by Ian Kershaw
The pact concluded with the Soviet Union in August, and in particular its secret protocol agreeing to partition Poland, naturally altered the situation. ‘Living space’ further east dropped for the foreseeable future out of the equation. Any resettlement of populations and ethnic experimentation would now have to take place in the former territory of Poland, not farther east. Whether a Polish state should continue in existence had been left open in the secret protocol. A country divided among two occupying powers held little prospect of sustaining even a puppet state. However, the lack of immediate invasion by the Soviets and Hitler’s hope even at this point of persuading the West, faced with the fait accompli of a Polish defeat, to pull out of the war and strike a deal with him left German plans still uncertain.27
On 7 September Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles, recognizing a rump Polish state (with territorial concessions to Germany and breaking of ties with Britain and France), together with an independent western Ukraine.28 Five days later he still favoured a quasi-autonomous Polish rump state with which he could negotiate a peace in the east, and thought of limiting territorial demands to Upper Silesia and the Corridor if the West stayed out.29 Another option advanced by Ribbentrop was a division between Germany and Russia, and the creation, out of the rump of Poland, of an autonomous Galician and Polish Ukraine – a proposal unlikely to commend itself to Moscow.30 The belated Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September in any case promptly ruled out this possibility. Hitler still left open the final shape of Poland in his Danzig speech on 19 September.31 During the next days, Stalin made plain his opposition to the existence of a Polish rump state. His initial preference for the demarcation line along the line of the Pissia, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers was then replaced by the proposal to exchange central Polish territories within the Soviet zone between the Vistula and Bug rivers for Lithuania. Once Hitler had accepted this proposal – the basis of the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939 – the question of whether or not there would be a Polish rump state was in Berlin’s hands alone.32
Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political entity at the end of the month.33 He held out the prospect of re-creating a truncated Polish state – though expressly ruling out any re-creation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement – for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of his ‘peace offer’ to the West.34 But by then the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of such a prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12 October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a rump Polish territory – the ‘General Government’, as it came to be known – alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.
By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen (or ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘War-thegau’). Hans Frank, the Party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory.35 Other former Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150—200 kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over 10 percent.36
It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded – with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice – as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.
In Germany itself, despite new economic restrictions, life went on during the Polish campaign much as normal.37 Berlin’s cafés, restaurants, and bars had been packed, as usual, on the first night of the war.38 On the evening that the British and French had declared war, William Shirer heard people saying that the ‘Polish thing’ would soon be over, and that the West would not move. ‘There were food cards and soap cards and you couldn’t get any petrol and at night it was difficult stumbling around in the blackout,’ he reported. ‘But the war in the east has seemed a bit far away to them.’39 A week later, fears of the conflagration in the west had not materialized. Leisure pursuits were not affected by the war raging in the east. Two hundred football matches were played in Germany that weekend. Berliners flocked to cinemas, to the opera to see Madame Butterfly and Tannhäuser, or to the State Theatre, where Goethe’s Iphigenie was playing.40 Shirer listened to a crowd of mainly women who had come out of the opera. They ‘seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on, that German bombs and shells were falling on the women and children in Warsaw’, he observed.41 ‘I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime,’ he added on 20 September, ‘who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland… As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.’42 Reports from the exiled Social Democrat leadership (the Sopade), resting on information filtered out from within Germany, told much the same tale.43 The propaganda version of a war forced on Germany was widely believed. So were lurid stories – mainly wild exaggeration – of Polish atrocities against the ethnic German minority in western Poland. Many approved of the ‘rigorous approach’ towards the Poles.44 This stance was given encouragement by letters sent home by soldiers. One, not exceptional, ran: ‘Anything more vile than Polish soldiers has never been seen in a war. They’ve taken hardly any prisoners. Those falling into their hands have been butchered in a horrible fashion, and the Polacks have been treated in such brotherly fashion by us.’45 People followed the military advance with keen interest.46 They rejoiced in the victory.47 But the military triumph in Poland was taken largely for granted. Hitler’s popularity was undiminished.48 Most people hoped that the West would now see sense, and that the war would then be over.
II
The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 – dreadful though that had been – completely in the shade.49 The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation – everything points to this – almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschluß. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in r
ecrimination for any show of hostility, or insurgents’ – seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings.50 It probably also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.51 This ‘action’ nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims.52 Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.53
There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.
