The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (8 page)

German projects for the East did not originate in academic research, but German academia volunteered historical justification and professional advice to enhance the exalting new vistas for the expansion of the
Volk
. In fact some of these expansion plans had been part and parcel of ongoing “research on the East” (
Ostforschung
) since the late 1920s. In other words this
Ostforschung
was a major nationalist,
völkisch
, and increasingly Nazi-tainted but self-initiated scholarly effort to bolster German expansion plans and, eventually, to suggest various practical options.
¹¹⁰
A particularly influential role in terms of the historical legitimation of this endeavor was played by a Jewish luminary at the University of Königsberg, the historian Hans Rothfels; of course none of his vocal nationalism protected him from dismissal and forced emigration in the late thirties.
¹¹¹

Two of Rothfels’s students, the already well-established Werner Conze and his colleague Theodor Schieder (both destined to become pillars of the historians’ guild in West Germany after 1945), came to play an important advisory role after the beginning of the war—with drastic anti-Jewish steps added for good measure. In a paper he had prepared for the International Congress of Sociology, scheduled to open on August 29, 1939, in Bucharest, Conze dwelled at length on the overpopulation problem in Eastern Europe; it could be alleviated, he suggested, by the “de-Judaization (
Entjudung
) of cities and marketplaces, to allow the integration of peasant offspring in commerce and crafts.”
¹¹²
Schieder’s proposals became more immediately applicable once Poland fell into German hands.

In the fall of 1939 Schieder, then a member of the “Königsberg Circle” affiliated with the North and East German Research Association (
Nord-und Ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
, or NODFG), was asked by his colleagues in the association to draft a memorandum about “the German national and racial border in the East” for the benefit of the political and administrative authorities in the newly occupied territories. The text was submitted to Himmler on October 7.

In the memorandum Schieder recommended the confiscation of the land and the transfer of parts of the Polish population from the annexed territories to the eastern part of the country in order to open the way to German settlement. And in order to facilitate the transfer of the Poles, the young Königsberg scholar pleaded for the evacuation of the Jews from Polish cities (
die Herauslösung des Judentums aus polnischen Städten
) and, as a further step, even more radically than Conze, the “total de-Judaization of remaining Poland.” The evicted Jewish population could be sent overseas. Thus, whereas Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich were still considering the deportation of the Jews of Poland into a reservation in the Lublin area or even their expulsion over the demarcation line into Soviet-occupied territory, Schieder and his colleagues were already suggesting an overseas territorial solution that would indeed become the next Nazi territorial plan a few months later.
¹¹³

The NODFG was functionally linked to the older Berlin
Publikationsstelle
(PuSte), whose own leading specialists volunteered from day one: “We must make use of our experience, which we have developed over many long years of effort,” Hermann Aubin wrote to Alfred Brackmann, the director of PuSte, on September 18, 1939. “Scholarship cannot simply wait until it is called upon, but must make itself heard.”
¹¹⁴
Aubin had no reason to worry. On September 23 Brackmann wrote to his colleague Metz: “It is in fact a great satisfaction for us to see that the NODFG with its PuSte offices has now become the central institution for scientific advice to the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior, the OKH, and partly also the Propaganda Ministry and a series of SS agencies. We are certain now that we shall be thoroughly consulted on the future drawing of borders.”
¹¹⁵

From the outset PuSte and NOFDG scholars worked on various aspects of the Jewish question in occupied Poland. Statistician Klostermann, for example, calculated the proportion of Jews in Polish towns with populations of ten thousand inhabitants or more; this study was prepared for the Gestapo.
¹¹⁶
Professor Otto Reche prepared a detailed memorandum titled “Main Theses for a Population Policy Aimed at Securing the German East.” The study was transmitted by Brackmann to high SS officials, who, it seems, passed it on to Himmler.
¹¹⁷
The main ideas were not fundamentally different from those submitted by Schieder, except that they delved into details that the Königsberg historian had not emphasized. In matters of mass expulsion of Poles and Jews, for example, Reche suggested that the Poles be allowed to take their belongings: “With the Jews however one may act with less generosity” (
bei Juden wird man weniger weitherzig verfahren dürfen
).
¹¹⁸
And, beyond these early studies, another scholar—a specialist in planning the demographic organization of large-scale space—Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling, was launching his own research for Himmler’s colonization projects; it was to become “General Plan East.”

