Prejudice Against Poles?- Chapter 7

"'Me and Mike, ve vork in a mine./Holy s**t ve have a good time./Vunce a veek ve get our pay./Holy s**t, no vork next day.' .... Speaking of people from Poland: Billy Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole hanged in public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden...The Pole was a farm laborer was being hanged for having sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes" (Vonnegut 155-156).

German execution of 51 Polish hostages during WWII.

With these beginning passages of Chapter 7, I was informed of the harsh prejudices of Germans against the Polish minorities of the country. According to Wikipedia, the Polish people first migrated to Germany to provide mass labor in the coal mines during the late 1800s. Although they currently are the second largest minority group in Germany, the prejudice continues, and the group is still denied formal minority status in Germany (which was established as part of the Nazi regime.) Also, Poles are subjected to harsh and sometimes ridiculous stereotypes. Common German thoughts toward the group stereotypes them as thieves, especially of cars, gypsies, black market dealers, unemployed or working for hardly any wages, cheaters and liars, and foolishly, bad soccer players.

The prejudice went beyond silly name calling during WWII. The Nazis, under the aspirations of Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf, put to death "...about 2.9 million Polish Jews (mostly killed in Operation Reinhard), [and] about 2.8 million non-Jewish Polish citizens during the course of World War II" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_ethnic_Poles). Polish people in Germany were prohibited to have relations with Germans, and Hitler ordered a merciless cultural genocide of all Polish on August 22, 1939. Polish women and even girls were raped by soldiers before being put before German firing squads. In attempt to wipe out the Polish race, German soldiers were permitted to round up Poles from the streets and execute them publicly in any town at any time of day. Pscyhiatric Polish patients in hospitals were mass murdered by refusal of food, poison gas, or forced inhalation of carbon monoxide fumes from German vehicles.

Additionally, at least 20,000 children were kidnapped and tested for good genes, called "racially valuable traits," and shipped to homes to be Germanized if the children were desirable. At least 1.5 Polish people were sent to labor camps between 1939-1944, and their clothes were sewn with purple "P"'s to mark their racial inferiority. Lastly, over 150,000 Polish civilians were murdered in the German capture of Warsaw, Poland, the bustling and peaceful capital of the country before the German takeover. While barbershop quartets of the time and Germans of Dresden insulted and prodded fun at the Poles, the death toll and persecution of the Poles in Germany is anything but silly.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_ethnic_Poles