"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (45 page)

The specific maxims of administrative policy in the conquered East European territories were total political
domination
and the greatest possible
exploitation
of all resources in the occupied countries. The domination was justified by saying that only those peoples were to be dominated who were incapable of governing themselves. Such peoples, that is, were only succumbing to their historically determined fate (“to each his own” [
jedem das Seine
]). For example, the Poles were said to lack a sense of how to fashion and maintain a state of their own.
³⁵
National Socialist doctrine granted the right to rule over colonial peoples to the
Volk
—that is, Germany—who were capable of taking and keeping possession of a country.
³⁶
From an economic perspective, the entire set of resources, industries, and arable land of the colonial territories consisted of “objects of exploitation” to be put at the disposal of the Reich;
³⁷
anything at all movable was, in an excess of exploitation, to be transported into the Reich;
³⁸
and the labor of the native population was to be utilized to the maximum degree.
³⁹

To achieve these objectives, both Hitler himself and his protégés in the civil administration and the police authorities of the occupied territories consistently advocated a policy of the “utmost severity” vis-à-vis subjugated peoples, opposing all practical considerations brought forward by administrative experts.
⁴⁰
Autonomous statehood was ruled out altogether, the highest permissible level of self-administration being that of the municipality.
⁴¹

That policy was correct which produced the most in terms of foodstuffs and labor; the “mild approach” was foolish and “starry-eyed.”
⁴²
Individual human lives were insignificant; how many of the natives died was a matter of absolutely no consequence, according to Hitler.
⁴³
However, the exploitation of economic and human resources alone was, in the eyes of the National Socialist leadership, by no means sufficient; hand in glove with that went a systematic policy of separating non-Germans from the German
Herrenmenschen
(master men)
⁴⁴
as well as one aimed at the greatest possible uprooting and depopulation, as a check to “Slavic fertility”
⁴⁵
and in order to as far as possible drive out the resident population, since room had to be made for intended German settlement (Germanization [
Eindeutschung
]) of these regions.
⁴⁶
Within the National Socialist leadership, there was at a very early date already the firm idea that the entire countryside was to come into German hands, while “foreign-race” farmers and workers were resettled to become migrant laborers for the Reich and unskilled workers for industry.
⁴⁷

At issue, therefore, was the forcing down of entire peoples to the status of helots,
⁴⁸
that is, to the level of unskilled helpers, a level that Hitler himself described as the “modern form of bondage,” as “slavery,” which was necessary for the development of human culture.
⁴⁹

In conjunction with this, there were also reflections on whether to keep foreign peoples at a low level with respect to education and living standards (or if necessary reduce them to such a level); to prevent an “education toward the European standard”; to introduce only the “most necessary” of intellectual and technical achievements—that is, to institute merely an “education for order and work.”
⁵⁰
Such reflections belonged to the well-known repertoire of pan-Germanist and folkish thinking that was later copied in many ways by the National Socialists.
⁵¹
Hitler himself called for the needed “courage to [promote] illiteracy,” since “education and knowledge” contained “certain dangers for the German master race”; knowledge must once again take on the “character of a secret science,” for education is a “means of control.”
⁵²
The “non-German” may be given only as much knowledge as needed to understand German commands and traffic signs and the simplest elements of arithmetic; any educated person would be a future enemy.
⁵³
The living conditions were to be kept as bad as possible, hygiene and health care deliberately neglected, the mortality rate kept high, and nutrition reduced to the barest minimum.
⁵⁴
Furthermore, since “we shall indeed [one day] settle this entire … land with Germans,” the plans of the National Socialist leadership were that alcoholism, the widespread availability of abortion, and poor sanitary conditions would be promoted, or at least tolerated.
⁵⁵

The legal consequences of these colonial plans consisted in the idea that the native population of the “colonial East” had lost its previous nationality, becoming, according to the German construction, merely a caste of stateless vassals whose labor and lives were seen as the exclusive object of exploitation by the occupying power. The means of their “suppression” was the practice of
völkisch
inequality in its two best-known forms: the strict separation between “Germans” and “non-Germans,” embodied in the prohibition against “race mixing”
⁵⁶
(euphemized under the slogan proclaiming “respect for the racial personality of nations”),
⁵⁷
followed by special legal treatment in all areas of law according to political expediency. The latter was based on the principle of the absolute priority of German interests and, where these were not involved, on the idea of a certain “autonomy” for the indigenous population at the lowest administrative level, but one that was never to be confused with any form whatsoever of national autonomy.
⁵⁸
In reality, therefore, despite numerous promises and consoling words from the German authorities,
⁵⁹
there could be no talk of autonomy, however modest, for the resident populations, neither in the occupied Polish nor in the Occupied Soviet Territories (where the populations of Galicia and the Ukraine, especially, had great hopes that the Germans would free them from the Soviet policy of repression),
⁶⁰
since nothing was so much feared as the eruption of national passions. As a result, the entire civil administration was taken over by the German occupation authorities.
⁶¹

