As far as the treatment of the remaining Polish territories was concerned, with his decision during this period to establish a ‘General Government’ [Generalgouvernement] Hitler set the course for a radical ‘ethnic political’ reorganization of central Poland. On 7 October, he signed an edict ‘For the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation’ with which he assigned the Reichsführer SS the task of organizing the resettlement of Reich and ethnic Germans living in the Polish and Baltic territories occupied by the Soviet Union, the ‘elimination of the corrupting influence’ of ‘alien population elements’ and the ‘establishment of new areas for German settlement through a programme of resettlement’.82
On 17 October, Hitler explained to a small group in the Reich Chancellery the basic guidelines for the government and administration of the future General Government. Those present included Keitel, Himmler, Hess, Frick, Lammers, Stuckart, and Frank, in other words all those members of the leadership who were involved. Basically, according to Hitler, the General Government should not ‘become part of the German Reich or an administrative district of the Reich’. The German administration did not have the task of ‘creating a model state exemplifying German order or to reform the country economically and financially’. At the same time, they must prevent ‘a Polish intelligentsia from forming a leadership cadre’. The standard of living should be kept low so that labour could be recruited for the Reich. The new German administration should work with its own clear lines of responsibility and must not be dependent on the Berlin ministries. The type of rule exercised would be that appropriate to ‘a tough ethnic struggle’ and would not be limited by ‘any legal restrictions’. ‘The methods will be irreconcilable with our normal principles.’ The territory is important above all militarily as an ‘advance glacis’ and, for this reason, the infrastructure must be maintained. Beyond that, however, ‘a consolidation of the conditions in Poland’ was not desirable. Those in charge of the territory must also enable ‘the Reich territory to be cleansed of Jews and Polacks’.83
Hitler had thereby set out the decisive guidelines for German rule in the General Government. It was a colonial type administration free from legal norms and bureaucratic rules, which was to assert German interests brutally and arbitrarily against an indigenous population that was classed as ‘racially inferior’, and to do so simply by issuing orders. In speaking of this as ‘devil’s work’ he made his intentions very clear. The constitutional status of the General Government remained intentionally vague. It was not subject to the Berlin government, but (via the Governor General) to Hitler directly; it was neither Reich nor foreign territory, but, according to a term increasingly used, an ‘adjacent territory of the Reich’.
Hitler’s decision to establish the General Government marked the conclusion of a decision-making process that had begun, less than two months before, with talk of maintaining an autonomous Polish rump state and moderate annexations. Now the country had been split up and handed over to rulers who were aiming to establish a racist regime. State authorities (Wehrmacht, the Foreign Ministry, Interior and Food Ministries) were excluded from the process of reorganization, which was mainly in the hands of Party functionaries and the SS. A completely new form of civilian occupation administration was constructed in the General Government that specifically overturned traditional administrative principles, while ‘in the East’ Himmler secured for himself a base where he wielded almost absolute power. And, with the new ‘Reich Gaus’, a new type of regional administration had been created (at the time the term ‘middle level’ was used) in which power lay in the hands of the Gauleiters as Reich governors.
Now, after the end of the war, Hitler began making contemptuous comments about Poles and Jews. His attempt to make Poland an accomplice in his plans for a war against the Soviet Union, brusquely rejected in spring 1939 by Beck, had proved to be a pipe dream. Given Hitler’s racist world view, it did not take him long to categorize his recalcitrant neighbour as ‘subhuman’. The Poles were ‘more animals than human beings, totally dull and stupid’,84 ‘frightful material’; Jews were ‘the most ghastly people one can possibly imagine’.85 These comments show that he now considered himself fully justified in the aim with which he had entered the war – to eliminate the ‘active forces there’ – and now wanted to implement it.
