Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What day did Poland surrender to the Nazis?
On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Polish government formally surrendered to Nazi Germany on 27 September 1939, but Pilecki and many of his men continued fighting as partisans. His division was disbanded on 17 October, with parts of it surrendering to the enemy. Pilecki went into hiding in Warsaw with his commander Major Włodarkiewicz. On 9 November 1939, the two men founded the Secret Polish Army ("Tajna Armia Polska", TAP), one of the first underground organizations in Poland. Pilecki became organizational commander of TAP as it expanded to cover Warsaw, Siedlce, Radom, Lublin, and other major cities of central Poland.
After the start of Polish Defensive War of 1939 Starzyński, refused to leave Warsaw together with other state authorities and diplomats on September 4, 1939. Instead he joined the army as a major of infantry. The Minister of War shortly before his departure created the Command of the Defense of the Capital with general Walerian Czuma as its commander. On September 7, the forces of 4th German Panzer Division managed to break the Polish lines near Częstochowa and started their march towards Warsaw. Most of the city authorities were evacuated to the east. Warsaw was left with a military garrison composed mainly of infantry battalions and batteries of artillery. The Headquarters of general Czuma had to organize the defense of the city. Unfortunately, there was some misunderstanding among the command. At that time Poland still believed that any time soon Great Britain and France would attack Germany according to the treaties which were signed by these countries at the beginning of 1939. As it happened these obligations were never to materialise. However, at that stage the Polish authorities wanted to preserve younger reservists for future fighting, so the spokesman of the garrison of Warsaw issued a communique in which he ordered all young men to leave the city. That step weakened the strength of the defence garrison.
Among one million Polish soldiers fighting the Germans in September 1939, 13 percent (130,000) were Polish citizens of Jewish background, who fought in all branches of Polish Armed Forces. It is estimated that during the entirety of World War II as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians. Germans killed about 20 000 civilians in September 1939, a number of them Jewish. For example, in Częstochowa 227 civilians were murdered on September the 4th, 22 of them Jewish.
The battle of Warsaw was fought from August 12–25, 1920 as Red Army forces commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky approached the Polish capital of Warsaw and the nearby Modlin Fortress. On August 16, Polish forces commanded by Józef Piłsudski counterattacked from the south, disrupting the enemy's offensive, forcing the Russian forces into a disorganized withdrawal eastward and behind the Neman River. Estimated Russian losses were 10,000 killed, 500 missing, 30,000 wounded, and 66,000 taken prisoner, compared with Polish losses of some 4,500 killed, 10,000 missing, and 22,000 wounded.
The number of Jews in Poland on 1 September 1939, amounted to about 3,474,000 people. One hundred thirty thousand soldiers of Jewish descent, including Boruch Steinberg, Chief Rabbi of the Polish Military, served in the Polish Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, thus being among the first to launch armed resistance against Nazi Germany. During the September Campaign some 20,000 Jewish civilians and 32,216 Jewish soldiers were killed, while 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the Nazi ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians in the ensuing Holocaust in Poland.
In 1939, Jews constituted 30% of Warsaw's population. With the coming of the war, Jewish and Polish citizens of Warsaw jointly defended the city, putting their differences aside. Polish Jews later served in almost all Polish formations during the entire World War II, many were killed or wounded and very many were decorated for their combat skills and exceptional service. Jews fought with the Polish Armed Forces in the West, in the Soviet formed Polish People's Army as well as in several underground organizations and as part of Polish partisan units or Jewish partisan formations.
The Catholic Church in Poland was brutally suppressed by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1945). Repression of the Church was at its most severe in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, where churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported. From across Poland, thousands of priests died in prisons and concentration camps; thousands of churches and monasteries were confiscated, closed or destroyed; and priceless works of religious art and sacred objects were lost forever. Church leaders were targeted as part of an overall effort to destroy Polish culture. At least 1811 Polish clergy died in Nazi concentration camps. An estimated 3000 clergy were killed in all. Hitler's plans for the Germanization of the East saw no place for the Christian Churches.
The official Polish government report on war damages prepared in 1947 put Poland's war dead at 6,028,000; 3.0 million ethnic Poles and 3.0 million Jews not including losses of Polish citizens from the Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups. This figure was disputed when the communist system collapsed by the Polish historian Czesław Łuczak who put total losses at 6.0 million; 3.0 million Jews, 2.0 million ethnic Poles, and 1.0 million Polish citizens from the other ethnic groups not included in the 1947 report on war damages. In 2009 the Polish government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) published the study ""Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami"" "(Poland 1939-1945. Human Losses and Victims of Repression Under the Two Occupations)" that estimated Poland's war dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million Poles and Jews, including 150,000 during the Soviet occupation. Poland's losses by geographic area include about 3.5 million within the borders of present-day Poland, and about two million in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Contemporary Russian sources include Poland's losses in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union with Soviet war dead. In Poland this is viewed as inflating Soviet casualties at Poland's expense. Todays scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) and 3 million Polish Jews were victims of German Occupation policies and the war."
Most Polish citizens who perished in the war were civilian victims of the war crimes and crimes against humanity during the occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates total deaths under the German occupation at 5,470,000 to 5,670,000 Jews and Poles, 2,770,000 Poles, 2.7 to 2.9 million Polish Jews According to IPN research there were also 150,000 victims of Soviet repression.Approximately three million Polish Jews were victims of the Holocaust. In 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) put the total of Jewish deaths at 2.7 to 2.9 million. Polish researchers estimate that 1,860,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camps, the remainder perished inside the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland, aboard Holocaust trains, and in mass shooting actions. The Nazi extermination camp overall death toll is estimated at 2,830,000; including 1,860,000 Polish Jews: 490,000 killed at Belzec; 60,000 at Sobibor; 800,000 at Treblinka; 150,000 at Chełmno; 300,000 at Auschwitz; and 60,000 at Majdanek. An additional 660,000 Jews from other countries, were transported to Auschwitz and murdered. Over a million Jews deported from Western countries to camps and ghettos set up in occupied Poland perished in the Holocaust. The Nazi death camps located in Poland are sometimes incorrectly described as Polish death camps.According to the figures published by the Polish government in exile in 1941 the ethnic Polish population was 24,388,000 at the beginning of the war in September 1939. The IPN puts the death toll of ethnic Poles under the German occupation at 2,770,000 and 150,000 due to Soviet repression
An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 ethnic Poles were killed in an ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) beginning in March 1943 and lasting until the end of 1944 in the Nazi occupied Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. The Institute of National Remembrance maintains that 7,500 ethnic Ukrainians were also killed during this interethnic conflict The figure of 5.6 to 5.8 million war dead estimated by the IPN was for only the Jewish and ethnic Polish population. They did not provide figures for the death toll of Polish citizens from the other ethnic minorities.According to the figures published by the Polish government in exile in 1941 there were about 7.0 million Polish citizens from ethnic minorities at the beginning of the war in September 1939, mostly Ukrainians, Belarusians, Polishchuks and Lithuanians living in the eastern regions of Poland annexed by the USSR. The IPN did not estimate the death toll of Polish citizens from these ethnic minorities. The IPN maintains that accurate figures for these losses are not available because of border changes and population transfers, according to their figures 308,000 Polish citizens from the ethnic minorities were deported into the interior of the Soviet Union and were conscripted into the Soviet armed forces. During the German occupation Polish citizens from ethnic minorities were deported to Germany for forced labor.In prewar Poland about 800,000 persons were identified as ethnic Germans. According to the IPN 5,437 ethnic Germans were killed in the 1939 military campaign. The IPN also puts the number of Polish citizens conscripted into the German armed forces at 250,000 of whom 60,000 were killed in action. Tens of thousands of ethnic Germans were killed during the Nazi evacuation from Poland in 1944 and 1945, and as a result of repression NKVD and Red Army or died in post war internment camps. During the war the Nazi occupiers instituted the Volksliste in the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany to register ethnic Germans in Poland. Many Polish citizens were pressured to sign the Volksliste in order to avoid Nazi reprisals. About 1 million persons were on Volksliste groups 1 and 2 that included Polish citizens of German descent; Volksliste groups 3 and 4 included 1.7 Polish citizens that were subject to future Germanisation. In addition 61,000 . ethnic Germans were living in the General Government. During the war 522,149 ethnic Germans from other nations were settled in Poland by the Third Reich. By 1950 670,000 ethnic Germans from prewar Poland had fled or were expelled and about 40,000 remained in Poland; about 200,000 Polish citizens who were on Volksliste groups 1 and 2 during the war were rehabilitated as Polish citizens.
