1939: Operation Tannenberg public mass executions begin

ExecutedToday.com ^ | October 20th, 2015 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

Kornik just weeks into the German occupation of Poland in 1939, fruit of a pre-planned Nazi project to secure the new territory as lebensraum.

Operation Tannenberg (English Wikipedia entry | German | Polish) could be seen as a vanguard for the mind-boggling exterminations to come in subsequent years, cementing the army’s commitment to a campaign that extended well beyond territorial conquest. Alexander Rossino examines this understudied segment of World War II in Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity and contends that “the unlimited, almost nihilistic violence of the Wehrmacht” emerges first in these initial weeks of the Polish campaign, which proved a “transitional conflict” pivoting towards the more notorious atrocities to come. “The invasion of Poland thus occupies a crucial place in the history of Nazi Germany’s descent into mass murder and genocide.”.....

[Chewbarkah]

I knew that Einnsatzgruppen slaughtered thousands in Poland, but thought Jews were the main target out of Nazi anti-Semitism. That the Nazis sought to kill off all political and intellectual elites is the identical motive attributed to Stalin’s Katyn Forest massacre of surrendered Polish officers. Bookends from hell.

[dfwgator]

In the movie “Katyń”, they show where the Nazis rounded up all the professors at Cracow’s Jagellonian University, and shipped them off to Matthausen, where many died.

One of the students there that day, who wasn’t taken was Karol Wojtyła.

[pierrem15]

My mother in law was forced to watch the Germans machine gun Poles against the walls of a church. She told me she would never have imagined that human blood could flow like water in the street gutters.

Later a German woman in their building disappeared so the Germans gathered all the Poles in the building (including my mother in law) and told them they would all be shot if she didn't return. So she got to spend an afternoon awaiting execution but the woman turned up. She was seven years old.