Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
Memorial to the Wola massacre, the systematic killing of around 40,000–50,000 Polish civilians and enemy combatants by Nazi German troops during the Warsaw Uprising of summer 1944
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| Date | 1939–1945 |
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| Location | Occupied Poland |
| Cause | Invasion of Poland |
| Participants | Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS, Selbstschutz, Trawnikis, Sonderdienst |
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5.470 million to 5.670 million Part of a series
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World War II crimes in occupied Poland Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–46) Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia |
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5.470 million to 5.670 million
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation claimed the lives of 2.77 million ethnic Poles, and 2.7 to 2.9 million Polish Jews, according to estimates of the Polish government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Historians outside Poland put the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in occupied Poland at 3.0 million. The dissemination of knowledge on the subject of Nazi German crimes in World War II was entrusted by an Act of the Polish Parliament in 2000 to the Institute, which replaced the former Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes against the Polish Nation.
The crimes were committed during the course of the 1939 invasion, as well as the subsequent occupation of Poland. The genocidal policy of the German Third Reich against the Polish nation was the epicenter of Nazi German war crimes (1939–45) and crimes against humanity.
From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan of territorial expansion, put forth by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, demanding the acquisition of the so-called living space (Lebensraum) in the East for massive settlement of German colonists. The object of war was to fulfill this territorial policy with the use of Nazi ideology of race. On 22 August 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language."
Ethnic cleansing was to be conducted systematically against Polish people: on 7 September 1939 Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy and Jews are to be killed. On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added the intelligentsia to the list. On 15 March 1940, Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task." At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed his pronouncement demanding liquidation of "all leading elements in Poland".
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