The history of Poland from 1939 to 1945 encompasses primarily the period from the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to the end of World War II. Following the German–Soviet non-aggression pact, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 and by the Soviet Union on 17 September. The campaigns ended in early October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland. After the Axis attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the entirety of Poland was occupied by Germany, which proceeded to advance its racial and genocidal policies across Poland.

Under the two occupations, Polish citizens suffered enormous human and material losses. According to the Institute of National Remembrance estimates, about 5.6 million Polish citizens died due to the German occupation and about 150,000 due to the Soviet occupation. The Jews were singled out by the Germans for a quick and total annihilation and about 90 percent of Polish Jews (nearly three million) were murdered as part of the Holocaust. Jews, Poles, Romani people and prisoners of many other ethnicities were killed en masse at Nazi extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibór. Ethnic Poles were subjected to both Nazi German and Soviet persecution. The Germans killed an estimated two million ethnic Poles. Generalplan Ost contemplated turning the remaining majority of Poles into slave labor and annihilating those perceived as "undesirable". Ethnic cleansing and massacres of Poles and to a lesser extent Ukrainians were perpetrated in western Ukraine (prewar Polish Kresy) from 1943. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army participated.

In September 1939, the Polish government officials sought refuge in Romania, but their subsequent internment there prevented the intended continuation abroad as the government of Poland. General Władysław Sikorski, a former prime minister, arrived in France, where a replacement Polish Government-in-Exile was soon formed. After the fall of France, the government was evacuated to Britain. The Polish armed forces were reconstituted and fought alongside the Western Allies in France, Britain and elsewhere. A Resistance movement began organizing in Poland in 1939, soon after the invasions. Its largest military component was a part of the Polish Underground State network and became known as the Home Army. The whole clandestine structure was formally directed by the Government-in-Exile through its delegation resident in Poland. There were also peasant, right-wing, leftist, Jewish and Soviet partisan organizations. Among the failed anti-German uprisings were the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising. The aim of the Warsaw Uprising was to prevent domination of Poland by the Soviet Union.

In order to cooperate with the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa, Sikorski, an important war ally of the West, negotiated in Moscow with Joseph Stalin and they agreed to form a Polish army in the Soviet Union, intended to fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Soviets. The "Anders' Army" was instead taken to the Middle East in 1942 and then to Italy. Further efforts to continue the Polish-Soviet cooperation had failed because of disagreements over borders, the discovery of the Katyn massacre of Polish POWs perpetrated by the Soviets, and the death of General Sikorski. Afterwards, in a process seen by many Poles as a Western betrayal, the Polish Government-in-Exile gradually ceased being a recognized partner in the Allied coalition.

Stalin pursued a strategy of facilitating the formation of a Polish government independent of (and in opposition to) the exile government in London by empowering the Polish communists. Among Polish communist organizations established during the war were the Polish Workers' Party in occupied Poland and the Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow. In late 1943 a new Polish army was formed in the Soviet Union to fight together with the Soviets. At the same time Stalin worked on co-opting the Western Allies (the United States led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United Kingdom led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill), who, in terms of practical implementations, conformed to Stalin's views on Poland's borders and future government. The fate of Poland was determined in a series of negotiations that included the conferences in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. In 1944, the Polish Government-in-Exile approved and the underground in Poland undertook unilateral political and military actions aimed at establishing an independent Polish authority, but the efforts were thwarted by the Soviets. The Polish communists founded the State National Council in 1943/44 in occupied Warsaw and the Polish Committee of National Liberation in July 1944 in Lublin, after the arrival of the Soviet army. The Soviet Union kept the eastern half of prewar Poland, granting Poland instead the greater southern portion of the eliminated German East Prussia and shifting the country west to the Oder–Neisse line, at the expense of Germany.

Before the war

Rearmament and first annexations

After the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the Sanation government of his political followers, along with President Ignacy Mościcki, embarked on a military reform and rearmament of the Polish Army in the face of the changing political climate in Europe. Thanks in part to a financial loan from France, Poland's new Central Industrial Region participated in the project from 1936 in an attempt to catch-up with the advanced weapons development by Poland's richer neighbors. Foreign Minister Józef Beck continued to resist the growing pressure on Poland from the West to cooperate with the Soviet Union in order to contain Germany. The attitude of the Polish leadership was also reflected by Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who, apparently confident in the French and British declarations of support, asserted that the security of Poland was not going to be guaranteed by a "Soviet or any other Russia". The Soviets then turned to concluding the German offer of a treaty and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed. The Soviet-Nazi cooperation had been making progress since May 1939, when Vyacheslav Molotov became the Soviet minister of foreign affairs.

