September 1939 The Most Tragic of Times in Polish History

Invasion of Poland (Polenfeldzug, Fall Weiß) was an attack by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the Second Republic of Poland, which started World War2 in Europe.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, a week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the day after the Pact was approved by the Soviet Union’s Supreme Soviet.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the north, south and west on the morning of the Gliwice incident.
Slovak forces advanced alongside German forces from the north of Slovakia.
As the Wehrmacht advanced, Polish forces retreated from their leading operational bases near the German-Polish border to more established defensive lines in the east.
After defeating Poland in mid-September following the Battle of Bzura, the Germans gained a major advantage.
Polish forces then retreated to the southeast, where they prepared for a long defense of the Romanian bridgehead, expecting the expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom.
These two countries concluded treaties with Poland and declared war on Germany on 3 September; in the end, their support for Poland was very limited, but France attacked a small part of Germany during the Saar offensive.
On September 17, 1939 the USSR invaded Poland, supporting Germany in accordance with the provisions of the #Ribbentrop-#Molotov Pact and its secret protocol, which divided the territories of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland & Romania into the German & Soviet sphere of influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact

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The bloodiest and most costly war in terms of human life was World War II. The country that suffered the most, in proportion to its population, was Poland. By the summer of 1945, some 6 million Polish citizens, equivalent to 17,1% of the pre-war population, had been killed.

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Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

My Parents’ Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

The 82nd Anniversary of the Start of World War II

The 82nd Anniversary of the Start of World War II 
My mother didn’t like to talk about the war. When I was a kid, I would ask her, and she would just wave me away. If I kept asking, she would only say, “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away.” 
She would say this, and then she would walk away. It wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that she started to share her experiences in the war with me.
One of the first stories she told me was about the day German soldiers came to her village in eastern Poland in the fall of 1942. The story was brutal, and my mother told it staring into my eyes and talking slowly as if she wanted to make sure I understood every word she said. 
She told me of the day the soldiers came to my grandmother’s house. They shot my grandmother in the face, and then they kicked my mother’s sister’s baby to death. When they saw my mother, they didn’t care that she was just a teenager. They raped her so she couldn’t stand up, couldn’t talk. They broke her teeth when they shoved her dress into her mouth to stop her crying. 
When they were done, they dragged my mother into a boxcar that was filled with other young people from her village that were being taken to Germany to be slave laborers. The trip to Germany took a week. 
My mother cried all that week, first in the boxcars then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla, don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you and leave you in the field,” but my mother couldn’t stop. Even when she had no more tears, she cried, cried the way a dog will gulp for air when it’s choking on a stick or some bone it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed. 
 My mother finally stopped crying when the woman guard in charge gave her a cold look and knocked my mother down with her fist, and then told her if she didn’t stop crying she would shoot her. 
 My mother never thought she’d survive that first winter in the slave labor camp. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just what she was wearing when the Germans came to her house and killed my grandmother and took my mom to the camps. A soldier saved her life there. He saw her struggling to dig beets in the frozen earth with her hands, and he asked her if she could milk a cow. She nodded, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn where the cows were kept and raped her. Later, the cows kept her from freezing and gave her milk to drink.
Two and a half years later, the war ended, but it didn’t really end, not for her. The war was always with her. For my mother, like for so many of the Poles who survived, the war never ended. It was always with them.

(https://youtu.be/eTCWlnyx8vw)

Source: https://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-82nd-anniversary-of-start-of-world.html

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Hans Frank Starves Poles

Many Poles were on starvation rations during the war, so it would seem reasonable, especially considering that their whole family would be executed for hiding a Jew to ask if the Jew could assist in anyway.
Today Poles are condemned for this.
Any Pole that asked a Jew if they could aid them for housing and feeding them, is eliminated from being honored by Yad Vashem.

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8/24/2021

​On this day, August 24th, 1942 during the occupation of Poland by the Germans, Hans Frank, governor of the General Government, decided to starve the Polish people in order to provide more food for German troops and the German people. In a Cabinet session with his departmental chiefs in Kraków he ordered the stoppage of food rations for all Poles who were not working for German interests. 

Hans Frank: “Before the German people are to experience starvation, the occupied territories and their people shall be exposed to starvation…The general Government has taken on the obligation to send 500,000 tons of bread grains to the fatherland….it must be done cold-bloodedly and without pity…you will essentially find an additional increase of the quota of foodstuffs to be shipped to Germany and new regulations for the feeding of the Jews and of the Polish population.” (1)

All food was seized for German consumption. Farmers in the Polish countryside were subject to compulsory quotas and levies developed by the Germans, resulting in the ruthless confiscation of wheat, cattle, eggs, honey, and poultry from farms throughout the General Government which left millions of Poles facing starvation. The absence  of milk  subjected an entire generation of Polish children to  suffer from vitamin and protein deficiency.

 Consumers were divided into broad categories in which each received rations in proportion to alleged needs and importance. All-important food groups were rationed at weekly or monthly amounts. Bread rations were cut drastically.

