II
Hitler’s views about the newly conquered populations and territories in the East were tentatively outlined on September 29, in a conversation with one of his earliest companions, party chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg: “The Poles” the Nazi leader declared “a thin Germanic layer, underneath frightful material. The Jews, the most appalling people one can imagine. The towns thick with dirt. He [Hitler] had learnt a lot in these past weeks…. What was needed now was a determined and masterful hand to rule. He wanted to split the territory into three strips: (1) Between the Vistula and the Bug: this would be for the whole of Jewry (including the Reich) as well as all other unreliable elements. Build an insuperable wall on the Vistula—even stronger than the one in the West [the Siegfried Line, which faced France]. (2) Create a broad cordon of territory along the previous frontier to be Germanized and colonized. This would be a major task for the nation: to create a German granary, a strong peasantry, to resettle good Germans from all over the world. (3) In between, a form of Polish state. The future would show whether after a few decades the cordon of settlement would have to be pushed farther forward.”20
At this stage Hitler’s plans included only half of former Poland, up to the Vistula and the Bug Rivers; the eastern part of the country had been invaded by the Soviet Union on September 17 in accordance with one of the main provisions of the secret protocol added to the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939. Moreover, the Germans had recognized Soviet “special interests” in the Baltic countries, Finland, and Bulgaria, and with regard to two Romanian provinces. For both sides the August treaty and a further secret arrangement signed on September 27 were tactical moves. Both Hitler and Stalin knew that a confrontation would ultimately come.21 How long, though, the “truce” between National Socialism and Bolshevism would last was something that in September 1939 nobody could tell.
In a so-called peace offer during a festive Reichstag speech on October 6, Hitler indeed spoke of a territorial reorganization of those areas of Eastern Europe lying between the German border and the Soviet-German demarcation line. His settlement idea was to be based on the principle of nationalities and solve the problem of national minorities, including “in this context, the attempt to solve the Jewish problem.”22
Reestablishing a Polish state was mentioned as a possibility. By then, however, Great Britain and France had become familiar with Hitler’s tactics; the “peace offer” was rejected. The idea of some form of Polish sovereignty disappeared, and German-occupied Poland was further divided. The Reich annexed several areas along its eastern borders: a large region along the river Warthe (Reichsgau Wartheland, or Warthegau23), Eastern Upper Silesia (eventually part of Gau Upper Silesia), the Polish corridor with the city of Danzig (Gau Danzig–West Prussia) and a small stretch of territory south of East Prussia. A population of 16 million people was thus added to Germany, around 7.5 million of whom were Germans. After a brief interim plan to establish an autonomous “Rest-Polen” (rump Poland), the remaining Polish territory, which included the cities of Warsaw, Kraków, and Lublin, became the “General Government,” an administrative unit of around 12 million people, governed by German officials and occupied by German troops. The General Government itself was subdivided into four districts: Warsaw, Radom, Kraków, and Lublin. The district of Galicia would be added in August 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union.
On October 17, freed from the peace proposal gimmick, the Nazi leader was back on track. One of the officers present at a meeting between Hitler and a group of military commanders and some high-ranking party members recorded his remarks about what was to be achieved in Poland: “The hard struggle of nationalities (Volkstumskampf ) does not allow for any legal constraints. The methods will be incompatible with our principles…. Prevent Polish intelligentsia from becoming a leadership group…the old and the new territory should be cleansed of Jews, Polacks and rabble.”24
The core notion was that of Volkstumskampf, the ethnic-racial struggle. It would be unhampered by “legal constraints,” and the methods used would be “incompatible with our principles.” On that essential point Hitler’s policy departed radically from the goals of pan-German expansionism, widely accepted during the later years of the Wilhelmine empire. Volkstumskampf did not mean mere military victory and political domination; it aimed at the destruction of the vital sinews of the enemy national-racial community; in other words it implied mass murder.25 Murder of well-defined groups for the sake of the racial supremacy of Germandom became a legitimate instrument of policy. In occupied Poland two groups in particular would be targeted: Jews and “Polish elites”: The murder of Jews was haphazard at this stage, that of Polish elites more systematic.
