World War II casualties of Poland
Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the entire pre-war population of Poland.
According to the Polish government's official report on war damages which was published in 1947, the total number of Poland's war dead was 6,028,000; 3.0 million ethnic Poles and 3.0 million Jews, excluding the losses of Polish citizens who were members of the Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups.
[12] The Nazi extermination camp overall death toll is estimated at 2,830,000; including 1,860,000 Polish Jews: 490,000 killed at Belzec; 60,000 at Sobibor; 800,000 at Treblinka; 150,000 at Chełmno; 300,000 at Auschwitz; and 60,000 at Majdanek.
[13] Over a million Jews deported from Western countries to camps and ghettos set up in occupied Poland perished in the Holocaust.
[17] The IPN puts the death toll of ethnic Poles under the German occupation at 2,770,000[4] and 150,000 due to Soviet repression[4] The main causes of these losses are as follows.
During the occupation, communities were held collectively responsible for Polish attacks against German troops and mass executions were conducted in reprisal.
Non-Jewish ethnic Poles in large cities were targeted by the łapanka policy which the German occupiers utilized to indiscriminately round up civilians off the street to be sent as forced laborers to Germany.
According to research by the Institute of National Remembrance between 1939 and 1945, 1,897,000 [29] Polish citizens were taken to Germany as forced laborers under inhuman conditions, which resulted in many deaths.
They were forced to wear identifying purple tags with "P"s sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew, and banned from public transportation.
While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, most Polish laborers were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than Western Europeans.
Prior to the war the area which became the General Government was not self sufficient in agricultural production and was a net importer of food from other regions of Poland.
[39] The Institute of National Remembrance puts the confirmed death toll due to the Soviet occupation at 150,000 persons including 22,000 murdered Polish military officers and government officials in the Katyn massacre.
They pointed out that Czesław Łuczak estimated the total population loss at 500,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet occupied regions.
Tens of thousands of ethnic Germans were killed during the Nazi evacuation from Poland in 1944 and 1945, and as a result of repression NKVD and Red Army or died in post war internment camps.
[52] In a 2009 study by the Polish government affiliated Institute of National Remembrance the total deaths of ethnic Poles and Jews were estimated at 5.6 to 5.8 million persons including 150,000 in Soviet captivity.
[53] The classification of the ethnic groups in Poland during the Second Polish Republic is a disputed topic, Tadeusz Piotrowski called the 1931 Polish census "unreliable", noting that it had underestimated the number of non-Poles[54] The official figures for nationality from the 1931 Polish census based on the mother tongue put the percentage of ethnic Poles at 68.9%, Jews 8.6% and other minority groups 22.5%., Tadeusz Piotrowski maintains that the adjusted census figures(taking religious affiliation into account) put the percentage of ethnic Poles at 64.7%, Jews 9.8% and other minority groups 25.5% of Poland's population.
[55] Based on the analysis by Tadeusz Piotrowski roughly 1.0 million Ukrainians and Belarusians and 400,000 Polish speaking Jews were misclassified as Poles in the official figures for the 1939 population.
[56] Polish demographer Piotr Eberhardt maintains that it is commonly agreed that the criterion of declared language to classify ethnic groups led to an overestimation of the number of Poles in pre-war Poland.
[66] The Ministry of Finance estimated actual losses at 5,085,000 persons, 943,000 less than the Polish government Bureau of War Damages(BOW) report of 1947.
According to Ministry of Finance figures losses were 5,085,000 persons (1,706,700 Poles and 3,378,000) Jews[67] According to Assessments and Estimates: an Outline by Mateusz Gniazdowski:[66] "This discrepancy was explained by demographers who maintained that the (BOW) included the "missing" category in the total population loss figure, based on the statistics of the end of 1945, while many people believed to have been dead either returned to the country, or remained abroad as emigres.
Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Warszawa 2009 ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 Page 15 (There was no explanation given for the difference of 9,300 between this schedule and the total losses of 5,085,000 persons in the description of the Ministry of Finance Report, see above) In 1987 the Polish Academy of Science journal Studia Demograficzne published an article by Kazimierz Piesowicz that analyzed the demographic balance from Poland from 1939-1950.
[76] Czesław Łuczak also authored an article in the Polish academic journal Dzieje Najnowsze Rocznik, titled Szanse i trudnosci bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939–1945 (Possibilities and Difficulties of the Demographic Balance in Poland 1939-1945), pages 9–14: Source: Wojciech Materski and Tomasz Szarota.
Bajer calculated the estimated population losses of the 12 million ethnic Poles over the age of 15 who were capable of resistance during the German and Soviet occupation.
[79] Source of figures: Bajer, Kazimierz Zakres udziału Polaków w walce o niepodległość na obszarze państwa polskiego w latach 1939–1945, "Zeszyty Historyczne Stowarzyszenia Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej", (Kraków) 1996 Pages 10–13 A.
[39] E. Population Not Capable of Resistance(100% ages 1–14; 50% ages 15–19; 30% women 20-39; 100% over 70 years and 632,000 disabled) [81] Source of figures: Bajer, Kazimierz Zakres udziału Polaków w walce o niepodległość na obszarze państwa polskiego w latach 1939–1945, "Zeszyty Historyczne Stowarzyszenia Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej", (Kraków) 1996 Page 14 A. Bajer uses the 1947 Bureau of War Damages figures as the base to compute his estimate of ethnic Polish war dead.
)[82] The Polish government affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in 2009 estimated total war dead at between 5,620,000 and 5,820,000 persons.
Page 30 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believes that "The Nazi terror was, in scholar Norman Davies's words, "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe."
According to the USHMM, "Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) were victims of German Occupation policies and the war.
Page 20 T. Panecki, Wysiłek zbrojny Polski w II wojnie światowej, pl:Wojskowy Przegląd Historyczny 1995, nr 1-2, s. 13,18.
The authors of the Oxford Companion to World War II maintain that "casualty statistics are notoriously unreliable".
