The core of the Germanization process was to destroy the Polish identity of the boys and girls. Barbara Mikolajczyk was an adolescent when the [Third Reich] took her and her sisters to Bruczkow, where the Nazis forced them to learn German. “The Germans always said that we must forget about speaking in Polish and about Poland,” Mikolajczyk said. They beat her and the other children when they spoke Polish.
Mikolajczyk now became Baber Mickler. Placed in a German home, she had to address a German woman as “Mama.“ Like other Polish children doled out to German households, Mikolajczyk received a fraudulent birth certificate and genealogy which the [Fascists] inventively composed for her.47
[…]
The [Fascists] examined Jan Sulisz, a Polish orphan, at Bruczkow and placed him in a school attended by German children. Forced to join the [Fascist] youth group Hitlerjugend, he, too, was cut off from his Polish roots. Interestingly, Sulisz, whose new name was Suhling, met Barbara Mikolajczyk and her sisters at a Germanization center in Salsburg. The SS gave Suhling to a [Fascist] business establishment from which he escaped. Unfortunately, he was caught and beaten. He survived the war to be reunited with relatives in Lodz.
A similar thing happened to Willi Nililek, who was sent to work in a [Fascist] factory. When he and his friends were caught speaking Polish, Nililek said, “They stuck us in the arms and back with needles. I was sick. The other two boys went crazy and were given ‘death pills.’”49
Despite the severe penalties involved, many Polish children continued to speak Polish. Jerzy Stickel, sent to a German institution in Ujazdow where he was treated as a German youth, was one of them. After the war, when Stickel learned he was Polish, German children got so angry with him they beat him up.50 In one institution, older Polish children used to wake up younger ones at night to use the Polish language and especially to recite their prayers so they wouldn’t forget their heritage.51
“I could not reconcile myself to denying my nationality, so I went on talking Polish,” said Sigismund Krajeski, who was 10‐years‐old when the [Fascists] sent him to Gmunden, Austria. “For this I was often tied to a post and beaten, but as I was strong and refused to give in, I managed to stand it.” When German families came to the institution to select a child for themselves, Krajeski deliberately spoke Polish.
“Of course the resulting punishment was dreadful, but I preferred it to disgracing myself and going to a Hitler family. They had no success with me.” Indeed, they didn’t. Krajeski ran away and managed to return to his home in Poznan.52
There were several escapes from the [Fascist] Germanization center at Kalisz, where the [Fascists] appropriated a monastery from Polish monks to set up their racist school. According to Stanislaw Kulczinski, known as “Papa Stanislaw,” a handyman there, the [Fascists] brought thousands of children to Kalisz. Those who refused Germanization were beaten and deprived of food.
Zygmunt Swiatlowski, stubbornly refusing denationalization, was killed by the woman supervisor of the institution. “The children were always sad,” Papa Stanislaw said. “They lived in fear and were homesick, and the German supervisors felt nothing but hatred for them because they were nothing but little ‘Polacks’ and did not belong to them.”
Events that happened today (August 15):
1939: Twenty‐six Ju87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel met unexpected ground fog during a dive‐bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crashed and burned.
1940: A Fascist submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Fascist provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco‐Italian War in October.
1941: Hungary’s leaders officially ended their large‐scale deportations because the Axis occupying forces in East Galicia did not want to handle more deportees. Elsewhen, an Allied firing squad executed Corporal Josef Jakobs at the Tower of London for his espionage on the Axis’s behalf.
1943: Superior Axis forces surround Cretan partisans during the Battle of Trahili, who manage to escape against all odds.
1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasted his declaration of surrender following the Axis’s defeat in World War II; Korea gained independence from the Empire of Japan. Shortly before or after the broadcast, Korechika Anami, the Axis’s last remaining War Minister, committed suicide.
1953: Ludwig Prandtl, Axis physicist and aerospace scientist, expired.
1989: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator who helped plan the assault on Pearl Harbor, died.
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that his design was to do to the Slavs what the USA did to the native peoples there. This assimilation is pretty much a direct lift from the USA program of genocide.
I think I am starting to see how this particular fact is the source of a lot of projection in the West, especially in the USA. The Third Reich was so bad they othered it, and thus all other “others” are compared to the Third Reich. But by othering it, they fail to understand that it is actually an extension of the USA, which itself is an extension of Britain, France, and Spain. So, when they see an other and accuse it of imagined evils, the imagined evils are the real acts of the Third Reich and those real acts are actual mimicry and extension of USA programs which are actual continuations of Western European programs.
I never really understood it that way. I always just assumed the projection was a bit more psychological, but it actually has a world historical material basis as well.
Reminds me of this Aime Cesaire quote:
[C]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer […] each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; […] a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “c—” of India, and the “n—” of Africa.
[…] [T]hrough the mouths of all those who considered and consider it lawful to apply to non-European peoples “a kind of expropriation for public purposes” for the benefit of nations that were stronger and better equipped, it was already Hitler speaking!
Ah, a nice dose of hatred to start the day!
Morderstwo nazisty jest czynem bez zbrodni i jest zawsze uzasadnione.
Not a big surprise
