The Holocaust in Poland in the context of "Kielce pogrom"

The history of Poland from 1945 to 1989 spans the period of Marxist–Leninist regime in Poland after the end of World War II. These years, while featuring general industrialization, urbanization and many improvements in the standard of living, were marred by early Stalinist repressions, social unrest, political strife and severe economic difficulties.Near the end of World War II, the advancing Soviet Red Army, along with the Polish Armed Forces in the East, pushed out the Nazi German forces from occupied Poland. In February 1945, the Yalta Conference sanctioned the formation of a provisional government of Poland from a compromise coalition, until postwar elections. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, manipulated the implementation of that ruling. A practically communist-controlled Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw by ignoring the Polish government-in-exile based in London since 1940.

During the subsequent Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, the three major Allies ratified a massive westerly shift of Poland's borders and approved its new territory between the Oder–Neisse line and the Curzon Line. The area of Poland was reduced in comparison to its pre-World War II extent and geographically resembled that of the medieval early Piast dynasty era. Following the destruction of the Polish-Jewish population in the Holocaust, the flight and expulsion of Germans in the west, resettlement of Ukrainians in the east, and the expulsion and resettlement of Poles from the Eastern Borderlands (Kresy), Poland became for the first time in its history an ethnically homogeneous nation-state without prominent minorities. The new government solidified its political power, while the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) under Bolesław Bierut gained firm control over the country, which would remain an independent state within the Soviet sphere of influence. The July Constitution was promulgated on 22 July 1952 and the country officially became the Polish People's Republic (PRL).

The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a plan orchestrated by Nazi Germany during World War II for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp". Christopher Browning, a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly the Allied naval blockade. There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia. Raul Hilberg wrote that, in 1941, in the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews.

The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Leading to World War II, nearly all Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, massacres of Jews took place originally as part of Operation Tannenberg against the Polish nation. The much larger and methodical mass killings of Jews began with the onset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Led by Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police battalions, the destruction of European Jews took place with the active participation of local Auxiliary Police including Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian units.

51°13′14″N 22°35′58″E / 51.22056°N 22.59944°E / 51.22056; 22.59944

Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had three gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder an estimated 78,000 people during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.

Treblinka (Polish pronunciation: [trɛˈblinka]) is a village located in eastern Poland, situated in the present-day district of Gmina Małkinia Górna, within Ostrów Mazowiecka County in Masovian Voivodeship, some 80 kilometres (50 miles) north-east of Warsaw. The village lies close to the Bug River. It has 350 inhabitants.

It is known as the site during World War II of one of the Nazi extermination camps, named after the village. An estimated 850,000 people were murdered here during the Holocaust in Poland, from the summer of 1942 to October 1943. In addition, the Treblinka I Arbeitslager, a forced labor camp, had operated about six miles away, from June 1941 to 23 July 1944. During this period, more than 10,000 prisoners are estimated to have died from executions, malnutrition, disease and mistreatment.

The Chełmno trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials of the Chełmno extermination camp personnel, held in Poland and in Germany following World War II. The cases were decided almost twenty years apart. The first judicial trial of the former SS men – members of the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof – took place in 1945 at the District Court in Łódź, Poland. The subsequent four trials, held in Bonn, Germany, began in 1962 and concluded three years later, in 1965 in Cologne.

A number of camp officials, gas-van operators and SS guards, were arraigned before the court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed at Chełmno (a.k.a. Kulmhof) in occupied Poland in the period between December 1941 and January 1945. The evidence against the accused, including testimonies by surviving witnesses, former prisoners, and mechanics attending to repair needs of the SS, was examined in Poland by Judge Władysław Bednarz of the Łódź District Court (Sąd Okręgowy w Łodzi). Three convicted defendants were sentenced to death, including the camp deputy commandant Oberscharführer Walter Piller (wrongly, Filer); the gas van operator Hauptscharführer Hermann Gielow (Gilow), as well as Bruno Israel from Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), his sentence was later commuted to life. All three were members of the SS Special Detachment Kulmhof responsible for the extermination of Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust in occupied Poland.

Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (22 April 1903 – 16 May 1946) was a German lawyer and SS-Brigadeführer in Nazi Germany. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned.

After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering an American pilot, Americo S. Galle, who was shot down over the Netherlands in November 1944. They were all found guilty. Schöngarth and four others were sentenced to death and executed in 1946.