The Pomeranian Crime of 1939 as the Onset of Genocide during the Second World War

Abstract

From the very beginning of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans conducted mass murders of Polish civilians in the entire country, however their scale differed in individual of the occupied regions. The greatest crimes were perpetrated in the pre-war Pomeranian Voivodeship, where approx. 30,000 people were murdered. The German terror did not assume such proportions in any other region of annexed Poland. These atrocities targeted mainly the Polish intelligentsia, but also farmers and workers. A thousand patients of psychiatric hospitals and hundreds of Pomeranian Jews were executed and buried in the same death pits. Apart from the Einsatzgruppen units, members of the German minority – the activists of the Selbstschutz Westpreussen – also played a special role in this crime. They were particularly exposed to and receptive of the Nazi ideology due to the German propaganda concerning the so-called Pomeranian corridor and the Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz. The planned extermination campaign, which Rafał Lemkin believed to be the first physical genocide of the war, was portrayed as an act of self-defense and retaliation for the death of the Volksdeutschers. In order to emphasize the importance of the events that unfolded in Gdańsk Pomerania in 1939 as the onset of the genocidal German occupation policy, a new historical concept was introduced: “the Pomeranian crime of 1939.”