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German Rule in Occupied Europe
Nazi Germans ruled with extreme brutality in eastern Europe. In western Europe, their policies were milder. Across Europe, people resisted the Nazis in various ways and to varying degrees.
In 1942, Germany dominated most of Europe. Greater Germany had been enlarged at the expense of its neighbors. Austria and Luxembourg were completely incorporated. Territories from Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, and the Baltic states were seized by Greater Germany. German military forces occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium, northern France, Serbia, parts of northern Greece, and vast tracts of territory in eastern Europe. Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia, and Vichy France were all either allied to Germany or subject to heavy German influence. Between 1942 and 1944, German military forces extended the area under their occupation to southern France, central and northern Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary.
Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, William's family was ordered into a ghetto and his brother went to a work camp. William bribed officials to discharge his brother from a hospital destined for evacuation to Auschwitz. Later, after escaping from a prison camp to tend to his brother, William was jailed. He was sent to Blechhammer, Gleiwitz (where he met his future wife), and other camps. William collapsed during a death march near the Austrian border, but was then liberated. His parents and brother perished.
Wallace and his family were Polish Catholics. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother a teacher. The Germans occupied Kielce in 1939. Wallace witnessed pogroms against Jews in 1942. Wallace was active in the anti-Nazi resistance, acting as a courier between partisan groups. In 1946, in liberated Poland, Wallace witnessed the Kielce pogrom. He was reunited with his father in the United States in 1949; other family members followed. The Communist regime in Poland, however, denied his only sister permission to emigrate for nearly a decade.
A blue and gray striped jacket from the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The letter "P" on the left front of the jacket indicates that it was worn by a Polish, non-Jewish prisoner. "P" stands for "Pole" in German. The jacket was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by the prisoner who wore it, Julian Noga.
Edward was born to a Jewish family in The Hague. In 1929, the family moved to the United States. Because his father had difficulty finding employment, Edward and his family returned to the Netherlands in 1932. They were living in the town of Delft and running a small clothing store when war broke out. Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. Anti-Jewish decrees were instituted, increasing in severity to the point that Jews could no longer own businesses and were forced to wear a yellow badge after May 3, 1942. When deportations of Jews in the Netherlands began, Edward and his family went into hiding. Edward posed as a non-Jew until the end of the war.
Wladyslaw was born to Catholic parents in Russian-occupied Poland. He grew up in Plock, a town located in a rural area north of Warsaw. Wladyslaw married in 1918 and he and his wife, Marie, raised four children.
1933-39: Wladyslaw worked as a bookkeeper, and then as an accountant for a local farmers' cooperative. In 1931 he was sent to the town of Wyszogrod to close a failing branch of the farmers cooperative. A year later, he organized a new, successful cooperative in Wyszogrod with local farmers and landowners. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the cooperative was taken over by the Germans, and Wladyslaw and the employees were ordered to stay on.
1940-42: On April 6, 1940, Wladyslaw and his eldest son Janusz were arrested at home in Wyszogrod by German police. They were taken to a large empty hall, where many men had been placed facing the wall. One by one, more men were brought in. After several hours, Wladyslaw was told to go home. His son was among the 129 arrested and deported to concentration camps. After that Wladyslaw, who had returned to the cooperative, joined the Polish resistance. In May 1942 he was arrested, and tortured for four months.
On September 18, 1942, Wladyslaw and 12 other prisoners were publicly hanged by the Germans in the former Jewish section of Plock.
Marian was raised by Catholic parents in Niewodowo, a town in Poland's Bialystok Province near Lomza. His family lived there under Tsarist rule until 1918, when Poland regained its independence. Following high school, Marian joined the Capuchin Franciscan Order of Friars. After eight years of study in France and Italy, he returned to Poland to teach philosophy to students of his order.
1933-39: When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Marian was at his monastery near Grodno. They evacuated the monastery three weeks later when Soviet troops, invading from the east, reached Grodno. Marian returned to Lomza. Their new Soviet rulers rejected religion, claiming it exploited the working people. He challenged this in his sermons. When he learned that the Soviets were about to arrest him, Marian escaped to German-occupied Poland.
