The German Foreign Office had noticed the significance of Stalin’s speech in March 1939 when he had said, in a clear rebuff to Britain, that he would ‘not let our country be drawn into conflict by warmongers, whose custom it is to let others pull their chestnuts out of the fire’.
‘That was the turning-point,’ says Hans von Herwarth, then a diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow. After Stalin’s speech, Germany and the Soviet Union began negotiations on greater economic ties. As the summer progressed, Ribbentrop, with Hitler’s blessing, pushed forward with negotiations for a political treaty, a ‘non-aggression’ pact, which was eventually signed on 23 August. At first sight, the treaty seemed incredible – totally at variance both with Hitler’s expressed ideological view of the Soviet Union and the Soviets’ own suspicions about the Nazi regime. But there was a secret part of the treaty, not revealed at the time, that shows why both countries, greedy for spoils, would have seen the agreement in their own national self-interest. Hans von Herwarth saw the secret protocol signed, and confirms that within it Hitler ‘promised to give back to the Soviet Union all that they had lost through the results of World War I. And naturally that was a prize which France and Great Britain couldn’t pay because that meant to sacrifice the freedom of the Baltic states, Poland and even, perhaps, Finland.’
Hans von Herwarth was clear what the consequences of the Non-Aggression Pact would be. ‘Now we have lost the war,’ he told his colleagues that summer. ‘My opinion was that the Americans would come in and we would lose World War II.’ But Hans von Herwarth was very much in a minority. The general view was that the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union was a major foreign policy coup. Britain and France realized that it made a Nazi invasion of Poland more likely. Hitler himself, according to notes of a meeting taken by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (head of the Abwehr – the military intelligence of the German High Command), admitted to his military commanders: ‘Now Poland is in the position in which I wanted her . . . Today’s announcement of the Non-Aggression Pact with Russia came as a bombshell. The consequences cannot be foreseen. Stalin also said that this course will benefit both countries. The effect on Poland will be tremendous.’24
This meeting at Berchtesgaden on 22 August 1939 showed Hitler at his most frightening. All the threads of Nazi thought were pulled together: an overwhelming sense of the great Darwinian struggle ahead (‘A life and death struggle . . . On the opposite side they are weaker men’), the importance of individual courage (‘It is not machines that fight each other, but men’), and a complete rejection of ‘weak’ values such as restraint and compassion (‘Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally.’).
Yet as he gave this chilling speech to his military leaders, Hitler had put himself in the position of being allied to the one country in the world he wanted as an enemy – Russia – and was close to war with the one country in Europe he had originally wanted as a friend – Britain. When faced with this reality today, a number of interviewees answered us reproachfully: ‘Please don’t forget,’ says Graf von Kielmansegg, then a Wehrmacht officer, ‘England and France declared war, not Germany.’
‘I always hoped,’ says Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, ‘that England – here I’m talking to you as an Englishman – that England would see what Germany was planning to do and would agree and share in Europe, whatever the politics.’
Even at this late stage – August 1939 – officers such as Karl Boehm-Tettelbach did not feel they were about to embark on a world war. ‘Hitler’s story was that he wanted to help Germans. He didn’t want to invade Czechoslovakia. He didn’t want to have Czechoslovakia, he wanted to help the Germans there. And it was the same with Poland. He wanted to erase the Versailles diktat that Danzig and Königsberg were separated from Germany. So therefore he had something good in mind: he wanted to help the Germans and to unite Germany . . . Politically, I approved of it.’
The Nazi leadership knew that Hitler was not limiting himself to ‘uniting Germany’ again. The tone of his 22 August meeting had shown that his desire for conquest was much more ambitious than that. On 29 August Hermann Göring beseeched Hitler not to ‘go for broke’. Hitler replied that ‘throughout my life I have always gone for broke’.
On 1 September German troops invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war. This war had not been planned, but with Hitler and the Nazis pursuing these particular policies, war of some kind was inevitable.
