"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (52 page)

However, the situation had long since surpassed the need for centralized legislation of police law. The Reich Ministry of the Interior draft was not adopted. Posen continued to act independently after effectively sabotaging the adoption of the Prussian Law of Police Administration for good. In a further decree on March 22, 1943, Greiser issued precise instructions about the external form and specification of the means to enforce coercive acts in police regulations,
³⁴
but he reserved internal guidelines for the application of the substantive provisions of the Prussian Law of Police Administration.
³⁵
Not unnaturally, such guidelines were never issued, as the
Reichsstatthalter
did not even wish to commit himself within his own administration; at any rate, practical implementation implicitly understood that the Prussian Law of Police Administration was substantively applied “analogously” (i.e., with the right of derogation at any time). This principle applied in particular as regards the treatment of “non-Germans.” Substantive police law in the Annexed Eastern Territories thus had no formal basis in either statutory or administrative provisions; as in every totalitarian regime, this legal uncertainty created the best breeding ground for special measures of every kind, which could now be enacted without being bound to any legislation or indeed to any form of regulations.

The imposition of coercive measures against Poles and Jews was therefore regulated without any basis in law, in contrast to the Prussian Law of Police Administration. On the basis of the original circular decree by the
Reichsstatthalter
on August 23, 1941,
³⁶
administrative fines and coercive detention of unlimited amounts and duration could be imposed on Poles (sec. 55, Prussian Law of Police Administration, specified a maximum fine of RM 150 or a maximum detention of three weeks); the imposition of forced labor by police order was also permitted. The decree further ordered that action taken against Poles should be more severe than that against Germans, in particular in cases of violation of “ethnic principles,” which included such serious crimes as the use of a railway compartment designated for Germans only. A circular decree by the
Reichsführer,
-SS and chief of the German police dated June 15, 1942,
³⁷
had introduced the new penalties against Poles (and Jews) of prison camp (three to six months) and administrative fines of RM 3 to RM 10,000, which could also be imposed by police orders,
³⁸
but the decree was ignored by the Posen
Reichsstatthalter,
who opposed any form of centralized regulatory scheme, regardless of its author; of course he had to issue his own scheme, which was incorporated into his own circulatory decree of March 22, 1943,
³⁹
but which contained nothing new of any substance. It stated that police regulations applying to all inhabitants of the Eastern Territories should threaten the standard penalties of the Prussian Law of Police Administration (an administrative fine of up to RM 150, with up to three weeks coercive detention in the event of nonpayment); police regulations applying only to Poles and Jews, however, should threaten prison camp and financial penalties up to RM 10,000. As part of the same policy, Poles and Jews were illegally prohibited from filing appeals of any kind against police orders, as mentioned before.
⁴⁰
The police ideal of total subjugation of the “non-Germans” was thus achieved, at least in the Warthegau (or Wartheland).

In line with the lack of any legal basis, substantive police law was also subjected to fundamental reorganization. The principles of legitimacy, necessity, and commensurability disappeared, replaced by lynch law based on the principles of the “racial struggle,” subjugation at any price. The lack of any substantive basis was the reason why police intervention powers were extended infinitely and rules were made that customary principles would have deemed inadmissible, such as the aforementioned regulations about the obligation of Poles to salute Germans with the Hitler-
Gruss
or the prohibition on contacts between Germans and the local population, which were regarded as totally inadmissible under “ethnic policy.”

The bulk of the special legislative restrictions for “non-Germans” discussed below were also based on the excessive expansion of police powers. These restrictions related to economic, cultural, constitutional, and labor discrimination and show that these police powers were first implemented comprehensively in the Eastern Territories.

The regulations cited below, principally from the Warthegau, originate from all areas of public administration, since—in contrast to the Reich—the
Reichsstatthalter
(district president), including the special administration offices, explicitly enjoyed jurisdiction in all matters in the Annexed Eastern Territories.
⁴¹

C. Special Topics

I. The Social, Political, and Cultural Sector

1. The Transformation of State Pension Payments into “Welfare Subsidies”

The first example of special legislative regulations relates to social welfare measures, such as the freeze on state pension benefits and the exclusion of Poles from social security, accident and life insurance, and other benefits. According to comments by the office of the Posen (Pozna
)
Reichsstatthalter,
the idea of making the Poles better off than before by granting them social security, benefits was “completely incomprehensible.” The most important aspect of the “policy toward Non-Germans” was its “consistency.” “Gradually backing off” would result in a drop in the labor performance of the Poles. And the granting of life insurance benefits to the Poles would not be “at all” in the interests of Germany, because of associated ethnic policy risks. In the event of a claim against such a policy, the family of the insured person would gain a certain amount of capital “without labor and effort.” The same applied to accident insurance, which would only give the Poles the opportunity to collect benefits on the basis of high contributions and then escape compulsory labor.
¹
Included in these measures was the elimination of old-age pensions and the reduction of welfare payments to an absolute minimum, since “the only interest in the Polish population was in the working elements”; those persons used as “slave laborers,” as it were, should be “sufficiently paid”
²
in the form of “subsistence” sui generis but excluded from the benefits of the Reich Social Security Insurance Code (RVO); on retirement, however, they should in principle receive no retirement pay or pensions, at best welfare subsidies without any legal entitlement (with the exception of wardisabled Poles who had been wounded while fighting on the German or Austrian side between 1914 and 1918, because the Reich was not the legal successor to the Polish State).
³

