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German Invasion of Poland (1939)

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Caleb
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« Reply #15 on: September 03, 2007, 10:07:41 pm »

The invasion of Poland led to Britain and France to declare war on Germany on September 3; however, they did little to affect the outcome of the September Campaign. This lack of direct help during September 1939 led many Poles to believe that they had been betrayed by their Western allies.

On May 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler explained to his officers that the object of the aggression was not Danzig, but the need to obtain German Lebensraum and details of this concept would be later formulated in the infamous Generalplan Ost.  The blitzkrieg decimated urban residential areas, civilians soon became indistinguishable from combatants, and the forthcoming German occupation (General Government, Reichsgau Wartheland) was one of the most brutal episodes of World War II, resulting in over 6 million Polish deaths (over 20% of the country's total population, and over 90% of its Jewish minority),-including the mass murder of 3 million Poles, regardless of religious beliefs,- in extermination camps like Auschwitz, in concentation camps, and in numerous ad hoc massacres where civilians were rounded up, taken to a nearby forest, machine-gunned, and then buried, regardless of whether they were actually dead or not.

The Red Army occupied the Polish territories with mostly Ukrainian and Belarusian population. Soviets, met at the beginning as liberators by local people, shortly after started to introduce communist ideology in the area. This led to a powerful anti-Soviet resistance in the West Ukraine. Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941 resulted in the death or deportation of least 1.8 million former Polish citizens, when all who were deemed dangerous to the communist regime were subject to sovietization, forced resettlement, imprisonment in labour camps (the Gulags) or murdered, like the Polish officers in the Katyn massacre. Part of these casualties were retributions for the attacks of the Ukrainian nationalists on the Polish villages in the West Ukraine, where vengeful feeling was particularly strong. Soviet atrocities commenced again after Poland was "liberated" by the Red Army in 1944, with events like the persecution of the Home Army soldiers and execution of its leaders (Trial of the Sixteen).



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