As a result, after the end of the war, the new rulers increased and systematized their employment of terror in Poland. From the end of October, Einsatzgruppen and ‘Self-Defence’ units, formed from members of the German minority, carried out the so-called ‘Intelligentsia Action’,86 which was coordinated by the RHSA and involved mass arrests and executions, particularly of teachers, members of the professions, former officers, civil servants, clergy, landowners, leading members of Polish nationalist organizations, politicians, and, above all, Jews.87
During the autumn of 1939 and the following winter, SS units murdered at least 7,700 patients in mental hospitals in the newly annexed Polish territory, but also in the neighbouring Gau, Pomerania, in the ‘old Reich’.88 This action was independent of the ‘Euthanasia’ murder campaign, beginning at the same time in the Reich itself, to which we shall return. Most of the victims were shot. However, in Fort VI within the Posen fortifications the Gestapo built a gas chamber, in which Polish patients were murdered with carbon monoxide, the first use of gas by the Nazis. Himmler is known to have visited the site in December 1939 in order to inspect the murder procedure.89 In total the ‘Self-Defence’ forces and the Einsatzgruppen murdered tens of thousands of people during the first months of the German occupation in Poland.90
The files from Heydrich’s office show that, responding to proposals from Himmler, between 14 and 21 September Hitler made the basic decision to deport all the Jews in the annexed territories and from the whole of the Reich itself to a ‘Jewish state under German administration’ on the eastern border of German-occupied Polish territory. As their ‘final destination’ he contemplated moving these Jews to the eastern part of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union.91
After the spheres of influence of the Soviet Union and the Reich had been redefined on 28 September, the region between the Vistula and the Bug, the later district of Lublin in the General Government, came under German occupation, creating space for the future ‘reservation’. However, according to the statements Hitler made on 29 September concerning the future division of Poland, this ‘Reich ghetto’, as Heydrich called it, was now to take in not only Jews, but also all ‘elements which are in any way unreliable’.92
Hitler made no secret of the idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’. On 26 September, he was already mentioning it to the Swedish industrialist, Dahlerus;93 on 1 October he explained the idea of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the Italian foreign minister;94 and, in his speech to the Reichstag on 6 October, he announced ‘a resettlement of nationalities’, linked to the ‘attempt to sort out and regulate the Jewish problem’.95 The German press was informed confidentially about the plans for a reservation and immediately speculation about a Jewish ‘reservation’ emerged in the foreign press.96
The so-called Nisko action was the first attempt to implement Hitler’s order for substantial deportations to be carried out.97 The plan, prepared by Eichmann on the authority of the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller was to deport 70,000 to 80,000 Jews from the new Silesian district of Kattowitz (Katowice) and from Mährisch-Ostrau (in the Protectorate). Eichmann considered these deportations, which initially affected 4,700 people,98 as only the first step in the expulsion of all Jews from Reich territory that was to be set in motion in a few weeks, following a further order from Hitler.99 He was referring to an instruction from Hitler that had already been given ‘to resettle 300,000 Jews from the old Reich and the Eastern Marches’. This was to be implemented following an initial field report, which was presumably going to be submitted to Hitler.100 To achieve this, Eichmann ordered Berlin officials to prepare a list of all Jews who had been registered in Germany and which Jewish religious communities they belo
nged to.101 However, the deportations had hardly begun, when they were halted again by the RSHA on 20 October.102 The Berlin authorities feared that a continuation of the Nisko transports would get in the way of the major resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Soviet occupied territories recently launched by Himmler.103 Moreover, in the meantime, Hitler had begun to have military concerns. On 17 October, he told Keitel that the future General Government ‘has military significance for us and can be used for forward deployment’. This objective clearly could not be reconciled with creating a Jewish reservation. Nevertheless, Hitler insisted that in the long term ‘control of this territory . . . must enable us to cleanse Reich territory of Jews and Polacks’.104
Although the Nisko project was quickly halted, it provides an insight into the SS’s ideas at the time on how to implement Hitler’s deportation order. The deportation trains ended up in Nisko on the river San, directly on the border with the district of Lublin, where the reservation was to be established. However, the majority of those involved were not put in the ‘Transit Camp’, which, as a result of the precipitate way in which the project had been launched, was still being built, but forcibly driven away and left to fend for themselves. Had the deportations been continued and, after a few weeks, extended to all Jews throughout the Reich, the arrival of winter would have created catastrophic conditions, resulting in a high death rate and a mass flight over the line of demarcation into Russian-occupied territory.105 The ‘Jewish reservation’ would have become a death zone.
