Life in German-Occupied Poland | Animated History

Some scenes of this video were cut because certain historical subjects are not allowed to be spoken about on YouTube, even if they're discussed in an educational context. For the uncensored version, head to our website armchairhistory.tv. There was a time when all we had was our faith. Faith that our nation would one day be freed from our enemy. In 1939, our young republic was crushed beneath the treads of the German war machine. Our government fled, going into exile in England. But the Polish people remained. We remained and we hoped. We adopted a refrain. We repeated it when the Nazis began forcing us to work in their factories. We repeated it when the typhus took our loved ones. And we repeated it when the Home Army called for us to rise up, to fight against the Nazis in the streets. To show the world that we would liberate ourselves. Hi, I'm Griffin Johnson, the Armchair Historian. In a previous video, we discussed the invasion of Poland from the Polish perspective. Today, we will examine its aftermath. The Poles were forced to endure a determined and persistent effort to eradicate their culture and turn their nation into a country of slaves to the Third Reich, while Polish Jews, in particular, faced the prospect of outright extermination. Yet even in the face of nightmarish oppression, the spirit of the Polish people was never broken, and they continued to resist the occupation until the bitter end. Today's sponsor is currently offering a massive giveaway of $2,000 in cash. If you want to enter the contest and unleash your inner passion for wargaming in the process, then Lords Mobile is the game for you. Lords Mobile is a unique strategy title, and a perfect game to help kill both time and your enemies while you're stuck at home. Assemble massive armies, create huge cities, recruit heroes, and forge powerful alliances. Embrace heroism by playing diplomatically, or gleefully indulge in tyranny by capturing, ransoming, and even executing your enemies. And as mentioned before, Lords Mobile is currently giving away $2,000 in cash prizes. To enter, download the game using the link in the description below and start leveling up. The top players by might rank all have the chance to win $500 each, and they can always spin the lucky wheel whenever they upgrade their castle to win another $1,500. Finally, $350 in Lords Mobile gift packs will be automatically offered to all participants after downloading the game through the link in the description below. On September 1st, 1939, the recently mobilized armies of Germany invaded the Republic of Poland. The defenders were rapidly pushed back by the speed and ferocity of the Germans' combined arms assault, but continued to fight bravely until the Soviet Union attacked from the east, sealing Poland's fate. On October 6th, the invasion came to a close, with only a tiny fraction of the Polish army managing to escape through Romania, along with most of the country's top government officials. These men formed a government in exile, and maintained that Poland Unfortunately, the defiance of these men did nothing to prevent the Germans and Soviets from carving up the lands of Poland between them in accordance with a secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union seized the eastern half of the country, incorporating the territory into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs. The Nazis directly annexed half of the remaining territory into Germany, granting a small slice to Slovakia, their client state. The rest was placed under an administration known as the General Government, staffed exclusively by German officials. Almost immediately, the General Government began to terrorize the Polish people, establishing five SS units, known as the Einsatzgruppen, to hunt down and execute potential threats to the occupation government. Armed with a list of 61,000 names, including doctors, intellectuals, political activists, and First World War veterans, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up and murdered over 16,000 people in the first few months after the invasion, and by mid-1940, over 100,000 Polish intellectuals had been massacred. Those who were not executed faced eviction. Over two million Poles, mostly landowners, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals, were forced from their homes and relocated into slums and ghettos. Their homes were soon occupied by German settlers, encouraged by the Reich to resettle in the newly conquered Lebensraum, or living space, in the east. Tens of thousands of Polish refugees fled the country, seeking asylum in Romania to the south, while many more were left displaced within Poland, having lost everything but their lives. When the dust of relocation and displacement had settled, the General Government began to institute policies designed to eradicate Polish culture. All cultural institutions, from schools and museums to theatres, libraries, and newspapers, were shut down. Radio receivers were confiscated, books were burned, all Polish music was banned, and every monument or piece of Polish art the SS could get their hands on was stolen or destroyed. The Germans intended to strip away any sense of national or cultural identity from the Polish people, in hopes of their will to resist. Following the attack on Polish culture as a whole, the occupiers honed in on the Jewish people. In April of 1940, the Jewish citizens of Warsaw were forced to begin construction of a walled ghetto within the ruined city, where they would be forced to live. The Jewish community in Warsaw made up over 30% of its total population, but the area covered by the As a result, conditions in the ghetto were desperately cramped and unsanitary, leading to outbreaks of typhus and other diseases. The same was true of other ghettos, of which more than 300 were built over the course of the occupation. Millions of Jews, Romani, Slavs, and disabled people were forced to live in these dismal slums before being shipped off to concentration camps. While conditions in ghettos were especially horrid, the Poles living outside of them were not much better off. Food was strictly rationed, leading to mass starvation in urban areas. People often had to wander for days at a time in search of somewhere they could buy food, and the portions they managed to scrounge up were barely enough to get by. But starvation was not the only threat they faced. There was also the danger of being pressed into the general government's forced labor service, known as the Baudienst. Initially, all Poles over the age of 18 were eligible for forced labor, and could be pressed into service at any time. The minimum age was soon lowered to 14, and for Jews, it was 12. Of those recruited into the Baudienst, many were sent to work in factories, farms, and construction sites within Poland. Some of the less fortunate were deported to work in Germany or other occupied territories, never to return home. As the war went on, German demands for labor increased dramatically, and the punishments for evading forced labor conscription became more severe. By 1943, failing to turn up for forced labor became a crime punishable by death. In the countryside especially, brutal retaliations were carried out against entire