Chris Hayes mentioned this on Bluesky today. I was unaware…
In October 1938, about 17,000 Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany were arrested and expelled. These deportations, termed by the Nazis Polenaktion (“Polish Action”), were ordered by SS officer and head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich. The deported Jews were initially rejected by Poland and therefore had to live in makeshift encampments along the Germany–Poland border.
From 1935 to 1938, Jews living within Germany had been stripped of most of their rights by the Nuremberg Laws, and faced intense persecution from the state. As a result, many Jewish refugees sought rapidly to emigrate out of the Reich. However, most countries, still feeling the effects of a global depression, enacted strict immigration laws and simply would not address the refugee problem. According to a census conducted in 1933, over 57 percent of the foreign Jews living in Germany were Polish.
Following the German annexation of Austria on 13 March 1938, the Polish government became worried that it would face a large-scale return of Jewish citizens of Poland that had been living in Austria. On 31 March 1938, the parliament approved legislation enabling the revocation of Polish citizenship if the person had been living abroad for more than five years since the establishment of Poland in 1919. The German government, which did not want to be stuck with tens of thousands of stateless Jewish Poles, passed legislation in August that allowed it to deport any foreigner who had lost their citizenship from their home country. Additionally, a confidential directive was issued to not allow any new residence permits to be issued to Jews.
History teaches if we want to learn.