Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi German “Fuhrer,” began World War II by invading Poland. He hurled 1.5 million troops, 2,000 tanks, and 1,900 warplanes against his neighbor on the east. The outnumbered and outgunned Polish army was no match for the Nazi assault.
The Polish capital, Warsaw, fell on September 17, and 11 days later, Soviet troops linked up with Hitler’s military juggernaut and divided Poland as part of the Berlin-Moscow non-aggression treaty signed a month earlier.
It was a bitter defeat, but for Poland’s 3.5 million Jews, 10 percent of the country’s population, it marked the beginning of the end of an extraordinary community which dated back more than 1,000 years.
It was because of Poland’s huge Jewish population that the engineers of the “Final Solution” built their largest death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, inside occupied Poland. And once Hitler invaded his former “ally,” the Soviet Union, in June 1941, even more Jews came under his brutal control.
The Polish capital, Warsaw, fell on September 17, and 11 days later, Soviet troops linked up with Hitler’s military juggernaut and divided Poland as part of the Berlin-Moscow non-aggression treaty signed a month earlier.
It was a bitter defeat, but for Poland’s 3.5 million Jews, 10 percent of the country’s population, it marked the beginning of the end of an extraordinary community which dated back more than 1,000 years.
It was because of Poland’s huge Jewish population that the engineers of the “Final Solution” built their largest death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, inside occupied Poland. And once Hitler invaded his former “ally,” the Soviet Union, in June 1941, even more Jews came under his brutal control.
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