Auschwitz (5 page)

Another (self-created) problem for the Nazis was finding homes for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who were currently being shipped to Poland. Under an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, ethnic Germans from the Baltic states, Bessarabia (northern Romania), and other regions now occupied by Stalin were permitted to emigrate to Germany—to “come home to the Reich” as the slogan went. Obsessed as they were by notions of the racial purity of “German blood,” it was an act of faith for men like Himmler to be able to accommodate all Germans who wanted to return to their native land. The difficulty was: Where should they actually go? Added to this was a third and final issue that the Nazis had to resolve. How should the eighteen million Poles now under German control who were not Jewish be treated? How should the country be organized so that they never posed a threat?

Hitler had made a speech in October 1939 which offered some guidelines to those wrestling with these questions of policy. He made it clear that “the main task is to create a new ethnographic order;
i.e.
to resettle the nationalities so that in the end better lines of demarcation exist than today.”
¹⁹
In practice, this meant that German-occupied Poland was to be divided—part of it would be a place where the majority of Poles would live, and part would be incorporated into Germany. The incoming ethnic Germans would then be settled not in the “Old Reich” but in this “New Reich”; they would indeed be “coming home to the Reich”—just not to the Reich they were expecting.

This left the question of the Polish Jews. Until the start of the war, Nazi policy towards Jews living under their control had been one of growing official persecution through countless restrictive regulations, interspersed with moments of unofficial (though sanctioned) violent outrage. Hitler's views about the Jews had changed little since the mid-1920s when, in his book
Mein Kampf,
he expressed the opinion that it would have been to Germany's advantage during World War I to use “poison gas” on “10 to 12,000 of these Hebrew destroyers of the nation.” But while Hitler clearly hated the Jews—and had demonstrably done so since the end of World War I—
and may, indeed, have privately expressed the desire to see them all die, no Nazi blueprint planning their extermination was yet in existence.

Lucille Eichengreen
²⁰
grew up in a Jewish family in Hamburg during the 1930s and remembers all too well the circumstances under which German Jews were forced to live, saying:

In the mid-1930s, the Eichengreens were informed that Jews were no longer permitted to live in the building in which the family then resided. Instead, they were assigned to places called “Jewish houses” that were owned partly by Jewish landlords. The Eichengreens' first new apartment was nearly as large as their previous one but, over succeeding years, they were forced to move into smaller and smaller accommodations until the entire family ended up in a single furnished room. “I think we more or less accepted it,” says Lucille. “This was the law, those were the rules, and you could do nothing about it.”

The illusion that Nazi anti-Semitic policy would one day “normalize” was destroyed by Kristallnacht, which occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. Nazi storm troopers destroyed Jewish property and rounded up thousands of German Jews in a revenge action motivated by the news that a Jewish student called Herschel Grynszpan had murdered Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, in Paris. “Walking to school we saw the synagogues burning,” says Lucille Eichengreen, “the glass of Jewish shops broken, merchandise in the streets, and the Germans laughing.... We were so afraid. We thought they would grab us and do I don't know what.”

By the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews could no longer hold German citizenship, marry non-Jews, own businesses or work in certain professions; they could not even hold driving licenses. Discrimination by regulation, coupled with the violent outburst of Kristallnacht—in which more than 1,000
synagogues were destroyed, 400 Jews killed, and approximately 30,000 male Jews imprisoned for months in concentration camps—caused a large number of German Jews to emigrate. Nearly 450,000 of them had left the area of the new “Greater German Reich” (Germany, Austria, and the ethnic German Czech lands)—this amounted to more than half the Jews who'd lived there. The Nazis were pleased; especially because, following the pioneering work of Adolf Eichmann in 1938 after the Anschluss (annexation) with Austria, a system had been devised whereby the Jews were robbed of most of their money before they were allowed to leave the country.

It was initially difficult, however, for the Nazis to see how the solution they had evolved to their self-created “problem” of the German Jews was transferable to Poland. Not only were there now millions of Jews under their control rather than a few hundred thousand, but most were poor; and, in the midst of a war, where could they be forcibly encouraged to emigrate to? Then, in the autumn of 1939, Adolf Eichmann thought he'd found the answer—the Jews should be made to emigrate not to another country, but to the least hospitable part of the Nazis' own empire. Moreover, he thought he had found the ideal place—the Lublin district of Poland, near the town of Nisko. This remote area at the far-eastern extreme of Nazi territory seemed to him the perfect location for a “Jewish reservation.” German-occupied Poland would thus be divided into three parts, a German-settled part, a Polish part, and a Jewish part, all set on a neat geographical axis moving from west to east. Eichmann's ambitious plan was adopted and the Nazis began shipping thousands of Jews from Austria to the area. Conditions were appalling. Little or no preparation was made for the Jews' arrival, and many died. This was a matter of no concern to the Nazis—indeed it was something to be encouraged. As Hans Frank, one of the most senior Nazis at work in Poland, put it when addressing his staff in November 1939: “Don't waste any time on the Jews. It is a joy finally to be able to deal with the Jewish race. The more that die the better.”
²¹

As Himmler sat composing his memorandum in May 1940, however, he knew only too well that the internal emigration of Jews to the far east of Poland had been a dismal failure. To a large extent, this was because the Nazis were attempting three separate emigrations simultaneously. The incoming ethnic Germans had to be transported to Poland and must be
found somewhere to live. This meant Poles had to be thrown out of their houses and transported elsewhere. At the same time, Jews were being transported east into property from which Poles also had to be evicted. It was scarcely a wonder that this all led to chaos and confusion on an epic scale.

