Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (28 page)

THE RACE WAR (1): POLAND, 1939–41

The Versailles approach to minorities problems in eastern Europe expired at Munich, when Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, secretly promised the Italians that the ethnic German minority in South Tyrol would be resettled in the Reich. Together with the annexation of the Sudetenland, this pledge ended the era of the Minorities Treaties and opened up a more brutal approach to Europe’s ethnic tensions. Legal guarantees were replaced by forced population
transfers along the lines of the Greco-Turkish exchange of fifteen years earlier.

Initially this meant a large influx of ethnic Germans into the Reich. Just as Hitler’s need for Italian support in 1938 led him to reverse earlier policy and sanction the resettlement of 80,000 Germans from the South Tyrol, so his need for Russian backing in 1939–40 led to a similar sacrificing of the German communities in the Baltic and Bessarabia. In October 1939 the SS was given the task of repatriating around 75,000 Germans from Latvia and Estonia; the following month, a further German-Soviet agreement embraced the 128,000
Volksdeutsche
of Soviet-occupied Poland. Within weeks, these people began arriving in the Reich and occupied Poland, and questions of where and how to resettle them had to be faced.

Hitler had first intended resettlement to be a matter for the Nazi Party, but Himmler quickly persuaded him to entrust it to the SS. At the beginning of 1940, he established the Reich Commission for the Consolidation of Germandom (RKFDV) to organize evacuations, the racial screening of evacuees and reception camps. The RKFDV was trustee of the property the Baltic Germans had left behind, but it was also responsible for finding new properties for resettlement. This latter task involved organizing the expulsion of the local Polish and Jewish population from property in the conquered territories.

Between 1939 and 1941 the focus of RKFDV activities was Poland, now split into the western territories of Warthegau and Danzig which were incorporated into the Reich, and the rump General Government, ruled as a colony by Hans Frank. Himmler envisaged creating a clear line of demarcation between Germans and the “racially inferior” population. The ethnic Germans were to be brought into the western incorporated territories, while the local Poles and Jews from those regions were to be expelled eastwards into the General Government, which he envisaged as a reservation for the
Untermenschen
.

Such a scheme, however, disturbed other Nazi bureaucrats. It involved, in the first place, a high degree of disruption of local economic life. In the annexed territories, the expulsion of the local Polish peasantry and Jewish artisan class threatened to lead to economic breakdown; at the same time, those administering the General Government were distinctly unhappy at having to receive masses of
impoverished and uprooted Poles and Jews. This prospect would make it impossible for them to realize their own ambitions of turning the General Government into an important centre of economic activity. The clash between racial dogmatism and economic interest pitted Himmler, the SS and the Nazi Party ideologues against Hans Frank, the ruler of the General Government, and Goering, spokesman for major economic interests in the Reich.

This conflict was still unresolved when further German-Soviet agreements led to the “recall to the Fatherland” of 50,000 Germans from Lithuania and 130,000 from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. By the summer of 1941, on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the RKFDV had settled 200,000
Volksdeutsche
in western Poland, mostly on expropriated farmsteads. Another 275,000 immigrants remained in hundreds of resettlement centres awaiting screening and transportation to a new life. As many as one million Poles and Jews had been summarily expelled to the General Government. Fifty per cent of all commercial establishments were now in the hands of German trustees from the Reich. The Jewish population there had swollen to 1,650,000, the newcomers mostly crowded into diseaseridden ghettos and work-camps. Frank had drafted 600,000–700,000 Polish workers as labourers for the Reich.

