To try to understand the human impact of the Nazis’ wild plan for Poland we traced individuals from every level of the Nazis’ racial order, from the indigenous Germans of the Warthegau to the Jews of Łódź, from the dispossessed Poles of Posen to the incoming Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) of the Baltic states. Together they bear testimony to the consequences of an inhuman scheme.
Parts of Poland had, of course, been German before the Versailles Treaty, and large numbers of ethnic Germans were already living there. They presented no problems to the Nazi administrators in classification terms – they were simply German and, therefore, at the top of the racial pile. Charles Bleeker-Kohlsaat belonged to one of the grand German families who lived in the province of Posen. His grandparents owned an estate of more than 600 hectares with a magnificent house. They kept fifty-four horses and employed twenty-eight Polish families, nearly 300 people altogether. The Bleeker family were proud of their German tradition and had refused to relinquish it after the Versailles Treaty made Posen part of Poland. Long before the German Army arrived, Charles Bleeker’s grandmother, who had deliberately never learnt more than a few words of Polish, held the view that the Germans were superior to the Poles. ‘She would say, “After all, we are the Germans, we are more highly evolved. Those are just Poles and there is no need to learn their language,”’ says Charles Bleeker. ‘We were rich and somehow the Poles were made to feel that.’
The Bleeker family were overjoyed at the news that the German Army was approaching: ‘The adults were glad to be German again,’ says Charles Bleeker. He remembers, when he was eleven, a German soldier arrived on a motorcycle, the first of an army they all felt would bring their liberation. ‘I looked at him,’ says Bleeker, ‘and said “Good afternoon!” and he looked at me and said, “Good afternoon, lad. What good German you speak!” I said, “But I am German!” Then it was the soldier’s turn to be astonished because he had thought that now that he was in Poland, there would only be Polish people living there. I was fascinated by his uniform, by the fact that he spoke German, that he was friendly to me, by his beautiful motorcycle. I was beside myself.’ But within days, this feeling of euphoria became mixed with fear. As ethnic Germans the Bleekers were able to keep their grand estate – indeed, the Nazis renamed the whole area Bleekersdorf – but their Polish landowning neighbours suffered a very different fate. ‘They were evacuated very early on,’ says Charles Bleeker, ‘and they came to us and begged us on their knees to intercede on their behalf so that they could stay on their own property. We did no such thing because we simply lacked the courage. Then we suddenly heard things like this person had been dispossessed and that person has been dispossessed, another one has been shot as a hostage, and we told ourselves, good heavens these people must have done something, otherwise the German government would not have dispossessed them or shot them as hostages. They must have done something.’
Still trying to rationalize the suffering they saw around them, the Bleekers went to welcome the trains bringing in ethnic Germans from the Baltic states, Bessarabia and the other regions now occupied by Stalin. At the station they experienced another disappointment: some of the incoming Germans were not the superior race they had expected. ‘We were not at all keen on them, at least my family wasn’t. These people spoke mostly very poor German. They had a terrible accent which nobody could understand and we almost took them for Poles.’
The Eigis were one incoming family of German ethnic origin. They had chosen to be deported by the Nazis from Estonia once they heard that Stalin was approaching. Irma Eigi was seventeen years old when she found herself with the rest of her family on a ship heading towards Poland. ‘We were not happy at all,’ she says. ‘It was like standing next to yourself. It happened, you didn’t quite grasp it. It was a bit like being in a state of shock.’ Irma Eigi had loved living in Estonia; she and her family had found it a tolerant and beautiful country, but they felt they had little choice but to leave on the German ships when they came. Their only alternative had been to face Stalin and, they were warned, risk being sent to Siberia. Instead, they thought, the German ships would take them to Germany. But, like the Bleekers, they too were disappointed by the harsh realities of the Nazi racial reorganization. When the Eigis learnt that their true destination was not Germany but Poland, they were outraged. ‘We hadn’t reckoned on that at all. When we were told we were going to the Warthegau, well, it was quite a shock, I can tell you.’ The shock increased when, after the boat docked, the Eigis found that their first home was a transit camp, a school strewn with straw. But this was nothing to the surprise they experienced on discovering how the Nazis went about finding somewhere for the incoming ethnic Germans to live. ‘Poles had to move out of their houses for us so that we had flats to live in,’ says Irma Eigi. ‘We had no inkling of that before it happened.’
Frau Eigi still remembers with horror the day, just before Christmas 1939, when she went with her family to the Nazi housing office in Posen to ask if there was a flat available for them. The housing officials said there was. The Eigis were given the keys, the address and a map of the city, and told to go off on their own and find it. ‘When we went to visit the flat we had terrible feelings,’ she says. ‘It was a tall apartment building, unrenovated and with strange windows.’ They climbed the stairs and opened the front door of the apartment. Inside there was chaos. ‘You noticed there had been people here who had had to leave very quickly,’ she says. ‘Some of the cupboards stood open. The drawers were open. On the table were the remains of food. And then the unmade beds, messed up.’ Frau Eigi’s father refused to stay in the flat and the whole family went back to the Nazi housing allocation office. There they were told that since it was near Christmas there was no other flat on offer, so the Eigis had to move in. They chose to settle in only one room, huddled together against their fears of what had happened. ‘Strangely, I can still see this flat today,’ says Frau Eigi. ‘And every time I think about it I am still overcome by some fear. It is as if I had goose pimples on my back. Always, when I’m frightened, I see this flat in front of me, even in other situations of fear.’
Now that the Eigi family had a flat, the next stage in the Nazi resettlement programme was to find the head of the family a job. In Estonia Herr Eigi had run a hotel. There were no hotels available in Posen, but there were still some restaurants that had not yet been taken over by the Nazis. Herr Eigi was told to walk around town and see if he liked the look of any restaurant still owned and run by Poles. Off he went, accompanied by his wife and his daughter. ‘Most restaurants were in German hands,’ says Irma Eigi, ‘we were relatively late. And the Baltic Germans had already taken possession of the better restaurants.’ Eventually they managed to find a small restaurant still run by Poles, so her father went back to the Nazis and asked for permission to run this restaurant. After signing formal papers of ownership, he simply took over the restaurant. (‘Taking over’ is a recurrent theme in Nazi ideology. Herr Eigi was behaving as the Nazis believed all Germans, as a superior race, should. He wanted this restaurant, so why not just take it?)
Irma Eigi cannot remember what happened to the Polish owner, or even if she or her father ever met him. ‘It could be that the Polish owner had already left,’ she says. ‘You live in a trance. If you were always thinking about it, you’d have to kill yourself. You can’t live with this guilt. You can’t even shrug off the guilt on to the government. But on the other hand, every person has an instinct for self-preservation. What else could we have done? Where else were we supposed to go?’
Frau Eigi still tries to imagine the suffering endured by the family evicted from the flat she and her family first inhabited in Posen. Anna Jeziorkowska doesn’t have to imagine the suffering because she experienced it. She and her family, all Poles, were quietly at home in their flat in Posen on the evening of 8 November 1939 when Anna’s mother looked out of the window and exclaimed ‘Germans!’ Buses and cars pulled up outside the block of flats and moments later German soldiers ban
ged on the door. ‘They burst into the room,’ says Anna Jeziorkowska, ‘into the kitchen, they were everywhere. Of course, there was great chaos, crying, wailing. The Germans pushed us, they hit father on the face, and we got so frightened that we started crying. My younger brother, he was very delicate, started vomiting.’ The German soldiers demanded money and jewellery from her parents before they threw them out of the flat. Her mother gave them all the jewels she had, including her wedding ring. ‘I was scared,’ says Anna, who was then just 10 years old, ‘as much as only a child can be’. The family, along with their neighbours from the same block, was taken to a transit camp where they slept on straw. ‘The conditions were unbearable for children,’ says Anna. ‘The food was cold. There was a turnip soup. For us children it was uneatable.’
