Hitler's Hangman (41 page)

Jews from Kattowitz and another transport from Moravia-Ostrava

followed over the coming days. Between 20 and 28 October a total of

4,700 Jews were deported to Nisko.65

When the first transport arrived, chaos ensued. The transit camp in

Nisko did not even exist at this point. The first deportees to arrive were

marched out of Nisko across the San river into a swampy meadow near

the village of Zarzecze where they started to erect basic barracks. The

following morning, the best workers were selected from the group, while

the rest were marched away eastwards and told never to return. The

following transports were treated similarly.66 This treatment of the depor-

tees, which involved a ready acceptance of the death of many in the largely

inhospitable meadows around Nisko, was entirely in line with Nazi plans:

Nisko was never intended to become a permanent home for the Jews of

Central Europe, but was rather a transit camp from which the expelled

Jews of Kattowitz, Vienna and Moravia-Ostrava were to be brought into

the Jewish reservation around Lublin.67

Despite some limited success, the deportation programme ended as

quickly as it had begun. On 20 October, Eichmann was notified by

Heydrich’s office in Berlin that the deportations were to be stopped

immediately. Military considerations for a future attack on the Soviet

Union may have played some role in this decision-making process.68

More importantly, however, it was Himmler’s gigantic resettlement

programme, which began to take shape in early October, that hampered

plans for a Jewish reservation near Lublin. Anti-Jewish deportation

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

159

policies were thus stymied by the wider consideration of ethnic German

resettlement in occupied Poland.69

After entering into a series of agreements with foreign powers to

resettle ethnic Germans ‘living abroad’, the first trainloads with Baltic

German settlers arrived in Danzig on 15 October. Himmler and Heydrich

hoped to settle many of these new arrivals in West Prussia and the

Warthegau and finding lodgings and livelihoods for them took priority

over the deportation of Jews from the Reich. Polish farms in the areas

designated for German settlement were to be expropriated and handed

over to the settlers, with the farmers themselves shoved over the border

into the General Government. The scope for deportations of Jews

from Germany into the remaining parts of Poland was now extremely

limited. Eichmann’s deportations, which were focused on the northern

Protectorate and Vienna, did not create space for German settlers where

Himmler and Heydrich most needed it. For the time being, therefore,

priority over the solution of the Jewish question was given to the consoli-

dation of the newly acquired living space in Western Poland through

German resettlement.70

Although Heydrich’s initial deportation plans had failed, he did not

waste time in adjusting to the new situation. On 28 November, he

presented his first ‘short-term plan’ (
Nahplan
) as well as a ‘long-term plan’

