Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
"liberated"
One dictator for another.
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Poland was granted independence after WW2, wasn't it? I said Stalin liberated Warsaw from Hitler, and this is certainly true unless you want to challenge that. Warsaw was surely a capital of an independent Poland from 1945 onwards.
Moving from Holocaust to communism is not that bad anyway. Maybe this will put things into a context:
At the end of October 1939, Germany enacted the death penalty for disobedience to the German occupation.[159] Germany began a campaign of "Germanization", which meant to assimilate the occupied territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich.[160][161][162] 50,000–200,000 Polish children were kidnapped to be Germanized.[163][164]
Elimination of Polish elites and intelligentsia was part of Generalplan Ost. The Intelligenzaktion, a plan to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia, Poland's 'leadership class', took place soon after the German invasion of Poland, lasting from fall of 1939 to the spring of 1940. As the result of this operation in 10 regional actions about 60,000 Polish nobles, teachers, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were killed.[165][166] It was continued in May 1940 when Germany launched AB-Aktion,[163] More than 16,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in Operation Tannenberg alone.[167]
Germany also planned to incorporate all land into the Third Reich.[161] This effort resulted in the forced resettlement of 2 million Poles. Families were forced to travel in the severe winter of 1939–40, leaving behind almost all of their possessions without recompense.[161] As part of Operation Tannenberg alone, 750,000 Polish peasants were forced to leave and their property was given to Germans.[168] A further 330,000 were murdered.[169] Germany eventually planned to move ethnic Poles to Siberia.[170][171]
Although Germany used forced labourers in most occupied countries, Poles and other Slavs were viewed as inferior by Nazi propaganda, thus, better suited for such duties.[163] Between 1 and 2.5 million Polish citizens[163][172] were transported to the Reich for forced labour, against their will.[173][174] All Polish males were required to perform forced labour.[163] While ethnic Poles were subject to selective persecution, all ethnic Jews were targeted by the Reich.[172] In the winter of 1939–40, about 100,000 Jews were thus deported to Poland.[175] They were initially gathered into massive urban ghettos,[176] such as 380,000 held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where large numbers died of starvation and diseases under the harsh conditions therein, including 43,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto alone.[172][177][178] Poles and ethnic Jews were imprisoned in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. In Auschwitz, which began operating on 14 June 1940, 1.1 million people perished.[179][