Capitalism in Decay

Pictured: Several Polish intellectuals standing before a Fascist firing squad. Click here for more (possibly NSFL) photographs.

The idea of making a thread overviewing the Fascist atrocities against Poland came to me after I saw another Pole trivializing the Fascist occupation to make the Soviets look worse. It feels preposterous that I should have to write any of this since I’m not Polish at all, but I since I’ve never seen any Polish anticommunists mention these facts, I’ll have to discuss them.

The Fascist occupation of Poland was worse than the Fascist occupation of Western Europe. Whereas the Axis considered the occupations of Belgium, France and so on as temporary measures to desist shortly after the war, Poland was part of the Fascists’ long‐term goal of settler‐colonialism. The Axis expected the natives to become extinct by the 1960s. Quoting Volker R. Berghahn in Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences, page 32:

If this Generalgouvernement was seen by some [Fascists] as the base of a future Polish satellite state, to be created by the [Axis] after the war, their expectations were swept aside by a Führer decision of March 1941 “to turn this region into a purely German area within 15 to 20 years.”⁴⁰ As [the head of state] added a day later, “the Generalgouvernement will be a German area. Where 12 million Poles now live is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as the Rhineland.”

Once the Axis extinguished the Jews, Polish gentiles would have been next on the chopping block, an operation that was already underway sometime after Poland’s anticommunist régime abandoned its own people and fled to London. Quoting Dorothy R. Douglas’s Transitional Economic Systems: The Polish–Czech Example, pages 22–3:

In the case of population losses, the figures referred to losses from the whole native Polish part of the 1939 population, including the five million‐odd nationals east of the line, almost a million of them Jews, who would have been eligible subsequently for repatriation.

Losses from the large Ukrainian and Byelorussian population formerly living under Polish rule in the eastern territories were not included. The total pre‐war population of Polish nationals reckoned in this way amounted to 27,000,000 (out of a grand total of 35,000,000). Losses by death from this number amounted to no less than 22 per cent.

Such enormous destruction and loss of life, the Poles pointed out, was not accidental. Only a minor part of it occurred in the course of direct military action. Poland was fought over for a month in September 1939; again, more protractedly, in 1944 and 1945 as the [Axis] retreated; there was also the period of the Warsaw rising in August–September 1944.

Pictured: The aftermath of the Fascists slaughtering Polish POWs in 1939.

All these actions together cost the native Polish population losses of some 600,000 killed, 500,000 of them civilians. But the war and occupation as a whole cost the Polish population losses ten times as heavy—6,200,000 dead in all, more than 5,500,000 of them killed by deliberate occupation policies. These policies were specially designed for eastern Europe.

The general pattern of [Axis] occupation in western Europe will be familiar to the reader. There was looting, official and unofficial. There was absorption of the native economy into the [Axis] financial and war machine, there was the export of [neo]slave labour to [the Third Reich], there were varying degrees of subjection of native labour and of the native cultural leadership, to produce the most for [the Third Reich] at the least cost and to stamp out hope of national resistance, and there was quite special [mis]treatment of the Jews.

All these features were to be found also in Poland, though to a more extreme degree. But added to them was the special ‘Lebensraum’ policy for eastern Europe, involving planned biological extermination. An increasing proportion of the native population was to be physically eliminated, to make way for German settlers, those alive at any given time serving as [neo]slave labour on the spot. Such [neo]slave labour might be used wastefully, underfed and used up, since a decrease in the total was desirable in any case.

To be sure, the Third Reich’s hostility to Poles was not always obvious. The Third Reich happily collaborated with Polish antisemites such as the police force, and the short‐term strategies differed depending on the region. Pages 23–4:

Administration methods also differed from region to region and between different nationality groups. At the outset Upper Silesia was directly incorporated into the Reich, and other northern and western regions, reaching almost to Warsaw, were incorporated indirectly as a new German province, the Neu‐Reich.

In these regions Poles were declared to be not wanted and were to be subject to mass evictions while in the rest of the country, the so‐called ‘General Government’, they were at first promised tolerance. In the Neu‐Reich marriage of Poles was forbidden, and the more extreme measures of suppression later extended to the other territories were begun here at once.

[…]

In the General Government conditions were at first much better. Poles, to be sure, were eliminated from the local administration, but they were given to understand that they were supposed to continue at their daily business. It was only gradually that the full programme of destruction unfolded itself here.

This may explain why some Poles today believe that the Fascists were ‘better’ than the Soviets, and indeed a minority of Germans developed friendly relations with Polish neoslaves, but focussing on these (usually isolated) instances of tolerance misses the big picture: the long‐term goal was to exterminate the natives, including the collaborators once they were no longer useful. The only exceptions were to be a couple hundred thousand Poles after undergoing the unpleasant process of forced assimilation.

Among the first Polish gentiles that the Fascists exterminated were the intelligentsia, and no more Polish intellectuals were to exist. The Fascists laid waste to Polish culture, including books, glass‐ware, concert recordings, artefacts, archives, libraries, musea, hospitals, tuberculosis sanatoria, maternity and child care centres, clinics, laboratories, and hundreds of thousands of other buildings, and they usually transferred any undestroyed houses to settlers:

By the middle of 1940 expropriation here was complete, including all personal and household effects. Expulsions amounted to over a million, the most able‐bodied of the population being sent to [the Third Reich] proper as [neo]slave labour, the rest to the General Government for resettlement. There, stripped of all possessions and without adequate food, they were left for considerable periods of time in transit camps; thence the survivors were sent, some to concentration camps, the majority to assigned localities for permanent settlement.

Pictured: The Fascist expulsion of Poles from the Żywiec area.

The residual Polish population in the incorporated regions remained in a state of extreme subjection, deprived of property rights, cleared out of the more habitable dwellings, forbidden education, and not allowed to practise skilled trades and professions. Only manual labour was permitted them. Half rations and special low wage scales were introduced for Poles, and longer hours of work were required of them than of Germans. A special penal code for Poles was introduced.

One special section of the General Government, however, was singled out early for treatment comparable to that of the Neu‐Reich, This was the region around Zamosc in the extreme southeast of the country, where a [Fascist] colonization scheme was afoot. The idea was evidently, after beginning here, to extend a wide area of colonization northward all along the Polish–Soviet frontier, to create a protective belt, so to say, inhabited by Germans.

Mass evictions were carried on here from late 1941 on, but were stopped after the [Axis] defeat on the eastern front in 1943.¹

The Fascists would employ every means at their disposal for exterminating millions of Poles. Page 28:

[Fascist] biological policy, ‘to break down the biological strength of the Polish nation by all means leading to this end’,¹ operated in a number of ways. Toward the intelligentsia, as indicated above, the policy was, where possible, annihilation. Towards the Jews it was strictly annihilation. Towards the population at large it was whatever would cause the greatest excess of deaths over births, plus some sporadic annihilation.

The means employed for the Polish population at large were simple enough: excessive under‐nourishment; overwork; overcrowding; destruction of sanitary facilities; mass evictions with accompanying high death‐rate and breaking up of families; concentration and other camps with incredibly high death‐rates, plus gas chambers chiefly for the Jews; and finally, mass executions, as reprisals or as clearing operations.

Pictured: The aftermath of the Rudzki Most massacre in 1939.

In the matter of food deprivation, very high compulsory levies in kind were imposed on farmers, impoverishing the countryside. Whole districts were spoken of in German documents as being weakened by starvation and subject to epidemics. Polish rations applied commonly only to Poles working directly for the [Axis].

I feel that I should end this examination here so as to avoid testing your patience, but it is with reluctance that I have decided to continue in order to emphasize that these are the atrocities that anticommunists gloss over when they trivialize the Axis occupation of Poland. Someone might say that the information on the Jewish victims is ‘irrelevant’ as anticommunists don’t typically mention them in their trivialisations, but I interpret the antisemitism as a preview of what was in store for Polish gentiles once the Jewish people were all gone. Pages 29–32:

A special rôle in the biological policy field was played by the concentration camps. These were of three kinds. The first were labour camps, with three sub‐types: ordinary labour camps, penal camps, and labour camps for Jews.

The ordinary camps served simply to exploit manpower: to them were sent persons temporarily out of work. The penal camps were a cross between ordinary labour and concentration camps proper, with insufficient food rations and constant beatings entailing a high death‐rate. They differed from concentration camps in that their inmates were committed for a certain period of time, whereas in the true concentration camps the length of stay was indefinite.

Labour camps to which highly skilled Jewish craftsmen were sent were of a particularly exhausting character, with starvation, great overwork, and excessively brutal treatment. After being worked out, the Jewish workers were to be killed.

