General Government: Encyclopedia II - General Government - Creation of the General Government

General Government - Creation of the General Government

Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied territories on 26 October 1939. Two decrees by Hitler (8 October and 12 October 1939) provided for the division of the annexed areas of Poland into the following administrative units:

• Reichsgau Wartheland (initially Reichsgau Posen), which included the entire Poznan Voivodship, most of the Lodz Voivodship, five counties of the Pomeranian voivodship, and one county of the Warsaw voivodship;
• the remaining area of Pomeranian voivodship, which was incorporated into the Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen (initially Reichsgau Westpreussen);
• Ciechanow District (Regierungsbezirk Zichenau) consisting of the five northern counties of Warszawa Voivodship (Plock, Plonsk, Sierpc, Ciechanow and Mlawa), which became a part of East Prussia;
• Katowice District (Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz) or unofficially Ost-Oberschlesien (East Upper Silesia); which included Sosnowiec, Będzin, Chrzanow, and Zawiercie counties and parts of Olkusz and Zywiec counties.

The area of these territories was 94,000 square kilometres and the population was about 10 million.

The remaining block of territory was placed under an administration called the General Government (in German Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete), with its capital at Krakow and subdivided into four districts, Warsaw, Lublin, Radom, and Krakow. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, East Galicia, previously part of the Ukrainian SSR, was incorporated into the General Government and became its fifth district.

The General Government was a purely German administration, not a Polish puppet government.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Creation of the General Government", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki