The photo comes from the resources of the State Archive in Zamosc
On the night of November 27-28, 1942, the Germans launched „Aktion Zamosc,” a displacement operation that resulted in the brutal expulsion of more than 100,000 Poles, including some 30,000 children, from their homes. It was part of the large German so-called General Plan East. The German plan not only boiled down to confiscation of property and forced resettlement or Germanization of a selected population, but was also a mass extermination of the population, including in the Zamojszczyzna region.
Eastern General Plan
From the very beginning of World War II, Polish citizens were subjected to cruel repression, both by German and Soviet criminals. The former’s sphere of influence included Gdansk Pomerania, Greater Poland, Mazovia and Lublin. Part of these lands were incorporated into the Third Reich. From the remnants, a General Government was established on October 12, 1939, ruled with an iron and criminal hand by the notorious German jurist Hans Frank.
The General Government was initially divided into four, and from August 1941 into five districts: Kraków, Lublin, Radom, Warsaw and Galicia. The Zamojszczyzna region, in keeping with its geographic location, was included in the Lublin District, which was headed by several German criminals who embodied the Nazi ideology.
Part of this ideology was the aforementioned General Plan East or Generalplan Ost, or GPO for short. It was created between 1941 and 1942 by a special team of employees of the Reich Main Security Office. It was to be implemented over a vast area of Central and Eastern Europe, and its main objective was to gain „living space” – the notorious Lebensraum, for the millions of German settlers who were to settle and develop the received territories.
Through the execution of the GPO, the Germans aimed to create the so-called Greater German Reich, on which the so-called New Deal was to prevail. Under this term was the domination of the Nazis over the entire area of Europe, the extermination of the Jews and all Slavic peoples. In planning the General Plan East, the Nazis assumed that thirty to fifty million citizens of various Central and Eastern European countries would be annihilated or displaced over a period of twenty years. In the case of Poland, the Germans estimated that this kind of oppression would succeed in destroying some 20 million citizens of the Second Republic, or eighty-five percent of the Polish population at the time.
The Germans began implementing the General Plan East first in those Polish lands that had been incorporated into the Third Reich in October 1939, that is, primarily Greater Poland and Pomerania. Nevertheless, in the subsequent years of the war, the Nazis decided to carry out their criminal plans also in other areas of the occupied Second Republic. Their choice fell, among others, on the Zamojszczyzna region, which led to a real nightmare that was realized on this small piece of Polish land.
Zamojszczyzna seemed „appealing” to the Germans for several key reasons. First of all, it was an extremely attractive area from an agrarian point of view. Nevertheless, the most important was the fact that by the end of the 18th century a total of several thousand Germans had settled in the area, whose descendants still lived there, although it is difficult to determine their national sympathies. For this reason, Zamojszczyzna was referred to by the Nazis as a „bastion of Germanness.”
However, before proceeding with the GPO, the Germans decided to hit the Polish Jews first. The operation was code-named „Reinhardt” and meant the extermination of all Jews residing in the General Government. It began on the night of March 16-17, 1942, with the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto. Subsequently, other such places were systematically destroyed in the following months, and their inhabitants were transported to German extermination camps, where they were subjected to mass extermination. For eighteen months, German criminals murdered a total of about two million Jews from the entire General Government.
After these events, the Germans focused on implementing their colonization intentions. Significantly, however, the first decisions in the aforementioned matter were made as early as July 1941, at which time SS chief Heinrich Himmler decided to establish a German Settlement District in the Zamojszczyzna area. Then, in November 1941, the first trial displacements were organized there. At that time, about two thousand Poles were expelled from their homes in six villages. In their place, people of German descent were brought in to live in Bessarabia. This action was called „Heim ins Reich” by the Nazis, which translates to: „Return home to the Reich.”
Photos are from the resources of the State Archives in Zamosc
„Aktion Zamość”
On the night of November 27-28, 1942, in the village of Skiebieszow and surrounding villages, the Germans launched a resettlement operation in four districts of the Lublin District: Bilgoraj, Hrubieszow, Tomaszow and Zamosc, which went down in history under the code name „Zamosc.” Under cover of darkness, German forces surrounded a selected village and then drove all residents from their homes. Those Poles who tried to put up any resistance, hide from the Nazis or escape during transport were murdered on the spot. The rest had to pack up in a very short time. They were then sent to a transit camp in Zamosc, with German colonizers arriving in their place.
The Zamosc camp was a terrible place, where cold, hunger and disease were the order of the day. Its first commandant was SS-Unterscharführer Artur Schültz – a former boxer and common thug who enjoyed abusing prisoners. In Zamosc, Poles were selected into four categories: I – Polishized Germans who were destined to be re-Germanized, II – Poles who could be Germanized, III – people who were fit for work, IV – the remaining people, i.e. children under fourteen, the elderly and the sick. In the latter group, the Germans introduced additional categories. People were divided into those who were going to be deported to Auschwitz and those, mainly children, who were to be Germanized.
The entire operation outlined above was supervised by the head of the SS and Police in the entire General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, and directed directly by the head of the SS and Police in the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik.
„Aktion Zamosc” lasted from November 1942 to August 1943 and proceeded in three phases. The first ended very quickly, as early as December 1942, at which time some ten thousand Poles were displaced from sixty Zamosc villages.
The second phase of the operation was launched by the Germans as early as January 1943 and ended two months later. During its course, the Nazis managed to displace nearly forty thousand residents.
The last phase of „Aktion Zamosc” lasted from June to August 1943, during which time some sixty thousand people were expelled from their homes. This part of the operation in question was characterized by the greatest brutality and ruthlessness against the Polish population, but also the Polish underground, which began to defend its compatriots, already leading to the so-called „Zamosc Uprising” in late 1942 and early 1943. During it there were many clashes between Polish soldiers and the German oppressor. The largest battle of that campaign took place on February 1, 1943 near Zaboreczne. At that time, units of the Home Army and the Peasant Battalions defeated German units.
Children of Zamojszczyzna
The case of the children of Zamojszczyzna is perhaps the most cruel part of the displacement process carried out by the Germans in the area in 1942-1943. The youngest, like their parents, were forced to leave their homes and were sent, first to a camp in Zamość, and also to a similar place, established shortly thereafter in Zwierzyniec. There, the ruthlessness of the Germans towards the Poles was probably even greater.
In the Zamosc and Zwierzyniec camps, children, like adults, were subjected to selection. The Germans brazenly took them from their Polish parents and deported them in an unknown direction. Children who were not destined for Germanization were decided to be sent by cattle cars, to various corners of the General Government. In addition, thousands of young Poles from Zamojszczyzna were sent to German concentration camps, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek, but also to a special concentration camp in Lodz. There, unfortunately, many of them were murdered by Nazi criminals.
„Aktion Zamosc” was formally completed in August 1943.It was an example of a crime, one of the very many that the Polish people experienced from the German occupiers. Nevertheless, many of them never suffered punishment for the crimes committed against the Polish people.
Dear Sirs,
We would like to inform you that in the next few weeks we plan to make a mobile application and an interactive service available to the public. These tools will present the results of the scientific research we have been conducting since July 2022, focusing on losses in the Zamosc region suffered by Polish citizens as a result of German crimes in 1939-1945.
We believe that the implementation of the exceptionally complex scientific project, the results of which we will present, will contribute to a broader understanding of the history of the region and a reminder of the suffering suffered by the people of the Zamosc region during World War II.
We will keep you informed of the exact date when the mobile application and interactive service will be available.