By the spring of 1940, Eichmann's Nisko plan had been abandoned and Poland had finally been divided into just two separate categories of territory. There were the districts that had officially become “German” and were part of the “New Reich”: West Prussia, around Danzig (Gdansk); the Warthegau, in the west of Poland near Posen and Łódź; and Upper Silesia, near Katowice (the area that included Auschwitz). And then there was the biggest single area of all, called the General Government, encompassing the cities of Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, which had been designated as living space for the majority of the Poles.

The most pressing problem Himmler faced was providing suitable housing for the hundreds of thousands of incoming ethnic Germans—a difficulty which would, in turn, impact on the way he thought both Poles and Jews should be dealt with. The case of Irma Eigi and her family illustrates just how ruthlessly the Nazis attempted to solve the seemingly intractable predicament they had maneuvered themselves into—and also how the population problems fed upon themselves, spiraling away towards crisis. In December 1939, Irma Eigi,
²²
a seventeen-year-old ethnic German from Estonia, found herself, together with the rest of her family, in temporary accommodation in Posen in what had been Poland and was now the part of Germany known as the Warthegau.

They had thought, when they accepted the offer of safe passage “to the Reich,” that they were going to be sent to Germany: “When we were told we were going to the Warthegau, well, it was quite a shock, I can tell you.” Just before Christmas 1939, a Nazi housing official gave her father keys to a flat which had until hours before belonged to a Polish family. Days later a restaurant was commandeered from its Polish owner so that the newcomers could also have a business to run. The Eigis were appalled. “We had no inkling of that before it happened.... You can't live with this guilt. But on the other hand, every person has an instinct for self-preservation. What else could we have done? Where were we supposed to go?”

This individual case of expropriation must be multiplied by a factor of
more than 100,000 to give an impression of just what was taking place in Poland during this period. The scale of the relocation operation was enormous—within a year and a half, about half a million ethnic Germans arrived to be resettled in the new part of the Reich, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were dispossessed to make room for them. Many were simply shoved on cattle trucks and taken south to the General Government where they were dumped, without food or shelter. It is not surprising that Goebbels remarked in his diary in January 1940 that “Himmler is presently shifting populations. Not always successfully.”
²³

All this still left the question of the Polish Jews. Having discovered that simultaneously attempting to relocate the Jews, the Poles, and the ethnic Germans was simply impractical, Himmler embraced another solution: If space was needed for the ethnic Germans—and it clearly was—then the Jews should be forced to live with a good deal less of it. Ghettos were the answer.

Ghettos, which were to become such a striking feature of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Poland, were never intended to have the life they did. Like so much in the history of Auschwitz and the Nazis' “Final Solution,” they evolved in ways that had not initially been planned. As early as November 1938, when discussing how to deal with the housing issues raised by the eviction of German Jews from their homes, Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had said:

Nonetheless, once other avenues seemed closed to them—albeit perhaps temporarily—the Nazis sought to ghettoize Polish Jews. This was not just a practical measure designed to release more housing (even though Hitler remarked in March 1940 that “the solution of the Jewish question is a question of space”
²⁵
); it was also motivated by the visceral hatred and fear
of Jews that had been at the core of Nazism from the beginning. Ideally, the Nazis believed, the Jews should just be made to “go away,” but if that was not immediately practicable then, because they were believed to be carriers of disease (especially Eastern Jews), they should be kept separate from everyone else.

The Nazis' intense, physical loathing of Polish Jews was something Estera Frenkiel,
²⁶
a teenage Jewish girl living in Łódź, felt from the first: “We were used to anti-Semitism ... Polish anti-Semitism was perhaps more financial. But Nazi anti-Semitism was: ‘Why do you exist? You shouldn't be! You ought to disappear!'”

In February 1940, as deportations of Poles to the General Government proceeded apace, it was announced that the Jews of Łódź were to be “relocated” to a ghetto area within the city. From the first, it was intended that such ghettos should only be a temporary measure—a place in which to incarcerate the Jews before they were deported somewhere else. In April 1940, the Łódź ghetto was sealed and Jews could no longer leave the area without permission from the German authorities. That same month the Reich Security Main Office announced that deportations of Jews to the General Government were to be curtailed. Hans Frank, Hitler's former lawyer who ran the General Government, had been campaigning for months to halt all “unauthorized” forced emigrations because the situation had become untenable. As Dr. Fritz Arlt,
²⁷
head of the Department for Population Affairs in the General Government, later put it:

Frank—no friend of Himmler's—complained to Hermann Goering (who took a keen interest in Poland in his capacity as head of the Economic Four Year Plan) about the deportation policy and the use of the General Government as a “racial dustbin,” and an uneasy truce was arranged whereby Himmler and Frank would “agree upon the procedures of future
evacuation.”

It was this mess that Himmler tried to address in his memorandum of May 1940. In response, he sought to reinforce the division of Poland into German and non-German areas and to define how the Poles and Jews were to be treated. Himmler, in this statement of racial faith, wrote that he wanted the Poles to be turned into a nation of ill-educated slaves and that the General Government should be home to a “leaderless laboring class.”
²⁸
Himmler also wrote that: