The two principal head bishops, or primates, who steered twentieth-century Poland's Catholic Church—August Hlond (in office 1926–1948) and Stefan Wyszyński (in office 1948–1981)—both had deep ties to the territory that, following the Third Reich's September 1939 invasion of Poland, would be annexed to Germany as the Reichsgau Wartheland (also called the Warthegau). Hlond served for two decades as Archbishop of Poznań and of Gniezno, the proverbial cradle of Polish nationhood; Wyszyński was trained and long affiliated with the seminary in Włocławek, the intellectual beating heart of the prewar Polish clergy. Four years into the war, Hlond was under house arrest in France, while Wyszyński was in hiding in the forests north of Warsaw. At the same time, in both Poznań and Włocławek, auxiliary bishops had been targeted for repression: by the start of 1943, the Poznań suffragan Walenty Dymek expected to be deported to Dachau, while the Włocławek auxiliary Michał...
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