Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

And I'm not using slavery euphemistically but in a literal sense. The Nazi plan for Poland and elsewhere was to establish slave labor plantations where the local population would belong to new German lords and would work for them. This plan was implemented. Here is a good article about it from Remember.org, a site commemorating the Holocaust. The official term is Polish forced laborers. Here's an excerpt from the article, which is titled "The Question of the Polish Forced Labourer during and in the Aftermath of World War II: The Example of the Warthegau Forced Labourers"

"The group of Polish forced labourers with which I am familiar with come from the "Gau Wartheland", one of four administrative districts which the Nazis cut out of the part of Western Poland which they annected in l939. The "Warthegau", as many Nazis referred to this district, was a Nazi creation with little or no bearing on the historical realities of the region. It was to become an experimental laboratory, where the economic, cultural and social supremacy of the German people would inevitably lead to the extermination of all other indigenous peoples in the region (most Poles and all Jews).

In a complicated system of burocratically determined ethniticity, "Volksdeutsche" (Germans by descent, but not by citizenship) were to be segregated from the rest of the population. Jews were to be crowded into local and then consolidated regional gettos. Following the Wannsee Conference (January 20, l942), the Nazis planned the industrial murder of these and all other European Jews en masse. The Poles were to be used as an inexhaustible source of slave labour for the colonisation of this and other regions of Poland and were then to be eventually exterminated. Germans from all parts of Eastern and Western Europe were to be brought in to take their place in the biggest colonisation project ever planned in Europe.

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While more than 360,000 Poles from this "Warthegau" were deported to other parts of Germany to do forced labour, many more Poles were made to do forced labour in their home country during World War II. How many is a question of definition: Who is a forced labourer in a war situation? Are all native workers in an occupied country "forced labourers"? Or are only those who are deported "forced labourers"? How does one define this concept? And how can one define this concept and still do justice to the victims of these horrendous crimes to humanity without overreaching the bounds of common sense? A reasonable educated guess is that somewhere around l to l l/2 Million Poles in this "Warthegau", above and beyond those who were deported, were engaged in some sort of forced labour in the course of the war. (The pre-war population in the region that became the "Warthegau" was around 4 Million.)"

So here we have the situation of millions of Poles not only in this area but in Poland as a whole facing forced labor including deportation to Germany itself as slave labor for German industry under the Nazis, yet here in the U.S.A. there's absolutely no recognition that this happened, or that it mattered.

It wasn't just Poland either. In the book "Hitler's Table Talk", a record of conversations (Hitler's part of them at least) that took place informally with the inner circle during the war, Hitler makes a comment that the schools in the Ukraine should all be shut down and Ukrainians only taught how to read road signs and other basics in order to help them serve their new masters.

Interestingly enough, even severe tragedies that happened during war time, that happen to be documented by top level foreign directors, don't make an impact. The film I'm talking about is "Katyn" by Andrzej Wajda. Wajda is possibly the most prominent film maker in post-World War II Poland. Katyn was a massacre of thousands of Polish Army officers by the Soviets in the area of Poland given to them under the Nazi-Soviet pact of '39. "Katyn" was released in 2007 and was nominated for an Academy Award. Yet although it's been released in Europe, and been available for some time, it's unavailable in the U.S. The only versions that have subtitles are European region DVDs that are being sold used on eBay. Strange treatment for an academy award nominated movie. I guess that the Polish Army victims at Katyn, one of which was Wajda's father, had the misfortune to be born Polish.

*on edit: ah, the actual number of people killed at Katyn is 21,768. From Wikipedia:

"The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, 'Katyń crime'), was a mass murder of thousands Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members the Polish Officer Corps dated March 5 1940."