Greiser was not just another conqueror who was exploiting the vanquished in order to live in comfort. He lived this way because, as a German, he believed it was his right. He was at the top of the racial ladder and, as a member of a superior race, he had to be true to the laws of nature and live better than his racial inferiors. Greiser was later to explain his philosophy thus: ‘If, in past times, other peoples enjoyed their century-long history by living well and doing so by getting foreign peoples to work for them without compensating them accordingly and without meting out justice to them, then we, too, as Germans, want to learn from this history. No longer must we stand in the wings; on the contrary, we must altogether become a master-race!’7
Equally, Greiser felt it essential for the future of the Reich that the racial classification of the incorporated territories was completed diligently and systematically. He was therefore deeply irritated when he saw the casual way in which his neighbour, Albert Forster, was treating the whole question of racial assessment. In a letter dated 16 March 1943, Greiser complained to Himmler about Forster’s attitude: ‘. . . right from the start I avoided trying to win cheap successes by Germanizing people who could not provide clear proof of their German origin . . . As I have frequently pointed out in my discussions with you, my ethnic policy is threatened by that pursued in the Reich Gau Danzig/West Prussia in so far as the policy followed there initially appears to many superficial observers to be more successful.’8
Himmler replied to Greiser that he was ‘particularly pleased’ by his work on Germanization. In contrast, Himmler had written a letter of complaint to Forster sixteen months previously, on 26 November 1941 in which he had expressed Hitler’s view that: ‘“I do not wish the Gauleiters of the eastern Gaus to enter into a competition to see who will be the first to report after two or three years, ‘My Führer, the Gau has been Germanized.’9 Instead, I wish to have a population which is racially impeccable and am content if a Gauleiter can report it in ten years’ time . . .” You yourself are such an old National Socialist,’ added Himmler, ‘that you know that one drop of false blood which comes into an individual’s veins can never be removed.’
The fact that Himmler wrote such a letter to Forster in 1941 but was still hearing Greiser’s complaints about Forster in 1943 demonstrates that even Himmler was fallible. As far as Forster was concerned, the only order he was following was the vague instruction from the Führer to Germanize his Gau. How he did it was his business. Forster, in his own eyes, was simply pursuing Hitler’s vision in the way he thought best. It scarcely mattered to him that Himmler thought he was Germanizing in a way contrary to racial theory; he knew that Himmler could do little about it. Thus, the lack of firm orders and the absence of specific job descriptions defining the scope of any individual’s responsibility, all attributes of Nazi administration which had been present in the party from the 1920s, had their bloody impact on the gigantic canvas of Poland.
Nothing better illustrates the conflict between the Nazi lords of Poland, or the inherent lack of a detailed plan for the Nazi administration of Poland, than a row that flared up early in the occupation between Hans Frank, who ran the General Government, and Arthur Greiser. Himmler and Greiser were keen to rid the Warthegau of ‘undesirables’ as soon as possible and, as we have seen with the tragic story of Anna Jeziorkowska and her family, herded unwanted Poles on to trains that took them to the General Government. Frank protested. The trains arrived and disgorged their human cargo but he had nowhere to put them. ‘Night after night trains of evacuees came to the General Government,’ says Dr Fritz Arlt, who was a former Nazi Storm Trooper and, in 1940, head of the Department for Population Affairs and Welfare in the General Government (someone who has never, incidentally, been convicted of war crimes). ‘The people were thrown out of the trains, whether in the marketplace or on the train station, or wherever it was, and nobody cared about it . . . We received a phone call from the district officer and he said, “I don’t know what to do any more. So and so many hundreds have arrived again. I have neither shelter nor food nor anything . . .” Without doubt, the most awful things were also happening.’ The situation was not helped by the antipathy that existed between Frank and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, who was the senior SS man in the General Government. Frank believed that since he was in charge of the General Government, then Krüger was subordinate to him. Himmler countered with the view that Krüger was simply ‘assigned’ to Frank, not ‘subordinate’. Hitler never decided who was right.
