Munoz, Antinio J. Hitler's War Against Poland's Partisans

The Battle Behind The Eastern Front, 1939-1945

From the beginning of the invasion and occupation of Poland, Germany waged a war of extermination in the East. The Polish population was the first to feel the wrath of Nazi oppression in the East, which was to serve as a blueprint for the horrors that other nations would suffer when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The Germans had carefully prepared the invasion of Poland. This included securing the newly conquered territories, deliberately murdering many innocent civilians and depopulating entire regions of the country. Hitler instructed his henchmen to act ruthlessly not only against any organised resistance in Poland, but also against the Polish civilian population. As Polish patriots were pushed into organised retaliation, the stage was set for a brutal conflict that would be fought throughout the war between the German war machine and its immense internal security forces and the Polish partisans. In order to adequately suppress the Poles, German training, reserve and replacement troops had to be transferred to Poland, which under normal circumstances would have remained within the borders of the Reich. However, as Polish resistance fighters intensified their attacks against their Nazi oppressors, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler saw it as increasingly necessary to reinforce the SS and police forces already stationed in Poland. From the spring of 1942 onwards, guerrilla attacks by the Poles against the occupying army increased, and by 1943 the Germans were losing an average of 25 to 30 men per day on Polish territory. The resistance against German rule culminated in the uprising of the Polish Home Army on 1 August 1944 in the Polish capital. The brutal Warsaw Uprising claimed thousands of lives on both sides and possibly more than 100,000 civilian casualties. Using dozens of authentic German wartime maps, newly created detailed battle maps and complete battle orders, the author focuses for the first time on this little-known conflict in Poland and presents a comprehensive overview of all the important and some of the less important anti-guerrilla operations in Poland. This is the first work to fully document the entire partisan and anti-partisan war in Poland from beginning to end.