(
Fernplan
). According to the short-term plan, to be applied only to the

Warthegau as the key target area for ethnic Germans resettled from

Eastern Europe, ‘enough Poles and Jews are to be deported to provide

housing for the incoming Baltic Germans’. In order to achieve this aim as

quickly as possible, 5,000 people per day were to be expelled.71 The long-

term plan continued to emphasize as its overall aim the deportation of all

Jews and politically ‘unreliable’ Poles into the General Government,

followed by the ‘racial screening’ and subsequent gradual deportation of

the remaining Polish population from the annexed territories.72

Even if the removal of unwanted Poles and their replacement with

German settlers was the key target of his short-term plan, Heydrich had

in no way forgotten about the Jewish question either in Poland or at

home. On 21 December he announced that he had decided to appoint

Eichmann as his special adviser on the ‘preparation of Security Police

matters in carrying out evacuations in the east’. Despite the failure of the

Nisko plan, he obviously felt that Eichmann had the necessary expertise

and drive to bring this important project to a successful conclusion.73 That

same day, Heydrich issued a revised version of his short-term plan, which

outlined more clearly those against whom the aforementioned Security

Police matters would primarily be directed: within the first few months of

1940, Eichmann was to ensure that 600,000 Jews from the annexed

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

territories, ‘without regard to age and gender’, were deported into the

General Government. No deferments were to be granted for employer

claims of economic indispensability.74

Only a few weeks later, Heydrich put a new idea on the table: chairing

a top-level meeting with senior police officials from the East in Berlin, he

noted that between 800,000 and 1 million Polish agricultural workers (in

addition to the Polish prisoners of war) were needed as temporary land

labourers in the Reich. The General Government, already cramped with

deportees, was to receive another 40,000 Jews and Poles from the annexed

territories to make room for more Baltic Germans. This would be followed

by ‘another improvised clearing’ of 120,000 Poles to provide space for

the Volhynian Germans. Since Himmler had forbidden the deportation

of any Poles who might be of German origin, only Congress Poles

were to be affected. A racial screening of those Poles deemed capable

of Germanization would follow in the future. After the deportation of

a total of 160,000 Poles for the Baltic and Volhynian Germans, Heydrich

explained, the ‘evacuation’ to the General Government of all Jews and

Gypsies from the newly annexed eastern territories and the Old Reich

would begin, presumably in the late spring or early summer of 1940.75

In reality, Heydrich’s ambitious attempts to find a final solution to

the Jewish question through expulsions into Polish territory had made

little progress. Since Hitler’s statement to Rosenberg in late September

that all Jews, including those in the Old Reich, were to be sent to

the region between the Vistula and the Bug, and Himmler’s orders of

30 October to deport all Jews from the annexed territories by the end

of February 1940, very little had been accomplished. The deportation of

Jews from the Old Reich had been postponed to an as yet unknown date,

and priority was given to the deportation of Poles and Jews from the

incorporated territories where space for new German settlers was badly

needed.76

But even here a key problem remained: the officials in the receiving

areas, most notably the General Government’s powerful ruler, Hans Frank,

continued to oppose large-scale resettlement schemes into their own fief-

doms. Frank refused to administer a social ‘refuse tip’, and aspired instead

to create a model German colony, an ambition that required the
expulsion

of Jews from the General Government. Partly for prestige and racial

reasons and partly because his General Government was already over-

populated, he lobbied vigorously for an end to the deportations. Heydrich

tried to brush such objections aside, arguing that several hundreds of thou-

sands of Jews could be put in labour camps to build the Eastern Wal .77

In February 1940, Frank sought help from a powerful ally: Hermann

Göring. During a meeting with Himmler at Göring’s country estate,

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

161

Carinhall, Frank argued that the SS leadership’s drive for resettlement was

leading to chaos, maintaining that the food supplies of the province were

visibly threatened and that the General Government’s economy was in

tatters. These arguments, rooted in a more realistic assessment of

the actual situation on the ground than that of Heydrich and Himmler,

were successful. The first priority, Göring believed, was to strengthen

the Reich’s war potential and Himmler grudgingly had to concede

that further deportations would be carried out only with Frank’s agree-

ment. The very same day, however, Heydrich’s men in Stettin rounded

up 1,200 German Jews, some over eighty years old, and transported them

to the General Government. The ensuing complaints from the district

governor of Lublin prompted a quick response. On 12 March 1940, Hitler

declared that the Jewish question was one of space and that he had none

at his disposal. Less than two weeks later, on 24 March, Göring officially

forbade any further deportations to the General Government.78

The situation was deeply frustrating for Heydrich, who attempted to

cover up this fresh defeat by stepping up once more the process of Jewish

emigration from the Reich. Deprived of the option of immediately

deporting Jews into the General Government, Heydrich’s RSHA issued a

decree on 24 April 1940 announcing that emigration of German Jews was

‘to be intensified during the war’.79

Six months after the invasion of Poland, Heydrich had few reasons to be

content. On the one hand, the SS had emerged as the key player in the

policing and racial reorganization of the newly occupied Polish territories.

Yet the progress made was more than outweighed by the setbacks that

Heydrich had experienced in the autumn and winter of 1939. The

Wehrmacht successful y used the Polish atrocities as an argument against

any SS involvement on the Western Front. Moreover, the solution of

the Jewish question in the Old Reich had made little progress and the

problem of finding a reception area for deportees from the annexed

Polish territories remained unresolved. If anything, the experiences in

Poland taught Heydrich that while his powers on paper were vast and

growing, the implementation of SS policies often faltered in the face of

wartime realities and opposition from powerful Nazi Gauleiters and mili-

tary agencies which careful y guarded their own interests. Heydrich’s expe-

riences in Poland confirmed his suspicion that both the army leadership

and the Old Fighters now in charge of the civilian administration lacked

the necessary commitment to an uncompromising implementation of Nazi

ideology as he understood it. They were not to be trusted. For the time

being, however, political realities forced him grudgingly to do what he most

disliked: to compromise.

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Terror on the Home Front

From the beginning of the Second World War, Heydrich envisaged the

conflict ahead as a battle on two fronts: a merciless struggle against alien

races and nations on the battlefield and a ruthless fight against all internal

enemies at home. His obsession with the home front dated from 1918

and the November Revolution, which he had experienced as a teenager in

Halle. Immediately after the seizure of power in Bavaria in March 1933,

he had confiscated and studied the extensive police files on the Munich

Council Republic of 1919. They reinforced his conviction that Imperial

Germany had been fatally undermined by defeatism, poor morale and

political opposition on the home front. To eliminate the potential for

revolution, Heydrich argued, meant to strengthen Germany’s ability to

win the war. This time, there would be no stab in the back and no

surrender.80

As soon as war broke out, Hitler charged Himmler with the mainte-

nance of order in Germany ‘at all costs’. On the same day, 3 September

1939, Heydrich issued his ‘Principles of Inner State Security during the

War’, a directive he had been working on for some time in anticipation of

the military onslaught against Poland. Heydrich’s orders were designed to

ensure the ‘co-ordinated deployment’ of all security forces against ‘every

disruption and subversion’ of the German war effort.81

Without the rigorous implementation of this task, Heydrich insisted,

the Führer’s overall aims and objectives could not be realized. A ‘ruthless’

approach towards the threat of defeatism was necessary: ‘Any attempt to

subvert the unity and the will to combat of the German people must be

ruthlessly suppressed. It is particularly essential to arrest immediately any

person who expresses doubts about the victory of the German people or

who challenges the just cause of the war.’ Yet Heydrich also called for leni-

ency in cases where Germans who had lost family members on the front

or who had other ‘understandable’ causes for personal distress made crit-