There had been undoubted discrimination against the German minority – around 3 per cent of the total population – in pre-war Poland, mounting sharply during the summer crisis of 1939. The Germans had also been economically disadvantaged. The incorporation of Austria and the Sudeten-land had then raised expectations among the Germans in Poland of their own ‘return to the Reich’.54 And, in a climate of mounting ethnic conflict, Goebbels’s propaganda, grossly exaggerating or simply fabricating incidents of sporadic violence against the German minority (while of course keeping quiet about worse outrages on the German side), contributed immensely to inciting venomous antagonism towards the Poles.
For their part, immediately following the German invasion the Poles, reacting to real or alleged cases of sabotage by the German minority – taken to be a ‘fifth column’ – arrested some 10–15,000 ethnic Germans (1–2 percent of the German minority) and force-marched them eastwards.55 Though the brutality accompanying the marches was later hugely magnified for propaganda purposes, the prisoners were indeed often beaten, or otherwise maltreated, and subjected to violence by the local population as they passed through Polish towns and villages. In some cases, those unfit to walk any further were shot.56
Outrages against the minority German population occurred in numerous places. Most notoriously in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), attacks on Germans on 3 September had the character of a local pogrom. Precisely how many died at Bromberg has never been satisfactorily established.57 For German propaganda, the attacks on ethnic Germans were exploited as an apparent justification for a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had surpassed in its first days anything that could be regarded as retaliation.58 The Germans claimed in November 1939 that 5,400 had been killed in the ‘September Murders’ (including what they dubbed the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’). Then, in February 1940, on Hitler’s own instructions (it was later claimed) this was simply multiplied by around ten-fold and a figure of 58,000 German dead invented.59 The most reliable estimates put the total number of ethnic Germans killed in outrages, forced marches, bombing and shelling at around 4,000.60 Terrible though these atrocities were, they were more or less spontaneous outbursts of hatred that took place in the context of panic and fear following the German invasion. They did not remotely compare with, let alone provide any justification for, the calculated savagery of the treatment meted out by the German masters, directed at wiping out anything other than a slave existence for the Polish people.61
Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS.62 Himmler’s adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization’s other branches.63 Tens of thousands of male ethnic Germans between seventeen and forty-five years of age served in the Selbst-schutz.64 Von Alvensleben told his recruits, at a meeting in Thorn on 16 October: ‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Führer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’65 Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. On 7 October, von Alvensleben reported that his units had taken the ‘sharpest measures’ against 4,247 former Polish citizens.66 When one subordinate Selbstschutz leader reported to von Alvensleben that no executions had been carried out that week, he was asked whether there were no more Poles left at all in his town.67 The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up – in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 – but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.68
The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the programme of radical ‘ethnic struggle’ (Volkstumskampf) designed by the SS leadership for the ‘new order’ in Poland. More systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance. Already at the end of the first week of the invasion, Heydrich was reported to be enraged – as, apparently, was Hitler too – at the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day. He was demanding shooting or hanging without trial. ‘The nobility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with (umgebracht),’ were his reported words.69 He repeated the same sentiments, referring to a general ‘ground cleansing’ (Flurbereinigung), to Haider’s Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner some days later.70 Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving. By 10–11 September accounts were coming in of an SS massacre of Jews herded into a church, and of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews.71 On 12 September Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told Keitel that he had heard ‘that extensive shootings (Fusilierungen) were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated (ausgerottet)’. Keitel replied ‘that this matter had already been decided by the Füihrer’.72 Chief of Staff Haider was already by then heard to have said that ‘it was the intention of the Führer and of Göring to annihilate (vernichten) and exterminate (auszurotten) the Polish people’, and that ‘the rest could not even be hinted at in writing’.73
What it amounted to – an all-out ‘ethnic cleansing’ programme – was explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The thinking was that the former German provinces would become German Gaue. Another Gau with a ‘foreign-speaking population’ (mit fremdsprachiger Bevölkerung) would be established, with its capital in Cracow. An ‘eastern wall’ would surround the German provinces, with the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’ forming a type of ‘no man’s land’ in front of it. The Reichsführer-SS was to be appointed Settlement Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east, confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October).74 ‘The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line has been approved by the Führer,’ Heydrich went on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards ‘the solution of the Polish problem’, the 3 per cent at most of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories ‘had to be rendered harmless’ and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-class groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the rump territory (soon to be
known as the General Government). The ‘primitive Poles’ were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’. Poles were to remain no more than seasonal and migrant workers, with their permanent homes in the Cracow region. Jews in urban areas were to be concentrated in ghettos, giving better possibilities of control and readiness for later deportation. Jews in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were systematically to be transported by goods-train from German areas. Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich’s Jews, and of 30,000 Gypsies.75
Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden (verlaust) and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall – even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state” (Staatlichkeit). Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.’76