2. The Prohibition of Political and Church Activities

There should be no further need to explain that the public life of the “non-Germans” came to a complete standstill. As a matter of course, Polish newspapers,
⁴
gatherings, associations,
⁵
and all demonstrations were prohibited in the Annexed Eastern Territories from the outset; the prohibition also applied to larger funerals, which were regarded as demonstrations of Polish national sentiment.
⁶
For the same reason, local authorities banned priests from appearing in their robes of office.
⁷
The Catholic Church was in any case the target of the anger of the new rulers, who saw it as the bearer of Polish nationalism, and it was completely excluded. This has already been described at length elsewhere,
⁸
so extensive details are unnecessary here. Suffice it to say that the basis for the ruthless segregation and persecution of the Catholic Church in the Annexed Eastern Territories, where each
Reichsstatthalter
acted at his own discretion, was the fact that the concordat of July 20, 1933, between the Reich and the Vatican,
⁹
which guaranteed the Catholic Church freedom of religions, the status of a public corporation, the right of self-administration, the right to raise taxes, the preservation of its vested rights, and so forth, was
not
applied, although the status of the Eastern Territories as an integral part of the German Reich would have demanded the application of the concordat. As he stated quite unmistakably in nonpublic comments, Hitler unilaterally decided that the concordat was no more than a continuation of the concordats of the individual German
Länder
and had “actually become void” on their merger with the Reich, a legally untenable construction, since the concordat contained no provision for termination, stipulating an amicable settlement in the event of differences of opinion. The concordat certainly did not apply in the new
Reichsgau
districts, according to Hitler; church matters there were the “exclusive business” of the
Reichsstatthalter.
¹⁰
On analysis of these unequivocal statements by Hitler, it can be regarded as a proven fact that he intended in any case to terminate the concordat unilaterally after the war
¹¹
and replace it by the fragmentation of the Church (“regional arrangements”) and the removal of all state subsidies.
¹²
The entire policy of church persecution in the Eastern Territories demonstrates the high degree of consistency of National Socialist policy goals and administrative practice: this region experienced the effects of what was later to become the general rule in the territory of the Reich.

The fate intended for the Evangelical (Protestant) churches in the Annexed Eastern Territories was only slightly better, with a sharp division between German and “non-German” Christians and, as far as the German Christians were concerned, a wretched existence as private associations.

The measures were most extreme in the Warthegau, attracting considerable attention in the Reich itself.
¹³
As in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the Polish Protestant churches lost their status as public corporations and were declared extinct; as their legal successors, private religious associations “of German nationality” were created,
¹⁴
for which special application to the police was necessary, reversing the general principle of rule and exception, with nonmembership in a church as the rule and joining a church requiring a special act. This curtailment of the status of the Protestant churches caused a great deal of resentment among the ethnic Germans and settlers.
¹⁵
The new Protestant church associations were, of course, closed to Poles, who were thus not members of any church establishment and whose services were illegal and no more than tolerated by the police. This was demonstrated publicly by the fact that some Protestant churches bore notices “Germans Only” or “Polish Church.”
¹⁶

3. Discrimination in the Education of “Non-Germans”

The same arbitrary policies and confusion reigned in all other cultural areas. The principal objective was to destroy all areas of Polish culture by segregation and discrimination,
¹⁷
ranging from the exclusion of non-Aryan creative artists (by the introduction of the Law on Editors and the Reich Chamber of Culture Law)
¹⁸
to the repression of “non-German” elements in education and language to below the minimum expected of civilized nations. Because the government was in any case of the opinion as regards German nationals that (primary) school teachers should not be too “comprehensively” trained and that children should not “be force-fed with everything,”
¹⁹
these maxims applied all the more to education for “non-Germans.” In line with the goal of reducing the local population to an army of unskilled laborers, the people were practically excluded not only from all forms of higher education but also from the most elementary basic education; all they received was a rudimentary primary school education (without history and geography) and modest technical training for the recruitment of skilled laborers.
²⁰

In consequence, the University of Posen and all tertiary, technical, and vocational colleges, as well as all public and private libraries
²¹
in the Annexed Eastern Territories were closed at the beginning of the war.
²²
A decree by the Reich minister for education and science on June 17, 1940,
²³
ordered a general compulsory school education for Polish children and the teaching of Polish by Polish teachers, but the decree was not enforced in the Warthegau and Zichenau administrative districts;
²⁴
only in Upper Silesia, where the majority of Poles were admitted to the German Ethnic Classification List
(Deutsche Volksliste),
did Polish teachers teach in Polish in packed classes.
²⁵
In Danzig–West Prussia there were Polish primary schools, in which classes were to be held in German “whenever possible.”
²⁶
In contrast, measures were much stricter in the Warthegau as part of the process of Germanization.
²⁷