The Wild East

Nearly one in five Poles died during World War II after the Nazi invasion in 1939 ushered in one of the most brutal episodes of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen. This film destroys the myth that Poland's Nazi leaders were acting under detailed 'orders' and that the country's Nazi administration was a model of German efficiency. Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, the two Nazi leaders charged with Germanising Poland, could not even agree on who should be Germanised.

Featuring interviews with former Nazis, moving testimony from witnesses to SS atrocities in Poland, ethnic Germans and Polish Jews, the programme provides insights into how the Nazis' reign of terror in Poland was characterised by huge population upheavals, chaos, petty squabbles and sheer bloodlust.