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Following the Soviet invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II, in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact against Poland, the Soviet Union acquired more than half of the territory of the Second Polish Republic or about 201,000 square kilometres (78,000 sq mi) inhabited by more than 13,200,000 people. [1]
Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland. As a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers became prisoners of war. Official Soviet estimate for the number of POWs taken during th campaign was 190,584 and is treated as reliable by some historians. [3]
According to Ostrowska and Zaremba, Polish women taken to Germany for slave labour were raped on a large scale by Soviet soldiers as well as former prisoners of war. In May 1945, at the conference of delegates of various repatriation offices, the final resolution stated: "through Stargard and Szczecin , there is a mass movement of Polish people ...
Warsaw Uprising; Part of Operation Tempest of the Polish Resistance and the Eastern Front of World War II: Clockwise from top left: Civilians construct an anti-tank ditch in Wola district; German anti-tank gun in Theatre Square; Home Army soldier defending a barricade; Ruins of Bielańska Street; Insurgents leave the city ruins after surrendering to German forces; Allied transport planes ...
[15] 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians were killed in the Katyn massacre, [2] [19] but thousands of others were victims of NKVD massacres of prisoners in mid-1941, before the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone. In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war.
Tadeusz Piotrowski, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire has provided a reassessment of Poland's losses in World War II. Polish war dead included 5,150,000 victims of Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and the Holocaust, the treatment of Polish citizens by occupiers included 350,000 deaths during the Soviet occupation in 1940 ...
The Wola massacre (Polish: Rzeź Woli, lit. 'Wola slaughter') was the systematic killing of between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles in the Wola neighbourhood of the Polish capital city, Warsaw, by the German Waffen-SS, Ordnungpolizei, Sicherheitdienst and the SS-Sonderregiment Dirlewanger, which took place from 5 to 12 August 1944.
Diplomatic relations were, however, re-established in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union forced Joseph Stalin to look for allies. Thus the military agreement from August 14 and subsequent Sikorski–Mayski Agreement from August 17, 1941, resulted in Stalin agreeing to declare the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in relation to Poland null and void, [29] and release tens of thousands ...