The concentration camps proper received inmates not only for specified offences, but often as a result of street or entire district or village round‐ups. Their chief function appeared to be to accelerate death by natural causes, i.e. by food inadequate to sustain life for more than a few weeks or months, by exposure, overcrowding, and hence disease. Sometimes, but not always, overwork and beatings also played a part.

Direct killings here were chiefly reserved for Jews. The extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) were operated almost exclusively for Jews. Usually Jewish sections were set apart in the larger concentration camps, with the victims killed in very large batches in gas chambers, either immediately upon arrival from a transport (this applied particularly to mothers and children) or after having been worked and starved into uselessness. (This applied more to able‐bodied men and women and to seasons when the camp was not too full.)²

The largest of these camps, [Auschwitz], actually processed 2,500,000 human beings. Its furnaces could accommodate 24,000 corpses a day when necessary, and it received Jews from all over Europe as well as from its native land [and from North Africa]. A number of railroad sidings received the many transports daily and despatched the possessions of the dead to [the Reich].¹

¹

The collection of passports, hand luggage, toilet articles, cooking utensils, school books, games, and children’s garments remaining over after the sortings, is unbelievably great. There is a room with half a million shoes, and another with hair to be made into mattresses, from the heads of many thousands of women. The enormous business conducted here by the occupationists is recorded in finely printed German forms, listing every conceivable garment, and every kind of personal possession, from ‘pencils‐ordinary’ and ‘pencils‐mechanical’ to belts, garters and different kinds of collar buttons.

Some of the furnaces themselves and their specially designed equipment could still be seen here in 1948, and also in the smaller Maidanek camp in eastern Poland, with the makers’ names on them, as could hundreds of cans of ‘Cyclon’ gas, each can sufficient for 300 people and labelled in German ‘Poison’, to which was added on the Maidanek cans, ‘Must be used within three months’. In the larger part of the Oswiecim camp (Birkenau), four great storage tanks, the size of large houses, still stand; these used to receive the human fat from the crematoria before it was processed into soap and fertilizer.

The size of the business end of all this procedure and the number of Germans at home who must have knowingly engaged in it, appeared to impress the Poles most of all. Since nearly a million Poles in the post‐war years, or about three out of every hundred living in Poland, are themselves survivors of concentration camp life, the feeling about the [Fascist] danger was surely something that any investigation of Poland’s post‐war structure and policies would have to bear strictly in mind.

A hint at future biological policy for Poland in case the [Axis] had not lost the war, was given by two features of the concentration camps. In several of them, medical experiments had been carried on on mass methods of sterilization of women by X‐rays. So far the women experimented on had died, but if successful, the methods, it was pointed out, would have proved extraordinarily quick and inexpensive.

The other feature was the enormous extension in size planned for the [Auschwitz] camp. Great tracts of land were still to be seen that had been in process of being prepared, and during the concluding months of the camp’s life new buildings sufficient to fill street after street had been ready to be assembled. The last of the [anticommunist] policies causing loss of life was group executions among the population at large.

(This probably includes the infamous Katyń forest massacre, as the little evidence for Soviet guilt is of questionable authenticity.)

Usually these occurred as a form of blanket reprisal for murder or injury done some German, sometimes for no assignable reason other than terror and the biological one. The victims themselves were commonly rounded up on the street. In any case, their ages, sexes, and numbers, and the manner of their deaths, followed no logical pattern.¹

¹

For example, there were 77 cases of mass burnings alive, 47 of them including children. At Łódź, a great textile centre not far from Warsaw, a burned‐out factory could still be seen set in a barbed‐wire stockade with observation turrets at the corners. Here some 3,000 Polish civilian prisoners, many of them simply rounded up on the street, were burned to death on 14 January, 1945, one day before the [Soviets] liberated the city. Those who jumped from the windows were shot. A graveyard opposite now holds their memorials, together with that of the Jews of Łódź.

The most clearly marked succession of practices was to be seen in the territories already referred to, incorporated directly by the [anticommunists] into the Reich. In the city of Łódź, a textile centre with many thousands of Jewish inhabitants, the stage‐by‐stage development of [Fascist] policy and the pattern connecting the fate of Jews and Gentiles were recounted to the writer by a survivor² approximately as follows.

