The German authorities introduced terror into Zaolzie . The Nazis especially targeted the Polish intelligentsia , many of whom died during the war . Mass killings , executions , arrests , taking locals to forced labour and deportations to concentration camps all happened on a daily basis . The most notorious war crime was a murder of 36 villagers in and around Żywocice on 6 August 1944 . This massacre is known as the Żywocice tragedy ( ) . The resistance movement , mostly composed of Poles , was fairly strong in Zaolzie . So-called '' Volksliste '' – a document in which a non-German citizen declared that he had some German ancestry by signing it ; refusal to sign this document could lead to deportation to a concentration camp – were introduced . Local people who took them were later on enrolled in the Wehrmacht . Many local people with no German ancestry were also forced to take them . The World War II death toll in Zaolzie is estimated at about 6,000 people : about 2,500 Jews , 2,000 other citizens ( 80 % of them being Poles ) and more than 1,000 locals who died in the Wehrmacht ( those who took the Volksliste ) . Also a few hundred Poles from Zaolzie were murdered by Soviets in the Katyn massacre . Percentage-wise , Zaolzie suffered the worst human loss from the whole of Czechoslovakia – about 2.6 % of the total population
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Zaolzie