1.
Poland
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Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
2.
Voivodeships of Poland
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A województwo is the highest-level administrative subdivision of Poland, corresponding to a province in many other countries. The term województwo has been in use since the 14th century, the word województwo is also rendered as voivodeship or a variant spelling. The Polish local government reforms adopted in 1998, which went into effect on 1 January 1999 and these replaced the 49 former voivodeships that had existed from 1 July 1975. Todays voivodeships are mostly named after historical and geographical regions, while prior to 1998 generally took their names from the cities on which they were centered. The new units range in area from under 10,000 km2 to over 35,000 km2, voivodeships are further divided into powiats and gminas, see Administrative divisions of Poland. Competences and powers at voivodeship level are shared between the voivode, the sejmik and the marshal. In most cases these institutions are all based in one city, but in Kuyavian-Pomeranian and Lubusz Voivodeship the voivodes offices are in a different city from those of the executive, Voivodeship capitals are listed in the table below. The voivode is appointed by the Prime Minister and is the representative of the central government. The voivodes offices collectively are known as the urząd wojewódzki, the sejmik is elected every four years, at the same time as the local authorities at powiat and gmina level. It passes bylaws, including the development strategies and budget. It also elects the marszałek and other members of the executive, the marshals offices are collectively known as the urząd marszałkowski. According to 2014 Eurostat data, the GDP per capita of Polish voivodeships varies notably, Administrative division of Poland between 1979 and 1998 included 49 voivodeships upheld after the establishment of the Third Polish Republic in 1989 for another decade. This reorganization of administrative division of Poland was mainly a result of government reform acts of 1973–1975. In place of the administrative division, a new two-level administrative division was introduced. The three smallest voivodeships – Warsaw, Kraków and Łódź – had the status of municipal voivodeship. After World War II, the new division of the country within the new national borders was based on the prewar one and included 14 voivodeships. The voivodeships in the east that had not been annexed by the Soviet Union had their borders left almost unchanged. The newly acquired territories in the west and north were organized into the new voivodeships of Szczecin, Wrocław and Olsztyn, two cities were granted voivodeship status, Warsaw and Łódź
3.
Masovian Voivodeship
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Masovian Voivodeship or Mazovia Province, is the largest and most populous of the sixteen Polish provinces, or voivodeships, created in 1999. It occupies 35,579 square kilometres of east-central Poland, and has 5,324,500 inhabitants. Its principal cities are Warsaw in the centre of the Warsaw metropolitan area, Radom in the south, Płock in the west, Siedlce in the east, the capital of the voivodeship is the national capital, Warsaw. The province was created on January 1,1999, out of the former Warsaw, Płock, Ciechanów, Ostrołęka, Siedlce and Radom Voivodeships, the provinces name recalls the traditional name of the region, Mazowsze, with which it is roughly coterminous. Masovian Voivodeship is divided into 42 counties,5 city counties and 37 land counties and these are subdivided into 314 gminas, which include 85 urban gminas. The counties, shown on the map, are described in the table below. The voivodeship contains 85 cities and towns and these are listed below in descending order of population, Protected areas in Masovian Voivodeship include one National Park and nine Landscape Parks. Together with Płock and Rawa Voivodeships, it formed the province of Masovia, Masovian Voivodeship was one of the voivodeships of Congress Poland. It was formed from Warsaw Department, and transformed into Masovia Governorate, there are three main road routes that pass through the voivodship, Cork–Berlin–Poznań–Warszawa–Minsk–Moscow–Omsk, Prague–Wrocław–Warsaw–Białystok–Helsinki and Pskov–Gdańsk–Warsaw–Kraków–Budapest. Currently there are small stretches of autostrada in the area. However, the A2 autostrada, upon its completion, will be the first autostrada to connect the region, the autostrada will pass directly through the voivodship from east to west connecting it with Belarus and Germany. The railroad system is based on Koleje Mazowieckie and PKP Intercity, the main international airport in the region is Warsaw Frederic Chopin Airport. Masovian Voivodeship is the wealthiest province in Poland and it produces 22% of Polish GDP, and GDP per capita is 160% of country average. Second Polish Republics Warsaw Voivodeship Official website Things to do in Warsaw
4.
Powiat
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A powiat is the second-level unit of local government and administration in Poland, equivalent to a county, district or prefecture in other countries. The term powiat is most often translated into English as county, a powiat is part of a larger unit, the voivodeship or province. A powiat is usually subdivided into gminas, major towns and cities, however, function as separate counties in their own right, without subdivision into gminas. They are termed city counties and have roughly the same status as county boroughs in the UK. The other type of powiats are termed land counties, as of 2008, there were 379 powiat-level entities,314 land counties, and 65 city counties. For a complete listing, see List of Polish counties. For tables of counties by voivodeship, see the articles on the individual voivodeships, the history of Polish powiats goes back to the second half of the 14th century. They remained the basic unit of organization in Poland, then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After Poland regained independence in 1918, the powiats were again the territorial units. Powiats were abolished in 1975 in favor of a number of voivodeships. This reform also created 16 larger voivodeships, legislative power within a powiat is vested in an elected council, while local executive power is vested in the starosta, who is elected by that council. The administrative offices headed by the starosta are called the starostwo, however, in city counties these institutions do not exist separately – their powers and functions are exercised by the city council, the directly elected mayor, and the city offices. In some cases a powiat has its seat outside its own territory, for example, Poznań County has its offices in Poznań, although Poznań is itself a city county, and is therefore not part of Poznań County. Powiats have relatively limited powers, since many local and regional matters are dealt with either at gmina or voivodeship level, the Polish the name of an county, in the administrative sense, consists of the word powiat followed by a masculine-gender adjective. In most cases, this is the formed from the name of the town or city where the county has its seat. Thus the county with its seat at the town of Kutno is named powiat kutnowski, if the name of the seat comprises a noun followed by an adjective, as in Maków Mazowiecki, the adjective will generally be formed from the noun only. There are also a few counties whose names are derived from the names of two towns, from the name of a city and an adjective, or a mountain range. There is more one way to render such names into English
5.
Otwock County
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Otwock County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Masovian Voivodeship, east-central Poland. It came into being on January 1,1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998 and its administrative seat and largest town is Otwock, which lies 22 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. The county also contains the towns of Józefów, lying 3 km north-west of Otwock, the county covers an area of 615.09 square kilometres. As of 2006 its total population is 116,086, out of which the population of Otwock is 43,247, that of Józefów is 18,353, that of Karczew is 10,396, and the rural population is 44,090. Otwock County is bordered by Mińsk County to the east, Garwolin County to the south-east, Grójec County to the south-west, and Piaseczno County, the county is subdivided into eight gminas. These are listed in the table, in descending order of population. Świdermajer, the style of architecture in the area Polish official population figures 2006
6.
