had been dismissed from the post of commander-in-chief after an outburst in which he accused Britain of betraying Poland; Churchill hoped that Mikołajczyk, free of his implacably anti-Russian rival, might now find it possible to bargain with Stalin. In October 1944, Churchill and Eden flew to Moscow, and Mikołajczyk followed them on 12 October.
There took place in Moscow a tragic, Shakespearian confrontation. It was a collision between Churchill and Mikołajczyk, two men who shared the same political values of liberty and democracy, whose stubborn temperaments were similar, and who at heart regarded one another with real affection. Stalin and Molotov scarcely took part. Mikołajczyk brought with him his Cabinet's final offer: an all-party government for post-war Poland in which the Communists would have a fifth of the ministries, and a redrawing of the eastern frontier which would leave Wilno and Lwów, with the nearby Galician oilfields, in Poland. Stalin turned this down. When Mikołajczyk retorted that Roosevelt had told him that Lwów should stay Polish, Molotov revealed to him that the President had agreed to the Curzon Line at Teheran, ten months earlier.
Deeply shaken, Mikołajczyk now met Churchill and Eden in private. Churchill reproached him: if he had only agreed to the Curzon Line frontier earlier in the year, Stalin would not have set up a rival 'government' in the form of the Lublin Committee - the PKWN. Mikołajczyk bitterly reminded him of Britain's pledges to Poland. Churchill shouted at him that he wanted to start a third world war. 'You're a callous people who want to wreck Europe. I shall leave you to your own troubles. You have only your miserable, petty, selfish  interests in mind!'
He threatened to withdraw recognition of the London government, and added that Mikołajczyk ought to be in a lunatic asylum. Beside himself with rage and misery, Mikołajczyk demanded permission to be parachuted into Poland, so that he could perish in battle with the Home Army. 'I prefer to die fighting for the independence of my country, rather than to be hanged later by the Russians in fulI view of your British ambassador!'
At this Churchill marched out of the room. Both men were close to tears. After some moments, Churchill returned and put his arm round the Pole's shoulders. But they had reached the end of a line, and they knew it. A last suggestion by Mikołajczyk that Poland could give up Wilno if Lwów could be saved was put to the Kremlin. Stalin, no doubt aware of this highly satisfactory quarrel through well-placed microphones, placidly refused.
Stanisław Mikołajczyk went back to London. There he told his colIeagues candidly that there was no longer any room for manoeuvre. If they wanted to have any share of the future government, they would have to swalIow the Soviet terms and the Curzon Line. He urged them to do so, reminding them of the rich new territories promised to Poland in the west. But it was too much for most of the London Poles, and on 24 November Mikołajczyk resigned.
This was the end of the Polish exile government as a force in international politics. From now on, world statesmen acted as if it no longer existed. In December, the PKWN proclaimed itself the provisional government of Poland, with Osóbka-Morawski as prime minister, Bolesław Bierut as head of state and Władysław Gomułka as a deputy premier. It was recognised by the Soviet Union a few days later.
On 12 January 1945, the Soviet armies on the Vistula resumed the offensive. The German defences broke, and the Red Army drove rapidly across central and western Poland towards the German frontier. The men of the Berling army entered Warsaw on 17 January, stepping in horrified silence through a desert of frozen rubble. Behind them, welI wrapped up against the savage frost, came a group of men whom most Poles had never heard "of - the new government. After more than five years of Nazi occupation, liberation had come at last, but wearing a uniform woven of irony. 
In early February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea. They planned the final phase of the war and the joint administration of occupied Germany in the interval before the peace conference. But no peace conference has ever taken place to make a formal settlement of the Second World War, and in its absence the agreements reached by the Big Three at Yalta have been treated as the charter for the division of Europe into 'zones of influence'. At Yalta, many now believe, Britain and the United States betrayed all the principles for which the war had been fought by handing over Europe east of the river Elbe to Joseph Stalin.
Yalta does not really deserve this bad name. In the first place, there was little Churchill and Roosevelt could do to prevent Soviet domination of the areas liberated by the Red Army, short of threatening a fresh war. Secondly, Yalta for the most part only ratified decisions taken earlier, especially at Teheran. As far as Poland was concerned, the West did attempt - in a callous, casual way - to ensure that Poland- would not become a Communised puppet of the Soviet Union, and that the political will of the Polish people would be freely expressed. The worst that can be said about Churchill and Roosevelt on this occasion is that they willingly deceived themselves about Stalin' s intention to keep his promises.
The three leaders agreed that Poland would be run by a provisional government including 'alI democratic and anti-Nazi elements', until free elections could be held. This temporary government was to include Poles from the London camp. On frontiers, Yalta again confirmed the Curzon Line in the east, but there was no precise agreement on how much of Germany would be added to Poland in the west.
Stanisław Mikołajczyk decided to accept the Yalta blueprint. It was a frightening gambIe. The London government in exile had instantly denounced Yalta as a new Partition. In March, sixteen leaders of the resistance in Poland we re invited to a 'meeting' with Marshal Zhukov, kidnapped and imprisoned in the Lubyanka in Moscow to await trial for - among other grotesque charges - collaborating with the Germans. In the Polish forests and villages, remnants of partisan bands were beginning to clash with Soviet security forces. But Mikołajczyk felt that if the Soviet assurances at Yalta meant anything at all, he stood a chance of rallying the Peasant Party within Poland and leading a non-Communist block of parties to victory in the elections.
On 2 May, Berlin fell to Soviet and Polish troops. On 8 May, the war in Europe ended.

The German terms Lebensraum and Konzentrationslager, both widely known because of their use by the Nazis, were not coined by the Hitler regime. These terms were minted many years earlier in reference to German South West Africa, now Namibia, during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Germans colonized the land and committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama peoples. Later use of these borrowed words suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine colonization and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle Eastern Europe, enslave and murder millions of Slavs and exterminate Gypsies and Jews? This article argues that the German experience in Namibia was a crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide and that personal connections, literature, and public debates served as conduits for communicating colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany. 
 

Key Words: Herero • Holocaust • Konzentrationslager • Lebensraum • Nama
 
 

IN Poland, as in all the countries of Western Europe, the collector's spirit was first awakened by the interest which ruling houses and their courts began to take in works of art about the middle of the sixteenth century. The last kings of the Jagelllonian dynasty (1386-1572) were already the possessors of splendid specimens of Renaissance art like the famous collection of tapestries known as the Wawel Arrases. . 
In the first half of the seventeenth century King Sigismund III and his successors, Ladislas IV and John Casimir, brought together in Warsaw works of art which, by their quality and number, deserved to be regarded not merely as part of the castle furnishings, but as an independent collection important enough almost to rank as a museum. Ladislas IV owned a great number of antique sculptures (which were under the care of a special curator), and he collected paintings by contemporary artists. We know that during his foreign travels he made purchases in person from Rubens and Guido Reni, and that after the death of Rubens the king's representative bought so many pictures from the sale of his works that Ladislas figures as the third most important purchaser, after the German emperor and the French king. These collections were dispersed before the century was out. During the Swedish wars many treasures were looted and carried off; and there were continual losses to other foreign countries for similar reasons. 
King John Sobieski (1674-96) brought together numerous fine specimens of decorative art at Wilanow, particularly from the East; and the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus (1764-95) organized a museum on modern lines in the Castle of Warsaw. The great families of the nobility followed these royal examples and formed their own collections: the Szydlowieckis at Opatów and Sandomierz, the Zamoyskis at Zamosc, the Lubomirskis at Wisnicz, the Radziwills at Nieswiez, the Potockis at Brzezany and Tulczyn, the Czartoryskis at Pulawy, the Ossolinskis in Warsaw, and so on. Besides such private collections there came into being in Western Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century public collections, created and provided for by the State, as, for example, the British Museum in England (1759) and the Louvre in France (1791). For Poland, at that time in the throes of a political crisis which ended in her loss of independence, this period brought a development in art-collecting wholly different from that in other nations. The duty of the State rationally to develop and to protect artistic and scientific collections, now fell to the nation in the persons of its more enlightened members. Large classes of the Polish people soon became conscious that works of art and historic relics carefully assembled by preceding generations represent a nation's cultural level as vitally as any other manifestation of intellectual life. The specific and most characteristic features of this new phase for Poland's collectors was the continual need to rescue the evidence of ancient history and culture from the destructive policy of the partitioning Powers. This explains the distinctively indigenous and historical bias of many collections. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, collecting was chiefly the privilege of the great families of the nobility, the Poniatowskis, Tyszkiewicz, Mniszechs, Czartoryskis, Radziwills, Lubomirskis, Dzieduszyckis, Raczynskis, and others, who formed the independent class of the nation. 
The idea of creating public art collections, which Stanislas Augustus had been unable to carry out, was taken up in the nineteenth century by the Warsaw Philomatic Society, founded in the year 1800, and in 1817 enriched by a substantial legacy from Gen. H. Dąbrowski. About the same time university collections came into being, the most important part of which were the prints and drawings. The richest of these, that of the University of Warsaw, had, since 1818, owned the large collection of some 100,000 prints and drawings bought from the heirs of Stanislas Augustus, and these were soon afterwards increased by a gift from Stanislas Potocki, then Minister of Education. In the year 1817 the Ossolinski Institute (Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich) was founded at Lwow. This Society collected books, manuscripts and graphic art, and in 1823 it was united with the Lubomirski art collection. In 1818 the Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts was founded in Cracow. The reprisals which followed the defeat of the 1830-31 insurrection in Tsarist-annexed Polish territory were also visited upon the collections of Warsaw University and the Warsaw Philomatic Society, Both of them were carried away to Russia. But in the second half of the nineteenth century (almost on the eve of a new armed rising) two new important institutions for the furthering of art and collecting were formed in Warsaw: the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych) in 1861, and the Museum of Fine Arts in 1862. The organization of the Museum, however, was arrested in its earliest stages by the outbreak of the insurrection, and the period of increased oppression which followed it did not favour the development of the institution. Reprisals from the Tsarist Government affected all parts of the "Congress Kingdom" as well as the former eastern provinces of the ancient Polish Commonwealth. Both private and public collections were confiscated and were taken away to Russia. Since then collectors have been most active in the lands under Austrian rule, mainly in Cracow. Their work was also much helped by numerous Polish emigres abroad. In France, the Czartoryski collection from Pulawy was housed in the Hotel Lambert in 1831, and the Polish Library was founded in Paris in 1838. In Switzerland a Polish Museum was founded by WI. Plater at Rapperswil in 1870. 
In the second half of the nineteenth century there was a marked increase of intellectual activity in all three parts of Poland, whether under Russian, Prussian or Austrian rule. This vitality expressed itself in the founding of new scientific societies, like the Wilno Archreological Committee with the Museum of Antiquities in 1855, the Poznan Philomatic Society in 1857, the Cracow Academy of Science and Letters, which arose from the old Philomatic Society, in 1872, and so on. At the same time municipal authorities in towns and provinces became aware of and interested in the existence of these collections. Results of this were the creation of the Municipal Museum of Torun in 1861, the Municipal Industrial Museum of Cracow in 1868, the Municipal Museum of Applied Art at Lwow in 1874, the municipally-owned National Museum of Cracow in 1879, the Municipal Historical Museum of Lwow in 1892-93, the Provincial Museum (later called the Muzeum Wielkopolskie) at Poznań in 1893, which is owned by the Provincial Federation of Poznania and the municipality of Poznan, the Town National Gallery at Lwow in 1894 and the Historical Museum at Cracow in 1898. The creation of institutions like these was possible only under Prussian and Austrian rule; the territories annexed by Tsarist Russia lacked all municipal organization and the few existing collections were entirely dependent on public generosity-though that was never appealed to in vain. It created the Museum of Industry and Agriculture in 1875, for instance, the Museum of Crafts and Applied Art in 1891, and the Majewski Museum of Archeology, also in 1891all of them in Warsaw. In this part of Poland the first decade of the twentieth century stimulated still further a strong instinctive interest in collections of an ethnographic and prehistoric character, and these were also fostered both by scientific associations and by the numerous branches of the Topographical Society (Towarzystwo Krajoznawcze) organized throughout the country. All these activities were, of course, carried on quite independently of the ruling authorities.  . 
A separate group, and one which does not fall under the head of" collections" in the strict sense of the word, was that formed by church treasuries, some of them very rich, particularly those belonging to cathedrals and monasteries. These were great storehouses of ecclesiastical art, and of treasures of decorative art destined for liturgical use. In the nineteenth century these riches, which were for the most part free gifts, partly fell a prey to the church policy of the partitioning Powers. They were either confiscated by the Tsarist Government after the Polish risings, along with the property of public institutions, or dispersed when the religious houses were abolished by the Prussian Government in 1819, and by the Russians in the "Congress Kingdom" in 1819 and 1864. 
More recently hostilities, which in Polish territory lasted without a break for almost seven years (1914-21), had devastating effects on collections and museums. It was only after peace was concluded that a new era of development in the restored Polish State could be hoped for. That State's first act in the matter was the Treaty of Riga, signed with Soviet Russia in 1921, which contained an article stipulating that the Soviet Government should restore to the Republic of Poland all cultural possessions such as archives, libraries, works of art, which had been forcibly carried away to Russia between 1772 and 1920. This article of the treaty was, however, never fully carried out. Nevertheless, what Poland regained after 1921 formed the nucleus of the State Art Collections, comprising in the main: the furnishings of the Warsaw Castle and the Lazienki Palace (some 5,000 items), militaria originally taken from Government buildings, the Arsenal, Churches and so on (housed after their return in the Army Museum and in the castles of Warsaw and Cracow), well over a hundred Brussels tapestries of the middle sixteenth century (Cracow Castle), the Gallery of Modern Polish Painting (some 1,000 items, in Warsaw), the numismatic collections (some 22,000 items, in Warsaw), collections of graphic art, bronze pieces, sculptures, paintings, and other valuable works of art. 
During their short existence of less than a score of years these State art collections were considerably enlarged, and Government purchases for them may be grouped under three main headings: (1) the further furnishing of the historic castles of Warsaw and Cracow by works of Gothic, Renaissance, and Early Baroque art (including decorative arts); (2) the creation of a collection of modern Polish painting and graphic art; (3) the enrichment of the collection of militaria illustrating the history of Polish arms. Apart from these collections, which were mostly grouped in Cracow and Warsaw, the State also owned a number of others-like the Silesian Museum of Katowice (founded in 1928, and in 1934 already in possession of collections totalling 64,000 items) and the Museum of Archaeology in Warsaw. 
According to the data for 1936, which correspond fairly well with the state of things in 1939, Poland had, inclusive of scientific university collections, twenty Government museums, thirty-five municipal, sixty-two which belonged to public institutions, eight diocesan and eleven private museums accessible to the general public-in all 134. Municipal museums and those owned by public institutions thus far outnumbered those owned by the State, this being a natural consequence of the conditions of development previously mentioned. Until recently, also, municipal and private collections by the sheer quality of their exhibits took first place. For among the richest museums in Poland, with interests comprising not only the entire artistic life of the country but also the cultural achievements of the whole world, two were municipal institutions, the National Museums of Warsaw and Cracow, and two were private property, the Czartoryski Museums at Goluchów and Cracow. But the important Government purchases made for the Warsaw and Cracow Castles somewhat redressed the balance. 
The most characteristic feature of museum history in Poland during the last twenty pre-war years of peace and comparative prosperity was an enthusiastic development which found expression in (1) new foundations and the enlargement of old ones; (2) a tendency to work for the rational unification of homogeneous collections; (3) the reorganizing of museum work on modern scientific lines; (4) training of qualified museum staffs; (5) publications and exhibitions. The most visible proof, however, of the favourable conditions for museum work in independent Poland is to be found in the erection of a number of new modern museum buildings, undertaken within a few years by four institutions: the National Museum of Warsaw (1922), the Silesian museum at Katowice (1928), the National Museum of Cracow (1934), and the Museum of Polish Pomerania at ToruIi (1936). The National Museum of Warsaw had already achieved its aim and transferred itself to the new edifice in 1936 ; the others were in process of building, and on the eve of completion, when the war broke out. 
The history of museums and collections in Poland thus shows that great efforts were made in this direction by royalty and the great families of the nobility in the old days, by the whole people together with the State and municipal authorities in modern times; so that if Poland could not boast collections as rich as those of mightier European States, it was not for lack of endeavour, but because her possessions were again and again looted and destroyed, as has been the case in this war. 

