Intelligenzaktion in Pomerania

Intelligenzaktion Pommern
Mass shootings in Darzlubska Wilderness
Pomerania: places of executions marked in red
Location	German occupied Pomeranian Voivodeship, Free City of Danzig annexed as Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany)
Date	1939–1940
Target	Polish intellectuals and the upper classes from prescribed list.
Attack type	Massacres
Weapons	Automatic weapons
Deaths	23,000
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany, SS-armed militia from German minority in Poland

The Intelligenzaktion Pommern was a Nazi German operation aimed at the eradication of the Polish intelligentsia in Pomeranian Voivodeship and the surrounding areas at the beginning of World War II. It was part of a larger genocidal Intelligenzaktion, that took place across most of Nazi-occupied western Poland in the course of Operation Tannenberg (Unternehmen Tannenberg), purposed to install Nazi officials from Sipo, Kripo, Gestapo and SD at the helm of a new administrative machine.

On the direct orders of Adolf Hitler carried out by Reinhard Heydrich's bureau of Referat Tannenberg along with Heinrich Himmler's SS-RSHA (Main Security Office), Poles from among intelligentsia and elites were rounded up, and executed without any due process by the SS-Einsatzgruppen in dozens of remote locations such as the forest massacres in Piaśnica and the cavernous Valley of Death. Starting right after the invasion in September 1939, with a second wave in the spring of 1940, these actions were an early measure of the German Generalplan Ost colonization.

After the Nazi invasion of Poland, the ethnically Polish and Kashubian population of Polish Pomerania was immediately subjected to brutal terror. Poles were seen by German state during the war as subhuman. Prisoners of war, as well as many Polish intellectuals and community leaders were murdered. Many of the crimes were carried out, with official approval, by the so-called Einsatzkommando 16 and "Selbstschutz", or paramilitary organizations of ethnic Germans with previously Polish citizenship. They in turn were encouraged to participate in the violence and pogroms by the local Gauleiter Albert Forster, who in a speech at the Prusinski Hotel in Wejherowo agitated ethnic Germans to attack Poles by saying "We have to eliminate the lice ridden Poles, starting with those in the cradle... in your hands I give the fate of the Poles, you can do with them what you want". The crowd gathered before the hotel chanted "Kill the Polish dogs!" and "Death to the Poles". The Selbstschutz participated in the early massacres as Piaśnica, and many of their members later joined police and SS formations which continued the massacres until the Fall of 1940.