Gmina
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The gmina is the principal unit of the administrative division of Poland, similar to a commune or municipality. As of 2010 there were 2,478 gminy throughout the country, the word gmina derives from the German word Gemeinde, meaning community. The gmina has been the unit of territorial division in Poland since 1974. Some rural gminy have their seat in a town which is outside the gminas division, for example, the rural Gmina Augustów is administered from the town of Augustów, but does not include the town, as Augustów is an urban type gmina in its own right. The legislative and controlling body of each gmina is the municipal council, or in a town. A gmina may create auxiliary units, which play an administrative role. In rural areas these are called sołectwa, in towns they may be dzielnice or osiedla and in an urban-rural gmina, for a complete listing of all the gminy in Poland, see List of Polish gminas. Each gmina carries out two types of tasks, its own tasks and commissioned ones, own tasks are public tasks exercised by self-government, which serve to satisfy the needs of the community. Commissioned tasks cover the remaining public tasks resulting from legitimate needs of the state, the tasks are handed over on the basis of statutory by-laws, charters and regulations, or by way of agreements between the self-government units and central-government administration. Official report from the Central Statistical Office of Poland dated January 1,2006
7.
Daylight saving time
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Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months by one hour so that evening daylight lasts an hour longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. Typically, regions that use Daylight Savings Time adjust clocks forward one hour close to the start of spring, American inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin proposed a form of daylight time in 1784. New Zealander George Hudson proposed the idea of saving in 1895. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary organized the first nationwide implementation, starting on April 30,1916, many countries have used it at various times since then, particularly since the energy crisis of the 1970s. The practice has both advocates and critics, DST clock shifts sometimes complicate timekeeping and can disrupt travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Computer software often adjusts clocks automatically, but policy changes by various jurisdictions of DST dates, industrialized societies generally follow a clock-based schedule for daily activities that do not change throughout the course of the year. The time of day that individuals begin and end work or school, North and south of the tropics daylight lasts longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the effect becoming greater as one moves away from the tropics. However, they will have one hour of daylight at the start of each day. Supporters have also argued that DST decreases energy consumption by reducing the need for lighting and heating, DST is also of little use for locations near the equator, because these regions see only a small variation in daylight in the course of the year. After ancient times, equal-length civil hours eventually supplanted unequal, so civil time no longer varies by season, unequal hours are still used in a few traditional settings, such as some monasteries of Mount Athos and all Jewish ceremonies. This 1784 satire proposed taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells, despite common misconception, Franklin did not actually propose DST, 18th-century Europe did not even keep precise schedules. However, this changed as rail transport and communication networks came to require a standardization of time unknown in Franklins day. Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him time to collect insects. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk and his solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. The proposal was taken up by the Liberal Member of Parliament Robert Pearce, a select committee was set up to examine the issue, but Pearces bill did not become law, and several other bills failed in the following years. Willett lobbied for the proposal in the UK until his death in 1915, william Sword Frost, mayor of Orillia, Ontario, introduced daylight saving time in the municipality during his tenure from 1911 to 1912. Starting on April 30,1916, the German Empire and its World War I ally Austria-Hungary were the first to use DST as a way to conserve coal during wartime, Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the year
8.
Central European Summer Time
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It corresponds to UTC + two hours. Other names which have been applied to Central European Summer Time are Middle European Summer Time, Central European Daylight Saving Time, and Bravo Time. Since 1996 European Summer Time has been observed between 1,00 UTC on the last Sunday of March and 1,00 on the last Sunday of October, the following countries and territories use Central European Summer Time. In addition, Libya used CEST during the years 1951–1959, 1982–1989, 1996–1997, European Summer Time Other countries and territories in UTC+2 time zone Other names of UTC+2 time zone
9.
Vehicle registration plates of Poland
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Polish vehicle registration plates indicate the region of registration of the vehicle encoded in the number plate. According to Polish law, the plate is tied to the vehicle. There is no possibility for the owner to keep the number for use on a different car. The licence plates are issued by the powiat of the vehicle owners registered address of residence, if it is owned by a legal person, the place of registration is determined by the address of its seat. Vehicles leased under operating leases and many de facto finance leases will be registered at the seat of the lessor, when a vehicle changes hands, the new owner must apply for new vehicle registration document bearing his or her name and registered address. The new owner may obtain a new licence plate although it is not necessary when new owners residence address lies in the area as the previous owners. In such a situation the licence plates are carried over to the new owner. If the car has a pre- May 1,2006 plate, the plaque cannot be replaced if destroyed. The change of the set is required. The change in system shown below in 2001 is related to the reduction in the year of the number of voivodeships in Poland from 49 to 16. The pre-2001 licence plates can be used indefinitely, but since they are obsolete they have to be replaced in case of change of vehicles ownership. In the pre-2001 model, there were not sufficient letters in the Polish alphabet for each of the old voivodeships to have a single letter, only the standard latin alphabet were used, the specific Polish characters with diacritics were excluded in order to make the plates fully internationally readable. Therefore, two letters had to be used to indicate the vehicles origin, since the change, the first letter denotes the new voivodeship. One additional letter is used in cities with rights of powiat, two additional letters are used in any other powiat. It is not necessary for EU citizens to re-register the vehicles they have brought them, which are duly registered and taxed elsewhere in the EU. This emerges from European law, although local regulations have to not been changed to reflect the law. If in doubt, refer to your Embassy, if the vehicle uses only one licence plate the excessive sticker must be attached to the registration papers. Each powiat uses a two or three letter code, with the first letter denoting the powiats voivodeship
10.
Warsaw
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Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland, roughly 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea and 300 kilometres from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population is estimated at 1.750 million residents within a metropolitan area of 3.101 million residents. The city limits cover 516.9 square kilometres, while the area covers 6,100.43 square kilometres. Once described as Paris of the East, Warsaw was believed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world until World War II. On 9 November 1939, the city was awarded Polands highest military decoration for heroism, Warsaw is one of Europe’s most dynamic metropolitan cities. In 2012 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Warsaw as the 32nd most liveable city in the world, in 2017 the city came 4th in the “Business-friendly” category and 8th in the “Human capital and life style”. It was also ranked as one of the most liveable cities in Central, Warsaw is considered an Alpha– global city, a major international tourist destination and a significant cultural, political and economic hub. The city is a significant centre of research and development, BPO, ITO, the Warsaw Stock Exchange is the largest and most important in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontex, the European Union agency for external security, has its headquarters in Warsaw. Together with Frankfurt, London and Paris, Warsaw is also one of the cities with the highest number of skyscrapers in the European Union, the city is the seat of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra and the University of Warsaw. The historic city-centre of Warsaw with its picturesque Old Town in 1980 was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, buildings represent examples of nearly every European architectural style and historical period. Warsaw provides many examples of architecture from the gothic, renaissance, baroque, neoclassical and modern periods, furthermore, the city is positioning itself as Europes chic cultural capital with thriving art and club scenes and renowned restaurants. Folk etymology attributes the city name to a fisherman, Wars, according to legend, Sawa was a mermaid living in the Vistula River with whom Wars fell in love. In actuality, Warsz was a 12th/13th-century nobleman who owned a village located at the site of Mariensztat neighbourhood. See also the Vršovci family which had escaped to Poland, the official city name in full is miasto stołeczne Warszawa. A native or resident of Warsaw is known as a Varsovian – in Polish warszawiak, warszawianin, warszawianka, warszawiacy, other names for Warsaw include Varsovia and Varsóvia, Varsovie, Varsavia, Warschau, װאַרשע /Varshe, Варшава /Varšava /Varshava, Varšuva, Varsó. The first fortified settlements on the site of todays Warsaw were located in Bródno, after Jazdów was raided by nearby clans and dukes, a new similar settlement was established on the site of a small fishing village called Warszowa
11.
