Poland became the first victims of German aggression during the Second World War and was at the centre of Nazi living space utopias. Invaded in September 1939 and suffering under German occupation for more than five years, the German administration turned Poland into a space for testing out new population policies culminating in the mass deportation and killing campaigns directed against the Christian Poles and the extermination of the Jewish Poles. The paper will analyse the National Socialist Germanisation policies towards the Christian population, explore the consequences for the Jewish minority and thus also shed new light on the dynamic leading to the Shoah.

Gerhard Wolf is DAAD lecturer in History at the University of Sussex.

By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Tuesday, 19 January 2010