The chaos and rivalries that had characterized so much of the Nazi government were now exposed to the stresses of a world conflict. As Dr Goebbels heard the news that war had been declared, he turned to his hated rival Ribbentrop and said, ‘Herr von Ribbentrop, this is your war. To begin a war is easy. To end it is more difficult.’25
4
THE WILD EAST
ON 20 JUNE 1946 there was a celebration in Poznan, Western Poland. Crowds gathered wherever they could, climbing fences and trees, all striving to find the best place to witness the much-anticipated hanging of Arthur Greiser, former Nazi ruler of the Polish Warthegau. Anna Jeziorkowska had taken a friend along: ‘I can only say that at the moment when Greiser was hanged from the gallows, people were so overjoyed, so overcome by enthusiasm that they were kissing one another, jumping up and down, shouting, bursting into songs.’ Anna walked home rejuvenated. ‘After one has had to endure such suffering,’ she says, ‘then one is looking for some form of satisfaction, isn’t one?’
No country occupied by Germany in the entire war endured as much as Poland. This was the epicentre of Nazi brutality, the place where Nazism achieved its purest and most bestial form. Six million Poles died in the war – around 18 per cent of the population; by comparison, the British lost fewer than 400,000.
Arthur Greiser was one of the men most responsible for the appalling suffering of the Poles. Along with Hans Frank, who ran the district the Nazis named the General Government, and Albert Forster, the overlord of Danzig/West Prussia, Greiser was one of the absolute masters of Poland. But at his war crimes trial you would never have guessed the individual power he had once possessed. He pleaded with the court that he had really been a friend of the Poles and that Hitler was the man to blame for what had happened. Greiser said that he, too, had been a ‘victim of Hitler’s policies’ and a ‘scapegoat for the crimes of his masters’. In essence, he claimed he was simply acting under orders. But this was a lie. There were, in fact, hardly any orders (in the sense of binding instructions) given to men like Greiser.
Hitler referred to such men as a ‘race of rulers, a breed of viceroys.’1 These rulers of the east were allowed tremendous latitude in decision-making. The order they received from Hitler was simply: ‘they had ten years to tell him that Germanization of their provinces was complete and he would ask no questions about their methods.’2 The logical conclusion of a regime where party leaders were told to ‘take over power themselves’ (see here), or where in the absence of orders from the top, party functionaries worked ‘towards the Führer’ (see here) was the terror and chaos of the Nazi occupation of Poland. A letter Greiser had written to Himmler was quoted at the trial. In it Greiser stated his belief that he could effectively treat the Jews of Poland as he liked: ‘I, for my part, do not believe that the Führer needs to be consulted yet again about this matter, particularly in view of the fact that it was only recently during our last discussion concerning the Jews that he told me I could proceed with them according to my own discretion.’3
Hitler had promised a ‘new order’ for the east. What happened may have been new, but there was precious little order in it.
As the German troops crossed into Poland on 1 September, their political masters had still not made the most basic decisions about what political shape the newly acquired territory should have. How much of it should be incorporated into the Reich? Indeed, should any piece be left that could still be called ‘Poland’? What was clear was what the Nazis wanted to do with the Poles themselves – turn them into slaves, educated only to the most basic level
. Poland was thus about to become the scene of the biggest racial experiment the world has seen. In the process the belief that twentieth-century Europe was home only to civilized people would be shattered.
Sporadic signs showed from the first that this was no ordinary invasion. German SS units displayed terrible and casual brutality as they accompanied the regular army into Poland. Wilhelm Moses served in a regular army transport regiment during the invasion of Poland and what he saw led him to the conclusion that ‘an animal isn’t as dangerous as the Nazis were in Poland’. As he drove through one Polish village, he witnessed the brass band of the SS Germania Regiment playing as seven or eight people were hanged from the gallows. He could see that the SS had first tied the victims’ feet together and then attached stones to them. This technique led them to die a deliberately slow death. Their tongues were hanging out, their faces blue and green. ‘I no longer knew where I was,’ says Wilhelm Moses. ‘You can’t really describe the way I saw it. The music was only playing because people were screaming so much.’