Vistula
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The Vistula is the longest and largest river in Poland, at 1,047 kilometres in length. The drainage basin area of the Vistula is 194,424 km2, the remainder is in Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia. The Vistula rises at Barania Góra in the south of Poland,1,220 meters above sea level in the Silesian Beskids, where it begins with the White Little Vistula and the Black Little Vistula. It empties into the Vistula Lagoon or directly into the Gdańsk Bay of the Baltic Sea with a delta, the name was first recorded by Pomponius Mela in AD40 and by Pliny in AD77 in his Natural History. Mela names the river Vistula, Pliny uses Vistla, the root of the name Vistula is Indo-European *u̯eis- to ooze, flow slowly and is found in many European rivernames. The diminutive endings -ila, -ula, were used in many Indo-European languages, in writing about the Vistula River and its peoples, Ptolemy uses the Greek spelling Ouistoula. Other ancient sources spell it Istula, ammianus Marcellinus refers to the Bisula, note the absence of the -t-. Jordanes uses Viscla, while the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith refers to it as the Wistla, the Vistula river basin covers 194,424 square kilometres, its average altitude rising to 270 metres above sea level. In addition, the majority of its basin is located at heights of 100 to 200 m above sea level. The highest point of the basin lies at 2,655 metres. The asymmetry of the basin is 73–27%. The most recent glaciation of the Pleistocene epoch, which ended around 10,000 BC, is called the Vistulian glaciation or Weichselian glaciation in regard to north-central Europe. The river forms a delta called the Żuławy Wiślane around the town of Biała Góra near Sztum, about 50 km from the mouth. In the city of Gdańsk the Head of the Leniwka branch separates again into the Szkarpawa branch, the so-called Dead Wisła divides again into the Przegalinie branch flowing into Gdańsk Bay. Until the 14th century the Vistula was divided into an eastern branch, the Elbląg Vistula, and the smaller western branch. Since 1371 the Vistula of Gdańsk is the main artery. After the flood in 1840 an additional branch formed called the Śmiała Wisła, in 1890 through 1895, additional waterworks were carried out up the Świbna. The history of the River Vistula and her valley spans over 2 million years, the river is connected to the geological period called the Quaternary, in which distinct cooling of the climate took place
12.
Polish Legions in World War I
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General Haller escaped to France to form the Polish army in the West against the anti-Polish German-Bolshevik treaty. The Legions took part in battles against the forces of the Imperial Russia. They suffered horrendous casualties outnumbered three to one in the Battle of Łowczówek and they captured Kielce, and in 1915 took part in the offensive on Warsaw. In June 1916 the unit had approximately 25,000 soldiers, both the number of troops and the composition of units changed rapidly. The Polish Legions became the Polish Auxiliary Corps, after the Act of 5th November of 1916 which pronounced the creation of the puppet Kingdom of Poland of 1916–18, the Polish Legions were transferred under German command. However, most of the refused to swear allegiance to the German Kaiser and were interned in Beniaminów. Approximately 3,000 of them were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and they were sent to the Italian Front. The formation of the Legions was declared by Józef Piłsudski in his order of August 22,1914, the Austrian government, having jurisdiction over the area, officially agreed to the formation August 27,1914. The unit became an independent formation of the Austro-Hungarian Army thanks to the efforts of the KSSN, initially the Polish Legions were composed of two legions, the Eastern and the Western Legion, both formed on August 27. After a Russian victory in the Battle of Galicia the Eastern Polish legion refused to fight on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian side against Russia and was disbanded on September 21, karol Trzaska-Durski, Gen. Stanisław Puchalski, Col. Stanisław Szeptycki, and Col. Zygmunt Zieliński. After the war ended the officers of the Polish Legions became the backbone of the Polish Army, below is a list of prominent Polish battles against the Imperial Russian Army in 1914–16, leading to victories in most cases, with notable exceptions especially during the Brusilov Offensive of 1916
13.
Vistula River Railroad
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Vistula River Railroad was a railroad system, opened on August 17,1877. It ran from northwest to southeast, through the territory of the former Congress Poland, in Mława, the system reached the Prussian railway network, as the nearby German border station of Działdowo was another important junction, with connections to Gdańsk, Olsztyn, and Toruń. Altogether, the length of the system was 522 kilometers, and originally, in 1887, the Vistula River Railroad employed 2364 workers. During the World War II the railroad was partitioned forming the Soviet Kovel Railways as one of its successors, in 1953 Kovel Railways were merged with Lviv Railways. Lublin Station still has the main station building dating from 1877. History of rail transport in Poland
14.
Lublin
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Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland and the second largest city of Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 349,103, Lublin is the largest Polish city east of the Vistula River, and is located approximately 170 kilometres to the southeast of Warsaw by road. One of the events that contributed to the citys development was the Polish-Lithuanian Union of Krewo in 1385. In 1474, Lublin, which was part of the Sandomierz region. Lublin also witnessed the early stages of Reformation in the 16th century, a Calvinist congregation was founded and certain groups of radical Arians also appeared in the city, making it an important national centre of Arianism. Until the partitions at the end of the 18th century, Lublin was a city of the Crown Kingdom of Poland. Its delegates and nobles had the right to participate in the Royal Election, although Lublin was not spared from severe destruction during World War II, its picturesque and historical Old Town has been preserved. The district is one of Polands official national Historic Monuments, as designated May 16,2007, the city is viewed as an attractive location for foreign investment and the analytical Financial Times Group has found Lublin to be one of the best cities for business in Poland. The Foreign direct investment ranking placed Lublin second among larger Polish cities in the Cost-effectiveness category, Lublin is also noted for its green spaces and a high standard of living. Archaeological finds indicate a presence of cultures in the area. A complex of settlements started to develop on the site of Lublin and in its environs in the 6th-7th centuries. Remains of settlements dating back to the 6th century were discovered in the center of todays Lublin on Czwartek Hill, the next period of the early Middle Ages was marked by intensification of habitation, particularly in the areas along river valleys. The settlements at the time were centered around the stronghold on Old Town Hill, when the tribal stronghold was destroyed in the 10th century, the center shifted to the north-east, to a new stronghold above Czechówka valley, and after the mid-12th century to Castle Hill. At least two churches are presumed to have existed in Lublin in the medieval period. One of them was most probably erected on Czwartek Hill during the rule of Casimir the Restorer in the 11th century. The castle became the seat of a Castellan, first mentioned in sources from 1224. The oldest historical document mentioning Lublin dates from 1198, so the name must have come into use some time earlier. The location of Lublin at the borders of the Polish lands gave it military significance
15.
