200,000 Jews Executed by Nazis in Poland, Black Book Asserts

A summary of all anti-Jewish regulations new in force in Nazi-occupied Poland, as well as detailed descriptions of the massacres and brutalities carried out by the Nazis against Jews there, are given in the Black Book of Poland published here by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

The book, which is the second volume of the Polish Black Book published last year in London by the Polish Government, devotes about forty of its 615 pages to the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in occupied Poland and to life in the ghettos there. Included in it are a number of authentic photos and documents confirming the Nazi atrocities, the executions of Jewish civilians, the treatment meted out by the Nazis to Jewish women in Poland and the torture of Jews sent to forced labor. It estimates that the number of Jews massacred by the Nazis in occupied Poland during three years of German occupation exceeds 200,000.

Quoting German official figures, the Black Book establishes that on July 1, 1940 there were 1,700,000 Jews in the section of occupied Poland known as the Government General. About one-third of them lived in the Warsaw ghetto. While Jewish deaths constituted 5 percent in 1939 before the Nazi invasion, they had risen to 24.3% in June 1941. The Black Book emphasizes that bad as is the situation of the Poles under the Nazis in occupied Poland, the Jewish situation is still worse.

Relating how Jews in various Polish towns were tortured to death, executed, or burned alive, and listing the cities from where the Jews were expelled, the Black Book cites a number of well-verified facts of how German soldiers and officers violated Jewish women, how they tore out the boards of religious Jews, and how they set fire to synagogues. It reproduces the texts of a number of Nazi orders affecting the Jews in the ghettos and shows photographs of elderly, haggard Jews being led away to compulsory labor by brutal-looking Nazi soldiers, and Jews being used by the Nazis as horses to draw their vehicles.