The rump of the German-occupied part of Poland that was not annexed to the Reich became the General Government of Poland, with its German-administered Viceroy who made the old Polish capital of Krakow his official residence. Forced assimilation in the style of the Bismarckian era was gone; it was replaced by confiscation of property, possessions and land, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement. It was a truly new era in Polish-German relations and one the Poles would not forget.
In the territories annexed by the Reich, the use of the Polish language was banned in public, and even though German was made the only official language, Poles were not taught to speak proper German — they were only to learn as much as they needed to follow orders. Poles who were allowed to remain in these territories were only there to serve in war production and had no civil rights, or protection from casual mistreatment or murder. Throughout the territory occupied by Nazi Germany, Poles were no longer allowed into pubs, cinemas, theatres, or to use the first carriage of the trams and trains; they were only allowed to shop at certain times and were not allowed to buy fruit, cake, cheese or fish. Certain parks and public areas were exclusively reserved for Germans, and the Poles could only use their bicycles to go to and from work. If Germans in uniforms were approaching, Poles had to get off the pavement and salute them. The Poles were also under curfew, and ‘special punishment’ provisions were in place for anyone who disobeyed any of these rules.(15) Polish property could be confiscated at any time and due to the demand for radios, cameras and binoculars, these were particular favourites for confiscation. The SS also set up offices to redistribute Polish land, farms and businesses to German companies, or to newly arrived colonists. Any and all Polish resistance was met with barbaric repression, with whole towns being burned to the ground and their citizens massacred. In total, by August of 1943, 171 Polish towns and villages had been cleared of their Polish inhabitants and resettled by Germans.(16) Those Poles who still regarded the Germans as the cultured people of Central Europe, and had memories of easy-going, well-disciplined German soldiers from the First World War, were stunned at the relentless brutality of this new generation of German occupiers.
As part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had been reached by the respective Foreign Ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the Germans had ‘assigned’ Eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia as a Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. The Red Army invaded these countries in short succession thereafter, invading Poland on 17th September 1939. There followed special NKVDccxxvi units, which terrorised the local civilian populations and started mass deportations to Siberia of ‘undesirable elements’. The Soviet Union’s policies toward the Polish intelligentsia were no different or less murderous than those of the Nazis. Once again, Poland’s fate was to be carved up by its neighbours, and to cease to exist, but this time its population was to be nothing more than a pool of slave labourers. The Soviets immediately began liquidating the Polish officer corps, the policemen and the civilian intelligentsia in their zone of occupation. The most infamous of these atrocities was the massacre of 24,000 men by shooting them in the back of the head in forest clearings at Katyn in Russia; this war crime, which the Soviets later attempted to pin on the Nazis, was far from an exception. NKVD units also began transporting hundreds of thousands of Polish and other East European citizens in the territories they had annexed to labour camps in Siberia. Estimates suggest that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Poles were transported from eastern Poland to Soviet Gulags in 1940–41, with some sources putting the number much higher.(17)
In the areas occupied by the Nazi SS, the Einsatzgruppen had also begun rounding up the Polish economic and intellectual elite for mass extermination, mostly by shooting. Average Polish citizens were liable to be interned, first in prisons and then in newly constructed special ‘work camps’. The Nazis also built children’s camps, such as the one at Heimdorf in the Warthegau, where children as young as eight years of age were interned to be worked to death. Mass round-ups of forced labourers began, with many also being shipped to Germany. Families were separated, husbands from wives and children from their parents. The Germans did not want to see an increase in the Polish population, so breeding was actively discouraged. Blond-haired, blue-eyed children were taken from their parents and put into special children’s homes called Lebensborn-Heime with many of them being given up for adoption to German families. Estimates suggest that snatch commandos grabbed over 200,000 children, of which only 15 per cent ever saw their real parents again.(18)
Polish civilians were expected to support themselves and soon had to start foraging for food. Racial anthropologists swiftly sorted the Polish population of the annexed territories into groups. Even those who were regarded as having sufficient German blood in their veins were divided into four different lists.ccxxvii Those who were ethnically cleansed from the annexed territories to make way for new German settlers were given fifteen minutes to pack and allowed to take a mere thirty kilograms of luggage; everything else had to remain and was immediately requisitioned. In one month alone, 90,000 Poles were expelled in this way from Poznan. Anyone offering protest, resistance or who tried to escape was summarily shot. The transports often took many days and were carried out in all conditions, leading to many deaths on the way. Anyone who tried to return was shot. In total, almost 1 million Poles were deported this way, and this does not include the Jews who were corralled into their own ghettos.(19)
Between the autumn of 1939 and the summer of 1941 when war broke out with the Soviet Union, a total of 370,000 Reich Germans, plus 350,000 ethnic Germans from other parts of Eastern Europe, were shipped in to help colonise the areas the Reich had annexed and cleared of Poles, and to supplement the 1.7 million ‘ethnic Germans’ (see last footnote) who had been allowed to remain. Many of the ethnic Germans, from places such as the Baltic States, were forced to give up their properties and businesses in their own states and move to the annexed territories of the Reich as part of agreements Hitler had made with their states. Effectively Hitler was beginning a process of forcibly transferring Germans from as far afield as the South Tirol and the Gulf of Finland to new homes in what had been Poland, whether they liked it or not. In addition, these press-ganged colonists had to up sticks and leave everything behind again when the Red Army came; those who awaited the arrival of the Polish militias were unlikely to escape with their lives.(21)
Even the rump of the General Government area that was left to the Poles, which formed a kind of buffer zone between the Nazis and the Soviets, was to become a new German colony within twenty years. Heinrich Himmler aimed to use all those deemed unfit for ‘racial assimilation’ as slave labour to help build the ‘1,000 Year Reich’, and ultimately to ethnically cleanse the remaining 16 to 20 million Poles, by shipping them to Siberia. Within a twenty- to thirty-year period the Polish people were to be entirely assimilated, enslaved or exterminated, depending on their racial categorisation.