In the ‘Old City’, largely inhabited by Jews, the [anticommunists] made a ghetto, gathering together all the 70 or 80,000 Jews of Łódź, and adding to them gradually Jews from the surrounding area. This was the first stage. At first they could come and go to work, then the area was sealed off by a ditch around it and no one was allowed in or out.

Next the Poles were dispossessed. All Poles had to leave all the best streets and leave behind all their belongings except what they could carry. The [Fascists], said my informant, did this everywhere in the region within the first three months of their Occupation. This was stage two. In every park, café, tramcar now appeared the sign, ‘For Germans Only’. Children from the age of twelve had to go to work, at street construction, at building labour, in factories.

Pictured: The Fascist expulsion of Poles from the Reichsgau Wartheland.

Stage three consisted of the liquidation of the ghetto. Its inhabitants, their numbers greatly swollen by new arrivals, were driven away to extermination camps. The buildings were looted and then sold individually for destruction.

Now came stage four in what my informant called the ‘conveyor system’, with the Poles in their turn becoming ‘raw material’ for extermination. There were man‐hunts (lapanka, the Poles called them), with no idea of selection of individuals on a logical basis.

Trucks would come and collect young people for work for the [Fascists]. Or if a German had been found murdered or had been struck by a Pole, a lapanka would round up and kill great numbers of Poles on the street. Then they would put up a notice, a red one with black letters on it, saying, ‘100 × 1’, signed by an S.S. leader.

(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for statistics.)

Pages 32–3:

The net biological effect of [Fascist] Occupation policy and combat losses was calculated by the Poles as follows.¹ Out of a prewar population of 27,000,000, total loss of life was estimated at something over 6,000,000. This figure included the killing in ghettoes and concentration camps of 3,200,000 Polish Jews; but it did not include the concentration camp killing on Polish soil of 1,500,000 Jews imported for that purpose from other countries in Europe.

Of these total losses, 644,000 or only something over 10 per cent, resulted from direct war operations. This included both civilian and military dead, and included such operations as the Warsaw rising. The remaining 90 per cent, nearly 5,400,000 persons, died from Occupation policy. A further breakdown of figures indicated over 3,500,000 murdered outright in extermination camps, ghettoes, so‐called pacification processes, and executions.

Something over 1,250,000 died in prisons, concentration camps and other places of detention from epidemics, starvation, bad treatment, etc. And something over 500,000 died outside of camps from undernourishment, beatings, overwork, and so forth.

Very striking was the disproportionate loss of life among the urban population. In absolute figures it was almost four times as great, in terms of rate of loss, nearly ten times as great as that of the rural areas. These figures of course included the Jewish dead, almost all of whom were city dwellers.

The rate of losses among intellectuals was also disproportionately high, although no total estimates were given. So was the loss among children. As to the balance between the sexes, the first post‐war census taken in 1946, indicated a ratio among adults of 140 females per 100 males.²

Sickness caused by the Occupation can only be guessed at, but the Poles estimated an increase in tuberculosis cases above expectance of over a million. The crippled and otherwise disabled were reckoned at 600,000, five‐sixths of them civilians.

In addition, nearly a million of the surviving population had suffered detention in concentration camps or prisons and nearly 2,500,000 had suffered transportation abroad for forced labour.

One need not be a communist to agree with the conclusion that the Fascist occupation was far worse than the Soviet presence, because as harsh as they might have been in suppressing thousands of anticommunists, there is simply no evidence to suggest that any Soviet officials were interested in converting Poland into a settler‐colony. Certainly, when we look at the Fascist occupation of Poland in a larger context, we see that it was of much greater significance, a significance that ordinary anticommunists never mention. Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’, page 63:

During the brutal five‐year occupation, [Fascist] ‘pacification’ and ‘resettlement[’] policies in Poland led to the murder of millions of Polish Christians and the near‐total extermination of Polish Jewry, as part of the declared [Fascist] intention to ‘erase’ the Polish nation, state and culture from the face of the earth.

In Poland, the [Fascists] adopted a policy of terror (Schrecklichkeit) against civilians at all levels of Polish society — unleashing a murderous wave of violence against Poland’s population (both Jewish and non‐Jewish). As part of this colonial‐style ‘pacification’, Polish elites and those segments of Polish society deemed capable of challenging [Fascist] rule (political leaders, educators, nobility, priests and intellectuals) were immediately put to death.

