"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (61 page)

Special shopping hours for Poles are also recorded for other areas of the Warthegau;
⁷
the assumption that such special regulations existed in all
Kreise
is supported by a directive by the Central Chamber of Commerce of the Warthegau in June 1942 repeating the principles described above: Poles were permitted to shop for their personal needs only at specified times, and Polish employees were not permitted to shop for their German employers; German customers were always to be given preferential service.
⁸

Again on the basis of documented sources relating to the Warthegau, a detailed system of special treatment for “non-Germans” had been developed with respect to the rationing of foodstuffs and other goods.
⁹
The first fact deserving mention is that Poles “naturally” received “far less coal” than the Germans, that there was no gas or electricity,
¹⁰
and that the Jews received no fuel rations what-soever, with the result that the catastrophic shortage of fuel gave rise to fears of a “total collapse,”
¹¹
and the ill feelings already rampant in the population because of the special shopping hours and other restrictions were reinforced further.
¹²
There were also restrictions on the supply to Poles of key commodities such as clothing, raw cotton, leather, soap, and medicines.
¹³
Despite this, there were numerous instances in which Poles received such goods despite the existing purchase restrictions, because—as the authorities complained—Polish sales staff were not adequately supervised and supported the Polish customers (by “fraud,” helping with “hoarding,” etc.) such that the Poles were, in part, “better supplied than the Germans.”
¹⁴

It is also evident that as far as food rationing was concerned, the protected subject status Poles received lower rations (they were even lower for Jews), which had a considerable impact on their mood and work performance.
¹⁵
Cases of Poles’ receiving relatively adequate rations gave rise to complaints by “racially conscious” administrative officials of “extravagance” or demands for remedial action, because they were causing unrest and ill feeling among the German population.
¹⁶
After 1941 a number of rations for Poles were canceled altogether. In early 1941, for instance, the sale of wheat flour to Poles was forbidden, followed in fall 1941 by prohibitions on the sale of cakes, pies, and other wheat-based bakery products;
¹⁷
fruit could not be sold to Poles, with Posen “setting a good example” as early as fall 1940.
¹⁸
Poles were also forbidden to buy vegetables from 1942 on.
¹⁹
Local regulations went even further, forbidding Poles to buy other foods.
²⁰
Poles were also banned from buying foodstuffs for sending to Polish prisoners of war.
²¹
A report from Upper Silesia states that the Poles were put on half rations for food in 1941.
²²

The consequences of these discriminatory measures were catastrophic, because they existed in an environment where—despite restrictions—
all
foodstuffs were very scarce and exorbitant prices prevailed.
²³
The Poles were therefore left with only what the Germans did not want; the conditions were so bad that the authorities feared a general famine,
²⁴
but they still did not cease their efforts to complain about the methods used by the local population to counter the privations (illegal purchases, substantial black market purchases, and hoarding),
²⁵
which had become so rampant precisely because of the restrictions imposed by the authorities. However, as admitted at the time, what was regarded as even more serious than these illegal activities by Polish consumers was the fact that the authorities themselves had ruined any chance of cooperation, or even a prudent attitude, on the part of the Poles.
²⁶
This was because the restrictions described above had affected the entire population; and even where there had been no impact, they had generated anti-German sentiments and activities.

Section Three

The Implementation of Völkisch Inequality in the General Government

INTRODUCTION

The Fundamentals of National Socialist Administrative Policy: The General Government as a Model for Future German Colonies

I. Immediate Aims: A Military Staging Area, a Labor Reserve, and Economic Exploitation

In contrast to the Annexed Eastern Territories, whose purpose (Germanization) and status (annexation) was established from the outset, the legal status and the fate of the occupied Polish territories (the General Government) were never concretely clarified because the Nazi leadership itself had developed no clear notions. In this respect, administrative policy and the treatment of “non-Germans” also demonstrate variations and contradictions, reflected on the one hand in an absurd policy of economic overexploitation and on the other in the numerous measures to preserve the labor resources of the Poles. There was clarity only with regard to the immediate aims pursued at the time of the occupation of the General Government. From the beginning, Hitler had ordered that the occupied Polish territories should serve as a military staging area for the forth-coming war with the Soviet Union (the primary immediate aim) as well as a reservoir of cheap labor for the Reich (the secondary immediate aim).
¹
The third immediate aim was to totally exploit all resources in the country to the benefit of the Reich.
²
The prime maxims of administrative policy were therefore, as Governor General Hans Frank repeatedly assured, to squeeze this region dry of all possible resources by implementing the measures needed to achieve this goal. This exclusively negative policy, according to Frank, would have “certain consequences that are unpleasant to us National Socialists at the moment.” The General Government was no “extension of the Warthegau[!].” It must be ensured that the Poles are kept peaceful and quiet.
³
In contrast, all those of no use to German interests (those who accomplished no work, or insufficient work) should be “left to their own ends”—more or less left to starve.
⁴

These were aims and precepts that had previously been applied only to colonies. And indeed, the General Government was destined to become the first colony of the Reich, in the same way that the Warthegau was to become the model district of an annexed territory. German colonial lands did not start de facto to the east of the General Government,
⁵
as Governor General Frank considered, but to the east of the Annexed Eastern Territories. This colonial definition of the General Government became the basis of all administrative acts and a fixed component of internal and external officialese. It was reflected in a policy of economic exploitation, the cultural suppression of the Poles, and the liquidation of their intelligentsia, euphemistically circumscribed as a policy of “general pacification.”
⁶
The Nazi occupation policy is thus characterized by a level of internal consistency and unity found in no other country occupied by Germany during World War II.
⁷
And the administrative leadership made no secret about the colonial designation of the General Government.

