Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
The students did go on excursions to other places in the newly conquered land. In Warsaw, for many, “the sight of the destroyed city and the ruins of the Castle made clear to us for the first time the destructive power of War.” On such outings they also had their first glimpses into the Jewish ghettos. To these visions they reacted, at least in their official reports on their trips, as they had been taught to react: as people looking at creatures of another species living in another dimension. In the reports there is, of course, no indication that they realized that the shocking condition of the people and dwellings might be the result of the Jews having been forced into the overcrowded ghettos and denied adequate sustenance by the Reich leaders the students admired so much. But in later accounts it is
clear that some were disturbed by what they saw. In Kutno passersby like Maschmann could look through holes in the walls of one temporary holding area for Jews set up in an old factory, “right into the inmost rooms”:
Everywhere a roof offered shelter from the rain the families were huddled together.… Many men, women and children lay on the bare earth. Some had managed to bring straw with them; a few, feather beds. All were enveloped in an oppressive lethargy.… The only exception was offered by a few ragged children who stood close by the fence.… The wretchedness of the children brought a lump to my throat. But I clenched my teeth. Gradually I learned to switch off my “private feelings.” … This is terrible, I said to myself, but the driving out of the Jews is one of the unfortunate things we must bargain for if the “Warthegau” is to become a German country.
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Both Poles and Germans stopped to stare at the Jews. Occasionally someone would throw in some food. One German official was overheard saying, “I have to show this to all my friends who pass through. They all want to see it. Just a few hundred Jews on a dump, a nasty bunch—filthy and no respect. Dozens of them often stand up here begging by the fence.” A little later, student Ilse P. of Hamburg, viewing the more organized Lodz Ghetto, wrote that it “made a big impression on us. Here we saw the real greasy Eastern Jews walking around among their run-down and dilapidated houses.” In Warsaw, a tour of several hours through the ghetto gave her “a real view of the life and activities of the Warsaw Jews” and of propaganda fulfilled.
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But many of the German youths in Poland were good observers and not easily deceived. They had been told that the new “German” settlers had idealistically given up everything to “answer the call of the Führer” and reclaim land from the unworthy Poles. But one group of boys was “surprised” to discover how unhappy a group of
Volksdeutsche
farmers brought from the rich, wine-growing areas of the Black Sea region were in Poland. These farmers not only complained bitterly about their forced resettlement and the “worthless sandy Polish soil” they had been given, but even spoke “longingly” of “Papa Stalin” and proudly displayed their Soviet hero medals.
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That this was a serious problem is confirmed by a personal request to Himmler from the Nazi governor of the Warthegau (the most important province in the area of Poland annexed to Germany) to send such settlers, who had “years-long Bolshevik political indoctrination,” not to him, but to the Reich proper, where they could be properly “monitored” for their “asocial attitudes.”
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Doubts about what they were doing and seeing crept into the dutiful reports that the students were required to file at the end of their time in the East. One boy noticed that the native ethnic Germans were deeply resentful when the incoming settlers sometimes got better farms than theirs. The new settlers, unclear about racial policy, let their children play with Polish ones and were too nice to the Poles, who often cheated them. It was clear to him that Germanic community spirit was slow to come in many villages and that the indigenous Germans would often rather help their Polish neighbors than the “strange” German resettlers. The young envoy, clearly having gotten deep into village jealousies, advised the establishment of more community centers and cottage industries, and noted that “more can be achieved by speaking firmly to the settlers than by listening to them too sympathetically.”
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The young people were often sent to villages from which Poles had recently been evicted, in order to get the emptied houses ready for arriving
Volksdeutsche
settlers. The official line was that the Poles were being given houses somewhere else. The empty houses were generally a mess. The Poles, having suspected for some time that they might be thrown out, had hidden and sold as much furniture as they could, knowing by now that it would otherwise be confiscated for the new settlers. The squalid conditions only confirmed the students’ negative view of the absent Poles. But sometimes, due to a lack of SS manpower, they were forced to take part in the actual expulsion of Polish families. On these occasions their job was to watch as the families departed and make sure that the Poles left behind enough furniture for the new arrivals. It is not hard to imagine the hatred this engendered. Melita Maschmann, by then leader of her own BDM camp, admitted later that this sort of action must have been harmful to her charges:
In the task they had been given they had to force themselves to play military roles more suited to men. It required a different temperament from ours to watch unmoved as whole families were driven from their ancestral farms. And now, in addition, to have to intervene if these people, whose future was bleak, secretly tried to take their cherished possessions with them under the eyes of the people driving them out.
