"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (66 page)

In terms of performance of duties,
⁹
the personnel disappointed even the lowest expectations: “a thousand kilometers and more away from home,” even the most reliable civil servants failed and “went off the rails,” as a former leading administrative official of the General Government put it.
¹⁰
Particularly in the field offices, numerous opportunities were available—and frequently used—to play the member of the “master race” in front of the “non-Germans” and indulge in the new colonial type, and even the SIPO (Gestapo), which behaved like an elite, was no exception.
¹¹
Although the wealth of powers available to the lower-level authorities was in itself an opportunity to achieve at least a bearable, although hardly loyal, coexistence with the local population,
¹²
this opportunity was frittered away recklessly by personal shortcomings, as demonstrated by the numerous examples (especially from 1942 on) of unbelievable incompetence, inaction, and brutality by the senior staff, in particular in the
Kreishauptmann
offices.
¹³
It was an open secret that corruption and profiteering were the order of the day in the German departments and that in the General Government “not all principles of the homeland were preserved,” whereby it is evident that a certain minimum level of misconduct was accepted as normal in view of the situation.
¹⁴
The security service was more straightforward. The notorious reports by the commander of the SIPO and the SD for the Galician District in Lemberg on the “conduct of the Reich Germans in the occupied territories” described with great relish the deplorable image of drunken excesses, bribery, profiteering, sexual offenses, and so on by members of the public administration and the police; their luxurious lifestyle; and their close contacts with the local Polish population, totally reprehensible in terms of racial policy, and—even worse—with Jews. These reports, which caused a tremendous stir and hit Berlin like a bomb,
¹⁵
resulted in the coining of the term
Polish disease
(“weakened morality”) of the administration in the General Government and in calls for the dismissal of Governor General Frank.
¹⁶

Against the backdrop of these shortcomings and the brutal actions of the SS and the police,
¹⁷
one gains the image of an administrative policy in which Eastern potentates were engaged in a futile struggle with the conventional administration, resulting in a strange conglomeration.

The victims were the Polish population, which was practically driven to resist the occupying powers by the contradictory policies of the various authorities. Only in 1944, when it was much too late for change in any case, was there any recognition or admission of the countless failures and mistakes with respect to the Polish population. On October 19, 1944, for instance, a report by the RSHA on “previous Polish policy and proposals for its relaxation or restructuring” noted that the “inadequate countermeasures adopted by the Germans [support] resistance activities very strongly. Politically incorrect measures [resettlement of Poles in Zamo
, labor roundups, etc.] [had increased] the Polish will to resist.” The treatment of a people “with methods (tin bowls and calico) used by England against non-European peoples” was therefore out of the question for the Poles from the outset(!).
¹⁸

Essentially, this situation merely reflected the style and policies of the leadership itself, and its loud complaints about the administration, personnel, and police interference demonstrated its double standards, since poor examples had already been set and abuses tolerated.
¹⁹
Characteristic of this is not only the vacillating, insecure personality of Governor General and Chief Administrator Frank, with his weak leadership and contradictory management of the administration;
²⁰
the arrogance and incompetence of his officials and large numbers of senior personnel also played a crucial role.
²¹
These attitudes and utterings show clearly that counter to the thesis repeatedly brought forward until very recently,
²²
the administration in the General Government did not fail because of “tight control from the outside” and the restricted room for maneuver of the authorities but first and foremost because of the corruption and indecisive leadership of its top officials and its unimaginative policy of brutal repression. In its blind actionism and short-sighted attitudes, the leadership of the General Government and its subordinate authorities pursued the totally insupportable notions that it had conceived about the “colonial East” and the treatment of subjugated peoples, completely ignoring the actual circumstances and refusing to make any effort, as a former high official in the General Government put it, “to understand the psyche of the subjugated peoples and drew the appropriate conclusions.”
²³
It therefore foundered less on any external threat than essentially on its own incompetence and shortsightedness.
²⁴
The consequence of these factors, combined with the extravagance and perfectionism of the administrative machinery, its inconsistency and jurisdictional chaos, was that the administration in the General Government neither was an administration in the conventional sense, nor did it meet the conditions for a real colonial administration; it was nothing more than an unimaginative ruinous administration on the greatest possible scale, politically, economically, and psychologically.
²⁵

A. Fundamentals: The Segregation of Germans and “Non-Germans” and the Discrimination against “Non-Germans” as Far as “Necessary”

