"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (53 page)

In the Warthegau, all Polish teachers were dismissed without notice;
²⁸
lessons in Polish schools were subsequently taught by poorly trained
²⁹
German auxiliary teachers,
³⁰
for whom an abbreviated training was quite sufficient since the education provided was of no more than a rudimentary nature (barely two hours per day).
³¹
It may be assumed that the quality of the lessons was poor from the outset, because in the view of the National Socialists, the only purpose of education for “non-German children” was to teach them to be “orderly, clean, disciplined, [and] honest.” As reported in a circular from the Posen district president responsible for these matters, only an elementary knowledge of arithmetic, writing and reading was necessary for this purpose; the teaching of history was superfluous; therefore, two to two and a half hours of class per day in two shifts were all that was necessary.
³²
The language of teaching was German,
³³
and though German had also been the main subject during the reign of the military administration,
³⁴
the subsequent teaching of German, as shown by a syllabus issued by the Hohensalza (Inowrocław) district president, was restricted to ensuring “that verbal instructions at the workplace could be understood without particular difficulty”; “no effort should be wasted … in attempting to teach error-free German.”
³⁵
“Subjects intended to train the soul and the mind” (e.g., music, history, etc.) as well as physical education were not taught; however, great store was set on so-called work practice (collecting medicinal herbs—according to the former Posen SS and police leader [SSPF], Wilhelm Koppe, this was due to a particular interest of Himmler—waste material, weed control, etc.).
³⁶

Furthermore, Polish children were required to attend school only between the ages of ten and fourteen,
³⁷
that is, a maximum of five years. To sever the influence of “Polishness,” no German child should attend a Polish school, and no Polish child a German school; there was strict class segregation, even as regards classrooms.
³⁸
Because the schooling age of Polish children was not standardized
³⁹
and the number of Polish schools was inadequate, an awkward situation arose because many Polish children did not attend school at all, so the authorities themselves urgently endorsed the opening of additional schools to avoid the risk of the ”total neglect and degeneration of Polish children of school age.”
⁴⁰
Poles were also prevented from gaining craft qualifications; although they were employed as apprentices, they did not receive any diplomas, learned only the “necessary minimum,” and were not permitted to attend vocational colleges.
⁴¹

II. The Economic and Commercial Sector

The short-sighted planning that prevailed in the education system also ruled in the economic and commercial realm.
¹
Although the equal treatment of “non-Germans” with safeguards for their vested interests would have been vital to stabilize the situation and bring these territories into line with the rest of the Reich, the Germanization of these territories was interpreted in the first instance as no more than the confiscation and expropriation of all Polish assets of any importance for the Reich; this systematically robbed the local population of its economic existence. The parallels to the anti-Jewish laws (which also applied to Jews from the Reich in the Annexed Eastern Territories)
²
in the treatment of the Poles are all too obvious, as the schematics of the anti-Jewish laws—seizure, appointment of trustees, sale of assets to private persons (Aryanization) or their transfer to public ownership—were an excellent model that could be used as a precedent in all the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. Outside the Reich, however, the system of state asset robbery was accompanied and frequently undermined by countless unauthorized seizures.

As early as the first weeks of the war, the Wehrmacht and the chiefs of the civil administration in Posen (Pozna
), Danzig (Gda
sk), and Kattowitz (Katowice) had issued extensive orders to confiscate the assets of “non-Germans,” in particular land,
³
backed up by confiscation regulations issued by the local administrative authorities, in particular as regards Jewish assets;
⁴
as in the Reich, the confiscation of Jewish property was described as the “safeguarding of Jewish assets.”
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At the same time, however, there was a regular rush by Wehrmacht, state, and Party agencies to acquire Polish and Jewish assets
⁶
(quite apart from efforts by private individuals to line their own pockets,
⁷
with everyone taking what they felt like, ignoring all existing regulations), which resulted in “practically every house” and “every floor” being “searched” for valuable assets;
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it was even admitted officially that ”in tens of thousands of cases,” “nondesignated” and “unauthorized agencies” had interfered with Poles, had misappropriated assets in many cases or removed them to their offices, and that very large numbers of “countless everyday articles” had disappeared
⁹
—in defiance of a central directive from the plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan (Göring) prohibiting all “unauthorized confiscation.”
¹⁰
Only in 1940 was the situation brought more or less under control by the civil administration and dealt with consistently, but even this could not quite put an end to the unauthorized confiscations.
¹¹

