Once again, the racial engineers of the Third Reich had nowhere to put them, and the camp population ballooned. Of the absurdly ambitious target set by Nazi population organizers of 5.3 million deportations from the Incorporated Eastern Territories for the winter of 1940–41, just 408,000 had been carried out by March 1941. To add to the difficulty, an ever-increasing proportion of colonizable land was set aside by the SS to be distributed as rewards to demobilized soldiers at the end of the war; by March 1942, half of the Warthegau had been designated for this purpose.38 Lastly, the poverty of many of the Polish and Jewish deportees meant that a single confiscated property was rarely considered adequate for the needs of the colonists. As Himmler explained to a campfull of impatient and disgruntled Volhynians at Kirchberg (Wiśniowa Góra) in May 1940, “You must understand that you have to wait. Before you get your farm, a Polack must first be thrown out. Often they are such holes that we first have to put the buildings in order or combine two farms.”39 In practice, the actual “multiplier” effect was higher still. Himmler’s insistence that the minimum size of a Volksdeutsch farm was to be 25 hectares (62.5 acres) meant that on average, three Polish farms had to be amalgamated to provide a holding for a single Volksdeutsch family.40
The confiscations, moreover, rarely went to plan. According to a protocol laid down by Wilhelm Koppe, head of the SS and police in the Warthegau, areas targeted for clearance should be raided without notice in the predawn hours to prevent the inhabitants from hiding or destroying their goods. The expellees should be taken immediately to an evacuation camp, pending their relocation to the Generalgouvernement. The new Volksdeutsch colonists should be standing by, but care was to be taken to ensure that they did not witness the distressing scene. Often, female “settlement advisers”—typically, middle-class young women from Germany performing their obligatory six months’ labor service—would be brought along to give the confiscated properties a quick spruce-up. “On resettlement days they ensured that the evicted Poles did not take everything with them, but left the necessary items behind for the settlers.” They were also supposed to clean the houses and provide a hot meal for the new arrivals “so that the settlers would quickly feel at ease in their new home.”41 In most cases, these operations took place in a far more chaotic fashion. Sometimes it was left to the Nazi women to carry out expulsions by themselves; one of them, Melita Maschmann, later recalled her fury when she and the girls of the Labor Service camp she headed were detailed in 1942 by the local SS-men to remove the Polish inhabitants of a Warthegau village, armed only with a wooden coat hanger.42 Local Volksdeutsche possessing advance knowledge of planned clearances frequently leaked the information to Poles selected for deportation in the hope of being able to buy their goods at knockdown prices. The reliance of German resettlement agencies on Polish ancillary workers also meant that secrecy was hard to maintain. In the summer of 1940, consequently, only about 40 percent of the Poles selected for deportation from the Warthegau were falling into the authorities’ hands. The remainder had gone to live with relatives, disappeared in the cities, or taken to the forests.43
The recipients of the confiscated properties, for their part, often found it impossible to maintain that comfortable distance from the squalid reality of the process to which Koppe attached such value. Irma Eigi, the seventeen-year-old daughter of an Estonian hotelier, was disturbed to find herself surrounded, in the flat assigned to her family by the housing office in Posen (Poznań) in December 1939, by evidence of the sudden catastrophe that had overtaken the previous owners. “Some of the cupboards stood open. The drawers were open. On the table were the remains of food. And then the unmade beds, messed up.”44 Shaken by the spectacle, her father asked to be transferred to a slightly less visibly morally compromised dwelling, but to no avail. Herr Eigi did, however, accept the invitation of the local resettlement agency to tour the Polish-owned restaurants of the town and find one he liked, following which a deed of ownership to his selected business was issued to him. Sylvia Bannister, the English wife of a German obstetrician sent to Bydgoszcz in October 1939, was similarly disconcerted on her arrival in the town to be handed a list of confiscated houses to view. At one of them she found the wife of a Pole who had been shot in a reprisal action the same morning still in residence; the woman was equally ignorant of her husband’s murder and her own impending eviction. Bannister too, though, saw little point in crying over spilt milk, or blood. “How could we ever live happily in one of these homes haunted by the misery of our predecessors? But what alternative had we? Kurt [her husband] had to carry on with his work and we had to live somewhere near.”45 Before long she was agreeably situated in an attractive residence previously owned by a Polish architect, whose entire family, conveniently, was nowhere to be seen.
