a4phantom:
You said "Maybe you ought to read up on Warsaw, as virtually the whole population was wiped out (and then some people from other areas herded over to the Warsaw ghettoes the nazis set up),". I took this to refer to the damage done by the Germans during the invasion, because unless I am mistaken Warsaw was never "wiped out" between the German invasion and the Uprising that preceded the German retreat. If you have information to the contrary, please share it.
Unfortunately I read it in a book I don't think I have any longer. I'm not talking about the immediate invasions, or the uprising, I'm tlaking about the period inbetween the two events primarily. If you will notice towards the end of that website's timeline, you will see the germans sent everyone out of the city and pretty much wiped it out, but that was after the Uprising. No, when I referred to wiping out earlier I was referring to the general policy to get rid of those occupying Warsaw, whihc if the Uprising had not happened one could only guess what course it would have taken further. IOW, things were not developing sweetly at all, and that's if you just forget about the jewish population for the moment. I told you before, the place was a hellhole where the nazis were running a systematic means of getitng rid of the population, one way or the other. We know what they did to most of the Jews, but they did things to other aspects of the city, like herding peopel into ghettoes and such to make their remaining life as miserable as they could. You might liken it what the nazis would have likely done to Leningrad had they ever occupied the city. I'm sure Moscow would have gone through much of the same. I don't think Warsaw holding out for like a month and their having a large Jewish population warmed Hitler over very well.
I clearly don't think that Warsaw was an entirely or even majority Jewish city if I spoke of the removal (to ghettos) and liquidation (killed in the Ghetto uprising or death camps) of the Jews and then the Warsaw Uprising.
I too have no idea if they were the majority or not, but if that were the case, they most certainly had been moved out of there no later than '43 (not all of them).
To some degree the Jews already lived in segregated neighborhoods, but the Nazis seperated them by law and by force. If you want to call Warsaw proper a ghetto for "just the non-Jews", I suppose that makes sense in a way.
No, I'm not really saying that any forced ghettoization was just for the non-Jews, but that once you have pretty much moved the Jews off to camps in farther eastern europe, then the non-Jews would be moved there to those ghetooes if they didn't live with the Jews already. Really, the basic notion was to make them miserable, and if part of the ghetto population had been moved out by various means, they took those with their own property and stuck them in those ghettoes.
The Germans, having isolated the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, took the next step of liquidating the Ghetto. The plan was to send the Jews to the death camps where they could be killed most efficiently, but because of the Ghetto Uprising many were killed on the stop resisting the Germans.
The plan, by that time, wasn't to send them to camps, because that had already to a very large extent been accomplished. Look at that website I posted, as it's clear the Jews in Warsaw were in a very large minority and probably only because they had forged papers and so on. you see what I keep saying? The nazis didn't invade and cause losses of sorts, and then the nazis decided to cause troubles after the Uprising. No, they were causing a great deal of trouble for the years between the two events. Warsaw wasn't just some city the nazis just patrolled like they might so many other cities.
The Nazis despised all Slavs (although they stole blond, blue eyed babies and children to raise as their own). No one denies this, although I think it's wierd to claim they had the same "basic attitude" towards Catholic Poles as they did towards Jews.
It's easy for you to not understand my complete meaning there. The basic attitude with the Jews was to kill them, sooner or later. But I describe the treatment of the Warsaw non-Jews as being reminiscent of the treatment of the cattle cars, because the cattle cars weren't intentionally meant to kill people, though quite a few did from that treatment. Cattle car treatment to me, means that they were given very much hardship, but in the main nothing was done to actually kill them by the hands of the nazis. For example, if they were to keep you from getting a job, or not letting you buy food, or removing you from your property to put you in a ghetto, etc. It was a treatment that in many ways was as harsh as you could get without killing or torturing them directly. IOW it wasn't a whole lot better than what the known Jews got, because they Jews often got the same treatment, the difference being that the Jews were sent off to the camps to be killed by their hands. It's not like the non-Jews of Warsaw weren't killed by nazi hands either, it's just that the preferred method was basically the hands off approach, where you deprive them of enough substenance that bad things will happen to them over a course of time.
The Germans were particularly brutal occupiers, but I am not aware of any effort to destroy Warsaw before the Uprising.
Oh yeah, but although my memory on that book is somewhat sketchy I don't recall that prior to the Uprising it was so much trying to lay the city waste, but more to ley the citizen's waste; in the cattle car sort of treatment to which I spoke. You give out very harsh treatment to people and many will die over time.
The Polish resistance launched the Warsaw Uprising as the Russians approached because they wanted to liberate themselves, hoping that this would keep them from falling under Soviet domination after the war. It was worth a try, I suppose.
Yes, that was one of the reasons, but them having been treated in cattle car manner was one of the others.
Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had declared that after the war countries would be free to make their own decisions. Every probably knew Stalin was lying, the Poles certainly didn't trust him and thought they would be in a better bargaining position if they drove the Germans out of Warsaw than if the Russians did it for them. They ended up with the worst of all worlds, because the Red Army sat across the river and watched them fight the Germans for a very long time without intervening, because they wanted Poles who were willing to die for freedom to do so at the hands of the Germans. Surivors of the Polish resistence who escaped the ruin of the Uprising were murdered by the Soviets. The Red Army and the Western Allies met up in Germany, Stalin imposed Soviet puppet regimes on Eastern Europe (what Churchill called the fall of the Iron Curtain), and there you have it.
True. What was really oathetic is that the red Air Force for a very long time did absolutely nothing to stop the Luftwaffe from attacking Warsaw. You ever hear of Poltava? That's the place where the USSR let the USA set up an air base from which to bomb the eastern portions of the Reich. It didn't take long till they pulled the same sort of stunt, only worse, then they did to the Poles of Warsaw. They let a German bomber force come through, and virtually didn't even man the airfield with anti-aircraft cover during a night raid (and this was when the Luftwaffe was very shot up in the East). To say nothing of their not even sending any fighters up to try to get at them. The Soviets were responsible for the defense of that field. Some think there was some cooperation between the USSR and Germany to let that happen. I read an entire book on the subject, but I can't recall all that much about it anymore. This was a major incident that flamed the Cold War on.