Even during the period of military administration, Frank, as head of the civil administration for the occupied Polish territories at the time, had stated to representatives of the military administration on October 3, 1939, that “Poland should be treated as a colony.”
⁸
On December 2, 1939, he told his heads of departments that the criterion of the political leadership was the will of the Führer that “this territory was the first colonial territory of the German Nation,” “the spoils of the German Reich”;
⁹
at the opening of the German judicial system in the General Government on April 9, 1940, the German judges were called upon to “develop a colonial, imperial legal system” in the General Government.
¹⁰
The leaders of the Security Police talked of “methods [within the General Government] that England applied to non-European peoples [tin spoons and calico].”
¹¹

Statements for public consumption also borrowed heavily from the language of colonialism; in proclamations to the population of the occupied Polish territories of October 26, 1939, and to the population of Galicia on June 22, 1940, the population was accorded the same status as a native population “under the protection of the Reich” (the General Government was presented as the “Reich Protectorate of the Polish
Volkstum
”).
¹²
The first “Report on the Development of the General Government,” issued in July 1940 by the government of the General Government, spoke of the achievements of the administration as achievements that would do justice to the image of the Reich as “a new major colonial power.”
¹³
In the sphere of justice, the terms
German Court
and
German Higher Court
already pointed toward the colonial status of the General Government (since these terms also appear in the drafts of the Foreign Office for the future colonial legislation), whereas with regard to the local Polish judicial system, there was overt mention of “native” jurisdiction.
¹⁴
The plans for the economic exports were totally oriented toward the “colonial structure” of the General Government.
¹⁵
Leading civil servants of the General Government presented papers on colonial administrative policy at the Colonial-Political Office of the NSDAP in Berlin,
¹⁶
because the General Government, as Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner propounded in Kraków on December 15, 1940, was in the Reich “an example, a model, an exercise … of what we will often create in the Reich in future elsewhere, perhaps under different conditions but still with the same goal.”
¹⁷
As Governor General Hans Frank repeatedly emphasized, the General Government served as a “laboratory for administrative studies and for the principles” of future colonial acquisitions, as a model of “how we can develop … colonial administrations in the first place.”
¹⁸

II. Ultimate Aims: German Colonial Rule

Despite the unambiguous nature of the immediate policy aims in the General Government, the notions about its ultimate fate remained unclear, lost in a vague future. Beyond dispute was only the principle that the General Government was more than temporarily occupied territory, that it was associated with the Reich in perpetuity and should be dependent upon it.
¹
The crucial question, however, was whether the General Government, like the Eastern Territories, should be a German settlement area or not.
²
Although this was agreed in principle (the Vistula should become just as German as the Rhine), no set time frame was specified (“in the foreseeable decades”). Hitler, too, never committed himself unequivocally,
³
and Frank, the head of the administration, referred all relevant speculation to the time after the war or after the Germanization of the Eastern Territories and the “Southeastern Region.”
⁴
In contrast, the radical racial experts in the departments of the
Reichsführer
-SS dreamed of mass deportations of the local “non-Germans” as soon as possible and “Greater German” settlement areas for members of the SS, discharged soldiers, deserving Party members,
⁵
and resettlers from Russia; they had already made a concrete start with the compulsory settlements and resettlements in the Lublin District.
⁶
Top secret deliberations by the SS had contemplated the monstrous notion of liquidating, or at any rate killing off, infirm resettlers and those unsuitable for resettlement, not only with regard to the “non-Germans” but also to the future German settlers.
⁷
In contrast, more detailed ideas about the future fate of the Poles were not developed. The extreme notions of the SS and police leadership were generally oriented toward deporting all Poles in the so-called Eastern region to western Siberia, since only 5 percent were “capable of Germanization” in any case, and space would have to be created there for the German settlers (“General Plan for the East” of the RFSS).
⁸

However, this differed from the vision of the administrative authorities. The top departments in the General Government also agreed that in the long term the General Government should be settled by Germans.
⁹
In the “Eastern Region Plans” of the civil administration, vague and blurred though their suggestions might have been, there appeared the vision of a “Germanic East” with strong German settlement strongholds as a catchment area for the overpopulated Reich territory;
¹⁰
but in contrast to the Annexed Eastern Territories (where there was an emphasis on Germanization with agricultural settlements), it is evident that only the Germanization of the towns and cities, as centers of German rule, was proposed, with the local population merely segregated from the Germans and remaining on the land as labor.
¹¹