The treatment of the incoming ethnic Germans by the RKFDV, the Nazi Party and other agencies was remarkably comprehensive and indeed welcoming—a welfare programme on an imperial scale. An American journalist touring the Galatz camp in Romania, which had been set up to cater for returning Bessarabian Germans in late 1940, described how

Old people sat peacefully in the sun on benches … Women with the headcloth of the Germans in these parts of the world gossiped as they did their washing on troughs along the hangars. There were porches, overgrown with green, where other women did their pressing and washing. The youngsters marched and sang and heiled under the supervision of SS-men and
Volksdeutsche
 … There were more babies and little children here than in French Canada, so it seemed, playing in the care of kindergarten teachers, chiefly young German girls from Rumania and
Jugoslavia who were thus doing their voluntary labor service. Now and then a young SS-man fondly picked up a child and carried it around on his shoulders or held it on his lap …

It was amazing to listen to these refugees. According to all standards they had suffered a major catastrophe in being forced to leave the lands of their ancestors. Nor did they know yet where and when they would find new homes. Their immediate prospect was other camps, as their final destination had not yet been determined. Yet old and young, rich and poor, expressed a minimum of regret, and a boundless confidence in the Führer’s Germany. These prolific descendants of prolific colonists, who spoke the antiquated German of the Wuerttemberg at the time of Schiller, were returning to Hitler’s Germany as to the Promised Land … To have inspired them with such fervent belief was, one had to admit, a great triumph for Hitler. You could not help being impressed with this triumph. Here the protective state acted really protective in a grandiose manner.
⁴²

Although it should be noted that Stalin was at least as important an influence on these refugees as Hitler (
Volksdeutsche
outside the Soviet sphere were a lot less enthusiastic about “repatriation”), it is certainly true that the Third Reich, remaining true to its concern with racial welfare, expended idealism, effort and money on the repatriation effort.

Not all immigrants welcomed being uprooted: significant numbers stayed behind whilst there were plenty who grumbled about wanting to return home. Hapless Lorrainers hardly wished to be settled in Galicia to satisfy Himmler’s racial experiments; Latvian Germans wanted to go home once the Baltic states were occupied by the Wehrmacht; the
Volksdeutsche
villagers from outside Athens, whose Bavarian ancestors had settled there with King Otto a century earlier, now found themselves in a camp in Passau where they muttered that “we don’t like it here in Germany, we want to return to Greece.” Nevertheless many were mollified by the eager young girls from the League of German Girls (BDM) who came east from the Reich to welcome new groups, tidying up expropriated farms for their arrival and helping with childcare. Thousands of Hitler Youth teenagers
were drawn by the “mystery of the East” and used their Land Service Year to help the newcomers settle down.
⁴³

Needless to say, however, the Germans’ treatment of Poles and Jews was rather different. From the western territories, the hapless
Untermenschen
were deported by the SS with little advance warning. Allowed to carry a small amount of hand luggage and forbidden to take along valuables or more than a small sum of money, they were directed to the nearest railway station, or simply abandoned in open fields. No provision was made for their future welfare. In a deliberate effort to weaken or obliterate Polish resistance—what Hitler called “political house-cleaning”—the intelligentsia and other elements of national leadership were targeted for mass murder by SS squads. The faculty members of Cracow University, for example, were deported en masse in November 1939 to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where most of them died. During 1940, villages were burned down and hundreds of civilians killed in a series of reprisals for assaults on German personnel, setting the pattern for a regime of brutality soon to be extended throughout eastern Europe. The “AB Action” that summer led a further 3,000 notables to be arrested and executed: the German officials responsible were guaranteed immunity from prosecution. On 12 July, Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish doctor, noted in his diary the “terrible news about the executions in Lublin of more than forty people … I have a difficult time believing this is true.” Two days later, learning that a German forestry official had shot a young Polish boy with impunity, he wrote sadly: “It is legal for Germans to shoot Poles and Jews.”
⁴⁴