One of the reasons given for the collapse of the Uprising was the reluctance of the Soviet Red Army to help the Polish resistance. On 1 August, the day of Uprising, the Soviet advance was halted by a direct order from the Kremlin. Soon afterwards the Soviet tank units stopped receiving any oil from their depots. Soviets knew of the planned outbreak from their agents in Warsaw and, more importantly, directly from the Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who informed them of the Polish Home Army uprising plans: The Red Army's halt and lack of support for the Polish resistance is seen as a calculated decision by Stalin to achieve certain post-war political objectives. In other words: had the Polish Home Army triumphed, the Polish government-in-exile would have had legitimacy to continue the pre-war government in Poland, rendering the post-war Polish-communists regime invalid and likely rejected in all of the pre-war Polish areas thus far liberated by the Red Army (the news of planned Warsaw Uprising is likely one of the reason of speeding up the installation of communist regime on 22 July 1944 in Lublin). Also the destruction of the main Polish resistance forces by the Germans was of direct benefit to Soviet Union, since it significantly weakened any potential Polish opposition to planned (and already started) Soviet occupation. Halting the advance and taking Warsaw in January 1945 enabled the Soviets to say they "liberated" Warsaw.
A day later his body was transported to a garrison church in Warsaw, and shortly, he was given a state funeral at the prestigious Powązki Cemetery, attended by many government and military authorities; general Józef Haller presented him with a posthumous Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari. His death became a political ploy, used by the opponents of Polish military commander and leader Józef Piłsudski, architect of the Polish strategy that led to the victory at Warsaw. His opponents labelled the battle "miracle of Vistula", and attributed the Polish victory to a number of causes, up to and including divine intervention, and Skorupka's martyr-like death became part of their attempt to minimize Piłsudski's fame. Several monuments, streets and other landmarks were dedicated to him in the Second Polish Republic; he became a central figure in several books, poems and dramas; and Pope Pius XI commissioned a wall painting of him by Jan Henryk de Rosen at the battle at the Castel Gandolfo. Another popular painting of him was created by Jerzy Kossak.
The Polish People's Republic (, ) was a state in Central Europe that existed from 1947 to 1989, and the predecessor of the modern democratic Republic of Poland. With a population of approximately 37.9 million inhabitants near the end of its existence, it was the most populous state of the Eastern Bloc after the Soviet Union. Having a unitary Marxist–Leninist communist government, it was also one of the main signatories of the Warsaw Pact. The official capital since 1947 and largest city was Warsaw, followed by industrial Łódź and cultural Kraków.
At the time of its founding, the ghetto imprisoned 34,000 Polish Jews, and an unknown number of Roma people. Virtually all of them were dead by the war's end. Most of the victims, about 30,000 were deported to the Belzec extermination camp (some of them through the Piaski ghetto) between 17 March and 11 April 1942 by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Orpo helped by "Schutzpolizei". The Germans set a daily quota of 1,400 inmates to be deported to their deaths. The other 4,000 people were first moved to the Majdan Tatarski ghetto – a small ghetto established in the suburb of Lublin – and then either killed there during roundups or sent to the nearby KL Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. 
The last of the Ghetto's former residents still in German captivity were executed at Majdanek and Trawniki camps in the Operation Harvest Festival (German: "Aktion Erntefest") on 3 November 1943. At the time of the liquidation of the ghetto, the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, "The procedure is pretty barbaric, and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews."
