The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The Polish elites were only one of the ‘problems’ Frank had to address. In Germany, Jews had made up less than 1 per cent of the population. By contrast, around 9 per cent of the Polish population – an estimated 2.3 million of those living in the Government-General – were Jews. It seemed self-evident that so many Jews could not be tolerated so close to the heartland of the new German empire. Had not Hitler likened them to a kind of malign racial disease, seeking to contaminate the Aryan race? They would clearly have to go, especially from Frank’s splendid new capital. But where? In the opening phase of the German invasion, scores of Jews had been shot in places such as Roznan, Blonie and Pultusk. But this was not yet a systematic policy of annihilation; objections by Wehrmacht officers applied a brake to the Einsatzgruppen’s activities. Slaughtering civilians was bad – bad, that is, for morale and the maintenance of local order. It was easier to encourage the Jews to flee eastwards a cross the border. After some deliberation, it was decided to herd those who still remained into ghettos, in effect to restore that enforced segregation which had been commonplace throughout Central Europe up until the end of the eighteenth century. This was a major administrative undertaking in its own right, necessitating the introduction of armbands bearing the Star of David to identify Jews and the creation of local Jewish councils, whose role it would be to run the ghettos. Yet from the outset the concentration of the Polish Jews in ghettos was intended to be no more than a prelude to expulsion. Although Friedrich Uebelhoer, the Regierungspräsident in charge of Kalisch and Łódź, already spoke of the ‘final goal’ as being to ‘burn out this plague-boil’, this was not yet official policy. Indeed, Himmler explicitly ruled out ‘the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction’ as ‘un-German and impossible’.

  For a while, Himmler and Frank toyed with the idea of sending the Jews to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, which the Polish government had already considered; it was agreed that this could happen only after the war. Then Hitler spoke of concentrating them on the new Poland’s eastern frontier, between the Vistula and the Bug. Later, Siberia was mentioned. In the meantime, the Lublin district became a kind of dumping ground for deported Jews, tens of thousands of whom were crowded into hastily constructed camps, while the supposedly transitional ghettos of Łódź, Warsaw, Łowicz and Glowno took on a more permanent quality. Not that they could have endured indefinitely. For one thing, they were intolerably cramped; a third of the population of Warsaw was crammed into 2.4 per cent of the city’s residential area. At the same time, food rations for Jews were reduced so that by 1941 their daily calorific content was just over 25 per cent of the standard Polish allocation and a meagre 7 per cent of the German, far less than the subsistence minimum. Overcrowding and underfeeding were themselves intended to be lethal – which indeed they were, with mortality rates soaring to 10 per cent in Warsaw in 1941. ‘It’s high time that this rabble is driven together in ghettos,’ declared Himmler, ‘and then plague will creep in and they’ll croak.’ In the summer of 1942 Frank described sentencing 1.2 million Jews to death by starvation as ‘just a marginal issue’.

  Yet the more Frank got to know his fiefdom, the more he began to doubt the wisdom of expelling or starving nearly one in ten of the population, to say nothing of the dangers of allowing epidemics to break out in the principal cities. In the early 1930s, Jews had accounted for nearly half of Poland’s highest income-earners. A very high proportion of the entrepreneurs, managers and skilled workers of Polish cities were Jewish. One of the first acts of the German occupation had been to authorize the seizure of all Jewish property – the beginning of a campaign of systematic and ruthless plunder. At around the same time Frank had issued an edict imposing a general obligation for forced labour on all male Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty. Whether for their capital or their labour, Jews had an unquestionable economic value; simply stealing the former and eliminating the latter was patently not a profit-maximizing strategy. Unless Frank wanted to return the Polish economy to the Middle Ages, he needed to work out a compromise between the dictates of racist ideology and the economics of empire. He outlined his planned compromise during a visit to Berlin in November 1941:

  A problem that occupies us in particular is the Jews. This merry little people [Volklein], which wallows in dirt and filth, has been gathered together by us in ghettos and [special] quarters and will probably not remain in the Government-General for very long. [Vigorous applause] But these Jews are not that parasite gang alone, from our point of view, but strangely enough – we only realized it over there [in Poland] – there is another category of Jews, something one would never have thought possible. There are labouring Jews over there who work in transport, in building, in factories, and others are skilled workers such as tailors, shoemakers, etc. We have put together Jewish workshops with the help of these skilled Jewish workers, in which goods will be made which will greatly ease the position of German production, in exchange for the supply of foodstuffs and whatever else the Jews need urgently for their existence.

  It was as if the Nazis could not decide which they wanted: to exploit the Jews (‘production’) or to starve them into extinction (‘attrition’). For the time being the ‘Jewish question’ in Poland was left unresolved, a contradiction at the heart of the Government-General. A half-starved kind of normality descended on the Łódź ghetto, where by the summer of 1941 around 40,000 Jews were employed in producing clothing, textiles and other manufactures, including military supplies.

  Killing the Polish elites and cramming the Jews into ghettos were, nevertheless, only preludes to the fundamental transformation of Central Europe to which the Nazis aspired. The ‘cleansing’ (Flurbereinigung) of the occupied territories was merely a means to an end. That end was to re-settle Germany’s newly acquired living space with members of the Aryan master race.

  HIMMLERTOWN

  In the spring of 1940, in his capacity as the newly created Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germandom, Heinrich Himmler took a tour of the Polish countryside with his friend, the Nazi poet and honorary SS officer Hanns Johst.* Himmler’s role in the new German empire was twofold. As well as eliminating ‘the harmful influence of those alien sections of the population which constitute a danger to the Reich and German national community’ (meaning Jews principally), he was charged with the ‘forming of new German settlements’. Periodically the two men would stop their car and stride across rolling fields where, according to Johst, Himmler looked ‘across the wide, wide space which was full, abundantly full, with this good, fertile earth… All of this was now once more German soil! Here [Himmler enthused] the German plough [would] soon change the picture.’

  Along the way, Himmler and Johst passed through the town of Zamość. Himmler was so impressed with its Italianate Renaissance architecture – so completely at odds with his stereotyped assumptions about Polish backwardness – that he decided to rename the town. ‘Himmlerstadt’, as it would henceforth be known, would become the first foothold of the German Volk on a new Eastern frontier. The first step towards its Germanization was straightforward. The town’s Jews were rounded up and deported, to await their fate in the ghettos. The next step was to get rid of the Poles. As in the annexed territories to the west, the SS carried out a careful classification of the indigenous population. Those in Class I (‘Nordic’) and Class II (‘Phalian’) were sent to the Łódź camp for ethnic Germans for screening. Those in Class III (‘Mixed’) were sent as slave labour to the Reich, apart from the elderly, who were rehoused in former Jewish residences. The fate of Poles in Class IV (‘Asocial and Racially Inferior’) was to be exterminated. Those who resisted, or were thought capable of resistance, were taken to the old fortification known as the Rotunda on the edge of town. Later in the war, the Rotunda became a bloody slaughterhouse, where prisoners were shot almost indiscriminately. To begin with, however, the Germans selected their victims quite precisely: priests, lawyers, judges, businessmen, teachers �
�� anyone who might conceivably be able to organize Polish national resistance. Even boy scouts and girl guides were regarded as potential threats. Among the earliest victims in Zamość was sixteen-year-old Grażyna Kierszniewska, one of thirty-six guides and scouts executed as potential Resistance leaders.