BOTH Government and private circles had, for several years before the German invasion, devoted much attention to the question of SAFEGUARDING, MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS in the event of a war. A plan for the international protection of memorials and works of art, which had been drawn up by the Office International des Musees, and had in July 1937 been accepted by the Commission Internationale de Cooperation Intellectuelle, was the startingpoint of their considerations. This plan the Assembly of the League of Nations had, in August 1938, turned over to the Netherlands Government, which had undertaken to conduct negotiations with other governments and to call a diplomatic conference. The plan was based on the idea that all States are equally interested in the preservation of art treasures, and that the loss of a work of art, belonging to any nation whatever, is a gap in the spiritual heritage of all mankind. The new convention, to be based on The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, was made necessary by the altered conditions of modern warfare. It was to lay upon all Governments an obligation to ensure respect for works of art and memorials by the issue of special instructions to their troops, by preventing pillage, and so on. The plan provided for the creation of special storehouses for works of art and national treasures, these storehouses to be under the control of international commissions, and to be immune from offensive action during hostilities, and from any other activities of an occupying Power. In particular, the convention stipulated that no national treasure or work of art could be made an object of enemy reprisals. Unfortunately, this convention was not signed by the year 1939, so that at the outbreak of war Poland had not been able to form the intended special storehouses under international control, since their formation before the signature of the convention might have meant the dispersal of the whole country's most valuable art treasures. Each museum therefore sought to safeguard its collections individually and in accordance with local conditions. The Silesian Museum was evacuated to Lublin, at the outbreak of war; the Czartoryski Museums of Cracow and Goluchow sent their most valuable possessions (including pictures by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rembrandt, jewels, goldsmiths' work and coins) to Sieniawa in the voivodship of Lwow, and there walled them up in previously prepared underground vaults. Part of the collection of Kórnik near Poznan (miniatures, illuminated manuscripts, and so on) were taken to the Zamoyski Library in Warsaw, some of the objects from the Gniezno Cathedral Treasury and Library were entrusted to the Dominican Friars at Lublin, a Rubens from the church of St. Nicholas at Kalisz was sent to the National Museum in Warsaw. The famous high altar of Our Lady's church in Cracow, the work of Veit Stoss (Wit Stwosz), among the city's most valuable treasures, was taken to pieces - the larger sculptures were carried in three barges to Sandomierz and were there deposited in the cathedral, while the smaller fragments were hidden in private houses in Cracow. Many other collections and works of art were similarly treated. Numerous private collections in western and south-western Poland were taken to the central provinces; for example, the Tarnowski family's collections from Sucha, Dzikow and Dukla, the Bninskis' collection from Samostrzele, the Skorzewski's from Czerniejewo, the Potockis' from Krzeszowice, and so on. Many privately owned objects were entrusted to the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Cracow, and the Lubomirski Museum in Lwow; others were placed in the houses of related families. No plan was made to send such objects abroad, and we know only two cases of such exportation: (1) The eleventh-century Coronation sword and the magnificent collection of 125 arrases made for King Sigismund Augustus in 1556, as well as a number of valuable historical relics, all belonging to the Polish State collections, have left the country, as also (2) a number of valuable objects from the Sanguszko residence at Gumniska. The remaining museums and collections, whether public or private, did their best to safeguard their buildings and property on the spot. The National Museum in Warsaw packed a great part of its collections in hundreds of previously prepared cases and stored them in its cellars. The same was done with the collections of the National Museum in Cracow, with the treasury of the Cracow Cathedral, the Lubomirski collections at Przeworsk, and the Branickis' at Wilanow. Other private collections in country residences such as Nieborow and Jablonna, were left in their usual places, as also were some in towns-for instance, those of the Zamoyski, Krasinski and Przeździecki families in Warsaw. 

The LOSSES OCCASIONED BY HOSTILITIES are enormous and irreparable, although the chief public and private collections were comparatively little effected. 
The losses directly due to hostilities were greatest in Warsaw. At the ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM fire destroyed practically the whole of a collection consisting of several thousand objects brought together in the course of decades by scientists and collectors from all corners of Poland, and truly representative of the whole nation. It had contained a rich selection of all branches of popular art and handicrafts ; dresses and textiles, embroideries, pottery, paintings on glass, objects of wood, metal and leather, musical instruments, household goods, furniture, ceremonial objects, and so on. The museum's inventories, with their drawings, water-colours, photographs, and manuscript catalogues were also destroyed. The destruction of the collections representative of foreign and exotic ethnography must also be accounted a serious loss. The museum had possessed good Spanish, Rumanian, Jewish, and Gipsy sections, not only valuable in themselves, but also because they were the fruit of Polish scientists' and collectors' work. Part had even been contributed by exiles in Siberia. All this was burnt during the last days of the September bombardment, when salvage work was impossible owing to lack of water and the- overcrowding of the museum building by refugees from the Old Town quarter. 
The most serious loss suffered by Polish art and science is the tragic destruction of the Zamoyski and Przeździecki collections, which also fell a prey to fire in the last days of the bombardment. The ZAMOYSKI MUSEUM with the Zamoyski archives and library not only gave a picture of the family's splendid patronage of science and art ever since the middle of the sixteenth century, but also bore witness to great pages in the nation's political, educational and scientific history. The museum had contained relics of the Zamoyski family, particularly of Chancellor Jan Zamoyski (1541-1605), of the kings: Sigismund Augustus, Stephen Bathory, Sigismund III and John Sobieski, of the hetmans: Zolkiewski and Czarniecki, and of the national heroes: Kosciuszko and Prince Joseph Poniatowski. In addition to this, the museum had possessed an armoury comprising a number of rare pieces and a valuable collection of decorative art, more particularly a splendid selection of pottery. In the numismatic section were to be found almost complete sets of coins of the Piast and Jagellonian dynasties, some of them unique, a large collection of imprints from antique gems and a valuable set of medals. The section of graphic art contained a rich collection of art publications and eighteenth century prints. 
All this, together with the archives, formed an invaluable source for the study of four centuries of Polish culture. Only a small part of the material had hitherto been utilized, so that many pages of that history will now never be written. 
The PRZEZDZIECKI COLLECTION also formed a whole, complete with library and archives, giving a picture of many aspects of Polish history and more particularly of that of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They contained a gallery of pictures by Polish and foreign artists, some of which were saved, though they are so much damaged that their artistic value has been almost entirely destroyed. The fire also destroyed the furnishings; bronzes, clocks, chandeliers, furniture, carpets, collections of Dresden, Berlin, Viennese and Polish china-mostly museum pieces, as well as a collection of militaria and a collection of some 10,000 important prints and drawings. 
The new buildings of the NATIONAL MUSEUM in Warsaw suffered considerable damage through incendiary and explosive bombs, as well as through artillery action. The bulk of its collections which had been placed in the cellars was saved, but losses were nevertheless severe, especially as regards antique furniture, Far Eastern art, and Egyptian antiquities. 
The building of the Warsaw SOCIETY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF FINE ARTS (usually called tbe "Zachęta") was seriously damaged by an explosive bomb and by artillery shells. Several score of pictures belonging to the Society (nineteenth-century Polish art) and a number of private deposits were destroyed. 
The collections of the Warsaw MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CRAFTS were almost wholly destroyed by artillery action. They had consisted mainly of a large collection of Polish pottery comprising rare and unique specimens. The antique furniture and the collection of metal-work were also lost and the building itself was seriously damaged.  . 
The collection belonging to COUNT EDWARD RACZYNSKI, Polish Ambassador in London, was destroyed almost entirely, together with the beautiful house which was its home, and with which it had formed a splendidly blended whole. It had been, as it were, a memorial of the cultural traditions of several eminent Polish families, the Czapskis, the Malachowskis, Krasinskis and Raczynskis, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward. The finest part of the collection was the picture gallery, containing some 300 works by Holbein, Murillo, Ribera, Guercino, Spagnoletto, Jordaens, Teniers, Bloomert, Honthorst, Netscher, Bol, G. Metsu, Van Dyck and others. Unfortunately it had never been exhaustively catalogued or studied by art historians. 
The collection of DR. BRYNDZA-NACKI, the beginnings of which dated back to the second half of the eighteenth century, and whose Flemish and Dutch pictures were particularly interesting, was totally destroyed by fire. It contained paintings by F. Mieris, P. Claes, Hondius, Fyt, A. van Ostade, Ruysdael, and others. The pictures of EDWARD NATANSON met with the same fate. It was only a small collection-some ninety paintings, but it was graced by the works of Bronzino, Guido Reni, P. Breughel, Boucher, a portrait of A. K. Czartoryski by Gainsborough (painted in 1761), and a number of valuable Polish pictures by Brodowski, Michalowski, Chelmonski, Grottger, Siemiradzki, Wyspianski and others. 
It is quite impossible to register here all the collections destroyed in the bombardment of Warsaw. The larger ones are numbered by tens, the smaller ones by the hundred. We have named only some of the largest and finest. 
Not only lack of space but also the impossibility of securing reliable information at the present time forbids our making any attempt at listing the damage caused by hostilities in the country-in smaller towns, in country residences and manor-houses. We will content ourselves with noting the considerable losses suffered by the museum of the WILNO PHILOMATIC SOCIETY during the shelling of the city by the Germans in June 1941. 

