Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Poland, Ethnic Cleansing in. At the end of World War II, the physical boundaries of
Poland shifted westward, as a trade-off for the incorporation of Poland’s eastern territories
into the Soviet Union owing to the Potsdam Agreement negotiated in July–August 1945.
Accordingly, Poland would occupy German territory to the west, and the Soviet Union,
in turn, would receive Polish lands in the east. Within the newly occupied lands to the
west were large numbers of ethnic Germans, including such German-speaking cities as
Stettin and Danzig, and it was decided by the reconstituted Polish Government of
National Unity that all Germans living in the new areas would have to be expelled in
favor of ethnic homogeneity for the future of the Polish state. In some areas, the Germans
left more or less voluntarily; in others, they left under Polish pressure; in yet others, expulsion
was accompanied by murder, rapine, violence, and property destruction. Given the
often haphazard nature of the expulsions, it is unclear how many Germans died while
being deported or in advance of it, though one estimate ranges between half a million and
1 million. Much of the destruction took place haphazardly and through informal gangs or
mobs of Polish peasants; the police and civilian Polish authorities were weak and ineffective
at this time and generally unwilling to interfere in any case. Just as the Czechs had
done in similar expulsions of Sudeten Germans from the Czech lands, the Poles
temporarily imprisoned the Germans in transit camps that were often former Nazi concentration
camps. By the end of 1947, at the latest, most of western Poland had been
cleared of a German presence, in an obvious case of ethnic cleansing. The Poles launched
a similar campaign, though smaller numerically, against Ukrainians in south-eastern
Poland; over four hundred eighty thousand Ukrainians from Poland were dispersed to
other parts of the country, or to Ukraine itself, by 1947. The ambition was to decrease the
multiethnicity that had characterized Polish society before 1939; to a large degree, the
homogeneity that followed was a direct result of the ethnic cleansing practiced after 1945.
Polish National Council. The Polish Government-in-Exile was originally set up in
France after Poland’s defeat by Germany in 1939, but relocated to Great Britain in 1940,
where it remained until the end of World War II. Of its thirty-nine representative
members, two were Jews. Among the council’s goals, in addition to the liberation of its
occupied country, was that of forging alliances with other Allied nations and
governments-in-exile and pressuring the Allies to draw up a punishment plan for the Nazi
hierarchy. In December 1942, as the revelations of the Nazis’ extermination of Jews
became more and more known, and at the urging of its Jewish representatives, a memorandum
was issued calling upon Germany to desist from its murderous actions and urging
Allied retaliation. Throughout the war, the Polish Government-in-Exile was a primary
source of information regarding the fate of the largest Jewish community in Europe under
Nazi hegemony. In 1944 it appointed a Council for the Rescue of the Jewish Population
of Poland.
Political Groups, and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide (UNCG). The decision to exclude “political groups” from those groups
protected under the UNCG was a result of political wrangling at its worst. Tellingly, on
December 11, 1946, the UN General Assembly passed an initial resolution (96–1) in which
it agreed to use the following definition of genocide in the UNCG: “Genocide is a denial of
the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to life
of individual human beings. . . . Many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred,
when racial, religious, political, and other groups have been destroyed entirely or in part”
POLITICAL GROUPS
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