Under the terms of two decrees by Hitler (8 October and 12 October 1939), large areas of western Poland were annexed to Germany. These included all the territories which Germany had lost under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, such as the Polish Corridor, West Prussia and Upper Silesia, but also a large, indisputably Polish area east of these territories, including the city of Łódź.

The annexed areas of Poland were divided into the following administrative units:

  • Reichsgau Wartheland (initially Reichsgau Posen), which included the entire Poznań Voivodeship, most of the Łódź Voivodeship, five counties of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, and one county of the Warsaw Voivodeship;
  • the remaining area of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, which was incorporated into the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia (initially Reichsgau Westpreussen);
  • Ciechanów District (Regierungsbezirk Zichenau) consisting of five northern counties of the Warsaw Voivodeship (Płock, Płońsk, Sierpc, Ciechanów and Mława), which became a part of East Prussia;
  • Katowice District (Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz) or, unofficially, East Upper Silesia (Ost-Oberschlesien), which included the Silesian Voivodeship, Sosnowiec, Będzin, Chrzanów, Oświęcim, and Zawiercie counties, and parts of Olkusz and Żywiec counties, which became a part of the Province of Upper Silesia.

The area of these annexed territories was 92,500 square kilometres and the population was about 10.6 million,

According to a 2009 estimate by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), between 5.62 million and 5.82 million Polish citizens (including Polish Jews) died as a result of the German occupation.]]

Parts of the Ukrainian population initially welcomed the end of Polish rule

Terror policies were also applied to the civilian population. The Soviet authorities regarded service for the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution" However, the moral position of Polish policemen were often compromised by a necessity for cooperation, or even collaboration, with the occupier. In 1944, the Germans clandestinely armed some regional AK units operating in the areas of Navahrudak and Vilnius. This AK-Nazi cooperation was condemned by General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, commander-in-chief in the Polish Government-in-Exile, who ordered the responsible officers court-martialed. Tadeusz Piotrowski quotes Joseph Rothschild as saying: "The Polish Home Army (AK) was by and large untainted by collaboration" and that "the honor of AK as a whole is beyond reproach".

Resistance in Poland

Armed resistance and the Underground State

The Polish resistance movement in World War II was the largest in all of occupied Europe. Resistance to the German occupation began almost at once and included guerrilla warfare. Centrally commanded military conspiratorial activity was started with the Service for Poland's Victory (Służba Zwycięstwu Polski) organization, established on 27 September 1939. Poland's prewar political parties also resumed activity. Thousands of Jews were saved with the help of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky in western Ukraine. The actions, orchestrated and conducted largely by the UPA together with other Ukrainian groups and local Ukrainian peasants in three former Polish provinces (voivodeships), resulted in between 50,000 and 60,000 Polish civilians killed in Volhynia alone. Other major regions of the slaughter of Poles were eastern Galicia (20,000–25,000 killed) and southeastern Lublin province (4,000–5,000 killed). Hundreds of thousands of Poles fled the affected areas. Ukrainian historians give higher numbers for the Ukrainian losses.

A conspiratorial AK-related organization known as NIE (for Niepodległość or Independence) was set up in 1944 by Emil Fieldorf. General Okulicki became its commander and NIE remained in existence after the AK was dissolved in January 1945. Its activities were directed against the communist Provisional Government. However, as a result of Okulicki's arrest by the NKVD in March and the persecution, NIE ceased to exist. The Armed Forces Delegation for Poland was established instead in May, to be finally replaced by the Freedom and Independence (WiN) formation, whose goal was to organize political rather than military resistance to the communist domination. In particular, the Soviet and Polish communist authorities expelled between 1944 and 1947 nearly 700,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos, transferring most of them into Soviet Ukraine, and then spreading the remaining groups in the Polish Recovered Territories during the Operation Vistula, thus ensuring that postwar Poland would not have significant minorities or any minority concentrations to contend with. Thousands were killed in the attendant strife and violence.

o.The Polish Government-in-Exile had to cope with a number of instances of negative media and other publicity. In one particularly damaging case, about one third of the Jewish soldiers in the Polish Army in Britain deserted, claiming antisemitism in the institution. Some of them joined a British corps and some were court-martialed, but eventually granted amnesty by President Raczkiewicz.

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