The largest number of concentration camps and extermination camps were constructed in Poland, and roughly a quarter of the inmates of Auschwitz were Poles. However, it is a little known fact that Auschwitz had two camps: the labour or concentration camp of Auschwitz, which housed many Poles and the extermination centre of Auschwitz-Birkenau, reserved primarily for the liquidation of Europe’s Jews.
Within the areas directly annexed by Germany, the control of the Nazi authorities was so tight that no resistance organisation was ever able to rear its head. However, in the General Government, the former Polish government (which had fled to London to establish a government in exile) armed a resistance movement with British support. The Armia Krajowa (AK) or Home Army was an organisation that, to this day, inspires passionate emotions from Poles and Jews alike.ccxxviii
Britain and her empire had ostensibly gone to war to safeguard Polish independence from Nazi aggression and occupation. As the war dragged on and Germany’s defeat only became a question of time, Churchill grew increasingly frustrated by t
he fact that Europe appeared to be trading one tyranny for another. He now felt honour-bound to do what he could to save Poland from Soviet aggression and occupation. There was also a strong element of saving face involved. Britain helped to equip and prepare the lightly-armed Polish AK and civilian resistance against the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in the Polish uprising during August and September of 1944. The uprising was led by the AK, in the vain hope that this could give the exiled government in London a better bargaining position in the post-war settlement. The AK assumed that if they managed to liberate themselves as the Germans retreated, and before the Red Army arrived, they could reimpose the legitimacy of the exiled London Poles. If they waited for the Red Army to ‘liberate’ Warsaw they knew they would be handing over power to Stalin’s puppet Polish government in waiting. The Soviet occupation in league with the Nazis had shown them what they could expect from that.
The Poles had been given hope when the French resistance finally plucked up the courage to hit the Germans whilst they were in retreat and liberate their own capital. However, to an extent, Paris was saved by the fact that German generals refused to follow Hitler’s orders to level the city. Paris had been a favourite haunt for British and American soldiers on leave during the First World War. Many German soldiers similarly held the city in high affection during the Second World War. These feelings did not extend to Warsaw. Special SS units were dispatched to Warsaw, including the infamously barbaric SS brigade led by Oskar Dirlewanger, which was nothing short of a murderous penal battalion. Himmler gave a particularly unpleasant character, SS Gruppenführer Erich von Bach-Zelewski, the task of crushing the resistance in the city. Warsaw was taken apart brick by brick, in house-to-house fighting, in an orgy of violence and destruction. SS units raped and murdered anyone in their path, also employing tanks and flamethrowers. In Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist, he gives a flavour of what was left of Warsaw once the uprising had been crushed. Anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000 were killed, and this figure included many women and children, near a quarter of the city’s pre-war population. Up to 400,000 people were displaced; 60,000 were marched off to concentration camps and a further 50,000 civilian survivors were rounded up and sent to the Reich as forced labourers. The AK lost 16,000 soldiers, and although those who surrendered had been offered favourable terms, they were soon sent to the concentration camps.
Eighty per cent of Warsaw’s historic centre was levelled, leaving it a dead city, and Poland lost the last vestiges of its resistance leaders, which the country would so desperately have needed after the war.(23) One eminent British military historian noted, ‘The horrors of Warsaw highlight the futility of any attempt by guerrillas to engage regular troops equipped with heavy weapons, artillery and armour,’ going on to say, ‘All the Allies behaved with considerable cynicism in encouraging armed resistance in occupied Europe while possessing no means of preventing German retribution.’(24)
The Russians had refused to help the British supply the Polish uprising, and throughout the ensuing horror the Red Army sat encamped on the ridge above Warsaw, watching and waiting, offering no support. By the time they entered the city, only 5,000 of its pre-war 1.2 million inhabitants remained. Supporting the army of the exiled government in London did not serve Stalin’s purpose; he had his own plans for the future of Poland as a Soviet satellite. The monument which the Russians erected after the war, marking the heroism of the Red Army in its ‘liberation of Poland’, was graffitied by a Pole with a morbid sense of humour as the ‘tomb of the unknown observer!’