Nobel Prize
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The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances. The will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the prizes in 1895, the prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine were first awarded in 1901. Medals made before 1980 were struck in 23 carat gold, between 1901 and 2016, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 579 times to 911 people and organisations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 23 organisations, the prize ceremonies take place annually in Stockholm, Sweden. Each recipient, or laureate, receives a medal, a diploma. The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the fields of literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, peace, and economics. The prize is not awarded posthumously, however, if a person is awarded a prize and dies before receiving it, though the average number of laureates per prize increased substantially during the 20th century, a prize may not be shared among more than three people. Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden and he was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1894, Nobel purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill and this invention was a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially the British smokeless powder cordite. As a consequence of his patent claims, Nobel was eventually involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite, Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous. In 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled The merchant of death is dead, as it was Alfreds brother Ludvig who had died, the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered and this inspired him to change his will. On 10 December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. He composed the last over a year before he died, signing it at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million SEK, to establish the five Nobel Prizes. Because of skepticism surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that it was approved by the Storting in Norway. The executors of Nobels will, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of Nobels fortune, Nobels instructions named a Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize, the members of whom were appointed shortly after the will was approved in April 1897. Soon thereafter, the other prize-awarding organisations were designated or established and these were Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June. The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded, and, in 1900, in 1905, the personal union between Sweden and Norway was dissolved
16.
Treblinka extermination camp
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Treblinka was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located in a forest north-east of Warsaw,4 kilometres south of the Treblinka train station in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship, the camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people, more Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. Managed by the German SS and Trawnikis, the camp consisted of two separate units, Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease, the second camp, Treblinka II, was an extermination camp, or the Vernichtungslager in German, referred to euphemistically as the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka by the Nazis. A small number of Jewish men who were not killed immediately upon arrival became its Jewish slave-labour units called Sonderkommandos and these bodies were exhumed in 1943 and cremated on large open-air pyres along with the bodies of new victims. Gassing operations at Treblinka II ended in October 1943 following a revolt by the Sonderkommandos in early August, several SS Hiwi guards were killed and 200 prisoners escaped from the camp, almost a hundred survived the subsequent chase. The camp was dismantled ahead of the Soviet advance, a farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site and the ground ploughed over in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide. In postwar Poland, the government bought most of the land where the camp had stood, in 1964 Treblinka was declared a national monument of Jewish martyrology in a ceremony at the site of the former gas chambers. In the same year the first German trials were held regarding war crimes committed at Treblinka by former SS members, after the end of communism in Poland in 1989, the number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad increased. An exhibition centre at the camp opened in 2006 and it was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 most of the 3.5 million Polish Jews were rounded up, the system was intended to isolate the Jews from the outside world in order to facilitate their exploitation and abuse. The supply of food was inadequate, living conditions were cramped and unsanitary, malnutrition and lack of medicine led to soaring mortality rates. The initial victories of the Wehrmacht over the Soviet Union inspired plans for the German colonisation of occupied Poland, including all territory within the General Government. At the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on 20 January 1942, new plans were outlined for the genocide of the Jews, Treblinka was one of three secret extermination camps set up for Operation Reinhard, the other two were Bełżec and Sobibór. All three were equipped with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, for the processing of entire transports of people, the lethal agent was established following a pilot project of mobile killing conducted at Soldau and Chełmno extermination camps that began operating in 1941 and used gas vans. Chełmno was a ground for the establishment of faster methods of killing and incinerating people. It was not a part of Reinhard, which was marked by the construction of facilities for mass murder
17.
Extermination camp
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This genocide of the Jewish people of Europe was the Third Reichs Final Solution to the Jewish question. It is now known as the Holocaust. In 1941, the experience gained in the killing of these hospital patients led to the creation of extermination camps for the implementation of the Final Solution. By then, the Jews were already confined to new ghettos and interned in Nazi concentration camps along with other targeted groups, including Roma, and the Soviet POWs. The Nazi Endlösung der Judenfrage, based on the killing of Europes Jews by gassing, began during Operation Reinhard. Responsibility for the logistics were to be executed by the programme administrator, notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months, but the gassings at Kulmhof north of Łódź using gas vans began already in December, under Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange. The camp at Bełżec was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt, Auschwitz concentration camp was fitted with brand new gassing bunkers in March 1942. Majdanek had them built in September, todeslagers were designed specifically for the systematic killing of people delivered en masse by the Holocaust trains. The executioners did not expect the prisoners to more than a few hours beyond arrival at Belzec, Sobibór. The Jewish men, women and children were delivered from the ghettos for special treatment in an atmosphere of terror by uniformed police battalions from both, Orpo and Schupo. From March 1936, all Nazi concentration camps were managed by the SS-Totenkopfverbände, who operated extermination camps from 1941 as well. An SS anatomist, Dr. Johann Kremer, after witnessing the gassing of victims at Birkenau, wrote in his diary on 2 September 1942 and they dont call Auschwitz the camp of annihilation for nothing. The distinction was evident during the Nuremberg trials, when Dieter Wisliceny was asked to name the extermination camps, then, when asked How do you classify the camps Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald. He replied, They were normal concentration camps, from the point of view of the department of Eichmann, irrespective of round-ups for extermination camps, the Nazis abducted millions of foreigners for slave labour in other types of camps, which provided perfect cover for the extermination programme. Prisoners represented about a quarter of the workforce of the Reich, with mortality rates exceeding 75 percent due to starvation, disease, exhaustion, executions. On top of that, the new death camps outside the borders of the Third Reich proper could be kept secret from the German civil populace. The killing method was based on experience gained by the SS during the secretive Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia, there were two types of death chambers operating during the Holocaust. The three killing centres of Einsatz Reinhard were constructed predominantly for the extermination of Polands Jews trapped in the Nazi ghettos
18.
