POLAND IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 337and factories, all the major land estates, and all state enterprises, were confis-
cated without compensation. With very few exceptions, the former private own-
ers were rendered destitute overnight, irrespective of their racial classification.
And a swarm of dubious German entrepreneurs descended to take their place.^20
In the territories annexed to the Reich, most sequestered industrial property
passed into the hands of the Reichswerke Herman Goering AG, and was turned
over to munitions. In the General-Gouvernement, official policies vacillated
wildly. In 1939-41, a start was made with schemes to dismantle industrial plant
for removal to Germany. But after 1941, it was more convenient to keep the fac-
tories nearer to the Eastern Front. From 1943, Allied bombing in western
Germany encouraged industrial concerns to take refuge in the east. For a time,
production levels exceeded those of 1938. Increasingly, economic life fell under
the control of the WVHA (Main Department for Economy and Administration)
of the SS, who tried, with no great success, to integrate it with their policies of
racial and population control. In 1944-5, as the point of total dislocation
approached, hundreds of thousands of underfed slave-labourers of both sexes
and of every conceivable nationality were marched back and forth, from project
to abandoned project, amidst the endless retreating convoys and demolition
squads of the defeated Wehrmacht.^21
To finance these operations, an Emissionsbank in Polen had been opened in
Cracow in April 1940, as a filial of the central Reichsbank. Its paper money and
wage-coupons provided a limited basis for trade and commerce in the General-
Gouvernement but failed to check the rampant price inflation or the widespread
'official' and 'unofficial' black market. It stayed in business till January 1945.
The Nazi Terror intensified inexorably. From 1941, Poland became the home
of humanity's Holocaust, an 'archipelago' of death-factories and camps, the
scene of executions, pacifications, and exterminations which surpassed any-
thing so far documented in the history of mankind.
Arbitrary executions by order of the police or military became an everyday
occurrence. The selective executions of 1939-40 gave way to indiscriminate
shootings and hangings. In the towns, prisoners and suspects were shot out of
hand. In Warsaw, hardly a street corner did not witness the death of groups of
citizens by the score and the hundred. Following an order on 16 October 1943
'to combat attacks against German reconstruction in the General-
Gouvernement' the tapanka, or 'seizure of hostages in the street', became a com-
monplace. Hostages were killed or tormented publicly, in the full view of the
populace forcibly assembled for the purpose.
Rural pacification proceeded apace. The well-known fate of the one
Bohemian hamlet of Lidice, whose 143 men were killed in retaliation for the
assassination of SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, was repeated in hundreds of
Polish villages. An incomplete post-war count put their number at 2.99: Rajsk,
16 April 1942 (142 deaths); Krassowo-Czestki, 17 July 1943 (259); Sktoby, 11
April 1940 (215); Michniow, 13 July 1943 (203); Jozefow, 14 April 1940 (169);
Kitow, 11 December 1942 (174); Sumin, 29 January 1943 (118); Sochy, 1 June