59: A Free-for-All in the East


The combined leadership of the state and the party in the incorporated area of occupied Poland provided far greater influence for the party than was the case in the "Old Reich," and Hitler's attitude towards policy in the incorporated territories was typical. The Führer placed great value on giving his Gauleiter the "necessary freedom of action" to carry out their difficult tasks. He stressed "that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German. He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the area German, and it was immaterial to him if sometime in the future is were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty or open to legal objection."

The inevitable consequence of this broad mandate - though it was alleged that it ran counter to Hitler's intention - was competition between Arthur Greiser and his arch-rival Albert Forster to be the first to announce that his Gau was fully Germanized. Greiser and Forster went about meeting this aim in different ways. Forster swept as many Poles in his area as possible into the third group of the Deutsche Volksliste (German Ethnic List), giving them German citizenship on approval, which irritated Himmler. Greiser, meanwhile, pushed fanatically and ruthlessly for complete apartheid -- the maximum separation of the two ethnic groups. While Forster frequently clashed with Himmler, Greiser gave full support to the policies of the Reichsführer-SS, and worked in the closes cooperation with the Higher SS-and-Police Chief in the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe.

The Warthegau turned years of indescribable torment for the subjugated people into the nearest approximation to a vision of the "New Order" in the east. The vast deportation and resettlement programs, the ruthless eradication of Polish cultural influence, the mass-closing of Catholic churches and arrests or murder of clergy, the eviction of Pols from their property, and the scarcely believable levels of discrimination against the majority Polish population -- always accompanied by the threat of summary execution -- were carried out under the aegis of Greiser and Koppe with little need to involve Hitler. Not least, the vicious drive by the same pairing to rid their Germanized area of the lowest of the low -- the Jewish minority in the Warthegau -- was to form a vital link in the chain that would lead by late 1941 to the "Final Solution."

The administrative structure for the occupied territories of Poland improvised rapidly with the free hand given to the party bosses. The widespread autonomy obtained by the police, the complete absence of legal constraint created a power free-for-all in the "wild east." But where conflict among the occupying authorities was most endemic, as in the General Government, the greatest concentration of power plainly lie in the hands of the Security Police, represented by the Higher SS-and-Police Chief, backed by Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler's "Black Order," under the Reichsführer's extended powers as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, and mandated by Hitler to "cleanse" the east, had come into its own in the new occupied territories.

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With Poland conquered, Adolf Hitler turned his attention to the west, pushing for an offensive against France in the fall of 1939. Nothing could stop the western offensive and Hitler was by now obsessed with "beating England." The only question was when, not if, the attack in the West would take place. After multiple short-term postponements, the Führer finally put the attack off until the spring.

The war, then, was set to continue, and also to widen. Also set to escalate was the barbarism that was an intrinsic part of the war. At home the T-4 killings in the asylums were mounting into a full-scale program of mass murder. In Poland, the grandiose plans of resettlement presided over my Himmler and Heydrich were seeing the brutal uprooting and deportation of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews into the 'dumping-ground' of the General Government.

Not least, the center-point of the "racial cleansing' mania, the "removal" of the Jews, was farther from solution that ever now that over a million Polish Jews had fallen into the hands of the Nazis. In December Goebbels reported to Hitler on his recent visit to Poland. The Führer, he recorded, listened carefully to his account and agreed with his views on the "Jewish and Polish question." "The Jewish danger must be banished from us. But in a few generations it will reappear. There's no panacea."

No "complete solution" to the "Jewish problem," was yet in sight. The constant quest to find such a "panacea" by Nazi underlings working directly or indirectly "toward the Führer" would nevertheless ensure that, in the conquered and subjugated territories of the east, a "solution" would gradually begin to emerge before long.

Source:

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

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