The Waffen-SS recruitment in the Polish lands occupied by Nazi Germany in the opinions of the leaders of the SS (1939—1941)
Abstract
The articles discusses the attempts at recruiting Polish citizens to Waffen-SS during the first stage of the war (the years 1939—1941). According to the correspondence of the SS leaders, at the time Germans wanted to conscript only ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). However, the said group of the pre-war Polish citizens was so negligibly small that it stood no change of having been organized as a separate armed formation. Another advanture that wounded up as a fiasco was the attempt to forma a Waffen-SS unit composed of the so-called racially mixed folk, which included the Gorals (Highlanders), the Kashubians, and the Silesians, who were yet to be granted German citizenship. From 1942 onwards, after the Volksliste had been introduced in the so-called Third Reich-annexed Polish lands and after the previously enforced racial restrictions had been lifted, the Waffen-SS draft was conducted as a part of compulsary enlistment. Being in the Waffen-SS, that was responsible for war crimes, genocide and extermination of civil population, for was by the Poles unequivocally meant collaboration and equalled with the active participation in the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi Germany.
Keywords
Waffen-SS; the Second World War; the General Government; Poland; Volksliste
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University of Silesia in Katowice Poland
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