Pacification actions in German-occupied Poland

Pacification actions were one of many punitive measures designed by Nazi Germany to inflict terror on the civilian population of occupied Polish villages and towns with the use of military and police force.

The projected goal of pacification operations was to prevent and suppress the Polish resistance movement in World War II nevertheless, among the victims were children as young as 1.5 years old, women, fathers attempting to save their families, farmers rushing to rescue livestock from burning buildings, patients, victims already wounded, and hostages of many ethnicities including Poles and Jews.

[1] No further investigations were conducted until June 1971 when the 1939 crimes of the 1st Panzer Division in Poland (Polenfeldzug) were also thrown out as unlikely after a statement by Major Walther Wenck, which was accepted on good faith.

[4] In just a year and a half between January 1, 1943, and July 31, 1944, the Wehrmacht army alone conducted 1,106 pacification actions in occupied Poland, independent of the killing operations by Einsatzgruppen and auxiliary forces, and the ongoing Holocaust of the Jews.

[5] The so-called "pacification operations" were introduced along with all other extermination policies directed against Poland already in September 1939, and were of a large scale, resulting in the confirmed murder of approximately 20,000 villagers.

Material losses from wanton destruction of Polish countryside unrelated to military maneuvers are estimated at 30 million złoty in the area of General Government alone.

They were not a part of the indiscriminate killings by the mobile Einsatzkommando death squads active during the invasion of Poland of 1939, and characterized by often deliberate targeting of civilian population by the invading forces,[8] with the active participation of the German minority living in the Second Polish Republic whose men joined the SS armed Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz battalions in West Prussia, Upper Silesia and Warthegau.

The victims among the villagers include women and children who were murdered in several ways, such as stabbing by bayonets, shooting, being blown apart by grenades, and being burned alive in a barn.

[19] According to article by Witold Kulesza published in Komentarze Historyczne by the Institute of National Remembrance, German Regiment SS-Leibstandarte "Adolf Hitler" of the 17th Division arrived in Złoczew on September 3, 1939 on motorcycles and on bicycles.

In the town of Aleksandrów in Biłgoraj County between 1939 and 1944, German authorities murdered 290 civilians (444 according to WIEM), wounded 43, deported 434 to forced labour camps, and burned at least 113 households.

[a] Modern international law considers these types of actions against civilians to constitute genocide, whether conducted within national boundaries or in occupied territories.