(short for , ) was the second stage of Nazi Germany's campaign of violence in the occupied General Government (GG) of Poland. It followed the , during Germany's invasion the preceding year, which sought to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic. The remaining Polish population would thus be docile and exploitable, making it easier to Germanise Poland and extirpate Polish cultural, ethnic and national identity. The November 1939 was a template for Aktion AB. Most of the 150 faculty and staff at Jagiellonian University in Kraków who were arrested survived the concentration camps and were released within months. German leader Adolf Hitler had personally charged GG governor with keeping Poland stable during the invasion of France the following year. When security forces made their next wave of arrests, Frank concluded it would be better to execute those arrested shortly afterwards.
In spring 1940 several conferences were held, including some jointly with the Soviet NKVD, to formalize plans for AB. Shortly afterwards arrests began. Over 30,000 Polish citizens were taken into custody;Chapter "Hitler's Plans for Poland." Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents , p. 988. about 7,000 were subsequently massacred."Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era" at the Despite Frank's initial intent to quickly execute all arrestees, at Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler's request many were sent to concentration camps, including the first to arrive at Auschwitz. The resistance soon recovered from the major setback. By late 1941, the Germans switched to tactics that more specifically targeted known or suspected underground groups, as more Poles from all walks of life began taking action against the occupiers, contrary to German expectations. Mass executions continued as a method of state terror.
History
The 1918 Treaty of Versailles had recognized the creation of the Second Polish Republic out of the eastern territory of the former German Empire. Some leaders of the postwar German Weimar Republic had regarded that as intolerable, and sought to restore German hegemony to the east by destroying the new Polish state. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the newly-established Soviet Union to Poland's east, also saw an independent Poland as "very dangerous" but useful in securing a Soviet alliance with Germany. Despite having concluded a non-aggression agreement with Poland in 1934, Germany under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler continued to have issues with Poland, particularly around the Polish Corridor, which while guaranteeing Poland access to the Baltic Sea also separated Germany from its exclave East Prussia and the German-dominated Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk), as well as the treatment of German citizens who remained resident in now-Polish territory. So, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, beginning World War II in Europe. By the end of the month, with some assistance from the Soviets, Poland had fallen.
After conquering Poland, the Nazis began drafting and implementing what they would eventually formalise as Generalplan Ost, their master plan for Germany's eastward expansion, entailing the colonisation and replacement of many of the (mostly Slavic) native populations of the countries it conquered with Germans and related peoples. "From now on, the swastika will fly over this country forever." announced Hans Frank, appointed governor of the General Government (GG), the German-occupied part of Poland that was not annexed by either Germany or the Soviet Union after the invasion. "The Polish state will never be reborn." The initial goal was to begin Germanising the former Poland once the war, expected to be short, was over. In order to do so it was necessary to minimize any potential resistance. The Nazis saw the Polish intelligentsia, including not just the country's academics and artists, but its politicians, aristocrats, professionals, clergy, military officers, and generally everyone sufficiently educated or wealthy to have a position of authority, even informally, in Polish society, as a likely source of leadership. Nazi ideology held that only these people had a true national consciousness; the rest of the population was indifferent to the fate of the state and cared more about their daily lives. Once the intelligentsia had been eliminated, the Nazis believed the remaining Poles would be useful to them as unskilled labour.
Intelligenzaktion
The first mass murder of the intelligentsia, and any other people suspected of potential anti-Nazi activity, began in September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, and continued until the next spring. It was conducted in part according to an "enemies of the Reich list" prepared before the war by the Gestapo members of the German minority in Poland and printed ahead of time by German intelligence as Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book-Poland). Nazi Germany regarded the operation as a pre-emptive measure to keep the Polish resistance scattered and prevent a possible uprising during the planned German invasion of France.Noakes and Pridham, Nazism: A History in Documents , p. 965. Known as the Intelligenzaktion, this was a plan to eliminate Poland's intelligentsia and leadership in the western and central areas Germany annexed after the invasion. It was carried out by the Schutzstaffels (SS) Einsatzgruppen units, with the assistance of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a militia raised from the ethnic Germans in Poland. As the result of this operation 100,000 Polish nobles, teachers, entrepreneurs, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were arrested in ten regional actions. Some were spared because they were needed for civil administration.. Nearly 50,000 of those arrested were executed, while the remainder were sent to concentration camps, where few survived.
