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Disaster: the end of a short spell of independence
The existence of the Second Republic of Poland was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and on 17 September the Soviet Union attacked from the east. After a month of fighting, Germany and the USSR enacted another partition of Poland. Part of the territory was transformed into what was known as "das General-Gouvernement", and part was annexed directly onto Nazi Germany.
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Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising, 1944. |
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| The eastern territories remained under Soviet occupation. Both powers applied a policy of systematic extermination of the Polish population, albeit in different ways: German concentration camps and Soviet labour camps filled up, Polish intellectuals were massacred in the Palmiry woods, at Wawer, and many other execution sites. 21 thousand officers, officials and intellectuals were executed on Stalin's orders, in Katyn, Kharkov, and elsewhere in the USSR. The Nazis murdered 3 million Polish citizens of Jewish ethnicity, and over 2 million non-Jewish Poles. Over quarter of a million Polish civilians of all ethnic backgrounds were deported east by the Soviet authorities, where many of them died. From 1939 to 1945 the entire territory of Poland was subjected to ruthless ethnic cleansing. The Polish Government did not give up the struggle. President Władysław Raczkiewicz, and General Władysław Sikorski, who was Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, were in exile in London, from where the government in exile ran the underground organisations at home. A fully operational clandestine Polish administrative system known as the "Underground State" was established and conducted its affairs, including an extensive system of undercover education at the secondary (grammar school) and university level, as the Nazis had closed down all education for Poles except for the elementary schools. The ranks of the armed resistance movement reached over 400 thousand combatants, and their sabotage operations and undercover campaigns were carried out on the largest scale in occupied Europe.
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