Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany

The Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II was a massive Nazi German operation consisting of the forced resettlement of over 1.7 million ethnic Poles from all territories of occupied Poland with the aim of their geopolitical Germanization (see Lebensraum) between 1939–1944.

Adolf Hitler had plans for the extensive colonisation of Polish territories directly opposite the pre-war borders of the Third Reich, making them part of his newly created Reichsgau Wartheland. Eventually his plans grew bigger to include the General Government in the process of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The region was to become a "purely German area" within 15–20 years, as explained by Hitler in March 1941. By that time the General Government was to be cleared of 15 million Polish nationals, and resettled by 4–5 million ethnic Germans.

During the occupation of Poland following the German invasion of the country, Nazi expansionist policies were enacted upon its Polish population on an unprecedented scale. In accordance with Nazi ideology the Poles were considered Untermenschen, deemed for slavery and their further elimination, in order to make room for the Germans re-settled from across Europe. Furthermore, Hitler intended to extensively colonize all territories lying to the east of the Third Reich. These were worked out by the RSHA department of the SS in Generalplan Ost (GPO, "[the] General Plan for the East"), which foresaw the deportation of 45 million "non-Germanizable" people from Central & Eastern Europe to West Siberia; of whom 31 million were "racially undesirable": including 100% of Jews, Poles (85%), Belorussians (75%) and Ukrainians (65%). Poland itself would have been cleared of all Polish people eventually, as 20 million or so were going to be expelled further east. The remaining 3 to 4 million Polish peasants believed to be the Polonized "descendants" of German colonists and migrants (Walddeutsche, Prussian settlers, etc.) – and therefore considered "racially valuable" – would be Germanized and dispersed among the ethnic German population living on formerly Polish soil. The Nazi leadership hoped that through expulsions to Siberia, famine, mass executions and slave labour, the Polish nation would eventually be completely destroyed. Experiments in mass sterilization in concentration camps may also have been intended for use on the populations.

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