  Now, with the town cleansed of racial impurities, there was one remaining question to be resolved: who would be the new German settlers, the bold Aryan pioneers who would colonize the living space conquered by Hitler’s armies? Precious few citizens of the Reich proper seemed interested in making a new life in Poland. In all, no more than 400,000 Germans from the Old Reich took advantage of the opportunity to move eastwards, and most of these were either bureaucrats who had drawn the short straw, or carpet-bagging businessmen. German peasants, the type of people who were supposed to provide the yeoman backbone of the new colonies, were simply not interested. However, there were Germans living elsewhere in Europe who were less reluctant to move. Himmler’s new responsibilities also included repatriating ‘persons of Germanic race or nationality resident abroad who are considered suitable for permanent return to the Reich’. The idea was to invite ethnic Germans living further east than the new frontier to come and re-settle in the freshly annexed and ethnically cleansed Polish territory. In response, around 57,000 came from eastern Galicia, 67,000 from Volhynia and 11,000 from the area around Białystok. A further 50,000 ethnic Germans came from Latvia and just under 14,000 from Estonia, under agreements reached with the Baltic governments in October 1939. Unlike the expulsions of Poles, these were voluntary moves. Indeed, as Soviet rule was imposed in these areas, there was a rush to accept the Nazi invitation to come heim ins Reich – ‘home into the Reich’. Around 189,000 ethnic Germans left Bessarabia and Bukovina after these territories were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and around 53,000 came from Lithuania after their country had suffered the same fate. Some came in specially organized trains and ships; others, like the peasants of Galicia, rode westwards with their farm carts piled high with possessions. This seemed a strange, back-to-front procedure for a regime supposedly in search of living space – to persuade German communities, some of which were centuries old, to leave their ancestral homes and move west. The rationale, which was not revealed to the ethnic Germans, was to screen them for their racial purity. Only those with satisfactory ‘physical fitness, origin, ethnic-political attitude and vocational training’ – which in practice tended to mean the degree of their past association with non-Germans – were fit to be colonists in the Reich’s newly conquered or re-conquered territory. By the summer of 1941, Himmler’s Commissariat had settled 200,000 Volksdeutsche in the Germanized parts of western Poland; a further 275,000 still languished in temporary resettlement centres. By the end of 1943, some 176,000 Romanian Volksdeutsche had been settled there. Around 25,000 ethnic Germans found their way to the Himmlerstadt area.

  This was a beginning. But it was not a wholly encouraging beginning. The ethnic Germans were in some ways rather a disappointment to the Nazis. Many did not seem quite German enough; they had, it was muttered by the more rigorous racial theorists, gone native, perhaps even allowed their racial purity to be diluted by interbreeding with their former Slav neighbours. By contrast, Himmler could not help noticing how distinctly Aryan many Poles seemed to look. There were in fact rather more blond-haired, blue-eyed specimens here than in his native Bavaria. One possibility he had contemplated as early as 1939 was to ‘“screen” the incorporated eastern territories and later also the General-Government’ for the offspring of mixed marriages ‘in order to make this lost German blood available again to our own people’. In a memorandum of May 1940 entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’, Himmler explained how his intended screening process would ‘fish out the racially valuable people from the mishmash, take them to Germany and assimilate them there’. All six- to ten-year-olds were to be ‘sifted each year to sort out those with valuable blood’ and the ‘racially first class children’ sent to the Reich. As the head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in Breslau put it in 1942, some Poles had

  a significant proportion of Nordic blood which, in contrast to the otherwise fatalistic Slavic strains, has enabled them to take the initiative… The racially valuable Polish families ought to be creamed off so that at least the next generation of these former carriers of Germanic blood can be restored to the German nation through a programme of education in the Old [pre-war] Reich.

  To be sure of retaining every viable Aryan, German women, who became known as the ‘Brown Sisters’, were employed to patrol the streets with sweets to lure potentially eligible children. Those who were taken captive were never seen by their parents again. As Himmler explained to SS leaders in Posen in October 1943: ‘What the [conquered] nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping children and raising them here with us.’

