The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (7 page)

The most extreme and militant Polish anti-Jewish political organization, the National Democratic Party (the Endeks), established in the 1890s by Roman Dmowski (who led it until the late 1930s), first and foremost demanded the exclusion of Jews from key positions in Polish political, cultural, and economic life. It rejected the possibility of Jewish assimilation (arguing that such assimilation was not real or “in depth”); it identified Jews with communism (coining the term
Zydokomuna
—Jewish communism) and, eventually came to consider mass emigration (or expulsion) of the Jews from Poland as the only solution of the Jewish question.
⁸⁶

During the 1920s, apart from pogroms in the immediate postwar period, anti-Jewish attacks were kept under control first by the postwar democratic governments and then by Marshal Józef Pilsudski’s autocratic regime.
⁸⁷
But, after Pilsudski’s death, mainly from 1936 on, anti-Jewish aggression grew in all domains. Widespread physical violence, economic boycott, numerous clashes in the universities, and church incitement were encouraged by successive right-wing governments. Thus, as the war started, the largest Jewish community in Europe, already badly bruised by surrounding hostility, was caught in the Nazi net.
⁸⁸

The SS
Einsatzgruppen
I, IV, V, and mainly Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch’s “Special Purpose Operational Group” were in charge of terrorizing the Jewish populations. The wanton murder and destruction campaign launched against the Jews did not have the systematic goal of liquidating a specific segment of the Jewish population, as was the case with the Polish elites, but it was both a manifestation of generalized Nazi anti-Jewish hatred and a show of violence that would incite the Jewish populations to flee from some of the regions about to be incorporated into the Reich, such as eastern Upper Silesia.
⁸⁹
More generally the
Einsatzgruppen
had probably received instructions to drive as many Jews as possible beyond the San River to what was to become the Soviet-occupied area of Poland.
⁹⁰

The men of Woyrsch’s mixed
Einsatzgruppe
of SD and Order Police excelled. In Dynow, near the San, Order Police detachments belonging to the group burned a dozen Jews in the local synagogue, then shot another sixty of them in the nearby forest. Such murder operations were repeated in several neighboring villages and towns (on September 19, more than one hundred Jewish men were killed in Przekopana). Overall, the unit had murdered some five hundred to six hundred Jews by September 20.
⁹¹

For the Wehrmacht, Woyrsch had transgressed all tolerable limits. Fourteenth Army commanding officers demanded the withdrawal of the
Einsatzgruppe
and, atypically, Gestapo headquarters immediately complied. On September 22 the group was pulled back to Katowice.
⁹²
Woyrsch’s case, however, was extreme, and more generally the tension between the Wehrmacht and the SS did not lead to any measures against the SS units as such but rather to army complaints about the lack of discipline of Heydrich’s men: “An SS artillery unit of the armored corps has herded Jews into a church and massacred them,” Gen. Franz Halder, chief of the Army (OKH) General Staff, noted in his service diary. “The court-martial has sentenced them to one year in jail. Küchler [Gen. Georg von, commander in chief of Armies Three and Eighteen] has not confirmed the sentence, because
more severe punishment is due
.”
⁹³
Again, on October 10: “Massacres of Jews—discipline!”
⁹⁴

The Wehrmacht may have considered massacring Jews as something demanding disciplinary action, but torturing them offered welcome enjoyment to both soldiers and SS personnel. The choice victims were Orthodox Jews, given their distinctive looks and attire. They were shot at; they were compelled to smear feces on each other; they had to jump, crawl, sing, clean excrement with prayer shawls, dance around the bonfires of burning Torah scrolls. They were whipped, forced to eat pork, or had Jewish stars carved on their foreheads. The “beard game” was the most popular entertainment of all: Beards and sidelocks were shorn, plucked, torn, set afire, hacked off with or without parts of skin, cheeks, or jaws, to the amusement of a usually large audience of cheering soldiers. On Yom Kippur 1939 such entertainment for the troops was particularly lively.

