Poland Under German Occupation 1939 1945

As a unique and innovative addition to the scholarship on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and modern Polish history, this volume provides fresh analysis on the Nazi occupation of Poland. Through new questions and engaging untapped sources the leading historians who have contributed to this volume provide original scholarship to steer debates and expand the historiography surrounding Nazi racial and occupation policies, Polish and Jewish responses to them, persecution, police terror, resistance, and complicity.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it aimed to destroy Polish national consciousness. As a symbol of Polish national identity and the religious faith of approximately two-thirds of the Polish population, the Roman Catholic church was an obvious target of the Nazi regime's policies of ethnic, racial, and cultural Germanization in occupied Poland. Jonathan Huener reveals in The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation that the persecution of the church in the Reichsgau Wartheland, a region of Poland annexed to Nazi Germany, was more brutal than anywhere else in Nazi-occupied Poland, or Nazi-occupied Europe. Here Catholics witnessed the execution of priests, the incarceration of hundreds of clergymen and nuns in prisons and concentration camps, the closure of churches, the destruction and confiscation of church property, and countless restrictions on public expression of the Catholic faith. Huener also illustrates how the Nazi elite viewed this area as a testing ground for anti-church policies to be launched in the Reich after the successful completion of the war. Bolstered by largely untapped sources from state and church archives, punctuated by vivid archival photographs, and marked by nuance and balance, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation exposes both the brutalities and the limitations of Nazi church policy. The first English-language investigation of German policy toward the Catholic Church in occupied Poland, this compelling story also offers insight into the varied ways in which Catholics--from Pope Pius XII, to members of the Polish episcopate, to the Polish laity at the parish level--responded to the regime's repressive measures.

The revised edition includes a short history of ZEGOTA, the underground government organisation working to save the Jews, and an annotated listing of many Poles executed by the Germans for trying to shelter and save Jews.

By combining historical and political analysis with a sophisticated sociological approach, Jane Gross offers a new itnerpretations of the German occupation of Poland during World War II. Based on his hypothesis that a society cannot be destroyed by coercion short of the physical annihilation of its members, his work has a twofold aim; to examine the model of German occupation in theory and in practice, and to identify the patterns of collective behavior that emerged among the Polish people in response to the social control exercised over them. The author argues taht when an occupier provdies no institutions through which a lcoal population can at least minimally satisfy its social needs, the subjugated populace builds substituted institutions on the remnants of previous forms of its collective life. These substitutes constitute the society's self-defense, to which the occupier must in some way adjust if its goals of manipulation and exploitation are to be achieved. Professor Gross points out numerous ways in which the Poles under the General gouvernement circumvented the goals and authority of the German occupiers. Most significant was the emergence of the Polish underground, which took on the leadership, social welfare, political, and financial functions of an independent state. This phenomenon, he concludes, shows that resistance should not be conceived merely as a military movement but rather as a complex social phenomenon. Jan Tomasz Gross is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it aimed to destroy Polish national consciousness. As a symbol of Polish national identity and the religious faith of approximately two-thirds of Poland's population, the Roman Catholic Church was an obvious target of the Nazi regime's policies of ethnic, racial, and cultural Germanization. Jonathan Huener reveals in The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation that the persecution of the church was most severe in the Reichsgau Wartheland, a region of Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. Here Catholics witnessed the execution of priests, the incarceration of hundreds of clergymen and nuns in prisons and concentration camps, the closure of churches, the destruction and confiscation of church property, and countless restrictions on public expression of the Catholic faith. Huener also illustrates how some among the Nazi elite viewed this area as a testing ground for anti-church policies to be launched in the Reich after the successful completion of the war. Based on largely untapped sources from state and church archives, punctuated by vivid archival photographs, and marked by nuance and balance, The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation exposes both the brutalities and the limitations of Nazi church policy. The first English-language investigation of German policy toward the Catholic Church in occupied Poland, this compelling story also offers insight into the varied ways in which Catholics—from Pope Pius XII, to members of the Polish episcopate, to the Polish laity at the parish level—responded to the Nazi regime's repressive measures.

Paying for Hitler's War is a comparative economic study of twelve Nazi-occupied countries during World War II.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.