From the very outset of the German invasion oland, it was apparent that the Nazis were_ engaged in a conventional war to defeat e ^htary nor even to subdue the state PO11C. ^tead, as the contemporary Polish-American^his-tonan Richard Lukas puts it,  	  the Je
Waged war against the Polish people, intent on
, 1996 -perspectives in Polish History."   1996 by the Polish Studies Program, Central Conner,
stroying the Polish nation. 1 This is an extremely crucial point, one that is often overlooked in writings on Polish victimization under the Nazis. Poles were not killed first and foremost as individual dissenters, whether religious or political. Nor did the Nazi leadership wish only to conquer Poland m a military or political sense. Rather, the Polish nation as nation fell victim to the same basic ideology which eventually turned its attention with even greater fury to the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe.
P The Nazi theory of racial superiority totally de
defeated and occupied, the primary goal of the sub
Z'JSared Hitler, "but the annihilation of living
forces. 2
Even prior to the actual	Poland.
Hitler had authorized on Augu	chll-
  h, msisted -can we obtain the living space i way, hemsiste. n placed in charge of im- I we need. And the P	  Heinrich Himmler,
said outn^it m ^ah
should consider It as Its major task to destroy
above puo^^
dent that key Nazi op	total extermination
self, seriously contemplated toe
of the Polish P0^	lan fully if they had
would have carne	matter of conjecture
at best. The arm	of ^ory, m
merely a Pos lb^  here Poles fit into the trying to nnders h e n0 other conclusion can Nazi victimization s .	Jews Gyp.
and physically incapacitated
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7. ETHNIC LEGACY
as candidates for eventual total extinction in the gradual emergence of the new Aryan humanity Once Poland was firmly under Nazi control, th country was divided into two separate zones. o western Poland, including the regions of Poznama, Pomerania and Silesia, and sections of central and southern Poland were formally annexed to the Reich. The remaining Polish territories not annexed outright into Germany were set up for administrative purposes as an occupation region and assigned the name  General Government. 
The Nazi policy of imposed  Germanization  in the annexed territories relied upon four strategies: a campaign of wide-spread and unmitigated terror; expropriation of land and possessions; deportations; and enslavement. The terror, designed to be harsh enough to mute all possible resistance, began immediately after the invasion in 1939. Virtually every city, town and village in western Poland witnessed wholesale massacres and executions of the leading citizenry. In the city of Bydgoszcz, for example, some 10,000 people perished, out of a population of 140,000, during the first four months of occupation. But even the regions designated as falling under the  General Government  were subjected to much the same treatment.
The terror employed by the Nazis to pacify the Polish population included an extensive use of torture. One of the most notorious sites was the train-
ing school for the Gestapo at Fort VII in Poznan. Famous as an institute of sadism. Fort VII drew its victims from the ranks of the clergy, university professors and politicians. It experimented with every conceivable form of torture, from massive beatings to the inflation of prisoners  intestines to the point of bursting.
The Nazi policy of destroying the Polish nations focused strongly, but not exclusively, upon eliminating anyone with even the least political and cultural prominence. But the Nazis had a wide definition of those falling under the rubric of  elite.  The category included teachers, physicians, priests, officers, people in business, landowners, writers and extended even to anyone who had completed secondary school. As a result, millions of Poles qualified for liquidation in the Nazi effort to reduce Poland to a nation of indentured servants in the first instance and, perhaps in due time, to wine it off the map completely.	P
Hitler gave the Initial approval and then turned ,?f PoIls11 campalsn to
SS and the police forces. The SS lost little time In Implementing his order. In November. 1939. thej arrested almost two hundred professors and felloe of the JaeeUonlan University In Cracow one of Europe s oldest centers of higher learning: as well as the faculty of the Polytechnic. Those seized were
all sent to Sachsenhausen, where mar The incident caused great concern Europe. The Nazis thus decided to sp process of removing the Polish professc scene. Taking advantage of the preoc world opinion with military operations in the Spring of 1940, the Nazis launc sive program to exterminate the Polis! sia living in the General Government r the code name of  extraordinary pur tion.  At least six thousand were mure spot; several thousand others were a sent to the newly established Auschwit tion camp.
It is important to underline at this p< trality of the Auschwitz camp in the : destroy Poland and why, as a result, it central symbolic value for contemp Originally opened as a camp for Germ of war, Auschwitz was quickly transfer principal camp for Polish victims even i were also sent to Stutthof, Dachau, F Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and N Poles remained the majority of the Auschwitz until 1942, when Jews a: dubious distinction. For Poles, the Aus remains a vital link in their collectiv facing the threat of national, not ji extinction.
