Nazi crimes in Poland

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
Date	1939–1945
Location	Occupied Poland
Cause	Invasion of Poland
Participants	Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS, Orpo, Selbstschutz, Trawnikis, Sonderdienst, BKA, UPA, TDA
Casualties
5.470 million to 5.670 million Part of a series
World War II casualties of Poland World War II crimes in occupied Poland Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–46) Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia

5.470 million to 5.670 million

Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and armed collaborationist forces (such as the Security Battalions) during the 1939 invasion of Poland, and the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, 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 genocidal policy of the Nazi German government's colonization plan known as Generalplan Ost was the epicenter of the Nazi German war crimes against the Polish nation, and crimes against humanity committed from 1939 to 1945. The original assumptions of the Nazi master plans, which were completely detached from reality, entailed the expulsion and mass extermination of around 85% (over 20 million) of the ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be turned into slaves. In 2000, by an Act of the Polish Parliament, the dissemination of knowledge on the subject of Nazi German crimes in World War II was entrusted to an institute, which replaced the former Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes against the Polish Nation.

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 Germanic 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."