Cruel World (38 page)

Evacuees found many of the lodgings provided in the seaports full of bedbugs and other vermin; luckier ones ended up in shuttered resort hotels and former Polish mental and old age institutions on the coast. The latter, unbeknownst to the settlers, had been made available by the SS, who had taken several thousand former patients to a remote site near Danzig and executed them. Those who went to Posen were housed in a former Polish school, where the food was plentiful and medical care adequate, but sleeping facilities were limited to straw on the floor.

Country life was not idyllic either. Hundreds of Baltic families, isolated from one another, were billeted for months with sometimes disagreeable German peasant families and battled cold, sickness, and depression. One family with three children aged six months, two, and five, rejected by all the peasant families in the village of Selchow in a remote area of Pomerania, was finally given an unheated laborer’s house near the horse barn. The mother, by helping with the chores, managed to get enough milk for her children. There were almost no vegetables, and the baby had to stay in bed most of the time because the floor was too cold to sit on. Winter came early and water froze in the kitchen. They had no news at all from their parents or friends. So passed their first Christmas in the Fatherland. Finally, in early spring, this family too went to the straw-bedding building in Posen, where the malnourished baby nearly died.
⁴⁵

By now the straw, according to another evacuee, who arrived in March, was not exactly clean. The group in the camp was very mixed: upper- and middle-class families were often terrified by the drunken fights of some of their less cultured countrymen. Order was supposed to be maintained by students from the elite Nazi Ordensburgen schools. One evacuee described his youthful camp commandant as “in fact, as handsome as the young Siegfried of the Sagas.” But most in the camp found the Ordensjunkers “uneducated and untrained.” In one of the women’s sections was a “typical example of this type, very young, excessively superior and remote. When he wanted us to do something he whistled instead of calling us. We Baltic women soon came into conflict with him.”
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From this and a hundred similar camps the new settlers were called to their final racial examination. This typically took place in a large hall where an array of officials clad in the myriad showy uniforms of the Nazi agencies, ministries, police, and youth organizations waited. Families were kept together while the birth certificates and genealogies of each member were examined. Assets were inventoried and arrangements made for compensation for items that had been left behind. Political affiliations and participation in ethnic German activities were considered. Everyone over six years old was photographed in the nude and given a medical exam by SS physicians in which the by now well established criteria for Aryan noses, head shape, and coloring were closely analyzed. There was no room for levity here. One young man who was told after his physical that the only good thing about him was his teeth retorted that his brains were good too, but that the doctor couldn’t tell that from the examination. This was noted as insolence, and the youth was told that he was, accordingly, disqualified from service in the SS, a reprimand he only later realized was a blessing.

It was in this daunting arena that anyone of “alien race” who had managed to hide among the other resettlers would be detected. At each stage of the examination spaces on a large file card for each subject were filled in with grades, and at the end a racial classification was awarded that determined the subject’s permanent place in the pecking order of his fellow Germans.

The classification formula set up by the racial agencies was highly complex and varied according to the status of the subject. In general, the analysis was distilled to a group of numbers and letters, each of which was fraught with meaning to any official who saw them. Thus “Ia9/I” meant that the subject was a very desirable population addition, pure Nordic, perfect physique, and good family, while “IV F,” so familiar to American GIs, here too was the category of the reject, indicating that the subject was totally unacceptable and of alien blood.
⁴⁷
Once this classification was established the candidate was either given naturalization documents or told that action on his status would be “delayed.” The racial indicators, combined with the subject’s experience, would determine where he would be placed for settlement. This factor too was shown by symbols. “A,” or
Altreich
, oddly enough, was for the less desirable settlers and meant that the subject would be sent to a strictly supervised life in Germany itself and would not be trusted with his own farm or business. “O”
(Ost-Falle)
indicated that the family was particularly worthy to be part of the Eastern Wall of German Blood and would be placed in the new eastern territories in a relatively independent situation as close to his old one as possible. “S” stood for
Sonderfall
, or “special case,” and was used for those of doubtful loyalty or race who were destined for eventual deportation or forced labor.
⁴⁸
After this processing, from which there was essentially no appeal, the settlers who were selected to stay in Poland went back to their camps to wait for allocation of permanent lodgings.

The assignment of housing and farms was only slightly less arbitrary. In the towns, a few lucky settlers were shown several choices by SS real estate agents. The word soon got around that one should not take the first places offered, as these were generally quite squalid. During this process it became abundantly clear to the new arrivals that, contrary to the propaganda they had heard, the houses they were seeing had been vacated under duress. Some wondered at first why those who had been forced to leave had not, like themselves, packed up more things. The truth did not take long to dawn on them. In some houses half-eaten meals still were on the dining room table, desks were full of personal papers, and unmade children’s beds told of small bodies lifted up in the night. Settlers who
could find lodgings on a different basis, for example, by renting them from Polish
Volksdeutsche
, felt less guilty, but for most there was no choice, and they moved in only to be haunted by the thought of former residents, often cultured middle-class Poles, some of whom had even served in the German Army in World War I and won the Iron Cross, which was duly displayed.

