Intelligenzaktion

It was prepared before the war: proscription lists (the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen) were compiled partly with the help of members of the German minority. Arrests and executions were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, and in Pomerania also by the Selbstschutz, a militia of local Germans. The targets were teachers, priests, landowners, officials, doctors, activists and veterans of the uprisings – anyone around whom Polish resistance might form. It was bloodiest in Pomerania, at Piaśnica, Szpęgawsk and Mniszek among other places.

It is estimated that about 50,000 people were shot and as many again sent to concentration camps, which few survived; the Institute of National Remembrance's monograph speaks of more than 100,000 victims. Its counterpart in the General Government was the AB-Aktion of spring and summer 1940, while the arrest of Kraków's professors in Sonderaktion Krakau was a separate episode. Some historians use the name Intelligenzaktion for the whole of these operations.