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By Root 1082 0

at peace treaties were now welcomed back into the fold. Part-German Poles were accorded some degree of security. Pure Poles became “protected persons,” and Jews and Gypsies were classified as “reserved”; neither term meant what it sounded like. “Protected” meant, in effect, that Poles were not protected at all; they could not own real estate, they could not go beyond primary education, they could not form any associations, they could not go to libraries, museums, or theaters, they were paid at the lowest wage scale, they received fewer rations than Germans, their movement was restricted, they had to have special permission to use a bicycle, and they could be sentenced to death for anti-German gestures.

The intelligentsia and upper class, the business leaders, the educators, the priests, were all systematically eliminated. Cut out of their jobs and positions, they were sent to prison camps or work camps or killed out of hand. The Poles were to be reduced as a people to the level of trained beasts. Anything of value that was distinctly Polish was looted or destroyed; art works were carried off, churches desecrated, museums closed, newspapers proscribed. There were successive reclassifications of Poles, constantly skimming off any surviving leaders or potential leaders, with the ultimate aim of producing a race of helots. In the end, Poland, over whom the Western Allies went to war, suffered the greatest proportional losses of lives and property of any country in World War II.

This was not only the Nazis’ doing. In 1943, German troops near Smolensk came across mass graves in the Katyn Forest. In the time between the Russian occupation of eastern Poland and the German invasion of Russia, thousands of soldiers, officers, and leading Polish civilians had been imprisoned by the Russians. About 15,000 of them had disappeared completely; survivors and Poles who were in the west made frantic inquiries and efforts to find them, but no trace appeared until the Germans discovered the graves. Delighted to be able to accuse someone else of massacre, the German government gave the Katyn finding wide publicity. Eventually, more than 4,000 bodies were exhumed, of which nearly 3,000 were identified by name, the rest by their rank. All were officers or officer cadets, or—in the case of the civilians—teachers, professors, doctors, and engineers. All had last been seen alive in Russian prison camps; all had been shot in the back of the head; some had their hands tied behind them, their overcoats pulled over their heads, mouths stuffed with sawdust; some had wounds from the unique four-sided Russian bayonet blade.

Russians and Germans both, then Germans, then Russians, combined to destroy the Poles as a people. To be a Pole was almost—but not quite—the most unfortunate thing a person could be in World War II.

Russians under German control fared equally badly. The Germans had several millions of Russian prisoners of war. It happened that Russia had never signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, and the Germans used this as an excuse to rid themselves of the Russians. Prisoners were drafted into work camps or put in concentration camps. They were systematically maltreated, denied proper rations or medical facilities and, as much as possible, worked to death. Nor was this treatment confined to “legitimate” military opposition; civilians under German occupation were handled the same way. In the spaces of Russia and the Ukraine, the war achieved a depth of savagery unmatched elsewhere. In the midst of the winters, retreating Germans would burn and destroy housing and drive the peasants into the cold to die. Very soon the Russians were burning their own housing, so it would not shelter the enemy; the “scorched earth” policy reduced vast stretches of European Russia to a desert. Civilians lived a precarious hand-to-mouth existence between or behind the lines. Those who could hid in the countryside. In the great Russian forests, partisans gathered, ambushing trains, killing sentries, being killed themselves, with no mercy expected