“Polenfeldzug”: Nazi Crimes during the War against Poland in 1939 and their Place in German Memory

Abstract

German crimes committed in Poland during the years 1939–1945 have not been forgotten in present-day Germany. But the so-called “Polenfeldzug” plays a strangely marginal role in memory. This is surprising insofar as it not only represented a drastic break from previous policy towards Poland, (Lehnstaedt, 2017) but also constituted the “prelude to the war of annihilation,” as Jochen Böhler termed it (Böhler, 2006; Böhler, 2009b). A war of annihilation not from 1941 but already in 1939. The Second World War was a crime against humanity from its very beginning.

The present article aims to shed some light on two aspects of the invasion of 1939. The first concerns the novelty of the German approach, that is the crimes committed in Poland and their prehistory, and the German memory of these events. It is, however, not on the German historiography of the occupation until 1945, but on its memory. Thus, while it does deal with the communication of research results as such, it shows that these are still widely lacking. But especially with Poland being a neighbor, NATO ally and partner in the EU, it is high time that Germans learned more about the countries’ mutual history.