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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]
[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.
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 ...
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 ...
Map of the sites related to the Katyn massacre. The Katyn massacre [a] was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin's order in April and May 1940.
Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the entire pre-war population of Poland. [1] Most of them were civilian victims of the war crimes and the crimes against humanity which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union committed during their occupation of Poland.
The numerical dimensions of Polish World War II human losses are difficult to ascertain. According to the official data of the Polish War Reparations Bureau (1946), 644,000 Polish citizens died as a result of military action and 5.1 million died as a result of the occupiers' repressions and extermination policies. According to Czubiński, the ...
The residents of occupied Poland were conscripted on the basis of the so-called Polish decrees (Polenerlasse), and were subject to discriminatory regulation.. Compared to German workers or foreign workers from neutral and German-allied countries (Gastarbeitnehmer), Polish Zivilarbeiters received lower wages and were not allowed to use public conveniences (such as public transport) or visit ...