1. Nazi Policy in the" Generalgouvemement" 

That the Germans possessed a detailed plan concerning Polish public and private museums and collections, as well as other art treasures, was abundantly proved even during the first months of ENEMY OCCUPATION. The studies carried on for so many years by German scholars, especially those of Breslau and Koenigsberg, appeared in a new light. At Koenigsberg Professor Dr. Karl Heinz Clasen had with his university collaborators made a special study of Poznanian and Pomeranian art. At Breslau Professor Dr. Dagobert Frey had organized a university institute for the study of Eastern European art and had shown a particular interest in Silesia, central, southern, and eastern Poland. Both these scientists had considerable means at their disposal and their many journeys to Poland had given them a detailed knowledge of the country's art treasures. In the domain of prehistoric research similar studies were diligently pursued by a group of scholars headed by Professor Dr. Ernst Petersen, Director of the Institute of Prehistoric Studies at Breslau and recently professor of Rostock University. 
It seems that these gentlemen must have been nominated to their war functions even before the outbreak of hostilities, for they appeared in Poland immediately on the occupation of her territory. Professor Frey at once arrived in Cracow and then toured the "Generalgouvernement" territory, giving detailed information on its art possessions, issuing instructions for the removal to Germany of such objects, and then collaborating in the organization of the Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for German Work in the East) in Cracow, in April 1940. At its inauguration he gave a lecture on German architecture in Poland. In museums and collections Professor Frey made no bones about exploiting his pre-war research, occasionally demanding the laying before him of objects as yet uncatalogued to which he had been given access as a student. Professor Clasen took over the task of turning Poznan University into a German one and simultaneously accepted the duties of State Curator of museums and antiquities for Poznania and Polish Pomerania. Professor Petersen carried out an inspection of archaeological museums and in November 1939 supervised the removal of the collections of the Warsaw State Museum of Archaeology. Breslau scientists form an important proportion of the collaborators in the Office of the" Special Commissioner for Requisitioning and Safeguarding Works of Art" (Der Sonderbeauftragte fuer Erfassung und Sicherstellung der Kunstgegenstaende). Apart from those already named, the most eminent member of that office is Dr. Gustav Barthel, Director of the Breslau Museums and editor of the periodical Die Hohe Strasse (Schlesische Jahrbuecher fuer deutsche Art und Kunst im Ostraum) ("Silesian Yearbook of German Life and Art in the Eastern Space”). 
The attempt to safeguard collections by evacuation and hiding as Polish authorities and private owners had done proved on the whole unsuccessful, both because of the occupation of the entire territory of the country and because of German brutality and a widely developed spy service. At Sandomierz the Germans demanded the Veit Stoss altar of Our Lady's church from Cracow as early as the middle of September, and they brought with them those who had been employed in packing it. At Sieniawa a sworn mason told the Gestapo representatives the hiding-places of the Czartoryski collection and the Goluchow treasures as soon as the first German units appeared. All the valuables were immediately stolen, and it proved impossible to find out which units had committed the act, so that later searches gave no results, even though they were conducted by the German authorities. This must be accounted one of the most grievous losses sustained, for the plunder included objects of quite exceptional value, such as a set of famous twelfth to sixteenth-century Limoges enamels and a magnificent collection of antique, mediaeval and Renaissance goldsmiths' work, coins, invaluable Polish historical relics, and a large number of engravings by Duerer, L. van Leyden, and others. The pictures and other remaining objects were later brought to Cracow to be confiscated and stored. The collections of the Silesian Museum were fetched from Lublin by Dr. F. Pfutzenreiter, Director of the Beuthen (Bytom) Museum, who had in his possession the bills of carriage from Katowice. The Tarnowskis at Sucha were forced by threats to disclose the fact that their collections were at Kozłówka. 
Apart from losses directly due to hostilities, Polish collections suffered considerably from depredations committed by German police, military persons and administrative officials, both during hostilities and for some months after. We mean here such acts of pillage as were done for private profit, and which still occur at the moment of writing, although on a more limited scale. We shall discuss these at more length when treating of individual collections. In addition to this, there were losses arising from wilful destruction, which we shall also discuss later. Losses by private pillage are the more grievous in that probably only a small part of the stolen objects will be rediscovered in the future. The names of the pillagers are unknown, and it will not be easy to find out what has become of their booty. 
The previously mentioned Office, at whose head is der Sonderbeauftragte fuer Erfassung und Sicherung der Kunst-und Kulturschuetze (Special Commissioner for the Requisitioning and Safeguarding of Treasures of Art and Culture), is the German Government's official medium for the official pillage of Polish public and private collections. It forms part of the civil administration, and the Commissioner, Staatsekretaer (Secretary of State) Dr. Kai Muehlmann, though attached to the Governor-General's office in Cracow, has autonomous powers. 
His permanent and chief collaborator is Dr. Gustav Barthel, of Breslau, already mentioned. Others were (or are) Dr. Mayer (Breslau), Dr. Kuedlich (Vienna), Dr. Polhammer and Dr. Demmel, both of Vienna; also Dr. Troschke, who was at the same time acting as one of the inspectors of the Oświęcim concentration camp. The office in Cracow directed activities in general, and also carried out the seizure of collections in that town and in the south of the "Generalgouvernement." For Warsaw and the north, an assistant commissioner was nominated, Dr. Josef Muehlmann of Linz, brother of the Special Commissioner. He was helped by an antique dealer, Dr. Kraus of Vienna. During the first three months of German occupation (the main seizures of public collections having then been already for the most part effected), activities in Warsaw and in the immediate vicinity were mainly carried on by Gestapo officials, one of them being Dr. Paulsen, university professor of prehistoric studies and Untersturmfuehrer of the Gestapo. The methods of the Gestapo men were marked by particular and systematic brutality towards collections, museum staffs, and private owners. There is not the slightest doubt that they are utterly devoid of any scruple concerning their share in the work of pillaging and plundering Polish museums and collections. Their actions are flagrantly contrary not only to international law, but also to the basic principles of museum theory, so that they can only be explained (a) by rapacity on behalf of German collections, (b) by political instructions aimed at destroying all traces of Polish culture. There is no similarity between their acts and, let us say, the restoring of the Van Eyck altar to Ghent by the Versailles Treaty, for the objects confiscated in Poland had never been carried off from Germany, and had in most cases no connection whatever with that country. A particularly plain instance of this is the carrying off from Cracow of the Veit Stoss altar, which had been carved in Cracow for a church in that town. 
Pillage and destruction of Polish collections were the obvious programme of the German authorities from the very first days of their entry, often without any regard to German profit. At first no effort was even made to create some semblance of legality. No receipts were given, and protests of owners or curators against such methods met with the retort that totalitarian war is waged in every field. Reprisals were also a frequent answer. 
The creation of a semblance of legality was first attempted by the issuing of the Governor-General's decree of November 15th, 1939, which announced the confiscation of the "former Polish State's property" throughout the "Generalgouvernement" (Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs, Nr. 6). This decree included State property in the form of art and national relics, contrary to the stipulations of clause 56 of The Hague Convention of 1906, which regulates the rights and usages of land warfare, and requires such objects to be treated like private property, even when they belong to the State. A month later, on December 16th, 1939, the Governor-General issued a decree concerning the confiscation of works of art, including decorative arts (Verordnung ueber die Beschlagnahme von Kungstgegenstaenden im Generalgouvernement). This decree says: 
All publicly-owned objects of art in the Generalgouvernement which are not already subject to the ruling of the decree of November 15th, 1939, concerning the confiscation of the property of the former Polish State, are herewith confiscated for purposes conducing to the common weal. 
Apart from “art collections and objects of art which formed the property of the former Polish State." the following are also considered "publicly-owned objects of art": (1) private collections designated by the Special Commissioner fuer die Erfassung und Sicherung der Kunst- und Kulturschaetze ; (2) all objects of art owned by churches, with the exception of those needed for daily service. (Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs, Nr. 12). The decree further ordered all owners and curators of such objects or collections to notify their possessions within three months, threatening severe penalties for noncompliance. The first executive decision for this decree, dated January 15th, 1940 (Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs, Teil H., Nr. 6), shortened the time-limit for registration to February 15th, 1940, and declared that all objects of artistic value dating before 1850 come under its ruling. The following objects were specified more particularly: 
(a) Paintings; (b) sculptures; (c) products of decorative art such as antique furniture, china, glass, goldsmiths' and silversmiths' work, tapestries, carpets, needlework, lace, vestments, etc.; (d) drawings, engravings and woodcut prints, etc.; (e) rare manuscripts, music manuscripts, autographs, hand-painted books, miniatures, prints and books, bookbindings, etc. ; (f) weapons, pieces of armour, etc.; (g) coins, medals, seals, etc. 
Two later decrees also partly affect museums and collections. They are: the decree of July 23rd, 1940 (Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs, Teil 1., Nr. 48) concerning societies, and that of August 1st, 1940 (Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouverneurs, Teil 1., Nr. 50) concerning the law on foundations. By these, almost all Polish societies have been dissolved, and an end has been put to the activity of foundations. Their large collections are to become the property of the "Generalgouvernement," which means that they are exposed to dispersal, or even to destruction. 
The decree of December 16th is an even more glaring violation of the rulings of The Hague Convention than that of November 15th, 1939. Clause 52 of the Convention expressly limits an occupying Power's requisitioning rights to objects needed by the army, thus of course excluding all works of art. Clause 46 forbids the confiscation of private property. Clause 56 states; "Municipal, ecclesiastical, charitable, educational, artistic and scientific objects shall be treated like private property, even if they belong to the State" ; that is to say they may not be confiscated. Furthermore:" Any seizure, destruction, or intentional degradation of such institutions, of historical monuments, of works of art or science, is forbidden and must be punished." Thus everything is reversed. The Hague Convention had granted even State collections the rights of private property in order to safeguard cultural values; but the Governor-General's decree treats even private and Church property as public. Since the Hague Convention was also signed by Germany, these decrees and the resulting action must be regarded as wholly lawless. 
It must be stressed that the major confiscations were carried out before the issuing of these decrees. The National Museum and the Czartoryski Museum of Cracow, the National Museum, the Army Museum, the State Museum of Archaeology, the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (all of these in Warsaw), and many others, were already despoiled between October and December 1939. The Veit Stoss altar was also carried off at this time. These acts were not based on any written orders to the owners and curators, nor even on any specific oral declaration. People were simply informed that such and such objects or parts of a collection would be removed. No explanation was given as to whether this was to be a confiscation or a provisional seizure. The decrees themselves also contain contradictions and doubtful passages. They order confiscation, but the chief of the confiscating office bears the title of "Special Commissioner for the Requisition and Safeguarding of Works of Art and Culture." There may have existed some vague idea of providing for a future attempt at justification by representing the matter, not as confiscation and pillage within the meaning of international law, but as a real safeguarding of works of art and national memorials in time of hostilities; but the Cracow collections did not need to be transferred from their buildings for such a purpose, since these had not sustained any damage and the presence of the entire museum staff was sufficient guarantee of proper care. As for the Warsaw museum buildings, these had suffered damage, more or less, but, nevertheless, the collections were best safeguarded by their own staffs, who were thoroughly acquainted with them, had remained on the spot during the siege, and continued at their posts after the entry of the occupying forces. Besides, the buildings had received proper attention, and those collections which had survived were in no danger there. German methods of packing and transport are proof enough that their actions were not dictated by any solicitude for the fate of art treasures and relics. Museum pieces were placed in leaky cases and transported in open lorries during wet autumn and winter weather. They were packed by inexpert hands, which caused much damage. Often objects were heaped in cars unpacked and quite unprotected. In many instances no list was made, and reprisals were threatened for any attempt to make one. The selection was frequently made simply by Gestapo men. 
The promulgation of the confiscating decrees had specific and highly dangerous consequences: Germans in uniform began to visit private houses and to carry out "confiscations" on their own and for their personal profit, always quoting the published decrees. Mostly they carried away carpets, sometimes pieces of furniture, more rarely works of art proper. The plague of these thefts lasted in Warsaw for about two months. 
Despite the duty of registering works of art which the decree sought to enforce, the office of the Special Commissioner received very few notifications, not more than a dozen or so. The owners of some of the requisitioned collections lodged protests with the Governor-General, but they never received any reply. Here, as elsewhere, we find the chaos characteristic of Nazi organization, which is the more striking in that its regulations are usually very detailed and cover a wide field. The confiscation of works of art and historic relics was instituted without any semblance of legal foundation: then decrees were issued in order to create that semblance; and then their rulings were not observed. By these decrees all public collections should be considered confiscated in their entirety; yet it was precisely after their publication that the extent of confiscations was in general no more enlarged. Nor was any action taken to bring about a more complete registration of private collections, and they were plundered only on the basis of information supplied by German historians of art. Then, since approximately the middle of May, 1940, that is, since the attack on Belgium, Holland and France, German interest in Polish possessions of this kind began to dwindle perceptibly and then almost to cease. The possibility of further" legalised" (as the Germans consider it) pillage, of course exists all the time. 

