Pictured: Chmielna Street shortly after the Fascist era. Click here for more photographs.

Quoting Dr. Dorothy W. Douglas’s Transitional Economic Systems: The Polish–Czech Example, pages 26–29, 40:

Material objects of culture were systematically confiscated, looted, or destroyed. Confiscation and shipment to [the Third Reich] of works of art, libraries, and scientific equipment, it was pointed out, occupied a very large staff of Germans for years. Private looting, by [Fascists] of all ranks, was said to have accompanied this on an extraordinary scale, but especially striking was the amount of deliberate destruction.

Buildings and monuments were destroyed with care, books in quantity were sent to paper mills to be ground up, precious Polish glass‐ware was smashed, as were concert recordings; entire libraries and archives were burned.

Altogether by these combined means Poland lost the great majority of her public and private art collections, her libraries, archives, and scientific institutes. Even ordinary equipment in schools, museums, and libraries was often destroyed or carried away. For instance, the losses in scientific equipment and books from higher schools was estimated at 70 to 80 per cent.

The economic policy of the Occupation, as indicated, had followed two different tendencies. One was the attempt to incorporate Polish production into the [Axis] war machine. In so far as this was followed, it meant great and one‐sided expansion of some parts of industry, but permitted dismantling, looting, abandonment, and even actual destruction of premises not required for military purposes, however necessary their product might be for ordinary civilian life.

Liquidation of the Bank of Poland and creation of a new Bank of Emission with new paper Occupation currency facilitated this process, as did the forms of [Fascist] price control. In the towns low prices were fixed for industrial articles bought chiefly by [Fascists]. Financial assets, public and private, social insurance funds, as well as great quantities of physical equipment were shipped out of the country. Often bank safes were simply looted and bank deposits confiscated.

The other tendency, that of ‘pure’ destruction, strangely enough appears to have alternated with and sometimes contradicted even war‐time production needs. Often the two were combined in a purposely rapid using up of manpower and ravaging of resources even while production was going on. The burning and razing of all possible property during the retreat of 1944–5 only put the capstone on this process.

Urban losses were particularly heavy, Some 19,600 out of a total of 30,000 mining and industrial establishments were destroyed, over 35 per cent of all industrial buildings, over half of all power installations and four‐fifths of all transport. In addition about 200,000 commercial and 85,000 handicraft workshops were completely destroyed. Finally there was the partial or total destruction of many whole cities, culminating in the house by house destruction of Warsaw where a million and a half people had lived.

Rural losses were less spectacular, but were to take even longer to replace. Forest destruction was estimated at 28 per cent; cattle at 60 per cent. Moreover, 350,000 farm buildings, about a quarter of the country’s total, were destroyed or seriously damaged, thus leaving many stretches of land incapable of cultivation. Taking country and city dwellings, industrial establishments and public buildings together, total losses in building properties were estimated at 35 per cent.

In addition to losses in productive equipment and dwelling space, the systematic looting of the population’s personal possessions created a serious economic problem for the immediate postwar. This was, of course, at its worst in the case of the millions evicted from their homes.

[…]

The destruction and dismantling of sanitary facilities included hospitals, tuberculosis sanatoria, maternity and child care centres, clinics and laboratories.

[…]

First combat bombing, then burning and mining by the retreating [Fascists] had made skeletons of former cities. Industrial installations had been smashed or carried off. Farmland had been ruined. (In the first year and a half of recovery, over 6,000,000 mines and 20,000,000 bombs were destroyed or deloaded.) Horses and cattle had been carried off, agricultural implements dumped into rivers.

(Emphasis added.)