https://t.me/redideologies/798

HITLER ORDERED THE ANTI-POLISH CAMPAIGN TO BE RATCHETED UP TO ‘80 PER CENT VOLUME:
"On 11 August, Hitler had one of his private aeroplanes fly the high commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, to Salzburg. He received the Swiss diplomat and historian in the Adlershorst, a large teahouse above the Berghof, and with no further ado revealed that at ‘the slightest incident’ he would ‘destroy Poland without warning’. When Burckhardt objected that this would bring a ‘general war’, Hitler exclaimed: ‘Then so be it!’ If he had to wage war, the Führer added, then ‘better today than tomorrow’. At the end of the conversation, as the high commissioner recalled in his memoirs twenty years later, Hitler reiterated: ‘I am not bluffing. If anything at all happens in Danzig or happens to our minorities, I will strike a hard blow.’ [1] Again Hitler showed how good he was at fooling his conversation partners, since no matter how things developed in Danzig, he was determined to go to war against Poland in any case. The same day he received Burckhardt, he ordered the anti-Polish campaign to be ratcheted up to ‘80 per cent volume’, causing Goebbels to note, correctly: ‘It is coming down to the final sprint.’ [2] "
~ Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45
[1] Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission, pp. 341, 345. On the authenticity of Burckhardt’s account, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, London, 2001, pp. 898-9n118.
[2] Goebbels, Tagebücher, part I, vol. 7, p. 64 (entry for 12 Aug. 1939)."

Nazi Germany colonized/annexed the Warthegau part of occupied Poland for German resettlement and ruled the other half as a colonial territory.

> "When the Germans invaded and then occupied Poland in September 1939, they did not take over the entire country. They honored a secret clause in a pact they had signed with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939, a little over a week before the invasion (see reading, A Pact with the Soviet Union in Chapter 7). The pact gave eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, and on September 17, the Soviets took over that territory. In June 1940, they moved on to the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia."

> "From the start, Hitler made no secret of how he felt about the people of Poland. He considered Poles, the ethnic majority in Poland, to be “sub-human.” Alfred Rosenberg, a leading proponent of Nazi ideology, summed up a conversation he had with Hitler in a diary entry dated September 1939:"

> "The Poles: a thin Germanic layer, underneath frightful material. ... The towns thick with dirt. He’s [Hitler] learned a lot in these past weeks. Above all, if Poland had gone on ruling the old German parts for a few more decades everything would have become lice-ridden and decayed. What was needed now was a determined and masterful hand to rule."

> "Soon after the invasion, Germany divided its portion of Poland into two parts: the Warthegau, which bordered Germany, and the General Government of Poland, which consisted of the rest of Germany’s portion of the country. The Warthegau was annexed into Germany itself; the General Government was treated like a colony and placed under the control of Hans Frank, one of Hitler’s chief advisors. To “Aryanize” the Warthegau, the Nazis expelled hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, and Sinti and Roma from that territory to the General Government."

> "In Hitler’s view, the only “racially valuable” inhabitants of Poland were the so-called “ethnic Germans”—those of German descent. To underscore that idea, the Germans established rules and regulations designed to make the Poles and other “undesirable groups” in Poland (both in the Warthegau and the General Government) understand “that they are the conquered and we are the conquerors and those who act against . . . regulations, expose themselves to the most severe punishment.”"

> "Educated Poles were now subject to arbitrary arrest. In early November 1939, the Nazis shipped 167 professors from Kraków University to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside Berlin. Later that week, they arrested a thousand Polish intellectuals. In December, Hitler issued a special decree that said that anyone considered a threat to German security could “vanish without a trace into the night and fog.”"

> "Following these directives, the Nazis shipped about 200,000 “racially valuable” children to Germany to be turned into “true Aryans.” The boys were trained as soldiers and the girls for motherhood."

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«On 22 August [1939], Hitler called the leaders of the three branches of the Wehrmacht to the Obersalzberg to run through the reasons for the imminent war [against Poland] one more time [...] Germany’s highest military leaders [...] would have been surprised at the emphasis HITLER PUT ON THE ECONOMIC NECESSITY TO GO TO WAR NOW. ‘We have nothing to lose and everything to gain,’ he proclaimed. ‘Because of the restrictions our economic situation imposes on us we can only hold out for a few years … We have no choice. We must act.’ WITH THAT, THE DICTATOR ADMITTED THAT ITS GIGANTIC MILITARY EXPENDITURES HAD INDEED BROUGHT GERMANY TO THE VERGE OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE, just as the former president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht, who had been fired in January, had predicted. It was already clear from Hitler’s words that the planned war would transfer the costs of this financial crisis to the peoples that Germany was going to subjugate.»

— Volker Ullrich
Hitler: Downfall 1939–45