After a few days word reached them that Germans had moved into their flat. ‘I cried,’ says Anna. ‘We cried together, my sister and I, cuddled to each other, remembering our toys, the good old days, what we had lost. And it was terrible, it is impossible to describe, even now it hurts to think about it.’ After five months in the transit camp, they were herded out and shoved into train wagons that were normally used for transporting animals. They had eight or ten days in the dark and cold of the wagons before they reached their destination, the town of Golice in the General Government. There, an old man saw them huddled in shock in the town square and took pity on them. He took them to his own run-down house and offered them a room. ‘The conditions there were also difficult,’ remembers Anna. ‘There were no beds, we slept on the floor, no comforts, no running water, and everything else was difficult. But at least we had a room, a very small room.’
Evictions and deportations, such as that suffered by the Jeziorkowska family, happened in town and countryside alike. In rural areas whole villages could be uprooted in one action. Franz Jagemann was a German of Polish ancestry who, as an interpreter, helped the Nazis in their dreadful work. He vividly remembers one action that took him to a remote village in the Gnesen district of Poland. Twenty or twenty-five police officers in vans drove to the village and were stopped by local Nazi Storm Troopers just outside the village boundary. The Storm Troopers had been keeping watch but the villagers suspected nothing. Then trucks arrived bearing the SS, members of the Totenkopf (death’s head) division. At a little after three o’clock in the morning the police and SS swarmed down the central street of the village, breaking into the homes, while the local Storm Troopers surrounded the village from the outside. ‘People were beaten,’ says Franz Jagemann, ‘people were kicked, there was blood. The worst thing about it for me was to see an elderly couple, they were over seventy and clearly didn’t understand what was going on, they were beaten up and thrown on to a truck. One SS man, who was born in Upper Silesia, carried on as if he was berserk, screaming at the villagers and driving them together with violence. People were kicked, punched, pistols waved in their faces. It was like a proper hold-up.’
Stefan Kasprzyk, the son of a Polish peasant, remembers that night when the SS came to call: ‘They surrounded the farms so that no one would run away. People took what they could carry. Only a few ever returned. My grandfather was tortured by them and after he was deported, he died. Our neighbour lost two children.’
The Nazis who terrorized this tiny Polish village needed space for the Germans who were arriving that very afternoon, so they solved their problem by simply removing the entire population of a village. Franz Jagemann also witnessed the arrival of the incoming Germans. ‘You might say that the beds were still warm when they arrived,’ he says. Some of the ethnic Germans expressed surprise that they were expected just to take over someone else’s house in someone else’s village. They said, “And we’re supposed to take it over? It doesn’t even belong to us!” I really did hear such comments,’ says Franz Jagemann, ‘but I would say that the majority were convinced that it was their new property now because the war had been won against Poland and that it was all in order.’
After witnessing the brutality of the SS, Franz Jagemann subsequently tried to get warnings to villagers who were to be deported, but he does not believe he was a hero: ‘I was there to assist in what we today euphemistically call ethnic cleansing. I was conscious of that . . . I didn’t immediately go into hiding or run away or join the underground. I displayed a lack of courage.’
There was no chance for any of the villagers caught up in these violent deportations to alter their fate by claiming, ‘I am really of German origin – you must reclassify me.’ Yet, for many thousands of other Poles, reclassification was a possibility. In pursuit of their aim to ‘Germanize’ the areas of Poland outside the General Government, the Nazi administrators had huge powers of discretion in deciding who was Polish and who was now German. These powers of discretion led to conflict between the two Gauleiters (district leaders) of the newly incorporated territories of Poland – Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau and Albert Forster of West Prussia – a conflict that shows how in wartime the notion of ‘working towards the Führer’ could assume arbitrary and contradictory dimensions on a massive scale.
Arthur Greiser was the hardest of the hardline Nazis, a man who had Himmler as a mentor. His aim was to turn the Warthegau into a model Gau (district). He expressed contempt for the indigenous Poles and took care to implement seriously the detailed criteria the Nazis used to determine which of the Poles could be Germanized and which could not. His policy was one of ruthless, uncompromising racial segregation. Albert Forster, ruler of the adjacent Nazi district, Danzig/West Prussia, though also a committed Nazi (and a man later sentenced to death for war crimes), had a very different attitude to racial classification. Forster had been overheard to joke that if he ‘looked like Himmler’ he wouldn’t talk about race so much.
