However, there is a modern historical myth in Poland about extermination camps targeting non-Jewish Poles. For many years, there was a Wikipedia article about a fictional extermination camp for Poles. That theory is now discussed in a subsection of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Disc....
The idea behind these theories is to draw an equivalence between what the Germans did to Catholics and Jews in occupied Poland, something that is popular among modern Polish nationalists.
On the part that non-Jewish Poles were not targetted - while I think we agree the fictious concentration camp is part of what I mentioned above, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles from both modern day Poland and modern day Germany have been victims of organized killings (take note, I don't necessarily mean concentration camps and holocaust as commonly understood). I can agree that catholic Poles were not targeted in the same way - there were numerous differences - nevertheless, the goal of Germany was to eradicate Poland as a country and Poles as a nation through either killings (which materialized in war casualties and through mass extermination), or germanization.
Edit: The people trying to draw an equivalence between what happened to Jewish and non-Jewish Poles are largely aligned with right-wing, strongly Catholic Polish nationalists, and are not in and way fond of the Soviet era. This is mostly a post-Soviet phenomenon.
I don't fully understand what specifically do you mean by saying that there was no holocaust to non-Jewish Poles, but thousands of them died in concentration camps all around territories occupied by Germans and often shared identical fate to those who were of Jewish origin.
If I understood you correctly, you use term "holocaust" to describe mass extermination of Jews and Jews only, and as long as you acknowledge there's been other mass killings during the war, I'm completely fine with that.
e: it's not how I was taught history at school - e.g. teachers would include non-Jewish Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Romas, Sinti, and other nationalities that were sent to death camps too - I think by holocaust they basically meant death camps (regardless on who was killed in there) rather than the bigger scheme of killing all the Jews.
There was no systematic extermination of Catholic Poles. To be a Jew in occupied Europe was to be hunted. 90% of Jews in Poland were killed. You basically had to have a miracle to survive. There's very little in modern history like this.
I think it would be sufficient to condemn the evil that was committed rather than make a certain group better because "They suffered more". So many suffered from that evil regime that we don't need a contest to see who is better. The Catholic clergy were in fact terribly persecuted in German and Poland by the Nazi regime, hundreds of priests being killed in Dachau alone. This doesn't take away the horrors that others suffered nor allow us to somehow abstract from them just because "our tribe suffered more".
What are you talking about? The Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate Catholic Poles (and other Slavs). Murdering Jews was higher priority, but had the Nazis won there wouldn't be too many Slavs around in Eastern Europe today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
And despite losing the war the Germans together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, still managed to exterminate a huge fraction of the Polish elite in a targeted fashion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
The fact that the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jews in Poland, and almost succeeded. They killed 90% of the Jewish population.
There were horrific plans for most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe for after the war (Generalplan Ost, which you've linked to), but they were never put into operation. Catholic Poles were not subject to anything near the level of persecution as Jewish Poles.
> together with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets
The Germans and Soviets weren't "erstwhile allies." The Soviets were defined as enemy #1 by the Nazis. The Soviets were aware of this, and tried to organize an anti-German military alliance with France and to save Czechoslovakia. France refused, and Poland, which itself wanted to get a piece of Czechoslovakia, refused to allow Soviet troops to transit its territory into Czechoslovakia. After Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets decided to make a dirty deal with the Germans, in order to delay the German attack for as long as possible. Not a shining moment, but calling the Soviets "erstwhile allies" of the Germans is a gross distortion of history, particularly given that it's the Soviets who made the largest contribution to the defeat of the Nazis.
Germany quite clearly started the war with its invasion of Poland, and without that decision, there would have been no war.
They two countries had a non-aggression pact, and an agreement not to interfere with each other's spheres of influence. The Soviets knew full well that the Germans planned to invade the USSR, and the point of the non-aggression pact was to delay that invasion until the Red Army was capable of fighting a war.
In this case the stones mark the places where the victims lived.
I assume most Polish victims did not live in the territory of present day Germany.
From personal experience I recall some with "eastern" names in a town that used to have a notable polish minority but I couldn't say for sure.
Btw Can you recommend places to visit to learn more about their stories and history (besides the former sites of the concentration camps)?
Think about where we would be if we hadn't gone down this path. We can all help move things forward if we meet each other with an open mind, and steer clear of the resentment and national chauvinism of the past.
There are stones like this in Poland commemorating Jews, e.g. former German city of Breslau, nowadays Wrocław. I believe the resistance came from the fact that Poles were not organizers of those killings/deportations and it was expected to be misunderstood by people unfamiliar with history (e.g. stone commemorating murdered Jews in a city that was formerly German but nowadays Polish, or Jews murdered in Poland by Germans).
Important to mention: there were killings (not supported by the state) of Jews and systemic antisemitism (clearly supported by the state) in Poland conducted and organized by Polish people before and during the war (this was, though, not supported by the state at that time), but incomparable in scale.
If you care about this, the "article" is wikipedia, and in the time you wrote this posts you could have added it already.
edit: I was quick to comment, the article is protected. So unless you already have an active Wikipedia account, you'd have to request an edit on the talk page.
It's hard to tell if this is some anti-Polish resentiments of one or many of the authors, or just extremely low level of historical knowledge, but something tells me it's the first.
If so, why would it have to mention Poles?
Edit: I’m sorry, I just read your comment again, and realised I misunderstood. I still feel those marginalised groups get overlooked often; the Nazis didn’t specifically select for Germans, but for „pure“ aryans, which excluded lots of different groups.
Edit: I just tried, that article is locked. Could add it to the Talk page.
> The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called "gypsies"), Poles, homosexuals, [...]
Edit: It looks like the word Poles was added today, so I assume it's because of this comment (otherwise that's a pretty wild coincidence.)
>The position of the German government is that after the German territorial losses after World War II, the current Polish minority has no century-old roots in the remaining German territory, because Germany lost all the territories where people of German and Polish ethnicity overlapped. Since they are therefore only recent immigrants, they do not fulfill the requirements of a national minority according to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Treaty of Good Neighbourship. Being German citizens, they still retain all civil and political rights every German citizen possesses, and therefore can voice their will in the political system.[10]
There is a big group of these people (e.g. in Ruhr area) but it's really hard for me to tell (and I'm a Polish migrant living in Germany myself) if that was the case, or it was the idea that Poles/Germans of Polish descent after the war were afraid of ethnical Germans and as a result, repressed the manifest of national identity/ethnicity. It definitely was (and still is) the case for Jewish survivors of the 1939-1945 regime, but the anti-Jewish and anti-Polish sentiments didn't end from day to day and it's extremely hard to narrow down what was the cause of it.
> It is estimated that in modern times, some 150,000 inhabitants of the Ruhr Area (out of roughly five million) are of Polish descent.