Except for “Schmelt Jews,” the expulsion plans included not only Jewish populations from the annexed Polish territories but also Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These deportations, which took place between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940, ended in failure.
In October 1939 the deportations of Jews from Vienna, Mährisch Ostrau, and Kattowitz to Nisko (a small town on the San River, near Lublin) started. These deportations, agreed to by Hitler, had been demanded by local Gauleiter mainly to seize Jewish homes. Moreover, as far as Vienna was concerned, the city would thus recover its pristine Aryan nature.120 A few thousand Jews were deported, but within days the operation came to a halt, as the Wehrmacht needed the railway lines for transferring troops from Poland to the West.121
The two other transfers were simultaneous and identical in their goals. One, small in scale (by Nazi standards), was the deportation in February 1940 of some eighteen hundred Jews from the German towns Stettin and Schneidemühl on the coast of the Baltic to Lublin. The second operation was a formidable exercise in utter brutality: It aimed at the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles from the annexed Warthegau into the General Government, over a period of several months. The abandoned homes and farms of the deportees were meant to be distributed to ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries and Volhynia, and Bukovina, whose departure and “ingathering into the Reich” the Germans had negotiated with the USSR.
Nothing was ready for the Jews of Stettin and Schneidemühl in the snow-covered Lublin area, and they were either housed in temporary barracks or taken in by local Jewish communities. For the newly appointed SS and police leader (SSPF) of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik, there was no particular problem. On February 16, 1940, he declared that “the evacuated Jews should feed themselves and be supported by their countrymen, as these Jews had enough [food]. If this did not succeed, one should let them starve.”122
The deportations from the Warthegau soon became mired in total chaos, with overfilled trains stalled for days in freezing weather or maneuvering aimlessly to and fro. The ruthlessness of these deportations, organized mainly by Adolf Eichmann, the RSHA specialist on the emigration and evacuation of Jews, in coordination with the newly established RKFDV, did not compensate for the complete lack of planning and of even minimal preparation of reception areas for the deportees.
During the first weeks of the transfers the governor-general, Hans Frank, who had barely settled down in his capital, Kraków, in the castle of the centuries-old Jagellonian dynasty, seemed rather unconcerned about the sudden influx. Regarding the Jews he even displayed high spirits in a speech given in Radom on November 25, 1939: “It is a pleasure to finally have a chance to get physically at the Jewish race. The more of them die, the better; to hit him [sic] is a victory for our Reich. The Jews should feel that we are here. We want to have about one-half to three-quarters of all the Jews east of the Vistula…the Jews from the Reich, from Vienna, from everywhere; we have no use for the Jews in the Reich. Probably the Vistula line; behind this line, no more.”123
But Frank’s elation did not last. In early February 1940, after some two hundred thousand new arrivals into the General Government had been counted, he traveled to Berlin and extracted from Göring an order to halt the transfers.124 Encouraged by this success, Frank took an initiative of his own: On April 12, 1940, he announced his intention to empty Kraków of most of its 66,000 Jews. The governor-general was eloquent: “If we want to maintain the authority of the National Socialist Reich, the representatives of this Reich cannot have to encounter Jews when they enter or leave their houses, they cannot be endangered by contagious diseases.” The city would be freed of most of its Jews by November 1, 1940, except for some five thousand to ten thousand “urgently necessary artisans…. Cracow must become the city in the General Government that is the most cleansed of Jews. Only thus does it make sense to build it as the German capital.” He was ready to allow Jews who would have left voluntarily by August 15 to take along all their possessions, of course “with the exception of those objects they had stolen.” The ghetto would then be cleaned, and it would become possible to set up clean German living quarters, where one would breathe German air.125
By the beginning of 1941, some 45,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city had left voluntarily or been expelled, and those who remained were concentrated in the district of Podgorce, the ghetto. As for the Jews that had been ousted, they could not go very far. They settled mostly in the surroundings of Frank’s capital, to the law of the local German administrators.126 At least the governor-general and the German civil and military administration in Kraków had chased most of the Jews out of their sight. More or less at the same time, the Jews of Radom and Lublin suffered the same fate as those of Kraków.127
After the establishment of the General Government on October 12, 1939, and the appointment of Hans Frank as governor-general fourteen days later, a German administrative apparatus was set up in the heart of Poland, to lord it, as mentioned, over 12 million inhabitants before June 1941 and 17 million after the attack on the USSR and the incorporation of eastern Galicia.