Seizure by the occupying power principally involved Polish
state
assets, which were “put into safe custody” in their entirety, that is, confiscated and administered in the name of the Reich.
¹²
The confiscation of private Polish and Jewish assets followed a few months later. The relevant Decree on the Property of Persons of the Former Polish State, dated September 17, 1940,
¹³
(the so-called Polish Assets Decree) contained the fundamental regulations about the legal “special treatment” of assets, the objective of which was “to make the Eastern Territories annexed to the Reich into German land.” Under this decree, all Jewish assets were confiscated and treated as the property of the Reich;
¹⁴
this therefore involved not restrictions on disposal but permanent
expropriation,
so that from this time on, the Jews were no longer legal entities in terms of asset and property law. This decree also provided for the confiscation of the total assets of Poles who had already fled or been deported, as well as of other “non-Germans” in the Eastern Territories,
¹⁵
with massive proceeds from their sale accruing to the Main Trustee Office East
(Haupttreuhandstelle Ost),
specially established for this purpose.
¹⁶
The assets of the Poles still to be deported also fell to the public purse.
¹⁷
Special directives were also issued for the legal treatment of the assets of Jews to be resettled or deported.
¹⁸

Under the Polish Assets Decree (sec. 2, par. 2), the remaining assets of Poles resident in the Annexed Eastern Territories were also open to seizure if they involved the assets of persons who had immigrated after October 1, 1918, or if the assets were required “for the public good,” that is, were claimed to meet the needs of the administration of German resettlers. On the basis of this decree, it is evident that all Polish businesses and enterprises were confiscated, as any “decision not to confiscate from a Pole … was essentially excluded.”
¹⁹
Under section 2, paragraph 4, of this decree, movables needed for personal existence were “regularly” exempt from confiscation, such as cash, bank balances, and securities up to a total value of RM 1,000. In practice, however,
all
bank balances, custody accounts, and safe deposit boxes of Polish nationals were initially confiscated on the basis of corresponding decrees issued by the head of the Main Trustee Office East, and cash assets up to RM 1,000 were released only on application, without any legal entitlement, where these involved so-called old assets (deposits before January 1, 1940). Deposits after December 31, 1939, were not subject to confiscation, to encourage savings.
²⁰

Only Poles who had remained in the Annexed Eastern Territories could make use of this personal allowance for “old assets”; those Poles who had fled or had been deported (“more than temporarily absent”) (including those of Jewish descent) as well as “Polish Jews still present” were not normally granted this personal allowance.

As far as Polish real estate was concerned, agricultural and forestry land not owned by Germans was confiscated, whether its owner was present or not, under the Decree on the Public Administration of Agricultural and Forestry Enterprises and Land in the Annexed Eastern Territories, dated February 12, 1940 (the so-called Eastern Land Decree),
²¹
and transferred to public administration by the organizations established by the Reich minister of food and agriculture for this purpose.
²²

German settlers were appointed as trustees to manage this land; they could purchase it outright from 1942 on.
²³
German trustees,
²⁴
again often resettlers with prospects for acquisition at a later date,
²⁵
were appointed to manage the other confiscated real estate and the commercial, trading, and industrial enterprises from which the Polish and Jewish owners had been evicted. The organization of manufacturing industry in the Reich was introduced here as well.
²⁶
The numerous Polish textile enterprises were either liquidated on the eviction of the local owners or converted into munitions and weapons factories, with the destruction of the original plants and equipment.
²⁷
Business activity was also largely interrupted.

Further restrictions followed. Under a decree issued on January 21, 1940, all real estate transactions were prohibited until further notice, and the establishment of all enterprises
²⁸
was subject to approval, with the aim of hindering the remaining Poles from all free economic activities and reducing them to a subordinate position in the economy and the administration. This created a situation very similar to that conceived by German Foreign Office drafts for treatment of natives in the future colonies.
²⁹

The confiscation of private and public Polish assets, initially also used to pay welfare subsidies to Poles and Jews,
³⁰
in fact represented nothing other than collective expropriation on a massive scale. Attempts were made to conceal this fact publicly by closely linking the concept of “trust administration” with that of confiscation. As with the earlier confiscation of Jewish assets in the Reich,
³¹
the confiscated assets of the Poles were put under “trust” “administration,” in an attempt to give the impression that this was a temporary state of affairs, that is, “administration” and not expropriation. However, the impression that it was temporary was belied from the outset by the fact that an unbelievably complicated administrative machinery (the Main Trustee Office East) was established to implement this administration, which worked closely
³²
with the departments of the RFSS/RKF
(Reichsführer
-SS/Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood) and was quite evidently intended and organized as a permanent establishment.
³³
This machinery, with its countless decrees and directives
³⁴
and with its powers intermingling and overlapping with those of the general administrative authorities and of police and RKF
³⁵
departments, led to a completely entangled chaos of powers and administration.
³⁶
Furthermore, the standards applied by the Main Trustee Office East made it quite clear that there could be no talk of “trust administration.” The task of this “trust administration” was, of course, to manage and employ the confiscated assets not in the interests of their owners but solely in the interests of the National Socialist economic and settlement policy (“confiscated Polish assets” shall be “employed in the interests of the Reich, i.e., the public at large”).
³⁷
The aim of the exploitation, that is, of the collective expropriation, was so self-evident that in part the confiscation regulations themselves, but in any case the administrative practices, automatically assumed the loss of title of the rightful owners.