During the first period, which began with the entry of German troops, as well as during the second, which followed the confiscating degrees, there was a marked difference in the treatment meted out to the" Generalgouvernement's" two chief centres of intellectual life, WARSAW AND CRACOW. This is undoubtedly no accident, but the result of explicit instructions. Only Church property suffered greater depredations in Cracow than in Warsaw-public collections were robbed far less brutally here, and private property (with the exception of Jewish belongings) was respected. Not only were there no confiscations at private residences and flats, but no inspection was even made. Warsaw was treated with far greater severity, probably because of its determined resistance in September 1939. The despoiling of museums and public collections was here carried out on unusually extensive scale; all the larger private collections, and even many small ones in private apartments, were affected. 
According to information spread by officials of the German administration during the winter of 1939-40, the confiscations carried out in Warsaw had for their purpose the creation of a great central museum of art and culture in Cracow. Warsaw was to be punished by being deprived of all its collections and reduced to the level of a purely commercial centre. In the spring of 1940 these plans were given up, and it is known that at that time the central German authorities planned to organize in Berlin a great exhibition of "Polish War Booty," where the plunder was to be divided among German museums and collections. The confiscated objects were therefore mostly placed in temporary storage centres, in the new building of the University Library of Cracow and in the storerooms of the Warsaw National Museum. It was probably the beginning of systematic air raids on Germany which brought about the postponement of this exhibition till the end of the war, so that the collections have hitherto for the most part remained packed in these two stores. In June 1941, before the outbreak of war with Russia, their contents were transported (again by the Gestapo) to Maehrisch Truebau, under scandalous conditions and not without new thefts. In the autumn of 1941 these collections were brought back to Cracow. 

Conditions of life in Poland under German occupation are such that it is impossible to make a complete inventory of losses caused by hostilities or by confiscation. Terrorism is at such a pitch that many private owners are afraid even to make a list of their losses, let alone give information about them. The fact that no receipts were given and the making of any notes concerning removal forbidden renders any detailed registration impossible, and this is the more mischievous as many private collections and even some public ones had never been fully studied. This is a further loss for Poland, since history will be deprived of even a description or a copy of some of these lost and destroyed possessions. We must also expect the making of any inventory to become more difficult month by month owing to the huge losses of the intelligentsia; people are dying of sickness and exhaustion in prisons and concentration camps, they have lost their memories, such materials as photographs, family documents, letters and so on are dispersed. 
+ + + 
The description of LOSSES OCCASIONED BY CONFISCATION in Warsaw and Cracow collections, which follows here, should be read merely as a sample of the Occupying Power's conduct. 
In CRACOW it was the ecclesiastical collections and treasures which suffered the most painful losses. They were the richest in Poland and had the oldest traditions. 
The CATHEDRAL was robbed of the so-called Lance of St. Maurice presented to Boleslas the Brave by the Emperor Otto III in A.D. 1000; of a Sicilian reliquary of the twelfth century; of the famous fourteenth-century ivory box which had been the property of Queen Jadwiga; of numerous gold crosses, monstrances, and chalices of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries; of a picture of St. George dating back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, a priceless sixteenth-century vestment (that of Piotr Kmita) was carried off, together with a series of eight Brussels and nine Flemish seventeenth century tapestries, a further series of nine tapestries bearing the Swan coat of arms (first half of the seventeenth century), four individual Gobelins, a carpet given by King John Sobieski, and three richly-illuminated parchment manuscripts. 
The CHURCH OF OUR LADY was deprived of the Veit Stoss triptych of which we have already spoken. The altar-case itself was not taken away till April 1940, the church having been closed for a week for that purpose. This triptych, on which Veit Stoss worked in Cracow during the years 1477-89, is the artist's finest work, and exercised very considerable influence on the development of art in Poland, Bohemia and Slovakia at the turn of the fifteenth century. Many studies on the subject have been published by Polish art historians, and ten years ago the sculpture was thoroughly overhauled at State expense, on which occasion the magnificent original Gothic colouring was brought to light and restored. This had been painted over during earlier restorations carried out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thereupon, further studies by Polish scholars were published, such as an album with French text (Le Retable de Notre Dame a Cracovie, by Professor Tadeusz Szydlowski, Paris, 1935). The masterpiece of Veit Stoss was thus not only duly valued and safeguarded, but its beauty was also made familiar to the whole world in various publications. We do not know what has become of it in Germany. In the autumn of 1940 there was an exhibition of photographs of it at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, but no part of the work itself was shown. In addition to this, the church also suffered the loss of nine pictures by Hans Suess of Kulmbach, an act as unwarranted as the first, since Suess, Duerer's best pupil, painted them during his stay in Cracow, about A.D. 1515, as a commission for the Cracow Church. Four fifteenthcentury Gothic chalices and eight seventeenth-century Baroque chalices were taken from the church treasury. 
Four further pictures by Hans Suess of Kulmbach (also painted in and for Cracow) were taken from the CHURCH OF ST. FLORIAN, together with the so called Gruenwald Reliquary (Gruenwald is the usual Polish name for Tannenberg) of Commander de Bode, A.D. 1360. 
In December 1940, a series of eleven Gothic stained-glass windows, dating back to the turn of the fourteenth century, were taken from the DOMINICAN ABBEY. They had once formed part of the cloisters. 
The CHURCH OF THE BERNARDINES was robbed of a carving representing St. Anne with the Virgin and Child by Veit Stoss. 
The armoury of the ROYAL CASTLE on Wawel Hill was put in the storerooms of the new building of the University Library. It is not known whether this signifies confiscation or whether it was merely done to make room. The rest of the Castle collections was left untouched, to serve as furnishings for the Governor-General's residence. These furnishings were further supplemented by objects confiscated elsewhere. It seems that some of the furniture from Warsaw Castle found its way here; for instance, a set of Kielce furniture, upholstered in Cordovan leather and dating from the second half of the eighteenth century. 
The chief losses suffered by the NATIONAL MUSEUM of Cracow are through confiscations in the section of Polish mediaeval art. The selection was made by Professor Frey. The more important items are: a polyptychon of A.D. J 504 ("St. John the Almoner "), the chief existing work of the Cracow school of painting of that time, which had been brought some years before from the Cracow church of the Augustine Order. Its donor was Marshal Lanckoronski. Then a Gothic polyptychon from the church of St. Giles in Cracow, a number of Madonna sculptures of the Veit Stoss school, and many other pictures and sculptures. The Polish Medireval Art Section of this museum was the largest and most valuable in Poland. (See Plate 7.) 
The Feliks Jasienski branch of the National Museum has ceased to exist. 
In September 1939, immediately on the entry of German troops into the city, its director was ordered to give up the keys of the building, and since then none of the museum staff has been admitted inside. As far as is known, the collection was "semi-privately" pillaged, so that there is no hope of ever recovering it. It had consisted of some 15,000 items, mainly specimens of Japanese art, and also collections of Polish and other pictures and prints, textiles, and so on. 
Nothing remains, either, of the Barącz branch of the Museum, the contents of which have been used to furnish the Potocki residence at Krzeszowice, (See Plate 14.) This has been confiscated and bestowed by Hitler personally on the Governor-General, so that presumably the furnishings are also considered Dr. Frank's private property. This branch of the National Museum had consisted of a rich collection of carpets and other antique textiles, of antique furniture, armour and decorative art. 
The Czapski branch, consisting of a famous collection of coins, the largest 1n Poland, was sealed up, and nothing is known of its fate. The inventories and catalogues of the whole of the National Museum were taken away. 
Apart from these confiscations and private thefts affecting whole museum sections, there is an endless, persistent and destructive nibbling at the Museum for pictures and objects of decorative art, for the purpose of decorating German offices and private lodgings. The Germans treat the museum as a storage centre of whose contents they dispose at will, not only for themselves, but also for their wives, as, to make an instance, for Frau Waechter, wife of the Governor of Cracow. 
The mind of contemporary Germany and its attitude towards art in Poland was well summed up in the ejection of the National Museum from its premises in the Clothiers' Hall in the autumn of 1940. Since the museum had already been deprived of its two other buildings-those of the Barącz and of the Jasienski branches-the collections were taken from the central rooms (those in the Cloth Hall) to the small house of the Czapski branch. Here all the rooms were filled up with packing-cases, so crowded that there is no possibility of access to anything, and unpacking is out of the question. Part of the collections found no room on these premises, and was stored in the Industrial Museum. There is of course no possibility of any museum work, nor even of a simple safeguarding of the collections. 
The CZARTORYSKI MUSEUM of Cracow was robbed, not once, but repeatedly. 
We have already mentioned the looting of the inestimable collections stored at Sieniawa, which must be considered irretrievably lost. From the Polish point of view, the dispersal by theft of the large collection of Polish royal jewels and relics is a particularly grievous loss. Its gravity may be realized if we recall that over a hundred years ago the Polish regalia were destroyed by the Prussians, who carried them away from the Castle of Cracow and melted them down, after removing the precious stones. 
Objects such as pictures left behind by the first German thieves were later taken to Cracow by German officials and there subjected to successive waves of confiscation, one of which occurred soon after this return, others in June and August 1940. Over a dozen paintings by foreign masters were seized, and the most famous: Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, Leonardo's Girl With a Weasel, and Rembrandt's Landscape, were taken to Germany, (See Plate 13.) The most valuable tapestries, carpets, antique weapons, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and so on, were also confiscated. Thus was an institution laid waste which was among the finest private museums in Europe, and was undoubtedly the most valuable collection of foreign art existing in Poland. The magnificent Czartoryski Museum at Goluchów suffered a similar fate. 
Seven unusually valuable carpets were confiscated in the INSTITUTE OF THE HISTORY OF ART of Cracow University. It is said that they have been taken to Vienna. Other objects confiscated here include an original drawing by Veit Stoss (Wit Stwosz), - probably taken to Breslau, as it was selected by Professor Frey and his collaborator, Dr. Sappok - part of the pictures, and mediaeval Polish sculptures, all these being taken to Germany. The rest of the institute's collection was removed to one of the storage centres and there thrown on a heap with the rest. 
The POLISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND LETTERS was robbed of part of its prehistoric collection, but part was left untouched. A German curator was, however, appointed, and the Polish staff were given subordinate functions. 
The famous and unique Balthasar Behem Codex (known as the Codex pictoratus), dating back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, of which the numerous miniatures illustrate Cracow's contemporary life, has been seized from the UNIVERSITY LIBRARY and carried off to Germany. 
The plundering of the Cracow ACADEMY OF FINE ARTs - whose professors had there deposited their private collections -  lasted throughout December 1939. The building was closed and the pictures were used for the decoration of offices or stolen for private profit. 
At Cracow, collections in private apartments were in general neither confiscated nor even inspected. Nevertheless, one picture - The Massacre of the Innocents (School of Cranach) - was taken away from a private owner in August 1940, and the numerous collections owned by Jews were, of course, plundered wholesale. 