Schematically the Germanization of the annexed eastern territories (and later colonization of further space in the East) demanded the liquidation of the Polish elites, the transfer of ethnic Germans or the migration of Reich Germans to the new territories, and of course the expulsion of the local racially alien inhabitants: the Poles and the Jews. The Poles who could not be expelled would be strictly separated from the German colonists, and a “happy few,” mainly children, would be mustered as belonging to Germanic stock, included in the
Volksliste
, and integrated into the
Volksgemeinschaft
.

Himmler’s RKFdV and the RSHA were in charge of the operations, as we saw, and the general expulsion plan regarding the ex-Polish areas was subdivided by Heydrich in a series of short-term plans (
Nahpläne
) mainly to be launched from the end of 1939 on. There was, however, one exception to the expulsion plans regarding Jews. In heavily industrialized Upper Silesia, the Jews living east of the “police line,” which divided the Kattowitz district into two separate administrative regions, were to stay. They would be moved, in the course of 1940, into forced-labor camps and employed in local industries or building projects. The SS officer whom Himmler put in charge of this forced-labor operation, which within a few months was to employ some seventeen thousand Jewish workers, was the former police chief of Breslau, SS Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt.
¹¹⁹

Except for “Schmelt Jews,” the expulsion plans included not only Jewish populations from the annexed Polish territories but also Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These deportations, which took place between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940, ended in failure.

In October 1939 the deportations of Jews from Vienna, Mährisch Ostrau, and Kattowitz to Nisko (a small town on the San River, near Lublin) started. These deportations, agreed to by Hitler, had been demanded by local
Gauleiter
mainly to seize Jewish homes. Moreover, as far as Vienna was concerned, the city would thus recover its pristine Aryan nature.
¹²⁰
A few thousand Jews were deported, but within days the operation came to a halt, as the Wehrmacht needed the railway lines for transferring troops from Poland to the West.
¹²¹

The two other transfers were simultaneous and identical in their goals. One, small in scale (by Nazi standards), was the deportation in February 1940 of some eighteen hundred Jews from the German towns Stettin and Schneidemühl on the coast of the Baltic to Lublin. The second operation was a formidable exercise in utter brutality: It aimed at the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles from the annexed Warthegau into the General Government, over a period of several months. The abandoned homes and farms of the deportees were meant to be distributed to ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries and Volhynia, and Bukovina, whose departure and “ingathering into the Reich” the Germans had negotiated with the USSR.

Nothing was ready for the Jews of Stettin and Schneidemühl in the snow-covered Lublin area, and they were either housed in temporary barracks or taken in by local Jewish communities. For the newly appointed SS and police leader (SSPF) of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik, there was no particular problem. On February 16, 1940, he declared that “the evacuated Jews should feed themselves and be supported by their countrymen, as these Jews had enough [food]. If this did not succeed, one should let them starve.”
¹²²

The deportations from the Warthegau soon became mired in total chaos, with overfilled trains stalled for days in freezing weather or maneuvering aimlessly to and fro. The ruthlessness of these deportations, organized mainly by Adolf Eichmann, the RSHA specialist on the emigration and evacuation of Jews, in coordination with the newly established RKFDV, did not compensate for the complete lack of planning and of even minimal preparation of reception areas for the deportees.

