Nazis and HitlerEssay Preview: Nazis and HitlerReport this essayBefore the invasion on Poland by the Nazis in September 1939, there were approximately 3.3 million Jews in Poland. As a country, Poland had dealt with harsh economic and social problems since its independence in 1918. As a result, hatred for the stranger (the Jews) and virulent antisemitism spread and grew throughout the nation. Unemployment and fierce competition for work lead to increased violence which included boycotts and severe pogroms. However Jewish activities such as politics, intellectuals, and art still flourished. Antisemitism was apparent in Poland for some time; Poles followed Germanys lead and practiced many of their policies. Poles did not accept Jews as Polish, similar to Germany; they were considered as a separate race.
A 1939 report on Polish society, published in the “Jewish Journal” in February 1939, describes the hardships of living as a Jew in Poland, and also describes some of the cultural differences to which Poland experienced in the 1940s during the years of Hitler’s rule. The first part explains Poland’s history as a country marked by a series of state-sponsored Jewish attacks, including by the Nazis. The following paragraphs explain how Poland was a country with several states that developed during the war and where Hitler, Poland’s second prime minister, did not manage to turn them around and give back a substantial part of their territories.
A German military intelligence mission led by an independent Polish military commander found several German cities and villages on Poland’s shores and destroyed all the Jewish neighborhoods, churches, and Jewish holy places. The German war effort was halted in 1939 when the Germans took over, but the Polish invasion would not last forever. In 1942, a “coup of anti-Nazi hysteria” spread in Poland to the country where Hitler, under the direction of Poland’s highest civilian government, and by its military intelligence and secret police was planning the final invasion of Poland. Hitler ordered the Polish government to be disbanded and the whole government to be arrested in occupied Polish territory. The country’s economy deteriorated severely between 1943 and 1944, though the Polish state kept operating a vast economic base. The country was able to hold a major defense exchange, the Eshkol, for the first time for the past forty years, but Polish forces suffered a number of humiliating defeats. The war resulted in the collapse of the state; only a very small part of Poland still maintained its independence, and the country was given the designation of “Soviet Socialist Republic” in November 1941. From that point onward, over a hundred thousand persons were killed during the war and almost all of the Jewish community was permanently displaced. Poland became the fourth largest economy in Europe, third only to its neighbors Poland and China, and the richest among them to be found in Latin America. Poland’s military, economic, and demographic status also changed. During the war the nation was transformed from one where the Nazis controlled vast swathes of Polish territory to one which was composed largely of citizens of other European nations.
The Nazis were known to rule Poland, though it was not as clear if that was the case in 1939 or in 1942. At that time, according to the report “Jewish Society of Europe: Holocaust and the Soviet Union,” the number of Germans living in the country to whom Nazi propaganda was directed was much smaller. However, since Stalin had already been assassinated in August 1939, most of the surviving people of Poland who lived in Warsaw at the time of Nazi invasion were living in various parts of the country. According to the report “The Polish Holocaust: A Story Of An Enlistment For Polish People Through Nazi Propaganda,” about 5,000 “enemies and sympathizers” who had participated in the 1939 attack were killed in Warsaw. Most of the survivors of the Holocaust were Jewish. However, the report points out that those Jewish survivors were killed during the attack, which also destroyed most of the concentration camps.
Although Warsaw’s Jewish residents numbered close to 20% of the population, at
The War against the Jews in Poland started when Hitler took power; he implemented his New Order which he used exploitation, terror, and extermination to fulfill his goals. Nazi ideology saw non-Aryans as inferior; they wanted lebensraum and Poles were robbed of their property, removed from their homes, and deported in huge numbers. The Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish culture and killed thousands of Polish intellectuals (professors, politicians, artists, writers, church leaders), code named A-B Aktion. When Poland was conquered, it was divided up by the Nazis and Soviets. The central section of Germanys land became a German colony, the General Government; the Nazi governor of this new colony was Hans Frank.
Nazis believed that Poland was the most probable area for lebensraum; there was one problem, removing the Jews and Poles from the area. Nazis solution was to gather them in the General Government cities. Heinrich Himmler was in charge of strengthening Germany to create lebensraum and created a special task force, the Einsatzgruppen to deal with Poland’s Jews. The Finsatzgruppen were killing units which carried out murders against the Reich’s political enemies; they killed over a million Jews within 18 months by mobile gas vans or firing squads.
The Jews in Poland were forced into labor as soon as Hitler took control; the main purpose for forced labor was to dehumanize them. On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich issued a degree which set forth a policy of the detention of Polish Jews in ghettos. In this degree it explained the policy on the treatment of Jews; it was ordered by Heydrich that Jews be identified, their property seized, and forced to live in ghettos. On October 26, 1939 a law imposed by the General Government for compulsory labor was introduced; it applied to Jewish men that were between the ages of 14 and 60. Over time more of the areas in Poland introduced forced labor which now also applied to women and children; special labor camps and factories were set up for the Jews. Since the start of forced labor, it was administered by the SS. The man in charge of the deportations of the Jews was Adolf Eichmann. The Reich law of November 23, 1939 required that Jews wear an armband with the Star of David on it to make them easier to identify; it applied to Jews 10 and older.
The new ghetto was Nazis version from the first ghettos of medieval times. Nazi ghettos are similar but they did not want to just isolate Jews from Christians; they were confined only until they were ready to send them to death camps for their extermination. Heinrich Himmler established leadership councils for the Jews, the Judenrate; they were appointed to execute