'When We Finish, Nobody Is Left Alive'

The ultimate in Big Brother.  Nazi Germany in Poland. 


Administrative divisions of Nazi Germany, 1944
Germany had absorbed Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia

The German publication Der Spiegel just translated and printed an extensive article on the Nazi occupation of Poland.  Below are a few highlights, but I would urge lovers of freedom to click on the link at the bottom and read the full article.  Nothing you can imagine can illustrate the insanity of Big Brother government better than the Nazi - Fascist - Communist era of the 1920s to the 1940s.

Germany's occupation of Poland is one of the darkest chapters of World War II.  Some 6 million people, almost 18 percent of the Polish population, were killed during the Nazi reign of terror that saw mass executions, forced evictions and enslavement.


'When We Finish, Nobody Is Left Alive'

By Michael Sontheimer

In Poland, the Nazis had more time than in any other occupied country to implement their policies against people they classified as "racially inferior."

The German Army in Poland

The task of implementing Hitler's plan fell to Hans Frank, a 39-year-old lawyer, Nazi Party member and brutal champion of the Nazis' vision of racial purity. Frank was named "Governor-General" of a large chunk of Poland, an area of about 95,000 square kilometers (36,680sq mi), with approximately 10 million inhabitants. This was the western part of Poland that had been annexed by the German Reich, while the eastern half of the country was occupied by the Red Army in accordance with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the 1939 non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In 1940, Frank told a reporter for the Völkische Beobachter newspaper: "In Prague, for example, large red posters were hung up announcing that seven Czechs had been executed that day." That had made him think: "If I had to hang up a poster every time we shot seven Poles, we'd have to cut down all the Polish forests, and we still wouldn't be able to produce enough paper for all the posters I'd need."

Plan for German Colonization up to the Urals

Himmler had his staff draw up an Eastern General Plan, a blueprint for the German colonization of all areas up to the Urals. After all, as Joseph Goebbels claimed, eastern Europe had always been Germany's "destiny." The propaganda minister predicted, "Tough peasant races will stand guard in the East." SS leader Reinhard Heydrich said German settlers would act as a bulwark against the "raging tides of Asia."

He wanted the annexed parts of western Poland to be "depolonized" and "germanized" as quickly as possible. To this end, some eight million Jews and Poles were to be moved into the General Government, the area of Poland under Nazi military control. Their places were to be taken by ethnic Germans "repatriated" from around the Baltic and from Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine.

Himmler ordered all those living in the annexed eastern zones to be classified by race. The list of alleged "Germanic peoples" divided ethnic Germans into four groups. These ranged from those who identified themselves as German and were thus naturalized immediately, to Poles considered "capable of germanization," who were deported for so-called "training" in the Altreich (Old Empire), as the Nazis called the area under German control before 1939. Such Poles were thus given German citizenship on a probationary basis

A Nation of Slaves

The Nazis' aim was to transform the Poles into a nation of slaves. In May 1940 Himmler wrote that "the non-German peoples of the East may not receive any education beyond four-year elementary school." Their educational goal was to be as follows: "The ability to do simple sums no higher than 500, write their name, and understand that it is their divine duty to obey Germans, be honest, diligent and well-behaved." The SS Reichsführer did not consider reading an essential element of the Polish curriculum.

Sabine Roewer from the memorial foundation at the notorious
former women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück holds
up a canister of Zyklon B poison gas

In October 1940 Hitler ordered "all members of the Polish intelligentsia" to be killed. SS leader Heydrich therefore instructed the heads of the security police task forces to ensure that the remaining members of the Polish "political leadership" be "rendered harmless and placed in a concentration camp." He also saw to it that lists of "teachers, clergymen, noblemen, legionaries, returning officers, etc." were drawn up immediately.

Poland's new masters were interested not only in landowners but more specifically in the influential Catholic clergy. German soldiers murdered 214 priests in the West Prussian diocese of Kulm-Pelplin alone.

Elsewhere in West Prussia, Protestant ethnic Germans sawed off Catholic crucifixes and demolished statues of the Virgin Mary. Some 60,000 Poles fell victim to the Nazis' campaign against the intelligentsia.

Resistance Groups in the Forests

In November 1942, police officers began brutally evacuating more than 100,000 Polish farmers to make way for 20,000 ethnic Germans. Those fit for work were sent to Germany as slave laborers, old people and children were resettled in so-called "retirement villages," while anyone deemed "inferior" or "unreliable" was deported to Auschwitz.

The Poles fled the police, hiding in the forests, and forming resistance groups that made the General Government unsafe for Germans. The more unbearable the suppression and slaughter by the Nazis became, the more determined the Poles became to die in battle rather than hoping to escape their fate.

After the War, Frank was brought before the Nuremberg Trials, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a moment of enlightenment he admitted, "In a thousand years, people will still be blaming Germany."

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