Editing Arthur Greiser (section)

===Anti-Church campaign===
[[Richard J. Evans]] wrote that the Catholic Church was the institution that "more than any other had sustained Polish national identity over the centuries".{{sfn|Evans|2009|p=34}} The Nazi plan for Poland entailed the destruction of the Polish nation.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The destruction of Warsaw: the Nazi plan to obliterate a city |url=https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-destruction-of-warsaw-the-nazi-plan-to-obliterate-a-city |access-date=2023-07-05 |website=Sky HISTORY TV channel |language=en}}</ref> This necessarily required attacking the Polish Church, particularly in those areas annexed to Germany.<ref>Jozef Garlinski; ''Poland and the Second World War''; Macmillan Press, 1985; p 60</ref> Greiser, with the encouragement of [[Reinhard Heydrich]] and Martin Bormann, launched a severe attack on the Catholic Church. He cut off support to the Church from the state and from outside influences such as the Vatican and Germany. In July 1940 he instituted Bormann's anti-church "thirteen point" measures in the territory.{{sfn|Epstein|2012|p=224}} The anti-church measures, which had Hitler's approval, suggest how the Nazis aimed to «'de-church' German society».{{sfn|Epstein|2012|pp=225–8}}

Catholic Church properties and funds were confiscated, and lay organisations shut down. Evans wrote that "Numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment." Greiser's administrative chief [[August Jäger]] had earlier led the effort at Nazification of the Evangelical Church in Prussia.{{sfn|Evans|2009|pp=33–4}} In Poland, he earned the nickname "''Kirchenjäger''" (Church Hunter) for the vehemence of his hostility to the Church.<ref>[[Mark Mazower]]; ''Hitler's Empire – Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe''; Penguin; 2008; {{ISBN|978-0-713-99681-4}}; p. 92.</ref> "By the end of 1941", wrote Evans, "the Polish Catholic Church had been effectively outlawed in the Wartheland. It was more or less Germanized in the other occupied territories, despite an encyclical issued by [[Pope Pius XII]] as early as 27 October 1939 protesting against this persecution."{{sfn|Evans|2009|p=34}}