In WARSAW the comparatively few works of art confiscated from church property were taken from thr CATHEDRAL and the DIOCESAN MUSEUM. This is perhaps due to the fact that the Warsaw churches possess few specimens of mediaeval decorative art, and the majority of their  treasures dates from the Baroque period and after, whereas the Office of the Special Commissioner 
devotes its attention more particularly to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. probably under the influence of Professor Frey, who specializes in mediaeval studies. 
The painted ceilings of the WARSAW ROYAL CASTLE were stupidly and barbarously destroyed. With the exception of that in the ballroom, representing Chaos, by Bacciarelli, all of them had survived fire and shelling unharmed, but they were smashed to pieces during the demolition of the Castle interior between December 1939 and February 1940. A separate chapter is devoted to this monstrous proceeding. The State Collections in the Castle bad suffered proportionately little loss during hostilities. The most valuable pieces were taken to the National Museum during the fire, and between October and December 1939 the Germans took many of them away to Cracow. But the greater part of the collections had not been moved to the National Museum and had remained in their place. There were hundreds of pictures, much antique furniture (seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries), many objects of decorative art, pottery, glass and the like. The plundering of it all began with the first days of the occupation of Warsaw, and became systematic from October 18th onwards - that is, from the day on which the Governor-General, Dr. Frank. appeared at the Castle with his retinue. More details will be given in the chapter devoted to the Castle. This much may be said here, in order to show the extent of the pillage: that even table-sets, table-linen and kitchen utensils were divided up between various German offices. 
The store rooms of the Management of the POLISH STATE COLLECTIONS OF ART, which had been housed in the library wing of the Castle were systematically plundered all through October and November 1939 by the Feldgendarmerie quartered in the Castle and by various German officials - they were finally cleaned out in December of that year. Not a thing remains of several thousand Polish and foreign pictures (including a large part of the Krosnowski Gallery), of engravings, sculptures, manuscripts, archives and the rest. Since the winter of 1939-40 many pictures and antiques from these collections have appeared in the hands of antique dealers and private traders who have acquired them from German functionaries of the lower ranks. 
The collections at the LAZIENKI PALACE were, during the siege of Warsaw. mostly transferred to the National Museum, and thence the Germans have taken them to Cracow. Among them were well over a hundred of the most valuable pictures of King Stanislas Augustus, including works by Fr. Bol., B. van der Helst, Fr. Pourbus and others; sculptures, clocks, eighteenth-century furniture, pottery and the like. It is said that Rembrandt's Portrait of a Young Man has been offered as a present to Dr. Frank - nothing is known of the rest. It may well be feared that the collection has been at least in part dispersed, for objects belonging to it are known to be now in private hands at Cracow, having allegedly been bought from antique dealers. Part of the antique furniture of the Palace was parcelled out among German officers' messes and offices, in the autumn of 1939. The chandeliers were taken to the Governor-General's Warsaw residence in the building of the former Czechoslovak Legation. 
The works of art in the building of the SEYM and SENATE were in part destroyed, in part stolen, after the German police had taken possession. They had included Matejko's well-known picture, The Constitution of the Third of May. 
A collection of plaster casts belonging to the UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW had survived the siege unscathed, but when German police units occupied the university buildings in the first days of October 1939, it suffered much damage, because beds, cupboards and other furniture from a military hospital were stored in the rooms in which it was displayed. In the summer of 1940 this collection was transferred to the main university building and further damaged in the process, quite apart from the damage caused by conditions in its new quarters, which had been rootless since the fire in September 1939. The collection, which had included unusually valuable casts, some of them once owned by King Stanis1as Augustus, must be regarded as wholly destroyed. 
The university library's COLLECTION OF PRINTS AND DRAWINGS was in great part taken to Cracow in December 1939. It had been the largest of its kind in Poland, and its importance rivalled that of other European collections. The core of it was the splendid collection of drawings, engravings and architectural designs brought together by Stanislas Augustus, and added to later by such collections as that of the Warsaw Philomatic Society and others. 
Confiscations at the Warsaw NATIONAL MUSEUM were far more extensive than at that of Cracow. They were effected between October and December 1939, and the confiscated objects were then sent to Cracow. Nothing certain is known about their further fate. They seem to have been deposited for a time in the building of the University Library, and some of them appear to have been used later for decorating the residence at Krzeszowice. The "legal" side of the matter has not been made clear, for there has been no official decree of confiscation, nor have any receipts been issued. 
The collection of Polish mediaeval art, consisting of some scores of pictures and painting, was removed almost without exception. 
In the foreign section, about a hundred valuable pictures were carried off. The section of decorative art was despoiled of many thousands of pieces, including fine collections of Italian, Dresden and Polish pottery, or seventeenth century glass-ware, tapestries, textiles, furniture, clocks, snuff-boxes, and so on. 
The entire numismatic collection of Polish and foreign coins was carried off. 
The foreign section, the finest of its type in Poland, had been one of world-wide importance, and had included Byzantine and Roman coins, as well as Byzantine seals. The Polish section had numbered over twelve thousand specimens, and had been the second most important in Poland, the Czapski collection ranking first. The major part of the prehistoric collection, and all the ethnographic exhibits, were also seized. 
In the spring of 1940 the ARMY MUSEUM and the National Museum were fused under the new name of a Warsaw City Museum. Before this, however, in the autumn and winter of 1939, the Army Museum had been deprived of all its antiques, from the oldest up to those of the seventeenth century. These included numerous coats and pieces of armour, firearms and other weapons, many thousand pieces in all. Much was also taken from the Museum Library. Nothing is known of the further fate of these collections. Unfortunately they seem to have been dispersed, part sent to Munich, part to a museum in Bohemia, part left in Cracow. This dispersal renders the possibility of any future reassembling very doubtful. 
The STATE MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY was in October 1939 partly occupied by soldiers. At the beginning of November 1939, there appeared Professor Dr. Ernst Petersen of Rostock, formerly curator of the prehistoric collections at Breslau, in company with Herr Schleif, Director of the Olympia Expedition, and closed the museum doors to the Polish staff. In the course of November these two gentlemen removed several thousand exhibits, such as numerous specimens of the Stone Age, a large number of others in iron, copper and bronze, ivory and amber work, pottery, a collection of Roman, Arabic and mediaeval European coins, also the museum cases, the museum and office furniture, the whole library of special literature, comprising some ten thousand volumes, all the museum catalogues, reports, and so on and so on. In addition, they took away the museum archives and all the private scientific materials of the staff. In September 1940 the museum was ejected from its quarters and the remainder of its collections was transferred to the National Museum. 
The Museum of the KRASINSKI LIBRARY was, in the winter of 1939-40, robbed of several score pieces, including two valuable pictures and many works of decorative art in gold, silver, ivory, and other media. In the autumn of 1941 the museum was turned out of the library building. 
Unknown German authorities, who did not disclose their identity and failed to give any receipt, in the winter of 1939-40 took away from the salvaged remainder of the ZAMOYSKI LIBRARY some fifty illuminated mediaeval manuscripts, the finest of the collection. After a year they were returned. Over a score of other manuscripts were confiscated. 
About the middle of October 1939, the Gestapo took away from the WARSAW SOCIETY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF THE FINE ARTS (the" Zachęta") several hundred pictures, the greater part of its collection, and transferred them to the National Museum. Part was left behind, including the biggest pictures, which were rolled up. Many other pictures from the collection were taken away for the purpose of decorating German offices and private lodgings, no receipt ever being given. The pictures were carried to the museum under the worst conditions imaginable, in open lorries, without any lists or minutes of the proceedings. The purpose of the action is hard to understand, for these pictures were neither packed nor sent away, but simply left on the spot. Probably this was part of some plan not fully considered and later relinquished-there were many such-but the pictures have not been returned to their owners. In the winter of 1939-40 all the Society's original drawings by foreign artists were confiscated. There were several hundred of them, by French, Italian and Dutch masters. The Society was first closed and then declared to be dissolved. 
The MUSEUM OF PHILATELY was confiscated and carried away in its entirety. 
As far as we know, this was done by the German postal authorities. 
The STATE NUMISMATIC COLLECTION, which numbered many thousand pieces, was confiscated and carried off, after having previously suffered individual acts of pillage. 
The whole collection of the CENTRAL INVENTORY OFFICE of the Ministry of Education was taken away. It consisted of twenty to thirty thousand photographic plates, several thousand photographs, many thousand plans of Polish architectural monuments, a card index of all antique immovables in Poland, and a great wealth of material for the study of the history of art in the country. This was in part the collection of the Society for the Protection of Antiquities, in part the twenty years' work of all the Polish curators of antiquities and of many other Polish specialists, commissioned by the Ministry of Education. Only a small part of this great mass of material, accumulated by Polish research work and scientific studies, had been published up to the outbreak of war. It seems that this collection was taken to Cracow. Its materials are utilized for publications by German scientists, the source being naturally not named. 
Polish circles have no influence whatever on the fate of works of art in public buildings. It is known that these are frequently moved from place to place, often used to decorate private lodgings, at times later taken away entirely as constituting private property. 
Contrary to the state of things in Cracow and other larger towns, in Warsaw and its vicinity many private collections also were confiscated. In some cases receipts were given; often, however, even the regularly constituted official confiscating authorities gave no such receipts, to say nothing of cases of wilful individual robbery. For reasons easily understood, it is not possible to enumerate here the losses thus suffered by private individuals, but they number many thousand items. 
Private collections owned by Jews and persons of Jewish origin must for the most part also be considered as having ceased to exist, for only a fraction can have been hidden or transferred to the ghetto-where their tenure IS also extremely uncertain.

Under present conditions a registration of COL L E C T I O N S  plundered or confiscated OUTSIDE WARSAW AND CRACOW is very difficult, and it is only possible to mention the most notorious facts. 
Ecclesiastical property has suffered most at Plock and Sandomierz, where goldsmiths' work of the late Gothic and early Renaissance period has been taken away, as also have a number of pictures by Cranach, Hans Suess of Kulmbach, and others. The parish church of Bodzentyn (voivodship of Kielce) has been robbed of its monumental triptych, dated 1510, which showed the figure of its donor, Bishop Konarski. This is perhaps the most important piece of Polish painting of that date extant. Moreover, many provincial churches have been deprived of their most valuable mediaeval and Renaissance relics. 
King John Sobieski's ancient residence of Wilanow probably ranks first among private sufferers. Here some 400 objects were confiscated, including a hundred pictures from the picture-gallery, a large collection of porcelain, Dresden vases, Limoges enamels, and so on. All the relics of King John Sobieski were also confiscated, including the magnificent inlaid escritoire presented to him by Pope Innocent IX after the victory of Vienna in 1683. 
Amongst other collections which have also suffered are those of Prince RadziwiU at Nieborow, Count M. Potocki at Jablonna, Prince A. Lubomirski at Przeworsk, Prince Czartoryski at Pelkinia, Count J. Tarnowski at Dzikow, and Count H. Tarnowski at Dukla. 
Shortly after the occupation of Lwow by the Germans in 1941, Dr. Kai Miihlmann arrived there with his helpers, including Dr. Behrens of the History of Art Section of the Cracow Institut fuer Deutsche Ostarbeit, and robbed the Ossoliński Institute of the whole of its fine collection of original Duerer drawings, which had been published in reproduction some years before the war. At the demand of the local German authorities, it is proposed to organize a private exhibition of all the most valuable objects in the city's museums, ostensibly for their benefit, but it is to be feared that this has no other purpose than to facilitate the selection of items for further confiscation.

