Читаем Poland полностью

The September campaign is usually portrayed as a courageous fiasco and characterised by the image of lancers charging tanks. It is difficult to understand why. In September 1939 no European army could hope to stand up to the Wehrmacht, with its crushing superiority in both tactics and firepower. It had been agreed with the British and French staffs that in the event of aggression, Poland was to pin it down for a period of two weeks, time enough to allow the French to throw ninety divisions, 2,500 tanks and 1,400 planes across the virtually undefended Rhine. But the French did not move, while the RAF confined itself to dropping leaflets on German cities. In the event, the Poles tied down the Germans for over three weeks, and would have managed to keep going longer had the Russians not invaded (which it is now known they would not have done if the French had attacked Germany). For all its inadequacy, the Polish army acquitted itself valiantly, taking a greater toll of German men and equipment than the Franco-British effort of 1940. The Germans lost roughly 45,000 men dead and wounded, three hundred planes and 993 tanks and armoured cars. But the cost to Poland was nearly 200,000 dead and wounded.

That figure covers only military casualties, and does not include the tens of thousands of civilians killed in bombing raids or mown down by marauding aircraft intent on spreading panic. Nor does it include the thousands of landowners, priests, teachers, doctors, policemen and others who, along with their families, were murdered by the advancing German army as a prelude to the ethnic cleansing of the part of western Poland that was to become the German province of Warthegau.

In October the country was divided between its captors. The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next months about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labour camps in Siberia or the far north of Russia. The Germans incorporated Pomerania, Silesia and Poznania into the Reich, while the remainder of their conquests was designated as the Generalgouvernement. This was a colony, ruled from the Royal Castle in Kraków by Hitler’s lawyer friend Hans Frank. He announced that the concept of Poland would be erased from the human mind, and that those Poles who were not exterminated would survive only as slaves within the new German Empire.

The process began at once. Here too, priests, landowners, teachers, lawyers and other persons of education or influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Oświęcim, renamed Auschwitz, in a process that aimed to decapitate Polish society and leave a leaderless and compliant workforce.

People were shunted about in a vast programme of rearrangement whose logic is difficult to follow. Over the next five years about 750,000 Germans were imported into the areas that had been incorporated into the Reich: 400,000 Poles from the same areas were resettled in the Generalgouvernement, while a further 330,000 were shot. In all, some two million Poles were moved out of the Reich into the Generalgouvernement, while 2.8 million were taken from the Generalgouvernement to the Reich as slave labour. Supposedly Aryan-looking children were kidnapped, as many as 200,000 of them, to be brought up as Germans. Some 2,000 concentration camps of one sort or another were set up on Polish soil, in which people from all over Europe were incarcerated alongside Poles.

Poland’s Jewish population was singled out for special treatment. In small towns and villages, Jews were rounded up and shot by the Wehrmacht or special police units following in its wake, and in some cases burnt to death in their wooden synagogues. In larger cities, they were made to wear yellow stars on their clothes and herded into designated areas known as ghettos. In May 1940 the Jewish ghetto of ŁLódź was sealed, and the same happened in Warsaw and other cities. From 1942, the people trapped in these ghettos were transported to camps set up at Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere, for extermination. In all, 2.7 million Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered.