The Holocaust saw the ghettoization, robbery, deportation and mass murder of Jews, alongside other groups under similar racial pretexts in occupied Poland by the Nazi Germany.

3,000,000+ Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps, who made up half of the Jewish Holocaust victims.

Many Jews tried to escape, but surviving in hiding was very difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation.

[12] After the foundation of the Second Polish Republic simultaneously with the armistice of 11 November 1918 ending World War I, Jews suffered from institutionalized discrimination and many were poor.

In 1918, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior banned Polish Jews from entering the country on the pretext of their unwillingness to work, low morals, physical uncleanliness and the spread of typhus by them.

[20] The Endecja faction waged a campaign against Jews consisting of economic boycotts, limitations on the number of Jewish students at universities, and restrictions on kosher slaughter.

[23] The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from the United Kingdom and France.

[27] Already during the hostilities, the Germans carried out pogroms against the Jewish population, for example, 600 people were murdered in Przemyśl [pl], 200 in Częstochowa, and 200 were burned in a synagogue in Będzin.

[30][31] Parts of western and northern Poland were annexed into Germany and incorporated into the administrative structure of the German Reich as Zichenau, Danzig–West Prussia, the Wartheland, and East Upper Silesia—while the rest of the German-occupied territories were designated the General Government.

[43] Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of Hans Frank, the appointed head of the General Government, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews.

More Jews lived in the city of Kraków than in all of Italy, and virtually any medium-sized town in Poland had a larger Jewish population than all of Scandinavia.

All of southeast Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece – had fewer Jews than the original four districts of the General Government.

[63] Most ghettos were not fully sealed from the outside world and although many Jews suffered from hunger, fewer died from it because they were able to supplement their rations from the black market.

[65] The most prominent ghettos were thus temporarily stabilized through the production of goods needed at the front,[66] as death rates among the Jewish population there began to decline.

[69] Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Government were affected by various goals of the SS (Schutzstaffel), military, and civil administration; stretching from purely racial one to the more pragmatic, such as the need to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, in order enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market, to avoid hunger and increase of the resistance among them.

[79] By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Government by the end of the year for forced labor;[79] for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared.

[80] On 19 July, Himmler decreed the "resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government should have been implemented and completed by 31 December 1942"; henceforth, Jews would only be allowed to live in Warsaw, Częstochowa, Kraków, and Majdanek.

[91] The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans.

[92][93][94] In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik[95] began work planning Belzec—the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers—amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Government.

[96][92] In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia, Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered.

[109] Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs.

[134] Jews resisted the Nazis with not only armed struggle, but also spiritual and cultural opposition that upheld their dignity despite the inhumane conditions of life in the ghettos.

[137] As the German authorities began to liquidate the ghettos, armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on both sides of Polish-Soviet border of 1939, especially in eastern Poland.

The Warsaw Ghetto firefight of January 18, 1943, led to the largest Jewish uprising of World War II launched on April 19, 1943.

[140] On 26 June 1942, BBC services in all languages publicized a report by the Jewish Social-Democratic Bund and other resistance groups and transmitted by the Polish government-in-exile, documenting the killing of 700,000 Jews in Poland.

[155][156] According to Grabowski, the number of "Judenjagd" victims could reach 200,000 in Poland alone;[157] Szymon Datner gave a lower estimate - 100,000 Jews who "fell prey to the Germans and their local helpers, or were murdered in various unexplained circumstances.

[170][171][172] Among some 30,000 Ukrainian nationalists who fled to polnischen Gebiete, thousands joined the pokhidny hrupy [pl] as saboteurs, interpreters, and civilian militiamen, trained at the German bases across Distrikt Krakau.

[173][174] The genocidal techniques learned from the Germans, such as the advanced planning of the pacification actions, site selection, and sudden encirclement, became the hallmark of the OUN-UPA massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia beginning in March 1943, and killing of Jews in Western Ukraine, parallel with the liquidation of the ghettos in Reichskommissariat Ostland ordered by Himmler.

Historian Andrew Kornbluth estimates that "several dozen Poles were executed for denouncing, capturing, and killing their Jewish neighbors during the war", and thousands more perpetrators were investigated or received a lesser sentence.

[190] The pogrom prompted General Spychalski of PWP from wartime Warsaw,[195] to sign a legislative decree allowing the remaining survivors to leave Poland without Western visas or Polish exit permits.