Racism in Poland in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a subject of extensive study. Ethnic minorities made up a greater proportion of the country's population from the founding of the Polish state through the Second Polish Republic than in the 21st century, when government statistics show 94% or more of the population self-reporting as ethnically Polish.[1][2]
Beginning in the 16th century, many Jews lived in Poland, so much so that it was referred to as the center of the Jewish world. Occasional pogroms, such as in Kraków in 1494 and Warsaw in 1527, punctuated a period of material prosperity and relative security for Polish Jews. Between 1648 and 1649, 30,000 Jews were killed in the Cossack Chmielnicki Uprising in Ukraine.[3] After the second partition of Poland, Frederick the Great, considering the Prussian-occupied territory a new colony and its people to be like the Iroquois of North America, began a Prussian colonization campaign aimed at replacing Polish language and culture with German.[4][5]
During World War II, Poland was occupied by Germany and subsequently was the main scene of the Jewish Holocaust, the Porajmos (Romani genocide), and Nazi atrocities against the Polish nation. These genocides varied in how, when, and where they were applied; Jews and Romani were targeted for immediate extermination and suffered the greatest casualties, while the Poles were targeted for destruction and enslavement within 15–20 years.[6] Robert Gellately has called the Nazi racial policy of cultural eradication and mass extermination of people based on ethnicity a serial genocide, since in its broader formulation it targeted multiple ethnic groups whom the Nazis deemed "sub-human", including Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, and Jews.[7]: 253, 256
Ducreux
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).In fact, from Hitler to Hans Frank, we find frequent references to Slavs and Jews as 'Indians.' This, too, was a long-standing trope. It can be traced back to Frederick the Great, who likened the 'slovenly Polish trash' in newly reconquered West Prussia to the Iroquois.
Hitler's genocidal policies in Poland were directed both at the Poles and at the Jews
Third, ethnic Poles were also victims of Nazi genocide, more than two and a half million of them – mostly civilians – were killed by the Nazis.
The Holocaust is the name given to one specific case of genocide: the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to destroy the Jewish people. Other genocides committed by the Nazis during the Second World War were the genocides of Poles and Roma.
When the Germans shot tens of thousands of Poles in 1944, with the intention of making sure that Warsaw would never rise again, that was genocide, too. Far less dramatic measures, such as the kidnapping and Germanisation of Polish children, were also, by the legal definition, genocide.
The Generalgouvernement was initially seen by Hitler as a reservation for Poles, but here too Nazi policies of economic exploitation and the eradication of Polish culture foresaw the extermination of the Poles as a nation. Some 2 million men and women were deported to the Reich to work in German agriculture and industry, while the rest suffered starvation (p. 201)
Nazi Germanization schemes demanded the complete elimination of Poles and Jews from the incorporated eastern territories. (p. 6)
The incorporated areas are subject to an especially severe regime, involving genocide for the Polish population
Bauer argues that Lemkin was most likely thinking of what was happening to the Poles when he defined genocide. (p. 20)
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