The Invasion of Poland and the Fate of Polish Jewry

By: Dr. Frances G. Sternberg, MCHE 

Seventy years ago, when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, more than 3 million Jewish men, women and children lived there. It was the world’s largest Jewish community – one-fifth of world Jewry. 

By October, Poland had been defeated and dismembered. Germany annexed western Poland directly into the Reich, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland, and the remainder of German-occupied Poland (including the cities of Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Lublin) was organized as a German-occupied territory – the “General Government” – under a civilian governor general, Hans Frank. 

Within weeks of their invasion, the Germans began to implement severe anti-Jewish measures. Jewish intellectuals, community leaders, potential leaders, and ordinary individuals were brutalized, arrested, and often executed. Jews of all ages were forced onto labor details. They were ordered to wear identifying badges and were stripped of their livelihoods, their property, and most of their possessions. Then, giving people very little time to pack up and leave, the Germans forced all Jews and those they defined as Jews to give up their homes and move into ghettos, where they lived in isolation from the non-Jewish population under increasingly harsh conditions. 

The Germans viewed the ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Polish Jewry while the leadership in Berlin considered how most effectively to implement their goal of removing the Jewish population from Europe – the so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish problem.” 

In spring and summer of 1942, the Germans began systematically destroying the ghettos. Along with their auxiliaries, they either shot many ghetto residents in mass graves or deported them to the six death camps established on Polish soil – Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. By the end of 1943, most Polish Jews had been murdered. Only a few more than 300,000 survived the Holocaust.