In the course of the controversy o melite convent at the Auschwitz siti mistakes were made on all sides.6 Su critical misstep was taken on the < when approval was granted for the ei Carmelite convent at the camp with< sultation with the Jewish community not, this unilateral move left the dis slon within the Jewish community tl considered Auschwitz their sacred : This was bound to provoke deep and standable feelings of hostility among cially the survivor community and th  famflies whose relatives had perished But as the controversy became pub more intense, some European Jewis particular spoke about Auschwitz as I the exclusive domain of their cornu seemed to lack any basic informati  historical origins of the camp as a p ceration for German political prisoner: role as the central execution site in to annihilate the elite of Polish socle islaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew who American Jewish Committee's repr Warsaw, has written of the problem o understanding. He admits that  m s recognize the exceptional character
206
40. Polish Americans
to wipe out the Jewish people and either poorly understand or altogether ignore the Jewish significance of Auschwitz.  But he likewise insists that people in the West, including Jews, simply do not appreciate the depth of Polish suffering at Auschwitz:  The historical fact is that the Nazis tried to crush the Polish nation; they not only introduced bloody tenor but began to murder Polish elites and destroy Polish culture. The Auschwitz camp was used also for this purpose, and during its first two years of existence, this was its main function. 8 I might add at this point that even Western Christians, with extensive experience in Christian-Jewish dialogue, frequently reveal Insufficient awareness of the profound (and enduring) impact of the Nazi era on Polish national life.
Returning to the narrative of the Nazi attack on the Polish nation, we find various tactical shifts in the campaign of extermination against the Polish elite. But the main thrust of the campaign, reduction of the nation to a condition of servitude, continued unabated throughout the war, even when personnel and equipment were needed much more urgently on the war front itself. This took a heavy toil on the Polish people, not only physically but psychologically as well. The Nazis, for example, committed troops to the work of museum destruction in Poland at a time when the absence of reserves on the frontlines was beginning to Impinge upon the Nazi war machine. Such activities clearly show that the Nazis envisioned far more than merely the military defeat of Poland. They literally Wished to wipe out its cultural identity, preparing Perhaps for the time in the future when the people itself might vanish as well.
By the time the war had ended and the Nazis defeated, Poland had suffered the loss of forty-five Percent of its physicians and dentists, fifty-seven Percent of its attorneys, over fifteen percent of its eachers, forty percent of its professors, thirty percent 0 its technicians, and nearly twenty percent of its Cergy. The majority of its journalists also disap-P^^ed. While these statistics are considerably lower
the ones for the Jewish community, and prob-w y tower than those for the Gypsy community as n t categories would be applicable this community), it still represents a substantial estruction of the  carriers  of the Polish cultural, ec*uah political and religious traditions.
he Nazi effort to annihilate the Polish intelli-p0?  ia Was part of a systematic program to destroy the N Cu^ure. Education was a particular focus of for Plan. The Nazis hoped eventually to trans-dem1 hito an  intellectual desert.  The Nazis and	young people the right to a secondary
Wer University education. Most primary schools orced to use German as their language of
instruction. Polish universities were often occupied by military and civil authorities, and their libraries and laboratories were pillaged. State, municipal, and ecclesiastical archives suffered the same fate.
Polish art and history also became the targets of the Nazi effort to eradicate Polish national selfidentity. Major art museums were generally stripped of their collections, with many going to Germany (including some to Hitler himself). After the war only thirty-three of the one hundred seventy-five pre-war art museums had sufficient collections remaining to reopen for public viewing. Museums that were left untouched usually were used by the Nazis to demonstrate alleged German influences on Polish culture. History books were largely confiscated by the Nazis and teachers forbidden to make reference to the nation s past and the persons who shaped it. Monuments, busts, memorials, and inscriptions of Polish heroes, including Koscluszko, Chopin, and Pifsudski were removed. In Warsaw the Nazis even planned to erect a monument to the victory of the Third Reich in the exact place where the monument to King Zygmunt III was located. This was thus a plan of total national annihilation, a plan the Nazis enacted in Poland alone of all their occupied territories.
Hitler understood that the attack on Polish culture would remain incomplete unless Poland s cities took on a German character. The change in this direction began with a change of names Gdynia became Gotenhafen, Lodz was called Litzmannstadt, Rzeszow was renamed Reichshof. Street names were also Germanized. Hitler hoped eventually to reduce Warsaw to a German provincial town of 100,000-200,000 people. This plan was never realized, however, because of the increasing drain on Nazi resources as the war went on. Cracow, however, which became the center of the General Gov- | eminent, did take on a very German flavor with a large transplanted German population.
Himmler and his chief assistant in the Polish campaign. General Hans Frank, launched a program to expel Poles from certain areas of the country (e.g., the Lublin region) and replace them with German peasants. By and large, these programs proved unsuccessful. But they were very painful for the affected people, sometimes involving the abductions of children from their parents who in some instances were sent to the Reich to be raised as  Germans  and in others were assigned to medical experimentation centers. Racial factors played an important role in determining where a person, especially a child, was sent. Auschwitz and other camps were the lot of many of those displaced.
Because of the close ti