September 1st in Poland is not only the first day of school for kids…It is also a very said day in the Poland’s history.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the act that started World War II (Druga Wojna Światowa)

The day before, Nazi operatives had posed as Polish military officers to stage an attack on the radio station in the Silesian city of Gleiwitz. Germany used the event as the pretext for its invasion of Poland.

The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 27, 1939. Britain and France, standing by their guarantee of Poland’s border, had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. The demarcation line for the partition of German- and Soviet-occupied Poland was along the Bug River.

In October 1939, Germany directly annexed those former Polish territories along German’s eastern border: West Prussia, Poznań, Upper Silesia, and the former Free City of Danzig. The remainder of German-occupied Poland (including the cities of Warszawa, Kraków, Radom, and Lublin) was organized as the so-called General Government  (Generalne Gubernatorstwo) under a civilian governor general, the Nazi party lawyer Hans Frank.

Nazi Germany occupied the remainder of Poland when it invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Poland remained under German occupation until January 1945.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ5h8MIpr6w