"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (71 page)

The segregation concept of the Forced Labor Decree of October 26, 1939, applied not only to Germans but also to Jews and Poles, such that Jewish workers were always to be segregated from Polish workers.
²⁴

The forced labor itself was dominated by rigorous, previously nonexistent practices, which even went so far as the proposal to hang Jews who did not work hard enough.
²⁵
The working conditions were kept below the Polish level as far as possible. Originally, the Jews received no wages whatsoever but depended on support from the Jewish Council. When these funds were exhausted, guidelines issued by the head of the Department of Labor in the Governor General’s Office dated July 5, 1940,
²⁶
stipulated that the Jews conscripted for forced labor should receive no remuneration but only performance bonuses; Jews placed in free employment were granted a wage on the basis of piece rates, which had to be 20 percent below the wage for Polish workers. A decree of December 15, 1941,
²⁷
refined this practice so that—as in the Reich—Jews received wages only for work actually performed (not for vacations or inability to work due to illness or accident), and all wage supplements (for overtime, qualifications, incentive payments, benefits, family allowances, etc.) were abolished. The period of notice was reduced to
one day,
and the regulations on the employment of women and young persons were declared inapplicable to Jews. The same applied to regulations governing working hours. A directive had already been issued in 1940 that Jews must work on Jewish holidays.
²⁸
The value of Jewish laborers, which was considerable in view of their craft and trade skills (resulting in a permanent tug-of-war between the labor administration and the police), was thus much higher than that of the Polish laborers, because of the low costs involved.
²⁹

Needy Jews did not, of course, receive any welfare benefits from the Germans but were dependent upon the Jewish welfare agencies.
³⁰
From 1942 on, when the Jewish labor camps were wrested from the jurisdiction of the German labor administration and placed under the responsibility of the police because the latter themselves now undertook the “exploitation” of Jewish “labor,”
³¹
the conditions in the labor camps, catastrophic in any case, deteriorated even further because these camps were now operated as satellite camps of the concentration camps, with the selective exploitation of labor organized as the penultimate station before final liquidation.
³²

b. Consequences of the
Arbeitseinsatz
(Labor Allocation) Policy

The implementation of compulsory labor for Poles and Jews had brought considerable gains for the labor market in the General Government and the Reich territory in terms of nominal figures. The Department of Labor in the Governor General’s Office noted with pride that the Poles formed the basis of the “German war economy,” a factor that was also acknowledged in the Reich itself.
³³
At the end of 1941, the proportion of the foreign labor force in the Reich accounted for by Poles was put at 47 percent.
³⁴
However, these results arose only because voluntary registration for
Arbeitseinsatz
had dropped since 1939-40 as a result of a number of factors including deterring reports about the treatment (“calumny”) of the Poles in the Reich and the expected resettlements and evacuations by the RKF (as the Reich Chancellery established without any pretense at embellishment); the police, increasingly reacting to requests from the labor administration itself—inspired by the ambition to fulfill the excessive demands of the Reich at all costs—rounded up the industrial conscripts in raids and ensured their forced deportation to the Reich or the
Arbeitseinsatz
facilities in the General Government.
³⁵

The administrative leadership had mixed feelings about these measures,
³⁶
implemented as they were with unbelievable brutality, because on the one hand it did not dare to forcefully oppose the excessive demands of the Reich and its own labor authorities, and on the other, these measures jeopardized economic life in the General Government because they caused considerable economic problems and numerous complaints by lower-level administrative authorities. For instance, the police actions were a major cause of problems: the willingness to work had sunk to a new low; the administration had lost the last remnant of any credibility it had enjoyed, including in the countryside; and there had been a considerable growth in Polish resistance activities, even in areas that had previously been relatively calm.
³⁷
The brutal policy of “registering” workers by the police thus proved to be absurd in the long term and without any positive result whatsoever. The administration authorities recognized early on that no “positive” cooperation by the Poles could be expected,
³⁸
but they either intentionally left matters as they were or were unable to do anything about the police hunt for workers, which was controlled centrally and enforced without any consideration at all for the economic situation.

The consequence of the police terror and the special labor law treatment was that the actual value of “non-German” labor in the General Government fell further and further. The legal uncertainty surrounding the erratic wage system for Poles and the difference between the remuneration of German workers (paid in reichsmarks on Reich German pay scales) and that of Polish workers had reached an “unbearable disparity,” as the authorities complained;
³⁹
a complicating factor was that the supply situation was catastrophic (“starvation status”), because the General Government had been looted to supply the Reich;
⁴⁰
as a result, only certain (war-priority) groups were recognized as eligible for supplies;
⁴¹
those Poles no longer used as labor received in the words of Governor General Frank “only the little left over” (with the Jews at the bottom of the pile, receiving minimal or even no rations whatsoever).
⁴²
The result was a rapid rise in black market prices, and inflation shot up rapidly, so that the value of the wages paid to the Poles—in any case minimal—shrank more and could be compensated only by allocating additional supplies of food rations to industry.
⁴³

