ZDFzeit

Seventy-five years ago, the invasion of Poland by Hitler's Germany marked the beginning of the worst war in world history. The aim was to destroy not only the military might of the neighbouring country—now designated an enemy—but also the very livelihood of its people. It began with a lie: on September 1, 1939, Hitler masked the German invasion with the claim, "Since 5:45 a.m., we have been returning fire." The attack was neither an act of self-defence—the pretext had been staged by the Nazi perpetrators themselves—nor was the time accurate. The German Luftwaffe had already begun an area bombardment of a small Polish town, killing over a thousand civilians in three waves of attacks. These were the harbingers of an unprecedented war of annihilation.

The German attack is widely remembered as a "Blitzkrieg." Yet, when the campaign ended after six weeks in the autumn of 1939, a "war within the war" began for most Poles. Many were murdered because they were Jewish or belonged to the local elite; deported to make room for new German settlers; or enslaved for forced labour to extract the maximum possible yield from the subjugated colonial territory.