Part of the invasion army was strongly ideologized, even at that early stage of the war. In a “Leaflet for the Conduct of German Soldiers in the Occupied Territory of Poland,” issued by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, on September 19, 1939, the soldiers were warned of the “inner enmity” of “all civilians that were not ‘members of the German race.’” Furthermore, Brauchitsch’s “leaflet” stated: “The behavior toward Jews needs no special mention for the soldiers of the National-Socialist Reich.”
⁹⁵
It was therefore within the range of accepted thinking that a soldier noted in his diary, during these same days: “Here we recognize the necessity for a radical solution to the Jewish question. Here one sees houses occupied by beasts in human form. In their beards and kaftans, with their devilishly grotesque faces, they make a dreadful impression. Anyone who was not yet a radical opponent of the Jews must become one here.”
⁹⁶

More commonly soldiers and officers, like their Führer, regarded the Jews with bottomless disgust and contempt: “When you see such people,” Pvt. FP wrote to his wife on September 21, “you can’t believe that this is still possible in the 20
^th
century. The Jews want to kiss our hands, but—we grab our pistol and hear ‘God protect me,’—and they run as fast as they can.”
⁹⁷
Back in Vienna First Cpl. JE recorded some of his impressions from the campaign in a letter of December 30: “And the Jews—I rarely saw such neglected people walking around, covered in tatters, dirty, greasy. To us they looked like a pest. The mean appearances, the cunning questions and behavior have often led us to draw our pistols in order…to remind them of reality.”
⁹⁸
Such impressions and reactions constantly recurred, and the line separating this sort of visceral hatred from brutality and murder was very faint.

Looting, however, did not demand any ideological passion: “They knock at eleven in the morning,” Sierakowiak noted on October 22, “…a German army officer, two policemen and the superintendent come in. The officer asks how many persons are in the apartment, looks at the beds, asks about the bedbugs, and if we have a radio. He doesn’t find anything worthy of taking and finally leaves disappointed. At the neighbors’ (naturally they go only to Jews), he took away radios, mattresses, comforters, carpets, etc. They took away the Grabinskis’ only down quilt.”
⁹⁹

On October 13, 1939, the Polish physician and longtime director of the hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, near Zamóść, Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski, recorded in his diary: “The Germans posted several new regulations. I am noting only a few: ‘All men of Jewish religion between the ages of fifteen and sixty must report at 8 a.m. on the morning of October 14, at city hall with brooms, shovels, and buckets. They will be cleaning city streets.” On the next day he added: “The Germans are treating the Jews very brutally. They cut their beards; sometimes they pull the hair out.”
¹⁰⁰
On the fifteenth the Germans added more of the same, yet with a slightly different—and certainly inventive—slant: “A German major, now town commandant, told the new ‘police’ [an auxiliary Polish police unit, organized by the Germans] that all brutalities against Jews have to be tolerated since it is in line with German anti-Semitic policies and that this brutality has been ordered from above. The Germans are always trying to find new work for the Jews. They order the Jews to take at least a half hour of exhausting gymnastics before any work, which can be fatal, particularly for older people. When the Jews are marched to any assignment, they must loudly sing Polish national songs.”
¹⁰¹
And, on the next day, Klukowski’s entry encapsulated it all: “Persecution of Jews is increasing. The Germans are beating the Jews without any reason, just for fun. Several Jews were brought to the hospital with their buttocks beaten into raw flesh. I was able to administer only first aid, because the hospital has been instructed not to admit Jews.”
¹⁰²
(The same, of course, was happening everywhere else.) “In the afternoon,” Sierakowiak wrote on December 3, “I went outside for a while and visited Ela Waldman. She had been chucked out of school, as they do to all the Jews. They also beat Jews terribly in the streets of the city. They usually come up to the Jews who walk by and slap them in the face, kick, spit, etc.” And at that point the young diarist added a puzzling question: “Is this evidence that the end for the Germans will probably come soon?”
¹⁰³