2. Nazi Policy in "Territories Incorporated in the Reich” 

Museum collections in the territory "incorporated in the Reich" seem in general to have been left undisturbed, but the Polish staff have been dismissed and Germans employed in their stead. In several cases the Polish directors were arrested. As far as we know, at Poznań in the Muzeum Wielkopolskie, the largest piece of Polish monumental sculpture only was destroyed  - the Wawel Procession by Waclaw Szymanowski. The most valuable part of the Goluchow collection was plundered at Sieniawa, as already described. It is reported that the German Frontier Guard (Grenzschutz) destroyed many works by Polish artists which they found on the spot, and carried off the rest; but this information has not yet been checked. In numerous private collections at country residences great losses have been caused by the Germans installed there in lieu of the rightful owners, for they relegate family relics and Polish works of art to the attics, or simply destroy them. An estate near Wloclawek may serve as an illustration of their proceedings. Here the pictures were cut out of their frames and taken away, antique furniture was used for firewood, and the family archives (which comprised valuable collections from the rising of 1863) were turned to household use. Another instance is to be found in an estate near Inowroclaw, whence a valuable special library (history of art) was taken away to be sold as waste paper. 

Our description has been devoted mainly to the losses suffered by the largest collections, but those of PROVINCIAL MUSEUMS have also been -considerable. About a hundred of them, created by public effort, and belonging to educational and topographical societies, have not only been deprived of all .care and attention, but also partly destroyed by dispersal. The former Polish staff is denied access ; they are turned out of their own premises, their possessions are at the mercy of German administrative officials and police. 
We should add here that even those Polish museums which have not been wholly destroyed or confiscated by the Germans are not accessible to the public. The only exception known to us is the. Tatra Museum at Zakopane. It was never closed for a single day, even during hostilities, and it continues to function unhampered; possibly because it is mainly devoted to the folklore and art of the Polish mountaineers, whom the Germans are endeavouring to credit with a separate nationality. 

Art collections and relics at manor-houses and country residences have doubtless been in great part destroyed, particularly in territory" incorporated in the Reich." 
The confiscation of collections belonging to persons of Jewish origin would need a chapter to itself. 
Lastly, it is necessary to state that museums and collections are all closed, and that any Polish care for them is rendered impossible, so that further damage and loss must be expected. 
The museum staffs have from the very first been helpless and at the tender mercies of the Gestapo. We will only mention the case of Dr. Pajzderski. Director of the Muzeum Wielkopolskie of Poznan, who was arrested in November 1939, held prisoner for several months in the Poznan fort, and at last taken to a concentration camp, where he died. He had never played any part in political life, nor had he ever undertaken any anti-German activities. We refrain from mentioning others, for reasons easily understood. 
The German attitude towards Polish culture in general, and museums in particular, is shown by the latest decisions concerning the museum buildings of Cracow and Katowice. The new building of the National Museum at Cracow, which was being erected from funds given by all classes of the people. has been sold by the Cracow municipality (naturally directed by Germans at present) to Dr. Frank, the Governor-General, for the sum of three million zlotys, and turned into a club for German officials and employees. This building was nearing completion when the war broke out. At Katowice, the new building of the Silesian Museum, already far advanced, is to be demolished as the work of a Jewish architect! On its site a German public building is to be erected. 
In order to grasp this attitude-unprecedented in modern times-of the Germans towards Polish museums and collections, historic relics and works of art, scientific studies and even scientists, it is necessary once again to emphasize the undoubted fact that the foremost task they have set themselves is the utter destruction of Polish culture and the disorganization of its centres. The intention to profit at Poland's expense ranks second in their plans, and that explains many seemingly incomprehensible actions and apparently senseless orders which cannot result in any immediate gain to the Germans. 
Another important characteristic of the present-day German mind is this: that whatever part national interests may play in ordering their actions, they are very much alive to the possibilities of personal profit. The Governor-General himself sets the example, for his "private" residence at Krzeszowice has been furnished and decorated with works of art officially stolen from museums and private owners, which are now considered his "property" Other dignitaries, and even officials of the lower ranks, follow suit. 

And it is unfortunately impossible to claim that only the Hitler gang is responsible. We have shown that it is not Gestapo officials and the highest German authorities alone, who take part in pillaging Polish museums and collections, in their wilful and deliberate destruction. The work is directed and carried out by German scholars, university professors and museum specialists.

January, 1942.
 

Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals

Judgement : War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

Judge PARKER:

(...)
One of the most notorious means of terrorising the people in occupied territories was the use of concentration camps. They were first established in Germany at the moment of the seizure of power by the Nazi Government. Their original purpose was to imprison without trial all those persons who were opposed to the Government, or who were in any way obnoxious to German authority. With the aid of a secret police force, this practice was widely extended and in course of time concentration camps became places of organised and systematic murder, where millions of people were destroyed.

In the administration of the occupied territories the concentration camps were used to destroy all opposition groups. The persons arrested by the Gestapo were as a rule sent to concentration camps. They were conveyed to the camps in many cases without any care whatever being taken for them, and great numbers died on the way. Those who arrived at the camp were subject to systematic cruelty. They were given hard physical labour, inadequate food, clothes and shelter, and were subject at all times to the rigours of a soulless regime, and the private whims of individual guards. In the report of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate's Section of the 3rd U.S. Army, under date 21st June, 1945, the conditions at the Flossenburg concentration camp were investigated, and one passage may be quoted:

" Flossenburg concentration camp can be described as a factory dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary object of putting to work the mass slave labour, another of its primary objects was the elimination of human lives by the methods employed in handling the prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations sadism, inadequate clothing, medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, freezing, forced suicides, shooting, etc., all played a major role in obtaining their object. Prisoners were murdered at random, spite killings against Jews were common, injections of poison and shooting in the neck were everyday occurrences; epidemics of typhus and spotted fever were permitted to run rampant as a means of eliminating prisoners, life in this camp meant nothing. Killing became a common thing, so common that a quick death was welcomed by the unfortunate ones."

The murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations reached its height in the treatment of the citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. Some four weeks before the invasion of Russia began, special task forces of the SIPO and SD, called Einsatz Groups, were formed on the orders of Himmler for the purpose of following the German armies into Russia, combating partisans and members of Resistance Groups, and exterminating the Jews and communist leaders and other sections of the population. In the beginning, four such Einsatz Groups were formed, one operating in the Baltic States, one towards Moscow, one towards Kiev, and one operating in the south of Russia. Ohlendorf, former chief of Amt III of the RSHA, who led the fourth group, stated in his affidavit:

" When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader of Einsatzgruppe D, in the southern sector, and in the course of the year during which I was leader of the Einsatzgruppe D it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women and children. The majority of those liquidated were Jews, but there were also among them some communist functionaries."

" in view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished, not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the armed forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population . . . Commanders must find the means of keeping order by applying suitable draconian measures."

" It should be possible to avoid atrocities and to bury those who have been liquidated. To lock men, women and children into barns and set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause, and hurts our reputation severely."

". . . Then the electric floodlights which had been erected all round the ghetto were switched on. SS and militia details of four to six members entered or at least tried to enter the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed, and the inhabitants did not open upon the knocking, the SS men and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the dwelling. The owners were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or whether they had been in bed.... Car after car was filled. Over it hung the screaming of women and children, the cracking of whips and rifle shots."

". . . Now we heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks, men, women and children of all ages, had to undress upon the orders of an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip.... Without screaming or crying, these people undressed, stood around by families, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for the command of another SS man, who stood near the excavation, also with a whip in his hand.... At that moment the SS man at the excavation called something to his comrade. The latter counted off about 20 persons, and instructed them to walk behind the earth mound.... I walked around the mound and stood in front of a tremendous grave; closely pressed together, the people were lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. The excavation was already two-thirds full; I estimated that it contained about a thousand people.... Now already the next group approached, descended into the excavation, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot."

" It is not our task to Germanise the East in the old sense, that is to teach the people there the German language and the German law, but to see to it that only people of purely Germanic blood live in the East."

" The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and Germanic health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable."

" What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take. If necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur, otherwise it is of no interest to me."

It was the same story in the occupied area of the Soviet Union. At the time of the launching of the German attack in June, 1941, Rosenberg told his collaborators:

" The object of feeding the German people stands this year without a doubt at the top of the list of Germany's claims on the East, and here the southern territories and the northern Caucasus will have to serve as a balance for the feeding of the German people.... A very extensive evacuation will be necessary, without any doubt, and it is sure that the future will how very hard years in store for the Russians."

A somewhat similar fate was planned for Czechoslovakia by the defendant von Neurath, in August, 1940; the intelligentsia were to be "expelled," but the rest of the population was to be Germanised rather than expelled or exterminated, since there was a shortage of Germans to replace them.

In the West the population of Alsace were the victims of a German " expulsion action." Between July and December, 1940, 105,000 Alsatians were either deported from their homes or prevented from returning to them.

A captured German report dated 7th August, 1942, with regard to Alsace states that:

" The problem of race will be given first consideration, and this in such a manner that persons of racial value will be deported to Germany proper, and racially inferior persons to France."

(A recess was taken.)

THE PRESIDENT: I now ask General Nikitochenko to continue the reading of the judgment.

General NIKTOCHENKO: Article 49 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may levy a contribution of money from the occupied territory to pay for the needs of the army of occupation, and for the administration of the territory in question. Article 52 of the Hague Convention provides that an occupying power may make requisitions in kind only for the needs of the army of occupation, and that these requisitions shall be in proportion to the resources of the country. These Articles, together with Article 48, dealing with the expenditure of money collected in taxes, and Articles 53, 55 and 56, dealing with public property, make it clear that under the rules of war, the economy of an occupied country can only be required to bear the expenses of the occupation, and these should not be greater than ,the economy of the country can reasonably be expected to bear. Article 56 reads as follows:

" The property of municipalities, of religious, charitable, educational, artistic and scientific institutions, although belonging to the State, is to be accorded the same standing as private property. All pre-meditated seizure, destruction. or damage of such institutions historical monuments, works of art and science, is prohibited and should be prosecuted."

" God knows, you are not sent out there to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live. That is what I expect of your exertions. This everlasting concern about foreign people must cease now, once and for all. I have here before me reports on what you are expected to deliver. It is nothing at all, when I consider your territories. It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve."

" The task for the economic treatment of the various administrative regions is different, depending on whether the country is involved which will be incorporated politically into the German Reich, or whether we will deal with the Government-General, which in all probability will not be made a part of Germany. In the first mentioned territories, the . . . safeguarding of all their productive facilities and supplies must be aimed at, as well s a complete incorporation into the Greater German economic system, at the earliest possible time. On the other hand, there must be removed from the territories of the Government-General all raw materials, scrap materials, machines, etc., which are of use for the German war economy. Enterprises which are not absolutely necessary for the meagre maintenance of the naked existence of the population must be transferred to Germany, unless such transfer would require an unreasonably long period of time, and would make it more practicable to exploit those enterprises by giving them German orders, to be executed at their present location."

In many of the occupied countries of the East and the West, the authorities maintained the presence of paying for all the property which they seized. This elaborate presence of payment merely disguised the fact that the goods sent to Germany from these occupied countries were paid for by the occupied countries themselves, either by the device of excessive occupation costs only forced loans in return for a credit balance on a " clearing account " which was an account merely in name.

