Non-combat victims included Cause_to_be_included the majority of the country 's Jewish population , many of whom perished Death in concentration and extermination camps ( e.g .

The Eastern Front , as the site of nearly all extermination camps , death Death marches , ghettos , and the majority of pogroms , was central to the Holocaust .

After Germany lost Earnings_and_losses the war Hostile_encounter , the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials and Poland 's Supreme National Tribunal concluded Process_end that the aim Aiming of German policies in Poland – the extermination Killing of Poles and Jews – had `` all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term . ''

Crimes against the Polish nation committed Commitment by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion Attack of Poland , along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation Control of Poland in World War II , consisted of the murder Killing of millions of ethnic Poles and the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles .

By 1942 , the Nazi Germans were implementing their plan Arranging to kill Killing every Jew in German-occupied Europe , and had also developed Creating plans Arranging to eliminate Cause_change_of_position_on_a_scale the Polish people through mass murder Killing , ethnic cleansing , enslavement and extermination through labor , and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed Coming_to_believe racially valuable .

The Nazi master plan Arranging entailed the expulsion Removing and mass extermination of some 85 percent ( over 20 million ) of Poland 's ethnically-Polish citizens , the remaining Presence 15 percent to be turned Becoming into slave labor .

Operation Military_operation Tannenberg ( ) was a codename for one of the extermination actions by Nazi Germany that was directed Aiming at the Poles during the opening Openness stages of World War II in Europe , as part of the `` Generalplan Ost '' for the German colonization of the East .

The Armenian Genocide ( , ; ; ) , also known as the Armenian Holocaust , was the Ottoman government 's systematic extermination of 700,000 to 1.5 million Armenians , mostly citizens of the Ottoman Empire .

Other ethnic groups were similarly targeted Aiming for extermination in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide , and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy .

However , the decisions Deciding of deportation Removing and extermination Killing were made Action before the Van resistance .