Wartheland

It was formed on 26 October 1939 as the Reich District of Posen and renamed Wartheland in January 1940. It covered about 44,000 square kilometres with nearly 5 million inhabitants, more than 90 per cent of them Poles. It was divided into the administrative regions of Posen, Hohensalza (Inowrocław) and Kalisch, later Litzmannstadt, as Łódź itself was renamed. Arthur Greiser was its Reich Governor and Gauleiter.

Greiser meant to make it a model German province. Polish schools and hundreds of churches were closed, place names were Germanised, and hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were expelled to the General Government, their homes given to German settlers from the Baltic states, Volhynia and Bessarabia. The Łódź ghetto and the Chełmno extermination camp lay within the Warthegau. The district collapsed in January 1945, when Greiser fled before the Red Army.