Poland During WWII: Not What Obama Thinks

It's another teachable moment for Obama's 14-year-old speechwriters and for the "smartest" speaker "in the room," who together managed to call a death camp designed, built, and staffed by German National Socialists in occupied Poland a "Polish" death camp.

As the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, correctly pointed out, "When someone says 'Polish death camps,' it is as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler."

I will grant that someone in the White House may have picked up the information that 3 million Polish Jews had their lives barbarically stolen from them in Poland during World War II as part of the Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews.

What seems to have entirely escaped the notice of the White House (and many others) is the fact that complete extermination of all Poles also was on the National Socialist to-do list.

Another fact missing from the White House history primer is the fact that the lives of 3 million non-Jewish Poles also had their lives barbarically stolen from them by Poland's Nazi occupiers.

Here's a quote from Heinrich Himmler, whom someone should inform the White House was the actual overseer (and not Poland) of the concentration camps, extermination camps, and Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads):

"All Poles will disappear from the world. [...] It is essential that the great German nation should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles." 

In 1939, Adolf Hitler authorized his military commanders to kill "without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language."

German execution of 51 Polish hostages in retaliation for an attack on a National Socialist (Nazi) police station.

In furtherance of this goal, people of Polish descent were shot, hung, burned alive, worked to death in German mines and factories, relocated, starved to death, etc., etc. Before using Zyklon-B to gas Polish Jews, Germans  first tested it on the Polish gentiles and Soviet POWs who were the first prisoners held by Nazis in their concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Elimination of education in Poland and persecution of the Catholic Church there were big parts of the National Socialist agenda. Himmler's long-term plan included leaving Poland only four grade schools, "in which counting would be taught only till 500 [and] writing one's name." No need for any Poles to learn how to read.

To these ends, Germans destroyed 80% of all the school libraries and 75% of all the scientific libraries in Poland and forbade all education above the elementary level. The Nazis closed all Catholic schools. In Western Poland, the Nazis closed all elementary schools where the Polish language was used. 

Maksymilan Binkiewicz,
one of the 108 blessed martyrs

The National Socialists closed not only schools run by Catholics but also Catholic seminaries, monastaries, and  convents and then rounded up the priests, monks, and nuns to shoot or imprison in Nazi concentration camps:

In Pomerania, all but 20 of the 650 priests were shot or sent to concentration camps. Between 1939 and 1945, 2,935 members of the Polish clergy (18%) were killed in concentration camps. In the city of Wroclaw (Breslau), 49% of its Catholic priests were killed; in Chelmno, 48%. One hundred and eight of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. 

An estimated 200,000 Polish children under the age of 10 that Germans thought had German ancestry were stolen from their parents for "Germanization" and adoption by childless German couples. Many more children who didn't quite make the "racially valuable" grade in their captors' twisted minds were killed by phenol injection, by suffocation with carbon monoxide, and by entirely draining their blood for use in transfusions for wounded German troops. Many children, after being abducted from their parents (who were beaten or murdered), died of thirst or cold during transport in cattle cars. The horror stories go on and on.

Forced expulsion of Poles from a village in the Zamość region of western Poland, where over 110,000 people from about 300 villages were expelled to make room for German settlers, and where almost 30,000 children were kidnapped for potential Germanization. Because of heavy resistance by Poles and their Soviet partisans hiding in the region's forests, only about 10,000 Germans were able to settle in the region before the advancing Red army forced them to abandon their effort

The enormity of the Nazi's crime of genocide committed against Europe's Jews does not obliterate from history the atrocities committed against Poland's non-Jewish citizenry by Nazi occupiers. If the Nazis had not been stopped, their attempted genocide of Europe's Poles would have had even more gruesome and deadly success.

The importance of understanding such uncomfortable facts as these is the job of American-taxpayer-supported specialists in European history and diplomacy whose services are available--at any time--to the White House. If only this administration bothered to make use of them . . . .


Source: Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles

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