FEBRUARY 1 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

FEBRUARY 1

1940

German soldiers executed Polish patients by firing squad and by revolver.  Victims included were 400 patients of a psychiatric hospital in Chelm and from Owinska. In Pomerania, they were transported to a military fortress in Poznan and gassed with carbon monoxide in the bunkers of Fort VII, including children as well as women whom the authorities classified as Polish prostitutes. Other Owinska hospital patients were gassed in sealed trucks using exhaust fumes. The same method was utilized in the Kochanówka hospital near Lódz, where 840 persons were killed in 1940, totaling 1,126 victims in 286 clinics. This was the first "successful" test of the mass murder of Poles using gas. The Nazis later perfected the technique on many other psychiatric patients in Poland and in Germany. Beginning in 1941, the technique was widely used in the extermination camps. Nazi gas vans were also first used in 1940 to kill Polish mentally ill children.


SS-Reichsführer Himmler ordered inspections of potential sites for a planned concentration camp. Among those inspected was the camp at Oswiecim, Poland, known in German as Auschwitz. By June 1940,  Auschwitz became the main concentration camp for Poles. Himmler declared that "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task."  Hitler confirmed this when he demanded the liquidation of "all leading elements in Poland".

1942

Henryk Wolinski became head of the "Jewish Department" in the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the AK Home Army (Polish Underground) and provided the Polish Government in Exile with information about the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. He received daily reports from Polish men working the railways of the number of trains and people that were deported in them.  Woliński is known to have been a strong voice in the AK command and he supported any action to save the Jews. He headed a Żegota cell that saved almost 300 Jews and he himself harbored in his apartment over 25 Jews for a period from a few days to several weeks.


Vichy France was a Nazi collaborator.  Numerous laws were decreed, along the lines of the Nuremberg laws, to strip all rights from the Jews. In early February 1942,  all telephones and radios were confiscated from Jewish homes, and a curfew on the Jews was enforced by the local police. The Vichy government also enforced the legal requirement that Jews not appear in public places, and ride only on the last car of the Parisian metro.  After the Fall of France in June 1940, the French government agreed to an armistice with Hitler, in which the country was divided between the Nazi-occupied zones in the North and West, and the unoccupied "free zone" to the south under the administrative control of the Vichy government.  They supported the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution" of the Jews, and had deported a total of 75,000 Jews, many of them children, to concentration camps in France and Germany.

1944

Operation Kutschera was the code name used by the Polish Home Army (Underground) for the
assassination of Franz Kutschera, an SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der SS heading the police in the Warsaw district. He was successfully killed by a combat sabotage unit of the Polish underground unit code-named, Kedyw, of the Home Army (predecessor of Battalion Parasol) mainly manned by members of scouting and guiding Gray Ranks. The mission was named Operation Heads (Glowki)

1945

Soviet forces reached Liebenow. Before  World War II, the village was part of Germany. Today it is the administrative district of Gmina Lubiszyn in Gorzow County, Lubusz Voivodeship, in western Poland.