Yet it was still unclear what legal status ought to be accorded these colonial territories. This uncertainly did not arise merely because there was no agreement as to the legal and political fate of those regions; it also corresponded to a disinclination within the National Socialist leadership toward legal commitments of any kind. As long as everything hung in the balance, the government intended for the “colonial East” was most likely to succeed. Against all rules of international law, the occupied regions of Eastern Europe were therefore not treated as occupied territories according to the Hague Convention
⁶²
but as colonies in which, according to the German construction, “all measures [were] permissible that appeared necessary and proper to the German administration in carrying out [its governmental authority].”
⁶³
What is more, they often enough fell short even of colonial status, since, at least with respect to the Occupied Eastern Territories, the civil administration was almost completely decommissioned in favor of the almighty police and other central authorities
⁶⁴
(as
Reichsführer
-SS and chief of the German police, Himmler coveted absolute authority with regard to all occupied territories, including the General Government and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia);
⁶⁵
that is, a colonial administration of the traditional type was never set in place to begin with. This procedure, a violation of international law, applied—with respect to the occupied territories—to the Wehrmacht as well, as demonstrated by the guidelines of the High Command of the Wehrmacht on the treatment of “non-Germans” and on the execution of hostages, “Communists,” and “Commissars,” as well as on the nonprosecution of crimes committed by members of the Wehrmacht.
⁶⁶

Such plans and practices were designed to create the conditions required for the new social order of National Socialism, in which the “non-Germans” were to form the lowest stratum as a class of slaves or helots. The actual design of this new order was, however, not fixed in all details but only vaguely hinted at. In this regard, as well, National Socialism was capable of developing detailed, concrete plans only in matters of destructiveness; it was incapable of clearly formulating new programs and goals, much less of constructively carrying them out.
⁶⁷
This new social order,
⁶⁸
which, like all other long-term considerations on the part of the National Socialist leadership, was not primarily nationalist or economic in character but rather justified exclusively in terms of power politics,
⁶⁹
was based, as Hitler had already expounded to his intimate circle in 1933–34, on the idea of the
destruction
of all social orders and the melting down of all social and national distinctions.
⁷⁰
To emerge in their place was a strictly hierarchic order, that is, a kind of modern slave-owners’ society. At its apex stood a German “master race,” selectively bred, much in the manner of horses, and drawing upon a gene pool made up of the SS, the peasantry, and the “good genetic makeup of the old aristocratic stock”
⁷¹
but also including those who “confessed belief” in this idea of the “master class.”
⁷²
After the caste of these new masters came the “mass of hierarchically ordered Party members” as the new middle class, then “the great mass of the anonymous, the collective of servants” (apparently the great mass of
Volksgenossen
who were not Party members). Consigned to the lowest rung of all, according to Hitler, was the “class of the subjugated foreign-born,” the “modern slave-class,”
⁷³
who, as shown above, were not to attain any level higher than that of merest subsistence.

Quite apart from its primitiveness, this conception meant the end of equal rights and opportunities and thus the end of any cultural and educational life for all those who did not belong to the new master class.
⁷⁴
The implementation of the ideas for the domination of the “master race” over masses of “non-German” slaves and for gigantic shifts of whole populations was first to be undertaken in the East, since the East was to represent, in Hitler’s own words, the “great field of experimentation”
⁷⁵
of the new racial order, experimentation, that is, for the great melting-down and denationalization process of Europe under German rule. All terms and expressions, all traditions within these states that recalled their own political and cultural identity were systematically eradicated (while at the same time the Germans vaunted their “pioneering achievements” of earlier centuries),
⁷⁶
in order to create the impression that Eastern Europe had at all times been culturally dominated by Germany and that nothing more was to be seen in the eastward expansion than the coming into their own of those who were from the first the legitimate heirs.
⁷⁷

Suited to this policy of denationalization were first and foremost the occupied Polish territories, since they had been held the longest and were the least impaired by the events of the war. The salient features of this policy were the ignorance and “downright naive” suppositions of the leadership about the traditions, history, and mentality of the country.
⁷⁸
Compounding this was a politically motivated antipathy toward the Poles, which gradually grew into an utterly pathological hatred of their staunch national will to survive, a hatred for whose maintenance the resentments that had been in plentiful supply among the eastern German population since the period after 1918 (and stemming in particular from the fighting in Upper Silesia) were stirred up even more.
⁷⁹

In Poland, after the de facto incorporation into the German Reich
⁸⁰
had been concluded and the colonization plans for Russia had miscarried, the occupants played through “on a small scale” what was to have served, later on, as the model colonial policy for all of Europe.
⁸¹
Thus Poland was the first colony within Europe, the proving ground for German “swiftness and brutality” in the political, military, and economic exploitation of the inhabitants.
⁸²