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Those who worked in the
Volksdeutsche
processing camps also had eye-opening experiences. Josef N., a medical student, spent the spring of 1940 with an SS Labor Agency team classifying potential
Volksdeutsche
from Poland. The team consisted of a doctor, a racial analyst, two medical students,
and a clerk. The procedure was much the same as that used for the Baltic settlers, but the social level of the candidates was very different. After the medical and racial examinations, the team determined the “fitness for work” of each family. Josef was appalled by the condition of these supposed members of the Master Race: “One can have no idea of the filthy and unkempt condition of those who come to the examinations,” he reported. Many had fleas and lice and were covered with sores and scratches. Few had clean underwear, and most “had no idea that one should not come to the doctor in such a filthy state.”
The young student soon realized that few of these
Volksdeutsche
had ever been to a doctor. He saw badly healed fractures, homemade prostheses, festering wounds, rickets, malnourished babies, and all sorts of diseases. This was blamed on the high cost of medicine during the “Polish period” and on discriminatory practices toward ethnic Germans. On one day only 11 of 136 examinees owned a toothbrush and many did not know what one was.
Decisions on classification were difficult, and the guidelines unclear. What, for example, should one do if the father of a family was ill but everyone else healthy? Josef felt that it was wrong to put the minor children of such a family at a “disadvantage” by classifying them as “unfit.” He also could not help noticing that the racial examiner’s judgments were based on the most superficial evidence and were essentially “unfounded.” A woman he observed had been given the low grade of Class III while the man with her was Class I. The racial examiner expressed outrage that a superior German type would marry such a low-grade woman. As it turned out, the lady was the man’s mother. Josef felt that this example reflected the bizarre nature of the racial analysis procedures. Must not half of the man’s chromosomes be from his mother? The student was also critical of quick rejections based on height alone (“I think immediately of Richard Wagner, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon”), as well as others resulting from wrong answers to questions such as “What is the capital of Germany?” With youthful fervor the medical student concluded his report with the observation that anyone with knowledge of human nature could tell a competent person from an unworthy one, but that a doctor could do so better than a labor official and thereby avoid a lot of “nonsense disguised as science.”
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Josef’s criticisms were clearly taken by his superiors as suggestions for improving the methodology for finding good German blood, but to us they reveal much more about the cynical interagency rivalries that made the whole
Volksdeutsche
program so schizophrenic. The rejects Josef was worried about would not be wasted: they would simply
be used as lower-level forced labor where their chances of survival were at least equal to those of the tall, Nordic-looking young people who passed the racial tests and who were generally slated for the Waffen-SS and an uncertain future on the battlefield.
Some of the Hitler Youth boys sent to Eastern Duty were very young indeed. In the summer of 1943 Jürgen Herbst and eight other Jungvolk leaders, by now aged about fourteen or fifteen, proudly set out for their
Osteinsatz
. This vacation duty would finally make them part of the real war effort. Before they left they were allowed to sew an Assignment East merit badge on their uniforms. After a stopover in Berlin, where they saw all the sights, they boarded a troop train headed for Katowice. On the platform were hundreds of soldiers returning to the Eastern Front, many of them drunk. The boys spent a miserable night in the corridor of the jammed, blacked-out train, “trying as best we could to keep our uniforms from getting soiled on the dirty floor.” At dawn they “entered the Silesian industrial area with its coke ovens and gas flames shooting up into the air all along the track. A penetrating smell of gas and coal pervaded and painted everything outside a water-streaked dark gray.” Dour Hitler Youth officials in Katowice gave them their assignment, which was in one of the many camps set up for the
Volksdeutsche
youth.