‘Euthanasia’
With the support above all of the SS and the Party, Hitler used the war against Poland to unleash a radicalization of racial policy, which, as we have seen, took shape above all in occupied Poland. This is reflected in the systematic mass murders, the imposition of a civilian administration with which to implement the most brutal ‘Germanization plans’, and the, albeit stalled, mass deportation of Jews into a death zone. On the outbreak of war, another murder project was begun: the systematic extermination of handicapped people carried out under the misleadingly named ‘euthanasia’ programme.
The euthanasia murders have a long pre-history. After the end of the First World War, there were growing demands for the ‘humane’ killing of people who were incurably sick and also ‘useless’ psychiatric patients. A number of factors were responsible for such ideas being seriously discussed during the post-war period, both among experts and among the general public. The millions of deaths during the First World War, but also the high rate of deaths in the ‘lunatic asylums’ because of war shortages resulted in utilitarian taking priority over humanitarian considerations. There was particular discussion as to whether the high costs of care for patients in asylums in the crisis-ridden post-war period were sustainable. Nevertheless, during the Weimar Republic the advocates of the killing of the mentally ill remained in the minority.106
From 1933 onwards, however, a more radical ‘eugenic approach’ became increasingly dominant within German psychiatry. After the mid-1930s, ‘useless’ patients incapable of work were increasingly systematically neglected, leading to a marked increase in the death rate in asylums.107 At the same time, the demand for the ‘elimination of lives unworthy of life’ did not go unchallenged. From 1933 to 1937, in the debate among specialists conducted in public, the killing of the incurably sick or of ‘inferiors’ was a highly controversial issue.108 This was also true within the judicial sphere. The Nazi Minister of Justice in Prussia and later Reich Minister for Churches, Hanns Kerrl, declared in a memorandum published in 1933 that the killing of incurable mental patients by organs of the state should not be regarded as an offence in itself.109 However, the official commission on revising the penal code, meeting during 1934, declined to respond to the demand for the ‘elimination of lives unworthy of life’ to be free from prosecution, and it only surfaced again in August 1939 in the form of a draft law.110
If we look more closely at what was a decidedly nuanced debate, it becomes clear that ‘euthanasia’ was advocated above all in the event of a general emergency, in time of war, and in the case of malformed children; the granting of permission for abortions for eugenic reasons in 1934/35, expressly supported by Hitler, led the way in this matter.111 However, the fact that the debate remained undecided until 1939 resulted above all from the lack of a clear statement by the ‘Führer’.
Hitler had already dealt extensively with eugenic issues in Mein Kampf and, among other things, demanded sterilization and birth control.112 In view of his comments about natural selective breeding, the right of the stronger, and the threat of degeneration through protection of the weak, a commitment to the ‘elimination of lives unworthy of life’ would not have been surprising, particularly as discussion about it had been relatively widespread after the publication of the book with that title by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in 1920.113 Hitler avoided taking up that position, however. In his speeches during the years 1925–29, only once, at the Party Rally in 1929, did he go so far as to claim that ‘if a million children were born annually in Germany and 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest people were eliminated this might in the end increase our strength’.114
From 1933 onwards, as we have seen,115 Hitler had actively supported a serious ‘hereditary health policy’, starting with the Sterilization Law of July 1933. He is alleged to have promised the Reich Doctors’ Leader, Gerhard Wagner, at the 1935 Party Rally, to introduce ‘euthanasia’ in the event of war; but the only evidence for this is a post-war statement by Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt.116 Whether or not this conversation took place, Wagner was in fact one of the leading advocates of the ‘euthanasia’ project in the Third Reich. On the other hand, in the large number of Hitler’s statements surviving from the years 1933–38 there is not a single one suggesting that he was a supporter of the idea of ‘euthanasia’.117
It was no accident that the mass murders of the sick began with a programme of children’s ‘euthanasia’, in other words with the group of victims, whose killing, since 1933, had been repeatedly described by its advocates as a humanitarian move and as a ‘release’. And, significantly, it began in August 1939 at a time of intensive preparation for war. The ‘emergency’ of a war with an anticipated large loss of ‘valuable’ human life was considered, from a ‘demographic–biological’ perspective, to provide the justification for the radical ‘culling’ of ‘inferior elements’. It appeared plausible that these murders could be carried out ‘more smoothly and easily’ (as the 1935 argument attributed to Hitler put it) under the exceptional conditions of wartime.
