occupation (see Bloody Sunday, and the Valley of Death). German Army and Selbstschutz paramilitary units composed of ethnic German Volksdeutsche also participated. The Nazis took hostages by the thousands at the time of the invasion and throughout their occupation of Poland. Hostages were selected from among the most prominent citizens of occupied cities and villages: priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, as well as leaders of economic and social organizations and the trade unions. Often, however, they were chosen at random from all segments of society and for every German killed a group of between 50 and 100 Polish civilians were executed. About 20,000 villagers, some of whom were burned alive, were murdered in large-scale punitive operations targeting rural settlements suspected of aiding the resistance or hiding Jews and other fugitives. Seventy-five villages were razed in these operations. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where the penalty for hiding a Jew was death for everyone living in the house; other laws were similarly ruthless. Ethnic cleansing through forced expulsion Germany planned to completely remove the indigenous population of Poland beginning with the newly created Reichsgau Wartheland territory in 1939. According to the Lebensraum aim and ideology, formerly Polish lands were to be taken over by the German military and civilian settlers including Eastern European Volksdeutsche. The "Germanizing" of occupied territories by the Reich was repeatedly condemned by Nuremberg Tribunal which stated that the practice of expelling civilians was "not only in defiance of well-established rules of international law, but in complete disregard of the elementary dictates of humanity." During the occupation of Poland, the number of Poles evicted by the German authorities from their homes is estimated at 2,478,000. Up to 928,000 Poles were ethnically cleansed to make way for the foreign colonists. The number of displaced Polish nationals in four years of German occupation included: from Warthegau region 630,000 Poles; from Silesia 81,000; from Pomerania 124,000; from Bezirk Białystok 28,000; and from Ciechanów district 25,000 Poles and Jews. In the so-called "wild expulsions" from Pomerelia, some 30,000 to 40,000 Polish people were evicted, and from General Government (to German "reservations") some 171,000 Poles and Jews. To create new colonial latifundia, 42% of annexed farms were demolished. Some Poles were sent to perform slave labor in the Reich. Additional 500,000 ethnic Poles were deported from Warsaw after the Warsaw uprising on top of 180,000 civilian casualties. The expulsions were carried