For the German officers and their men, it was a time for celebration.For the Poles, it was the beginning of one of the most brutal occupations in history.Poland would suffer proportionately more than any other country in this war-nearly six million Poles would die.More than 16% of the population.For Hitler and the Nazis,this was an ideological war from the very beginning.Hitler told Joseph Goebbels that autumn that he thought the Poles were more animals than human beings and that the filth of the Poles was unimaginable.Hitler's judgment on the Poles, said Goebbels, was annihilatory.Two million Polish Jews came under Nazi control in the autumn of 1939.Thousands were shot and the Nazis began to mark the rest,with Polish Jews made to wear special symbols on their clothes.They would shortly be imprisoned in ghettos.Later in the war, they would be sent to death camps.The likelihood is that not one of these Polish Jews would have survived the war.
