Oct 17, 2011
In his biography of Bl. Pope John Paul II, George Weigel noted that there was wide-spread collaboration between the Communist regime and members of the clergy in Poland. During the Second World War, the Polish Church was not given that particular ‘luxury’. Nazi racial ideology branded Poles an inferior race, sub-humans who had to make way for German expansion. We know all this is based on two lies: one, the lie of races within one human race, and another, that Germany lacked space for its people.
Indeed, during the Nazi era, the German countryside lost people to the German cities at the same rate as before they came to power. The Lebensraum or living space sought by Germans was in cities and not in a field in what had been Poland.
The German plans for the occupied regions were implemented in full only after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which brought all of Poland under their control. Worse off were those Poles of all denominations and ethnicities who found themselves in the annexed part of their former country. This included the important city of Poznan or Posen, with a mixed population, which was the seat of an archbishopric and of the Polish primate, August, Cardinal Hlond. As it happened, Hlond was to play a less important role during the war. He was in Rome for the conclave that elected Pope Pius XII when war broke out, and was to remain away from Poland until the end of the conflict. He did intervene on behalf of his people on a number of occasions, most notably in the Vatican Radio broadcast of January 1940, during which he exposed the persecution inflicted upon his flock.
This region, the so-called Warthegau, was especially badly affected by Germanisation attempts. Here, massive expulsion of Poles took place, as well as the targeted extermination of any Polish leadership. This included many priests and religious, to whom the Poles had looked for leadership during the long years of the partitions.