The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Hitler had little to say about Poland and the Poles before the war, and his personal attitude towards them seemed in some ways unclear, in contrast to his long-held dislike of the Czechs, nurtured already in pre-1914 Vienna. What concentrated his mind and turned it sharply against the Poles was the refusal of the military government in Warsaw to make any concessions to his territorial demands, in contrast to the Czechs, who had obligingly caved in under international pressure in 1938, demonstrating their willingness to co-operate with the Third Reich in the dismemberment and eventual suppression of their state. Matters were made worse by the refusal of Britain and France to push Poland into conceding demands such as the return of Danzig to Germany. In 1934, when Hitler had concluded a ten-year non-aggression pact with the Poles, it had seemed possible that Poland might become a satellite state in a future European order dominated by Germany. But by 1939 it had become a serious obstacle to the eastward expansion of the Third Reich. It therefore had to be wiped from the map, and ruthlessly exploited to finance preparations for the coming war in the west.23

  The decision as to what should be done had still not been taken when, on 22 August 1939, as final preparations were being made for the invasion, Hitler told his leading generals how he envisaged the coming war with Poland:

  Our strength lies in our speed and our brutality. Genghis Khan hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart. History sees in him only the great founder of a state . . . I have issued a command - and I will have everyone who utters even a single word of criticism shot - that the aim of the war lies not in reaching particular lines but in the physical annihilation of the enemy. Thus, so far only in the east, I have put my Death’s Head formations at the ready with the command to send man, woman and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly . . . Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans.24

  The Poles were, he told Goebbels, ‘more animals than men, totally dull and formless . . . The dirt of the Poles is unimaginable’.25 Poland had to be subjugated with complete ruthlessness. ‘The Poles’, he told the Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg on 27 September 1939, consisted of ‘a thin Germanic layer: underneath frightful material . . . The towns thick with dirt . . . If Poland had gone on ruling the old German parts for a few more decades everything would have become lice-ridden and decayed. What was needed now was a determined and masterful hand to rule.’26 Hitler’s self-confidence grew rapidly as days, then weeks, passed in September 1939 without any sign of an effective intervention by the British and the French to help the Poles. The success of the German armies only increased his feeling of invulnerability. In the creation of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, strategic and economic considerations had played the major role. With the takeover of Poland, however, for the first time, Hitler and the Nazis were ready to unleash the full force of their racial ideology. Occupied Poland was to become the proving-ground for the creation of the new racial order in East-Central Europe, a model for what Hitler intended subsequently to happen in the rest of the region - in Belarus, Russia, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. This was to show what the Nazi concept of a new ‘living-space’ for the Germans in the east would really mean in practice.27

  1. Poland and East-Central Europe under the German-Soviet Pact, 1939-41

  By early October 1939 Hitler had abandoned his initial idea of allowing the Poles to govern themselves in a rump state. Large chunks of Polish territory were annexed by the Reich to form the new Reich Districts of Danzig-West Prussia, under Albert Forster, Nazi Party Regional Leader of Danzig, and Posen (soon renamed the Wartheland), under Arthur Greiser, formerly President of the Danzig Senate. Other pieces of Poland were added on to the existing Reich Districts of East Prussia and Silesia. These measures extended the borders of the Third Reich some 150 to 200 kilometres eastward. Altogether, 90,000 square kilometres of territory were incorporated into the Reich, along with around 10 million people, 80 per cent of them Poles. The rest of Poland, known as the ‘General Government’, was put under the autocratic rule of Hans Frank, the Nazi Party’s legal expert, who had made his name in defending Nazis in criminal cases during the 1920s and since then risen to become Reich Commissioner for Justice and head of the Nazi Lawyers’ League. Despite his unconditional loyalty to Hitler, Frank had clashed repeatedly with Heinrich Himmler and the SS, who cared a good deal less for legal formalities than he did, and removing him to Poland was a convenient way of sidelining him. Moreover, his legal experience seemed to fit him well for the task of building up a new administrative structure from scratch. More than 11 million people lived in the General Government, which included the Lublin district and parts of the provinces of Warsaw and Cracow. It was not a ‘protectorate’ like Bohemia and Moravia, but a colony, outside the Reich and beyond its law, its Polish inhabitants effectively stateless and without rights. In the position of almost unlimited power that he was to enjoy as General Governor, Frank’s penchant for brutal and violent rhetoric quickly translated into the reality of brutal and violent action. With Forster, Greiser and Frank occupying the leading administrative positions, the whole area of occupied Poland was now in the hands of hardened ‘Old Fighters’ of the Nazi movement, portending the unrestrained implementation of extreme Nazi ideology that was to be the guiding principle of the occupation.28

