General Government: Encyclopedia II - General Government - Genocide policies

General Government - Genocide policies

During the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, The State Secretary of the General Government, Dr. Josef Bühler pushed Heydrich to implement the "final solution" in the General Government. As far as he was concerned, the main problem of General Government was an overdeveloped black market that disorganised the work of the authorities. He saw a remedy in solving the "Jewish question" in the country as fast as possible. An additional point in favour was, that there were no transportation problems here.

In 1942 the Germans began the systematic extermination of the Jewish population. The General Government was the location of four of the six extermination camps in which the most extreme measures of the Holocaust, the genocide by gassing of undesired "races," chiefly millions of Jews from Poland and other countries, was carried out between 1942 and 1944.

Overall 4 million of the 1939 population of the General Government area had lost their lives by the time the Soviet armed forces liberated the area in late 1944.

It was German policy that the (non-Jewish) Poles, like other Slavic peoples, were to be reduced to the status of serfs, and eventually replaced by German colonists of the "master race." In the Government General, all secondary education was abolished and all Polish cultural institutions closed. In 1943, the government selected the Zamojskie area for further German colonisation. German settlements were planned, and the Polish population expelled amid great brutality, but few Germans were settled in the area before 1944. See Generalplan Ost for more information about this.

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