The disagreement between Frank on the one hand and Himmler and Greiser on the other wasn’t just about the administrative difficulties of trains turning up unannounced and leaving thousands of deportees out in the cold. There was a fundamental conflict of ideology between them. Frank wanted the General Government to be the ‘granary’ of the Reich. He wanted to keep the farmers in their place and to maximize the economic exploitation of the area with as little inconvenience as possible caused by what he believed were unnecessary transportations. Greiser and Himmler had a bigger vision; the priority for them was not tawdry economic need, but the racial and ideological goal of incorporated territories that were ‘pure’ and of German blood. If that meant that the General Government would become a dustbin into which all the undesirables of the Reich would be thrown, then so be it.
On 12 February 1940 there was a meeting at Göring’s Karinhall estate near Berlin in an attempt to thrash out the difficulties. All the key participants in the dispute were present: Himmler, Frank, Greiser and Göring. Frank allied himself with Göring, who supported him in the meeting. The General Government should become the ‘granary’ of the Reich, said Göring; the priority must be to strengthen the war potential of the Reich. Himmler protested that he needed space in which to put the incoming ethnic Germans. A compromise appeared to be reached when Himmler stated that he and Frank would ‘agree upon the procedures of future evacuations’.10 Frank was delighted. He thought that Himmler’s racial vision of a reordered Poland had received a body blow. Göring’s argument that the demands of an ongoing war in France must take priority seemed decisive.
Himmler, however, was not to have his vision dashed so easily. Just as Frank had appealed to Göring, so Himmler decided to appeal to Hitler. A study of the way he did so is particularly instructive because there was no greater manipulator of the Nazi system than Himmler. First, he timed his approach to Hitler perfectly, presenting him with a memo innocuously entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’ on 15 May 1940, once it was obvious that the German Army was progressing well in France. In the memo he again called for the General Government to be a dumping ground for undesirable Poles, and since it was clear that the Nazis would now have possession of France and her colonies, he proposed a new solution to the problem of the Polish Jews. Instead of transporting them to the General Government, he suggested that they be sent to a colony in Africa. The memo also outlined the methods that would be used to turn the remaining ‘unGermanized’ Poles into a ‘leaderless labouring class’.
Himmler later noted that Hitler read the memorandum and found it ‘good and correct’. Furthermore, Himmler felt authorized to tell others that Hitler approved of the memo. Professor Christopher Browning, who has made a particular study of Nazi resettlement policy in Poland, told me: ‘This is the way decisions are made: Hitler does not draw up an elaborate plan, sign it and pass it down the line. What you get is an encouragement to Himmler to fight it out with the others and the ability now to invoke Hitler’s approval if they don’t give way. And Hitler can still back out later, of course. You see, he’s reserving his options, but he’s encouraging Himmler who has anticipated that this is really the sort of long-range thing that Hitler would like.’
Hans Frank now learnt that there had been a change in policy since his meeting with Göring and decided to put the best face he could on it. On 30 May 1940, at a meeting of police chiefs in Krakow, Frank announced the change of policy caused by Hi
mmler’s victory. Referring to a recent conversation he himself had had with Hitler, he talked openly of the difficulties of resettling the incoming Poles and of trying to turn them into a leaderless class that could never rise against the Germans again. His speech was extraordinary in its casual brutality even by the standards of the Third Reich: ‘. . . we, as National Socialists, are faced with such an incredibly difficult and responsible task that we can only talk about these things in the most intimate circles . . . The Führer told me that the implementation of German policy in Poland is a matter for the men who are in charge of the General Government to deal with themselves. He put it this way: we must liquidate those people whom we have discovered form the leadership in Poland; all those who follow in their footsteps must be arrested and then got rid of after an appropriate period. We do not need to burden the Reich organization of the German policy with that. We don’t need to bother to cart these people off to concentration camps in the Reich because then we would only have trouble and an unnecessary correspondence with their relatives. Instead, we will finish the thing off here. We will do it in the simplest way.’11 As a result, during the summer of 1940, thousands of Poles, many from the intelligentsia, were simply murdered.