During the first weeks of the transfers the governor-general, Hans Frank, who had barely settled down in his capital, Kraków, in the castle of the centuries-old Jagellonian dynasty, seemed rather unconcerned about the sudden influx. Regarding the Jews he even displayed high spirits in a speech given in Radom on November 25, 1939: “It is a pleasure to finally have a chance to get physically at the Jewish race. The more of them die, the better; to hit him [
sic
] is a victory for our Reich. The Jews should feel that we are here. We want to have about one-half to three-quarters of all the Jews east of the Vistula…the Jews from the Reich, from Vienna, from everywhere; we have no use for the Jews in the Reich. Probably the Vistula line; behind this line, no more.”
¹²³

But Frank’s elation did not last. In early February 1940, after some two hundred thousand new arrivals into the General Government had been counted, he traveled to Berlin and extracted from Göring an order to halt the transfers.
¹²⁴
Encouraged by this success, Frank took an initiative of his own: On April 12, 1940, he announced his intention to empty Kraków of most of its 66,000 Jews. The governor-general was eloquent: “If we want to maintain the authority of the National Socialist Reich, the representatives of this Reich cannot have to encounter Jews when they enter or leave their houses, they cannot be endangered by contagious diseases.” The city would be freed of most of its Jews by November 1, 1940, except for some five thousand to ten thousand “urgently necessary artisans…. Cracow must become the city in the General Government that is the most cleansed of Jews. Only thus does it make sense to build it as the German capital.” He was ready to allow Jews who would have left voluntarily by August 15 to take along all their possessions, of course “with the exception of those objects they had stolen.” The ghetto would then be cleaned, and it would become possible to set up clean German living quarters, where one would breathe German air.
¹²⁵

By the beginning of 1941, some 45,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city had left voluntarily or been expelled, and those who remained were concentrated in the district of Podgorce, the ghetto. As for the Jews that had been ousted, they could not go very far. They settled mostly in the surroundings of Frank’s capital, to the law of the local German administrators.
¹²⁶
At least the governor-general and the German civil and military administration in Kraków had chased most of the Jews out of their sight. More or less at the same time, the Jews of Radom and Lublin suffered the same fate as those of Kraków.
¹²⁷

After the establishment of the General Government on October 12, 1939, and the appointment of Hans Frank as governor-general fourteen days later, a German administrative apparatus was set up in the heart of Poland, to lord it, as mentioned, over 12 million inhabitants before June 1941 and 17 million after the attack on the USSR and the incorporation of eastern Galicia.

Although Frank was directly subordinate only to Hitler himself, his own authority and that of his administration were constantly undermined by Himmler and his appointees. The SS Reichsführer was of course in charge of all internal security matters in the General Government, as concretely demonstrated by the terror campaign unleashed from day one of the German onslaught. As his delegate Himmler appointed Higher SS and Police Leader [
Höhere SS und Polizeiführer,
or
HSSPF
] Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who consulted with Frank but was under the Reichsführer’s sole authority. On a regional level, in each of the four districts of the General Government, SS and police leaders followed Krüger’s—that is, Himmler’s—orders. Moreover, Himmler as chief of the RKFDV took over the dumping of Poles and Jews into the General Government until the operation was temporarily stopped, as we saw. Thus the local SS commanders represented Himmler both in security and in deportation and/or “resettlement” matters. A de facto dual administration was being put in place as 1940 began: Frank’s civilian administration and Himmler’s security and population transfer SS administration. The tension between the two grew rapidly, mainly at district level and particularly in the Lublin district, where Himmler’s appointee and protégé, the notorious Globocnik, established a quasi-independent domain in direct defiance of the authority of District Governor Ernst Zörner.
¹²⁸

Unexpectedly the first round in this ongoing power struggle was won by Frank. Not only did the governor-general succeed in halting the deportations into his domain, but, in the Lublin District, he compelled Globocnik to disband his private police, recruited among local ethnic Germans: the
Selbstschutz
(self-protection). Within weeks Globocnik’s units had displayed a level of lawlessness that even Krüger and Himmler could then not countenance. The
Selbstschutz
disappeared, and Frank took its recruits into his own new police, the
Sonderdienst
(special service). This, however, was but round one, and soon enough Globocnik would resume his terror activities on a far wider scale.
¹²⁹