In most of the occupied countries of the East even this presence of legality was not maintained, economic exploitation became deliberate plunder. This policy was first put into effect in the administration of the Government-General in Poland. The main exploitation of the raw materials in the East was centred on agricultural products and very large amounts of food were shipped from the Government-General to Germany.

The evidence of the widespread starvation among the Polish ,people in the Government-General indicates the ruthlessness and the severity with which the policy of exploitation was carried out.

The occupation of the territories of the U.S.S.R., was characterised by premeditated and systematic looting. Before the attack on the U.S.S.R., an economic staff -Oldenburg- was organised to ensure the most efficient exploitation of Soviet territories. The German armies were to be fed out of Soviet territory, even if "many millions of people will be starved to death." An OKW directive issued before the attack said:

" To obtain the greatest possible quantity of food and crude oil for Germany- that is the main economic purpose of the campaign."

" We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings."

In addition to the seizure of raw materials and manufactured articles, a wholesale seizure was made of art treasures, furniture, textiles and similar articles in all the invaded countries.

The defendant Rosenberg was designated by Hitler on the 29th January 1940, Head of the Centre for National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research, and thereafter the organisation known as the " Einsatzstab Rosenberg" conducted its operations on a very great scale. Originally designed for the establishment of a research library, it developed into a project for the seizure of cultural treasures. On the 1st March, 1942, Hitler issued a further decree, authorising Rosenberg to search libraries lodges and cultural establishments, to seize material from these establishments, as well as culture treasures owned by Jews. Similar directions were given where the ownership could not be clearly established. The decree directed the cooperation of the Wehrmacht High Command, and indicated that Rosenberg's activities in the West were to be conducted in his capacity as Reichsleiter, and in the East in his capacity as Reichsminister. Thereafter, Rosenberg's activities were extended to the occupied countries. The report of Robert Scholz, Chief of the special staff for Pictorial Art, stated:

"During the period from March, 1941, to July, 1944, the special staff for Pictorial Art brought into the Reich 29 large shipments, including 137 freight cars with 4,174 cases of art works."

Museums, palaces and libraries in the occupied territories of the U.S.S.R. were systematically looted. Rosenberg's Einsatzstab, Ribbentrop's special " Battalion ", the Reichscommissars and representatives of the Military Command seized objects of cultural and historical value belonging to the people of the Soviet Union, which were sent to Germany. Thus, the Reichscommissar of the Ukraine removed paintings and objects of art from Kiev and Kharkov and sent them to East Prussia. Rare volumes and objects of art from the palaces of Peterhof, Tsarskeye Selo, and Pavlovsk were shipped to Germany. In his letter to Rosenberg of the 3rd October, 1941, Reichscommissar Kube stated that the value of the objects of art taken from Byelorussia ran into millions of roubles. The scale of this plundering can also be seen in the letter sent from Rosenberg's department to von Milde-Schreden in which it is stated that during the month of October, 1943, alone, about 40 box-cars loaded with objects of cultural value were transported to the Reich.

With regard to the suggestion that the purpose of the seizure of art treasures was protective and meant for their preservation, it is necessary to say a few words. On the 1st December, 1939, Himmler, as the Reich Commissioner for the " strengthening of Germanism ", issued a decree to the regional officers of the secret police in the annexed eastern territories, and to the commanders of the security service in Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. This decree contained administrative directions for carrying out the art seizure programme, and in Clause 1 it is stated:

" To strengthen Germanism in the defence of the Reich, all articles mentioned in Section 2 of this decree are hereby confiscated.... They are confiscated for the benefit of the German Reich, and are at the disposal of the Reich Commissioner for the strengthening of Germanism."

" I was able to gain some knowledge on the public and private collections, as well as clerical property, in Cracow and Warsaw. It is true that we cannot hope too much to enrich ourselves from the acquisition of great art works of paintings and sculptures, with the exception of the Veit-Stoss altar, and the plates of Hans von Kulnback in the Church of Maria in Cracow . . . and several other works from the national museum in Warsaw "

Article 6 (b) of the Charter provides that the " ill-treatment ,or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose, of civilian population of or in occupied territory" shall be a war crime. The laws relating to forced labour by the inhabitants of occupied territories are found in Article 52 of The Hague Convention, which provides:-

" Requisition in kind and services shall not be demanded from municipalities or inhabitants except for the needs of the army of occupation. They shall be in proportion to the resources of the country, and of such a nature as not to involve the inhabitants in the obligation of taking part in military operations against their own country."

" The territory which now works for us contains more than 250,000,000 men, but the territory which works indirectly for us includes now more than 350,000,000. In the measure in which it concerns German territory, the domain which we have taken under our administration, it is not doubtful that we shall succeed in harnessing the very last man to this work."

In the early stages of the war, manpower in the occupied territories was under the control of various occupation authorities, and the procedure varied from country to country. In all the occupied territories compulsory labour service was promptly instituted. Inhabitants of the occupied countries were conscripted and compelled to work in local occupations, to assist the German war economy. In many cases they were forced to work on German fortifications and military installations. As local supplies of raw materials and local industrial capacity became' inadequate to meet the German requirements, the system of deporting labourers to Germany was put into force. By the middle of April, 1940, compulsory deportation of labourers to Germany had been ordered in the Government General; and a similar procedure was followed in other eastern territories as they were occupied. A description of this compulsory deportation from Poland was given by Himmler. In an address to SS officers he recalled how in weather 40 degrees below zero they had to " haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands." On a later occasion Himmler stated:-

" Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.... We must realise that we have 6-7 million foreigners in Germany.... They are none of them dangerous so long as we take severe measures at the merest trifles."

" During all this time a great number of Frenchmen were recruited, and voluntarily went to Germany."

" Not only voluntary, some were recruited forcibly."

" The calling up started after the recruitment no longer yielded enough results."

" Out of the five million workers who arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily,"

" Let us forget for the moment whether or not some slight pressure was used. Formally, at least, they were volunteers."

The defendant Sauckel was directly under the defendant Goering as Commissioner of the Four Year Plan, and a Goering decree of the 27th March, 1942, transferred all his authority over manpower to Sauckel. Sauckel's instructions, too, were that foreign labour should be recruited on a voluntary basis, but also provided that " where, however, in the occupied territories the appeal for volunteers does not suffice, obligatory service and drafting must under all circumstances be resorted to. " Rules requiring labour service in Germany were published in all the occupied territories. The number of labourers to be supplied was fixed by Sauckel, and the local authorities were instructed to meet these requirements by conscription if necessary. That conscription was the rule rather than the exception is shown by the statement of Sauckel already quoted, on the 1st March, 1944.

The defendant Sauckel frequently asserted that the workers belonging to foreign nations were treated humanely, and that the conditions in which they lived were good. But whatever the intention of Sauckel may have been, and however much he may have desired that foreign labourers should be treated humanely, the evidence before the Tribunal establishes the fact that the conscription of labour was accomplished in many cases by drastic and violent methods. The " mistakes and blunders " were on a very great scale. Man-hunts took place in the streets, at motion picture houses, even at churches and at night in private houses. Houses were sometimes burnt down, and the families taken as hostages, practices which were described by the defendant Rosenberg as having their origin " in the blackest periods of the slave trade." The methods used in obtaining forced labour from the Ukraine appear from an order issued to SD officers which stated:

" It will not be possible always to refrain from using force.... When searching villages, especially when it has been necessary to burn down a village, the whole population will be put at the disposal of the Commissioner by force.... As a rule no more children will be shot.... If we limit harsh measures through the above orders for the time being, it is only done for the following reason.... The most important thing is the recruitment of workers."

" All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent, at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure."

" We have made a request for an order that a certain percentage of men in the Ack-Ack artillery must be Russians; 50,000 will be taken altogether. 30,000 are already employed as gunners. This is an amusing thing, that Russians must work the guns."

"At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it to-day, as raw material, as labour. What after all thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labour, is that the prisoners - died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger."

" The aim of this new gigantic labour mobilisation is to use all the rich and tremendous sources conquered and secured for us by our fighting armed forces under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, for the armament of the armed forces, and also for the nutrition of the Homeland. The raw materials, as well as the fertility of the conquered territories and their human labour power, are to be used completely and conscientiously to the profit of Germany and her Allies.... All prisoners of war from the territories of the West, as well as the East, actually in Germany, must be completely incorporated into the German armament and nutrition industries.... Consequently it is an immediate necessity to use the human reserves of the conquered Soviet territory to the fullest extent. Should we not succeed in obtaining the necessary amount of labour on a voluntary basis, we must immediately institute conscription or forced labour.... The complete employment of all prisoners of war, as well as the use of a gigantic number of new foreign civilian workers, men and women, has become an indisputable necessity for the solution of the mobilisation of the labour programme in this war."

When the witness Bach Zelewski was asked how Ohlendorf could admit the murder of 90,000 people, he replied:

"I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and Jews not even human, then such an outcome is inevitable."

" We have fought against Jewry, we have fought against it for years: and we have allowed ourselves to make utterances and my own diary has become a witness against me in this connection- utterances which are terrible.... A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased."

With the seizure of power, the persecution of the Jews was intensified. A series of discriminatory laws were passed, which limited the offices and professions permitted to Jews; and restrictions were placed on their family life and their rights of citizenship. By the autumn of 1938, the Nazi policy towards the Jews had reached the stage where it was directed towards the complete exclusion of Jews from German life. Pogroms were organised which included the burning and demolishing of synagogues, the looting of Jewish businesses, and the arrest of prominent Jewish business men. A collective fine of one billion marks was imposed on the Jews, the seizure of Jewish assets was authorised, and the movement of Jews was restricted by regulations to certain specified districts and hours. The creation of ghettoes was carried out on an extensive scale, and by an order of the Security Police Jews were compelled to wear a yellow star to be worn on the breast and back.

It was contended for the Prosecution that certain aspects of this anti-Semitic policy were connected with the plans for aggressive war. The violent measures taken against the Jews in November, 1938, were nominally in retaliation for the killing of an official of the German Embassy in Paris. But the decision to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia had been made a year before. The imposition of a fine of one billion marks was made, and the confiscation of the financial holdings of the Jews was decreed, at a time when German armament expenditure had put the German treasury in difficulties, and when the reduction of expenditure on armaments was being considered. These steps were taken, moreover, with the approval of the defendant Goering, who had been given responsibility for economic matters of this kind, and who was the strongest advocate of an extensive rearmament programme notwithstanding the financial difficulties.

It was further said that the connection of the anti-Semitic policy with aggressive war was not limited to economic matters. The German Foreign Office circular, in an article of 25th January, 1939, entitled " Jewish question as a factor in German Foreign Policy in the year 1938", described the new phase in the Nazi anti-Semitic policy in these words:

" It is certainly no coincidence that the fateful year 1938 has brought nearer the solution of the Jewish question simultaneously with the realisation of the idea of Greater Germany, since the Jewish policy was both the basis and consequence of the events of the year 1938. The advance made by Jewish influence and the destructive Jewish spirit in politics, economy, and culture paralysed the power and the will of the German people to rise again, more perhaps even than the power policy opposition of the former enemy Allied powers of the first World War. The healing of this sickness among the people was therefore certainly one of the most important requirements for exerting the force which, in the year 1938, resulted in the joining together of Greater Germany in defiance of the world."

The plan for exterminating the Jews was developed shortly after the attack on the Soviet Union. Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, formed for the purpose of breaking the resistance of the population of the areas lying behind the German armies in the East, were given the duty of exterminating the Jews in those areas. The effectiveness of the work of the Einsatzgruppen is shown by the fact that in February, 1942, Heydrich was able to report that Estonia had already been cleared of Jews and that in Riga the number of Jews had been reduced from 29,500 to 2,500. Altogether the Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Baltic States killed over 135,000 Jews in three months.

Nor did these special units operate completely independently of the German Armed Forces. There is clear evidence that leaders of the Einsatzgruppen obtained the co-operation of Army Commanders. In one case the relations between an Einsatzgruppe and the military authorities was described at the time as being "very close, almost cordial "; in another case the smoothness of an Einsatz-commando's operation was attributed to the " understanding for this procedure " shown by the army authorities.

