POLAND UNDER NAZI TERROR    For Poles to have had sex with a German, would have meant the death penalty.  Any private German citizen demonstrating    kindness or benevolence towards a Pole was imprisoned for a month.  In fact, Poles who even dared to exhibit a hostile    mentality towards Germans were arrested or shot.  Poles were required to always give the right of way to German    pedestrians, and display courteous subservience to them.   Many Jewish individuals as well as Poles collaborated with the Nazis, occupying positions of authority such as the infamous   Polish Blue Police.  They patrolled the outskirts of the Jewish Ghettos preventing any unauthorized people from entering or   leaving  The Jewish Police were known to be particularly vicious.  Even the Jews avoided them.   The Secret Jewish Court in the Warsaw Ghetto executed 59 Jewish collaborators who were connected to Zagiew, a Jewish   militia organized by the Nazis to spy on the Jewish underground.   In 1939 the Germans went on a killing spree targeting Poles.  In one town Bydgoszcz, the Germans shot 20,000 civilians.   Overall, 15,000 Polish Catholic priests, teachers, and political leaders were deported to Dachau or shot.  There were over   2,000 concentration camps in Poland at which Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Poles, and Jews from other European nations were   exterminated.  The Germans were able to accumulate a large number of informers that represented every ethnic group,   including Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians.  Their motives for collaborating with the Germans had as much to do   with greed and self-preservation than with Nazi racist ideology.  Poles had a derogatory word for the degenerates who   denounced, black-mailed, and massacred the Jews - szmalcowniki - the lowest element of; Polish society. They were   criminals, drunks, mental and moral degenerates and punks These were the marginal elements most sought after by the   Nazis to do their killing for them.   Over 3,500 Polish political and municipal leaders were shot in the Palminy Forest, near Warsaw. Over 183professors from   Jagiellonian University, near Krakow, were arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In Lwow, the Germans   arrested and shot professors from the universities as well as their families.  Over 2,800 priests and monks were executed,   and 4,000 of them sent to concentration camps. Of 17,000 nuns,1,100 were imprisoned and 289 were murdered.   Poles were shot at random in the street just for the amusement of the Nazis.  The Hitler Jungen ( Hitler Youth )in which   the now Pope Benedict  XVI used to be a member during the war, frequently entered the Jewish ghettos, and with loaded   guns, shot at Jews for target practice, maiming and killing Jews at random.   In a macabre scene out of hell, several Poles had been arrested and were taken to a public square and whipped.  Assembled   there were the local Volksdeutcher ( Poles of German descent ) who watched the scene as if it were entertainment..   When   the SS Commander selected seven of the Poles, he shot each of them at point blank range, the Volksdeutscher applauded   gleefully.   Before the Jews were even rounded up into ghettos, they were deprived of every right and freedom.  They did not have the right   to education, to work, to own possessions.  They were even barred from public buildings, libraries,museums - segregated on   trams, denied medical care, forbidden to enter the partk, or even walk on the sidewalks  Eventually they did not even have the   right to exist.  German soldiers and Volksdeutscher frequently barged into private homes taking whatever they wanted,   and terrorizing the Jews at gunpoint.   German propaganda was wielded as a weapon to segregate Poles and Jews from each other, and inflame hatred and   revenge between them.Germany's plan was to exterminate the Polish people beginning with the intelligentsia. Under the   guise of a lecture, on November 9, 1939, the Germans invited professors of the Jagiellonian University.  With the exception   of a few who did not attend, 200 of Polands most distinguished scholars crowded into the lecture hall and were promptly   arrested by SS Storm Troopers, loaded onto trucks and sent to concentration camps at Sachsenhausenin Germany .   Within a few months, they had all died .      HOME                                                                                                                  POLAND UNDER NAZI TERROR PHOTO GALLERY