Some sixty thousand Poles whose names had been collected over the prewar years were to be eliminated;26 the operation was partly camouflaged under directives for ensuring the security of the troops and, more generally, of the occupied territory. SS chief Heinrich Himmler chose the code name Tannenberg for the terror campaign; it evoked the victory of the German armies over the Russian forces at Tannenberg in East Prussia in 1914, and represented a symbolic retaliation against the Poles for the resounding defeat they had inflicted upon the Teutonic Knights at that same place in the early fifteenth century.27
Of course the basic order stemmed from Hitler. In July 1940 Reinhard Heydrich, since mid-September 1939 chief of the SS Main Office for the Security of the Reich (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), wrote to his SS colleague Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or ORPO), that at the onset of the Polish campaign Hitler had given him an “extraordinarily radical…order for the liquidation of various circles of the Polish leadership, [killings] that ran into the thousands.”28 The same order was well known to the supreme command of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), as confirmed by its chief, Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, to the head of military intelligence, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, on September 12: “The matter [of the executions of Polish elites] had already been decided by the Führer; the commander of the Army [meant as “ground force”] had been informed that if the Wehrmacht refused to be involved, it had to accept the pressure of the SS and the Gestapo. Therefore, in each military district, civilian commanders would be appointed who would carry the responsibility for ethnic extermination” [added in pencil: political cleansing].29
In concrete terms Heydrich was in charge of Tannenberg, although several SS “Death’s Head” units, under the command of the inspector of concentration camps, Theodor Eicke, independently took part in the “antiterror” campaign. Initially Heydrich had set up five “operational groups” (Einsatzgruppen) and one “special purpose operational group” for the murder campaign; ultimately seven Einsatzgruppen were involved. Some basic briefings took place on the eve of the attack. Then, on two occasions following the beginning of the campaign, Heydrich clearly defined the goals of the operation. “The leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless,” he declared to his unit commanders, on September 7.30 In another meeting, on September 27, he stated that merely 3 percent of the Polish elite still remained and that “they too should be rendered harmless.”31 Sometimes authorization for specific murder operations was requested in Berlin. Thus, at the end of 1939, for example, SS Brigadeführer Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Königsberg, inquired whether the Poles concentrated in the East Prussian camp of Soldau—mainly academics, businesspeople, teachers, and priests—could be “liquidated” on the spot instead of being deported. Heydrich agreed.32
On-the-spot executions were the most common practice, in retaliation against Polish civilians for attacks against German troops and as a revenge for Polish murders of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) in the initial stages of the war—in Bromberg, for example; for the elimination of the local elites, however, other methods were also used. Thus, on November 3, 1939, 183 faculty members of the Jagellonian University in Kraków were summoned by the Gestapo, arrested, and deported to the Sa
chsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. A few months later the older scholars were released and the younger ones sent to Dachau. By that time 13 of the imprisoned scholars had already died; none of the Jews was set free.33
III
Victory in the Volkstumskampf would be achieved by unbridled ruthlessness against non-Germanic races mainly in the East, and simultaneously, by an equally ruthless cleansing of the Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) inside the Germanic space. In line for eradication were the mentally ill, the Gypsies, and various other “racially foreign” elements still mingling with the Volk, although many of them had already been shipped to concentration camps.
Thousands of mental patients from asylums in Pomerania, East Prussia, and the Posen region in the Warthegau were eliminated soon after the German attack on Poland.34 They were murdered without any medical coverup, independent of the “euthanasia” operation. On orders from Himmler these patients were to be killed so that the buildings they lived in could be used for billeting Waffen SS soldiers and accommodating military casualties, possibly also in order to help in the resettlement of ethnic Germans from neighboring Eastern countries.35
Brought by train to Danzig-Neustadt, the Pomeranian patients were delivered to the Eimann SS Commando (named after its chief, Kurt Eimann), led to the surrounding woods, and shot. The bodies were thrown into graves previously dug by prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp. Day in, day out, one batch of victims followed another; by midafternoon the “work” was over and the trucks that had brought the patients returned empty to the train station, except for the victims’ clothes. Soon thereafter the concentration camp inmates who had dug the graves were themselves liquidated. The number of patients killed by Kurt Eimann’s unit is not known precisely but in January 1941 its own report mentioned more than three thousand victims.36
Newborn children with serious defects had already been targeted by the eve of the war. The “euthanasia” program as such (identified by its code name, T4, in fact an acronym of Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the operation’s headquarters in Berlin), which also extended to the adult population, secretly started in October 1939 on Hitler’s order. It was established under the direct authority of “the Chancellory of the Führer of the National Socialist Party” (Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP, or KdF), headed by Philipp Bouhler. Bouhler appointed the chief of Office II in the KdF, Viktor Brack, to be directly in charge of the killing operations. Under T4, some seventy thousand mental patients were assembled and murdered in six mental institutions between the beginning of the war and August 1941, when the framework of the extermination system changed.
From the end of the nineteenth century, eugenics had preached racial improvement by ways of various social and medical measures meant to bolster the biological health of the national community. Such theories and measures were as fashionable in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries as they were in Germany. After the end of World War I, the view increasingly held in Weimar Germany argued that the biological depletion incurred by the Reich as a result of the war, and the economic difficulties that precluded any large-scale social policies to foster “positive” eugenic measures, reinforced the need for excluding the weak, the nonadapted, and diseased individuals from the biological pool of the Volk. Such notions became tenets of Nazi ideology during the “years of struggle.”
Within months of his accession to the chancellorship, Hitler initiated a new law that ordered compulsory sterilization of individuals suffering from certain hereditary diseases. Yet, as late as September 1935, the Nazi leader refused to take the next “logical” step: murdering those individuals “unworthy of living.” Negative reactions from the population and the churches could have been expected—a risk that Hitler was not yet prepared to take. At the end of 1938 and mainly in 1939, the Nazi leader’s readiness to move ahead in this domain—as in that of foreign aggression—grew and, once the war started, the final authorization was given;37 the crucial move from sterilization to straightforward group extermination was made.
