In 1939, Germany’s military machine looked unstoppable. Having already annexed former Czechoslovakia, they turned their blitzkrieg or “lightning war” strategy on Poland, defeating the less well-armed, conventional Polish army within a month. With Nazi figureheads installed at every level of government and an overabundance of Nazi soldiers—especially SS soldiers—in place, the Nazis began to move swiftly to complete what had obviously been a carefully planned, long intended action: the removal of Jewish citizens into an enclave in Warsaw.

The Germans expected that, having quickly defeated the Polish military, they would soon dominate all aspects of Polish life. Their executions of Polish artists and intellectuals signaled an effort to stamp out Polish civil society and therefore any chance of dissent.

What the Nazis had not anticipated and therefore were not prepared for was the unwillingness of the Polish people to surrender to the rule, the arbitrariness, and the arrogance of the Nazi high command. As Ackerman writes, so many generations of Poles had gone to war against Germans and their forebears that it was virtually a family tradition to fight against Germans. With the end of the First World War, only two decades before, the Poles had won their independence from the Germans and the Russians, ending the foreign rule that had divided their nation for centuries.