Poland: WW II: 2

From Wikipedia:
"The Holocaust in Poland"

The Holocaust in German-occupied Poland was the last and the most lethal phase of the Nazi "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) marked by the construction of death camps on German-occupied Polish soil. The genocide officially sanctioned and executed by the Third Reich during World War II, collectively known as the Holocaust, took the lives of three million Polish Jews and similar numbers of Poles, not including losses of Polish citizens of other ethnicities. The extermination camps played a central role in the implementation of the German policy of systematic and mostly successful destruction of over 90% of the Polish-Jewish population of the Second Polish Republic. Throughout the German occupation, at great risk to themselves and their families, many Christian Poles succeeded in rescuing Jews from the Nazis. Grouped by nationality, Polish rescuers represent the biggest number of people who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Already recognized by the State of Israel, the Polish Righteous Among the Nations include 6,706 gentiles, more than any other nation. A small percentage of Polish Jews managed to survive World War II within the German-occupied Poland or successfully escaped east beyond the reach of the Nazis into the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, only to be deported to forced labour in Siberia along with the families of up to 1 million Poland's non-Jews.

Ghettos:

Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland were established during World War II in hundreds of locations across occupied Poland.  Most Jewish ghettos had been created by Nazi Germany between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine and segregate Poland's Jewish population of about 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. The liquidation of the Jewish ghettos across occupied Poland was closely connected with the construction of highly secretive death camps built by various German companies in early 1942 for the sole purpose of annihilating a people. Jews were transported to their deaths in Holocaust trains from liquidated ghettos of all occupied cities, including Litzmannstadt, the last ghetto in Poland to be emptied in August 1944. 

Mass Graves:

Following the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Himmler assembled a force of about 11,000 men to pursue a programme of physical annihilation of the Jews for the first time. Also, during Operation Barbarossa, the SS had recruited collaborationist auxiliary police from among Soviet nationals. The local Schuma provided Nazi Germany with manpower and critical knowledge of the local region and language. In what became known as the Holocaust by bullets, the German police battalions (Orpo), SiPo, Waffen-SS and special-task Einsatzgruppen along with the Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, operated behind the front lines systematically shooting tens of thousands of men, women and children independently of the army.  Massacres were committed in over 30 locations across the formerly Soviet-occupied parts of Poland, including in Brześć, Tarnopol, and Białystok, as well as in prewar provincial capitals of Łuck, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Wilno (see Ponary).  The survivors of mass killing operations were incarcerated in the new ghettos of economic exploitation, and starved slowly to death by artificial famine at the whim of German authorities.  Within two years, the total number of shooting victims in the east had risen to between 618,000 and 800,000 Jews. Entire regions behind the German–Soviet Frontier were reported to Berlin by the Nazi death squads to be "Judenfrei". 

Death Camps:

The Chełmno extermination camp (German: Kulmhof), 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Łódź, was built as the first-ever, following Hitler's launch of Operation Barbarossa. It was a pilot project for the development of other extermination sites. The experiments with exhaust gases were finalized by murdering 1,500 Poles at Soldau. The killing method at Chełmno grew out of the 'euthanasia' program in which busloads of unsuspecting hospital patients were gassed in air-tight shower rooms at Bernburg, Hadamar and Sonnenstein. All Jews from the Judenfrei district of Wartheland were deported to Chełmno under the guise of 'resettlement'. At least 145,000 prisoners from the Łódź Ghetto perished at Chełmno in several waves of deportations lasting from 1942 to 1944. Additionally, 20,000 foreign Jews and 5,000 Roma were brought in from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. All victims were killed with the use of mobile gas vans (Sonderwagen), which had exhaust pipes reconfigured and poisons added to gasoline. 

The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest of the German Nazi extermination centers. Located 64 kilometres (40 mi) west of Kraków, Auschwitz processed an average of 1.5 Holocaust trains per day. The overwhelming majority of prisoners deported there were murdered within hours of their arrival. The camp was fitted with the first permanent gas chambers in March 1942. The extermination of Jews with Zyklon B as the killing agent began in July.  At Birkenau, the four killing installations (each consisting of coatrooms, multiple gas chambers and industrial-scale crematoria) were built in the following year. By late 1943, Birkenau was a killing factory with four so-called 'Bunkers' (totaling over a dozen gas chambers) working around the clock. Up to 6,000 people were gassed and cremated there each day, after the ruthless 'selection process' at the Judenrampe. Only about 10 percent of the deportees from transports organized by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) were registered and assigned to the Birkenau barracks. Auschwitz II extermination program resulted in the death of 1.3 to 1.5 million people. Over 1.1 million of them were Jews from across Europe including 200,000 children. Among the registered 400,000 victims (less than one-third of the total Auschwitz arrivals) were 140,000–150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 25,000 others. Auschwitz received a total of about 300,000 Jews from occupied Poland, shipped aboard freight trains from liquidated ghettos and transit camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria were blown up on November 25, 1944, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of mass killings, by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Located 80 kilometres (50 mi) northeast of Warsaw,  Treblinka became operational on July 24, 1942, after three months of forced labour construction by expellees from Germany.  The shipping of Jews from the Polish capital – plan known as the Großaktion Warschau – began immediately. During two months of the summer of 1942, about 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates were exterminated at Treblinka. The gas chambers, rebuilt of brick and expanded during August–September 1942, were capable of killing 12,000 to 15,000 victims every day,  with a maximum capacity of 22,000 executions in twenty-four hours. The number of people killed at Treblinka in about a year ranges from 800,000 to 1,200,000, with no exact figures available. The camp was closed by Globocnik on October 19, 1943 soon after the Treblinka prisoner uprising, with the murderous Operation Reinhard nearly completed.