Although Frank was directly subordinate only to Hitler himself, his own authority and that of his administration were constantly undermined by Himmler and his appointees. The SS Reichsführer was of course in charge of all internal security matters in the General Government, as concretely demonstrated by the terror campaign unleashed from day one of the German onslaught. As his delegate Himmler appointed Higher SS and Police Leader [Höhere SS und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF] Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who consulted with Frank but was under the Reichsführer’s sole authority. On a regional level, in each of the four districts of the General Government, SS and police leaders followed Krüger’s—that is, Himmler’s—orders. Moreover, Himmler as chief of the RKFDV took over the dumping of Poles and Jews into the General Government until the operation was temporarily stopped, as we saw. Thus the local SS commanders represented Himmler both in security and in deportation and/or “resettlement” matters. A de facto dual administration was being put in place as 1940 began: Frank’s civilian administration and Himmler’s security and population transfer SS administration. The tension between the two grew rapidly, mainly at district level and particularly in the Lublin district, where Himmler’s appointee and protégé, the notorious Globocnik, established a quasi-independent domain in direct defiance of the authority of District Governor Ernst Zörner.128
Unexpectedly the first round in this ongoing power struggle was won by Frank. Not only did the governor-general succeed in halting the deportations into his domain, but, in the Lublin District, he compelled Globocnik to disband his private police, recruited among local ethnic Germans: the Selbstschutz (self-protection). Within weeks Globocnik’s units had displayed a level of lawlessness that even Krüger and Himmler could then not countenance. The Selbstschutz disappeared, and Frank took its recruits into his own new police, the Sonderdienst (special service). This, however, was but round one, and soon enough Globocnik would resume his terror activities on a far wider scale.129
VIII
“In the morning, I proceeded through the streets with an armband,” Czerniaków, the newly appointed chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, noted on December 3, 1939. “In view of the rumors about the postponement of the wearing of armbands such a demonstration is necessary.”130 As of December 1 all Jews in the General Government above age ten had to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on their right arm. And although the definition of “Jew” was applied de facto according to the Nuremberg laws with the German occupation of Poland, it was formally so decreed first in the Warthegau at the end of 1939, and then in Frank’s kingdom, on July 27, 1940.131
The armband was rapidly followed by a prohibition from changing residence, the exclusion from a long list of professions, being banned from the use of public transportation and barred from restaurants, parks, and the like. But, although the Jews were increasingly conc
entrated in specific areas of cities and towns, neither Heydrich nor Frank gave an overall order to establish closed ghettos. The ghettoization stemmed from different circumstances from place to place. It extended from October 1939 (Piotrkow Trybunalski) to March 1941 (Lublin and Kraków) to 1942, even 1943 (Upper Silesia), and in some cases, no ghettos were established before the beginning of deportations to the extermination camps. The Lodz ghetto was established in April 1940 and the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940. Whereas in Warsaw the pretext for sealing the ghetto was mainly sanitary (the Germans’ fear of epidemics), in Lodz it was linked to the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries in the homes vacated by Jews.132
From the outset the ghettos were considered temporary means of segregating the Jewish population before its expulsion. Once they acquired a measure of permanence, however, one of their functions became the ruthless and systematic exploitation of part of the imprisoned Jewish population for the benefit of the Reich (mainly for the needs of the Wehrmacht) at as low a cost as possible. Moreover, by squeezing the food supply and, in Lodz, by replacing regular money with a special ghetto currency, the Germans put their hands on most of the cash and valuables the Jews had taken along when driven into their miserable quarters.133
The ghettos also fulfilled a useful psychological and “educational” function in the Nazi order of things: They rapidly became the showplace of Jewish misery and destitution, offering German viewers newsreel sequences that fed existing repulsion and hatred; a constant procession of German tourists (soldiers and some civilians) were presented with the same heady mix.
“What you see,” Fräulein Greiser, the Warthegau Gauleiter’s daughter, wrote after touring the Lodz ghetto in mid-April 1940, “is mainly rabble, all of which is just hanging around…. Epidemics are spreading and the air smells disgustingly, as everything is poured into the drain-pipes. There is no water either, and the Jews have to buy it for 10 Pfennigs the bucket; they surely wash themselves even less than usually…. You know, one can really feel no pity for these people; I think that their feelings are completely different from ours and therefore they do not feel this humiliation and everything else…. They surely also hate us, although for other reasons.” In the evening the young lady was back in the city, where she attended a big rally. “This contrast, in the afternoon the ghetto and in the evening the rally, which could not have been more German anywhere else, in one and the same city, that was absolutely unreal…. You know, I was again really happy and terribly proud of being a German.”134
Eduard Koenekamp, an official of the Stuttgart Auslandsinstitut, had visited several Jewish quarters in December 1939. In a letter to a friend, Koenekamp showed less restraint than Fraulein Greiser: “The extermination of this subhumanity would be in the interest of the whole world. However, such an extermination is one of the most difficult problems. Shooting would not suffice [Mit Erschiessung kommt man nicht durch]. Also, one cannot allow the shooting of women and children. Here and there, one expects losses during the deportations; thus in a transport of 1,000 Jews from Lublin, 450 perished [Koenekamp probably meant to Lublin]. All agencies which deal with the Jewish Question are aware of the insufficiency of all these measures. A solution of this complicated problem has not yet been found.”135
The Jewish Council ( Judenrat) was the most effective instrument of German control of the Jewish population. The English term “Jewish Council” is a misnomer, however. Heydrich’s order of September 21, 1939, demanded the creation of “Jewish Elders’ Councils” ( Jüdische Ältestenräte), which rapidly became, in most places, the contemptuous Judenrat, or “Jews’ Council,” in line with the appellation introduced on November 28 by Hans Frank’s decree. These councils were soon established in all Jewish population centers, large and small.136
Of course the councils were established by the Germans for their own purposes, but even during the early days of the war, communal activities were organized by the Jews themselves according to various patterns, to cater to the basic needs of the population. Thus, as pointed out by historian Aharon Weiss, “This combination of German pressure and interest in the establishment of a Jewish representation, on the one hand, and the need and wish of the Jews for a representative body of their own, forms one of the major aspects of the convoluted question of the Judenräte.137
As far as German policies were concerned, the two sets of founding decrees (Heydrich and Frank) indicated that from the outset both the Security Police and the General Government’s civil administration fought for control over the councils. In May 1940, Heydrich’s delegate in Kraków, SS Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, openly argued for the Security Police’s primacy.138 Frank did not give in, but in fact, whether formally or not, the SS apparatus increasingly dominated the appointments and the structure of the councils while Frank’s appointees were mostly involved in the administrative and economic life of the ghettos, until the beginning of the deportations.139 Then the SS apparatus would completely take over.
In principle the twelve or twenty-four council members (according to the size of the community) were to be chosen from the traditional Jewish elites, the recognized community leadership.140 Heydrich’s orders, issued as the decimation of the Polish elites was taking place, were probably based on two assumptions: first, that Jewish elites would not be instigators and leaders of rebellion and self-affirmation but rather agents of compliance; and additionally that the Jewish elites—as represented in the councils—would be accepted and, all in all, obeyed by the population. In other words the Polish elites were murdered because they could incite against the Germans; the Jewish elites were kept because they would submit and ensure submission.
In fact in many instances the council members did not belong to the foremost leadership of their communities, but many had previously been active in public life.141 The Judenrat as such was a replica—distorted of course, but a replica nonetheless—of self-government within the framework of the traditional kehilla, the centuries-old communal organization of the Jews. And many of those who joined the councils did believe that their participation would benefit the community.142
Some of the councils’ earliest German-ordered tasks took on an ominous significance only when considered in hindsight; the potentially most fateful one was the census. The entries in Czerniaków’s diary show that the census ordered by Heydrich looked like any other administrative measure, fraught with difficulties but not particularly threatening. “From 12 until 2, in the Statistical Office,” the chairman recorded on October 21. “Between 3 and 6 p.m., at the SS…. I point out that the first [of November] is “All Saints Day” and the second “All Souls Day”; hence the Jewish census should be postponed until the 3rd…. A long and difficult conference. It is decided that the census will take place on [October] 28th…. The census forms were discussed and approved. I have to see to it that this German announcement is posted on the walls throughout the city.”143
Actually the Judenrat itself needed the census for identifying the pool of laborers at its disposal and for housing, welfare, food distribution, and the like; the immediate needs seemed by far more demanding and urgent than any long-term consequences. Nonetheless Kaplan, usually more farsighted than any other diarist and suspicious on principle of German intentions, sensed that the registration carried threatening possibilities: “Today, notices inform the Jewish population of Warsaw,” he wrote on October 25, “that next Saturday [October 29] there will be a census of the Jewish inhabitants. The Judenrat under the leadership of Engineer Czerniaków is required to carry it out. Our hearts tell us evil—some catastrophe for the Jews of Warsaw lies in this census. Otherwise there would be no need for it.”144
On January 24, 1940, Jewish enterprises in the General Government were placed under “trusteeship”; they could also be confiscated if “public interest” demanded it. On the same day Frank ordered the registration of all Jewish property: Nonregistered property would be confiscated as “ownerless.” Further expropriation measures followed, and fi
nally, on September 17, 1940, Göring ordered the confiscation of all Jewish property and assets except for personal belongings and one thousand reichsmarks in cash.145
The expropriation decrees opened the way to profiteering and enrichment on an enormous scale at all levels of the German administration in the annexed Polish provinces and within the General Government. The corruption that had spread throughout all segments of society in the Reich, in annexed Austria, and in the Protectorate was reaching new proportions in occupied Poland and would keep growing throughout the war.146 On January 1, 1940, diarist Emanuel Ringelblum—to whom we will return at length—noted: “The Lords and Masters not too bad. If you grease the right palms, you can get along.”147 Throughout the second half of November 1939, Czerniaków spent days trying to raise three hundred thousand zlotys to ransom a group of hostages from the Warsaw SS.148
Bribery became an integral part of the relations between the Germans and their victims. “The Councils constantly had to satisfy all kinds of demands to remodel and equip German office premises, casinos, and private apartments for various functionaries, as well as to provide expensive gifts, etc. In dealing with a ghetto, each functionary considered himself entitled to be rewarded by its Council. On the other hand, the Councils themselves implemented an intricate system of bribes in an effort to try and ‘soften the hearts’ of the ghetto bosses or to win favors for the ghetto inmates from the ‘good Germans.’ This in turn enhanced the pauperization of the Jews.”149 The bribes may have delayed briefly some threats or saved some individuals; but, as the coming months would show, they never changed German policies or, in most cases, major implementation steps. In addition, bribing the Germans or their auxiliaries led to the spreading of corruption among the victims: A “new class” of Jewish profiteers and black marketeers was rising above the miserable majority of the population.
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