Cruel World (36 page)

Indeed, the Ambassador continued a few days later, “the good prospects for a gradual spread of anti-Semitism have suffered a serious setback,” as “even the most bitter anti-Semites are anxious to disassociate themselves from methods of this kind,” a trend that Dieckhoff felt had been demonstrated by the fact that “in an old Protestant church in Massachusetts they went so far as to have a rabbi preach for the first time, departing from a 300-year-old tradition, in order to show that in a situation like the present they stand by the Jews.”
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A few days after these telegrams were sent, the Roosevelt administration firmly demonstrated its displeasure with Germany by sending the German Ambassador back to Berlin for good. The Nazi leaders did not give up on their efforts to retrieve ethnic Germans, however. On December 16, Göring, desperate for skilled labor for his Four Year Plan, claiming to have heard rumors that German workers were being fired by U.S. firms and being replaced by Jews, ordered the Foreign Office to come up with a “bold scheme” (within three or four days) to “attract people of German origin here from America (even those who are already American citizens).” Göring had Hitler’s approval for this plan and even speculated that “it would be possible to organize an exchange of people of German origin returning home for Jews to be sent there.” The workers were to be lured by subsidized travel in the lower classes of German shipping lines, free temporary housing in Germany, plus numerous other perks. Dieckhoff, newly back from Washington, wearily pointed out to his untraveled superiors that “in the case of German Americans we must never forget that they are not compelled to live under foreign dominion … but that they went to America of their own free will in order to live there as Americans.”
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The outbreak of war would prevent further efforts to retrieve German blood from the United States, but the more fanatic Nazis were ever hopeful. In an April 1942 memorandum to Hitler’s chief of staff, Martin Bormann, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, not the least convinced by Dieckhoff’s observations, still advocated a postwar continuation of the sub rosa efforts in America in order to “call back each single man of German blood who has any value whatsoever to the German Reich, for the settlement of conquered soil.” Recognizing that these former Germans would be “undoubtedly politically poisoned,” he advised solving that problem “by means of personal propaganda.… Each individual family must be called back by employing their personal ties.”
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Efforts similar to those in the United States went on in every country where ethnic Germans could be found. South America was the target of
great activity. The Nazis considered its German populations to be much more open to National Socialist thinking than those in the United States, since they had arrived in the New World far later and tended to maintain closer contact with one another. Among many other things, German agencies subsidized German schools there and encouraged pen pals, scholarships to the Fatherland, and faculty exchanges.
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Few countries on earth were left unlisted. Agents were active in South Africa, Spain, Romania, the Baltic states, Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia, and even Papua New Guinea, a former German colony that had become a British protectorate. A secret memo from that remote outpost reported 442 ethnic Germans still in residence. The agent was pleased to report that the Lutheran mission had decorated the train station with swastika flags for his arrival and that he had been serenaded by a black oompah band playing Nazi songs (perhaps not exactly what Hitler had in mind). A list of local loyalists was appended, which informed officials back home that one colonist was “an energetic Führer type,” that another had a signed picture of Hitler in his house, and that several others would be suitable administrators should the colony revert to Germany.
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If the overseas Germans were a long shot for use as workers or settlers, there were other candidates closer to hand. For the vast regions that would be taken from Poland and the Soviet Union, Himmler, with Hitler’s blessing, had conceived one of the greatest projected displacements of human beings in history. The plan was to eventually push the great mass of the Slavic population east beyond the Ural Mountains, and to create an “Eastern Wall” of resettled Germans, who would provide a buffer zone between Aryan and Slav. In this zone, magnificent autobahns would soon take the new blond, blue-eyed inhabitants to sunny beaches in the Crimea. The settlers, in theory exemplary Germanic farmers, would be protected by fortress garrisons reminiscent of the Wild West novels so beloved by Hitler, and would, temporarily, use Slavic serf-type labor to help till the land. German ethnic groups long established in these somewhat exotic regions, which included, among others, Transnistria, the Volga, Bukovinia, Bessarabia, and the Baltic countries, would be rearranged within the new areas and united with others brought from around the world. It was a glorious dream, which from the beginning would have to be altered to fit the byzantine realities of power politics in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Indeed, in 1938 Hitler had grudgingly had to concede the “Germanic” territory of the South Tyrol, with its 200,000 ethnic Germans, to Mussolini in return for the latter’s acquiescence in the Nazi takeover of Austria. The following year, after the German entry into the Sudetenland on the pretense of further consolidating Germandom, and Hitler’s subsequent subjugation of the supposedly independent remains of Czechoslovakia in Bohemia and Moravia, Mussolini, quite rightly fearing that the South Tyrol might soon suffer the same fate, insisted that all ethnic Germans be evacuated from there forthwith. Hitler, whose secret plans for the invasion of Poland were well under way, could not afford to alienate Mussolini, and was forced to consent. This was extremely awkward, as the Germanic organizations, which for years had been stirring up the South Tyroleans, as well as the Sudeten Germans, to push for minority rights
sur place
, now had to persuade the former to settle elsewhere in order to give control of Czech territory to the latter.
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Even more awkward was the fact that, for the moment, Hitler did not yet have any place to move 200,000 people.

Forced migration
.
(photo credit 8.1)

Before this problem could be dealt with, the German invasion and dismemberment of Poland had begun. To the astonishment of the world, Hitler’s accomplice in this effort was the Soviet Union, with which he had signed a Treaty of Nonaggression on August 23, 1939, a little more than a week before his long-planned invasion.

Joseph Stalin, certainly the Führer’s equal when it came to the cynical use and elimination of human beings, had temtorial plans as well. He was
far more interested in gaining control of the Baltic states, with their vital seaports, and the areas bordering on Romania, than he was in central Poland. He too envisioned a buffer zone—to protect himself from Germany. Hitler, with the declarations of war of France and Great Britain after his attack on Poland, was again forced to concede territory occupied by a large number of ethnic Germans, this time to Stalin. Since his future plans also included the betrayal of the USSR, it was clear that any Germans living deep in its bosom would be in grave danger when the moment of invasion arrived, and would have to be moved. Stalin, suspicious of a group that would undoubtedly be loyal to the Nazis, was only too glad to get rid of the ethnic Germans. The final agreements with the Soviet Union, therefore, included a secret protocol that gave the Germans permission to relocate Reich citizens and others of “German descent” from the Baltic states to German-controlled areas.
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This would add some 86,000 souls of good blood to Hitler’s new empire from Estonia and Latvia alone, and more would follow from Lithuania. A few days later Hitler was also able to advise Mussolini that “a climatically and topographically suitable area” would soon be set aside in Poland for the South Tyrolese.
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Only days after these diplomatic agreements were reached, responsibility for all the resettlement was eagerly taken over, after considerable Machiavellian maneuvering, by Himmler, who was given a nest egg of ten million reichsmarks to get things going. The resettlement of so many hundreds of thousands of
Volksdeutsche
, would require an entirely new organization. In a decree dated October 7, 1939, Hitler created the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKFDV). Stating that “the consequences which Versailles had on Europe have been removed,” Hitler declared that the Greater German Reich could now “accept and settle within its space German people who up to the present had to live in foreign lands.” Himmler was given a threefold commission:

1. To bring back those German citizens and ethnic Germans abroad who are eligible for permanent return to the Reich;
   
2. To eliminate the harmful influence of such alien parts of the population as constitute a danger to the Reich and the German community;
   
3. To create new German colonies by resettlement, and especially by the resettlement of German citizens and ethnic Germans coming back from abroad.
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Himmler was authorized to use the services of a whole list of established agencies for this project, which had to gather, move, and resettle
millions of ethnic Germans to as yet undesignated areas from which equivalent thousands of undesirables would have to be ejected. Nor could the gathering of ethnic Germans be done in a slapdash manner. Every single one, as the citizenship laws required, would have to be racially, medically, and politically screened to make sure he or she was truly German and truly “worthy.”

The territory part was easy. Within a week of the creation of the RKFDV, most of the west of Poland, including the areas around Posen and Lodz, was annexed to Germany. These areas, which included the new Gaus of Danzig–West Prussia, Zichenau, Katowice, and the Wartheland, were to be reserved for ethnic Germans. The names of towns, rivers, streets, and so on were Germanized and Polish culture was to be suppressed. Henceforth Poznan would be called Posen, and Lodz became Litzmanstadt. The central and southern part of Poland, which contained the cities of Warsaw, Lublin, and Cracow, the so-called General Gouvernement, was to retain a majority Polish population under German rule and would be used as a dumping ground for all those not welcome in the annexed zones. For the time being, the east of Poland, taken over by the Soviet Union in mid-September, lay beyond Nazi control and was not available for settlement, but that would soon change.

Organizing the processing of the new settlers was equally swift. The Liaison Office for Ethnic Germans Abroad (VoMi), set up by Himmler in 1937 to dominate all the previously established organizations in the ethnics-abroad field, was to evacuate the German groups. Another agency, the Immigration Authority (EWZ), would vet them for suitability, after which the RKFDV would place them in new settlements. To make sure the new arrivals would not “contaminate” any pure Germans, the EWZ brought in officials from the police, the Ministry of Health, the Reichsbank, and the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), plus statisticians and nutritionists.
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One could not, after all, be too careful. Finding trained personnel was not a problem—the agencies involved had been doing this sort of work at home for years—and by October 12, 1939, the first of many processing stations was open for business in the Baltic port city of Gdynia.

The resettlement and eviction plans were all very fine on paper, presupposing as they did that ethnic Germans, wherever they were, would happily divest themselves of property, liquidate businesses, abandon homes they had lived in for generations, and become enthusiastic pioneers in
unknown locations. The policy also assumed that Germans already in the areas in which their racial brothers would appear would support the policies and welcome the new arrivals with open arms. It was, alas, not so simple.

In Estonia and Latvia, where the first resettlements would take place, the German authorities had to tread a fine line. They had to persuade the ethnic Germans to leave voluntarily without betraying to the world that Hitler had essentially abandoned the Baltic states to the USSR. The resettlement must, above all, not be seen as a rescue of Germans from a Soviet takeover, or as the evacuation of a potential war zone. The evacuees, described in one German document as a “feisty group bound by strong tradition” who would be perfect for “border placement,” should, therefore, never be referred to as refugees by the German agencies, but as people who were “answering the call of the Führer.”
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Hitler made the resettlement public knowledge in a speech to the Reichstag on Friday, October 6, 1939. In his oration he rather vaguely referred to “the creation of a Reich frontier which … shall be in accordance with existing historical, ethnographical and economic conditions” and to “the disposition of the living space according to the various nationalities” as well as to “an attempt to reach a solution and settlement of the Jewish problem.” Ethnic German Jews, if one could use such a phrase, would not be included in the evacuations. Russia and Germany, he said, would transform Poland and its surrounding areas from a hotbed of intrigue against both of them to “a zone of peaceful development.”
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