On 20 August the 1st Polish Army of General Zygmunt Berling joined the Soviet 47th Army. Red Army forces north of Warsaw finally advanced across the Bug River on 3 September, reached the Narew River the following day, and secured bridgeheads across that river on 6 September. Lead elements of two Polish divisions from the 1st Army attempted to cross the Vistula into Warsaw on 13 September but made little progress and having sustained heavy casualties were evacuated back across the river ten days later. The Uprising forces capitulated on 2 October; the Soviets would take Warsaw without a major battle during their advance early in 1945. American military historian David M. Glantz notes that while the Soviets could have taken Warsaw and aided the insurgents, from a purely military standpoint this would have required diverting efforts from attempts to secure bridgeheads south and north of Warsaw, involved the Soviets in costly city fighting and gained them less optimal positions for further offensives; this, coupled with political factors meant that the Soviet decision not to aid the Warsaw Uprising was based not only on political, but also on military considerations.
For Poles living in Eastern Galicia, the victory of the Polish forces over the Ukrainian Galician Army and the prospect of the region once again becoming part of the newly reconstructed Polish Republic, after 123 years of foreign domination caused a great wave of excitement. In the years following the war, battles such as the Defense of Lwów were remembered as outstanding examples of Polish heroism and resilience. Young defenders of the Łyczakowski Cemetery, who lost their lives defending the city, such as Jerzy Bitschan became household names in Poland during the interwar period.
In the German language, Festung Warschau ("Fortress Warsaw") is the term used to refer to a fortified and well-defended Warsaw. In the 20th century, the term was in use on three occasions during World War I and World War II. It was used when the Germans threw back the Russian advance in 1914, where Warsaw came within distance of the fighting in October. The term resurfaced during the September 1939 German invasion of Poland. Later in the second war, the term resurfaced between September 1944 and January 1945, when the retreating Germans tried to establish a defense in the city against the advancing Soviet Union.
During the invasion of Poland in 1939 the German troops reached the outskirts of Warsaw on 9 September. The Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) assumed that the unfortified city damaged by countless terror bombing raids would be taken by German motorized units without any resistance and issued a press and radio release stating that the capital of Poland was taken. However, the German motorized assault was defeated and the advancing troops were forced to retreat with heavy casualties. From 8 September the city started to be referred to as "Fortress of Warsaw" in German broadcasts, which was to justify the aerial bombardment of civilian targets.
German-occupied Poland contained 457 camp complexes. Some of the major concentration and forced labour camps consisted of dozens of subsidiary camps scattered over a broad area. At the Gross-Rosen concentration camp (to which Polish nationals were expelled from the annexed part of Poland) the number of subcamps was 97. Under Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) with thousands of prisoners each, the number of satellite camps was 48; their detailed descriptions are provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Stutthof concentration camp had 40 subcamps officially and as many as 105 subcamps in operation, some as far as Elbląg, Bydgoszcz and Toruń, at a distance of from the main camp.
Elsewhere in Warsaw collective responsibility was the rule resulting in the murders of thousands, which resulted in the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944. In response, under orders from Heinrich Himmler, Warsaw was kept under ceaseless barrage by Nazi artillery and air power for sixty-three days and nights with Erich von dem Bach, "SS-Gruppenführer" and Police General who took over from Heinz Reinefarth at the helm. Von dem Bach later wrote about his meeting with Reinefarth: "Reinefarth drew my attention to the existence of a clear order issued by Himmler. The first thing he told me was that he has been distinctly ordered not to take any prisoners but to kill every inhabitant of Warsaw. I asked him, 'women and children, too?' to which he replied, 'Yes, women and children, too ...'" In the wake of this unprecedented planned destruction and ethnic cleansing, by 1944 around 800,000 civilians were killed, or 60% of the population.
During the Battle of Berlin (16 April 1945 – 2 May 1945), Hitler and his staff lived in the underground "Führerbunker" while the Red Army approached. On 30 April, when Soviet troops were within two blocks of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler, along with his girlfriend and by then wife Eva Braun committed suicide. On 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling unconditionally surrendered Berlin to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov. Hitler was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as Reich President and Goebbels as Reich Chancellor. Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide the next day after murdering their six children. Between 4 and 8 May 1945, most of the remaining German armed forces unconditionally surrendered. The German Instrument of Surrender was signed 8 May, marking the end of the Nazi regime and the end of World War II in Europe.
After the end of World War I, Poland regained her independence and the pre-war commander of I and IV departments, Capt. Józef Hłasko, returned to Warsaw from Moscow (where he served as the commander of that city's firefighters) and became the successor of Tuliszkowski. In 1920, during the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Polish Ministry of Interior decided to nationalize the unit. However, the authorities of Warsaw have sued the state authorities and the decision was withdrawn. Until World War II the Warsaw Fire Guards were the only privately owned fire brigade in Poland and one of the very few such units in the world. Officially their status was similar to that of the Municipal Police. The private ownership (most of the shares were held by the city of Warsaw) allowed for fast modernization of the Guards. In 1928 the last horse-drawn cart was decommissioned; since then the Guard has been fully motorized. In 1936 a new headquarters was built at Polna street, where one of the branches is located even now.
Inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced Jews to live. These World War II ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. The first ghetto was established in October 1939 at Piotrków. Initially the ghettos were open but on 1 May the Łódź ghetto was closed by Germans sealing the Jews inside. The Warsaw Ghetto was closed in November 1940. The Germans started a reservation for Jews near Lublin.
According to Polish historians, during the course of the war, Ukrainian forces conducted massacres against the Polish population in Sokoloniki where 500 buildings were burned down and circa 50 Poles killedIn Zamarstynow. a Ukrainian commander accused the Polish population of supporting the Polish side and allowed for brutal house searchers by his troops in which civilians were beaten, robbed, murdered and raped. Ukrainian forces also murdered prisoners of war during these events. A day later, Polish troops executed a group of Ukrainian prisoners in retaliation..
At the end of World War II, the Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. There were extensive changes to the territorial extent of Poland, following the decision taken at the Teheran Conference of 1943 at the insistence of the Soviet Union. The Polish territories east of the Curzon Line (known as the Kresy), which the Soviet Union had occupied in 1939 along with the Bialystok region were permanently annexed, resulting in Poland losing over 20% of its pre-war borders. While a large portion of this area was predominately populated by Ukrainians and Belarusians, most of their Polish inhabitants were expelled. Today these territories are part of Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania.
War had resumed in September 1939 following a Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression pact that opened the way for a repeat partition of Poland between the two dictatorships. War ended in May 1945. By then Breslau had been besieged by the Red army for three months, before being surrendered on 6 May 1945. By that time in Breslau, along with the surrounding Silesian territories, a programme of wholesale ethnic cleansing was underway. At end of 1946 Breslau had become Wrocław and the ethnic German population had been replaced by an ethnic Polish population, many of those involved having themselves been expelled from territories in the east of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. Helmut Kirchberg was expelled to the west, ending up in the Soviet occupation zone of what had previously been Germany. By 1946 he was working as an interpreter in the Central Administration for the Fuels industry.
The region largely escaped fighting, and its mountainous remoteness proved useful to the Nazis as a refuge for items looted from across Europe. When the US 88th Infantry Division occupied South Tyrol from May 2 to May 8, 1945, and after the total unconditional surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945, it found vast amounts of precious items and looted art treasures. Among the items reportedly found were railway wagons filled with gold bars, hundreds of thousands of metres of silk, the Italian crown jewels, King Victor Emmanuel's personal collection of rare coins, and scores of works of art looted from art galleries such as the Uffizi in Florence. It was feared that the Germans might use the region as a last-ditch stronghold to fight to the bitter end and from there direct Werwolf activities in Allied-controlled territories, but this did not occur due to the suicide of Hitler, the disintegration and chaos of the Nazi apparatus and the rapid Nazi German surrender thereafter.
By the end of 1941 all Jews in German occupied Poland were ghettoized. Except the children, they had to wear an identifying badge with a blue Star of David. Many Jews in what was then eastern Poland also fell victim to mobile Nazi death squads called "Einsatzgruppen", which massacred Jews especially in 1941. Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the Nazis formally imposed the death penalty for anybody found sheltering and helping Jews. Food rations for Poles were very small (669 kcal per day in 1941) and black market prices of food were high, factors which made difficult to hide people and almost impossible to hide entire families, especially in the cities. Despite these draconian measures imposed by the Nazis, Poland has the highest number of Righteous Among The Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Museum.