Invasion of Poland
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The campaign ended on 6 October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty. German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west the morning after the Gleiwitz incident, as the Wehrmacht advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the Polish–German border to more established lines of defence to the east. After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast where they prepared for a long defence of the Romanian Bridgehead and awaited expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom. While those two countries had pacts with Poland and had declared war on Germany on 3 September, in the end their aid to Poland was very limited. The Soviet Red Armys invasion of Eastern Poland on 17 September, in accordance with a protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Facing a second front, the Polish government concluded the defence of the Romanian Bridgehead was no longer feasible, on 6 October, following the Polish defeat at the Battle of Kock, German and Soviet forces gained full control over Poland. The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, the Soviet Union incorporated its newly acquired areas into its constituent Belarusian and Ukrainian republics, and immediately started a campaign of sovietization. In the aftermath of the invasion, a collective of underground resistance formed the Polish Underground State within the territory of the former Polish state. Many of the exiles that managed to escape Poland subsequently joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West. On 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party, under its leader Adolf Hitler, as part of this long-term policy, Hitler at first pursued a policy of rapprochement with Poland, trying to improve opinion in Germany, culminating in the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. Earlier, Hitlers foreign policy worked to weaken ties between Poland and France, and attempted to manoeuvre Poland into the Anti-Comintern Pact, forming a front against the Soviet Union. The Poles feared that their independence would eventually be threatened altogether, the so-called Polish Corridor constituted land long disputed by Poland and Germany, and inhabited by a Polish majority. The Corridor had become a part of Poland after the Treaty of Versailles, many Germans also wanted the city of Danzig and its environs to be reincorporated into Germany. Danzig was a city with a German majority. It had been separated from Germany after Versailles and made into the nominally independent Free City of Danzig, the series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. Poland participated with Germany in the partition of Czechoslovakia that followed the Munich Agreement and it coerced Czechoslovakia to surrender the region of Český Těšín by issuing an ultimatum to that effect on 30 September 1938, which was accepted by Czechoslovakia on 1 October. This region had a Polish majority and had been disputed between Czechoslovakia and Poland in the aftermath of World War I, the Polish annexation of Slovak territory later served as the justification for the Slovak state to join the German invasion. Poland rejected this proposal, fearing that after accepting these demands, it would become subject to the will of Germany
19.
Nazi ghettos
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In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, the first anti-Jewish measures were enacted in Germany with the onset of Nazism, without the actual ghettoization planning for the German Jews which was rejected in the post-Kristallnacht period. The first ghetto of World War II was established on 8 October 1939 at Piotrków Trybunalski, the first large metropolitan ghetto known as the Łódź Ghetto followed them in April 1940, and the Warsaw Ghetto in October. Most Jewish ghettos were established in 1940 and 1941, subsequently, many ghettos were sealed from the outside, walled off with brickwork, or enclosed with barbed wire. In the case of sealed ghettos, any Jew found leaving them could be shot. The Warsaw Ghetto, located in the heart of the city, was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe, the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 people. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, there were at least 1,000 such ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland, Ghettos across Eastern Europe varied in their size, scope and living conditions. The conditions in the ghettos were generally brutal, in Warsaw, the Jews, comprising 30% of the city overall population, were forced to live in 2. 4% of the citys area, a density of 7.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół,700 people lived in an area occupied by five families. With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation, in the Łódź Ghetto some 43,800 people died of natural causes,76,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto before July 1942. To prevent unauthorised contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations, German Order Police formations were assigned to patrol the perimeter, within each ghetto, a Jewish Police force was created to ensure that no prisoners tried to escape. In general terms, there were three types of ghettos maintained by the Nazi administration, there were severe restrictions on entering and leaving them. Closed or sealed ghettos were situated mostly in German-occupied Poland and they were surrounded by brick walls, fences or barbed wire stretched between posts. Jews were not allowed to live in any other areas under the threat of capital punishment, in the closed ghettos the living conditions were the worst. The quarters were extremely crowded and unsanitary, starvation, chronic shortages of food, lack of heat in winter and inadequate municipal services led to frequent outbreaks of epidemics such as dysentery and typhus and to a high mortality rate. Most Nazi ghettos were of particular type. The Jewish population was imprisoned in them only to be deported or shot out of town by the German killing squads often with the aid of local collaborationist Auxiliary Police battalions and those parts of the city outside the walls of the Jewish Quarter were called Aryan
20.
Aktion T4
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Aktion T4 was the postwar designation for a programme of involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to select patients deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination, about half of the victims were from church-run asylums. Several reasons for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, compassion, reducing suffering, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the nominal end of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices of Aktion T4, the unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds emptied by the end of 1941. The technology, personnel and techniques developed were instrumental in the implementation of Nazi genocides, the term Aktion T4 came into use after the war, before that German terminology included Euthanasie and Gnadentod. The euthanasia programme was part of the evolution of the policy of murder that culminated in the extermination of Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene, the idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted. Canada, Denmark, Switzerland and the US had passed laws for the sterilisation of people before Germany. Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation, the policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by Emil Kraepelin. Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance and it is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner and he wrote that he intended to radically solve the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. Although officially started in September 1939, Aktion T4 was initiated with a case in late 1938. Hitler instructed his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to evaluate a familys petition for the killing of their blind. The child, born near Leipzig and identified as Gerhard Kretschmar eventually, was killed in July 1939, Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. Three weeks after the killing of the boy, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and it was to prepare and proceed with the registration of sick children or newborns identified as defective. Secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started, by 1941 more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be unworthy of life and this issue, according to the Nazi regime, assumed new urgency in wartime. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power, as early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were unworthy of life
21.
History of the Jews in Poland
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The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over 800 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world, Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the Partitions of Poland which began in 1772, in particular, from the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. Known as paradisus Iudaeorum, it became a shelter for persecuted and expelled European Jewish communities, according to some sources, about three-quarters of the worlds Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century. With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife, Polands traditional tolerance began to wane from the 17th century onward. Still, as Poland regained independence in the aftermath of World War I, Antisemitism was a growing problem throughout Europe in those years, from both the political establishment and the general population. At the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, one-fifth of the Polish population perished during World War II, half of them were 3,000,000 Polish Jews murdered in The Holocaust, constituting 90% of Polish Jewry. Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, there was collaboration with the Nazis by its citizens. Collaboration by individual Poles has been described as smaller than in other occupied countries, statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission indicate that less than 0. 1% of Polish gentiles collaborated with the Nazis. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the largest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, britain demanded Poland to halt the exodus, but their pressure was largely unsuccessful. Most of the remaining Jews left Poland in late 1968 as the result of the Soviet-sponsored anti-Zionist campaign. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, the situation of Polish Jews became normalized, Religious institutions were revived, largely through the activities of Jewish foundations from the United States. The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the 10th century, by travelling along the trade routes leading eastwards to Kiev and Bukhara, Jewish merchants, known as Radhanites, crossed the areas of Silesia. In the summer of 965 or 966 Jacob made a trade and diplomatic journey from his native Toledo in Moslem Spain to the Holy Roman Empire, the first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. Among the first Jews to arrive in Poland were those banished from Prague, the first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl. The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Bolesław III, the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, Bolesław III recognized the utility of Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country
22.