At all levels of German society, scruples over profiting from the displaced Poles’ and Jews’ misery were rapidly overcome. Volksdeutsch colonists brought in from outside the Incorporated Territories fought vigorous turf battles with those already there, who pressed the authorities—often successfully—for compensation for their losses at the hands of the Polish state during the interwar years. Both found themselves competing with hundreds of thousands of predatory Reichsdeutsche, the citizens of the “old Reich,” who flooded into the conquered districts with an eye to the main chance. (One of them was Hitler’s favorite tank commander, General Heinz Guderian, who trawled the Warthegau in search of an estate befitting his elevated status. When an aghast Field Marshal von Manstein asked him what had become of the Polish owners of the manor he eventually selected, “Guderian said that he did not know, when he had taken over his estate the Poles had gone and he had no idea what had become of them.”)46 Tensions among all three groups, and among different ethnicities within the Volksdeutsch “family,” frequently ran high:
Settlement advisers depicted Bessarabian German children fighting local Volksdeutsche children. Native ethnic Germans were portrayed complaining that everything was done for the incoming settlers but nothing for them, and murmuring that if the settlers hadn’t come, they would have got all the confiscated Polish land for themselves. One settlement adviser reported that the local ethnic Germans called the settlers from Bukovina “gypsies.” Bukovina Germans hit back by calling the local ethnic Germans “Poles.” … Settlement advisers were also quick to criticize fellow Reich Germans, usually men, for arrogance towards the Volksdeutsche. One told the story of a settler’s wife from Bukovina who forgot to wear the badge showing she was German and was thrown out of the post office, where she was trying to post parcels to her son at the front, by a Reich German man who hit her in the face.47
Trying in just a few years to concoct a cohesive Germanic whole from a Volksdeutsch melting pot that constantly threatened to boil over was thus a forlorn hope. For many colonists, the dream of an idyllic life in the Incorporated Territories ended even sooner. The Volksdeutsch holding camps proved irresistibly attractive as reservoirs of available personnel to military recruiters and to businesses struggling to maintain production in the face of Germany’s increasingly acute labor shortage. Inmates, facing an open-ended sojourn in ramshackle facilities whose commandants were prone to imposing upon them “a militarized regimen, separating them by sex and treating the newcomers as children, if not prisoners,” were susceptible to such overtures.48 Sometimes even Himmler yielded to the temptation, ordering in December 1940 that the Bessarabian Germans, who had not fulfilled his expectations as potential colonists, be conscripted instead into labor battalions. On other occasions it was the Volksdeutsche themselves who threw in the towel. Some colonists from Galicia, disappointed with the farms assigned to them in the Warthegau, abandoned them in the autumn of 1940 and sought readmission to their holding camp in łódź; another group was arrested for rejecting the properties they were offered and holding a demonstration against the authorities.49 And sometimes the mismatch between colonist and colony was so great that no amount of official intervention could make Germanic silk purses out of sociol
ogical sow’s ears. The genteel Estonian and Latvian Volksdeutsche proved a particular disappointment as settlers, looking askance at the notion that they should become agrarian pioneers in the agoraphobia-inducing Polish steppes. “Either they were large landowners, who were not prepared to accept the conditions of peasant settlements (which would be like suggesting to Thomas Jefferson or ‘Turnip’ Townshend that they take on three acres and a cow) or they were urban dwellers…. Soon planning officials were calling on the evacuation staff not to send them any more Balts.”50
The sheer diversity among the Volksdeutsche, indeed, was probably the biggest single impediment to the success of the colonization program. Other than their regional accents, some were indistinguishable from their Reichsdeutsch counterparts. Arthur Greiser, born in Poznań province, was himself Volksdeutsch. But the claims of others were far more tenuous, if not completely fictional. Poles and Jews often observed with bemusement that many members of the Selbstschutz militias that sprang up to assist the Germans were, as one woman put it “people from our town, Poles,” who as soon as the Nazis arrived “suddenly heard the call of their German blood! Mostly they were scum: ex-jailbirds, card-sharps, thieves, petty (and not so petty!) crooks.”51 The ease with which yesterday’s Pole, Ukrainian, or Czech could become today’s German was not lost on the Reichsdeutsche, who began to describe their supposed co-racials as Beutegermane or “booty Germans” who had attached themselves to the Volk solely for the purpose of grabbing as much loot as they could. Nor was the SS unaware of or indifferent to the phenomenon of “piggybacking” on German ethnic identity. In October 1939, Arthur Greiser ordered the compilation in his Gau of a racial census, the Deutsche Volksliste, to separate the authentically German from the pretenders. The Volksliste classification scheme, however, was not itself a German invention. It was modeled on the lettered gradations used by the French to determine the expellability of Germans from Alsace in the early 1920s.52 By Himmler’s order, the scheme was extended to the whole of the Incorporated Territories in March 1941.
As with its French predecessor, four gradations of Germanness were specified by the Volksliste in its mature form. Persons in category I were those who had given proof of their national loyalty by participation in German organizations before September 1939; undisputed Germans who had taken no part in the “ethnic struggle” between the wars were registered in category II. In practice, few if any distinctions were observed between the two classes; members of each automatically received German nationality and carried the same identity card. For all intents and purposes, then, the only meaningful categories on the Volksliste were the third, for individuals of German racial heritage who had “abandoned” their national allegiance, e.g. by speaking Polish normally or exclusively at home; and the fourth, who notwithstanding possessing German racial characteristics had actively opposed Germanization in their respective countries between the wars. Individuals assigned to these categories were liable to be sent to the “old Reich” for Germanization; if eventually found suitable for German citizenship, they would be required to serve a lengthy probationary period. At the very bottom of the German ethnic pyramid were the Deutschstämmige, persons of more or less nebulous “German heritage.” The significance of this category could vary widely—from nil in some instances to a fast track to inclusion on the Volksliste in others, especially when military recruitment drives or labor shortages made it convenient for the authorities to have to hand a pool of “potential Germans” that could be expanded at will.
