The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  I V

  Poland’s troubles were scarcely any less dire in the area occupied from 17 September 1939 by the Red Army, as a consequence of the Nazi- Soviet Pact.137 The Soviets occupied 201,000 square kilometres of Polish territory, with a population of 13 million. The 200,000 Polish prisoners of war in the hands of the Red Army were partly released to go home, particularly if they lived in the German part of the country, or transferred to labour camps in south-eastern Poland to work on construction projects. The officers among them, however, were deported to camps in the Soviet Union, where they were joined by Polish customs officials, police, prison guards and military police until they numbered 15,000 in all. During April and early May 1940 some 4,443 of these men were taken in batches by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on orders from Moscow, to the Katy’ Forest near Smolensk, where they were individually shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves. The rest of the Polish officers were also killed. Only about 450 out of the 15,000, who were Communists, or deemed capable of being converted to Communism, were spared. The others were shot in a variety of locations or killed in the camps, along with some 11,000 alleged counter-revolutionaries. Some estimates put the total killed at around 20,000; the exact number may never be known. Most of these men were reserve officers, professionals, doctors, landowners, civil servants and the like.138

  Their extermination was part of a much larger campaign by the Soviets to eradicate Polish national culture. It was accompanied by massive intercommunal violence in which many thousands of Poles were slaughtered by paramilitaries from Ukrainian and Belarussian national minorities in the Polish east, encouraged by the Soviet occupiers. Following a rigged plebiscite, the occupied territories were annexed by the Soviet Union and the economic and social system accommodated to the Soviet model, with businesses and estates expropriated and taken over by the state, and Ukrainians and Belarussians brought in to run them. Polish monuments and street signs were destroyed, bookshops and cultural institutions were closed down. Half a million Poles were imprisoned within Soviet-occupied Poland. Many of them were subjected to torture, beatings, killings and executions. A campaign of mass deportations began. Those singled out included members of political parties, Russian and other exiles, police officers and prison guards, officers and volunteers of the Polish army, active lay members of the Catholic Church, aristocrats, landowners, bankers, industrialists, hoteliers and restaurateurs, refugees, ‘persons who have travelled abroad’ and even ‘persons who are esperantists or philatelists’. Almost all Polish professionals in the occupied area were arrested and deported as well. In many cases their families were sent with them. Altogether the deportees numbered an estimated 1.5 million people. In the first half of 1940, they were packed into cattle-trucks, with standing room only, and taken off in vast train convoys to collective farms in Kazakhstan and other distant locations. Tens of thousands of Poles who had served the previous government or shown themselves unwilling to conform to the occupiers’ Marxist-Leninist ideology were arrested, tried on trumped-up charges and sent to labour camps in Siberia. Perhaps a third of the deportees died before the survivors were released after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. By this time, Soviet policy in occupied Poland had become marginally more lenient, as growing concern in Moscow about the danger of Ukrainian support for a possible German invasion led to a limited encouragement of Polish national identity, which was indelibly anti-German in sentiment. Nevertheless, the outcome of the Soviet occupation was scarcely less disastrous for the Poles than that of the German occupation.139

  For the 1.2 million Jews who lived in the Soviet-controlled part of Poland, and the 350,000 or so Jewish refugees who had fled there from the advancing Germans, the Soviet takeover of the territory initially provided welcome relief. They would be protected, they thought, not only from the exterminatory racism of the Germans but also from the native antisemitism of the Poles. Even conservative and religious Jews welcomed the Soviet takeover. A substantial, though subsequently disputed, number of Jews took on administrative positions in the Soviet Communist ruling apparatus; however many they were, their number was sufficient to convince many Polish and Ukrainian nationalists that the entire Jewish community was working for the hated Soviet Communists. In fact, the arrest and deportation of wealthy Jews and others, particularly intellectuals and professionals, who refused as Polish patriots to sign on for Soviet citizenship, soon dispelled the Jewish population’s illusions about the true nature of Soviet rule. As many as one in three of the Polish citizens deported to Siberia and other remote areas of the Soviet Union was Jewish; 100,000 are estimated to have died in the process. Still, the damage was done; those who remained would pay dearly for their initial enthusiasm for the Soviet invasion when the Red Army was eventually driven out by the Germans. In the meantime, conditions deteriorated so rapidly that Jews who had fled from German-occupied Poland began going back there.140

  There were, however, crucial differences between the two occupations. Unlike the western part of Poland, annexed by the Nazis, the eastern part contained a majority of non-Poles. These were Ukrainians and Belarussians, mainly peasants whom the occupying power urged to rise up against the supposedly fascist Polish landowning class, and Jews. In pursuit of a social revolution, the Soviet administration expropriated Polish property, nationalized banks and divided up the big estates among peasant smallholders. Formal civil rights were extended to everybody, and younger Jews in particular welcomed their liberation from the antisemitic discrimination practised by the regime of the Polish colonels. When these Jews joined the Communist Party in their enthusiasm for the new regime, they threw off their Jewish identity in the process. The Polish elites were seen as the leaders of Polish nationalism by both occupying powers, to be crushed and eliminated by force; but the main concern of the Soviets was to destroy them politically, and so they were deported not from the Soviet Union altogether, but deep into its interior. From Stalin’s point of view, what was being carried out in occupied Poland was a social revolution for the benefit of the majority; from Hitler’s point of view, what was being carried out in occupied Poland was an ethnic revolution for the benefit of a small minority, that of the ethnic Germans; capitalism, property and private enterprise were left in place, but the Poles and Jews were to play no part in them.141

  ‘A DREADFUL RABBLE’

  I

  If Poles were second-class citizens in the General Government, then Jews scarcely qualified as human beings at all in the eyes of the German occupiers, soldiers and civilians, Nazis and non-Nazis alike. The Germans brought with them a fear and contempt for the Jews that had been instilled into the great majority of them by incessant Nazi propaganda over the previous six and a half years. During this time, the Jews of Germany itself, less than 1 per cent of the population, had been subjected to growing government discrimination, dispossession and periodic bouts of violence from Nazi activists. Half of them had emigrated. Those who remained had been deprived of their civil rights and their livelihoods, removed from social interaction with other Germans, drafted into forced labour schemes and effectively cut off from the rest of German society. In November 1938 they had been subjected to a nationwide series of pogroms in which virtually all of Germany’s synagogues had been destroyed, thousands of Jewish-owned shops smashed, Jewish flats and houses ransacked, and 30,000 Jewish men arrested and put in concentration camps, where over a period of several weeks they were beaten and terrorized until they were eventually released after giving assurances that they would emigrate. Following this, the remaining Jewish population of Germany was robbed of its last assets. The process by which non-Jewish Germans came to regard their Jewish compatriots as a race apart, despite the fact that Germany’s Jews shared all the central aspects of German culture, and looked and dressed no differently from other Germans, had been gradual and uneven, but by 1939 it had gone a long way.142

  When the Germans invaded Poland, however, they encountered a very different situation. Poland in 193
9 contained the largest proportion of Jews living in any European state, numbering almost three and a half million, or 10 per cent of the population, measured by religious affiliation. More than three-quarters of them lived in Poland’s towns and cities. There were over 350,000 in Warsaw alone, making up nearly 30 per cent of the capital’s population. More than 200,000 lived in L’d’, fully a third of its inhabitants. In more than 30 per cent of towns in the General Government Jews actually formed a majority. 85 per cent of them spoke Yiddish or Hebrew as their first language rather than Polish. The overwhelming majority of them practised Judaism. Many dressed differently from Christian Poles and wore beards or sidelocks on religious grounds. They formed a distinctive national minority against which the antisemitic Polish military government had increasingly discriminated in the second half of the 1930s. Most Polish Jews were small traders and shopkeepers, artisans and tradespeople, or wage labourers; fewer than 10 per cent were professional or other successful members of the middle classes; many of them were very poor, and in 1934 more than a quarter of them had been living off benefits. Just over 2 million Jews lived in the areas taken over by Germany in September 1939, of whom up to 350,000 fled immediately to the eastern part of Poland, to Lithuania or to Hungary. To the incoming Germans these were ‘Eastern Jews’, a wholly alien and despised minority regarded by most of them as non-European, to be treated with even greater contempt and mistrust than the Jews of Germany itself.143 Indeed, 18,000 Polish Jews had been forcibly expelled from Germany across the Polish border in October 1938, followed by another 2,000 in June the following year.144

  In Poland the Nazis’ policies of racial suppression and extermination were applied in full for the first time, in a gigantic experiment that would later be repeated on an even larger scale in other parts of Eastern Europe. German rule in Poland was ruthlessly and exclusively designed to further what the Nazis perceived as Germany’s interests, including Germany’s racial interests. The deliberate reduction of Poland to a state of nature, the boundless exploitation of its resources, the radical degradation of everyday life, the arbitrary exercise of unfettered power, the violent expulsion of Poles from their homes - all of this opened the way to the application of unbridled terror against Poland’s Jews. Moreover, the chaotic situation of the country, and Hitler’s repeated insistence on the primacy of racial policy in Poland, facilitated from the very beginning the autonomous exercise of power there by the most fanatical and determined elements in the Party and the SS.145 The Special SS Security Service Task Force under Udo von Woyrsch was particularly active in attacks on Jews. In Bedzin on 8 September 1939 it murdered a number of Jewish children and burned down the local synagogue with flame-throwers, setting light to nearby houses in the town’s Jewish quarter; the Task Force troops indiscriminately shot Jews they encountered on the streets. By the time they left, some 500 of the town’s Jewish inhabitants were dead. Meeting with Heydrich and Streckenbach in Cracow on 11 September 1939, Woyrsch was told that Himmler had ordered the harshest possible measures to be taken against Jews so that they would be forced to flee to the east and out of the area controlled by the Germans. The Special Task Force redoubled its efforts to terrorize the Jewish population into flight, burning a group of Jews alive in the synagogue at Dyn’w and carrying out mass shootings in a variety of locations across the land.146

  Ordinary soldiers and junior officers shared many of the antisemitic prejudices against ‘Eastern Jews’ encouraged by Nazi propaganda since 1933.147 German attitudes were well exemplified by the Chief of Staff of General Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army, Hans Felber, who on 20 September 1939 described the Jews of L’d’ as ‘a dreadful rabble, filthy and sly’. They had to be deported, he said.148 He was echoing the impressions gained by Hitler himself in a visit to the Jewish quarter of Kielce on 10 September 1939: his press chief Otto Dietrich, who accompanied him, noted: ‘The appearance of these people is unimaginable . . . They live in inconceivable filth, in huts in which not even a tramp would pass the night in Germany.’149 ‘These are no longer people,’ remarked Goebbels after visiting L’d’ at the beginning of November 1939, ‘these are animals. So the task is not humanitarian but surgical. Steps have to be taken here, and really radical ones too. Otherwise Europe will perish from the Jewish disease.’150 Goebbels sent film crews in to take pictures for the weekly newsreel show in German cinemas, and Jewish congregations and rabbis were forced to stage special religious services for the German film crews, who also went into Jewish slaughterhouses to get pictures of the ritual slaughter of cattle. All of this material was collected under Goebbels’s personal direction and with Hitler’s personal involvement for a feature-length documentary entitled The Eternal Jew, which was eventually screened a year later, in November 1940.151

  The general atmosphere of racial hatred and contempt encouraged by Hitler’s instructions to the generals before the outbreak of the war gave soldiers clear encouragement to take whatever they wanted from Poland’s Jews. As the German army entered Warsaw, the troops immediately began looting Jewish shops and robbing Jews at gunpoint in the street.152 The Jewish schoolmaster Chaim Kaplan recorded in his diary on 6 October 1939 that German troops had broken into his flat and raped his Christian maid (they were not raping Jewish women because of the Nuremberg Laws, he thought - although in practice this did not prove much of a hindrance). Then they beat her to try to get her to reveal where he had hidden his money (he had in fact already removed it). Kaplan recorded how even officers were manhandling Jews in the street and roughly cutting off their beards. They forced Jewish girls to clean public latrines with their blouses, and committed innumerable other acts of sadism against Warsaw’s Jewish inhabitants.153 Zygmunt Klukowski recorded many instances of theft and looting by German soldiers, often aided and abetted by local Poles, particularly where Jewish shops and premises were concerned. Theft was often followed by arson and wanton destruction, in which local people, their prejudices fed by years of antisemitic propaganda and indoctrination from Polish nationalists, including senior figures in the Polish Catholic Church, participated with enthusiasm.154

  On 22 October 1939 German troops brought up lorries to cart away the contents of Jewish stores in Zamość the nearest large town to where Klukowski lived. Eight days later, German army officers began taking away cash and jewellery from Jewish houses in the town.155 Increasingly, looters and robbers used violence against their Jewish victims.156 When the Germans settled into Zamość in mid-October 1939, noted Zygmunt Klukowski in his diary, they ordered the Jews to ‘sweep the streets, clean all the public latrines, and fill all the street trenches . . . They order the Jews to take at least a half hour of exhaustive gymnastics before any work, which can be fatal, particularly for older people.’ ‘The Germans are treating the Jews very brutally,’ he noted on 14 October 1939: ‘They cut their beards; sometimes they pull their hair out.’157 On 14 November 1939 the town’s synagogue was burned down, along with neighbouring Jewish houses. All of this was in direct imitation of the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 in Germany and its aftermath. The Jewish community was ordered to pay a massive fine as ‘compensation’.158 And from 22 December 1939 all Jews aged ten years and over had to wear a yellow star on their sleeve, and shops had to display signs indicating whether they were Jewish or not.159 Jews were barred from medical treatment except by Jewish physicians. Called to see a sick Jewish man, Dr Klukowski ‘went to him wondering whether anyone was spying on me. I feel terrible,’ he wrote in his diary on 29 March 1940. ‘On my prescription I even omitted the name of the sick man. So now we come to this: the main goal of every physician is to give medical help, but now it becomes a crime, punishable by imprisonment.’160

  It was striking that these acts were carried out not by the SS but by regular German army officers and men. Groups of grinning German soldiers fired randomly into houses they marched past in the Jewish quarters of the towns they entered, or gathered around Jewish men in the street, forcing them to smear each other with excrement, setting their beard
s on fire, compelling them to eat pork, or cutting the Jewish star into their foreheads with knives.161 For many ordinary soldiers this was their first confrontation with Polish Jews, many of whom in their whole appearance seemed to bear out all the clich’s of the propaganda to which Germans had been subjected for the previous six years. These, as one corporal wrote in August 1940, were ‘genuine Jews with beards, and filthy, to be precise, even worse than the Stormer always describes them as being’.162 Here, as another corporal wrote in December 1939, were ‘Jews - seldom have I seen such unkempt figures wandering around, wrapped in tatters, filthy, greasy. These people seemed to us like a plague. Their nasty way of looking at you, their treacherous questions and deceitful fussing about have often prompted us to reach for our pistols, to recall these over-curious and prying subjects to reality.’163