"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (55 page)

The principle of equal (net) wages for Germans and Poles in the October 5, 1941, directive of the Reich minister of labor correspondingly met the stiffest resistance in the Warthegau.
Reichsstatthalter
Greiser flatly rejected the granting of equal wage rates for Poles. “No Reich minister was his superior, because he … had been granted far-reaching powers by the Führer, which no other individual was able to set aside. The Reich directive [of October 5, 1941] was therefore inoperative in the
Gau.
” This was not an issue of labor law but of race.
¹⁹
Posen (Pozna
) authorities continued, stating that it was exactly because of the “racial question” that it was vital to introduce a piece rate system based on work performance, to scrap vacation entitlements, and, if the labor administration filed any objection, to resort to the Party (DAF) to force through this plan.
²⁰

In the Reichsgau Wartheland, however, every effort was made to bypass the provisions of Reich law in other spheres as well. Polish workers were banned from taking vacations for the duration of the war. In the question of maternity protection, the tried and tested method of undermining existing regulations was applied. Under a directive issued by the Posen
Reichsstatthalter,
maternity protection should be applied to Polish women “in principle” but in compliance with the “general political policy toward Poles,” with the result that maternity protection was undermined to such an extent that very little remained.
²¹
Furthermore, payment was below statutory rates in every instance, to keep operating over heads at a minimum,
²²
and wages were depressed further by substantial deductions and the cutting of family and housing allowances to a far greater extent than allowed by Reich labor regulation.
²³
In addition, it was evidently normal practice for individual employers to arbitrarily refuse to pay allowances normally included in wages if the workers proved themselves “unworthy of the wage conceded to them.”
²⁴
In the Zichenau administrative district, too, there was no attempt to comply with Reich law when wages were cut to 60 percent and later raised to 70 percent of normal rates (with the possibility of a performance bonus of up to 15%).
²⁵

This system of wage reductions came ever closer to the ideal of minimum wages or piece rates for Poles, which had been the favored idea of the Party and the political leadership from the outset.
²⁶
With the same cool cynicism with which the leadership exploited the population as nothing more than a labor commodity, a wage freeze was ordered in the Warthegau on October 27, 1939, and in the subsequent years the wages of Polish workers were steadily changed by a system of wage deductions (up to 30%)
²⁷
and allowances—but never with the effect of increasing wages, because of the opinion that wage increases would “weaken the German nation in the East.”
²⁸
In contrast, according to the reports from Upper Silesia, general wage cuts were not implemented there, in order to avoid the immediate drop in productivity this would cause;
²⁹
industry in particular showed itself “interested” in the “reasonable” payment of those of its Polish workers who achieved their production target, because otherwise the will to work would drop even further.
³⁰

Poles were also discriminated against in the conditions of labor. Not only was there compulsory labor for Poles, which also covered Polish youths (aged 12 to 18) and, toward the end of the war, even children.
³¹
Even the choice of place of employment, still enjoyed to a certain extent by German employees (the chosen place of employment was subject to approval), was abolished by frequent police raids to round up Poles subject to compulsory labor,
³²
after no further volunteers had been forthcoming since 1941 at the latest. Those rounded up were then assigned to compulsory employment in the Annexed Eastern Territories or in the Reich.
³³
In the Warthegau during the last years of the war, the working hours for Poles were up to seventy-two hours per week, to offset the man-hours lost as a result of the high sickness rate (tuberculosis was prevalent) and the continuous arrests by the Gestapo; however, these long working hours could not be maintained because they caused an increase in the sickness rates.
³⁴
It was no more than a natural consequence of the absurd policy of exploitation and the poor working conditions that there was a rapid decrease in employee morale
³⁵
and the sickness rates were high; this did not result in any change in the “special treatment,” although the catastrophic situation was clear to all involved.
³⁶
Whereas the relevant authorities and industry had followed this policy with reluctance because they could see the consequences for the economy every day and urged—albeit too late—that remedial action be taken, even as late as 1944 the leadership in Posen doubted that any U-turn was necessary.
³⁷
A number of concessions, such as the right of Poles to appeal punishments ordered by plant managers, were no more than illusory, having no real substance.
³⁸