Initially the Nazis invested a great deal of energy in compiling and policing the Volksliste, local versions of which were extended later in the war to Bohemia and Moravia—where Heydrich hoped to “Germanize” half the Czech population—Yugoslavia, and the western districts of European Russia. In theory, all Volksdeutsche were subject to screening, and purges of the lists were occasionally carried out when Himmler feared that the definitions of Germanness were becoming excessively elastic. With the passage of time, though, the process of selection for the Volksliste degenerated into farce. Local administrators, facing a variety of pressures from various higher authorities, reached decisions that were so arbitrary as to be practically meaningless, but that nearly always erred on the side of inclusion. “If the Volksdeutschen had not existed,” Doris Bergen observes, “Nazi ideologues might have invented them. And in some very significant ways, they did precisely that.”53 In truth, they had little choice but to do so. Proving German ancestry by documentary means was difficult enough within the “old Reich,” but virtually impossible outside it. Members of ethnic communities long separated from the homeland spoke German badly, or in dialects incomprehensible to the Reichsdeutsche, or not at all. In the Czech lands, as Chad Bryant notes, “Many ‘new Germans’ spoke only Czech.”54 Lacking any objective means of determining—or even defining—Germanness, the “ethnocrats” of the RKFDV applied whatever criteria tended to yield the desired result, “ranging from elaborate orange cards with questions about the shape of individuals’ eyelids and chins, to designating entire villages as ethnic German settlements, to tests of political reliability.”55 By mid-1942, however, the emphasis had swung decisively on the side of signing up as many “Germans” as possible. With the war against the USSR turning into a quagmire, cannon fodder was urgently required and the supply of conscriptible Reichsdeutsche was running low. Only “Aryans” could be drafted into the German armed forces in Hitler’s Reich, so “Aryans” the previously despised Poles, Ukrainians, Bessarabians, and Byelorussians in many cases had to become. Himmler, who had once tried to impose a cap of a million names on the Volksliste in the Incorporated Territories, now made refusal to enroll by a person declared eligible an offense punishable by detention in a concentration camp. In many areas, individuals were placed on the Volksliste, or “promoted” to a higher grade that would render them liable to military service, without their consent or even, in some cases, their knowledge.56 As Anna Bramwell wryly concludes, “The Volksliste became a sifting procedure to procure potential citizens of the New Order: loyal, healthy, and possessed of five fingers on each hand.”57
The effect of this policy of forced Germanization was witnessed by Zygmunt Klukowski, a doctor and hospital administrator from Szczebrzeszyn in the Zamość district of the Generalgouvernement. In 1942 this district was chosen as the first outside the Incorporated Territories to be opened up for German colonization. Soon afterward, his hospital was visited:
Yesterday morning two soldiers from Sonderdienst came into the local pharmacy with new registration forms. On special forms they registered all the employees and then ordered them to sign. Some people signed without checking the forms. Among the physicians, Dr. Spoz was first. He looked at the form and realized that it was a request for identification papers for people claiming German nationality. At first he refused to sign, but after being pressured he did. Very shortly thereafter he came to the hospital, very nervous and informed me of what had happened, and he asked how he could get his form back. I called all the physicians together to discuss the matter. As I found out, all physicians, pharmacists, veterinarians, dentists, and nurses must fill out the registration forms. During the meeting it was decided that everyone had to make their own decision, whether or not to sign the form or refuse….
I learned that many people in Zamość signed this questionnaire without any reservations. This was stated also in the underground press. Now we ask ourselves what kind, if any, repressions we will face.58
The struggle that ensued between the Polish underground Home Army and the Germans over Volksliste registration became a microcosm of the larger conflict. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of ordinary Poles of both sexes found themselves in a Catch-22 situation, menaced with beatings, imprisonment, or deportation if they did not subscribe to the Volksliste, and arson, pillage, or assassination at the hands of the Home Army if they did. Even members of the same family could find themselves on opposite sides: the Volksdeutsch Mayor of Urzędów, Kazimierz łoziński, was sho
t in 1943 on the orders of the Home Army, of which his two sons were members.59 So common were Resistance attacks on settlers in the Generalgouvernement, as well as savage Nazi reprisals—as Dr. Klukowski recorded, in December 1942 some 160 Poles were executed in retaliation for an arson attack in the hamlet of Nawóz in which five Volksdeutsch houses were burned down—that the ethnic German Selbstschutz militias were revived in Poland, as well as in Ukraine, Estonia, and Yugoslavia.60 In general these were units of limited military effectiveness, known more for their indiscipline and their readiness to assist the Germans in rounding up and massacring Jews than for their ability to protect their fellow colonists. The Nazis, too, reposed little confidence in them, conscripting the most capable into the army or Waffen-SS and often withholding even small arms from the remainder.
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