I. Jews

The methods and intensity of the treatment of the local population needed for this predatory administration differed depending on whether Poles or other “non-Germans” were involved or Poles of Jewish extraction. For the Jewish Poles, whose proportion of the total population of the General Government was relatively high (1.6 million) and whose influence in commerce and the professions was considerable,
¹
a special system of legal rules was devised, the details of which are discussed below. This system of legal rules had become necessary because in contrast to the Annexed Eastern Territories, in which Jews were no more than a temporary phenomenon (deportations and ghettoization had largely been completed in 1940–41), it was expected that the local Jews would remain in the General Government for a longer time; furthermore, this region was designated as the catchment area for all Jews deported from Western Europe, so special rules were needed covering all areas of life. The basic policy of the treatment of the Jews consisted of utmost harshness, because Jews, as in general in the East, were barely regarded by the administration any more as persons (legal entities) or groups but rather as troublesome “parasites,” the more so where “Eastern Jews” were concerned, who were viewed as the embodiment of the “Jewish essence” and of corruption.

Although the concept of the Jew was harmonized with the concept prevailing in the Reich territory,
²
the office of the governor general was contemplating far-reaching plans to foil efforts by the Jews to be excluded from the official concept of the Jew. In the legislation office of the governor general, a plan was drafted to introduce a general prohibition on the baptism of Jews,
³
but this was never implemented. The compulsory wearing of badges by Jews (irrespective of their citizenship) was introduced as early as November 1939, long before the corresponding regulation in the Reich.
⁴
At the end of October 1940, the emigration of Jews from the General Government was finally halted because it was only reinforcing “world Jewry.”
⁵
To prevent them from enjoying any rights whatsoever, Jews were prohibited from acting on their own behalf with respect to the authorities.
⁶
When submitting applications, Jews paid double the fees charged to Poles.
⁷
An uninhibited anti-Semitic propaganda campaign flooded the General Government, whereas a certain amount of restraint was practiced in dealing with the Polish population, on whose labor the Germans depended. Countless anti-Semitic posters, publications, and photos about the Jewish slums, the Jewish markets and ghettos, the “Jewish wealth” and “Jewish dissipation” were in circulation in the General Government and the Reich;
⁸
anti-Semitic exhibitions were organized to “prove” the long list of bad qualities and features attributed to the Jews (they were considered “born dealers,” marked by “dissipation,” etc.),
⁹
characteristics to which they had been more or less driven by the actions of the German administration described below. These actions had been carefully prepared and implemented in a phased plan. They were designed to prepare the population for what was to come, namely, the elimination of personal freedom and the evacuation and resettlement of the Jews until they were reduced to indifference and oblivion behind the ghetto walls,
¹⁰
a state that frequently occurred.

These measures, which, as in the Reich, mostly fell under the jurisdiction of the internal administration,
¹¹
aimed at the quickest possible total deprivation of all rights of the Jews. Mostly small-scale craftsmen and merchants whose traditions and lifestyle often differed substantially from those of the Poles, the Jews, living in poverty and not suspecting their fate, were reduced to a condition of absolute privation by the rigorous practices of the German agencies; they were hardly capable of living, to say nothing of working.
¹²
With single-minded purpose, anti-Jewish special laws were promulgated in the first weeks of the civil administration; the first official act by the German authorities in the General Government was the introduction of forced labor for Jews. The reason for the speed with which this special law appeared was that numerous models were already available in the Reich that could be borrowed or adopted.
¹³
In all, four phases of anti-Jewish legislation can be identified.
¹⁴
The first phase was segregation and
discrimination
compared with the rest of the population (forced labor, compulsory wearing of badges, etc.).
¹⁵
The second phase involved
extension
of the isolation measures, starting as usual with numerous reporting and registration obligations and ending with residence restrictions and restrictions on the use of public facilities and transport;
¹⁶
it served the purpose of “marshaling” the Jews by the authorities. The third phase was the
total isolation
of the Jews from their environment. This included directives that Jews must reside in a particular residential district (the Jewish quarter, the ghetto) and sealing this off hermetically from the outside world, with total administrative and police special law reigning inside the ghetto walls.
¹⁷
Ghettoization was the preliminary to the fourth phase, the resettlement or evacuation
¹⁸
of the Jews to the extermination camps in the process of the Final Solution, for which the SS and the police were responsible, collaborating closely with the administrative authorities.
¹⁹