Such brutal behavior by the Wehrmacht demonstrates a measure of continuity between the attitudes and actions of German troops at the very outset of the war and their murderous behavior after the attack on the Soviet Union.
¹⁰⁴
Yet, during the Polish campaign, at top echelons of the army the inroads of Hitler’s exhortations were still neutralized in part by traditional rules of military behavior and discipline, as well as, in some cases, by moral qualms. Thus, Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz, the army commander in Poland (
Oberbefehlshaber Ost
), addressed a protest directly to Hitler. Blaskowitz was shocked by the behavior of Heydrich’s units and by the brutalization of the army. “It is wholly misguided,” he wrote on February 6, 1940, “to slaughter some 10,000 Jews and Poles, as it is happening at the moment; such methods will eradicate neither Polish nationalism, nor the Jews from the mass of the population.”
¹⁰⁵
Hitler shrugged off the complaint. By mid-October the Wehrmacht was divested of its authority over civilian matters in occupied Poland.

Heydrich had grasped the thrust of the changes taking place within the Wehrmacht. In his already mentioned letter to Daluege of July 1940, he alluded to his difficulties with “the upper-level commanders of the army” but indicated that “cooperation with troops below staff level, and in many cases with the different staffs of the army themselves, was generally good.” He added: “If one compares [the number of] physical assaults, incidents of looting, and atrocities committed by the army and the SS, the SS and police do not come away looking bad.”
¹⁰⁶

VII

On September 21, 1939, Heydrich had issued the following guidelines to the commanders of the
Einsatzgruppen
: Their tasks included (1) the rounding up and concentration of Jews in large communities in cities close to railway lines, “in view of the end goal”; (2) the establishment of Jewish Councils in each Jewish community to serve as administrative links between the German authorities and the Jewish population; and (3) cooperation with the military command and the civil administration in all matters relating to the Jewish population.
¹⁰⁷

The “end goal” in this context probably meant the deportation of the Jewish population of the Warthegau and later of the western and central parts of former Poland to the easternmost area of the General Government, the Lublin district, along the lines of Hitler’s vague indications at that same time. A few days later, on September 27, in a conference with heads of the RSHA departments and the
Einsatzgruppen
chiefs, Heydrich added an element unmentioned until then: the expulsion of Jews over the demarcation line [between German occupied Poland and the Soviet occupation area] had been authorized by the Führer (
“Abschiebung über die Demarkationslinie ist vom Führer genehmigt”
).
¹⁰⁸
Such an authorization meant that at this early stage the Germans had no clear plans. Their policy regarding the Jews of former Poland seemed to be in line with the measures they had elaborated before the war, mainly from 1938 on, regarding the Jews of the Reich—now applied with much greater violence, of course: identification, segregation, expropriation, concentration, and emigration or expulsion (emigration was allowed until early 1940, as far as the Jews of Poland were concerned).

In this context the significance of a September 29 letter from Heydrich to Daluege seems as hazy as the “end goal” he had mentioned a few days before. “Finally,” Heydrich wrote, “the Jewish problem will, as you already know, be settled in a special way (
Schliesslich, soll das Judenproblem, wie Du ja schon weisst, einer besonderen Regelung unterworfen werden
).”
¹⁰⁹

By then, however, a new element had become part of the picture and considerably influenced the measures taken against Jews and Poles (particularly in the areas annexed to the Reich): the mass ingathering of ethnic Germans from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Jews and Poles would be expelled and
Volksdeutsche
would move in. On October 7 Himmler was appointed head of the new agency in charge of these population transfers, the Reichskommissariat für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV (Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom).

This ethnic-racial reshuffling of vast populations in Eastern Europe after September 1939 was but one further step in the initiatives already launched before the war to bring “home into the Reich” the Germans of Austria, the Sudetenland, Memel, Danzig, and the like. In Nazi phantasms the reshuffling planned at the end of 1939 would eventually lead to entirely new and far-flung Germanic colonization much farther east, if a new political and military situation were to allow it.

Over recent years many historians have sought a link between these plans and the onset of the “Final Solution.” Yet, as we shall see further on, these operations appear to have been distinct and to have stemmed from separate motives and plans. Nonetheless, between 1939 and 1942, Himmler’s population transfers led directly to the expulsions and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews, mainly from the Warthegau into the General Government.