Historical story

How many Poles died as a result of the German occupation?

How many Poles died in World War II because of the Germans? How many Polish civilians and how many soldiers were murdered? How many Poles lost their lives as a result of repression and displacement? The answer is not easy, even after more than seventy years.

The data at our disposal on the number of victims of the German occupation are based only on the estimates made just after the war by the War Compensation Office at the Presidium of the Council of Ministers. To this day, the exact number of victims is unknown, as well as their personal details. However, estimates make it possible to assess the scale of the crime.

Soldiers and civilians

In 1939, about 70,000 Polish soldiers were killed in battles with the Germans. Of the 420,000 people who were captured by the Germans, around 10,000 died or were murdered. From the first days of September 1939, the wave of repression against the civilian population was also growing. During the fighting there were many times mass executions of Polish civilians. One of the largest ones took place in the village of Śladów on the Vistula river in Mazovia. On September 18, soldiers of the 4th Wehrmacht Armored Division, assisted by local Germans, killed 300-350 Poles with machine gun fire.

Large numbers were killed as a result of the aggressive actions of the Luftwaffe, which attacked columns of refugees and defenseless cities. In Wieluń alone, about 1,200 people died as a result of this (other estimates include over 2,000 victims). In turn, Professor Norman Davies estimated the total number of Warsaw residents who lost their lives as a result of the bombings in 1939-1944 at 90,000.

As a result of the German bombing in Warsaw, as many as 90,000 people died during the war.

In this respect, the losses of the population of the Polish capital far exceed those of other European cities, equaling those resulting from the bombing of Hiroshima. Meanwhile, in the common consciousness of the average inhabitant of our continent, the German Dresden is a symbol of the destructive activity of aviation during World War II ...

Special operations

About 100,000 victims were killed in the "political clean-up" operation code-named "Tannenberg", also known as "Intelligenzaktion". It was the first planned extermination operation carried out with such great panache and determination during World War II. In another operation of this type, an extraordinary pacification action - Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion (AB) - lasting from spring to winter 1940, the Germans liquidated several thousand Poles living in the General Government.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to establish the exact number of Polish victims of the German operation "T4". It embraced people whose lives, as Nazi leaders and ideologists proclaimed, "were not worth living". According to estimates, even more than 20,000 people could have been killed then.

There was also a huge group of Poles who were put to death as a result of repression for the actions of the Polish resistance movement. About 200,000 soldiers of the Polish underground and about 100,000 civilians were killed in direct and retaliatory actions. If we add the people who lost their lives as a result of the Warsaw Uprising, that is even about 200,000 people, this gives us as much as half a million dead.

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Extermination camps, repression, deportations

A large crowd of Polish inhabitants was absorbed by the German mass extermination camps. 2,830,000 Polish citizens were exterminated in the six largest ones . Out of this number, less than a million are Poles, the rest are Jewish. And yet there were about 6,000 camps in occupied Poland! Unfortunately, for many of them mortality data is incomplete.

One should also take into account the losses of the Polish population in the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, resulting from repressions caused or provoked by the German occupier. It is estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000 people.

However, we do not know the number of Poles who were murdered for helping Jews. We also do not know how many people died in displacement actions, during transports, in transit camps or in places intended for them by the occupant to live. We can only guess how many Poles died or were murdered in forced labor.

It is also worth remembering that the war caused enormous injuries, both physical and mental, in a great number of our countrymen. After its completion, they were often permanently excluded from social life. Sometimes they also died prematurely.

As a result of the criminal activities of the Germans, millions of Polish citizens died during the war. The photo shows the hostages in Palmiry being prepared for execution.

With so many unknowns, can we give the total number of losses? Depending on the sources it is estimated at between 6,000,000 and 7,500,000 people . Up to 5,100,000 Polish citizens were to die at the hands of the Germans, of which approximately 1,500,000 to 1,700,000 were Poles, 2,900,000 to 3,300,000 Jews, and the rest an undetermined number of representatives of national minorities.

Approximately 450,000 Polish citizens died in direct hostilities, so it is easy to calculate that the population losses resulting from direct and indirect extermination were more than ten times greater. This clearly proves the genocidal nature of the German occupation.