57: Draconian Policy in Poland

At the end of the first week of the invasion of Poland, Reinhard Heydrich was in a rage, at least he was reported to be. What upset the head of the Gestapo was the legalities of the military courts, despite 200 executions a day; Heydrich was demanding that shooting or hanging be done without trial. "The nobility, clerics, and Jews must be done away with,' he reportedly said. Reports of atrocities were not long in arriving, and by 10-11 September 1939 there were accounts of an SS massacre of Jews who had been herded into a church, as well as of an SS shooting of large numbers of Jews.

On 12 September, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, told General Wilhelm Keitel that he heard "that extensive shootings were planned in Poland and that especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated." Keitel replied "that this matter had already been decided by the Führer." The Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, had by then been heard to say that "it was the intention of the Führer and of Göring to annihilate and exterminate the Polish people," and that "the rest could not even be hinted at in writing."

What it amounted to was an all-out "ethnic cleansing" program as explained by Heydrich to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September. The former German provinces would become German Gaue, while another Gau with a "foreign-speaking population" would be established, with its capital in Cracow. Additionally, an "eastern wall" would surround the German provinces, with the "foreign-speaking Gau" forming a type of "no man's land" in front of it. 

On 27 September, the SD and SiPo -- made up of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police, or Kripo -- were folded into the new Reich Security Main Office, which was placed under Heydrich's control. The title of Chief of Security Police and SD, or CSSD was conferred on Heydrich on 1 October. Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler was appoint Settlement Commissar for the East, which the Reichsführer-SS practically unrestricted power in the east, as confirmed by an edict from Adolf Hitler on 7 October.

"The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line had been approved by the Führer," Heydrich explained to the Einsatzgruppen on 21 September; the process was to occur over the space of a year. At the same time, "the solution of the Polish problem," the 3 percent at most of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories "had to be rendered harmless" and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-class groups (to including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the designated "dumping ground" of the General Government. The "primitive Poles" were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the "foreign-speaking Gau." Jews were systematically to be transported by goods-train from German areas. Heydrich also foresaw the deportation to Poland of the Reich's Jews, and of 30,000 gypsies.

A little more than a week later, Hitler spoke to Alfred Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation program to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks Hitler had spent in Poland during the campaign served to confirm his ingrained prejudices. "The Poles," Rosenberg recalled the Führer saying: "a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible things imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learned a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here."

Hitler then referred to his plans for the conquered Polish territories, and along similar lines as what Heydrich told the Einsatzgruppen leaders. "He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall -- even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish 'form of state.' Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future."

A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in a similar fashion. "The Führer's judgement on the Poles is annihilatory," Goebbels recorded. "More animals than human beings. . . . The filth of the Poles is unimaginable." Hitler did not want any assimilation. "They should be pushed into their reduced state" -- The General Government -- "and left entirely among themselves." Hitler then argued that if the twelfth century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria -- Henry the Lion -- had conquered the east, the result would have been a "slavified" German mongrel-race. "It is all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws of race and can act accordingly."

Hitler would hint in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in only the vaguest of terms for public consumption, at "cleansing work" and massive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the "new order of ethnographical relations" in former Poland. Only in confidential dealings with those in the regime's leadership who needed to know -- a characteristic technique of his rule not to spread information beyond essential limits -- did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended.

At a meeting on 17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Hans Frank, Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Hans Lammers, Wilhelm Frick, and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, the Führer outlined the draconian policy for Poland. The military should be happy to be freed from administrative responsibility. The General Government was not to become part of the Reich; it was not the task of the administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a sound economic and financial structure. The Polish intelligentsia were to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling class. The standard of living was to remain low: "We only want to get labor supplied from there."

The administration in Poland was to be given a free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. "We don't want anything there that we do in the Reich," was ominously noted. Carrying out the work there would involve "a hard ethnic struggle that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles." Rule over the area would "allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks." Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement purposes -- this through Himmler's new role as head of the program for the ethnic reordering of Poland. "Cleverness and hardness in this ethnic struggle," with his usual recourse to national needs for justification Hitler ended, "must save us from again having to enter the fields of slaughter on account of this land." The Führer called it "the devil's work."

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"Hitler's approval for what Heydrich had set in motion cannot be doubted," writes Ian Kershaw. Referring back several months later to the checkered relations of the SS and police in Poland with the army leadership, Heydrich pointed out that the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland was "in accordance with the special order of the Führer." The "political activity" carried out in Poland by the Reichsführer-SS, which had caused conflict with some of the army leadership, had followed "the directives of the Führer as well as the General Field Marshal." He added "that the directives according to which the police deployment took place were extraordinarily radical (e.g. orders of liquidation for numerous sectors of the Polish leadership, going into thousands)." Since the order was not passed on to army leaders, they had presumed that the police and SS were acting arbitrarily.

"Indeed," adds Kershaw, "the army commanders on the ground in Poland had been given no explicit instructions about any mandate from Hitler for the murderous 'ethnic cleansing' policy of the SS and Security Police, though [General Walther von] Brauchitsch, like Keitel, was well aware of what was intended. This was in itself characteristic of how the regime functioned, and of how Hitler's keenness -- through keeping full knowledge to the smallest circle possible, and speaking for the most part even there in generalities, however draconian -- to cloud his own responsibility.

"The army's hands," Kershaw continues, "were fare from unsullied by the atrocities in Poland. Brauchitsch's proclamation to the Poles on 1 September had told them that the Wehrmacht did not regard the population as its enemy, and that all agreements on human rights would be upheld. But already in the first weeks of September numerous army reports recounted plundering, 'arbitrary shootings,' 'maltreatment of the unarmed, rapes,' 'burning of synagogues,' and massacres of Jews by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The army leaders -- even the most pro-Nazi among them -- nevertheless regarded such repellent actions as serious lapses of discipline, not part of a consistent racially motivated policy of unremitting 'cleansing' to be furthered with all means possible, and sought to punish those involved through the military courts."

As it happened, most army offenders were amnestied on 4 October by Hitler in a decree justifying German actions as retaliation "out of bitterness for the atrocities committed by the Poles." Though their own military rule was harsh, the commanders on the ground in Poland did not see the atrocities which they acknowledged among their own troops as part of an exterminatory program of "ethnic struggle." In their view, the atrocities were a regrettable, if inevitable, side effect of the military conquest of a bitter enemy and a people perceived as "inferior." Draconian though their treatment of the Poles was, the army's approach differed strikingly from the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.

Gradually, during the second half of September, the unease among the army commander at the savagery of the SS's actions in Poland turned into unmistakable criticism. Awareness of this fed complaints from the Nazi leadership about the "lack of understanding" in the army of what was required in the "ethnic struggle." Hitler told Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland was "too soft and yielding" and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil administration. "Only force is effective with the Poles," the Führer added. "Asia begins in Poland. On 17 October, in a step which contributed notably to the extension of the SS's autonomy, Hitler removed the Ss and police from military jurisdiction.

Source:

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