Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (33 page)

a priority. Goal is removal of vital forces not reaching a given line. . . . Close hearts to sympathy. Proceed brutally. 80 mill. people must get what is theirs. Their

existence must be secured. Right is with the stronger. Greatest rigour.’
3
On 2 October Hitler went on to say how it was vital to ensure that ‘there must be

no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh

that sounds’.
4
At a meeting of departmental heads on 7 September, the Chief of 144

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

the Security Police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, gave instructions to the effect

that ‘the higher echelons of the Polish population need to be rendered as good as

harmless’, and on 14 October, to the same body, he made the demand that the

‘liquidation of leading Poles’ that had already begun be concluded by 1 November

at the latest.
5

In the spirit of these instructions, which could hardly have been expressed more

clearly, during the war and the first months of occupation 10,000 Polish citizens

were murdered by German units. The pretext for these murders was atrocities that

the Poles were said to have perpetrated and which German propaganda claimed

had cost the lives of more than 50,000 people. It is true that during the war

between 4,500 and 5,500 ethnic Germans lost their lives, partly as members of the

Polish army, partly as the civilian victims of acts of war, but some were also

transported by order of the Polish authorities, executed by the Polish military, or

the victims of violent attack by civilians. The peak was the so-called ‘Bloody

Sunday of Bromberg’, which claimed about a hundred lives and was depicted by

Nazi propaganda as a massacre with thousands left dead.
6

The systematic mass murder of certain sectors of the Polish population, pre-

sented as ‘retribution’ for these attacks, was directed and implemented to a large

extent by so-called Einsatzgruppen, ‘task forces’ or ‘death squads’. As in the case of

the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, special groups

were set up for the war against Poland consisting of members of the SS, the SD,

and the police. Initially there were five Einsatzgruppen (two more were added after

the start of the war) and they were each assigned to one of the armies; in total, the

seven units comprised some 2,700 men.
7
According to an agreement reached with OKH (Army High Command) in July, these Einsatzgruppen officially had the role

of dealing with all ‘elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany in enemy

territory behind the troops engaged in combat’. In addition, as a file note by

Heydrich from July 1940 establishes, they received instructions that were ‘extra-

ordinarily radical (e.g. the order to liquidate numerous Polish ruling circles, which

affected thousands)’. In concrete terms this meant that they had the authority to

murder members of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the nobility, as well as Jews

and the mentally ill.
8
Corresponding lists of targets had been drawn up by the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) as early as May 1939
.9

When the additional instructions that Heydrich referred to were issued is not

clear. Various statements by the Einsatzgruppe leadership suggest that they had

already had a meeting with Himmler and Heydrich by August in which they had

been told that how they should eliminate the Polish intelligentsia was up to

them.
10
This form of highly generalized instruction, giving the junior leadership considerable room for manoeuvre, matches the way the National Socialist

leadership proceeded on the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht); we

shall encounter this tactic of relying on the initiative and intuition of the junior

leaderships again when we come to the nature of instructions given to

Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 145

the Einsatzgruppen shortly before the beginning of the war against the Soviet

Union.

These Einsatzgruppen were supported above all by the ethnic German Self-

Defence Corps (volksdeutscher Selbstschutz), a militia formed after the start of the

war from overwhelmingly National Socialist members of the German minority

and integrated into the regular police force (Ordnungspolizei).
11
Both Einsatzgruppen and the Self-Defence Corps—but also the regular police, the military arm of

the SS (Waffen-SS), and army units—shot thousands of Polish civilians during the

war, often in the course of retaliation measures against supposed or actual attacks

on German troops.
12
In the month of September alone, according to post-war investigations undertaken by the Poles, more than 16,000 people fell victim to

such executions.
13
In the course of this massive outbreak of violence against the civilian population hundreds of Polish Jews were arbitrarily murdered by the

police, the Self-Defence Corps, and members of the army, and in a series of cases

locked into synagogues and burned alive.
14
These murders were part of a wave of anti-Semitic violence that the German occupying forces unleashed on the Jews of

Poland from the very beginning of the war and which also manifested itself as

looting, mistreatment, rape, public mockery, and more. It should also be empha-

sized that after September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and the army forcibly drove

tens of thousands of Polish Jews across the line of demarcation into the Soviet-

occupied areas.
15

After the end of the war this wave of terror became more systematized. From

late October on Einsatzgruppen and Selbstschutz carried out the ‘intelligentsia

campaign’ organized by the RSHA,
16
in which groups such as teachers, academics, former officers, and civil servants, the clergy, landowners, and leading members of

Polish national organizations, as well as Jews and the inmates of mental institu-

tions became the victims of large-scale mass arrests and executions. Some of the

victims were transported to camps, where they either died from the conditions

obtaining there or were murdered in mass executions that took place up to the

spring of 1940
.17

There were sometimes other groupings involved in extensive campaigns such as

this, just as they were in the murders of civilians during the war. They included the

National Socialist Motor Corps,
18
the Paramilitary Police (Schutzpolizei),
19
the Waffen-SS,
20
but above all units from the army itself.
21
In the first four months of German occupation tens of thousands of people were murdered in this way, with a

notable focus on the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West-Prussia, where at least ten

towns or camps can be identified with certainty, in each of which more than a

thousand civilians were shot between autumn 1939 and spring 1940
.22

In the course of these events in Danzig-West-Prussia in autumn 1939, as well as

members of the Polish elites, Jews and the inmates of mental hospitals, in many

towns there were smaller groups of ‘a-social’ individuals killed, including prosti-

tutes, women said to be suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and Gypsies.