What sort of man makes a speech like that? Hans Frank had been Hitler’s lawyer, more used to talking to judges than Nazi executioners. At his enormous and elaborate country retreat outside Krakow we talked to some of Frank’s servants and asked them what it was like to work in the household of such a man: ‘Wonderful,’ says Anna Mirek, a Polish cook, ‘even though we worked very hard, sometimes sixteen hours a day, depending on the need, if there were guests. But the atmosphere was jolly, pleasant: people were polite, and even if one was tired it gave one strength . . . To me Frank seemed a nice man, polite.’ Bemused by this response we asked how Anna Mirek reconciled this memory with the knowledge that Frank had been involved in the mass killing of Poles. ‘As for those higher political affairs that’s something different,’ she answered, ‘I know nothing about it. I’m not good at it. I’m good at cooking, observing the stars, telling the weather. That I’m good at.’
Zbigniew Bazarnik worked at Frank’s country house as a furnace-stoker. ‘We all felt quite relaxed here,’ he says, ‘not, as one used to hear, like in a camp, where one was shaking at the sight of a German.’ He did, though, remember one incident that showed a darker side to life in the Frank household. Polish Jews were working at the house doing renovation work in the early years of the German occupation. One day it was discovered that one of the Jews had decided to have a bath in Hans Frank’s own bathroom when he thought no one was looking. Mr Bazarnik later learnt what happened to him: ‘Here in the courtyard he was pushed into the boot of a small car – an Opel – and they could not fit him in so they broke his arms and legs, took him somewhere outside Krzeszowice and shot him . . . A sad story but then why he took such a fancy into his head, it is difficult to understand.’
Dr Fritz Arlt knew Hans Frank not as a servant knows a master but as a valued subordinate knows a boss. Dr Arlt worked for Frank in the early years of the war in Krakow. ‘If I think about Frank, then I have to say that he was a tragicomic figure,’ says Dr Arlt. ‘Frank was a highly intelligent chap. He was a good musician, a pianist.’
Our interview with Dr Arlt was one of the most extraordinary we conducted because, even though he was a senior Nazi figure involved in population affairs in the General Government, he said he never knew of the atrocities ordered by Frank and carried out by the SS. Dr Arlt talked of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ and said that he himself had done his best to implement Nazi policies humanely and that Poles had spoken up in his defence after he had tried to help them. Only once, because we confronted him with a specific document, did I see what I took to be the granite heart of a true Nazi administrator. In Götz Aly’s book Endlösung a frightening letter is quoted that called for the removal to a concentration camp of ethnic German farmers who were complaining because they were ‘homesick’. These ethnic Germans simply refused to accept naturalization. An official letter ordered ‘arrangements to be made for the transportation into a concentration camp’ of the recalcitrant ‘gang leaders’ of the homesick farmers.12 The letter, signed by a Gauleiter, bears the dictation mark Dr A – Dr Arlt’s initials. ‘Yes, it is without doubt the Dr Fritz Arlt who is sitting in front of you now who is named there,’ says Dr Arlt when we asked him about the letter. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ We asked him what he knew about the concentration camps to which the letter called for the ethnic Germans to be sent. His reply was illuminating. ‘This was a regulation passed by Herr Himmler. And I knew about regulations which were in this connection, that people who were not willing to be resettled were to be sent to a concentration camp.’ Dr Arlt, of course, had not answered the question. He had simply stated, in effect, that he was ‘acting under orders’. When we pressed him and asked what he thought a concentration camp was, he replied: ‘What I thought a concentration camp was? Exactly what it says: a camp in which people who somehow or other represented a danger against law and order were concentrated.’ We pressed him again, asking if he did not think that this was a severe punishment. ‘I’m sorry, but the people knew that they probably would have to expect that. I don’t know. I was never a camp administrator.’ Here was a man who had been a key part of a process in which homesick ethnic Germans who refused resettlement were consigned to a concentration camp, who had not the slightest remorse about his actions. Indeed, he expected those who questioned him to be satisfied with a response which was that in 1943 all he knew about concentration camps was that they were places where people were ‘concentrated’. In our interview with Dr Arlt it was a moment of revelation. Who can tell where coldness and indifference end and criminality begins?
