The Third Reich at War (5 page)

Typical of these men in most though not all respects was Bruno Streckenbach, an SS brigade leader born in Hamburg in 1902, son of a customs officer. Too young to fight in the First World War, Streckenbach joined a Free Corps unit in 1919 and was involved in fighting against left-wing revolutionaries in Hamburg before taking part in the Kapp putsch of March 1920. After working in various administrative jobs in the 1920s, Streckenbach joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and then in 1931 the SS; in November 1933 he became an officer in the SS Security Service, rising steadily through its ranks and becoming chief of the State Police in Hamburg in 1936, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in the process. This recommended him to Best, who appointed him head of Task Force I in Poland in 1939. Streckenbach was unusual chiefly in his relative lack of educational attainments; a number of his subordinate officers had doctorates. Like them, however, he had a history of violent commitment to the extreme right.
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Streckenbach and the Task Forces, numbering in total about 2,700 men, were charged with establishing the political and economic security of the German occupation in the wake of the invasion. This included not only the killing of ‘the leading stratum of the population in Poland’ but also the ‘combating of all elements in enemy territory to the rear of the fighting troops who are hostile to the Reich and the Germans’.
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In practice this allowed the Task Forces considerable room for manoeuvre. The Task Forces were placed under the formal command of the army, which was ordered to assist them as far as the tactical situation allowed. This made sense insofar as the Task Forces were meant to deal with espionage, resistance, partisan groups and the like, but in practice they went very much their own way as the SS unfolded its massive campaign of arrests, deportations and murders.
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The Task Forces were armed with lists of Poles who had fought in one way or another against German rule in Silesia during the troubles that had accompanied the League of Nations plebiscites at the end of the First World War. Polish politicians, leading Catholics and proponents of Polish national identity were singled out for arrest. On 9 September 1939 the Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice, arrived in Bromberg to set up a series of show trials before a special court, which had condemned 100 men to death by the end of the year.
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The hospital director Dr Zygmunt Klukowski began recording in his diary mass executions of Poles in his district by the Germans, carried out on the slightest of pretexts - seventeen people in early January 1940, for example.
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The danger to him as an intellectual, professional man was particularly acute. Klukowski lived in constant fear of arrest, and indeed in June 1940 he was taken by German police from his hospital to an internment camp, where the Poles were put through punishing physical exercises, beaten ‘with sticks, whips, or fists’, and kept in filthy and insanitary conditions. Under interrogation he told the Germans that there was typhus in his hospital and he had to get back to stop it spreading into the town and possibly infecting them (‘In my head I was saying “glory be to the louse”,’ he later wrote in his diary). He was immediately released to go back to what he portrayed as his thoroughly infested hospital. He had been very lucky, he reflected; he had escaped being beaten or having to run round the prison training field, and he had got out quickly. The experience, he wrote, ‘surpassed all the rumors. I was unable before to comprehend the methodical disregard of personal dignity, how human beings could be treated much worse than any animals, while the physical abuses that were performed with sadistic pleasure clearly showed on the faces of the German Gestapo. But,’ he went on, ‘. . . the behavior of the prisoners was magnificent. No one begged for mercy; no one showed even a trace of cowardice . . . All the insults, mistreatment, and abuses were received calmly with the knowledge that they bring shame and disgrace to the German people.’
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Reprisals for even the most trivial offences were savage. In one incident in the village of Wawer, a Warsaw physician reported,

A drunken Polish peasant picked a quarrel with a German soldier and in the resulting brawl wounded him with a knife. The Germans seized this opportunity to carry out a real orgy of indiscriminate murder in alleged reprisal for the outrage. Altogether 122 people were killed. As, however, the inhabitants of this village, for some reason or other, apparently fell short of the pre-determined quota of victims, the Germans stopped a train to Warsaw at the local railway station (normally it did not call there at all), dragged out several passengers, absolutely innocent of any knowledge of what had happened, and executed them on the spot without any formalities. Three of them were left hanging with their heads down for four days at the local railway station. A huge board placed over the hideous scene told the story of the victims and threatened that a similar fate was in store for every locality where a German was killed or wounded.
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When a thirty-year-old stormtrooper leader and local official arrived drunk at the prison in Hohensalza, hauled the Polish prisoners out of their cells and had fifty-five of them shot on the spot, killing some of them personally, the only effect that the protests of other local officials had was to persuade Regional Leader Greiser to extract from him a promise not to touch any alcohol for the next ten years.
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In another incident, in Obluze, near Gdynia, the smashing-in of a window in the local police station resulted in the arrest of fifty Polish schoolboys. When they refused to name the culprit, their parents were ordered to beat them in front of the local church. The parents refused, so the SS men beat the boys with their rifle-butts then shot ten of them, leaving their bodies lying in front of the church for a whole day.
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Such incidents occurred on a daily basis through the winter of 1939-40 and involved a mixture of regular German troops, ethnic German militias and units from the Task Forces and the Order Police. While the army had not been ordered to kill the Polish intelligentsia, the view most soldiers and junior officers had of Poles as dangerous and treacherous subhumans was enough for them to target a large number of Polish intellectuals and professionals as part of what they thought of as preventive or reprisal measures.
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Given the fierce if ineffective resistance they encountered from the Poles, German army commanders were extremely worried at the prospect of a guerrilla war against their troops, and took the most draconian retaliatory measures where they suspected it was emerging.
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‘If there is shooting from a village behind the front,’ ordered Colonel-General von Bock on 10 September 1939, ‘and if it proves impossible to identify the house from which the shots came, then the whole village is to be burned to the ground.’
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By the time the military administration of occupied Poland ended on 26 October, 531 towns and villages had been burned to the ground, and 16,376 Poles had been executed.
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Lower-ranking German soldiers were fuelled by fear, contempt and rage as they encountered Polish resistance. In many units, officers gave pep-talks before the invasion, underlining the barbarism, bestiality and subhumanity of the Poles. Corporal Franz Ortner, a rifle-man, railed in a report against what he called the ‘brutalized’ Poles, who had, he thought, bayoneted the German wounded on the battlefield. A private, writing a letter home, described Polish actions against ethnic Germans as ‘brutish’. Poles were ‘insidious’, ‘treacherous’, ‘base’; they were mentally subnormal, cowardly, fanatical; they lived in ‘stinking holes’ instead of houses; and they were under the ‘baleful influence of Jewry’. Soldiers waxed indignant about the conditions in which Poles lived: ‘Everywhere foul straw, damp, pots and flannels’, wrote one of a Polish home he entered, confirming everything he had heard about the backwardness of the Poles.
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Typical examples of the ordinary soldier’s behaviour can be found in the diary of Gerhard M., a stormtrooper, born in Flensburg in 1914 and called up to the army shortly before the war. On 7 September 1939 his unit encountered resistance from ‘cowardly snipers’ in a Polish village. Gerhard M. had been a fireman before the war. But now he and the men of his unit burned the village to the ground.

Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children. A picture of misery. But the Polish people didn’t want it any better. In one of the primitive peasant houses we even surprised a woman servicing a Polish machine-gun. The house was turned over and set alight. After a short while the woman was surrounded by the flames and tried to get out. But we stopped her, as hard as it was. Soldiers can’t be treated any differently just because they’re in skirts. Her screaming rang in my ears long after. The whole village burned. We had to walk exactly in the middle of the street, because the heat from the burning houses on both sides was too great.
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Such scenes repeated themselves as the German armies advanced. A few days later, on 10 September 1939, Gerhard M.’s unit was fired on from another Polish village and set the houses alight.

Soon burning houses were lining our route, and out of the flames there sounded the screams of the people who had hidden in them and were unable any more to rescue themselves. The animals were bellowing in fear of death, a dog howled until it was burned up, but worst of all was the screaming of the people. It was dreadful. It’s still ringing in my ears even today. But they shot at us and so they deserved death.
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SS Task Forces, police units, ethnic German paramilitaries and regular German soldiers were thus killing civilians all over German-occupied Poland from September 1939 onwards. As well as observing actions of this kind, Dr Klukowski began to notice more and more young Polish men leaving for work in Germany in the early months of 1940. At the beginning of the year, indeed, the Reich Food Ministry, together with the Labour Ministry and the Office of the Four-Year Plan, had demanded a million Polish workers for the Reich economy. 75 per cent of them were to work in agriculture, where there was a serious labour shortage. These, as G̈ring decreed on 25 January 1940, were to come from the General Government. If they did not volunteer, they would have to be conscripted. Given the miserable conditions that existed in occupied Poland, the prospect of living in Germany was not unattractive, and over 80,000 Polish workers, a third of them women, were transported voluntarily to Germany on 154 special trains in February, mainly from the General Government. Once in Germany, however, they were subjected to harshly discriminatory laws and repressive measures.
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News of their treatment in Germany quickly led to a sharp decline in the number of volunteers, so that from April 1940 Frank introduced compulsion in an attempt to fulfil his quota. Increasingly, young Poles fled into the forests to avoid labour conscription in Germany; the beginnings of the Polish underground resistance movement date from this time.
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In January the resistance tried to assassinate the General Government’s police chief, and over the following weeks there were uprisings and murders of ethnic Germans in a number of villages. On 30 May 1940, Frank initiated a ‘pacification action’ in which 4,000 resistance fighters and intellectuals, half of whom were already in custody, were killed, along with some 3,000 Poles sentenced for criminal offences.
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This had little effect. In February 1940 there were still only 295,000 Poles, mostly prisoners of war, working as labourers in the Old Reich. This in no way made good the labour shortages that had been occasioned by the mass conscription of German men into the armed forces. By the summer of 1940, there were 700,000 Poles working as voluntary or forced labourers in the Old Reich; another 300,000 went to the Reich the following year. By this time, Frank was issuing local administrations with fixed quotas to fulfil. Often the police surrounded villages and arrested all the young men in them. Those who attempted to flee were shot. In towns, young Poles were simply rounded up by the police and the SS in cinemas or other public places, or on the streets, and shipped off without further ceremony. As a result of these methods, by September 1941 there were over a million Polish workers in the Old Reich. According to one estimate, only 15 per cent of them had gone there of their own accord.
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The mass deportation of young Poles as forced workers to the Reich was paralleled by a wholesale campaign of looting unleashed by the German occupation forces. When German soldiers tried to steal from his hospital, Klukowski managed to get rid of them by telling them once again that several of the patients had typhus.
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Others were not so quick-witted, or so well situated. The requirement for the troops to live off the land was not accompanied by any kind of detailed rules of requisitioning. From impounding chickens it was but a short step to requisitioning cooking equipment and then to stealing money and jewellery.
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Typical was the experience of Gerhard M., whose unit arrived in a Polish town and stood on the street awaiting orders:

A resourceful chap had discovered a chocolate shop with its windows boarded over. Unfortunately the owner wasn’t there. So we cleared out the shop on tick. Our vehicles were piled high with chocolate until there was no more room. Every soldier ran around with his cheeks stuffed full, chewing. We were mightily pleased with the cheapness of the purchase. I discovered a store of really beautiful apples. All up onto our vehicle. A can of lemons and chocolate biscuits on the back of my bike, and then off we went again.
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