One hundred eighty-three professors from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków were captured as a part of a special action (Sonderaktion). Some were later released, but many were transported directly to death camps in Germany or were delivered to the Gestapo (the German secret police), a fate that, in reality, also meant death. These first acts of terror were then followed by arrests of members of the Polish intelligentsia, the clergy, political activists, students, and anyone suspected of having leadership skills, whose names appeared on specially prepared lists used during spring 1940 and summer of 1941. The captives were then placed in German prisons and concentration camps, especially Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.4
Nazi authorities closed Polish universities, schools, museums, research institutes, theaters, archives, libraries, publishing houses, and presses. Poles were not allowed to own radios or to listen to Polish music. Food was rationed, and the work order included all citizens. In December 1939 Germans introduced the rule of collective responsibility that they later used with horrifying frequency; in revenge for the wounding of a German soldier, they executed 107 Poles in Wawer near Warsaw. In January of the following year, plans were laid for the building of a concentration camp in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), where some 1.5 million people were to perish by the time the war was over.5 The terror further intensified in 1941, when an arbitrary German law allowed for indiscriminate street executions, imprisonment and torture, and street hunts (łapanki). Rural pacifications decimated the Polish population in hundreds of villages. The largest systematic action was a 1942 campaign in the Zamość region, where hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants were forcibly evicted to make room for German and Ukrainian settlers, while their children were sent to the Reich for Germanization purposes.6
Approximately 2 million Jews who found themselves on the territory of the Generalna Gubernia (many resettled from the area incorporated into Reich) were officially identified by a yellow Star of David worn on the clothing. Their possessions and businesses were confiscated. At the beginning of 1940 the Germans created work camps for Jews that did not differ much from concentration camps. In the ghettos created in many Polish cities, Jewish citizens were isolated and terrorized. They lived in terrible conditions, dying of hunger, brutal work, and epidemic diseases. In the spring of 1942 the Nazis began the introduction of the “Final Solution”: the ghettos were liquidated, and their inhabitants murdered en masse in concentration camps. Facing the liquidation of the largest Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, the Jewish population struck back against their oppressors in a military uprising, which the Nazis suppressed with great brutality.7
The Polish nation responded to the Nazi terror with the formation of an extensive network of the resistance organizations. Already by the end of September 1939, the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (Polish Victory Service)—the largest underground organization and the basis for the future Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army)—had been established and had initiated its activities. Eventually, a large percentage of the Polish population directly participated in or supported what became the strongest resistance movement on the territory of occupied Europe. The Home Army, together with other guerrilla forces (Bataliony Chłopskie—Peasant Battalions; Gwardia Ludowa—People’s Guard; and Narodowe Siły Zbrojne—National Armed Forces), participated in a number of actions, including derailing trains and blowing up bridges to slow down German military transports, executing high Nazi officials, freeing Polish prisoners, and engaging local German units in direct battles. The resistance movement also contributed to uplifting the spirits of the oppressed population through the organization of underground schools, theaters, presses, and publications, the protection of Polish national art treasures, the dissemination of information on Allied victories, or the encouragement of small acts of sabotage and slowdowns in work for the German economy. Polish resistance fighters also passed information on German military movements to the Allies. Youth from the Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego (ZHP, Polish scouting), which during the occupation reorganized itself into the storm troops known as Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks), worked within the Home Army.8
When the Soviet offensive approached Warsaw in July 1944, the leadership of the Home Army decided to call for an uprising in the capital. Fighting began on the streets of Warsaw on August 1, 1944, and lasted for sixty-three days of heroic struggle to wrest Warsaw from German hands. After initial successes on the Polish side, the Nazis gradually regained control of the city, killing both Polish soldiers and the civilian population, while the Soviet army waited on the other bank of the Vistula River. Deprived of help, short on munitions, food, water, and medicines, the Warsaw Uprising collapsed in the fall of 1944. In an act of revenge, the Germans evacuated the city and undertook its systematic destruction, razing it to the ground.9
The Nazi occupation caused tremendous population movements that resulted in masses of Poles remaining outside Polish borders, forming the bedrock of the Polish postwar diaspora. The first waves of Poles left Nazi-occupied Poland in September 1939, and each following year brought more forced population movements out of the country.10 In October 1939 the Polish government, after evacuating to France, reached an agreement with the French government to raise a Polish army there. By early summer of the next year, more than forty-four thousand Polish immigrants residing in France had enlisted, joined by about forty thousand officers and soldiers initially interned in Romania and Hungary as well as some eighteen hundred who escaped from occupied Poland.11 In June 1940 Polish forces in France numbered more than eighty-four thousand men. Of that number, more than thirty thousand were brought over to Britain after the collapse of France in 1940, and these troops were reinforced by volunteers recruited from refugees and escapees from Poland.12 The Polish army under British command (London became the new seat of the Polish government in exile) was reorganized in Scotland as the First Polish Corps. Polish soldiers participated in battles on several different fronts. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, Polish fighter pilots accounted for some 15 percent of enemy losses.13 The First Polish Armored Division, under the command of General Stanisław Maczek, fought during the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe and distinguished itself in battles on the territories of Belgium and France. After the capitulation of Germany, the division was stationed in the British zone of occupation in Haren, which was renamed Maczków in honor of the Polish commander.14
These military units in the West were not the only Polish soldiers outside of Poland after the end of the war. Combatants captured by the Germans in September 1939 had been interned in Oflagen (POW camps for officers) and Stalagen (POW camps for noncommissioned soldiers), and prisoners in the latter were forced to work in the German economy. The total number of Polish POWs taken in the initial invasion came close to four hundred twenty thousand. In the fall of 1944 some seventeen thousand insurgents of the Home Army who had fought in the Warsaw Uprising joined the imprisoned Polish soldiers.15 There was also a separate category of Polish citizens who had been forcibly conscripted into German military units. Most of them came from the areas that had been annexed directly to the Reich, and were considered “ethnically German.” In sum, between two hundred thousand and two hundred fifty thousand Poles served in German forces during the war.16
The largest category of migrants from Nazi-occupied Poland included people who worked for the German war machine as slave laborers. A few thousand accepted offers of work in the Reich, compelled by deteriorating living conditions in late 1939 and early 1940 and lured by German promises of a quick return to Poland. Some decided to join family members deported to or imprisoned in Germany. Wacław Jędrzejczak’s family, for example, made such a decision. After Wacław’s father had participated in the September campaign, he was imprisoned in a POW camp in Germany and then was forced to work for a German farmer. Despite receiving help from their extended family, Wacław’s mother and her two sons could barely support themselves. The reunification of the family in the Reich allowed them to survive the harsh economic reality of the war years.17 But low numbers of volunteers resulted in increased physical coercion, including penalties of prison and death camps for those who refused to comply. When even those methods did not bring about the expected results, the German authorities organized łapanki, the infamous manhunts in which they rounded up hostages in the streets and transported them to the Reich. The precise number of Polish citizens of various ethnic and religious