  Similar policies were adopted in other annexed or occupied areas. In the new Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (formerly the rump Czechoslovakia), the former Foreign Minister and now Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath argued for:

  absorption of about half the Czech nation by the Germans, in so far as this is of significance in view of its value from a racial or other standpoint… The remaining half of the Czech nation must be deprived of its power, removed from its country by all sorts of methods. This is particularly true of the section which is racially Mongolian.

  Hitler’s view was that some Czechs were capable of Germanization; if racially suitable, they might be admitted to German educational institutions. There is no question that some Czechs opportunistically sought to go down this route. Ota Filip recalled resisting his father’s attempts to make him attend the German elementary school in Schles-isch Ostrau (Slezská Ostrava); hearing the son’s protests, the local Czech teacher rebuked the father for being an ‘ ersatz Teuton’. The question, however, was how exactly to identify German blood in an individual. Neurath’s deputy, a Sudeten German named Karl Frank, defined a German national as ‘one who himself professes allegiance to the German nation, as long as this conviction is confirmed by certain facts, such as language, education, culture etc.’, adding: ‘Any more precise elaboration of the term “German national” is not possible given current relationships.’ Likewise, in the ‘blossoming, pure German’ province of West Prussia after 1939, Reich Governor Forster simply ‘assume[d] the presence of German blood in a family on the basis of typically German abilities and gifts (e.g., technical skills, a sense of how to look after household and farm appliances properly)… personal and domestic hygiene’. Tell-tale ‘Slavic racial characteristics’, on the other hand, included ‘a markedly disorderly and careless family life, demonstrating a complete lack of feeling for order, for personal and domestic cleanliness, or any ambition to advance oneself’. In other words, race in West Prussia was identifiable in behaviour. By contrast, Forster’s counterpart in the neighbouring Warthegau, Artur Greiser, insisted on ‘a minimum of 50 per cent German ancestry for entry in the German Ethnic Registry’, which was supposed to divide the population into four distinct racial categories on the basis of rigorous genealogical criteria.

  When the Interior Ministry attempted to rule on the fate of non-Polish minorities, the confusion between cultural and biological definitions of race became painfully apparent:

  The mixed population in the areas of Oppeln and Kattowitz, which has been for centuries greatly under German influence, is not to be regarded as Polish … The same applies to a class of population living in the Reich province of Danzig-West Prussia, which is of predominantly Polish descent, but tends to German nationality owing to mixed marriages and cultural influence. The Kashubes, in spite of their Slavonic dialect, are never to be treated as Poles. This is still more the case with the Masurians. Anybody belonging to these nationalities is, however, to be treated as a Pole if he professes to be one, or has done so before the incorporation.

&nbs
p; The journal Ostland went so far as to deny that the Polish nationality existed, asserting instead the existence of myriad petty ‘tribal types’: Mazovians, including Podlasians, Kurpians and Lowiczians, and Malopolanians, including Cracovians, Lachs, Lazowiaks, Sandomierzians and Lubliners. Moreover, as the Nazis looked further east, new dilemmas presented themselves. Alfred Rosenberg, the minister responsible for the occupied territories in Eastern Europe, argued that all the inhabitants of the Baltic States should be regarded aseligible for Germanization, but this position was initially rejected by those who regarded the ‘Finno-Ugric’ Estonians and the supposedly ‘Slavic’ Lithuanians as racially alien. Later, Rosenberg’s view prevailed; indeed, Hitler contemplated integrating the Baltic States into the Reich, though only after a gradual process of cultural Germanization. Ukrainians were also considered as potentially salvageable. Hitler argued that women aged between fifteen and thirty-five should be deported from the Ukraine to the Reich to work as housemaids. This, he argued, would retrieve German blood that had supposedly been lost when the ancient Gothic realm in the Ukraine had been conquered by the Huns in the fifth century.

  Typical of the pseudo-scientific basis of all this was the report drawn up in April 1942 on ‘The Solution of the Polish Question’ by Dr Erhard Wetzel, lawyer and desk officer for racial matters in the Reich Ministry for Eastern Territories: