The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Reprisals for even the most trivial offences were savage. In one incident in the village of Wawer, a Warsaw physician reported,

  A drunken Polish peasant picked a quarrel with a German soldier and in the resulting brawl wounded him with a knife. The Germans seized this opportunity to carry out a real orgy of indiscriminate murder in alleged reprisal for the outrage. Altogether 122 people were killed. As, however, the inhabitants of this village, for some reason or other, apparently fell short of the pre-determined quota of victims, the Germans stopped a train to Warsaw at the local railway station (normally it did not call there at all), dragged out several passengers, absolutely innocent of any knowledge of what had happened, and executed them on the spot without any formalities. Three of them were left hanging with their heads down for four days at the local railway station. A huge board placed over the hideous scene told the story of the victims and threatened that a similar fate was in store for every locality where a German was killed or wounded.46

  When a thirty-year-old stormtrooper leader and local official arrived drunk at the prison in Hohensalza, hauled the Polish prisoners out of their cells and had fifty-five of them shot on the spot, killing some of them personally, the only effect that the protests of other local officials had was to persuade Regional Leader Greiser to extract from him a promise not to touch any alcohol for the next ten years.47 In another incident, in Obluze, near Gdynia, the smashing-in of a window in the local police station resulted in the arrest of fifty Polish schoolboys. When they refused to name the culprit, their parents were ordered to beat them in front of the local church. The parents refused, so the SS men beat the boys with their rifle-butts then shot ten of them, leaving their bodies lying in front of the church for a whole day.48

  Such incidents occurred on a daily basis through the winter of 1939-40 and involved a mixture of regular German troops, ethnic German militias and units from the Task Forces and the Order Police. While the army had not been ordered to kill the Polish intelligentsia, the view most soldiers and junior officers had of Poles as dangerous and treacherous subhumans was enough for them to target a large number of Polish intellectuals and professionals as part of what they thought of as preventive or reprisal measures.49 Given the fierce if ineffective resistance they encountered from the Poles, German army commanders were extremely worried at the prospect of a guerrilla war against their troops, and took the most draconian retaliatory measures where they suspected it was emerging.50 ‘If there is shooting from a village behind the front,’ ordered Colonel-General von Bock on 10 September 1939, ‘and if it proves impossible to identify the house from which the shots came, then the whole village is to be burned to the ground.’51 By the time the military administration of occupied Poland ended on 26 October, 531 towns and villages had been burned to the ground, and 16,376 Poles had been executed.52 Lower-ranking German soldiers were fuelled by fear, contempt and rage as they encountered Polish resistance. In many units, officers gave pep-talks before the invasion, underlining the barbarism, bestiality and subhumanity of the Poles. Corporal Franz Ortner, a rifle-man, railed in a report against what he called the ‘brutalized’ Poles, who had, he thought, bayoneted the German wounded on the battlefield. A private, writing a letter home, described Polish actions against ethnic Germans as ‘brutish’. Poles were ‘insidious’, ‘treacherous’, ‘base’; they were mentally subnormal, cowardly, fanatical; they lived in ‘stinking holes’ instead of houses; and they were under the ‘baleful influence of Jewry’. Soldiers waxed indignant about the conditions in which Poles lived: ‘Everywhere foul straw, damp, pots and flannels’, wrote one of a Polish home he entered, confirming everything he had heard about the backwardness of the Poles.53

  Typical examples of the ordinary soldier’s behaviour can be found in the diary of Gerhard M., a stormtrooper, born in Flensburg in 1914 and called up to the army shortly before the war. On 7 September 1939 his unit encountered resistance from ‘cowardly snipers’ in a Polish village. Gerhard M. had been a fireman before the war. But now he and the men of his unit burned the village to the ground.

  Burning houses, weeping women, screaming children. A picture of misery. But the Polish people didn’t want it any better. In one of the primitive peasant houses we even surprised a woman servicing a Polish machine-gun. The house was turned over and set alight. After a short while the woman was surrounded by the flames and tried to get out. But we stopped her, as hard as it was. Soldiers can’t be treated any differently just because they’re in skirts. Her screaming rang in my ears long after. The whole village burned. We had to walk exactly in the middle of the street, because the heat from the burning houses on both sides was too great.54

  Such scenes repeated themselves as the German armies advanced. A few days later, on 10 September 1939, Gerhard M.’s unit was fired on from another Polish village and set the houses alight.