More from Hans Frank’s diary:

“…more than 3 million persons are non-German normal consumers (Poles), who do not work directly or indirectly in the interests of Germany”…and that these “non-German normal consumers will receive, from 1 January 1943 to 1 March 1943, instead of 4.2 kg of bread per month, 2.8 kg; from 1 March 1943 to 30 July 1943 the total bread ration for the non-German normal consumers will be cancelled.”  (2)

 According to German regulations, each resident had to be satisfied with the amount of food he was entitled to according to the allocation set in the card system. The trouble was, they were starvation rations. Critical shortages of food arose in urban areas with people resorting to every possible means to find food. To try and fill the void, black markets sprung up, but being caught in any activity with black markets was punishable with a fine, months in a penal camp, or their life.  

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Photo: German soldiers during an inspection in search of illegal food.

Jadwiga Załuska, a nurse in occupied Warsaw, recalls:

 “The food situation was getting worse all the time but being rescued by people bringing food to Warsaw illegally…Everyone in Warsaw had some kind of haunt where on a designated day they could obtain some dairy product and meat …The business was generally conducted by women and their ingenuity was something.  They brought in (from the outlying farms) sausage under their clothes, winding pork fat around their waist. The most difficult to bring in was eggs and cream…There were so many women raising their children alone that they would walk kilometers carrying potatoes or eggs, the entire time faced with the possibility of confiscation and a beating…the obtaining of smuggled goods was an impossibility – people didn’t have the money and the majority were starving on food coupons. People were making up all kinds of dishes to quiet their stomachs. Sausage was being made from cabbage, pancakes from beans, spice cookies and cakes from carrots…and pumpkin.”(3)

The situation for the people of Poland was critical. The few Polish-run charitable organizations allowed by the Germans were overwhelmed.  The years 1942 and 1943 brought the greatest reduction in food available to the people of the General Government. Consistently malnourished, the people of Poland became easy prey to a host of diseases including tuberculosis, gastrointestinal and disorders, and communicable diseases. The people of Poland were doomed to suffer and starve right through to the end of the war. 

1.Frank diary. Document PS-E-2233 Cabinet session 2 4August 1942 Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume 4
2.Ibid
3.Chapter 5 . Wearing the Letter”P”. Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi  Germany 1939-1945

​Full article here: https://www.sophieknab.com/blog/hans-frank-starves-poles

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August 1944 in Warsaw, the Germans murdered eight Sisters of Charity for hiding sick Jews in a shelter. The Sisters were doused with gasoline and burned alive. There is no other nation that has suffered so much for helping Jews … We don’t want much, only the truth …

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“The German ambassador to Poland, Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven said:
– It was the Germans here in Wieluń and then all over Poland who committed crimes against humanity. Not some abstract Nazis, but German soldiers, administrators, German occupiers, committed the most serious crimes. Responsibility for this will never pass away – he said during a speech delivered on Wednesday in Wieluń.”

Finally, a useful quote

Full article here: (https://www.polishnews.co.uk/82nd-anniversary-of-the-outbreak-of-world-war-ii-german-ambassador-on-abandoned-flags-charge-daffaires-of-the-us-embassy-in-poland-on-cherishing-the-memory-of-victims-and-heroes/)

82nd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. German ambassador on abandoned flags, chargé d’affaires of the US embassy in Poland on cherishing the memory of victims and heroes

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Edward Reid – Polish Truth

If you think Western civilization can’t be rebuilt then take a look at this. After being destroyed by the Germans in 1944, the Poles rebuilt the Royal Castle in Warsaw on the original cellars, with many original fragments and salvaged furnishings. We should also state that the entire city was rebuilt from ashes. And they did this without reparations.

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Poles and Not Only Jews Were Subject to a Final Solution: Himmler on the Planned Extermination of Poles. IPN

The Destruction of the Polish Elite: Operation AB–Katyn, by Pawel Kosinski et al (eds.) 2009. Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (IPN), Warszawa

Himmler Exterminate Poles. Not Only Jews: Poles, Too, Were to Be Totally Destroyed

In the Foreword, Professor Janusz Kurtyka, then the Head of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), wrote:

“On 15 March 1940, in German-occupied Poznan, at a meeting of commanders of detention camps, SS Commander Heinrich Himmler said: ‘All the professionals of Polish descent should be used in our defence industry. Later, all Poles will disappear from the world. … It is therefore necessary that the great German nation saw its main task in destructing all Poles’.” (p. 8).

ANALYSIS OF THE GENOCIDE

This short book (87 pages) centers on the destruction of educated Poles, done by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union acting in unison. It is full of photos.

However, the elimination of Poland’s intelligentsia, and the reduction of the remaining Poles to slaves, was not an end in itself. The end was physical extermination, as with the Jews. Note that Himmler’s exterminate-Poles statements came almost two years before Wannsee. Just because the destruction of Poles was of a phased nature (intelligentsia first), and was long-term in character, does not make it any less real.

The Germans lost the war. They ran out of time.

(https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/09/16/poles-and-not-only-jews-were-subject-to-a-final-solution-himmler-on-the-planned-extermination-of-poles-ipn/)

Poles and Not Only Jews Were Subject to a Final Solution: Himmler on the Planned Extermination of Poles. IPN

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Living Under Nazi Occupation in Poland | WW2

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JD1s8xoHac)