What made the Polish predicament particularly dreadful was that Soviet forces were behaving with even greater ruthlessness in the zone of Eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army between 1939 and 1941. There too forced settlement was in full swing, while the total of those killed at Soviet hands was many hundreds of thousands. This figure left even the Nazi murder tally at this time far behind. But the Germans, in their war of racial conquest, would soon overtake the communists, and embark upon a full-scale “war of annihilation.” Already, the inmates of Polish mental asylums had been assembled and machine-gunned to death to clear space for SS barracks. In this way, the German euthanasia programme was reaching into the occupied
pied territories. Treatment of Polish Jews was equally alarming. The deportation programme from the western territories had not generally discriminated between Poles and Jews—both were to be cleared from the areas reserved for German settlement. But the SS, through special Death’s Head regiments and SiPo/SD
Einsatzgruppen
carried out summary executions of Jewish elders, burned synagogues and looted Jewish property. Lublin was assigned as the destination for the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from western Poland.

Nineteenth-century Germanization in Poland had been a gradual process, with culture and language providing for a gradual transmission of German values to the population at large (often indeed via the Jews). In sharp contrast, exclusion, separation and extermination were the guiding principles of Nazi policy. The occupied territories were to be Germanized by force and as quickly as possible. Hitler told his
Gauleiters
that they had no more than ten years to complete the Germanization of their provinces. German replaced Polish in public life, and the cities, in particular, were soon transformed: Łódź was renamed Litzmannstadt; Poznań became Posen. Even in the General Government, in central and southern Poland, similar processes were at work. Klukowski noted that “in Biłgoraj there is more and more Germanization. Everywhere there are new signs in German.”
⁴⁵

Germanization involved a fully-fledged policy of cultural denial. Polish universities were closed down (as Czech ones had been earlier) and in accordance with the policy of “spiritual sterilization” only limited primary and vocational education was permitted. Explaining Nazi education policy in May 1940 Himmler wrote that “the sole goal of this school should be: simple arithmetic up to 500 at most; writing of one’s name; a doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industrious and good. I don’t think reading should be required. Apart from this school there are to be no schools at all in the East.”
⁴⁶

Having made a sharp distinction between cultures, the SS still endeavoured to sift the racially “valuable” from the “worthless” elements of the population. But to identify potential Germans among the Slavic population in the ethnically mixed societies of eastern Europe, the pseudo-science of biological racism offered an imperfect guide. The selection procedure was as strict as it was arbitrary. One
Nazi official tasted the process at first hand when he was included by mistake in the screening of hundreds of Czechs and was declared racially valueless before he could prove his identity. But this moment of humiliation was insignificant beside the thousands of families which were split up in the effort to conserve racially valuable stock, or the hundreds of thousands of women who were shipped off to the Reich, having been declared Germanizable, in order to learn German ways in domestic service to German households. Eventually, the screening process was even extended to the concentration camps in an effort to reinforce the increasingly depleted stocks of
Deutschtum
with blue-eyed, blond-haired slave labourers.
⁴⁷

For the Jewish population, no such escape valve was offered. Jewish culture itself was to meet a “historical death,” and would exist only as a memory. Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s chief ideological theorist, sent out squads of soldiers, bibliographers and art historians to seize the cultural possessions of Jewish communities across Europe. They were destined for Frankfurt where Hitler had instructed Rosenberg to establish a research centre for Nazi ideologues. By 1943 an administrator was boasting that “in the New Order of Europe
the
library for the Jewish question not only for Europe but for the world will arise in Frankfurt on Main.”
⁴⁸

THE RACE WAR (2): VERNICHTUNGSKRIEG, 1941–5

The murderous dimensions of Nazi policy towards the Jews took time to emerge from out of the overall racial restructuring of eastern Europe. As Himmler’s schemes for an
apartheid
state in former Poland ran afoul of other Nazi bureaucrats, the aim of using the General Government as a “reservation” for the Jews had to be abandoned. Hitler himself had come to realize by March 1940 that the idea of herding millions of Jews into the Lublin region was not feasible. In this policy vacuum, the invasion of France gave Himmler a new opening, and in May 1940 he outlined for Hitler a comprehensive new approach to Germany’s racial dilemmas.