Nazism
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National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, as well as other far-right groups. Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race and it aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of racial purity. The term National Socialism arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of socialism, the Nazi Partys precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semitic German Workers Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organisation, following the Holocaust and German defeat in World War II, only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, still describe themselves as following National Socialism. The full name of Adolf Hitlers party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the shorthand Nazi was formed from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of the word national. The term was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a peasant, characterizing an awkward. It derived from Ignaz, being a version of Ignatius, a common name in Bavaria. Opponents seized on this and shortened the first word of the name, Nationalsozialistische. The NSDAP briefly adopted the Nazi designation, attempting to reappropriate the term, the use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, and so on was popularised by German exiles abroad. From them, the spread into other languages and was eventually brought back to Germany after World War II. In English, Nazism is a name for the ideology the party advocated. The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics, far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements. Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms, a major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organisations that engaged in political violence after World War I. The Nazis stated the alliance was purely tactical and there remained substantial differences with the DNVP, the Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and called themselves an anti-bourgeois party. After the elections in 1932, the alliance broke after the DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag, the Nazis denounced them as an insignificant heap of reactionaries. The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their violence. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, there were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical
23.
Auschwitz concentration camp
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Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Auschwitz III–Monowitz, Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, from early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camps gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish, approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel, some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe reports of the atrocities at the camp. As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march, the prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, acts of violence perpetrated against Jews became ubiquitous. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933 excluded most Jews from the legal profession, similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Harassment and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to leave the country voluntarily and their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. German Jews were subjected to violent attacks and boycotts, in September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens, thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people and this supplementary decree defined Gypsies as enemies of the race-based state, the same category as Jews. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germanys 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed, approximately 65,000 civilians, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race, were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani, sS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September that Polish Jews should be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links
24.
Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
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Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland were established during World War II in hundreds of locations across occupied Poland. In most cases, the larger ghettos did not correspond to traditional Jewish neighborhoods, smaller Jewish communities with populations under 500 were terminated through expulsion soon after the invasion. The Nazi extermination program depended on killing centers as much as on the effectiveness of their railways, rail transport enabled the SS to run industrial-scale mass-extermination facilities and, at the same time, openly lie to their victims about the resettlement program. Jews were transported to their deaths in Holocaust trains from liquidated ghettos of all occupied cities, including Litzmannstadt, by the time Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was liberated by the Red Army, not a single Jewish ghetto in Poland was left standing. Only about 50, 000–120,000 Polish Jews survived the war on native soil with the assistance of their Polish neighbors, in total, according to USHMM archives, The Germans established at least 1000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. Also, not all ghettos are listed due to their transient nature. Permanent ghettos were created only in settlements with connections, because the food aid was completely dependent on the Germans. Throughout 1940 and 1941, most ghettos were sealed off from the outside, walled off or enclosed with barbed wire, and many Jews found leaving them were shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles, the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. In documents and signage, the Nazis usually referred to the ghettos they created as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, the quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin, where the Final Solution was set in place. The settlements listed in the Polish language, including cities, had all been renamed after the 1939 joint invasion of Poland by Germany. Renaming everything in their own image had been one way in which the sought to redraw Europes political map. All Polish territories were confiscated as either Nazi zones of occupation, Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah without visas or exit permits upon the conclusion of World War II. By contrast, Stalin forcibly brought Soviet Jews back to USSR along with all Soviet citizens, german camps in occupied Poland during World War II Nazi crimes against the Polish nation Timeline of Treblinka
25.
The Holocaust in Poland
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The genocide officially sanctioned and executed by the Third Reich during World War II, collectively known as the Holocaust, took the lives of more than three million Polish Jews. German companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria in concentration camps run by Nazi Germany in the General Government as well as in parts of occupied Poland and beyond. Throughout the German occupation, at risk to themselves and their families. Grouped by nationality, Polish rescuers represent the biggest number of people who saved Jews during the Holocaust, already recognized by the State of Israel, the Polish Righteous Among the Nations include 6,706 gentiles, more than any other nation. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland in accordance with the protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany. Large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany, within months, the Polish Jews in the Soviet-occupied zone, who refused to swear an oath of allegiance, were deported to Siberia along with the Catholics. Their number is estimated at about 200,000 men, women and children, both occupying powers were equally hostile to the existence of sovereign Polish state, and endorsed the policy of ethnic cleansing. However, the Soviet rule was short-lived because the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact signed earlier in Moscow were broken, from 1941 to 1943 all of Poland was under the control of Nazi Germany. The semi-colonial territory of the General Government, set up in central and south-eastern Poland, prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living predominantly in the cities, about 10% of the general population. Database of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews provides information on 1926 Jewish communities across the country, following the conquest of Poland, the first German anti-Jewish measures involved the policy of expulsion of Jews from the territories annexed by the Third Reich. Annexed directly to the new Warthegau district, the city of Łódź absorbed the influx of some 40,000 Polish Jews forced out from the surrounding areas, a total of 204,000 Jews passed through the ghetto in Łódź. Initially, they were to be expelled to the Generalgouvernement, however, the ultimate destination of the massive removal of Jews was left open until the Final Solution was set in motion two years later. Persecution of Polish Jews by the German occupation authority began immediately after the invasion, during this period, the Germans ordered Jewish communities to appoint Jewish Councils to administer the ghettos and to be responsible in the strictest sense for carrying out orders. Most ghettos were set up in cities and towns where Jewish life was well organized, for logistical reasons, the Jewish communities in settlements without railway connections in occupied Poland were dissolved. In a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains, the food aid was completely dependent on the SS. Jews were legally banned from baking bread, they were sealed off from the public in an unsustainable manner. By the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries, the Warsaw ghetto contained more Jews than all of France, the Łódź Ghetto more Jews than all of the Netherlands. More Jews lived in the city of Kraków than in all of Italy, all of southeast Europe – Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece – had fewer Jews than the original four districts of the General Government
26.
Irena Sendler
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With the exception of diplomats who issued visas to help Jews flee Nazi-occupied Europe, Sendler saved more Jews than any other individual during the Holocaust. The German occupiers eventually discovered her activities and she was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and sentenced to death, in 1965, Sendler was recognised by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations. Late in life, she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Polands highest honour, Sendler was born as Irena Krzyżanowska on 15 February 1910 in Warsaw to Dr. Stanisław Krzyżanowski, a physician, and his wife, Janina. She grew up in Otwock, a town about 15 miles southeast of Warsaw and her father died in February 1917 from typhus contracted while treating patients. After his death, Jewish community leaders offered to help her pay for Sendlers education. Sendler studied Polish literature at Warsaw University, and joined the Polish Socialist Party and she opposed the ghetto-bench system that existed at some pre-war Polish universities and defaced her grade card. As a result of public protest, she was suspended from the University of Warsaw for three years. She married Mieczysław Sendler in 1931, but they divorced in 1947 and she then married Stefan Zgrzembski, a Jewish friend from her university days, by whom she had three children, Janina, Andrzej, and Adam. In 1959 she divorced Zgrzembski and remarried her first husband, Mieczysław Sendler, however, Sendler moved to Warsaw prior to the outbreak of World War II, and worked for municipal Social Welfare departments. She began aiding Jews soon after the German invasion in 1939, Poland was the only country in German-occupied Europe in which such a death penalty was applied. In August 1943, Sendler, by then known by her nom de guerre Jolanta, was nominated by Żegota, the underground organization also known as the Council to Aid Jews, to head its Jewish childrens section. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus. During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people, the children were given fake Christian names and taught Christian prayers in case they were tested. Sendler was determined, however, to prevent the children from losing their Jewish identities and she kept careful documentation listing the childrens fake Christian names, their given names, and their current location. According to American historian Debórah Dwork, Sendler was the inspiration, about 400 of the children were directly smuggled out by Sendler herself. She and her co-workers buried lists of the children in jars in order to keep track of their original. The aim was to return the children to their families when the war was over. In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo and severely tortured, as they ransacked her house, Sendler tossed the lists of children to her friend, who hid the list in her bra
27.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims
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Polish Righteous Among the Nations
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There are 6,706 Polish men and women recognized as Righteous to this day, over a quarter of the total number of 26,513 awards. It is estimated hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided hundreds of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks of Polish resistance which were dedicated to aiding Jews – most notably, in German-occupied Poland the task of rescuing Jews was especially difficult and dangerous. All household members were punished by death if a Jew was found concealed in their home or on their property. It is estimated that the number of Poles who were killed by the Nazis for aiding Jews was as high as tens of thousands,704 of whom were posthumously honored with medals. Before World War II, Polands Jewish community had numbered between 3,300,000 and 3,500,000 persons – about 10 percent of the total population. During World War II, Germanys Nazi regime sent millions of deportees from every European country to the concentration camps it set up in the General Government in occupied Poland. Soon after war had broken out, the Germans began their extermination of Polish Jews, ethnic Polish, Romani, Russians, Czech, most were quickly rounded up and imprisoned in ghettos, which they were forbidden to leave. Many Polish Gentiles concealed hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors, many of these efforts arose spontaneously from individual initiatives, but there were also organized networks dedicated to aiding the Jews. Most notably, in September 1942 a Provisional Committee to Aid Jews was founded on the initiative of Polish novelist Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, of the famous artistic and literary Kossak family. This body soon became the Council for Aid to Jews, known by the codename Żegota, with Julian Grobelny as its president and Irena Sendler as head of its childrens section. It is not exactly known how many Jews were helped by Żegota, at the end of the war, Sendler attempted to locate their parents but nearly all of them had died at Treblinka. It is estimated that half of the Jews who survived the war were aided in some shape or form by Żegota. Numerous families who concealed their Jewish neighbours paid the price for doing so. Most notably, several hundred Poles were massacred in Słonim for sheltering Jews of the Słonim Ghetto, in Huta Stara near Buczacz, all Polish Christians and the Jewish countrymen they protected were burned alive in a church. Anyone from the Aryan side caught assisting those on the Jewish side in obtaining food was subject to the death penalty, capital punishment and collective responsibility of entire families for aiding Jews, was the most draconian such Nazi practice against any nation in occupied Europe. The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities, Polish rescuers were fully conscious of the dangers facing them and their families, not only from the Germans, but also from betrayers within the local population. The Nazis implemented a law forbidding all non-Jews from buying from Jewish shops under the penalty of death
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Yad Vashem
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Yad Vashem is Israels official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Established in 1953, Yad Vashem is on the slope of Mount Herzl on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem,804 meters above sea level. Those recognized by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations are honored in a section of Yad Vashem known as the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, after the Western Wall, Yad Vashem is the second-most-visited Israeli tourist site. Its curators charge no fee for admission and welcome approximately one million visitors a year, naming the Holocaust memorial yad vashem conveys the idea of establishing a national depository for the names of Jewish victims who have no one to carry their name after death. The original verse referred to eunuchs who, although they could not have children, Yad Vashem was first proposed in September 1942, at a board meeting of the Jewish National Fund, by Mordecai Shenhavi, a member of Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek. In August 1945, the plan was discussed in detail at a Zionist meeting in London. A provisional board of Zionist leaders were established that included David Remez as chairman, Shlomo Zalman Shragai, Baruch Zuckerman, in February 1946, Yad Vashem opened an office in Jerusalem and a branch office in Tel Aviv and in June that year, convened its first plenary session. In July 1947, the First Conference on Holocaust Research was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, however, the outbreak in May 1948 of the War of Independence, brought operations to a standstill for two years. In 1953, the Knesset, Israels Parliament, unanimously passed the Yad Vashem Law, establishing the Martyrs, the new Yad Vashem museum was designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, replacing the previous 30-year-old exhibition. It is the culmination of a $100 million decade-long expansion project, in November 2008, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau was appointed Chairman of Yad Vashems Council to replace Tommy Lapid. The Vice Chairmen of the Council are Yitzhak Arad and Moshe Kantor, elie Wiesel was vice chairman of the Council until his death on July 2,2016. The Chairman of the Directorate is Avner Shalev, who has replaced Yitzhak Arad, the Director General is Dorit Novak. The Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent is John Najmann, the Chair for Holocaust Studies is Prof. Dan Michman. The Chief Historian is Prof. Dina Porat, the Academic Advisor is Prof. Yehuda Bauer. The Members of the Yad Vashem Directorate are Yossi Ahimeir, Daniel Atar, Michal Cohen, Matityahu Drobles, Abraham Duvdevani, Prof. Boleslaw Goldman, Vera H. Golovensky, Moshe Ha-Elion, Adv. Shlomit Kasirer, Yossi Katribas, Yehiel Leket, Baruch Shub, Dalit Stauber, Dr. Zehava Tanne, the aims of Yad Vashem are education, research and documentation and commemoration. Yad Vashem seeks to preserve the memory and names of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem also honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem trains 10,000 domestic and foreign teachers every year, the organization operates a web site in several languages, including German, Hebrew, Farsi and Arabic