The ghosts who haunted the houses were not always immaterial. In the chaotic deportations of Jews and Poles that had taken place, many had escaped the Nazi net or had made their way back home. It was not unusual to find the former owners at the door politely asking if they could collect a few of their things. One settler, a small boy at the time, to this day remembers the image of the former Polish owners of his new home disappearing into the snow, pulling a sled loaded with a small pile of their family papers, photographs, and paintings.
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In Lodz, a more energetic Polish materfamilias made six trips to her old house and each time removed an enormous bundle of possessions. The visits were dangerous for everyone, as contact with the former inhabitants was strictly forbidden. The nervous Baltic family, perhaps not aware of the fate of many Poles, was relieved when the elderly woman “finally disappeared for good, thanking us heartily and shedding a few tears.”
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In the country the housing authorities seem to have made some effort to put people at their accustomed social levels. Titled Baltic Germans often ended up in decrepit small manor houses once owned by minor Polish gentry, which they worked hard to restore, while peasants from Volhynia were given simple farms. But none of the settlers were given clear title to their new property. Ownership remained in the hands of the various Nazi agencies, which meant that the families could be evicted at any moment.

Nevertheless, by the summer of 1940 many of the relatively small group of Baltic settlers in western Poland were more or less comfortably established and only prayed that they would not have to move again. True to their word, the Nazi agencies had sent on their cattle and household belongings. For the time being food was abundant and staff even more so, as Poles were protected from deportation if they worked for Germans. But living in the midst of the resentful indigenous population, which still outnumbered them by a vast percentage, was far from comfortable. If Himmler had wanted a frontier situation, he certainly had it now. The children of these families, in the way of all children, were not unhappy: many still remember the arrival of wild geese, the excitement of parades, or
the fun of hunting expeditions in the country. But they remember other things too:

In many cases the resettled Baltic Germans, entirely defeating the purpose of the exercise, quickly learned Polish and in the end got along better with the Poles than they did with some of the Reich Germans, whose arrogance and corruption they found unattractive. And indeed, many Nazis considered the Balts overeducated, old-fashioned, and too religious.

At the opposite extreme from the relatively well-to-do Baltic Germans were the settlers who came into the annexed provinces of Poland from the border areas of the USSR and eastern Poland. This group consisted in large part of very primitive peasants and farmers, most of whom spoke little German and were illiterate. During the winter of 1939–40 tens of thousands, enduring terrible seasonal conditions, had come to the reception camps in long wagon-train treks to await processing. To help the overwhelmed resettlement agencies, in the spring of 1940, the Nazis mobilized the youth and student organizations that had been preparing for so long to take part in the
Osteinsatz
, or Eastern Action-Mission. They would be busy: by mid-November there would be nearly half a million resettlers of all categories.
⁵²

Leadership elements of the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel had, along with representatives of all the other German civilian agencies, come into Poland just after its surrender. Their job was to organize the ethnic German youth already there and to prepare for young resettlers. For many students and young people, whether they were true Nazis or not, the opportunity to work in the newly conquered areas was an adventure and, above all, a way to contribute to the war effort. Patriotic fervor, fueled by the incredible success of the German forces and the disinformation that blamed Poland for starting the war, was high. After all the boring afternoons at Hitler Youth meetings, here was action at last and the chance to help and serve. But the help and service was not to be given to all who were in need: it was for ethnic Germans alone and not for the defeated Slavic
Untermenschen
.

A Hitler Youth “Germanizing” a resettled child
.
(photo credit 8.2)

From the reminiscences of many young occupiers, it is clear that they had not given much thought to the feelings of the Polish enemy and viewed them as beings from another world. Arriving in Posen on a dreary November night, BDM leader Melita Maschmann got her “first intimation of the hostility of the land in which I now wanted to work” when a young woman she asked for directions “gave me a hostile look and turned her back in silence.” Her billet was the parlor of a lower-middle-class Polish household much like those she knew in Germany: “There were plush armchairs and lace mats and
art nouveau
twirls on the furniture.” Here she spent three uncomfortable weeks sleeping on the sofa. The room was unheated. She could hear muffled conversation and children crying and sometimes she heard shots. One night, “the feeling crept over me that I was shut away in a tower with my escape barred by enemies,” and she pushed a chair against the lockless door. Fraternization was forbidden, and she did not try to speak to the other unseen inhabitants of the house, whom she assumed were Polish refugees. The minimal contact she did have with her landlady made her uncomfortable:

Maschmann’s feelings of superiority toward the locals was bolstered by the fact that she seldom saw educated-looking Poles in Posen, which confirmed the Nazi propaganda that they were a primitive people incapable of decent self-government. She did not know then that most of the intelligentsia and professional classes had already been imprisoned or deported. Oppressed by the dreary poverty in the town, with its “particular smell of saturated clothes, stale bread, unwashed children and cheap scent,” she still was upset for a time by the “visibly starving” children who begged for food. From her room she often watched Polish children stealing coal from the piles in the street that were meant for the soldiers. At one point she was overcome by her feelings: