German AB-Aktion in Poland
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| AB-Aktion | |
|---|---|
 A picture taken from a nearby house by the Polish Underground of the Nazi Secret Police dislodging condemned victims from the Polish intelligentsia at the Palmiry forest execution site near Warsaw in 1940 | |
| Also known as | German: Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion |
| Location | Palmiry Forest and similar locations in occupied Poland |
| Date | Spring–summer 1940 |
| Incident type | Mass murder with automatic weapons |
| Perpetrators | Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen |
| Participants |  Nazi Germany |
| Organizations | Waffen-SS, Schutzstaffel, Order Police battalions, Sicherheitsdienst |
| Victims | 7,000 intellectuals and leaders of the Second Polish Republic |
| Documentation | Pawiak and Gestapo |
| Memorials | Murder site and deportation points |
| Notes | Lethal phase of the invasion of Poland |
The 1940 AB-Aktion (German: Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion, lit. 'Extraordinary Operation of Pacification'), a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence in Poland during World War II, aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic across the territories slated for eventual annexation by the German Reich.
Most of the killings were arranged in a form of forced disappearances from multiple cities and towns upon the arrival of German forces.[1] In the spring and summer of 1940 the Nazi authorities in German-occupied central Poland (the so-called General Government) arrested more than 30,000 Polish citizens.[2] About 7,000 of them, including community leaders, professors, teachers and priests (labeled as suspected of criminal activities), were subsequently massacred secretly at various locations - including at the Palmiry forest complex near Palmiry.[3][4] The others were sent to Nazi concentration camps.
History
[edit]The Nazis considered the Polish intelligentsia to include not just the country's academics and artists, but its politicians, artists, aristocrats, professionals, clergy, present and former military officers, and generally everyone sufficiently educated or wealthy to have a position of authority, even informally, in Polish society. Their ideology held that only these people had a true national consciousness; the rest of the population was indifferent to the fate of the state and cared more about their daily lives.[5] Once the intelligentsia had been eliminated, the Nazis believed the remaining Poles would be useful to them as unskilled labour.[6]
Intelligenzaktion
[edit]The first mass murder of the intelligentsia, and any other people suspected of potential anti-Nazi activity, began in September 1939 as German troops began invading Poland and continued until the next spring.[1] This was seen by Nazi Germany as a pre-emptive measure to keep the Polish resistance scattered and to prevent the Poles from revolting during the planned German invasion of France.[7]
The first killings of Polish intelligentsia took place soon after the invasion. It was called the Intelligenzaktion, a plan to eliminate Poland's intelligentsia and leadership in the western part of the present Polish state, territory annexed by Germany after the invasion, realized by Einsatzgruppen and Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a militia raised from the ethnic Germans in Poland. As the result of this operation 100,000 Polish nobles, teachers, entrepreneurs, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were arrested (save those whose skills were temporarily needed for civil administrative purposes) in 10 regional actions.[8] Of those, nearly 50,000 were executed and the rest sent to concentration camps that few survived.[9]
The Intelligenzaktion was also extended to the General Government, the German-occupied rump of Poland not annexed to either the Soviet Union or Germany after the invasion. In general those actions were less intense and less lethal, sparing most of the Catholic clergy and larger landowners.[10] One such action, the November 1939 Sonderaktion Krakau, in which the president and the entire faculty Jagiellonian University in Kraków were arrested and sent to concentration camps,[10] drew condemnation from Fascist Italy and the Vatican.[11] All those who had survived their incarceration were eventually released, some of whom later died.[12]
By May 1940, Polish society had begun to recover from the previous year's military defeat, leading to an increase in resistance activity. With international attention diverted from Poland by the German invasion of France, Nazi authorities thus decided the time was ideal for another anti-intellectual purge, this time to focus on the areas within the General Government.[13]
AB-Aktion
[edit]The Intelligenzaktion was continued by the German AB-Aktion Operation in occupied territories of central Poland. Both murder operations were conducted in part according to an "enemies of the Reich list" prepared before the war by members of the German minority in Poland and printed ahead of time by the German Intelligence as the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book-Poland).[3]
The later anti-Polish AB-Aktion was prepared by Hans Frank, the commander of the General Government. It was also discussed with Soviet officials during a series of secretive Gestapo–NKVD Conferences.[3] Prior to it, most Polish university professors, intellectuals, writers, politicians, teachers and other members of the elite of Polish society were briefly arrested by the Gestapo and had their names registered. Frank finally accepted and approved the Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion on 16 May 1940. In the following weeks, the German police, Gestapo, SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and units of the Wehrmacht arrested roughly 30,000 Poles in major Polish cities, including Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin and Kraków. The interned were held in a number of prisons, including the infamous Pawiak where they were subject to brutal interrogations by Nazi officials. After time spent in the prisons of Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, Kielce, Nowy Sącz, Tarnów, Lublin or Wiśnicz, the arrested Poles were transferred to Nazi concentration camps, most notably to the newly created camp of Auschwitz, as well as Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Approximately 3,500 members of the Polish intelligentsia were executed at the mass murder sites in Palmiry near Warsaw, Firlej, Wincentynów near Radom, and in the Bliżyn forest near Skarżysko-Kamienna.[3]
Among those killed were Maciej Rataj, Stefan Bryła, Tadeusz Tański, Mieczysław Niedziałkowski, Janusz Kusociński and Stefan Kopec. Actions were started on a similar scale in other Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany. According to many historians[weasel words] , including Norman Davies, the action against Polish leaders was coordinated with the authorities of the Soviet Union[citation needed], who at the same time perpetrated the mass murder of 22,000 Polish military officers at Katyń and other places.
The active persecution of Polish intellectuals was continued until the end of the war. The direct continuation of the AB Action was a German campaign in the east started after the German invasion of the USSR. Among the most notable mass executions of Polish professors was the massacre of Lwów professors, in which approximately 45 professors of the university in Lwów were murdered together with their families and guests. Among those killed in the massacre were Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, former Polish prime minister Kazimierz Bartel, Włodzimierz Stożek, and Stanisław Ruziewicz. Thousands more perished in the Ponary massacre, in German concentration camps, and in ghettos.[3]
Aftermath
[edit]The total number of victims and the specific dates of executions of members of the Polish intelligentsia can only be approximated due to their multitude.[14] After the war, many Germans responsible for organizing the AB Action were tried before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. However, the majority of responsible commanders vanished during and after the war, before being held legally accountable for their crimes.
See also
[edit]- Sonderaktion Krakau: a 1939 Nazi round-up professors and academics of the Jagiellonian University
- World War II atrocities in Poland
- Pacification operations in German-occupied Poland
- Operation Tannenberg
- Generalplan Ost
- Gestapo–NKVD conferences (1939-1940)
- Intelligenzaktion
- Katyn massacre
- Anti-Polonism
- History of Poland (1939–45)
- Chronicles of Terror
References
[edit]- ^ a b Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust: ethnic strife, collaboration with occupying forces and genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland. p. 25. ISBN 0786403713.
- ^ Chapter "Hitler's Plans for Poland." Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents Archived 2013-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, p. 988.
- ^ a b c d e AB-Aktion, Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies.
- ^ "Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era" at the "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum". Archived from the original on June 7, 2007. Retrieved 2013-05-24.
- ^ Wardzyńska 2009, p. 67.
- ^ Wardzyńska 2009, p. 7.
- ^ Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents Archived 2013-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, p. 965.
- ^ Meier, Anna. Die Intelligenzaktion: Die Vernichtung der polnischen Oberschicht im Gau Danzig-Westpreußen, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. ISBN 3-639-04721-4; ISBN 978-36-3904 721-9.
- ^ Wardzyńska 2009, p. 74.
- ^ a b Mańkowski 1992, p. 19.
- ^ Uwe von Seltmann. "Jagd auf die Besten" [Hunt for the Best]. Zweiter Weltkrieg (in German). Spiegel Online. Retrieved January 7, 2025.
- ^ Gwiazdomorski, Jan (1975). Wspomnienia z Sachsenhausen [Memories of Sachsenhausen] (in Polish). Kraków, Polande: Wydawnictow Literackie. pp. 126–127, 211–216, 224, 245, 252–253.
- ^ Bartoszewski 1970, p. 60.
- ^ Peter Longerich acknowledged some 6500 victims (3500 member of the intelligentsia and political functionaries and about 3000 people labeled criminals by the Germans), in Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust - The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press. p. 165. ISBN 978-019280436-5.
Works cited
[edit]- Bartoszewski, Władysław (1970). Warszawski pierścień śmierci 1939–1944 [Warsaw's Ring of Death 1939-1944]. Warsaw: Interpress.
- Mańkowski, Zygmunt (1992). Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion 1940 – akcja AB na ziemiach polskich: materiały z sesji naukowej (6–7 listopada 1986 r.) [Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion 1940 – Aktion AB on Polish soil: material from the scientific session (6–7 November 1986)] (in Polish). Warsaw: Zakład Historii Najnowszej Uniwersytetu Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie i OKBZpNP-IPN w Lublinie.
- Wardzyńska, Maria (2009). Był rok 1939. Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Intelligenzaktion [It was 1939: Operations of the German security forces in the Polish Intelligenzaktion] (in Polish). Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN 9788376290638.
External links
[edit]- The Destruction of the Polish Elite. Operation AB – Katyn Archived 2016-04-08 at the Wayback Machine, the exhibition organized by the Institute of National Remembrance (2009).
- Collection of testimonies concerning terror against the Polish elites in 'Chronicles of Terror' testimony database