Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
At first my sympathies were entirely on the side of the children. I gave them to understand by signs that they need not be afraid of me, but they mistrusted my uniform. They scuttled back silently into the darkness on their rag-bound feet. One afternoon I wrested a girl of perhaps eight from the hands of a sentry. In her fear of being beaten she had to let fall her bucket [of coal] and held both arms folded over her head.… The soldier glared furiously at my silver-trimmed uniform coat. He could not make head or tail of my intervention.
But, as had been the case with the Communist Party workers in the Ukraine during the famine, she soon was describing as “politically naïve the ‘uncontrolled way’ I had reacted to this encounter with human misery.” The Poles, she reminded herself, “even if militarily defeated—remained dangerous enemies: their strength lay in their biological superiority; it was a kind of suicide for us to try to save their children from starvation.” The endless barrage of propaganda on the Slavic population menace published at home had had its effect. Her mind from then on would be entirely focused on helping the
Volksdeutsche
population.
It was not hard to feel sympathy for the ethnic Germans in Poland. Thousands of indigenous
Volksdeutsche
had been killed by Poles during the fighting; vengeance and atrocities had taken place on both sides. And some ethnic Germans, isolated in the countryside, rightly lived in fear. But many others, who had lived in Poland for generations, of course had Polish friends, especially if they were children. These would have to be reeducated. Maschmann’s job was to establish hostels and schools for the
Volksdeutsche
.
This she did by driving around the countryside in a decrepit car that was constantly mired in snow and mud. In each little village she would find a “pathetic handful” of ethnic German boys and girls waiting for her visit. Since they had never lived under Nazi rule, the children and their leaders were not at all clear about ideology: “One of these groups, when I came into the room, was even listening piously to the life story of a Polish national hero.”
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The youth effort was major indeed. Along with the Ordensjunkers sent to deal with the Baltic arrivees now came thousands of Hitler Youth, BDM
Mädels
, and students of many varieties performing their various work requirements. BDM officials, in one report on the project, noted that the newly arrived settlers were “in low spirits.” This was understandable, the report continued, as they had left their villages behind and were now spread out over the countryside. Besides, the confiscated farms were often filthy and run-down, so that adjustment was difficult. It was a terrible contrast to what they would have found in the clean villages of Germany proper. The BDM and Hitler Youth, therefore, would send teams to help out and to lighten things up with songfests, games, and “village evenings which would ease the way of the settlers into the German folk-community” and, at the same time, set up BDM and HJ cells.
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Many of the students were used to “Eastern Duty,” having done previous stints on farms in the east of Germany proper. In the summer of 1940, packed trainloads of students, burdened with bicycles and backpacks, left Berlin for the East.
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The atmosphere was festive. As students are wont to do, they stayed up all night singing and talking. After all the blackout precautions at home, some were amazed to find the Polish cities brightly lighted. Once in Poland they were taken to an orientation camp that combined doctors, teachers, construction technicians, and welfare workers. Housing was in villas that had “formerly belonged to Jews and Poles.” One girl found the digs ugly and garishly painted, noting that they also had flat roofs, a feature considered unacceptable by volkish Nazi architects. During orientation they were given lectures on the genealogy of the Volhynian and Galician Germans and told of their recent hardships. Nazi plans for the development of the annexed areas were revealed, and the squalid conditions of Poland were vividly described, making the students realize “how big the problems needing to be solved really were.”
After a few days of such orientation they were taken to their work stations, and in many cases left quite alone. On the way, some local occupation officials had the foresight to teach the students a few words of Polish “in case they couldn’t understand the villagers,” who, despite their German
blood, frequently did not understand a word of the language. Those assigned to be teachers usually lived right in the schoolhouses, which had been confiscated from the Poles. Having been prepared by their orientation to be teaching in primitive barns and sheds, they were sometimes surprised to find that, as a result of recent efforts by the Polish government to upgrade education, many of the school buildings were new and full of light, and that the only serious cleaning they had to do was to get rid of the Polish books and flags and replace them with portraits of the Führer and other suitable emblems.
Supplies were hard to come by: one ingenious teacher glued a wall map of Germany to the back of one of Poland, and used pebbles and toothpicks for arithmetic instruction. Furniture for the volunteers was also scarce. One girl, having found her assigned room totally empty, was given lodging for some weeks by the local butcher, the only native ethnic German in the town. She was well cared for, but there were drawbacks: the only radio in the village was in her room, the roof leaked in three places, and the room shared a wall with the local pub, run by the butcher, where local Germans and Poles, happily ignoring anti-fraternization rules, together indulged nightly in considerable quantities of schnapps.
The children were a challenge: few spoke German and some had never been to school. One teacher was faced with a class of thirty-two mostly illiterate ethnic Germans resettled from Russia who spoke a mixture of German and Russian and six local ethnic German children who spoke only Polish. Their ages ranged from six to fourteen. In the six weeks of her tour of duty, she could do little more for this disparate group than teach them a few basic words of German, a lot of Nazi songs, and some “Homeland” studies, since “the children knew nothing or very little about Germany and the Führer.” Another teacher, at the end of her stay, admitted that she was in no wise trained for her job, but felt that she had at least given the children some self-confidence and, most importantly, the ability to hold their own in the face of the “still more numerous Poles,” something of an understatement, as the Poles, despite continuing deportations, continued to outnumber the Germans nine to one.
