When the Germans invaded and then occupied Poland in September 1939, they did not take over the entire country. They honored a secret clause in a pact they had signed with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939, a little over a week before the invasion (see reading, A Pact with the Soviet Union in Chapter 7). The pact gave eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, and on September 17, the Soviets took over that territory. In June 1940, they moved on to the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
From the start, Hitler made no secret of how he felt about the people of Poland. He considered Poles, the ethnic majority in Poland, to be “sub-human.”
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