146

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

These murders will have been committed for the most part on the authority of

lower-ranking policemen, SS, and Selbstschutz functionaries, who had on their

own initiative amplified the orders they had received in the spirit of ‘racially

hygienic cleansing’.
23

In the newly formed Warthegau, too, Germans were shooting people from the

same groups as in Danzig-West-Prussia, beginning in September and continuing

throughout October and November, albeit on a smaller scale.
24
More executions occurred in the Polish areas attached to East Prussia, in Upper Silesia and the

central and eastern Polish districts.
25
A report made by the commanders of Einsatzgruppe 16 to the Central Office of the SD on 20 October makes it clear

just how systematically these murders were being carried out: the planned liquid-

ation of ‘radical Polish elements’, who the report’s author regretted were already

largely in detention, could only be continued for a short time, which meant that

the number of dead in East Prussia could ‘only’ reach about 20,000.
26

The role of the army in these systematic murders was not only restricted to

participating in executions or to attacks by individual soldiers. More significant

is the fact that the leadership of the army had accepted a ‘division of labour’ with

the SS and the police at the beginning of the campaign. When the Head of

Military Intelligence (Abwehr), Canaris, alerted the Head of the OKW, Keitel,

on 12 September to the plans for sweeping, comprehensive executions in Poland,

Keitel replied that ‘this matter has already been decided by the Führer’ and that

Hitler had made it clear that ‘if the army does not want to have anything to do

with this, it will have to accept the SS and the Gestapo working visibly alongside

them’.
27
After a meeting with Hitler, Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army (ObdH), informed his senior officers that the Einsatzgruppen in

Poland would have ‘certain tasks concerning ethnic politics’ the fulfilment of

which would lie outside the army’s areas of responsibility. The army thereby

created the parameters for a war that was already being waged in part as an

ideological campaign of annihilation, but without itself having to carry out the

mass murder of civilians.

Whilst the army tolerated the murder by Einsatzgruppen and during the war

against Poland carried out considerable numbers of executions, after the end of

the war the resistance of the military (and the civilian administration) to the

uncontrollable activities of the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz began to

grow.
28
Again and again there were awkward confrontations between the Self-Defence Corps or Einsatzgruppe units and army officers. In the middle of

November the commander of the new military district (Wehrkreis) of Danzig,

Lieutenant General von Bock, complained to Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter For-

ster about the continuation of murders by the Selbstschutz,
29
despite an undertaking to desist given in mid-October.
30
Even though the Self-Defence Corps was supposed to have been dissolved after autumn 1939, in some areas this process

was drawn out until spring 1940
.31
In February 1940 Blaskowitz, the Military Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 147

Commander (Militärbefehlshaber) for the East, protested to the Commander-in-

Chief of the Army about the murders of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles.
32

The racist policies of the National Socialist regime in Poland were also exp-

ressed in the separation of Jewish prisoners of war (estimated at some 60,000–

65,000) from non-Jewish prisoners, and in the fact that they were treated worse

than their Polish comrades, who themselves lived under much more miserable

conditions than their Western counterparts. The consequence was a much higher

mortality rate amongst Jewish prisoners.
33

Establishing German Rule in the Occupied Territories

After a short-lived intermediate period of military administration, the fundamen-

tal decisions regarding the future governance of Poland were taken in October

1939: extensive areas of Poland were annexed by the Reich; the ‘General Govern-

ment’ was established in central Poland and the extent of the eastern Polish areas

to be ceded to the Soviet Union was definitively agreed.
34

In Poland the National Socialists attempted to put into direct practice their

utopian dream of a form of rule that was founded on the principle of racial

inequality: a relatively narrow section of ethnic Germans and occupying forces

from the area of the Reich subjugated the mass of the Polish population, whose

Jewish minority was further sharply segregated as a lowest-ranking social group

without rights of any kind.
35
After the extension of the General Government to cover eastern Polish areas in the summer of 1941 the Ukrainians and White

Russians living there were generally better off than the Polish population.

Within this differentiated system of racist rule the persecution of the Polish

Jews must always be seen within the context of ‘Poland policy’ in general, but also

at the same time it should be distinguished from the overall repression of occupied

Poland. The gradual intensification of Jewish persecution (expropriation, expul-

sion, ghettoization, enforced labour, and finally systematic mass murder) was only

possible because the mass of the remaining population was extensively terrorized

and deprived of its rights. On the other hand, from the perspective of the

occupying powers, the persecution of the Jews in Poland represented the decisive

starting point for the whole-scale restructuring of Poland along racist lines.

Germany’s Polenpolitik aimed at the complete annihilation of every form

of Polish statehood or national identity. This goal was to be achieved via the

systematic mass murder of the Polish elites, by the destruction of Poland’s