Narrator: Marchand Steenkamp.
About the story: After the German invasion of Poland which began on 1 September 1939, Warsaw was stripped of its status and reduced to a provincial city within the newly created General Government. Yet it remained the beating heart of Polish culture and the headquarters of the Polish Underground State, quickly becoming a stronghold of armed and political resistance.Years later, on 14 December 1943, Hans Frank, the head of the German-occupied part of Poland named the General Government, wrote in his diary: “There is one place in this country, which is a source of all our misfortunes, it is Warsaw. Without Warsaw we would not have four-fifths of the trouble we are facing now. Warsaw is the focus of all disturbances, the place from which discontent is spread through the whole country.”
The Polish capital had surrendered to the Germans on 28 September 1939. Only three days later, SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel and his Einsatzgruppe IV, a Nazi mobile death squad, entered the city. Public and private buildings were searched, and mass arrests began almost immediately. On 8 October 1939, 354 Polish teachers and Catholic priests were detained, accused of harboring “Polish chauvinism” and posing a threat to public order. Before long, Warsaw’s prisons such as Pawiak, Mokotów, the Central Detention Center on Daniłowiczowska Street, and the Gestapo headquarters at 25 Szucha Avenue were overflowing. Many prisoners were deported to concentration camps, while others were executed.In the first months of the occupation, political prisoners were secretly shot in the gardens behind the Polish parliament building. Between October 1939 and April 1940, several hundred people were murdered there. But carrying out executions in the very heart of Warsaw soon became impossible to hide. The Nazis needed a place where mass killings could be carried out in secrecy, and for this purpose they selected a secluded clearing in the forest near the village of Palmiry.
Credit to : World History
