Hitler's Hangman (39 page)

West Prussia to the ‘foreign-speaking
Gau
’ in the Kraków region, while

‘adolescent Polish elements’ were to be exploited as seasonal migrant

workers.33

On 6 October, the day after his triumphant visit to recently conquered

Warsaw, Hitler publicly referred to these decisions when he declared in a

speech before the Reichstag that the ‘most important task’ resulting from

Poland’s col apse was the ‘ethnic reordering’ of East-Central Europe.34 The

day after his speech, he formal y assigned to Himmler the enormous task of

organizing this ethnic reordering by appointing him Reich Commissar for

the Strengthening of Germandom (RKFDV), thus giving the SS a second

power base – in addition to the police – in Polish territory. Hitler set

Himmler two interrelated tasks: to keep Poles and Jews under surveil ance

in order to ‘eliminate’ their ‘harmful influence’ and, by deporting hundreds

of thousands of them from their homes in Western Poland, to create the

precondition for the second task: the ‘repatriation’ of hundreds of thousands

of ethnic Germans scattered across Eastern-Central Europe, the Baltic

States and Russia, to the newly annexed territories of Western Poland.35

The decision to place the SS leadership in charge of the ethnic

unweaving of the conquered territories was both surprising and momen-

tous. For ideological reasons, Himmler and Heydrich had long shown

interest in the so-called
Volksdeutsche
– people of German descent living

outside the Reich’s borders, often as a result of the redrawing of maps in

the aftermath of the First World War. But, until 1939, the SS had had no

experience in practical settlement work. Just as in 1933–4, when the two

men acquired control over the political police in the German states

without any prior experience in police work, Heydrich and Himmler had

to improvise. What secured Himmler’s appointment as RKFDV was

primarily his ideological reliability, which seemed to guarantee a speedy

implementation of Hitler’s wishes.

The need to resettle ethnic Germans from the now Soviet-occupied

Baltic States went hand in hand with Hitler’s far-reaching decision in the

autumn of 1939 to annex the Western Polish territories now under

German occupation and to transform them permanently into German

living space. The two newly created
Reichsgaue
, Danzig-West Prussia and

Wartheland, were to be ethnically cleansed of Poles and Jews, who were

to be deported to Central Poland – the so-called General Government –

before being replaced by ethnic German settlers from the Soviet Union

and South-Eastern Europe. This was nothing short of an order for a revo-

lutionary unweaving and reordering of Central and Eastern European

ethnicities, affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

151

For Heydrich, too, the new task of unleashing a violent wave of ethnic

engineering significantly expanded his responsibilities. The intended

resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people necessitated the creation

of a sizeable new apparatus under Heydrich’s control. On Himmler’s

orders, a Central Office for Immigration (
Einwandererzentralstelle
or

EWZ) was established in mid-December, with branch offices in Posen

(Poznań), Litzmannstadt (Łódź) and Gotenhafen (Gdyna). With the

help of racial experts from the Race and Settlement Main Office, the

agency was to undertake racial tests of ethnic Germans and to decide

where to resettle them. Its counterpart, also based in Posen with subsid-

iary offices in other Polish cities, was the Central Office for Emigration

(Umwandererzentralstelle or UWZ), which was responsible for the racial

screening and expulsion of Poles and Jews from the annexed territories.

The main tools of terror and resettlement – the Security Police, the

Einsatzgruppen
, the UWZ and the EWZ – were now all concentrated in

the hands of the SS leadership.36

While the scale of the task ahead may have been historically

unprecedented, the policies employed by Himmler and Heydrich were

not. More or less co-ordinated waves of ethnic or religious ‘unmixing’,

deportations and murder had already occurred on a massive scale in

South-eastern Europe between the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s, during

which large-scale anti-Ottoman violence errupted in the Caucasus and

the Balkans, and the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a

period during which hundreds of thousands of the Ottoman Empire’s

Muslims, Christian Armenians and Orthodox Greeks were expelled or

murdered. The genuinely modern idea of creating ethnically homogeneous

nation-states through the suppression, expulsion and often murder of

‘suspect’ minorities was by no means a Nazi invention. Instead it followed

a logic of Social Darwinism and sociological positivism – the idea that

human society could be perfected through scientific quantification, ethnic

categorization and, if necessary, violent unmixing. A similar logic had

already guided the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and

the Bolshevik approach to class enemies. The main difference from these

precedents was that the Nazi project of social and ethnic engineering was

not based on the somewhat firmer categories of religion or class. Rather

it was founded on the slippery concept of race that left ample room

for different interpretations. While Heydrich and the SS leadership

in general insisted on the rigid application of supposedly objective

criteria for racial segregation, some of the civilian authorities in occupied

Europe took a more lax stance. The Gauleiter of Danzig – West Prussia,

Albert Forster, for example, defied SS population policy by applying his

own rather unique interpretation of Hitler’s Germanization mandate.