According to the post-war statements of a number of those responsible for the killings, the launch of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme was prompted by an individual case. In response to a petition from parents to the Führer’s Chancellery, which was responsible for dealing with such requests, Hitler authorized his personal physician, Brandt, to have their seriously malformed child killed.118 At the same time as this individual assignment, Hitler authorized Brandt, together with Philipp Bouhler, the head of the Führer’s Chancellery, to develop a procedure for dealing with similar cases. The ambitious Bouhler, determined to extend his office’s responsibilities to a new sphere of activity, together with his deputy, Viktor Brack, then set up a small group of experts. For the purposes of disguise, the murder programme was run by the ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses’, which had originally been established, to deal, among other things, with problematic sterilization cases.
On 18 August 1939, the Reich Interior Ministry issued a ‘highly confidential’ circular introducing ‘a duty to report deformed etc. births’. Medical personnel were obliged to report to the Public Health Offices ‘serious congenital defects’ in children up to the age of three. These reports were then sent to the Reich Committee, which passed the forms on to three assessors, who examined them in turn. If the decision was negative, after the parents had given their consent to the children being
hospitalized, they were sent to one of thirty so-called child specialist clinics, where they were murdered. It has been estimated that by 1945 there were around 5,000 victims of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme.119
As already mentioned, alongside the start of this children’s murder programme during the autumn of 1939, the SS began another ‘euthanasia’ programme involving asylums in Poland. The third murder programme under the rubric of ‘euthanasia’, the killing of adult patients in the Reich, was being prepared from the summer of 1939 onwards. After Hitler had given his approval in principle at a meeting in the summer of 1939, attended by Lammers, Bormann, and the state secretary in the Health Ministry, Dr Leonardo Conti, Bouhler and Brack managed to seize control of this project as well. In the summer of 1939, Bouhler held a meeting of around 15 to 20 physicians in which he announced the start of a general programme of ‘euthanasia’. This move was justified in terms of the need to free up hospital space and nurses for the coming war. With the aid of the Reich Criminal Police Department’s Technical Institute, which had already supplied the poison required for the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme, an appropriate method for killing was found in the form of carbon monoxide gas.120
An organization to carry out the project was established at a meeting in the Führer’s Chancellery on 9 October. Party functionaries, civil servants, and doctors agreed that around one in five psychiatric in-patients should be killed, in other words between 65,000 and 70,000 people. It was probably also on 9 October that Hitler wrote a note on a piece of his personal writing paper giving Bouhler and Brandt ‘the authority to extend the powers of specific doctors in such a way that, after the most careful assessment of their condition, those suffering from illnesses deemed to be incurable may be granted a mercy death’. Significantly, he backdated the note to 1 September 1939, in order to emphasize once again the link between the war and the ‘destruction of worthless life’.121 As Hitler had not given his assent to the procedure being legalized on the grounds of the need to keep it secret,122 this note provided those responsible for the ‘euthanasia’ programme with the necessary legitimation.
Hitler Page 88