Units of the Security Police and SD in the occupied territories of the East, which were under civil administration, were given a similar task. The planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions is best illustrated by the original report of the SS Brigadier-General Stroop, who was in charge of the destruction of the ghetto in Warsaw, which took place in 1943. The Tribunal received in evidence that report, illustrated with photographs, bearing on its title page: "The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists." The volume records a series of reports sent by Stroop to the Higher SS and Police Fuehrer East. In April and May, 1943, in one report, Stroop wrote:

" The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer SS ordered therefore on the 23rd April, 1943 the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I therefore decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto, without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burnt. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings, and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire.... Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in the sewers.... Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes, and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued, the tougher became the members of the Waffen SS, Police and Wehrmacht, who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner."

These atrocities were all part and parcel of the policy inaugurated in 1941, and it is not surprising that there should be evidence that one or two German officials entered vain protests against the brutal manner in which the killings were carried out. But the methods employed never conformed to a single pattern. The massacres of Rowno and Dubno, of which the German engineer Graebe spoke, were examples of one method, the systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camps, was another Part of the " final solution " was the gathering of Jews from all German occupied Europe in concentration camps. Their physical condition was the test of life or death. All who were fit to work were used as slave labourers in the concentration camps; all who were not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Certain concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were set aside for this main purpose. With regard to Auschwitz, the Tribunal heard the evidence of Hoess, the Commandant of the camp from 1st May, 1940, to 1st December, 1943. He estimated that in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time 2,500,000 persons were exterminated, and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation. Hoess described the screening for extermination by stating in evidence:

" We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realised our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated."

" It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one half-hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses."

Evidence was given of the treatment of the inmates before and after their extermination. There was testimony that the hair of women victims was cut off before they were killed, and shipped to Germany, there to be used in the manufacture of mattresses. The clothes, money and valuables of the inmates were also salvaged and sent to the appropriate agencies for disposition. After the extermination the gold teeth and fillings were taken from the heads of the corpses and sent to the Reichsbank.

After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some instances attempts were made to utilise the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap. Special groups travelled through Europe to find Jews and subject them to the " final solution." German missions were sent to such satellite countries as Hungary and Bulgaria, to arrange for the shipment of Jews to extermination camps and it is known that by the end of 1944, 400,000 Jews from Hungary had been murdered at Auschwitz. Evidence has also been given of the evacuation of 110,000 Jews from part of Roumania for "liquidation." Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4.000.000 were killed in the extermination institutions.

more: The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Die Urteile der Nürnberger Prozesse, Die Hinrichtung der Kriegsverbrecher des 3. Reiches

Wroclaw, Poland: the capital of Polish Silesia
proud of its Roman - Catholic   past, present and future
silesian.eu

After all the half-measures of the years before 1939, a sweeping and radical land reform was carried through. The estates were broken up and distributed to the peasants; only in the Western Territories did the government keep the big Prussian estates intact, to be used as state farms. It is one of the ironies of Polish history that it was Communist-inspired policy that turned most of Poland into a patchwork of little private strip-fields, owned by peasants whose fierce independence and primitive methods have hampered the planned economy ever since. Basic industries were nationalised, and by 1946 the state sector controlled over ninety per cent of industrial production.
Poland in 1945 was ready, even impatient, for swift and revolutionary social change. The radical mood which had arisen during the Nazi occupation still prevailed; not only workers and peasants but the surviving intellectuals wanted to create a new, strong, socially just and egalitarian nation, to overcome all the weaknesses which had contributed to the loss of independence in 1939. In another country, this mood would have given a Communist Party its historie opportunity to take the leadership of this hunger for change. But in Poland, where the Communists had been escorted to power by Soviet bayonets, it was a different matter.
As party leader, Władysław Gomułka saw this very clearly. He was unlike most of his colleagues in the PPR leadership in two ways: he was a worker rather than an intellectual, and he had spent the war in the underground in Poland rather than in the Soviet Union. His two predecessors, both parachuted in from Moscow, had died in the war: Marceli Nowotko was murdered in a still-mysterious feud in 1942, and his successor Pawel Finder had been arrested by the Gestapo the following year. Gomułka had led the PPR side in the unsuccessful negotiations for a common military and political platform with the Home Army. As the new secretary of the PPR, he had taken an independent line, helped by an accidental but convenient breakdown in radio contact with Moscow when he took office.
Gomułka was a harsh intolerant personality with a violent temper. His grim, bony skulI, eyes peering at the world through steel-rimmed spectacles, encouraged his opponents to regard him as a pitiless Marxist fanatic. But although he was a convinced Communist, he was never a 'Comintern man' who took orders unquestioningly from the Great Socialist Motherland. The fact that he was in prison at the time probably saved him from the fate of his comrades in the old KPP, who were summoned to Moscow and for the most part murdered in 1938.
This was a crime which Gomulka never forgot. He accepted the need for close alliance between Poland and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet military and political support without which - given the strength of the non-Communist parties in the first years - the Communists would neither have acquired the main share of power nor kept it for more than a few weeks. But he intended to find a 'Polish Road to Socialism' which would avoid the mistakes of the Soviet Union and find gradual acceptance in a Catholic nation whose patriotic tradition was anti-Russian.
In this up hill task, he faced three main problems. The first was Soviet behaviour within Poland, where Soviet 'advisers' had taken command of the security police and where Russian soldiers we re running wild, looting and frequently killing. The second was his own party. The PPR membership had risen from 30,000 at the beginning of 1945 to some 300,000 by April, swamping the party with careerists, half-baked revolutionaries and mere brigands who in some places were threatening to collectivise the land and even announcing that Poland was to become a republic of the Soviet Union.
The third problem, which became dangerous the moment that Mikolajczyk returned to Poland, was the huge revival of non-Communist politics, headed by the Peasant Party. Gomulka might wish to give a democratic appearance as he moved cautiously along his 'Polish Road' but, unless he could smash or cripple these political rivals before the 'free elections' prescribed by Yalta, the PPR would be swept away.
Gomulka made some progress. He ensured that the new government behaved with ostentatious respect towards the Church, and Bierut, as head of state, walked with Catholic bishops in religious processions. The Soviet Union made a faint show of goodwill by imposing only light sentences on the kidnapped resistance leaders in Moscow. More important for Poland's stability was the final Big Three meeting at Potsdam in July 1945, at which Stalin - against British and American doubts - insisted on the demarcation of Poland' s new western border along the rivers Oder and Neisse, including the city of Stettin (Szczecin) on the west bank of the Oder estuary. Final recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier was deferred to a future peace conference. As for Gomulka's problems with the PPR, the bubble burst soon after Mikolajczyk's return; party membership collapsed to about 65,000 in the summer of 1945 as masses of Poles defected to the Peasant Party and the other revolving groups.
But the bloodshed went on. Although Bór- Komorowski's successor as head of the Home Army, General Leopold Okulicki, had dissolved the AK in January, some Home Army units and many NSZ bands carried on the struggle, raiding towns and villages to murder PPR members and ambushing Soviet convoys on the roads. In return, Polish security troops aided by Soviet regulars carried out their own repressions and atrocities. An amnesty in August 1945 brought 42,000 men and women out of the underground, but Okulicki's successor, Colonel Jan Rzepecki, then organised a new Freedom and lndependence Resistance (WiN), in touch with the exile government in London, and fought on. A separate problem was a desperate and determined army of Ukrainian partisans in the foothills of the Carpathians, whose final success before dissolving and escaping to the West was to ambush and kill General Karol Świerczewski ('General Walter' of the Spanish Civil War) in March 1947.
The fighting - almost a Polish Civil war - cost tens of thousands of lives and poisoned political life with hatred, as Gomułka and Bierut accused Mikołajczyk and his allies of secret contact with the underground. It petered out only in early 1947, when another amnesty brought most of the surviving guerrillas out of the forests. The Ukrainian population of south-eastern Poland suffered savage punishment. Their villages were destroyed; some Ukrainian groups were resettled in the Western Territories and the rest deported to summary execution or labour camps in the Soviet Union.
In June 1946, there was a first trial of strength between the political parties of the new Poland. The Communists needed public evidence that the 'programme of the left' had popular support; ingeniously, they proposed a referendum on three questions to which they knew that most Poles - whatever their politics - would be inclined to answer  'Yes'. The referendum asked the electors whether they approved of the abolition of the Senate (the upper house of parliament), of land reform and the nationalisation of basic industries, and of the new frontiers on the Oder-Neisse line.
These questions put Mikołajczyk in a trap - as they were meant to. His party had supported all three changes. Yet he could not miss this chance to show the world the strength of the PSL. Rather unconvincingly, he launched a campaign for a 'Yes' to the last two points but a 'No' to the abolition of the Senate. The PPR, supported by most of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), toured the country calling for 'Three Times Yes'.
The question on the Senate had become a vote of confidence in the government's domination by the Communists, and the campaign was a chaos of abuse and intimidation. The polling took place on 30 June. Ten days later, the government announced the results: on the vital first question, sixty-eight per cent had voted 'Yes' and only thirty-two per cent 'No'. Jerzy Morawski, then one of the younger Communist leaders, today admits with bitter candour: 'I found out afterwards that the results had been faked. In reality, the situation was probably just the reverse: two-thirds had voted for what Mikołajczyk was asking.' For the inner circle of the PPR (the Communists), who knew the real totals, the referendum was an ugly shock. Morawski recalls: 'It was a warning which showed how strong the influence of Mikołajczyk's opposition was in Poland. It showed how much effort to pressurise, destroy, intimidate and discredit Mikołajczyk's opposition was still needed in order to win the elections.'

It was an effort which Gomułka and Bierut now proceeded to make. The Yalta 'free' elections did not take place until January 1947, but the six months that followed the 'Three Times Yes' referendum brought an onslaught of official terror against the Peasant Party. Meetings of the PSL were broken up by mobs, party buildings were destroyed, PSL members were threatened with the loss of their jobs, and there was astring of arrests, kidnappings and murders. In the midst of this violence, a horrific incident took place at Kielce in July 1946, when a building sheltering Jews on their way from the USSR to Palestine was attacked and forty of them were killed. At the time, everybody blamed everyone else for the 'Kielce Pogrom'. Mikołajczyk claimed it was a Communist police provocation, while others saw it as a spontaneous explosion of the anti-Semitism which was, undeniably, a part of the hysterical mood of Poland in the first years after the war. The Communists said the pogrom was the work of right-wing nationalists. The right-wingers and several Catholic bishops retorted by pointing out that many of the Communist leaders who had spent the war in the Soviet Union were Jews, especially in the secret police: a propaganda point which has festered in Polish consciousness ever since.
In the teeth of the storm, Mikołajczyk fought an erratic campaign. He appealed for international supervision of the elections, but Britain and the United States, now preoccupied with their confrontation with the Soviet Union in occupied Germany, paid no attention. For a time, the key to his victory seemed to lie with the PPS, the Polish socialists, now in tragic disorder. One fraction in the PPS wanted an open struggle against the Communists; even the pliable Osóbka-Morawski, the prime minister, was now rebelling against Gomułka's domineering style. Others, some from a genuine belief that the left must hold together and put through a socialist programme, some because they were fellow travellers planted in the PPS by the Communists or by Soviet intelligence, stood by the government and looked forward to an eventual fusion with the PPR. But when the Polish socialists approached the Peasant Party and asked them to join the (democratic bloc', hoping to keep Communist influence in the next government to a minimum, Mikołajczyk turned them down, refusing a secret offer of a quarter of the Sejm seats which would have made a mockery of the elections before they were even held.
Another body-blow to Mikołajczyk followed in September. Under President Truman, the United States was growing increasingly nervous about Soviet intentions in Europe. The Communist parties in France and Italy were powerful and militant; the western zones of Germany were sinking into a mire of hunger and hopelessness which looked like a breeding-ground for revolution. Conditions might soon be ripe for Stalin to advance his ideology and power to the Atlantic, if he so wished. In this situation, American aims rapidly changed from the hope of keeping Europe united to a policy of drawing a fire-break across the continent which Communism could not surrnount.The first requirement of the new policy was to show the Germans that the United States was not a hostile occupying power but a potential friend.