Military Review English Edition November-December 2013

That Pilecki managed to get to occupied Warsaw the confluence of the Vistula (Wis?a) and So?a where he joined the underground and survived is Rivers, good train connections, natural resources, truly a wonder. The joint Nazi-Soviet conquest and existing barracks. The Polish army had used (September-October 1939) and co-occupation the building structures prior to the war. (October 1939-June 1941) erased Poland’s borIn fact, the quarters for Polish troops predate ders, choked Poland’s leaders, and terrorized independent Poland. Auschwitz was founded by Poles. The Nazis unleashed Generalplan Ost, the the Germans in the 1200s; however, soon after the colonization of Eastern Europe so that they could German inhabitants abandoned the town, the Poles provide Germans their “living space” in Poland. purchased and incorporated it in the Polish KingTo achieve it, Generalplan Ost, a series of planned dom. As a result of the Three Partitions (the last one murder, genocide, enslavement, expulsion, kidnap- in 1795), Auschwitz returned to being a Germanic ping, sterilization, starvation, incarceration, ban on town. When Auschwitz lay between the Germanic education, and destruction of native culture pro- and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was an important grams, was put in place. Early programs included seasonal labor center and emigration hub. As histoOperation Tannenberg (August-September 1939), rians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt point Operation Intelligenzaktion (autumn 1939-spring out, right before the start of World War I, imperial 1940), and AB Aktion (spring 1940-summer officials erected “twenty-seven brick dormitories for 1940), which targeted and murdered mainly ethnic 3,000 workers, ninety wooden barracks to house an Poles. Some Polish Jews were killed in these early additional 9,000 men, and buildings for infrastrucoperations. Operation Reinhard, the program to tural services to support the life of the temporary exterminate Polish Jews, began in 1942. community.” During World War I the buildings were Another part of Generalplan Ost was ?apanka, not used. After the war, Auschwitz became again the indiscriminate mass arrests of innocent pass- O?wi?cim in independent Poland. The Polish army ersby; the Wehrmacht or SS would suddenly seal used the structures. When the Nazis defeated Poland, off a city block, and all the civilians caught in the they renamed the town Auschwitz. cordon would step into waiting trucks. Captured Poles were sent to labor or concentration camps; others were executed. Early measures to crush the Poles were taken to such extremes that the Nazi security services complained that they needed additional support to keep up with the demands of those actions. Prison overcrowding strained their efforts to neutralize current and thwart future Polish resistance. Working under SS-Gruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, SSOberführer Arpad Wigand proposed at the end of 1939 to create a new concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, specifically in AusStill photograph from the Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz, taken as the child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed chwitz (O?wi?cim). The wire fence, Auschwitz concentration camp, 1945. (United States Holocaust Memorial town’s location was prime— Museum, courtesy of Belarussian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography) 90 November-December 2013 • MILITARY REVIEW

Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 92