In each of the medical institutions turned into killing centers, physicians and police officers were jointly in charge. The exterminations followed a standardized routine: The chief physician checked the paperwork; photos of the victims were taken; the inmates were then led to a gas chamber fed by containers of carbon monoxide and asphyxiated. Gold teeth were torn out and the bodies cremated.38
The killing of Jewish patients started in June 1940; they had previously been moved to a few institutions designated only for them.39 They were killed without any formalities; their medical records were of no interest. Their death was camouflaged nonetheless: The Reichsvereinigung (the representative body of Jews in Germany) had to pay the costs of the victims’ hospitalization in a fictitious institution: the “Cholm State Hospital,” near Lublin. In August 1940 identical letters were sent from Cholm to the families of the patients, informing them of the sudden death of their relatives, all on the same date. The cause of death was left unspecified.40
IV
As we saw in the introduction, in Hitler’s view the Jews were first and foremost an active (eventually deadly) threat. Yet, in the wake of the Polish campaign, the first German reactions to the sight of the Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) were more immediately dominated by disgust and utter contempt. On September 10 Hitler toured the Jewish quarter of Kielce; his press chief (Reichspressechef ), Otto Dietrich, described the impression of the visit in a pamphlet published at the end of that year: “If we had once believed we knew the Jews, we were quickly taught otherwise here…. The appearance of these human beings is unimaginable…. Physical repulsion hindered us from carrying out our journalistic research…. The Jews in Poland are in no way poor, but they live in such inconceivable dirt, in huts in which no vagrant in Germany would spend the night.”41
On October 7, referring to Hitler’s description of his impressions from Poland, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, added: “The Jewish problem will be the most difficult to solve. These Jews are not human beings anymore. [They are] predators equipped with a cold intellect which have to be rendered harmless.”42 On November 2 Goebbels reported to Hitler about his own trip to Poland. “Above all,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, “my description of the Jewish problem gets his [Hitler’s] full approval. The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one.”43
In Nazi parlance “to render harmless” meant killing. There was no such concrete plan in the fall of 1939, but murderous thoughts regarding the Jews were certainly swirling around. The harshest measures were not necessarily backed by all members of the Nazi elite, however: “Frick [the minister of the interior] reports about the Jewish question in Poland,” Goebbels recorded on November 8. “He is in favor of somewhat milder methods. I protest and so does Ley” [Robert Ley, the labor minister and head of the “German Labor Front”].44 At times Hitler’s musings about Jewry took off, as they did from the outset of his career, into loftier spheres: “We touch again upon religious issues,” Goebbels noted on December 29. “The Führer is profoundly religious but totally antichristian. He considers Christianity as a symptom of decline. Rightly so. It is a deposit [Ablagerung] of the Jewish race. One also notices it in the similarity of religious rituals. Both have no relation to animals and this will destroy them in the end.”45
While Hitler’s anti-Semitic harangues went on unabated in his conversations with Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other party subordinates, his only public anti-Jewish outbursts throughout a period of several months came at the beginning of the war, on the day Great Britain and France joined the conflict. On September 3, in the afternoon, German radio broadcast four proclamations by Adolf Hitler: the first to the German people, the second and third to the armed forces on the Eastern and Western Fronts, the last and most important one to the National Socialist Party. In the first proclamation the Nazi leader lashed out at those who had initiated this war; it was not the British people who were responsible, but “that Jewish-plutocratic and democrat
ic ruling class that wanted to turn all the nations of the earth into its obedient slaves.”46 Whereas in the proclamation to the German people the attack against “Jewish plutocracy” came only in the middle of the address, it opened the proclamation to the party: “Our Jewish-democratic world enemy has succeeded in pulling the English people into a state of war with Germany.”47 The real “world enemy” was clearly identified once again: party and state would have to act. “This time,” Hitler warned darkly, “those who hoped to sabotage the common effort would be exterminated without any pity.”48
Whether these dire threats were signals of steps to come or, at this point, merely ritualized outbursts remains an open question. Hitler’s subsequent public restraint derived from obvious political reasons (first the hope of an arrangement with France and Great Britain, then with Great Britain alone). Nothing was said about the Jews either in the annual address to the party “Old Fighters” on November 8, 1939, or in the official announcement that followed an attempt by a single assassin on Hitler’s life that same evening.
In his 1940 New Year’s message to the party, Hitler merely hinted that the Jews had not been forgotten: “Jewish-international capitalism, in alliance with reactionary forces, incited the democracies against Germany”; the same “Jewish-capitalist world enemy” had only one goal, “to destroy the German people,” but, Hitler announced, “the Jewish capitalist world would not survive the twentieth century.”49 And, in the annual speech commemorating the Machtergreifung, on January 30, that restraint would be even more noticeable. A year earlier, on the same occasion, Hitler had proclaimed that a world war would bring about the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and a year later, on January 30, 1941, he would renew his threat. On January 30, 1940, however, the Jews were not mentioned at all.
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