The London Poles were under no illusions about the likely fate of post-war Poland. A delegation that had gone to see Stalin in Moscow in August 1944 were told that they must resign and recognise the Soviet Union’s claim to their eastern territories. Roosevelt remained largely indifferent; he was not prepared to allow the concerns of the London Poles to damage his relationship with his key ally ‘Uncle Joe’ (Stalin). Churchill was indignant, but Stalin knew Britain alone was in no position to force his hand.(25) The combined German-Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland, for the six years of the war, was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Polish nation. This was followed by a forty-five-year occupation by the Soviet Union that Poland is only slowly re-emerging from. Poland’s pre-war multiethnic population had numbered approximately 34 million before the outbreak of hostilities; of these, nearly 6 million perished. Three million Polish Jews died as a result of the Holocaust, and nearly 3 million Poles perished as a result of the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Many more died in the aftermath of Soviet ‘liberation’. In comparative terms, Polish losses amounted, per capita, among the highest of any nation during the war; most were not killed as combatants but were murdered by their occupiers. In addition to this, two-thirds of Poland’s industry lay in ruins and an estimated 40 per cent of the country’s wealth was destroyed. One German Wehrmacht officer who participated in the razing of Warsaw wrote, prophetically, ‘These actions undertaken by Germany will awake a terrible nemesis of revenge and will be the undoing of our nation.’(26)
clxxi Two-thirds of Sudeten Germans would come to vote for Henlein’s pro-Nazi party. And the idea that Austria was the first victim of Nazi aggression was an Allied invention. The Allies no more wanted a ‘Greater Germany’ after the Second World War than they had after the First World War, when the Allies had expressly forbidden Austria’s union with Germany. The notion of Austria’s victim status was a convenient fabrication entertained by Churchill, born of his generation’s obsession with Prussia’s monumental rise in the nineteenth century and the threat it posed to the European balance of power, leading him and many others to over-simplify and equate the rise of Nazism as a form of resurgent Prussian militarism. The figures don’t bear out this version of history. Austria’s population of 6.5 million had over 700,000 members of the Nazi Party; 1.2 million Austrians served in German military units during the Second World War and there were a disproportionately high number of Austrians in the SS and the concentration camp system.(4)
clxxii The ultra-conservative right, during the last days of the Weimar era, finally did away with the dualistic state within a state that Prussia had remained since unification in 1871. On 20th July 1932, Prussia became just another state within Germany. When the Nazis came to power, as part of the National Socialist policy of Gleichschaltung (levelling of societal class differences), Prussia was only retained as a Reich state in little more than name. Its new Minister President was none other than the bauble-loving Hermann Goering — a Bavarian!
clxxiii A.J.P. Taylor really began the debate by arguing that Hitler did not so much possess a plan for war but hoped to use rearmament, intimidation and bluff as a means to achieve his foreign policy aims without war and that his plans for war did not mean he actually intended to start one — certainly not a world war. For Taylor then, Hitler was the greatest of all ideological opportunists. ‘History is made by people not geopolitics.’(8) For decades it has been argued whether a man like Hitler is merely a product of society or whether man himself can shape and mould history. The two historians who have recently helped to move this argument forwards are Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography of Hitler, and Professor Sir Richard J. Evans, in his three-part history of the Third Reich, where you can read ad infinitum every detail of Hitler and the Nazis’ rise to power and their time in power, which builds on the work of generations of historians. I am not going to labour these well-rehearsed arguments here all over again, as there are too many books on this element of German history already. Essentially the argument divides between Intentionalists who put Hitler at the centre of all events and believe he had a plan for everything from rearmament to world war and the extermination of Europe’s Jews, and the Functionalists who believed that Hitler and Nazism were born of more deep-rooted antecedents in German society, that neither Hitler or Nazism had what one can describe as a ‘philosophy’ or a blueprint for what they wanted to do once in power, merely a vague set of ideas, which through a
process of cumulative radicalisation took on a momentum of their own, especially once the war began. These arguments are most commonly rehearsed over Hitler’s role in the Holocaust: Intentionalists argue the extermination of the Jews was Hitler’s intention from the outset and Functionalists argue that very few Jews were killed between 1933–41, and that the Final Solution evolved gradually out of an escalating cycle of violence against the Jews. The Functionalist argument emphasises the increasingly radicalising and often chaotic and overlapping structures of the Third Reich, which aimed at ‘Working towards the Führer,’ progressively radicalising the Nazi Party’s and Hitler’s anti-Semitism, among other policies. This radicalisation taking on a faster and more extreme trajectory once the genocidal total war of annihilation began against the Soviet Union. Intentionalists have generally tended to focus more on Hitler’s foreign policy objectives, in which he took greater personal interest and was more hands-on, whilst Functionalists have tended to dwell more on the domestic aspects of the Third Reich, where Hitler’s influence is less evident. There are obviously merits to both sets of arguments and they should not be seen as being mutually exclusive.
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