Living under occupation

1939–1945

Occupation brought foreign rule, restrictions on rights and the exploitation of people and economies for war. Nazi racial policy developed from exclusion and persecution into genocide. People tried to survive, help others and resist; their choices and risks depended on where and who they were.

Occupation meant more than soldiers being present. The conqueror determined who governed, how labour and property were used, and who could live freely. In Poland, German authorities killed leaders of society, displaced inhabitants and forced people to work for Germany. Elsewhere they used different administrative arrangements, but extracted money, industrial goods and raw materials from occupied countries.

The persecution of Jews began before the war, as the Nazis progressively stripped them of rights and property. During the war, the regime established ghettos in occupied Europe, separating Jews from other inhabitants and subjecting them to overcrowding, disease, starvation and forced labour. Leaving required special permission; many inhabitants were later deported to camps.

The Holocaust was the genocide of Europe’s Jews, in which the Nazis murdered approximately six million people. It was deliberate killing, not an accidental consequence of battle. Alongside it, the Nazis perpetrated the genocide of Roma and other crimes against persecuted groups. The victims’ different experiences show how widely the regime reached into society.

Mass murder did not take place only in camps. Mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, massacred Jews and other victims during the German advance into the Soviet Union in 1941. Local collaborators, institutions and regimes allied to Germany also participated in the crimes. Nazi power drew on the actions of others as well as its own apparatus.

Auschwitz brings together several functions of the Nazi camp system. The main camp operated from 1940, imprisoning political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war among others. Birkenau became a centre of mass murder in gas chambers; the complex also included industrial forced labour. Imprisonment, exploitation and killing overlapped there.

Opportunities for escape, hiding and resistance varied with occupation authorities, local conditions and the course of the war. In April and May 1943, people in the Warsaw Ghetto took up arms against its liquidation. In the Czech lands, Operation Anthropoid struck the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and was followed by repression. The detailed journey introduces the people and relationships that a single account of the attack cannot explain.

Occupation violence was not confined to Europe. Japanese troops killed and raped civilians in Nanjing, and Japan used the forced labour of civilians and prisoners of war. European and Asian experiences involved different regimes and particular victims, but both require us to ask what conquest meant for the people subjected to it.

The Soviet army liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. The Nazis had already forced many prisoners onto westward marches. Liberation ended Nazi control, but did not arrive for everyone at the same time and could not restore murdered lives or destroyed communities.

Places

• The Warsaw Ghetto: confinement, deportation and resistance

  Forced segregation and armed resistance in 1943.

• Auschwitz: a camp complex built for imprisonment, exploitation and murder

  A complex of imprisonment, forced labour and mass murder, and its liberation.

While people under occupation sought ways to survive and resist, the military balance was changing on several fronts.