In many ways, Poland served as a kind of ‘dress rehearsal’ for Operation Barbarossa (the colonial war for Lebensraum in the Soviet Union). Seen in this light, the Polish ‘pacification’ campaign was a significant first step in the ongoing escalation of Nazi ‘out‐group’ policies, culminating in mass genocide and the Vernichtungskr[ie]g (War of Annihilation) against the Russian ‘Judeo‐Bolsheviks’.¹⁴

(Emphasis added.)

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Click here for events that happened today (April 6).

1924: The Fascists won the elections in Italy with a ⅔ majority.
1930: Josias’s fellows promoted him to the rank of SS‐Sturmbannführer.
1938: Imperial troops began to withdraw from Tai'erzhuang, abandoning ammunition and heavy equipment in their wake, and Washington recognized the Reich’s occupation of Austria.
1940: Emden embarked six hundred troops at Swinemünde, and Kriegsmarine’s Marine Gruppe 1 departed Cuxhaven, Germany for Narvik, Norway with two thousand soldiers on ten destroyers escorted by battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Marine Gruppe 2 departed Wesermünde, Germany for Trondheim, Norway with one thousand seven hundred soldiers on for destroyers escorted by cruiser Admiral Hipper. They both departed when it was nighttime so that the Allies wouldn’t spot them.
1941: A transport of 1,021 prisoners from Pawiak Prison in Warsaw arrived at Auschwitz. Several famous actors were among them, arrested for the murder of actor Igo Sym who collaborated with Axis propaganda efforts. Before dawn, the Axis invaded Yugoslavia from Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The Luftwaffe swiftly destroyed the Yugoslavian Air Force on the ground and devastated Belgrade with aerial bombing, slaughtering four thousand civilians; on the ground, the Wehrmacht spearheaded by armor reached the Skopje and Veles areas in southern Yugoslavia. On the same day, the Axis invaded Greece from Bulgaria. Unlike the success in Yugoslavia, Greek and British troops slowed the invasion at the Metaxas Line. After sundown, a Luftwaffe raid on Piraeus, Greece got an unexpected boost when the ammunition ship Clan Fraser was hit, with the resulting blast doing more damage to the port facilities than the aerial bombs dropped by the Axis; the explosion also caused the sinking of eleven other freighters. Apart from that, the Axis captured Msus, Libya, a major fuel and supply dump; the Allies destroyed the fuel before Axis capture, and that evening the Axis besieged Mechili.
1942: The Luftwaffe group II./KG 27 flew a supply operation for the Axis troops trapped in Kholm, Russia. Three He 111 aircraft failed to return; one of which was forced to land within the pocket due to heavy damage. The crew of the downed He 111 aircraft removed the aircraft’s radio and used it to help direct further supply runs. Likewise, Axis aircraft continued to assault American and Filipino targets at Bataan, Philippine Islands, and the Axis captured Mandalay, Burma. Off Akyab on the western coast of Burma, Axis aircraft sank Indian sloop HMIS Indus, and Axis bombers sank the Royal Indian Navy's sloop Indus at Akyab, Arakan (now Sittwe, Rakhine), Burma. Axis troops landed Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Lorengau, too.
1943: The Axis fell back from Wadi Akarit towards Enfidaville, Tunisia as the British Eighth Army began linking up with U.S. II Corps, and the Axis began falling back from the El Guettar region, too.
1944: SS‐Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie raided a children’s home in Izieu, France, arresting seven adults and forty‐four Jewish children. Aww man… sigh… well, aside from that, Axis troops assaulted the White City site of Operation Thursday in Burma, and after dark the Axis launched an attack at Kohima, India, reaching the buildings at the edge of the village.
1945: Joseph Goebbels announced that a German victory was to come during this month and only his Chancellor knew the moment. He obtained this information from astrology. (Seriously.) The Chancellor read Wilhelm Canaris’s diary in which said Chancellor learned of Canaris’s involvement in antifascist activities. On the Island of Texel off the Netherlandish coast, the Georgian troops serving as volunteers with the Wehrmacht mutinied. The Georgians (most of whom had originally been captured on the Eastern Front) killed some 246 Wehrmacht troops were in their sleep and a battle broke out. That aside, the Axis evacuated 15,000 prisoners from Buchenwald and the Axis sent Moringen’s able‐bodied prisoners on a death march toward the east.