152

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Rather than assiduously measuring the Polish population of Danzig-West

Prussia against racial criteria, he simply took at their word Poles claiming

German ancestry and declared them citizens of the Reich, thus

Germanizing his fiefdom with great speed and minimal effort, but

creating a continuous source of conflict with the SS and Heydrich in

particular, who considered Forster’s approach a severe danger to the racial

health of the German people.37

Fearing that the civil administration due to replace the military occupa-

tion regime on 25 October might limit his freedom of action, on

14 October Heydrich reiterated his earlier order that the ‘liquidation of

the Polish leadership’ in Western Poland should be completed within the

next two weeks.38 In accordance with these orders, the
Einsatzgruppen

carried out a second wave of arrests and mass shootings in West Prussia,

again targeting Polish teachers, academics, ex-officers and members of

nationalist organizations as well as so-called Congress Poles, that is Poles

who had moved to West Prussia from the East since 1919. The total

number of victims of this second round of murders and deportations in

West Prussia is unclear, but SS men in the field believed that ‘approxi-

mately 20,000’ Poles were ‘destroyed’ that autumn. A further 87,000

people were deported from Danzig-West Prussia by February 1940.39

The terror and ethnic cleansing in south-east Prussia began somewhat

later, notably after the arrival of Heydrich’s trusted associate, Otto Rasch,

in Königsberg in November. Born in 1891, he had studied law, philos-

ophy and political science before the Great War. Rasch had extensive

experience in violently persecuting ‘enemies of the Reich’. After the

war, he had volunteered for the Freikorps campaigns of the early 1920s

against Polish insurgents. Known as Dr Dr Rasch because he had

completed two PhDs, he joined the SS and the SD in the early 1930s

where, thanks to Heydrich’s protection, his star rose rapidly. He quickly

became head of the Gestapo in Frankfurt. Heydrich recognized his

‘talents’ as a man in the field and insisted on his participation in the SD

campaigns in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where he acted as

deputy of Udo von Woyrsch. After his arrival in Königsberg in the

autumn of 1939, Rasch immediately suggested the execution of large

numbers of Polish prisoners, mostly drawn from the intelligentsia.

Heydrich happily approved, but insisted that the liquidations were to be

‘unobtrusive’, an order implemented by Rasch by means of secret execu-

tions of prisoners in the shady forests along the former East Prussian–

Polish border and in the now deserted former Polish army barracks in the

town of Soldau.40

Systematic murders were not confined to the incorporated territories.

What began in West Prussia and the Warthegau in the autumn of 1939,

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

153

and passed through south-east Prussia in the winter, reached the General

Government in the spring of 1940. The targeted liquidation of Poles noted

for their education, nationalism or social status demonstrated that the

Nazis were capable of and committed to murdering by the thousands.

Complementary to this aim was the ‘resettlement’ of hundreds of thou-

sands, eventually even millions of people. The expulsion of ‘undesired

elements’ to the East and the restitution of ‘valuable German stock’ in

their place would provide the basis for the new German
Lebensraum
.

Although the Poles were the main victims of the first wave of murders

and deportations in Eastern Europe, the outbreak of war also impacted

dramatically on the fate of the Jews now living under Nazi rule. As Hitler

had pointed out in his triumphant Reichstag speech of 6 October, the

ethnic reordering of Poland would involve a concerted effort to ‘settle and

regulate the Jewish problem’ once and for all.41

But how was this to be achieved? Heydrich was painful y aware that, as

a result of the recent German conquests, the scale of the ‘Jewish problem’

had increased many times over. At the beginning of the German invasion,

Poland contained almost 3.5 mil ion Jews, by far the largest number of Jews

living in any European state. More than three-quarters of them lived in

Poland’s towns and cities, with 350,000 in Warsaw alone. Al in al , over

2 mil ion Jews lived in the German-control ed territories of Poland in

September 1939, of whom 300,000 fled eastwards during the German

invasion. But the differences were not just quantitative. The Orthodox

Polish Jews whom German troops encountered seemed to conform to the

anti-Semitic imagery, with a traditional garb and way of life. Unlike the

mostly assimilated Jews of Germany, Orthodox Polish Jews were easily

identifiable, spoke a different language and had no protection from German

friends or relatives. Furthermore, Germany was now at war and the

‘restraints’ under which radical Nazis had operated since 1933 no longer

applied. Ever since the beginning of the German invasion, Polish Orthodox

Jews had routinely been singled out for public humiliation and violent

attacks. Of the 16,000 Polish civilians kil ed during the first six weeks of

the war, 5,000 were Jews. Jewish shops and homes were specifical y targeted

by both the SS and regular German troops as they passed through Polish

towns and vil ages.42

Despite the continuous efforts to step up Jewish emigration from

Germany since 1938, neither Heydrich nor anyone else in the Nazi lead-

ership had entered the war with a clear conception of what they were

going to do with the Jews of Poland. Up to September 1939, Heydrich’s

forced-emigration policies had led to a drop in the Jewish population of

the Reich by more than half – from just over 500,000 to 215,000.

Although the conquests of 1938 and 1939 had brought new Jewish

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

communities under Nazi control – 180,000 Jews in Austria and 85,000 in

Bohemia and Moravia – the same policy had worked there, too. By the

outbreak of war in September 1939, around half of the Austrian and

Czech Jews had fled or been forced to emigrate as a result of Eichmann’s

operations. Poland changed the equation completely. Heydrich now found

himself nominally responsible for an additional 1.7 million Polish Jews, a

community nearly ten times larger than that in the Old Reich in 1939.43

Having been hit by this problem without any predetermined solution,

Heydrich wanted to make it go away as quickly as possible. As early as

7 September, he suggested to his subordinates in the Gestapo headquar-

ters in Berlin that SS Jewish policy in Poland would have to include a