1940-45: In 1941 the Nazis arrested Marian in Warsaw. He was told that there was no real reason for his arrest, but that as an educated Pole, he couldn't be trusted to cooperate. He was held in Pawiak Prison and then deported to Auschwitz. There, the commandant lectured them about working hard. An interpreter was translating his ranting into Polish, but Marian understood German. He yelled that they'd only be freed through the crematorium chimney. Instead of translating those words, the interpreter said, "You will overcome everything."
Rev. Dabrowski was deported to Dachau where he was subjected to malaria experiments. He was liberated on April 29, 1945, by American troops and immigrated to the United States in 1949.
Reidar was the third of four sons born to religious Lutheran parents in a small seafaring and whaling town along the Norwegian coast. Reidar's father was a civil servant. Reidar attended public school and dreamed of becoming a musician.
1933-39: Although Reidar was not interested in politics, he sympathized with his Jewish neighbors who had come as refugees from Germany. In fall 1939 he was saddened when Germany attacked Poland and the USSR attacked Finland. Several days later, his oldest brother passed away. On Christmas Eve, as his aunt and cousins joined them at his family's home, he learned that his uncle had also died—his merchant ship was sunk by a German submarine.
1940-44: Reidar was arrested 6 months after the Germans occupied Norway. His crime was disorderly conduct and leading young people in singing anti-German songs. His sentence was 6 weeks imprisonment. After being released, Reidar joined the resistance and helped sabotage his local shipyard. When a new ship sank upon launching, he was arrested again. Reidar received a life sentence, but the Norwegian Nazi government amnestied 1,000 political prisoners in February 1942. After his third offense, the Germans deported him to Buchenwald.
Reidar survived 30 months of captivity in Buchenwald. Released to the Swedish Red Cross on March 18, 1945, he returned to Norway before immigrating to the United States in 1945.
Shortly before liberation by Allied forces, French resistance fighters staged uprisings across occupied France. Here, fighters gather arms during the Marseille uprising. Marseille, France, August 1944.
Germany planned to annex most of the conquered eastern territories after they had been Germanized. While some areas were to serve as reservations for forced laborers, most were to be resettled by German colonists. Most German plans for resettlement were postponed until the end of the war. Meanwhile, the regions were ruthlessly exploited for the German war effort: foodstuffs, raw materials, and war stocks were confiscated. Members of the local population were drafted for forced labor in war industries or military construction projects. Millions more were deported to Germany to be used as forced laborers in German war industries or agriculture.
German rule in Poland was extremely harsh. German authorities regarded the Polish population as a supply of forced laborers. The Nazis sought to terrorize the Polish population and prevent them from resisting Nazi policies. A campaign of terror was directed against members of the Polish intelligentsia, many of whom were killed or sent to the camps. Polish teachers, priests, and cultural figures, who might form the core of a resistance movement, were especially targeted for persecution. The Germans destroyed Polish cultural and scientific institutions and plundered national treasures. Poles were supplied only with starvation rations, as the bulk of the country's food was confiscated by the Germans for their home front. Despite the terror, the resistance movement in Poland continued.
As a result of the wartime German policies, resistance movements sprang up throughout Europe. Members of armed, irregular forces fighting the Germans in occupied areas of Europe were called partisans. They disrupted German civilian and military operations across Europe, engaging in sabotage, demolition, and other diversionary attacks.
In occupied western Europe, far milder policies were followed. "Germanic" countries like the Netherlands were ultimately slated to become part of Germany. Other countries, especially France, were to be kept dependent on Germany. Still, Germany ruled with brutality there as well. For example, on June 10, 1944, an SS unit massacred almost the entire population of Oradour-sur-Glane, a small village in southern France. The massacre was supposedly carried out in retaliation for local partisan activity.
Last Edited: Sep 24, 2025
Author(s):
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
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