On August 5-12, 1944, German forces, aided by Russian collaborationist units, carried out the Wola Massacre, killing over 40,000 Poles in the Wola district of Warsaw. The massacre took place in the midst of the ongoing Warsaw Uprising (August – October 1944), a failed attempt by the Polish resistance to liberate the city from German occupation.
The massacre began when German units, unable to advance toward the city center because of heavy fire from the Polish fighters, went house to house in the Wola and nearby districts and indiscriminately fired on residents or led them out to be executed en masse. Men were tortured and women raped. Most victims were the elderly, women, and children. Houses and buildings, as well as hospitals and factories, were burned down.
The massacre ended on August 12 following an order by German authorities that stated that captured civilians were to be transported to concentration or labor camps outside the city. Rather than dampen opposition as the German had hoped, the massacre further steeled the Polish resistance to fight on, leading to a further two months of heavy fighting before the Germans regained control of Warsaw.
(Taken from Wars of the 20th Century – World War II in Europe)
Genocide and slave labor Because of the failure of Operation Barbarossa and succeeding campaigns, Germany was unable to implement the planned mass-scale transfer of targeted populations to the Russian interior. Elimination of the undesired populations began almost immediately following the outbreak of war, with the conquest of Poland. The killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians occurred in hundreds of incidents of massacres and mass shootings in towns and villages, reprisals against attacks on German troops, scorched earth operations, civilians trapped in the cross-fire, concentration camps, etc.
By far, the most famous extermination program was the Holocaust, where six million Jews, or 60% of the nine million pre-war European Jewish population, were killed in the period 1941-1945. German anti-Jewish policies began in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and violent repression of Jews increased at the outbreak of war. Jews were rounded up and confined to guarded ghettos, and then sent by freight trains to concentration and labor camps. By mid-1942, under the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” decree, Jews were transported to extermination camps, where they were killed in gas chambers. Some 90% of Holocaust victims were Jews. Other similar exterminations and repressions were carried out against ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavs and Romani (gypsies), as well as communists and other political enemies, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Germany itself, a clandestine program implemented by German public health authorities under Hitler’s orders, killed tens of thousands of mentally and physically disabled patients, purportedly under euthanasia (“mercy killing”) procedures, which actually involved sending patients to gas chambers, applying lethal doses of medication, and through starvation.
Some 12-15 million slave laborers, mostly civilians from captured territories in Eastern Europe, were rounded up to work in Germany, particularly in munitions factories and agriculture, to ease German labor shortage caused by the millions of German men fighting in the various fronts and also because Nazi policy discouraged German women from working in industry. Some 5.7 million Soviet POWs also were used as slave labor. As well, two million French Army prisoners were sent to labor camps in Germany, mainly to prevent the formation of organized resistance in France and for them to serve as hostages to ensure continued compliance by the Vichy government. Some 600,000 French civilians also were conscripted or volunteered to work in German plants. Living and working conditions for the slave laborers were extremely dire, particularly for those from Eastern Europe. Some 60% (3.6 million of the 5.7 million) of Soviet POWs died in captivity from various causes: summary executions, physical abuse, diseases, starvation diets, extreme work, etc.