German Occupation

Germany invades the Soviet Union 22 June turning point

Within weeks the Wehrmacht takes the Second Republic’s eastern lands, and the whole of pre-war Poland is under German occupation. Eastern Galicia is added to the General Government and the Białystok district put under East Prussia. Behind the front come the units that murder Jews by the thousand.

The Sikorski–Mayski agreement 30 July treaty

After Germany attacks the USSR, the Polish government restores relations with Moscow. The USSR declares that its 1939 treaties with Germany on territorial changes in Poland have lost their validity, announces an "amnesty" for deported Polish citizens and allows a Polish army under General Anders, which in 1942 leads more than a hundred thousand people out to Iran. The question of the future border it leaves open.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 19 April uprising

After the deportation of more than 250,000 people to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, those left in the ghetto fight with no prospect of winning. The ghetto is burned house by house; it was the first urban revolt in occupied Europe.

The Tehran Conference 28 November treaty

Churchill and Roosevelt agree with Stalin, without the Polish government’s knowledge, that Poland’s eastern border will follow roughly the Curzon Line and that Poland will be compensated in the west. Yalta will only confirm it.

The Warsaw Uprising 1 August, 2 October uprising

The Home Army fights for 63 days, hoping to liberate the capital itself before the Soviets arrive. The front halted on the Vistula, the rising failed and the city was demolished — by estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians died.

The PKWN Manifesto 22 July turning point

The communist Polish Committee of National Liberation, set up in Moscow, issues a manifesto dated at Chełm on 22 July and takes power in Lublin under the Red Army’s protection. It is the seed of People’s Poland and a rival to the government in exile.

The Second World War war

Germany and the Soviet Union divide Poland; both occupiers destroy its elites, and Germany murders the Polish Jews in ghettos and death camps. The Underground State works at home, the government and army in exile fight beside the Allies — and still Poland comes out of the war in new borders, under a government the USSR imposed, and without close to six million of its citizens.

The German reign of terror repression

Germany annexes the western provinces to the Reich and expels hundreds of thousands of Poles from them; in the General Government it closes the secondary schools and the universities. Operations against the educated class, street round-ups and public executions, concentration camps, more than two million people taken for forced labour, the expulsions from the Zamość region and children kidnapped for Germanisation: by most estimates the occupation cost close to two million ethnic Poles their lives.

The Soviet occupation repression

The eastern lands taken by the USSR are annexed to it after sham elections. The NKVD arrests people, shoots prisoners of war, and in four mass deportations in 1940–41 sends more than three hundred and twenty thousand Polish citizens to Siberia and Kazakhstan by its own records; older Polish estimates are much higher.

The Polish Underground State social movement

Under the occupation a clandestine state answers to the government in exile: the Government Delegation, an underground parliament, courts, secret schooling, a press and the Home Army, more than 300,000 sworn soldiers by 1944. Its last great effort is the Warsaw Uprising; the Home Army is disbanded in January 1945, and the Council of National Unity dissolves itself in July.

The Holocaust atrocity

After shutting them into ghettos, Germany moves on to murder: first the shootings in the east, from December 1941 Chełmno, and in 1942 Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all on occupied Polish soil. About three million Polish Jews are killed, nine in every ten.

The Volhynia massacres atrocity

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army murders the Polish population of Volhynia and then Eastern Galicia, to clear them from lands meant to become Ukraine’s; the peak is July 1943. Estimates of the Poles killed run from sixty to a hundred thousand; in Polish reprisals, several thousand to more than ten thousand Ukrainians.

The post-war resettlement resettlement

The new borders move people along with the state: over a million Poles leave the old eastern lands for the new Poland, Germans are expelled from the Recovered Territories, Ukrainians sent from Poland to the USSR, and in 1947 Operation Vistula scatters those who stayed across the west. A country of many nations comes out almost uniform.

The anti-communist underground uprising

Part of the underground does not lay down its arms when the Red Army arrives: Freedom and Independence, the National Armed Forces and dozens of forest units fight the NKVD, the security police and the army. Tens of thousands pass through the units in their busiest years; the amnesty of 1947 and terror break the movement, though the last partisan, Józef Franczak, is killed only in 1963.