The Intelligenzaktion, or Intelligentsia mass shootings, was a, not always secret, mass murder conducted by Nazi Germany against the Polishintelligentsia early in the Second World War. The operations were conducted to realise the Germanization of the western regions of occupied Poland, before territorial annexation to the German Reich. The mass murder operations of Intelligenzaktion killed 100,000 Polish people; by way of forced disappearance, the Nazis imprisoned and killed selected citizens of Polish society, identified before the war as enemies of the Reich; they were buried in mass graves at remote places. To facilitate the depopulation of Poland, the Nazis terrorised the general populace with the public, summary executions of selected intellectuals and community leaders, before effecting the expulsions of the general population from occupied Poland. The executioners of the Einsatzgruppendeath squads and the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the German-minority militia, pretended that their police-work was meant to eliminate politically dangerous people from Polish society. The Intelligenzaktion was a major step towards implementing Sonderaktion Tannenberg, the installation of Nazi policemen and functionaries — from the SiPo, and the SD — to manage the occupation and facilitate the realisation of Generalplan Ost, the German colonization of Poland. Among the 100,000 people killed in the Intelligenzaktion operations, approximately 61,000 were of the Polish intelligentsia, whom the Nazis identified as political targets in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, compiled before the war began in September 1939. The Intelligenzaktion occurred soon after the German invasion of Poland, and lasted from the autumn of 1939 until the spring of 1940; the mass murder of the Polish intellectuals continued with the operations of the AB-Aktion.
Purpose
Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of the intelligentsia and the social élites of Poland to prevent them from organising the Poles against their German masters, and thwart the occupation and colonisation of the country; the mass murder was to occur before the annexation of Poland to the Greater Germanic Reich: Nazi racialism considered the Polish élites as being most likely of German blood, because their style of dynamic leadership contrasted positively against the “Slavonic fatalism” of the Russian people; nonetheless, the extermination of such national leaders was necessary, because their patriotism would prevent the full-scale Germanization of the enslaved populace of Poland. Moreover, by way of the Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, the racially valuable children of the Polish intelligentsia were to be kidnapped to the Reich proper, for Germanization; Nazi ideology claimed that such non-Slavic acculturation would prevent the generational resurgence of the Polish intelligentsia, and thus prevent the resurgence of Polish nationalism in Germanised Poland.
Method
Upon controlling Poland, the German Nazis arrested, imprisoned, and killed approximately 61,000 people as enemies of the German Reich, all of whom were identified as the intelligentsia of each city, town, and village. Each man and woman was biographically listed in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, which German citizens of Poland loyal to the Nazi party in the German Reich compiled before the war for the German police and security forces of the SiPo and the SD. The Einsatzgruppen and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the Ethnic Self-defence militia of the German minority in Poland, were to kill the intelligentsia identified in the Special Prosecution Book–Poland. Aware they would be killing unarmed civilians, the commanders of the paramilitary militias strengthened morale with ideological and racialist instructions to the soldier–policemen, that their political role in the ethnic cleansing of Poland would be more difficult than fighting in battle against soldiers; as noted by Martin Borman, in a meeting between Hitler and Hans Frank: As part of Generalplan Ost, the political purpose of the Intelligenzaktion was extermination of the élites of Polish society, which the Nazis broadly defined as the Szlachta, the intelligentsia, teachers, social workers, judges, military veterans, priests and businessmen; any Polish man and woman who had attended secondary school, and so could provide nationalist leadership to resist the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Regional operations
Intelligenzaktion Pommern, a regional mass murder operation in the Pomeranian Voivodeship; 23,000 Poles were arrested, imprisoned, and killed soon after identification and arrest. To terrorise the general populace, the Nazis then selected prominent citizens, from the arrested people, and publicly executed them, leaving the corpses on display, as formal warning against resistance to German occupation.
Intelligenzaktion Posen, the mass murder of 2,000 victims from Poznań.