The Intelligenzaktion was extended to the GG, where it spared most of the Catholic clergy and larger landowners. Among the actions carried out there was Sonderaktion Krakau in November 1939, in which the president and the entire faculty of Jagiellonian University in Kraków were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Their arrest drew condemnation from Fascist Italy and the Vatican. Those who survived imprisonment were eventually released, although some died shortly afterwards as a result of maltreatment and undernourishment in the camps.
The Polish resistance had been organizing since the previous year's military defeat. By the end of 1939 there were 140 separate organizations that had begun underground operations of some kind, from printing newspapers to promoting light sabotage such as painting the logo of the Polish Underground State and anti-German slogans on walls. In February 1940 the Political Consultative Committee was formed to unite all the resistance organizations politically. In March and April Henryk Dobrzański, an army major who had taken command of soldiers who had refused to surrender and evaded German capture over the winter, led ambushes against superior German forces near Radom until he himself was killed in an ambush. Nazi German authorities decided the time was ideal for another anti-intellectual purge, this time within the GG, while international attention was focused on France.
Aktion AB
German preparations and planning
The AB-Aktion had its origins in discussions with Soviet officials during a series of secret Gestapo–NKVD conferences that began at the end of September 1939 after Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland. A secret protocol to the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed at that time bound both parties to "tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party [and] suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation." By the conclusion of the talks in March 1940, the two secret police agencies had begun primarily discussing how to suppress Polish resistance.
Hitler had personally charged GG governor-general Hans Frank with keeping Poland under control to avoid any distractions during the forthcoming offensive in the West. On March 2, 1940, Frank convened a meeting with the military and security leaders, together with the four GG district governors, to announce Aktion AB, short for Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion, or "Extraordinary Pacification Action". Noting that resistance organisations had already arisen, he warned that "we may wake up one morning and find ourselves overwhelmed by them if we do not soon launch a large-scale attack against at least their leaders." At a meeting six days later, he revealed that the initiative had been ordered personally by Hitler. "The slightest attempt by the Poles to take action will result in a massive liquidation action against them", he warned. "I would not hesitate to use any method of terror and I would not shrink from any consequences."
Immediately after the second meeting, SS Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, commander of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) in the GG, ordered his officers to begin arresting members of resistance organizations. He also suspended the releases of Poles who remained imprisoned after the 1939 actions. By the end of April, he reported that 1,000 of 2,200 to 2,400 suspected resistance members were in custody.
At a meeting in Kraków on 16 May with Streckenbach and GG administrative officials, Frank again stressed the danger posed by Polish resistance. Citing the ongoing partisan actions of the Detached Unit of the Polish Army and other recent incidents of attacks and acts of sabotage against Germans and the occupying forces, those present agreed to launch a plan to ensure that "the Polish resistance movement will be deprived of its leaders, the authority of the Führer and the Reich in the General Government will increase enormously, and peace in the country will be unconditionally maintained." All measures were to be centrally coordinated and authorised in order to emphasize German authority over the GG. Frank ordered Streckenbach to commence Aktion AB without delay and granted him special legal powers for its implementation. The operations were intended to be completed within a month, after which cases were to be heard before Standgerichte, special temporary police courts. The list of targets came in part from the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen used during the Intelligenzaktion.
Two weeks later, after the operation had started, another meeting was held to discuss the progress and further elucidate its goals and methods. Frank made it clear to all concerned that Aktion AB was specifically aimed at preventing the Poles from taking advantage of the invasion of France and the Low Countries to mount an uprising. For the first time he used the word "liquidation" to describe the goal of the operation, estimating that it would cost the lives of at least several thousand Poles. Streckenbach reported that half of "the flower of Polish intelligentsia and resistance" had been arrested; he estimated that 75% of the total would be in German hands by the conclusion of Aktion AB. Most of the arrested would simply be shot shortly afterwards rather than sent to camps, it was decided. This, for Frank, was a lesson learned from the arrests of the Jagiellonian professors, which led to unnecessary "hassle" and would have turned out differently had the Germans just killed them. He also ordered any Polish prisoners still held in camps in the Reich to be returned to the GG to avoid overburdening those camps.