The German War (9 page)

When they were unable to find any more Polish men, some militiamen hunted down Polish women and children instead. Many were out for private vengeance. Others aped the ‘pacification methods’ practised by the German military. In Bromberg, Boy Scouts who had acted as runners for the Polish Army were lined up against a wall and shot alongside the priest who wanted to give them the last rites. Many of the local militia commanders turned the basements and courtyards of their improvised prisons into torture chambers where prisoners were whipped, had nails driven into their backs and their eyes gouged out with bayonets.
⁴¹

It was like the ‘wild’ concentration camps which local Nazis, SA and SS units had established in Germany in 1933 – but with one difference: in Germany, that wave of violence had been contained, and most prisoners were released by the summer of 1934. In occupied Poland, as ‘German order’ was established, the terror increased further. Hitler was set on preventing the Polish ruling class from re-establishing an independent nation state. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, grasped their opportunity to organise the ‘action against the intelligentsia’ – the liquidation of the Polish elites. Key targets were teachers, priests, academics, officers and officials, landowners, politicians and journalists. All became liable to arrest, summary execution or deportation to concentration camps, where further mass executions were carried out. Pursuing their own ideological common sense, militias and
Einsatzkommandos
routinely included Jews as well as psychiatric patients in their ‘actions’ without seeking further clarification.
⁴²

The largest massacres were conducted by ethnic German militias, often acting under SD and Gestapo command, in former West Prussian towns. Six thousand were shot in the woods around Piasnica/Neustadt, 7,000 in Szpedawsk (Preußisch-Stargard), and at Kocborowo 1,692 asylum patients were killed. On the Gruppa parade ground 6,500 Poles and Jews from Graudenz were shot while 3,000 were killed in Lszkówko. In Mniszek, 10,000–12,000 Poles and Jews from the Schwetz area were shot in gravel pits. Some 3,000 Jews and Poles were killed on the airstrip at Fordon and in the sand dunes of Miedzyn by Gestapo, SS and militiamen. In the woodland of Rusinowo (Kreis Rippin) the militia shot 4,200 people, and by 15 November members of the militia and the Wehrmacht had executed 8,000 people in the forest near Karlshof. In the absence of complete figures, some order of magnitude is suggested by the fact that these major ‘actions’, in each of which more than a thousand people were killed, alone accounted for over 65,000 deaths. Of these, 20,000–30,000 people were killed by local German militias. The overall death toll of the first months of German occupation must be far higher still. Already, these massacres set a new precedent even in the bloodstained annals of Hitler’s regime. They would serve as a starting point for the future campaigns in the east.
⁴³

Many of the shootings were staged out of the public eye, in forests and on airbases, but others attracted numerous spectators. During the evening of Saturday 7 October, the soldiers stationed in Schwetz were talking about the shootings which had been carried out that day and were scheduled to continue at the Jewish cemetery the next morning. On Sunday, Corporal Paul Kluge got there early, taking up a position close to the trench. As so often, it was the sight of the first group of victims that left the most enduring impression. A woman with three children got off the bus which had brought the prisoners to the Jewish cemetery and walked the 30 metres to the trench. Carrying her youngest child in her arms, she was made to climb down into it. She then lifted one of the other children in, while an SS man picked up the remaining little boy and passed him down to her. The woman then had to get her children to lie down on their stomachs next to her. Kluge stayed on, managing to get near enough to the four-man firing squad to look right down into the trench and observe how the men held their rifles about 20 centimetres from the back of the neck of their victims. Afterwards, he was asked to shovel earth over the corpses. He unhesitatingly obliged.
⁴⁴

Unable to watch children being killed, some of the soldiers walked away, but returned in time to see the shooting of the Polish men who arrived in a second bus. Paul Roschinski, a non-commissioned officer, noticed that some spectators got so close to the trench that their uniforms were sprinkled with the ‘flesh, brain and sand’ that flew out of it. Many of the soldiers who witnessed such events across Poland took rolls of photographs, which they sent home to be developed and printed. In this way, a visual record passed through the hands of parents, wives and photographic assistants before being returned to the ‘execution tourists’ in Poland. In most places, the Wehrmacht co-operated with the police and the SS, sometimes providing personnel for the firing squads.
⁴⁵

For some witnesses, these executions violated a moral boundary. The chief doctor to the 4th Army was so outraged that he compiled a dossier of eyewitness statements, which he addressed directly to ‘the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht and the Führer of the German people Adolf Hitler’. His report was doomed for the archives, but the head of the military occupation in Poland, General Johannes Blaskowitz, also made it an issue. A devout Lutheran, Blaskowitz was so appalled by the reports reaching him that he repeatedly lobbied Walther von Brauchitsch, his Commander-in-Chief, and wrote to Hitler to protest about the behaviour of the SS, police and administration, underscoring the corrosive effects of such killings on military morale. Hitler dismissed his protests, declaring that ‘one cannot wage war with Salvation Army methods’. Blaskowitz persisted, warning in February 1940 that the more brutal the occupation, the more German troops it would tie down. Indeed, the Wehrmacht could never reduce its occupation force below 500,000 men. After five months of badgering, Hitler eventually replaced Blaskowitz, but he did not retire him permanently.
⁴⁶

With a thousand priests among the victims of SS terror, the exiled primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, published a damning indictment of the German occupation in London. The Vatican tried to intervene through diplomatic channels, only to be told that the Concordat with the Church did not apply to the new territories; the State Secretary at the Foreign Ministry, Ernst von Weizsäcker, simply refused to acknowledge the Vatican’s protest about the treatment of Polish clergy. Although the German Catholic Church made some effort to minister to Polish prisoners of war, no German bishop raised his voice to join Cardinal Hlond’s condemnation of the murder of Polish Catholic priests.
⁴⁷

As a Catholic, Wilm Hosenfeld found himself having to follow his own moral compass. He had been horrified by the pogrom against the Jews in November 1938, and he quickly realised that the scale of violence against the Poles was out of all proportion to the tales of woe he had heard from the local German population. ‘It’s not about retaliation,’ he wrote to his wife on 10 November 1939; ‘it looks more like imitating the Russians and trying to exterminate the intelligentsia.’ He had no idea how accurate his guess was. ‘Who would have thought it of a regime with a deadly hatred of Bolshevism,’ he continued. ‘How gladly I became a soldier, but today I’d like to tear the [field-] grey uniform into pieces.’ Was he there to hold ‘the shield . . . behind which these crimes against humanity can happen?’ During these first months in Poland, Hosenfeld intervened personally a couple of times to have Poles released from German custody, and, as a result, befriended their families. During the years that followed, Hosenfeld would keep in touch and even bring his wife from Thalau to stay with his Polish friends, disregarding all the norms of communal apartheid typical of German occupation.
⁴⁸

Hosenfeld’s Catholic faith served as an important bridge across the chasm between occupied and occupier. Unable to express his sense of shock and abhorrence openly, let alone to alter the course of events, he had to force his emotional response inwards where it grew into a gnawing and profound sense of shame. His letters to his wife became a private confessional. ‘We still have these letters,’ Hosenfeld wrote to Annemie on 10 November, closing his most unhappy letter of the war so far. ‘I am going to sleep now. If I could weep, I’d like to do it in your arms, and that would be such a sweet comfort.’ The longer the war lasted, the more isolated he would become. Hosenfeld still believed that the Germans had a right to occupy Poland, sharing in the conventional notions of the ‘right of the higher culture’; it was his sense of moral restraint and humanitarian conviction that was becoming increasingly rare.
⁴⁹

To another devout Catholic soldier, it all looked quite different. Even after the Poles had been defeated and cowed, Heinrich Böll looked into their faces and saw lurking ‘behind the melancholy of their eyes, hatred and real fanaticism’. The eighth child of a Catholic carpenter in Cologne, Böll had just started studying literature at university and trying his hand at writing when war broke out. A generation younger than Hosenfeld, he had been called up that summer. ‘If there was no more military here, within three weeks not a single ethnic German would survive. One sees quite clearly in their eyes that this people is predestined for revolution,’ the 21-year-old wrote home from Bromberg. They needed a strong German hand, and he needed his mother to send him the latest cure-all to stay alert and on his guard – Pervitin, a methamphetamine whose use the Reich Health Leader tried to limit without much success.
⁵⁰

Böll’s reflections were more typical of soldiers’ views than Hosenfeld’s and the German media had done its best to make sure that Poles would be viewed with suspicion. In mid-August, it had reported on mass deportations of Germans from the borderlands to ‘concentration camps’ in the Polish interior, with the outbreak of war precipitating a string of massacres in which ethnic German women and children were the principal victims. The weekly cinema news, the
Wochenschau,
carried graphic reports of these events and portrayed captured Polish soldiers and civilian ‘irregulars’ as criminally degenerate ‘subhumans’, who had been ordered to exterminate the German minority. The Wehrmacht Office for the Investigation of War Crimes was sent in to find evidence of a deliberate, top-down, Polish attempt at genocide.
⁵¹