In general, the new settlers and local ethnic Germans were indeed glad to see the volunteers, who, as the Ordensjunkers had been for the Baltic settlers, were often their only day-to-day contact with the German authorities, and whom they immediately besieged with requests to intervene for them with the occupation authorities for any number of problems from first aid to funerals. In addition to the teachers there were other groups of German students, who lived in small “camps” or “lagers” of ten or twelve
around the countryside and who concerned themselves with farm, welfare, and construction problems. These camps were not luxurious. The first job was to set up the camp itself—all that was provided in the confiscated houses and buildings the students were given were the straw mattresses on the floor. The schedule was rigorous and military in style. Reveille was at 6:00 a.m. Workdays were ten hours long, not counting housekeeping, which was laid out in remarkable drill-sergeant-like detail (perhaps necessary, given the universal antipathy of teenagers for these activities):
In the same tone the students were exhorted to wash out their basins, hang up their towels, disinfect the toilets daily, and scrub everything in the kitchen to the nth degree. On top of all this, in the girls’ camps at least, they were supposed to “always look for fresh flowers” and plant a kitchen garden. Permission to spend a night away had to be obtained from the local administrator, and the whereabouts of each girl at all times was required to be posted on a notice board.
From these camps the girls, imbued with ideas of the Thousand Year Reich, and particularly eager to increase the number of Germans, went forth to help the new “colonizing” families. The work was hard and the German maidens were frequently confronted with appalling social situations. Some of the villages were in ruins from the war, and the new families might arrive at any time of the day or night.
One group, whose official escort had not appeared, had found its way through the strange and hostile countryside by bravely asking directions to their new village. They arrived hours late, in rain and pitch darkness, with no one to greet them. BDM leader Melita Maschmann, who came to check, was “already in the village when I saw the German settlers’ carts. Their hurricane lanterns gave off a feeble circle of light.” She could hear women weeping. Everyone was terrified of revenge by the expelled Poles, and it took hours to persuade the new arrivals to go into the dark houses. Inside was little better than out. The BDM leader reported that “one woman with eight children, whose husband was at the front … was in a particularly bad way because the house which had been allotted to her was completely empty.” A huge straw bed was made for her and the children. There was one candle for light. The young woman was so afraid of Polish
thieves, and undoubtedly so hungry for company, that she insisted that her mare and its little foal stay in the house too.
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Enormous families were, of course, just what the Nazis wanted, but they were not easy to raise. An official report proudly noted that one student, sent to take care of a Volhynian family with six children whose mother was in the hospital, and whose house had become “very neglected,” had soon “put the house back in order and run it perfectly.” This brief remark does not give any idea of the challenge that must have faced that girl. Melita Maschmann, put in a similar situation, this time with seven children, gave a more graphic description.
The house given her resettled Volhynian
famille nombreuse
had two rooms. A third room was being built. The mother, once again, had been in a hospital for months. The desperate father, in a masterpiece of understatement, apologized to Maschmann for the mess: “You must not be alarmed, Fraulein. There has been no woman here for four months and seven children make the place untidy.” In the two rooms were three beds that the whole family shared. The farmer also had a feebleminded brother, who slept in the barn and who, among other things, when given chicken to eat, swallowed it bones and all. Maschmann was afraid of him. Of the seven children, only one was a girl, “thirteen, but she has the body of an eight-year-old and the face of an old woman.” This was because she had been running the household alone during her mother’s illness. The family had been living on potatoes and thin soup. Bread was too expensive and available only on Sundays. Maschmann plunged in and cooked, sewed, and scrubbed, all the while trying to gain the trust of the children and teach them crafts and more German. When not engaged in these activities, she hoed potatoes with the feebleminded brother. Such energetic measures worked well with this family, but they were not well received at Maschmann’s next stop.
This time she was dealing with an ethnic German Polish family, who took a dim view of her interference. They were much better off than the first group. The wife used “two Polish maids in the kitchen” and “did not do much work herself.” The unfortunate parents had had five children of whom four had died, and the fifth was sickly. Maschmann’s main objective was to save this Germanic mite for the Fatherland. The wife resisted her at every step, which made Maschmann more and more officious: “I scrubbed out the living room and kitchen, although I was rather cramped by the two Polish maids, who were busy sewing and peeling potatoes. I only wanted to show the woman that I [had] come to work.” The wife drove Maschmann mad by talking to her husband and the maids in Polish.
The BDM girl, trying to force the family to speak German, retaliated by asking “after every sentence” what the wife had said. The two women clashed over what to feed the dying child and how to dress it. Carrot juice prepared for the baby was surreptitiously poured out. When Maschmann told the wife, “emphatically, that she was responsible for the life of her child and therefore must not simply ignore well-meant advice, the mother retorted that she would treat it ‘the way my mother treated me.’ ” The father, when told he should speak German in his own house, replied, “ ‘German or Polish, it’s all the same to me.’ ” Finally, one day, Maschmann got the baby away from the mother and “fled behind the barn” with it. She then undressed it, “coated it lightly with cream,” and “let it kick naked in the sun for three minutes,” taking care to “keep its little head in the shade all the time.” Before she could wrap the baby up again, the mother “appeared and made a great scene,” and from then on would not allow Maschmann to touch the child at all. Defeated, the German left, undoubtedly much to the relief of everyone. The child, clearly suffering from some ailment that could not be remedied by either Nazi or Polish superstitions, died soon afterward.
Again and again the students ran head-on into primitive superstition. The settlers clung to their faith healers and folk remedies and were suspicious of doctors. A simple layette and crib made by one of the German girls for a baby about to be born were destroyed by a couple who believed that such preparations were bad luck and would make the child die.
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The absence of religion was also difficult for the new settlers, especially when it came to funerals, for nothing in Nazi ideology, though it constantly demanded the ultimate sacrifice for the Fatherland, could ever take the place of the comforting assurances established religion gave about the afterlife. When faced with death, even the Hitler Youth sometimes turned to prayer.
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