  Hitler announced his intentions on 17 October 1939 to a small group of senior officials. The General Government, Hitler told them, was to be autonomous from the Reich. It was to be the site of a ‘hard ethnic struggle that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles.’ There was to be no attempt at efficient or orderly government. ‘ “Polish muddle” must be allowed to flourish.’ Transport and communications had to be maintained because Poland would be ‘an advanced jumping-off point’ for the invasion of the Soviet Union at some time in the future. But otherwise, ‘any tendencies towards stabilizing the situation in Poland are to be suppressed’. It was not the task of the administration ‘to put the country on a sound basis economically and financially’. There must be no opportunity for the Poles to reassert themselves. ‘The Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from forming itself into a ruling class. The standard of living in the country is to remain low; it is of use to us only as a reservoir of labour.’29

  These drastic policies were implemented by a mixture of local paramilitary groups and SS task forces. At the very beginning of the war, Hitler ordered the establishment of an Ethnic German Self-Protection militia in Poland, which soon afterwards came under the aegis of the SS. The militia was organized, and then led in West Prussia, by Ludolf von Alvensleben, adjutant to Heinrich Himmler. He told his men on 16 October 1939: ‘You are now the master race here . . . Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’30 The militia began organized mass shootings of Polish civilians, without any authorization from the military or civil authorities, in widespread acts of revenge for supposed Polish atrocities against the ethnic Germans. Already on 7 October 1939 Alvensleben reported that 4,247 Poles had been subjected to the ‘sharpest measures’. In the month from 12 October to 11 November 1939 alone, some 2,000 men, women and children were shot by the militia in Klammer (Kulm district). No fewer than 10,000 Poles and Jews were brought by militiamen to Mniszek, in the parish of Dragass, from the surrounding areas, lined up on the edge of gravel pits, and shot. Militias, assisted by German soldiers, had shot another 8,000, in a wood near Karlshof, in the Zempelburg district, by 15 November 1939. By the time these activities had been brought to an end, early in 1940, many thousands more Poles had fallen victim to the militiamen’s rage. In the West Prussian town of Konitz, for example, the local Protestant militia, fired up by hatred and contempt for Poles, Catholics, Jews and anyone who did not fit in with the Nazis’ racial ideals, began on 26 September by shooting forty Poles and Jews, without even the pretence of a tr
ial. Their tally of Jewish and Polish victims had reached 900 by the following January. Of the 65,000 Poles and Jews murdered in the last quarter of 1939, around half were killed by the militias, sometimes in bestial circumstances; these were the first mass shootings of civilians in the war.31

  III

  In the course of 1939 Himmler, Heydrich and other leading figures in the SS had been engaged in a lengthy debate about the best way of organizing the various bodies that had come under their control since the beginning of the Third Reich, including the Security Service, the Gestapo, the criminal police and a large number of specialized offices. Their discussions were lent urgency by the prospect of the forthcoming invasion of Poland, in which it was clear that the lines of responsibility and demarcation between the police and the Security Service would need to be redrawn if they were to assert themselves effectively against the mighty power of the German army. On 27 September 1939 Himmler and Heydrich created the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt ) to pull all the various parts of the police and SS together under a single, centralized directorate. As elaborated over the following months, the Office came to consist of seven departments. Two of these (I and II) ran the administration in all its various activities, from employment conditions to personnel files. The initial director, Werner Best, was eventually pushed aside by his rival Heydrich in June 1940 and his responsibilities divided between less ambitious figures. Heydrich’s Security Service itself occupied Departments III and VI, covering respectively domestic and foreign affairs. Department IV consisted of the Gestapo, with sections devoted to dealing with political opponents (IVA), the Churches and the Jews (IVB), ‘protective custody’ (IVC), occupied territories (IVD) and counter-espionage (IVE). The criminal police was put into Department V, and Department VII was created to investigate oppositional ideologies. The whole vast structure was in a state of constant flux, riven by internal rivalries, and undermined by periodic changes of personnel. However, a number of key individuals ensured a degree of coherence and continuity - notably Reinhard Heydrich, its overall head, Heinrich M̈ller, the Gestapo chief, Otto Ohlendorf, who ran Department III, Franz Six (Department VII) and Arthur Nebe (Department V). It was to all intents and purposes an independent body, deriving its legitimacy from Hitler’s personal prerogative power, staffed not with traditional, legally trained civil servants but with ideologically committed Nazis. A key part of its rationale was to politicize the police, many of whose senior officers, including M̈ller, were career policemen rather than Nazi fanatics. Cut loose from traditional administrative structures, the Reich Security Head Office intervened in every area where Heydrich felt an active, radical presence was needed, first of all in the racial reordering of occupied Poland.32

  This now proceeded apace. Already on 8 September 1939 Heydrich was reported as saying that ‘we want to protect the little people, but the aristocrats, the Poles and Jews must be killed’, and expressing his impatience, as was Hitler himself, with the low rate of executions ordered by the formal military courts - a mere 200 a day at this time.33 Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, believed that ‘it’s the aim of the Leader and of G̈ring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish people’.34 On 19 September 1939 Halder recorded Heydrich as saying there would be a ‘clear-out: Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy’. 60,000 names of Polish professionals and intellectuals had been gathered before the war; they were all to be killed. A meeting between Brauchitsch and Hitler on 18 October confirmed that the policy was to ‘prevent the Polish intelligentsia from building itself up to become a new leadership stratum. The low standard of living will be maintained. Cheap slaves. All the rabble must be cleared out of German territory. Creation of a complete disorganization.’35 Heydrich told his subordinate commanders that Hitler had ordered the deportation of Poland’s Jews into the General Government, along with professional and educated Poles, apart from the political leaders, who were to be put into concentration camps.36

  Building on the experience of the occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and acting on Hitler’s explicit orders, Heydrich organized five Task Forces (Einsatzgruppen), later increased to seven, to follow the army into Poland to carry out the Third Reich’s ideological policies.37 Their leaders were appointed by a special administrative unit created by Heydrich and put under the command of Werner Best.38 The men he appointed to lead the Task Forces and their various sub-units (Einsatzkommandos ) were senior Security Service and Security Police officers, mostly well-educated, middle-class men in their mid-to-late thirties who had turned to the far right in the Weimar Republic. Many of the older, more senior commanders had served in the violent paramilitary units of the Free Corps in the early 1920s; their younger subordinates had often been initiated into the politics of the ultra-nationalist, antisemitic far right during their university days in the early 1930s. A good number, though not all, had imbibed violent anti-Polish feelings as members of paramilitary units in the conflicts of 1919- 21 in Upper Silesia, as natives of areas forcibly ceded to Poland in the Peace Settlement, or as police officers along the German-Polish border. Best expected his officers not only to be senior, experienced and efficient administrators but also to have military experience of one kind or another.39

  Typical of these men in most though not all respects was Bruno Streckenbach, an SS brigade leader born in Hamburg in 1902, son of a customs officer. Too young to fight in the First World War, Streckenbach joined a Free Corps unit in 1919 and was involved in fighting against left-wing revolutionaries in Hamburg before taking part in the Kapp putsch of March 1920. After working in various administrative jobs in the 1920s, Streckenbach joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and then in 1931 the SS; in November 1933 he became an officer in the SS Security Service, rising steadily through its ranks and becoming chief of the State Police in Hamburg in 1936, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in the process. This recommended him to Best, who appointed him head of Task Force I in Poland in 1939. Streckenbach was unusual chiefly in his relative lack of educational attainments; a number of his subordinate officers had doctorates. Like them, however, he had a history of violent commitment to the extreme right.40

  Streckenbach and the Task Forces, numbering in total about 2,700 men, were charged with establishing the political and economic security of the German occupation in the wake of the invasion. This included not only the killing of ‘the leading stratum of the population in Poland’ but also the ‘combating of all elements in enemy territory to the rear of the fighting troops who are hostile to the Reich and the Germans’.41 In practice this allowed the Task Forces considerable room for manoeuvre. The Task Forces were placed under the formal command of the army, which was ordered to assist them as far as the tactical situation allowed. This made sense insofar as the Task Forces were meant to deal with espionage, resistance, partisan groups and the like, but in practice they went very much their own way as the SS unfolded its massive campaign of arrests, deportations and murders.42 The Task Forces were armed with lists of Poles who had fought in one way or another against German rule in Silesia during the troubles that had accompanied the League of Nations plebiscites at the end of the First World War. Polish politicians, leading Catholics and proponents of Polish national identity were singled out for arrest. On 9 September 1939 the Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice, arrived in Bromberg to set up a series of show trials before a special court, which had condemned 100 men to death by the end of the year.43

  The hospital director Dr Zygmunt Klukowski began recording in his diary mass executions of Poles in his district by the Germans, carried out on the slightest of pretexts - seventeen people in early January 1940, for example.44 The danger to him as an intellectual, professional man was particularly acute. Klukowski lived in constant fear of arrest, and indeed in June 1940 he was taken by German police from his hospital to an internment camp, where the Poles were put through punishing physical exercises, beaten ‘with sticks, whips, or fists’, and kept in filth
y and insanitary conditions. Under interrogation he told the Germans that there was typhus in his hospital and he had to get back to stop it spreading into the town and possibly infecting them (‘In my head I was saying “glory be to the louse”,’ he later wrote in his diary). He was immediately released to go back to what he portrayed as his thoroughly infested hospital. He had been very lucky, he reflected; he had escaped being beaten or having to run round the prison training field, and he had got out quickly. The experience, he wrote, ‘surpassed all the rumors. I was unable before to comprehend the methodical disregard of personal dignity, how human beings could be treated much worse than any animals, while the physical abuses that were performed with sadistic pleasure clearly showed on the faces of the German Gestapo. But,’ he went on, ‘. . . the behavior of the prisoners was magnificent. No one begged for mercy; no one showed even a trace of cowardice . . . All the insults, mistreatment, and abuses were received calmly with the knowledge that they bring shame and disgrace to the German people.’45