The Bełżec extermination camp, set up near the railroad station of Bełżec in the Lublin District, began operating officially on March 17, 1942, with three temporary gas chambers later replaced with six made of brick and mortar, enabling the facility to handle over 1,000 victims at one time. At least 434,500 Jews were exterminated there. 

The Sobibór extermination camp, disguised as a railway transit camp not far from Lublin, began mass gassing operations in May 1942. The total number of Polish Jews murdered at Sobibór is estimated at a minimum of 170,000.  Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp dismantled following a prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943; one of only two successful uprisings by Jewish Sonderkommando inmates in any extermination camp, with 300 escapees (most of them were recaptured by the SS and killed).

The Majdanek forced labor camp located on the outskirts of Lublin (like Sobibór) and closed temporarily during an epidemic of typhus, was reopened in March 1942 for Operation Reinhard; first, as a storage depot for valuables stolen from the victims of gassing at the killing centers of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. It became a place of extermination of large Jewish populations from south-eastern Poland (Kraków, Lwów, Zamość, Warsaw) after the gas chambers were constructed in late 1942. Majdanek was the site of death of 59,000 Polish Jews (from among its 79,000 victims). By the end of Operation Harvest Festival conducted at Majdanek in early November 1943 (the single largest German massacre of Jews during the entire war), the camp had only 71 Jews left.

Armed Jewish Resistance

There is a popular misconception among the general public that most Jews went to their deaths passively. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jewish resistance to the Nazis comprised not only their armed struggle but also spiritual and cultural opposition which gave the Jews dignity despite the inhumane conditions of life in the ghettos. Many forms of resistance were present, even though the elders were terrified by the prospect of mass retaliation against the women and children in the case of anti-Nazi revolt. As the German authorities undertook to liquidate the ghettos, armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of Polish-Soviet border of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland. The uprisings erupted in 5 major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps. Notably, the only rebellions in Nazi camps were Jewish.

The Nieśwież Ghetto insurgents in eastern Poland fought back on July 22, 1942. The Łachwa Ghetto revolt erupted on September 3. On October 14, 1942, the Mizocz Ghetto followed suit. The Warsaw Ghetto firefight of January 18, 1943, led to the largest Jewish uprising of World War II launched on April 19, 1943. On June 25, the Jews of the Częstochowa Ghetto rose up. At Treblinka, the Sonderkommando prisoners armed with stolen weapons attacked the guards on August 2, 1943. A day later, the Będzin and Sosnowiec ghetto revolts broke out. On August 16, the Białystok Ghetto uprising erupted. The revolt in Sobibór extermination camp occurred on October 14, 1943. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the insurgents blew up one of Birkenau’s crematoria on October 7, 1944.  Similar resistance was offered in Łuck, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Pińsk, Poniatowa, and in Wilno.

Rate Of Survival:

It is estimated that about 350,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust. Some 230,000 of them survived in the USSR and the Soviet-controlled territories of Poland, including men and women who escaped from areas occupied by Germany. Gunnar S. Paulsson estimated that 30,000 Polish Jews survived in the labor camps and were liberated from camps in Germany and Austria alone, except that declaring their own nationality was of no use to those who did not intend to return. According to Longerich, up to 50,000 Jews survived in the forests (not counting Galicia) and also among the soldiers who reentered Poland with the pro-Soviet Polish "Berling army" formed by Stalin. The number of Jews who successfully hid on the "Aryan" side of the ghettos could be as high as 100,000 wrote Peter Longerich, although many were killed by the German Jagdkommandos. Thousands of so-called Convent children hidden by the non-Jewish Poles and the Catholic Church remained in orphanages run by the Sisters of the Family of Mary in more than 20 locations, similar as in other Catholic convents. Given the severity of the German measures designed to prevent this occurrence, the survival rate among the Jewish fugitives was relatively high and by far, the individuals who circumvented deportation were the most successful.

Holocaust Memorials and Commemorations:

There is a large number of memorials in Poland dedicated to the Holocaust remembrance. Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw was unveiled in April 1948. Major museums include the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the outskirts of Oświęcim with 1.4 million visitors per year, and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw on the site of the former Ghetto, presenting the thousand-year history of the Jews in Poland. Since 1988, an annual international event called March of the Living takes place in April at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex on the Holocaust Remembrance Day, with the total attendance exceeding 150,000 youth from all over the world. There are state museums on the grounds of each death camp of Operation Reinhard including the Majdanek State Museum in Lublin, declared a national monument as first in 1946 with intact gas chambers and crematoria from World War II. Branches of the Majdanek Museum include the Bełżec, and the Sobibór Museums where advanced geophysical studies are being conducted by the Israeli and Polish archaeologists. The new Treblinka Museum opened in 2006. It was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum.

^ This is a good summary of all the different aspects of the German Holocaust in occupied Poland. ^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland