[a][6][7] German occupation policies in Poland have been recognized in Europe as a genocide, characterized by extremely large death tolls compared to Nazi atrocities in Western European states.

[11] While the final objectives of Hunger Plan and GPO were always pursued by the Nazi regime, it could not complete these programmes due to German defeat in World War II.

[12] In 2000, by an act of the Polish Parliament, dissemination of knowledge on World War II crimes in Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was entrusted to the Institute of National Remembrance.

[16] In the Obersalzberg Speech delivered on 22 August 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to murder "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language.

That is why I have prepared, for the moment only in the East, my ‘Death's Head’ formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language.

It included politicians, scholars, actors, intelligentsia, doctors, lawyers, nobility, priests, officers and numerous others – as the means at the disposal of the SS paramilitary death squads aided by Selbstschutz executioners.

[26] They were deployed behind the front lines to murder groups of people considered, by virtue of their social status, to be capable of abetting resistance efforts against the Germans.

[36] Amongst the Polish cities and towns bombed at the beginning of war were: Brodnica,[37] Bydgoszcz,[37] Chełm,[37] Ciechanów,[37] Częstochowa,[38][39] Grodno,[39] Grudziądz,[39] Gdynia,[37] Janów,[37] Jasło,[37] Katowice,[39] Kielce,[39] Kowel,[39] Kraków,[37][38] Kutno,[37] Lublin,[37] Lwów,[39] Olkusz,[37] Piotrków,[40] Płock,[37] Płońsk,[39] Poznań,[38][39] Puck,[39] Radom,[37] Radomsko,[39] Sulejów,[40] Warsaw,[38][39] Wieluń,[37] Wilno, and Zamość.

[41] Warsaw suffered particularly severely with a combination of aerial bombardment and artillery fire reducing large parts of the historic centre to rubble,[42] with more than 60,000 casualties.

[44][45][46][47] Summary executions of Poles were conducted by all German forces without exception including, Wehrmacht, Gestapo, the SS and Selbstschutz in violation of international agreements.

[80][82] Hostages were selected from among the most prominent citizens of occupied cities and villages: priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, as well as leaders of economic and social organizations and the trade unions.

The "Germanizing" of occupied territories by the Reich was repeatedly condemned by Nuremberg Tribunal which stated that the practice of expelling civilians was "not only in defiance of well-established rules of international law, but in complete disregard of the elementary dictates of humanity.

[88] Members of Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were assigned the task of overseeing evictions to ensure that the Poles left behind most of their belongings for the use of the settlers.

Franciszek Piper, the chief historian of Auschwitz, estimates that 140,000 to 150,000 ethnic Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000 to 75,000 were murdered there as victims of executions, human experimentation, forced starvation and disease.

In smaller towns, ghettos served as staging points for mass deportations, while in the urban centers they became instruments of "slow, passive murder" with rampant hunger and dead bodies littering the streets.

[108] By the end of 1941, most of about 3.5 million Polish Jews were already ghettoized, even though the Germans knew that the system was unsustainable; most inmates had no chance of earning their own keep, and no savings left to pay the SS for any further basic food deliveries.

Although Germany also used forced laborers from Western Europe, Poles and other Eastern Europeans viewed as racially inferior were subjected to intensified discriminatory measures.

While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, in many cities Poles were forced to live in segregated barracks behind barbed wire.

[118] Polish researcher Raphael Lemkin stated in 1944: "Even before the war Hitler envisaged genocide as a means of changing the biological interrelations in Europe in favor of Germany.

Gauleiters Albert Forster and Arthur Greiser reported to Hitler that 10 percent of the Polish population contained "Germanic blood", and were thus suitable for Germanisation.

[121] In order to meet the imaginary targets, Gauleiter Albert Forster, in charge of Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, had decided that the whole segments of Polish population are in fact ethnic German, whilst expelling others.

[139] According to a May 1940 memo from Heinrich Himmler: "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans.

In Pomerania, they were transported to a military fortress in Poznań and gassed with carbon monoxide in the bunkers of Fort VII,[143] including children as well as women whom the authorities classified as Polish prostitutes.

In 1943, the SS and Police Leader in Poland, Wilhelm Koppe, ordered more than 30,000 Polish patients with tuberculosis to be exterminated as the so-called "health hazard" to the General Government.

[146] Historically, the church had been a leading force in Polish nationalism against foreign domination, thus the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their terror campaigns—both for their resistance activity and their cultural importance.

[147] Of the brief period of military control from 1 September 1939 – 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "according to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot.

[152] In the Wartheland, regional leader Arthur Greiser, with the encouragement of Reinhard Heydrich and Martin Bormann, launched a severe attack on the Catholic Church.

Evans wrote that "Numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot.

Six extermination camps (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka) were established in which the mass murder of millions of Polish Jews and various other groups, was carried out between 1942 and 1944.

The most notorious massacre took place in Wola where, at the beginning of August 1944, between 40 and 50,000 civilians (men, women, and children) were shot, sexually assaulted and tortured by the Einsatzkommando of the Sicherheitspolizei under Heinz Reinefarth's command and the amnestied German criminals from Dirlewanger.