56: Barbarism Unleashed

Hitler had his "mission" - destroying Germany's enemies, both internal and external, undoing the stain of defeat and humiliation in 1918, and restoring national greatness - and now he had his war.

"In war Nazism came into its own," writes Ian Kershaw. "The Nazi movement had been born out of a lost war. As with Hitler personally, the experience of that war and erasing the stain of defeat were at its heart. 'National renewal' and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. The new war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism's ideological crusade. Long term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country."

In peace, and now in war, the tone was set by Hitler for the escalation of barbarism, he both approved of it and gave sanction to it. But there is little explanation for the escalation in his own actions.

"The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government," continues Kershaw, "the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of power in the SS leadership saw Poland as an experimental playground. They were granted a tabula rasa to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Führer's 'vision' served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and 'inventive' civil servants, also saw themselves as 'working towards the Führer' in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible 'Germanization' of their territories. And the occupying army - officers and rank-an-file - imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated."

In the eighteen months following the German invasion there occurred an ideological radicalization that proved to be an essential precursor to what would unfold in Russia in the summer of 1941.

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Territorial and political plans for Poland were improvised as events played out in September and October 1939. Hitler had been ready to negotiate with the Poles and recognize a rump Polish state, with territorial concessions to Germany, along with the breaking of ties to France and Britain. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September ruled out the possibility of a rump state. Stalin opposed the creation of a Polish rump state and it was suggested that the central Polish territories in the Soviet zone should be exchanged for Lithuania. Once Hitler accepted this proposal, the question of whether or not their would be a rump state was in Berlin's hands alone. The German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was signed on 28 September.

Hitler held out the possibility of creating a truncated Polish state in a speech to the Reichstag on 6 October, as part of his 'peace offer' to the west. By then, however, the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of the prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain's rejection of the 'peace offer' on 12 October, a different dynamic had been created which militated toward a rump Polish territory - the "General Government," as it came to be known - alongside substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.

By 26 October, through a series of hasty decrees and improvisations, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested "Old Fighters" of the Nazi Movement. Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, became the head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, the former President of the Danzig Senate, was given charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen, also known as Reichsgau Wartheland, or, more simply, as the "Warthegau.' Hans Frank, the legal chief of the Nazi Party, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory. Additional Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia.

In each of the incorporated territories, especially in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 93-124 miles (150-200 kilometers) to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the number of Germans in the population rarely exceeded much more than 10 percent.

"It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism," writes Kershaw. "The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded -- with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice -- as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit."

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The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland eclipsed the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 - dreadful though that had been. "The orgy of atrocities," in Kershaw's words, "was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done so much to incite. The radical, planned program of 'ethnic cleansing' that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation - everything points to this - almost certainly came from the SS leadership.

"The SS had readily the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschluss. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czechoslovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS's attack on 'enemies of the state.' The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot 'hostages' in recrimination for any show of hostility, or 'insurgents' - seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces."

There was a need to maintain good relations with the Wehrmacht which may have, at least initially, restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings. This probably constrained the "action" at first which was aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. Nonetheless, this "action" would ultimately claim an estimated 60,000 victims. It was clear that the occupation of Poland had moved the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen up to a new level. By doing so, the platform was established for the mass slaughter that was to take place in the Soviet Union in 1941.

There was, among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories, no shortage of eager helpers. The explosion of violence recalled, though in an extensively magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of "enemies of the state" in Germany in the spring of 1933. After six years of a cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behavior, and due to persistent indoctrination and chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.

Some of the worst German atrocities perpetrated in the weeks following the invasion were by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established at Hitler's direction in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS. Himmler's adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of actions by the organization's other branches. Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out an untold number of "executions" of Polish civilians. The Selbstschutz was eventually discontinued in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940, but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counterproductive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in occupied areas.

The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the program of radical 'ethnic struggle" designed by the SS leadership for the "new order" in Poland. More systematic "ethnic cleansing" operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in the hands of the Security Police Einsatzgruppen, following in the wake of the military advance.

Source:

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. London: W. W. Norton and Company.