The dispute between Forster and Greiser is personified by the experience of Romuald Pilaczynski of Bydgoszcz, a town in what was then Albert Forster’s kingdom. Forster did not enforce tedious individual classification on the population. He decided to reclassify some Poles as Germans en masse, without detailed examination. After all, hadn’t Hitler said that in the pursuit of Germanizing Poland he would ‘ask no questions about their methods’? ‘According to materials known to me,’ says Mr Pilaczynski, ‘about 80 per cent of Bydgoszcz’s population responded to Forster’s announcement: “If you want to be in Germany, sign the ‘Germanization list’.” ’The Pilaczynski family signed and became German ‘in the third category’. This gave them important advantages denied to ordinary Poles: the right to increased rations, the right to an education and the right to remain in the incorporated territories. But signing the paper didn’t make Romuald Pilaczynski feel German: ‘We lived the Polish way, we spoke Polish . . . The 80 per cent who obtained the identity cards of the third group did not consider themselves in any way German.’ But Mr Pilaczynski had an uncle who lived in the Posen region, Arthur Greiser’s realm: ‘The uncle from Posen was not offered the Volksliste (the chance to be Germanized) but was deported.’ Of course, as the Pilaczynskis realized at the time, there was no sense to this. They were from the same family and had the same ethnic background. One was no more German than the other. Yet the Pilaczynskis of Bydgoszcz escaped the suffering of deportation while their relatives in Posen had to endure it.
Unlike Forster, Greiser was pursuing a policy of debasing the Poles and Polish culture out of pure ideological zeal. In September 1940 a directive was issued in Greiser’s name. It said: ‘It will require a long period of education to achieve a state of affairs in which every German citizen adopts an attitude to Poles which corresponds to our national dignity and the aims of German policy.’6 In other words, Germans were still being too friendly to Poles. Now, if they did not treat them as slaves out of conviction, they would be made to treat them as slaves out of fear. The directive went on: ‘Any individuals belonging to the German community who maintain relations with Poles which go beyond those deriving from the performance of services or economic considerations will be placed in protective custody
. . . In all cases the maintenance of repeated friendly contacts with Poles must be regarded as failure to observe the prescribed distance.’
At his country house outside Posen, Greiser himself certainly strove to live up to his own ideals. Danuta Pawelczak-Grocholska was a servant in the Greiser household. She remembers him as ‘a powerfully built figure. He was a tall man, you could see his arrogance, his conceit. He was so vain, so full of himself – as if there was nothing above him, a god, almost. Everybody tried to get out of his way, people had to bow to him, salute him. And the Poles, he treated them with great contempt. For him the Poles were slaves, good for nothing but work.’ Danuta Pawelczak-Grocholska was terrified when first told that she had to work in Greiser’s house. ‘The very sound of Greiser’s name made people shake with fear because they knew who he was.’ Greiser had grown up in Poland of German descent, spoke Polish, gone to a Polish school and yet now he was nicknamed the ‘Pole hater’. Danuta had already witnessed what he was capable of. In a reprisal action ordered by him, she had seen the Germans shoot twenty Poles in the local village square. ‘They shot them solely because they were Polish,’ she says. ‘It was incredible. That image has stayed with me for so long that whenever I walk through the square, past that place, I see those people. And it was all Greiser’s doing.’ When he heard the name of his daughter’s new employer, Danuta’s father said to her, ‘You are walking into the lion’s den; who knows if you will leave it alive.’ Danuta had walked the 6 kilometres from her own home to the Greisers’ house in tears. Once there she was put to work cleaning the house – to the ‘German’ standard: ‘You were not supposed to see a speck of dust. Carpet fringes had to be combed in straight lines. God help us if there was one out of place! It was all done to perfection, with exaggerated opulence. On the coldest day of the winter, her ladyship would order the cleaning of the windows for New Year’s Eve. Our hands would freeze to the window panes. We blew on our fingers but we had to carry on with the cleaning.’ Everything in the seventy-room palace and estate was kept immaculate, all for the use of just Greiser and his wife. ‘The orangery, the fishponds, the gamekeeper. . . . The whole economic base of the place was geared exclusively for the use of these two people. It was luxury, in every respect pure luxury.’
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 12