V. Citizenship Law for Poles and Other “Non-Germans” (the German Ethnic Classification List)

One of the keynotes of the segregation and special legislation measures was in the area of citizenship, because membership in a particular state community is the basis of the status of the individual and his rights and obligations; if this bond is severed, the individual loses all rights of domicile and is thus no longer subject to the principles of common law but rather to aliens’ law, that is, solely to considerations of state expediency. One of the first actions by the National Socialists in the Eastern European territories occupied by the Reich was therefore to dissolve the legal status of the “non-Germans.”
¹
In doing so, however, they proceeded initially less on the basis of racial than on political-ethnic grounds; they also incorporated by a collective act “non-German.” population groups for reasons of population policy, so as to include as many people as possible in the German state community, either as Reich citizens or as mere state subjects.
²

The inclusion of the local inhabitants of the occupied territories into the German state community, which was contrary to prevailing international law but led to intrastate consequences,
³
was implemented such that the formerly Austrian citizens of “related” extraction (including Czech extraction) became German state subjects and citizens of the Reich
uno acto
(Jews were excluded, of course),
⁴
the “long-established inhabitants of the Sudeten-German territories” became German state subjects,
⁵
and the “ethnic German inhabitants” of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia became citizens of the Reich and state subjects (whereas the remaining population of the protectorate became so-called protectorate subjects),
⁶
as did those inhabitants of the Memel region who had lost their German citizenship in 1924 when the Memel region was annexed by Lithuania.
⁷
German state subject status was also granted to inhabitants of German extraction in Eupen, Malmédy, and Moresnet,
⁸
as well as in Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg, if they had “proved” themselves with distinction.
⁹

1. Point of Departure: Statelessness for All “Non-German” Inhabitants of the Annexed Eastern Territories

In the Annexed Eastern Territories, the linkage of
state subject status
and the
principle of extraction
was taken seriously for the first time, and all persons of “non-German” extraction, including the Poles, were proclaimed ineligible to acquire German state subject status (citizenship in the Reich) as a matter of principle.
¹⁰
As will be seen below, however, the Germanization policy with respect to the Poles in particular is an example of the blending of racial and political considerations, because the Poles could not be classified racially by the regime.

The basis for all citizenship law measures was the thesis of the collapse of the Polish state, which had automatically occurred on October 26, 1939, the effective date of the Annexation Decree of October 8, 1939. With the Decree issued by the Führer and Reich chancellor on October 12, 1939, on the Administration of the Occupied Polish Territories (the General Government), the local population had automatically lost its Polish citizenship.
¹¹
Remarkably, this establishment of mass statelessness—again contrary to international law but an effective act in terms of intrastate law
¹²
—was never explicitly declared as such. It emerged as a converse conclusion from the existing regulations and became the dominating principle of administrative practice, as confirmed by the German Supreme Court.
¹³

Apart from the special arrangement applying to Danzig (Gda
sk), the Decree on the Organization and Administration of the Annexed Eastern Territories, issued by the Führer and Reich chancellor on October 8, 1939,
¹⁴
provided that the inhabitants “of German or related” blood in the Annexed Eastern Territories became German state subjects effective October 26, 1939; from another provision of this degree, that the “ethnic Germans” in these territories simultaneously became citizens of the Reich, one could have drawn the conclusion that the Poles were also “of related extraction” and would therefore also become German state subjects, if the term “of related extraction” was only extended to a sufficient degree.

Indeed, this had been the original intention of the Reich Ministry of the Interior,
¹⁵
in the expectation that it would not be possible “to remove all members of alien races from the Annexed Eastern Territories and replace them with members of the German race”; thus the “desired population growth” should provide an opportunity to acquire German state subject status, and later Reich citizenship.
¹⁶
The Reich Ministry of the Interior therefore proposed that the ethnic Germans in the Annexed Eastern Territories would initially be distinguished from the Poles not by the possession of German state subject status but by the possession of Reich citizenship. However, because the question of who should be counted among the “desired population growth” had yet to be settled, a circular decree from the Reich Ministry of the Interior dated November 25, 1939,
¹⁷
provisionally stipulated that the general acquisition of state subject status by Poles could be considered only after the issue of definitive regulations, which could not currently be promulgated. Because there was no unity at that time on how the Poles should be treated, only the ethnic Germans (the
Volksdeutsche
)
¹⁸
in the Eastern Territories were allowed to become German state subjects and Reich citizens, with the citizenship of the Polish population remaining undecided for the time being; in practical terms, the Poles were treated as stateless, since in the German view the Polish state as a legal entity had disappeared on the capitulation of Poland.