EXCURSUS

Social Welfare Law

With the wages paid to working Poles worse than inadequate, this applied all the more to other benefits under labor law and to welfare benefits for the non-working population, people who were of no practical use to German interests, the support of whom was thus reduced to an absolute minimum. After a temporary drop, health insurance and pension insurance benefits reached prewar levels (according to German claims), and certain social facilities were established to preserve the Polish labor capacity (again according to German claims), but all these benefits were provided at the discretion of the administration.
⁴⁴
The payment
obligations
of health and pension insurers were turned into
optional
provisions, and maximum rates were stipulated for pensions (Jews were totally excluded from such benefits); in addition, war pensions were reduced to around half of 80 percent of the Polish rates.
⁴⁵
Furthermore, Polish unemployment benefit law had been suspended in December 1939—apart from the liability for contributions; all entitlements to unemployment relief were abolished, the amount paid was restricted to minimum rates, and its granting was subject to the discretion of the administration.
⁴⁶

The responsibility for welfare benefits for Poles in need of assistance was delegated to the Polish municipalities without specific benefit rates being set.
⁴⁷
For financial reasons, social relief for the “non-Germans” (for refugees and children) was detached from welfare benefits, an artificial division because social relief functions frequently overlapped with other welfare tasks. For the central organization of social relief measures, a “voluntary social relief work” association of the Central Polish Aid Committee, with a branch in the seat of government of each
Kreishauptmann,
was established because German agencies were totally uninterested in these functions, and the state “could not possibly” assume these responsibilities for financial reasons.
⁴⁸
This committee, financed by public subsidies and donations, thus assumed “social relief responsibilities” for the Poles;
⁴⁹
the Jewish mutual aid organizations had the same functions for the Jews, but these were also responsible for welfare benefits and received no public subsidies at all, surviving only through “mutual aid” and donations from outside.
⁵⁰

V. The Legal Status of “Non-Germans”

As regards special-law practice in the sphere of the general and internal administration, whose responsibilities more or less corresponded to those of the internal administration of the Reich,
¹
the same policy of ruthless exploitation already described was implemented.

It should be noted, however, that the actual and most extreme forms of special law, in the form of the countless, extensive police measures against “non-Germans,” were removed from the jurisdiction of the general administration because they had been usurped by the police—who regarded them as their own province—and because numerous special duties were assigned to special authorities by way of special powers. Among the areas usurped by the police (who merely followed their regular practice under Reich law) was the regulation of Jewish affairs and ghetto matters, to be discussed later; the resettlement and evacuation of “non-Germans” to and within the General Government (and now to all Occupied Eastern Territories),
²
one of the prime everyday administrative tasks, was undertaken by the departments of the RFSS, in his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, on the basis of a special authorization by the Führer, in close cooperation with the internal administration.
³
These measures were intentionally implemented in the midst of the war, because, as Himmler said, they “were easier to digest in time of war.”
⁴
The crucial factor, however, was that—going far beyond the organization in the Reich—all police powers were removed from the administration and integrated into the agencies of the higher SS and police leader (HSSPF),
⁵
who was in practice independent of the administrative leadership; all that remained under the jurisdiction of the administration itself (until 1943) were the so-called administrative police matters.
⁶
Both the unmistakable changes in jurisdiction implemented in the organizational structure of the authorities and the focus of the administration itself thus resulted in the practically limitless omnipotence of the SS and police agencies in the General Government.
⁷

Although the internal administration lagged behind the police with its special-law measures, it still achieved a high degree of radicalism, because like the police measures, the special-law measures were implemented largely without any formal legal basis, since the constitutional status of the “non-Germans” made any consideration of the principles of Reich law (such as the principle of the legitimacy of the administration), indeed of any normative principles whatsoever, quite superfluous. A condition for the designation on the one hand of the Poles as a dependent mass of laborers and on the other of the Jews as objects of exploitation only tolerated in the General Government on a temporary basis was that the administration could do as it pleased, free from any legal restraints. The legal status of the “non-German” population therefore had to be abolished and their capacity as the bearers of subjective rights eliminated.

In contrast to the situation in the Annexed Eastern Territories, where the expulsion of the Poles was accompanied by the “reclamation of German blood,” the inhabitants of the General Government were therefore not subject to a phased legal status depending on their extraction: their legal status was destroyed for good. This was all justified by the thesis that at the latest with the capitulation of Poland, Polish state authority and thus Polish citizenship had disappeared. Neither could a new citizenship appear, because the General Government was neither a state or a parastatal entity but practically a part (a “dependency”) of the Reich. Its inhabitants were therefore stateless and must remain so.
⁸
In the view of the Germans, such persons as were deported to the General Government, such as Poles from the Annexed Eastern Territories, also lost their citizenship; however, this applied above all to the Jews deported from Germany, because under the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 25, 1941, Jews who were German state subjects lost their state subject status on crossing the German state border, and the General Government (although a part of the Reich) was regarded in this case (as with the Annexed Eastern Territories) as non-German Territory (de facto as foreign territory).
⁹
During the course of the German occupation, no changes were made to the stateless status of the inhabitants of the General Government, although the police leadership showed itself interested in the Germanization of Poles “of German blood.”
¹⁰
This was because on the one hand—in contrast to the practice in the Annexed Eastern Territories, where the Germanization of the “non-Germans” of German extraction was hurried along at all costs—no Germanization in the General Government was intended by the political leadership (at least during the war)
¹¹
and on the other hand because the deprivation of rights of the population most closely corresponded to the practical requirements of the authorities.