Later in the invasion, Wilhelm Moses and his truck were commandeered by the SS, and he was ordered to transport Polish Jews between towns, delivering them from one SS unit to the next. He is still haunted by their cries as they were loaded: ‘Let me get down, don’t take me, they will kill us,’ he says the families would cry.
‘Well, who said that they are going to kill you?’ he asked.
‘But of course they will kill us, they killed the others too, my mother, my father, my children have all been killed. They will kill us too!’
‘Well, are you Jews?’ asked Herr Moses.
‘Yes, we are Jews,’ they replied.
‘What could I do?’ says Herr Moses. ‘I am a tortured person. As a German, I can only tell you that I was ashamed about everything that had happened. And I no longer felt German . . . I had already got to the point where I said, “If a bullet were to hit me, I would no longer have to be ashamed to say that I’m German, later, once the war is over.”’
Wilhelm Moses has no clear idea why those he saw executed were murdered, or how the particular families he transported were selected. Even today, studying the documents, it is hard to make sense of why the terror occurred where it did. Unlike the systematic killing the Einsatzgruppen (Reinhard Heydrich’s infamous ‘special units’) were to embark on in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the killings following the invasion of Poland were sporadic. The SS probably killed anyone they didn’t like the look of – especially any Polish Jews who had in some way ‘offended’ them. There was no law to prevent their random cruelty.
Aside from individual acts of terror against Jews, or ‘partisans’ who had been resisting the invasion, the Nazis also victimized another particularly hated section of Polish society, the intelligentsia. Implementing a policy that was to be copied by the Cambodian Communist Pol Pot more than thirty years later, the Nazis proposed genetically engineering a country by killing. They believed that if intelligent people were removed, there would be less resistance to their plans for creating a state consisting of ignorant slaves. And if intelligent people could be prevented from breeding, the next generation would consist of only stupid people. A practical step to the fulfilment of this warped idea occurred in November 1939 at the Jagellonian University in Krakow.
The occupying Germans called the professors of the ancient university to a meeting in one of the lecture rooms. One of those who attended was Mieczyslaw Brozek, an assistant professor of philology. He expected the representatives of the new German authorities simply to instruct the academics present how they were to carry on teaching. Instead, after he and his colleagues had been sitting in the lecture room for a few minutes, they turned round to see that a row of soldiers had appeared behind them. The Nazis ordered the academics to go downstairs, beating them with rifle butts as they went. Brozek was in shock as he saw elderly professors hit by young German soldiers. ‘I had a very Catholic upbringing,’ he says, ‘and it did not enter my head that something evil could happen . . . For anyone to imagine anything like this. It was beyond our life experience.’
Professor Stanislaw Urbanczyk was another academic caught up in this diabolical German plan whose intention was, he says, for ‘the Poles to remain only at the lowest levels . . . to be slaves’. In the concentration camps where the professors were imprisoned, ‘What was really difficult to survive was the hunger and the cold. It was a particularly cold winter and in the space of one month over a dozen professors died.’ Those who transgressed even the most minor camp rule were tortured. ‘One of my colleagues had a letter from his mother in his pocket,’ says Professor Urbanczyk, ‘and when they found it during a search he was strung up on a post and had to hang there with his arms tied tight behind him for an hour or more. Another punishment was to be beaten with a stick.’
For these extremely intelligent men used to making sense of what was going on around them, the sheer injustice of their suffering was almost unbearable. Mieczyslaw Brozek remembers seeing a German guard cuddling his child in his arms and then thinking, ‘Crowds of corpses lie in the cellar, and at the same time this man has a heart for his child, his wife and so on. The duality of this is unbelievable.’ Brozek suffered the effects of this psychological torture for many years afterwards. His time in the camp persuaded him of ‘the complete annihilation of values. After the experiences I had in the camp there are no values. I had a vision of the worthlessness of everything. The senselessness of everything. This tormented me desperately, to the brink of suicide.’
Fourteen months after the meeting at which they had been snatched, almost all the surviving professors were released. News of their abduction had reached the outside world and pressure had been growing, particularly from Italy and the Pope, for them to be freed. That the Nazis were susceptible to outside pressure of this sort may seem surprising given what was to happen during Operation Barbarossa (see here) and its aftermath; but the professors had the ‘good fortune’ to be victims of the regime in the very first year of the war when, particularly before the fall of France, the Nazis still took some notice of outside pressure.
In those early months of the war some of the German Army leadership also disliked the excesses they learnt had been committed, primarily by the SS. Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Ober-Ost region, wrote two memorandums of complaint; this extract is from his second, dated 6 February 1940: ‘It is misguided to slaughter tens of thousands of Jews and Poles as is happening at present . . . The acts of violence against the Jews which occur in full view of the public inspire among the religious Poles not only deep disgust but also great pity . . . The attitude of the troops to the SS and police alternates between abhorrence and hatred. Every soldier feels repelled and revolted by these crimes which are being perpetrated in Poland by nationals of the Reich and representatives of State authority.’4
Hitler was not moved by such arguments. The diary entry of his army adjutant, Major Engel, for 18 November 1939 records Hitler’s reaction to Blaskowitz’s first memo: ‘[Hitler] starts making serious criticisms of the “childish attitudes” among the army leadership; one can’t fight a war with Salvation Army methods. This also confirms his long-held aversion to General Bl. whom he had never trusted.’5
There was never any question about which side of the argument Hitler supported. But the very fact that generals such as Blaskowitz still felt able to protest at atrocities witnessed by the army may go some way to explaining why the killings and oppression in Poland were seemingly arbitrary. Less than two years later, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the army leadership would be much more compliant in the face of Nazi atrocities.
Six weeks after the invasion and its initial chaos, the Nazi administrative plans for Poland had taken shape. The country had been split between Germany and the Soviet Union under the secret part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in August 1939 by Molotov and Ribbentrop. The German part (188,000 square kilometres of Polish territory with a population of 20.2
million Poles) was either parcelled off to be part of existing Reich territory like East Prussia, or formed into one of three new districts, each run by a committed Nazi. Albert Forster ran the area called West Prussia, Arthur Greiser ran the Warthegau (an area with Posen – or Poznan, as the Germans called the city – at its heart), and Hans Frank ran the remaining occupied territory, now called the General Government. West Prussia and the Warthegau were integrated into the Reich, and the General Government was to be, initially at least, a dumping ground for unwanted Jews and Poles.
Hitler may have had a ‘vision’ for Poland – to reorder it racially so that West Prussia and the Warthegau became ‘German’ while the General Government became the dustbin into which the people not wanted elsewhere were thrown. But the enormity of accomplishing this vision at a time of war, plus the chaos endemic within the Nazi hierarchy, meant that those charged with carrying it out had great latitude in decision-making – even, as we shall see, to the extent of contradicting the spirit of the vision altogether.
Central to the task of racially reordering Poland was movement. The Nazis intended to treat the Polish people like so many parcels, throwing them from one place to the next until the pattern pleased them. Heinrich Himmler was charged with organizing this massive task. Space first had to be found in the incorporated territories for the hundreds of thousands of incoming ethnic Germans who, under the secret protocol with the Soviet Union, had been allowed to leave the Baltic states and other territories in the wake of Stalin’s occupation. Meanwhile, ‘unsuitable’ Poles (such as the intelligentsia, or those who might present a ‘threat’ to the Germans) were to be deported south to the General Government. Simultaneously, the indigenous Polish population was to be assessed and graded according to racial value. Some might be classed suitable as ‘additional population’, others classed as ‘unsuitable’. The Jews (who were certainly ‘unsuitable’ in the eyes of the Nazis) were to be gathered in ghettos until a decision could be made as to their eventual fate. In a regime within which there was already a predisposition to institutional chaos, this gigantic reordering of a population was a recipe for anarchy.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 11