Between the two world wars, Poland bordered in the west on Germany, in the south on Czechoslovakia and Romania, in the east on the Soviet Union, and in the north on Latvia and Lithuania. The Poles are a Western Slavic people who created a unified state in the tenth century and accepted Roman Catholicism. In the course of Poland's thousand-year existence, its area has alternately expanded and contracted. In the first few centuries of its existence, Poland's domain in the West included areas along the Oder River and the shores of the Baltic Sea. By the fourteenth century, however, Poland lost the territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and areas along the Baltic Sea, which took on a German character. The cities of Poland also contained a strong German element. Poland began to expand in the east mainly when it established links with Lithuania at the end of the fourteenth century; the two countries united in 1569. This unified state included all of Belorussia, most of the Ukraine, and large parts of western Russia. Polish influence, rather than that of Lithuania, prevailed, and most of the nobility assimilated with the Poles. However, beginning in the seventeenth century, Poland was without a strong central regime of its own and prey to its neighbours, who were gaining in strength and who, in the eighteenth century, intervened in Poland's internal affairs. Poland's three large neighbours - Russia, Prussia and Austria - divided the country among them in 1772, 1793, and 1795, and except for a short period (1807-1813) when Poland was under French protection, this situation prevailed until the end of World War I. Polish uprisings against Russia in 1830-1831 and 1863-1864, and against the Austrians and Prussians in 1846 and 1850, were suppressed. At the end of World War I, owing to the downfall of its enemies and the struggle waged by the Poles, Poland regained its independence, and the Second Polish Republic was created. Its borders were the cause of discussions among the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference, of military encounters, and of numerous political crises. Poland's situation forced it to manoeuvre among the powers in the complex and weak European political alignment. In early 1934, Poland signed a treaty with Nazi Germany, indicating a Polish rapprochement and a cooling of relations with its traditional ally, France. Poland's policy, designed to protect its independent status, did not take into account the fact that Hitler was ready, at best, to accept the existence of Poland as a satellite state, and that the revision of Poland's border was only a question of time.
The German Invasion of Poland
On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland and World War II began; Poland was overrun and major portions were annexed within a few weeks. Until October 26, 1939, occupied Poland was in the hands of a military administration. Thereafter, Germany annexed parts of western and northern Poland (the so-called eingegliederten Ostgebiete, or eastern territories incorporated into the Reich). In the remaining areas of Poland held by the Germans, a civil administration, the General Government, was formed. Over 22 million inhabitants of Poland were now under German occupation. More than 10 million of them lived in the territories annexed by the Reich, including 600,000-1 million Germans and 600,000 Jews. The rest, some 12 million people, including 1.5 million Jews, lived in the General Government. The Soviet forces, as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement of August 26, annexed eastern Poland. The Soviets seized an area of 75,675 square miles (196,000 sq. km), with a population of 4-5 million Poles and 1.2 million Jews. The German plan for the creation of a Polish state in the remaining part of Poland (the Reststaat) was based on the expectation that once Poland had been defeated Britain and France would not remain in the war. When this did not happen, the Germans created the General Government, in which a Polish administration was permitted to function, within the limits set by General Government (Governor-General) Hans Frank. Following the June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union and the German occupation of the formerly Soviet-held parts of Poland, the district of Galicia was formed, and in August 1941 was incorporated into the General Government. This step meant that the Germans were rejecting the Ukrainian nationalists' hopes and aspirations for the establishment of a Greater Ukraine.
Nazi occupation policy was implemented by the following administrations of the occupied areas: the SS; police; Waffen-SS; and the Wehrmacht units stationed there, which in 1942 numbered some 500,000 troops, and in 1944 varied between 600,000 and 1.1 million. Neither Poles nor Germans were prepared to co-operate with the other. The conquerors had no interest in such a relationship, since their plan was to transform Poland into German Lebensraum ("living space"), and the vanquished felt sheer hatred for the conquerors. The basic goal of Nazi policy was to destroy Polish society, so that Poland would cease to exist as a nation. The means used to achieve this goal were the destruction of the Polish leadership, the murder of persons regarded as present or potential enemies of the Reich, and the murder and total extermination of "undesirable" racial and other groups (Jews, Gypsies). The Jews were at first separated from the Polish population and imprisoned in ghettos and camps, and were later nearly all killed in the "Final Solution." In the areas incorporated into the Reich, the terror practised against the Polish population between 1940-1945 was more or less uniform. The degree of violence in the General Government was applied with varying severity, depending on the military and political situations and the effectiveness of the methods used. The General Government authorities employed terror on a large scale. When they could not control or suppress the population, the terror frequently took the form of indiscriminate mass beatings and manhunts. The Wehrmacht's retreat from occupied Poland was also accompanied by the murder and massacre of prisoners. Worst among the crimes committed by the Third Reich in occupied Poland was the murder of the Jews. The 150,000 civilians killed in the Warsaw Polish Uprising and the tens of thousands imprisoned in concentration camps in its wake were also the victims of terror, whose object was to break resistance, instil fear, and wreak destruction. The largest Nazi camp system was set up on the soil of Poland. Four extermination centres - Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec - were constructed for the immediate extermination of Jews, in addition to the three Concentration Camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Plaszow. a fourth Concentration Camp, Stutthof, was located near Danzig. Besides these, there were 1,798 labour camps and 136 refugee camps. Transit camps for deportees were also used as killing sites, as were several prisons and ghettos. Poles were to be found in nearly every concentration camp where they underwent the harrowing experience of the highly efficient Nazi camp system.