When the boys arrived at the camp, they were surprised to see that it was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by an armed sentry, not the norm for Jungvolk camps in Germany. A senior Hitler Youth official soon made clear to them that they would not be teaching the boys in the camp patriotic songs and arranging scavenger hunts, but that they would be guarding the camp perimeter so that no one could escape. In secret conversations with the inmates it became clear that the boys they were guarding were teenaged Polish
Volksdeutsche
being used as apprentice miners, who were on “vacation.” This consisted of two weeks in the camp under the supervision of sadistic Hitler Youth leaders who were supposed to be “Germanizing” their charges, but whose exercises looked more like hazing or torture. The older HJ members coveted duty at the camp, as it exempted them from military service. On the side, they ran a black market operation, which provided them with all the luxuries of life. The newly arrived Jungvolk boys, invited to attend a late night “leaders’ banquet,” were staggered to find a huge spread that featured meats, fruits, and real coffee—all unobtainable in Germany itself. Alas, the secret conversations they had had with the “campers” did not remain secret for long, and the boys from the Reich were accused of treason and threatened with expulsion from the Jungvolk by the gun-toting camp commander. For the duration
of their Eastern Duty they were separated and transferred to small towns, where they were supposed to “contact” and work with the local Hitler Youth groups.
Herbst, the son of genteel middle-class intellectuals, bravely sallied forth, dressed in his Jungvolk leader’s uniform, to find his assigned group, said to be gathered at a local country fair some two miles away. He found them: “By the looks of their clothes they worked on farms and in the coal mines. Many of them wore shirts with their sleeves cut off, showing arms that were the size of my thighs.” This crowd was clearly not interested in songfests. After some awkward conversation Herbst managed to impress them by his prowess at the fair’s shooting gallery and left as fast as he could:
When I was on my way, I couldn’t help but look back frequently, making sure I was not being followed. Something told me I had better get home before darkness set in. It was not a good idea, I thought to myself, in the summer of 1943 when dusk fell to be a lone boy in a Jungvolk uniform in the midst of a Polish rye field.
He did not try to make contact again, and from then on his Eastern assignment consisted of excursions with the kindly
Volksdeutsche
family with which he was billeted. It was all very educational. He went down into a coal mine and visited the hellish interior of a steel mill. As they left the mill, Herbst also had a brief glimpse of a group of Jews:
A vista opened over an immense open pit mine. We looked down into a vast hole, dug into the ground, a hole in which dozens of gray-clad men and women, each wearing strips of yellow cloth on their backs, were pushing small carts loaded with black coal up the winding rails that led from the pit to the plant.
His guide told him that they were “Jews from the concentration camp” who were “helping to keep the plant productive.” These prisoners, who looked for all the world like insects on an anthill to the horrified Herbst, were the luckier ones. By 1943 hundreds of thousands of their brethren had already died in the extermination camps.
Once home, Herbst, full of doubts after what he had seen but afraid of retribution, did not reveal his experiences to anyone. As he later wrote:
If I had learned a lesson from my Polish experience it was how to turn people’s attention away from scenes I did not want them to see and to keep them from asking questions I did not want to answer. I had
learned how to keep silent on issues such as corruption, cruelty, and steel mills with concentration camp labor, which I knew no one wanted to hear about.
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Not all the
Osteinsatz
students were enthusiastic volunteers. Some participated as part of their required national labor service and were not happy campers. This was particularly true of urban working-class girls who often had to leave well-paying jobs and a lively social life behind. Bored by Germanic folk dances, patriotic songs, and other such instruction, they preferred to talk about sex and longed to listen to forbidden American pop songs. The noble aspects of farm labor, so beloved of the Nazis, had zero appeal, and they found it hard to take the racial theory lectures they were forced to listen to seriously. They crept out at night to find German soldiers, got pregnant, were lazy at work, had fights in their dormitories, and generally drove the hard-line BDM leaders to distraction.
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