In the Second World War, Germans were not the first victims of flight and expulsion. Even in the province of East Prussia it was initially Poles and Jews. After the Polish capitulation in autumn 1939, the area around Ciechanów was incorporated into East Prussia as the new "Zichenau administrative district " and subjected to the terror of Nazi racial ideology. Of the approximately 80,000 Jews living there, only about 4,000 survived the German occupation.
Nazi German Reichsgau Wartheland and Nazi German Reichsgau Gdansk-West Prussia, which were both conceived at the same time in occupied Poland as National Socialist "Mustergaue" (model NSDAP districts), became settlement areas for Baltic Germans and other "ethnic German" resettlers. These people allegedly brought "Heim ins Reich" (Home to the Reich) served to "Germanise" the occupied territories according to the National Socialist Volkstum policy (related to Nazi racial ideology, anti-Jewish practices and the strengthening of German nationalism). If they corresponded to racial selection, they were naturalised and used as trustees of confiscated farms and businesses. These originally belonged to thousands of Poles and Jews who were expropriated, expelled from their homes to the General Governorate for the occupied Polish Region, used for forced labour or murdered.
Illustration:
Occupied Polish Region 1939-1945