It’s not well covered in English language history which basically just skips over the fact poland was a viciously fascist state in the 1930s but it does get covered by Timothy Snyder, although he has a pretty firmly anti-Russian slant through his work.
You can see a lot of the works that cover it are in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian
60-70 hangings a day to fight “guerrillas”, floggings and torture to control the population, the Belorussians not having access to the education system, and the use of concentration camps to hold political activists, and trade unionists. Language rights were suppressed and the local population were forcibly “Polonized” / assimilated while also being held in an oppressed state as a cheap labor force for Polish settlers who were given the land as an agricultural fiefdom no different in any sense from the lebensraum concept - especially during the Polish fascist period of the mid to late 1930s.
Today the western part of Belorussia is still less industrialized than the east and the divide clearly falls along the line of polish occupation and colonial-settlement.
Ironically it was the atrocious treatment of the Belorussian minority that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland needed to be “rescued” - although the German minority were actually not treated badly.
Where could one read more about this?
It’s not well covered in English language history which basically just skips over the fact poland was a viciously fascist state in the 1930s but it does get covered by Timothy Snyder, although he has a pretty firmly anti-Russian slant through his work.
You can see a lot of the works that cover it are in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_minority_in_Poland
60-70 hangings a day to fight “guerrillas”, floggings and torture to control the population, the Belorussians not having access to the education system, and the use of concentration camps to hold political activists, and trade unionists. Language rights were suppressed and the local population were forcibly “Polonized” / assimilated while also being held in an oppressed state as a cheap labor force for Polish settlers who were given the land as an agricultural fiefdom no different in any sense from the lebensraum concept - especially during the Polish fascist period of the mid to late 1930s.
Today the western part of Belorussia is still less industrialized than the east and the divide clearly falls along the line of polish occupation and colonial-settlement.
Ironically it was the atrocious treatment of the Belorussian minority that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland needed to be “rescued” - although the German minority were actually not treated badly.