The Second World War (9 page)
Nazi Party officials began selecting large numbers of Poles for labour in Germany as well as young women to work as domestic servants. Hitler told the army commander-in-chief General Walther von Brauchitsch, they wanted ‘
cheap slaves
’ and to clear the ‘rabble’ out of the newly acquired German territory. Blond children who corresponded to Aryan ideals were seized and sent back to Germany for adoption. Albert Förster, the Gauleiter (or regional leader) of Danzig-West Prussia, however, outraged Nazi purists when he permitted a massive reclassification of Poles as ethnic Germans. For the Poles concerned, however humiliating and distasteful, this redesignation of their origins offered the only way to avoid deportation and the loss of their homes. The men, however, soon found themselves conscripted into the Wehrmacht.
Hitler issued an amnesty order on 4 October to troops who had killed prisoners and civilians. They were presumed to have acted ‘
from bitterness over atrocities
committed by Poles’. Many officers were uneasy at what they saw as a loosening of military discipline. ‘
We have seen
and witnessed wretched scenes in which German soldiers burn and plunder, murder, and loot without thinking about it,’ an artillery battalion commander wrote. ‘Grown men, who without being conscious of what they were doing–and without any scruples–contravene laws and instructions and the honour of the German soldier.’
Generalleutnant Johannes Blaskowitz, the commander-in-chief of the Eighth Army, protested vehemently at the killing of civilians by the SS and their auxiliaries–the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. Hitler, on hearing of his memorandum, said in a fury that ‘
you can’t run a war
on Salvation Army lines’. Any other objections from the army were also dealt with in scathing terms. Yet many German officers still believed that Poland did not deserve to exist. Hardly any had objected to the invasion on moral grounds. As former members of the Freikorps in the violent chaos which followed the First World War, some of the older officers had been involved in bitter fighting against the Poles in frontier battles, especially in Silesia.
In a number of ways the Polish campaign and its aftermath became a trial run for Hitler’s subsequent
Rassenkrieg
, or race war against the Soviet Union. Some 45,000 Polish and Jewish civilians were shot, mainly by ordinary German soldiers. The SS
Einsatzgruppen
machine-gunned the inmates of mental asylums. An
Einsatzgruppe
had been allocated to the rear area of each army, under the codename Operation Tannenberg, to capture and even kill aristocrats, judges, prominent journalists, professors and any other person who might provide some form of leadership for a Polish resistance movement in the future. On 19 September,
SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich told General der Artillerie Franz Halder, the army chief of staff, quite openly that there would be ‘
a clear-out
: Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy’. At first the terror was chaotic, especially that carried out by the ethnic German militia, but towards the end of the year it became more coherent and directed.
Although Hitler never wavered in his hatred of the Jews, the industrial genocide which began in 1942 had not always been part of his plan. He exulted in his obsessive anti-semitism and established the Nazi mindset that Europe had to be ‘cleansed’ of all Jewish influence. But his plans before the war had not included a murderous annihilation. They had concentrated on creating an unbearable oppression which would force Jews to emigrate.
Nazi policy on the ‘Jewish question’ had fluctuated. In fact the very term ‘policy’ is misleading when one considers the institutional disorder of the Third Reich. Hitler’s dismissive attitude towards administration permitted an extraordinary proliferation of competing departments and ministries. Their rivalries, especially those between the Gauleiters and other Nazi Party officials, the SS, and the army, produced an astonishingly wasteful lack of cohesion which was totally at variance with the regime’s image of ruthless efficiency. Seizing on a random comment from the Führer, or trying to second-guess his wishes, competitors for his favour would initiate programmes without consulting other interested organizations.
On 21 September 1939, Heydrich issued an order laying down ‘preliminary measures’ for dealing with Poland’s Jewish population, which, at about three and a half million before the invasion, had represented 10 per cent of the population, the highest proportion in Europe. The Soviet zone held about one and a half million, a figure which was increased by the 350,000 Jews who had fled eastwards in front of the German armies. Heydrich ordered that those who still remained on German territory were to be concentrated in larger cities with good rail links. A massive movement of population was envisaged. On 30 October, Himmler gave instructions that all Jews in the Warthegau were to be forcibly transported to the Generalgouvernement. Their houses would then be given to
Volksdeutsche
settlers, who had never lived within the borders of the Reich and whose spoken German was often said to be incomprehensible.
Hans Frank, the overbearing and corrupt Nazi bully who ran the Generalgouvernement for his own profit from the royal castle in Kraków, was angry when told to prepare for the reception of several hundred thousand Jews as well as displaced Poles. No plan had been made to house or feed the victims of this forced migration, and nobody had thought what to do with them. In theory, those Jews fit enough would be used for forced labour. The rest would be confined in temporary ghettos in the larger
cities until they could be resettled. Jews trapped in the ghettos, deprived of money and with little food, were in many cases left to die of starvation and disease. Although not yet a programme of outright annihilation, it represented an important step in that direction. And as the difficulties of resettling Jews in an as yet undesignated ‘colony’ proved greater than imagined, the idea soon began to grow that killing them might be easier than moving them around.
While the looting, killing and chaotic conditions in Nazi-occupied areas made life appalling, it was scarcely better for Poles on the Soviet side of the new internal frontier.
Stalin’s hatred of Poland went back to the Soviet–Polish War and the defeat of the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920, which the Poles referred to as the Miracle on the Vistula. Stalin had been strongly criticized for his part in the failure of the 1st Cavalry Army to support the forces of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, whom he had executed on false charges in 1937 at the start of his purge of the Red Army. During the 1930s, the NKVD targeted as spies the large number of Poles in the Soviet Union, mostly Communist.
Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD during the Great Terror, became obsessed with imagined Polish conspiracies. Poles in the NKVD were purged, and in
Order 00485
of 11 August 1937 Poles were implicitly defined as enemies of the state. When Yezhov reported after the first twenty days of arrests, torture and executions, Stalin praised his work: ‘
Very good
! Keep on digging up and cleaning out this Polish filth. Eliminate it in the interests of the Soviet Union.’ In the anti-Polish drive during the Great Terror, 143,810 people were arrested for espionage and 111,091 executed. Poles were about forty times more likely to be executed during this period than other Soviet citizens.
Under the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which had ended the Soviet–Polish War, victorious Poland had incorporated western parts of Belorussia and Ukraine. It then settled them with many of Marshal Józef Pi
sudski’s legionaries. But following the Red Army’s invasion in the autumn of 1939, more than five million Poles found themselves under Soviet rule, which treated Polish patriotism as counter-revolutionary by definition. The NKVD arrested 109,400 people, most of whom were sent to the labour camps of the Gulag, while 8,513 of them were executed. The Soviet authorities targeted all those who might play a role in keeping Polish nationalism alive, including landowners, lawyers, teachers, priests, journalists and officers. It was a deliberate policy of class warfare and national decapitation. Eastern Poland, occupied by the Red Army, was to be split and incorporated into the Soviet Union, the northern region becoming part
of Belorussia and the southern joined to Ukraine.
Mass deportations to Siberia or central Asia began on 10 February 1940. The NKVD rifle regiments rounded up 139,794 Polish civilians in temperatures below 30 degrees Centigrade. The first wave of families selected were roused by shouts and the banging of rifle butts on their door. Red Army soldiers or Ukrainian militia, under the command of an NKVD officer, would barge in and point their guns, yelling threats. Beds were overturned and cupboards searched, allegedly for hidden weapons. ‘
You are Polish elite
,’ the NKVD man told the Adamczyk family. ‘You are Polish lords and masters. You are enemies of the people.’ A more frequent formula of the NKVD was ‘
Once a Pole, always a kulak
’–the Soviet term of abuse for a rich and reactionary peasant.
Families were given little time to prepare for the terrible journey, abandoning their homes and farms for good. Most felt paralysed by the prospect. Fathers and sons were forced to kneel facing the wall, while the womenfolk were allowed to gather possessions, such as a
sewing machine
to earn money wherever they were taken, cooking utensils, bedding, family photographs, a child’s rag doll and school books. Some Soviet soldiers were clearly embarrassed by their task and murmured apologies. A few families were allowed to milk their cow before they left or to kill some chickens or a piglet as food for the three-week journey in cattle wagons. Everything else had to be left behind. The Polish diaspora had begun.
SEPTEMBER 1939–MARCH 1940
O
nce it became evident that massed enemy bombers were not going to flatten London and Paris immediately, life returned almost to nor mal. The war had ‘
a strange, somnambulistic quality
’, wrote a commentator on daily life in London. Apart from the risk
in the blackout
of walking into a lamp-post, the greatest danger was being run down by a motorcar. In London, over 2,000 pedestrians were killed in the last four months of 1939. The absolute darkness encouraged some young couples to have sexual intercourse standing up in shop doorways, a sport which soon became a subject for music-hall jokes. Cinemas and theatres gradually reopened. In London, pubs were packed. In Paris, cafés and restaurants were full as Maurice Chevalier sang the hit of the moment, ‘Paris sera toujours Paris’. The fate of Poland had almost been forgotten.
While the war on land and in the air languished, the war at sea intensified. For the British, it had begun with a tragedy. On 10 September 1939, the submarine
HMS
Triton
sank another submarine, HMS
Oxley
, in the belief that it was a U-boat. The first German U-boat was sunk on 14 September by the escort destroyers to the carrier HMS
Ark Royal
. But on 17 September the
U-39
managed to sink the obsolete carrier HMS
Courageous
. Nearly a month later, the Royal Navy suffered a far greater blow when
U-47
penetrated the defences of Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and sank the battleship HMS
Royal Oak
. Britain’s confidence in the strength of its navy was deeply shaken.
The two pocket battleships loose in the Atlantic, the
Deutschland
and the
Admiral Graf Spee
, had meanwhile been given permission to start the war in earnest. But the Kriegsmarine made a grave mistake on 3 October, when the
Deutschland
seized an American freighter as a prize of war. Following the brutal invasion of Poland, this helped to swing public opinion in the United States against the Neutrality Act, which forbade the sale of arms to a belligerent, and in favour of the Allies who needed to purchase them.
On 6 October, Hitler announced in the Reichstag his offer of peace to Britain and France, assuming that they would accede to his occupation of both Poland and Czechoslovakia. The very next day, without even waiting to hear their reply, Hitler began discussions with commanders-in-chief and General der Artillerie Halder on an offensive in the west. The army
high command, the OKH, was instructed to draw up a plan, Case Yellow, for an attack in five weeks’ time. But the arguments of his senior commanders about the difficulties of redeployment, provisioning and the lateness of the season for such an operation exasperated him. He must also have been put out when, on 10 October, a wild rumour swept Berlin that the British were agreeing to peace terms. The spontaneous celebrations in street market and
Gasthaus
alike turned to dejection when Hitler’s eagerly awaited speech on the radio showed that this was a wishful fantasy. Goebbels was furious, above all at the lack of enthusiasm for the war which had been revealed.