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Calel Perechodnik
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Calel Perechodnik was a Polish Jew who joined the Jewish Ghetto Police in the Otwock Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland. His wartime diaries were published posthumously as Am I a Murderer. in 1995 by the Karta Centre of Warsaw, a secular Jew, Perechodnik was born in 1916 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Otwock, south east of Warsaw. He earned a degree in agronomy at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, perechodniks wife Anka née Nusfeld was also from Otwock, she ran a cinema named Oasis with her two brothers. Calek and Ankas only daughter Alinka, was born on 19 August 1940, in 1940, Perechodnik and his family, along with the 8,000 other Jews of Otwock, were forced to relocate to the Otwock Ghetto. To provide for himself, his wife, and their daughter, in early 1942, the German authorities began the Ghetto liquidation action. The Jewish police were ordered to assist in the rounding up of Jews who were taken to the station and loaded onto freight trains heading for the Treblinka extermination camp. Assured by the commandant of the Ghetto Police that his family would be protected, on 19 September 1942, Perechodnik brought his own wife, but he was betrayed, Anka and Alinka were among the 8,000 Otwock Jews sent to their deaths at Treblinka. Subsequently, he was sent to a labour camp, Perechodnik constantly blamed himself for the death of his wife and daughter. Prior to their shipping to Treblinka, Anka asked Calek on several occasions to obtain a false kennkarte for her, Calel later wrote that she could easily pass for a Pole if she dyed her hair. Perechodnik failed to obtain the kennkarte for his wife in time, partly due to his laziness, on 20 August 1942, Calel Perechodnik escaped to Warsaw. His father, Aryan in appearance, remained at large to support the family until he was captured by the Gestapo, Calel spent 105 days in hiding with his mother and other Jews in the apartment of a Polish woman risking her own life to save them. While in hiding, he spent the time writing, the last entry in his memoir concerns his last will and is dated 23 October 1943. He then joined the Polish Underground, it was during this time that he contracted typhus, on 1 August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began as part of a nationwide Operation Tempest. Perechodnik participated in the uprising as part of the Chrobry II Battalion, there are several theories as to how he died. One states that he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide after the Uprising failed, another claims that he was killed by pillagers after the uprising. Another account claims he was burned alive in the bunker, unable to get out because of the typhus, Perechodnik wrote his memoir between 7 May and 19 August 1943 in Warsaw, during his stay at the home of his Polish rescuer. He expresses his outrage at the refusal by some Orthodox Jews to send their children to Polish orphanages which would have saved them from the Holocaust, Perechodnik expressed his anguish and astonishment at the savagery of war. It was, he wrote, he greatest disillusionment that I have endured in my life, the Jewish Ghetto Police which he joined, was not a benevolent force by any means
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Jewish Ghetto Police
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They were used by the Germans primarily for securing the deportation of other Jews to the concentration camps, but their work encompassed all forms of public order in the ghetto. The Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst were recruited from two groups, who could be relied upon to follow German orders. The first were Jewish lawyers, disbarred by the Nazi occupiers, largely recruited by deputy commander Jakub Lejkin, the second, larger and more criminally active group, were recruited from among pre-War Jewish organised crime groups. The first commander of the Warsaw ghetto was Józef Szeryński, a Jewish lieutenant-colonel in the pre-War Polish Police and he changed his name from Szenkman and developed an anti-Semitic attitude. Szerynski survived an assassination carried out by a member of the Jewish police, Yisrael Kanal. In ghettos where the Judenrat was resistant to German orders, the Jewish police were used to control or replace the council. The criminal elements in the Ordnungsdienst soon came to several areas of life in the ghetto, notably the transportation of people. Additionally, there was a department, Section 13, known as the Jewish Gestapo. It specialised in tracking down Jewish people outside the Ghetto walls, as well as their Polish helpers, one of the largest police units was to be found in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst numbered about 2,500. The Łódź Ghetto had about 1,200, and the Lviv Ghetto 500, the fate of many of the Jewish Policemen was eventually the same as all other ghetto Jews. Upon the liquidation of the ghettos they were murdered on site or sent to the extermination camps. However, some of the more active criminals, especially associated with the Zagiew network, are known to have survived the War. Judenrat Kapo Adam Czerniaków Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski Anonymous, the Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police. Judischer Ordnungsdienst at Yad Vashem The Relations between the Judenrat and the Jewish police at Yad Vashem Ghetto Police at the The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
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Ewa reactor
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The Ewa Reactor was Polands first research nuclear reactor. Its name was derived from the first letters of the Polish words, Eksperymentalny, Wodny, the reactor was activated on June 14,1958, in the Instytut Badań Jądrowych in Otwock near Warsaw. It was deactivated it in February 1995 due to a shortage of uranium for experiments, the reactor is currently deactivated and partially dismantled. Ewa was based on the Soviet VVR-S design, had a power of 2 MW, was fueled by enriched uranium. In 1963 and 1967, the reactor underwent two major overhauls that improved the safety of the reaction and allowed for the use of better enriched fuels, after these changes, the reactors power increased first to 4 MW and ultimately to 10 MW. Its primary use was for producing radioactive isotopes and it functioned an average of 3500 hours a year. Because of its design, the reactor is currently considered a site for the future site of storage of the spent fuel from the Maria reactor. Maria reactor List of nuclear reactors
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Nuclear reactor
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This article is a subarticle of Nuclear power. A nuclear reactor, formerly known as a pile, is a device used to initiate. Nuclear reactors are used at power plants for electricity generation. Heat from nuclear fission is passed to a fluid, which runs through steam turbines. These either drive a ships propellers or turn electrical generators, Nuclear generated steam in principle can be used for industrial process heat or for district heating. Some reactors are used to produce isotopes for medical and industrial use, some are run only for research. As of April 2014, the IAEA reports there are 435 nuclear power reactors in operation, when a large fissile atomic nucleus such as uranium-235 or plutonium-239 absorbs a neutron, it may undergo nuclear fission. The heavy nucleus splits into two or more nuclei, releasing kinetic energy, gamma radiation, and free neutrons. A portion of neutrons may later be absorbed by other fissile atoms and trigger further fission events, which release more neutrons. This is known as a chain reaction. To control such a chain reaction, neutron poisons and neutron moderators can change the portion of neutrons that will go on to cause more fission. Nuclear reactors generally have automatic and manual systems to shut the fission reaction down if monitoring detects unsafe conditions, commonly-used moderators include regular water, solid graphite and heavy water. Some experimental types of reactor have used beryllium, and hydrocarbons have been suggested as another possibility, the reactor core generates heat in a number of ways, The kinetic energy of fission products is converted to thermal energy when these nuclei collide with nearby atoms. The reactor absorbs some of the rays produced during fission. Heat is produced by the decay of fission products and materials that have been activated by neutron absorption. This decay heat-source will remain for some even after the reactor is shut down. A kilogram of uranium-235 converted via nuclear processes releases approximately three times more energy than a kilogram of coal burned conventionally. A nuclear reactor coolant — usually water but sometimes a gas or a metal or molten salt — is circulated past the reactor core to absorb the heat that it generates
Poland
listen) is a town in central Poland, some 23 kilometres (14 mi) southeast of Warsaw, with 42,765 inhabitants (2004). Otwock is a part of the Warsaw Agglomeration, it is situated on the right bank of Vistula River below the mouth of Swider River. Otwock is home to a unique architectural style called Swidermajer.
Lennestadt, Germany
Saint-Amand-Montrond, France
