336 GOLGOTAIn the early summer of 1941, it was obvious that something was afoot. In May,
the entire German assault force from Yugoslavia rumbled through southern
Poland, and moved to new stations on the Bug and the San. In June, German units
followed each other eastwards by road and rail towards the Soviet frontier. The
movement of hundreds of divisions could not be concealed. Everyone except
Stalin was convinced that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was drawing to a close. On 22
June, the Webrmacht launched Operation Barbarossa, and invaded the USSR.
For the next four years, the Polish lands formed first the rear area of the
German—Russian War, and then one of the principal battlegrounds. Until the very
end of those four years, German supremacy could not be seriously challenged.
In the shadow of its military success, the German administration in occupied
Poland dropped all previous restraints. The General-Gouvernement was
extended to include the District of Galicia. In the east, new zones of occupation
were created in territories wrested from the Red Army. In Berlin, the Nazi lead-
ers began to sketch out the details of their Generalplan-Ost, whereby, in the
coming decades, the whole Slav population from the Oder to the Dnieper was
to be replaced by German settlers. Within the over-all scheme, they imagined
that some twenty million Poles could be resettled in Western Siberia; some three
to four million were suitable for re-Germanization; the rest were to be elimin-
ated. In the first stage, all human and material resources were to be devoted to
the war effort; all resistance was to be ruthlessly suppressed; all inferior and use-
less human beings-Jews, gypsies, Soviet prisoners-of-war, Polish intellectuals,
homosexuals, the mentally sick, the disabled, the genetaically deformed, the
demented and the terminally ill — were all to be exterminated.
At this juncture, an exceptional cluster of atrocities took place in a handful of
villages in a district near Bialystok which from 1939—41 had been governed by
the Soviets but which, after the war, was left in Poland. Under Soviet control,
Jedwabne had seen deportations, arbitrary arrests, the killing of resistant fight-
ers, confiscations of property, and the formation of a 'Red militia' that was
offensively enthusiastic. Subsequently, during Operation Barbarossa, special
German Einsatzkommandos had indulged in a wave of mass shootings of Jews
behind the front, sometimes engaging local civilians to help them. But on 10 July
1941 at Jedwabne, and possibly elsewhere, investigations were to show that the
murder of part of the town's Jews, though instigated by the Gestapo, was
largely perpetrated without compulsion by local residents. The episode was in
no way typical. It was not repeated in the vast majority of Poland's 10,000 small
towns and villages. But when brought into the open some sixty years later, it
cause a furore. It was not welcome news to learn that nations, like the Poles,
who had every right to mourn their own wartime victimhood, could nonetheless
harbour mass murderers in their midst.^19
Nazi economic activity deteriorated under the pressure of war from simple
exploitation to frenzied destruction. In occupied Poland, all private companies