  Soon burning houses were lining our route, and out of the flames there sounded the screams of the people who had hidden in them and were unable any more to rescue themselves. The animals were bellowing in fear of death, a dog howled until it was burned up, but worst of all was the screaming of the people. It was dreadful. It’s still ringing in my ears even today. But they shot at us and so they deserved death.55

  SS Task Forces, police units, ethnic German paramilitaries and regular German soldiers were thus killing civilians all over German-occupied Poland from September 1939 onwards. As well as observing actions of this kind, Dr Klukowski began to notice more and more young Polish men leaving for work in Germany in the early months of 1940. At the beginning of the year, indeed, the Reich Food Ministry, together with the Labour Ministry and the Office of the Four-Year Plan, had demanded a million Polish workers for the Reich economy. 75 per cent of them were to work in agriculture, where there was a serious labour shortage. These, as G̈ring decreed on 25 January 1940, were to come from the General Government. If they did not volunteer, they would have to be conscripted. Given the miserable conditions that existed in occupied Poland, the prospect of living in Germany was not unattractive, and over 80,000 Polish workers, a third of them women, were transported voluntarily to Germany on 154 special trains in February, mainly from the General Government. Once in Germany, however, they were subjected to harshly discriminatory laws and repressive measures.56 News of their treatment in Germany quickly led to a sharp decline in the number of volunteers, so that from April 1940 Frank introduced compulsion in an attempt to fulfil his quota. Increasingly, young Poles fled into the forests to avoid labour conscription in Germany; the beginnings of the Polish underground resistance movement date from this time.57 In January the resistance tried to assassinate the General Government’s police chief, and over the following weeks there were uprisings and murders of ethnic Germans in a number of villages. On 30 May 1940, Frank initiated a ‘pacification action’ in which 4,000 resistance fighters and intellectuals, half of whom were already in custody, were killed, along with some 3,000 Poles sentenced for criminal offences.58 This had little effect. In February 1940 there were still only 295,000 Poles, mostly prisoners of war, working as labourers in the Old Reich. This in no way made good the labour shortages that had been occasioned by the mass conscription of German men into the armed forces. By the summer of 1940, there were 700,000 Poles working as voluntary or forced labourers in the Old Reich; another 300,000 went to the Reich the following year. By this time, Frank was issuing local administrations with fixed quotas to fulfil. Often the police surrounded villages and arrested all the young men in them. Those who attempted to flee were shot. In towns, young Poles were simply rounded up by the police and the SS in cinemas or other public places, or on the streets, and shipped off without further ceremony. As a result of these methods, by September 1941 there were over a million Polish workers in the Old Reich. According to one estimate, only 15 per cent of them had gone there of their own accord.59

  The mass deportation of young Poles as forced workers to the Reich was paralleled by a wholesale campaign of lootin
g unleashed by the German occupation forces. When German soldiers tried to steal from his hospital, Klukowski managed to get rid of them by telling them once again that several of the patients had typhus.60 Others were not so quick-witted, or so well situated. The requirement for the troops to live off the land was not accompanied by any kind of detailed rules of requisitioning. From impounding chickens it was but a short step to requisitioning cooking equipment and then to stealing money and jewellery. 61 Typical was the experience of Gerhard M., whose unit arrived in a Polish town and stood on the street awaiting orders:

  A resourceful chap had discovered a chocolate shop with its windows boarded over. Unfortunately the owner wasn’t there. So we cleared out the shop on tick. Our vehicles were piled high with chocolate until there was no more room. Every soldier ran around with his cheeks stuffed full, chewing. We were mightily pleased with the cheapness of the purchase. I discovered a store of really beautiful apples. All up onto our vehicle. A can of lemons and chocolate biscuits on the back of my bike, and then off we went again.62

  Leading the way in the despoliation of occupied Poland was the General Governor himself. Frank made no effort to conceal his greed. He even referred to himself as a robber baron. He confiscated the country estate of the Potocki family for use as a rural retreat, and drove around his fiefdom in a limousine large enough to attract critical comment even from colleagues such as the Governor of Galicia. Aping Hitler, he built an imitation of the Berghof in the hills near Zakopane. The magnificent banquets he staged caused his waistline to expand so fast that he consulted a dietician because he could barely fit into his dress uniform any more.63

  Looting and requisitioning were soon placed on a formal, quasi-legal basis in the territories incorporated into the Reich. On 27 September 1939 the German military government in Poland decreed a blanket confiscation of Polish property, confirming the order again on 5 October 1939. On 19 October 1939 G̈ring announced that the Office of the Four-Year Plan was seizing all Polish and Jewish property in the incorporated territories. This practice was formalized by a decree on 17 September 1940 that set up a central agency, the Head Office of the Trustees for the East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost), to administer the confiscated enterprises. In February 1941 these already included over 205,000 businesses ranging in size from small workshops to major industrial enterprises. By June 1941, 50 per cent of businesses and a third of the larger landed estates in the annexed territories had been taken over by the requisitioned Trustees without compensation. In addition, the army took over a substantial number of farms to secure food supplies for the troops.64 Confiscations included the removal of scientific equipment from university laboratories for use in Germany. Even the Warsaw Zoo’s collection of stuffed animals was taken away.65 Metal was at a premium. Along the banks of the Vistula, one German paratrooper reported not long after the invasion, there were great crates ‘full of bars of copper, lead, zinc in enormous quantities. Everything, absolutely everything was loaded up and brought back to the Reich.’66 As had been the case in the Reich itself for some time, iron and steel objects, such as park railings and garden gates, even candelabras and saucepans, were collected to be melted down and used in armament and vehicle production in Germany.67 When the cold winter really began to bite, in January 1940, Dr Klukowski noted, ‘the German police took all sheepskin coats from passing villagers and left them only in jackets’.68 Not long afterwards the occupation forces began raiding villages and confiscating all the banknotes they found there.69

  IV

  Not all German army commanders, particularly in the senior ranks, where the influence of Nazism was less extreme than lower down the army hierarchy, accepted this situation with equanimity. Some of them indeed were soon complaining of unauthorized shootings of Polish civilians on the orders of junior officers, and of looting and extortion by German troops, and alleging that ‘some of the prisoners were brutally beaten’. ‘Near Pultusk,’ reported a General Staff officer, ‘80 Jews have been mown down in a bestial manner. A court-martial has been established, also against two people who have been looting, murdering and raping in Bromberg.’ Such actions began to arouse concern in the army leadership. Already on 10 September 1939 Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder was noticing ‘dirty deeds behind the front’.70 In mid-October, complaints from army commanders led to an agreement that the ‘self-protection militias’ were to be dissolved, though in some areas it took several months for this to be brought about.71 But this did not end the senior officers’ concerns. On 25 October 1939 Walther von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army, rapped his officers sharply over the knuckles about their conduct in Poland:

  A disturbing number of cases, for example of illegal expulsion, forbidden confiscation, self-enrichment, misappropriation and theft, maltreatment or threatening subordinates partly in over-excitement, partly in senseless drunkenness, disobedience with the most serious consequences for the troop unit under command, rape of a married woman, etc., yield a picture of soldiers with the habits of freebooting mercenaries (Landsknechtsmanieren), which cannot be strongly enough condemned.72

  A number of other senior officers, including those whose belief in Hitler and National Socialism was beyond question, shared this view.73

  In many instances, army leaders, concerned that they might be saddled with the responsibility for the mass murders now in progress, were only too pleased to devolve it onto the SS Security Service Task Force leaders by allowing them a free hand.74 Yet instances began to multiply of senior army officers taking action against SS units which they thought to be breaching the laws and conventions of war and causing disturbances behind the front that were a general threat to order. General von K̈chler, commander of the German Third Army, ordered the arrest and disarming of a police unit belonging to Task Force V after it had shot some Jews and set their houses on fire in Mlawa. He court-martialled members of an SS artillery regiment who had driven fifty Jews into a synagogue near Rozan after they had finished working on strengthening a bridge, and then shot them all ‘without reason’. Other officers took similar measures, even in one case arresting a member of Hitler’s SS bodyguard. Brauchitsch had met Hitler on 20 September and Heydrich on 21 September to try to sort out the situation. The only result was an amnesty issued by Hitler personally on 4 October for crimes committed ‘out of bitterness against the atrocities committed by the Poles’. Yet military discipline was being threatened, and a number of senior officers were deeply concerned. Rumours spread quickly through the officer corps. At his Cologne base in early December 1939, a thoughtful staff officer in his mid-thirties, Captain Hans Meier-Welcker, heard of the atrocities and wondered, ‘How will something like this avenge itself?’75

  The most outspoken criticism of the occupation policy came from Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, who had played a major part in the invasion and was appointed Commander-in-Chief East, in charge of the military administration of the conquered territories, in late October 1939. Military rule was formally brought to an end on 26 October 1939, and authority passed to the civil administration. Thus Blaskowitz had no general powers over the region. Nevertheless he remained responsible for its military defence. A few weeks after his appointment, Blaskowitz sent Hitler a lengthy memorandum detailing the crimes and atrocities committed by SS and police units in the area under his command. He repeated his allegations at greater length in a memorandum prepared for an official visit by the army Commander-in-Chief to his headquarters on 15 February 1940. He condemned the killing of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles as counter-productive. It would, he wrote, damage Germany’s reputation abroad. It would only strengthen Polish national feeling and drive more Poles and Jews into the resistance. It was harming the army’s reputation in the population. He warned of ‘the boundless brutalization and moral depravity that will spread through valuable German human material like an epidemic in the shortest time’ if it was allowed to continue. Blaskowitz instanced a number of cases of murder and looting by SS and police units. ‘E
very soldier,’ he wrote, ‘feels himself disgusted and repelled by these crimes that are being committed in Poland by members of the Reich and representatives of its state authority.’76

  The hatred and bitterness these actions were arousing in the population were driving Poles and Jews together in a common cause against the invader and needlessly endangering military security and economic life, he told the Nazi Leader.77 Hitler dismissed such scruples as ‘childish’. One could not fight a war with the methods of the Salvation Army. He had never liked or trusted Blaskowitz anyway, he told his adjutant, Gerhard Engel. He should be dismissed. The head of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, brushed aside the incidents detailed by his subordinate as ‘regrettable errors of judgement’ or baseless ‘rumours’. In any case, he was fully behind what he called the ‘otherwise unusual, tough measures taken against the Polish population in the occupied territory’ that were in his view necessary in view of the need for the ‘securing of the German living-space’ ordered by Hitler. Lacking support from his superior, Blaskowitz was relieved of his command in May 1940. Although he subsequently served in senior posts in other theatres of war, Blaskowitz never gained his Field Marshal’s baton, unlike other generals of his standing.78

  The generals, now more concerned with military events in the west, knuckled under.79 General Georg von K̈chler issued an order on 22 July 1940 banning his officers from indulging in ‘any criticism of the struggle being waged with the population in the General Government, for example the treatment of the Polish minorities, the Jews, and Church matters. The achievement of a final solution of this ethnic struggle,’ he added, ‘which has been raging for centuries along our eastern frontier, requires particularly tough measures.’80 Many senior army officers subscribed to this view. What they were concerned about in the main was indiscipline. Given the prevailing attitude of the troops and of junior and middle-ranking officers towards the Poles, it was scarcely surprising that the incidents where officers intervened to prevent atrocities were relatively few in number. The German army hierarchy did not, for example, intend to break the Geneva Convention of 1929 in relation to the nearly 700,000 prisoners of war they took in the Polish campaign, but there were numerous cases of military guards shooting Polish prisoners when they failed to keep up with a forced march, killing prisoners who were too weak or ill to stand, and penning prisoners into open-air camps with inadequate food and supplies. On 9 September 1939, when a motorized German infantry regiment took 300 Polish prisoners after a half-hour exchange of fire near Ciepiel’w, the colonel in charge, angered by the loss of fourteen of his men during the clash, lined all the prisoners up and had them machine-gunned into a ditch by the side of the road. A later Polish investigation identified a further sixty-three incidents of this kind, and many more must have gone unrecorded.81 In formal military executions alone at least 16,000 Poles were shot; one estimate puts the figure at 27,000.82