The German Foreign Office had been busy for months prior to the war, gathering the evidence that would justify the invasion. In the event, the upsurge of spontaneous ethnic violence in the borderlands in the first week of war provided real evidence, which could be magnified and manipulated to serve German needs. In November 1939 the Foreign Office rushed out a book with hundreds of pages of testimony and over a hundred documentary photographs. Carefully selected to create a powerful emotional narrative, it included intimate images of grieving wives and mothers, weeping quietly in their homes or beside carts laden with the dead; forensic photos of women who had been dismembered, or killed in positions suggestive of rape; children whose heads had been smashed in; corpses, like the First World War veteran with his full-length prosthetic leg still attached and his face obliterated beyond all recognition, laid out naked on the mortuary slab. One particularly grisly photo showed a woman giving birth at the moment she and her newborn baby were murdered, the umbilical cord still visibly connecting them. The Foreign Office publication was intended to justify Germany’s occupation of Poland and to influence neutral, especially American, opinion. A second German edition followed in February 1940, and an English edition was published in May.
⁵²

The violence was real enough, especially in northern Posen around Bromberg/Bydgoszcz, where many ethnic Germans were killed, mainly by retreating Polish soldiers who believed that they had been shot at from the houses of Germans or who searched them for Nazi flags and symbols. Some of the dynamics at work here had been seen in the initial violence visited on Polish villages by German troops, but this time on a lesser scale: despite German propaganda claims to be countering a centrally planned attempt at deportation and genocide by the Polish state, even the Wehrmacht War Crimes Investigators found only evidence of spontaneous and uncoordinated violence, with some Polish military units even warning ethnic Germans about the mood of the troops following them.

There was also one major difference between the two German editions of the Foreign Office’s
Documents on Polish Cruelty
: in November 1939, the number of German victims was put at 5,800, a figure still broadly accepted by scholars. In February 1940, it increased tenfold, possibly at Hitler’s behest. Goebbels ordered newspapers to underline the new findings, and a fresh wave of press coverage drove the point home with headlines like ‘58,000 VICTIMS OF POLISH TERROR’ and ‘20 YEARS OF POLISH RULE OF MURDER’. On the home front, the publication was criticised only for minimising the ‘justified’ German retaliatory measures against the Poles. Whether or not people fully believed that the Polish state had ordered the deliberate extermination of the German minority, they certainly did not forget these events. Indeed, in spring 1943, when Goebbels tried to mobilise public opinion – for the one and only time – in sympathy with the Poles, in order to showcase the far greater threat of Soviet terror, he had to contend with the popular memories of 1939. People pointed to the ‘fact’ that 60,000 Germans had been killed by Poles and asked why they merited German sympathy, even against killers from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The Propaganda Ministry could not remake public sympathies at will.
⁵³

Such arguments appropriated victimhood, justifying all subsequent German actions. They worked not by denying German violence but by making it, comparatively, insignificant. Only the numbers of German dead mattered, because only German rights mattered; and they had to be multiplied ten times in order to carry the right moral weight. The first two German documentary films of the war,
The Campaign in Poland
and
Baptism of Fire,
both opened with the threat of mass murder of ethnic Germans. The feelings evoked by existential threat and rescue also lent themselves to feature films, and the first of these appeared in 1940 with the fitting title
Enemies.
When Polish workers kill the German owner of a sawmill in the summer of 1939, the film’s stars, Brigitte Horney and Willy Birgel, rescue his children and join other German refugees on their way to safety across the borders of the Reich. Directed by the renowned émigré Russian filmmaker Viktor Tourjansky, the film cast Horney as the heroine rescuing her fellow ethnic Germans from their murderous enemies. The plotline and the role of the German heroine were reprised the following year, in the bigger-budget film
Homecoming.
Here a group of Germans, hiding in a barn and listening secretly to Hitler’s speech of 1 September 1939, are discovered by Poles and locked up in a partially submerged cellar. Expecting to be liquidated at any moment, they are saved by the passion and bravery of the young Nazi teacher, Paula Wessely, who leads them across the border – this time the Russian–German demarcation line. Against her emotional final monologue, the film ends with a shot of her blending into the refugee trek to be greeted by a giant image of Hitler at the border post. In keeping with Nazi aesthetics the film elevated the existential threat to the ethnic Germans into a quasi-religious experience. As they recognise the imminence of their own martyrdom, their readiness for sacrifice transforms them and, it was hoped, the watching audience. The film received standing ovations when it opened in the Reich. In contrast to the passive female and child victims portrayed by the documentation of the Foreign Ministry, here were German heroines capable of providing moral leadership. They were spiritual not physical combatants, unlike the depraved Polish women irregulars, whom Gerhard M. and his comrades had burned alive.
⁵⁴