communities for attempting to evade the labor draft. If a community failed to provide enough workers to satisfy the government's quota, German soldiers would surround the village and burn it to the ground, massacring everyone, and leaving the charred ruins as a message to surrounding villages. In the face of such brutality, resistance was inevitable. Underground guerrilla armies formed almost as soon as the invasion ceased, and thousands of Poles flocked to their banners. These ragtag forces eventually coalesced into a unified organization known as the Polish Underground State, which attempted to maintain some continuity of the Polish nation beneath the shadow of the general government. Through their military branch known as the Home Army, the Underground State carried out guerrilla attacks on occupying forces, disrupted German supply lines, and assassinated Nazi officers. Meanwhile, the Underground's civilian arm coordinated clandestine education for children, distributed aid wherever possible, and disseminated anti-German publications. By 1943, the Underground State had grown to over 300,000 members, and was powerful enough to operate its own secret criminal courts. In these underground courts, thousands of Poles suspected of supporting or collaborating with Nazi occupiers were arrested and brought to trial. They included Poles who served as police officers, acted in German films, wrote for German-produced newspapers, or worked for the general government administration. Ironically, these trials often made life harder for the Polish civilians they were meant to avenge. Poles who were removed from positions of authority within the police and administration were replaced by German officials with even less sympathy for the Polish people. Access to food became even more scarce, and police brutality became worse and worse in spite of the Underground's court's intentions. The general government fought hard to suppress the Underground State, responding to every major action with brutal reprisals against the Polish people. Frequently, in cities like Warsaw, the Nazis would respond to home army attacks by rounding up and executing up to 100 random civilians, leaving their bodies hanging in the streets as a grisly warning to their former neighbors. However, horrific violence inflicted by the Nazis only stiffened the resolve of the resistance movement, even among the most downtrodden of the Polish people. In the spring of 1943, when the Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto to organize another round of deportation to the death camps, a few hundred members of the Jewish resistance fought back. Armed with grenades and small arms provided by the home army, the fighters killed dozens of Nazi soldiers and forced them to withdraw from the ghetto. In retaliation, the SS invaded the ghetto and razed it, killing 13,000 people. Afterwards, the Warsaw concentration camp was established in the ruins of the ghetto to exterminate everyone who had remained. The aftermath of the Warsaw ghetto uprising left the home army outraged, and by that time they were large and organized enough to begin preparing for revenge. As the Soviets drove back the German army in the east, the Polish Underground planned a massive uprising across the entire country codenamed Tempest. The operation began in early January 1944, when the Red Army crossed the pre-war Polish border. Over 6,500 soldiers rose up across Poland and began fighting against the German army alongside Soviet troops. Their efforts to disrupt German defenses were largely successful, but as soon as the fighting stopped, the Poles' worst fears about their new allies were confirmed. The Soviets forcibly disarmed and arrested all home army soldiers they had fought beside, treating them as enemy prisoners of war. By the summer, when it had become abundantly clear that the Soviets were not their allies, the home army decided that the only way to ensure Poland's independence would be to liberate the capital and have the government in exile return. To this end, on August 1st, the Polish resistance in Warsaw rose up against the German occupiers, beginning the Warsaw Uprising. Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people fought in the uprising, the vast majority of them civilians, who had been pushed past the breaking point by years of brutal Nazi rule. At first, they experienced great success, seizing control of central Warsaw and sending the German garrison into retreat. The leaders of the uprising expected the rapidly advancing Red Army to take advantage of the chaos and occupy the city, but they stopped on the opposite bank of the Vistula River, barely six miles from the city center. There, the Soviet forces sat back and watched as German reinforcements arrived and began to suppress the uprising. Fighting in the streets was horrific and much of the city was destroyed, as the Poles fought tooth and nail for every inch of terrain. In an effort to demoralize the uprisers, the Germans began to massacre Polish civilians en masse. SS squads were deployed into captured neighborhoods, where they proceeded house by house, murdering everyone inside and burning the bodies. Men, women, and alike were slaughtered, and by the end of the uprising, over 150,000 Polish civilians had been killed. The Home Army fought hard, but by October, they were forced to surrender. The Germans systematically leveled much of what remained of the city in retaliation for the uprising, leaving almost the entirety of Warsaw in ruins. Almost all of those remaining in the city, more than 700,000 people, were expelled, forced to become refugees, and the Nazis destroyed their homes out of spite. Only a few hundred Poles remained in the city when all was said and done, hiding out among the rubble of their capital. The uprisings of the Home Army and the collapse of the Eastern Front sealed the fate of the Jews remaining in the Polish ghettos. Throughout 1944, the inhabitants of the ghettos were rapidly shipped off to death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. When the camps reached capacity, the SS resorted to simply shooting Jewish families in their homes. While some made valiant efforts to resist, the exhausted, malnourished, and largely unarmed prisoners could do little to prevent their fate. The most successful of these efforts was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but for all their courage and tenacity, their fight ended in defeat. Most other attempts at Jewish resistance ended similarly, and by the time the war ended, three million Polish Jews had been killed out of a pre-war population of 3.5 million. The German occupation took a horrible toll on the people of Poland. Over 5.6 million Polish citizens were killed, amounting to over 20% of the country's population. Those who survived were left with a largely ruined nation now under the control of the Soviets, who wasted no time establishing a puppet communist government. Many felt betrayed by their allies in the West, who had not only failed to help them withstand the invasion in 1939, but had then left the Polish people at the mercy of the Germans and Soviets, even as the tides of war turned. These feelings of resentment, and other very real scars of foreign occupation, remain visible in Poland even today.