As a group, of course, it was the Jews of Poland who were to suffer most. But in the initial months of the war a racially obsessed Nazi like Greiser perceived himself as having less a Jewish problem than a Polish one. The difficulties of resettling incoming ethnic Germans from the east plus the need to Germanize the Warthegau were his immediate priorities. The Jews were perceived at first as a problem whose solution was imminent, then, as difficulties arose, as one whose ultimate solution could be postponed. As a first interim measure, the Nazis ordered the concentration of Jews in ghettos, the biggest of which in the Warthegau was Łódź. This was always intended to be a temporary solution until the Jews could be deported, so Greiser and his minions presumed, down to the ‘dustbin’ of the General Government.
Estera Frenkiel, who came from a Łódź Jewish family, read in her local newspaper in early 1940 that a ghetto for Jews was to be established in the northern part of the city. The streets of Łódź were listed according to the dates by which their Jewish inhabitants had to leave their flats. ‘It was just as though a bomb had gone off over our heads,’ she says. ‘We were used to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was also rife among the Poles . . . Polish Anti-Semitism was perhaps more financial. But German anti-Semitism was: Why do you exist? You shouldn’t be! You ought to disappear!’
The Jews of Łódź rushed to find somewhere to live within the designated area of the ghetto. Housing conditions there were appalling from the very beginning. Out of a total of 31,721 flats, the majority of which consisted of just one room, only 725 had running water.13 Estera Frenkiel’s mother found that the apartment they thought they had reserved, a shop with a small flat attached, was already occupied. ‘And then my mother went out on to the street and walked up and down talking to herself: “What shall I do now? Where shall I go with my children? There remains nothing else other than to commit suicide.” The people who had taken the flat heard this, called her over and said, “Please, listen. The room and kitchen are enough for us. You can move into the shop.”’ So the Frenkiel family, with immense gratitude, moved into a shop measuring 12 metres square.
There were rich pickings for those of German descent left in Łódź. Eugen Zielke was an ethnic German who watched an empl
oyee of his father’s ‘take over’ a big grocery store in Łódź that had previously been owned by Jews who had now been forced into the poverty of the nearby ghetto. Zielke accompanied his father’s employee as he went on to choose an apartment for himself from the accommodation abandoned by the Jewish residents of Łódź. ‘The flat was locked up and sealed,’ he says, ‘but we opened it. It was indescribable. Things were strewn all over the floor, all the clothes. The table in the dining-room was laid for supper, there was bread, there was tea, there was even sausage. But when he saw all that and how it was, he said, “It’s not possible! It’s unbelievable! What on earth was going on here?”’ They both left the apartment, shocked, though not sufficiently so for Zielke’s acquaintance to give up the Jewish grocery store he had already accepted from the Nazis.
Greiser asserted that the Jews had ‘hoarded colossally’. Therefore, once in the ghetto, they were made to give up their money for food. It was an act of pure gangsterism, a means of plucking all the valuables from the Jews before they were transported to whatever ‘dustbin’ or reservation was to be their future home. And not only the incoming Nazis benefited from selling food at inflated prices to the Jews trapped in the ghetto. One of Eugen Zielke’s relatives participated in the crime, and he himself benefited from it. ‘I saw it from the point of view of a businessman,’ says Zielke. ‘They couldn’t nibble on a ring, but if they could get a piece of bread for it, then they could survive for a day or two.’ Jewellery would be smuggled out of the ghetto and bought for a fraction of its worth. ‘If I got something in my hand for 100 marks and it was worth 5000 marks, then I’d be stupid not to buy it,’ says Zielke. ‘You don’t have to be a businessman – that’s what life’s about.’
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 13