Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
By 1942 the
Osteinsatz
program was very large. A report on the BDM alone indicated that 449 camps were operating by then and that some 7,000 maidens had been involved in that year. This did not include administrators and leaders.
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The Hitler Youth numbers were even greater, and their activities were coordinated by a special HJ Action Staff headquartered in Lodz. By the spring of 1944 some 47,000 HJ and BDM members had participated along with at least 16,000 members of other youth organizations such as the Landdienst. Their task was vital: nearly 730,000 children of resettlers and Poles thought to have German blood would eventually be available for the Nazi armed forces and further colonization of the
Lebensraum
, if they could be properly Germanized by their peers from the Reich.
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While the complex resettling of the incoming
Volksdeutsche
was going on, yet another array of organizations had been planning the equally complex operations necessary to get rid of the indigenous population of Poland. This process did not involve just the evictions so upsetting to the BDM maidens, but would include the massive killing, imprisonment, or deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.
From the beginning of the invasion of Poland, the long years of indoctrination and propaganda that had depicted the Slavs as prolific
Untermenschen
, no better than the subhuman Jews, were immediately evident in the merciless comportment of members of the hard-core Nazi military formations, who swept away all efforts by more moderate elements in the German Army to observe the traditional rules of warfare. Only a week before the invasion Hitler had exhorted all his forces to show no mercy toward the Poles. They were told to “close their hearts to pity,” to “act brutally,” and to pursue the Poles “until complete annihilation” had occurred.
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And indeed, foreign observers in Poland during the fighting noticed much gratuitous action, such as the targeting of small rural villages of no strategic value, often full of people seeking refuge from the fighting, with resulting loss of whole families.
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For children in the war zone, the flight from the larger towns, where bombardments were expected, was often exciting at first. But what seemed an adventure soon turned into horror. One ten-year-old boy recalled the exodus from the towns as being “like a national holiday … it was like going on a day’s outing in the country.… The one lane dirt road was packed with people, wagons and horses.” Another boy remembered people in the village where he took refuge “walking around in the warm sunlight.… I started playing with the local boys. Within minutes I had new friends. A lovely, lovely day.” The idyll did not last. In the late afternoon the boys heard the sound of planes. “I was standing and looking at the planes as they dived out of the sky throwing explosives and incendiary bombs.… The houses around me collapsed.” The planes returned, “streaking down with their machine guns blazing, shooting the people down … They were all running in different directions, some with their
clothes on fire. Blindly running. Cats, dogs, horses, cows, all of them aflame, too all running. Madly, pointlessly, agonizingly.” One boy’s mother threw him on the ground and covered him “with her own body.… Some time later I stood up and was completely alone. Mother had gone off and all I saw around me was total chaos and destruction with dead bodies everywhere.”
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But such random brutality was not all that Hitler had in mind. The references to “annihilation” were made more precise two days after his first pronouncement with the organization of seven special SS mobile units known as Einsatzgruppen, whose mission it was to “combat all anti-Reich and anti-German elements.” That this meant the immediate elimination of as many members of the Polish “leadership class” as possible, which included most professionals, the nobility, and the clergy, was made clear in comments to subordinates in the next few weeks by Hitler and SS police chief Reinhard Heydrich. The same criteria applied to Jews and to the “primitive, inferior classes” of Poles not immediately needed to keep industry and agriculture going in the new territories. The Einsatzgruppen, aided by the notorious, black-uniformed Selbstschutz, a local militia made up of long-resident ethnic Germans who were only too happy to settle long-festering scores with their Polish neighbors and point out Jews to the Nazis, would execute some 60,000 souls of all ages and ethnicities in their three months of activity in Poland.
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Everywhere men were dragged from their houses in front of their families and were taken to be executed or beaten. Children were not exempt: witnesses in the town of Bydgoszcz watched with horror as a troop of Boy Scouts, aged twelve to sixteen, were lined up against a wall and shot in retaliation for the killing of ethnic Germans by Poles.
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But this was still not enough for Hitler, who did not just wish to avenge the Polish atrocities but planned to eradicate Poland both as a people and as a nation. The project would be greatly facilitated by keeping the population in a state of “splintered” uncertainty, and nothing makes people more helpless and “splintered” than moving them about at random with no warning.
Thousands of both Jewish and gentile Poles had already fled eastward before the armies during the fighting. Nazi units soon began to deport tens of thousands more to the General Gouvernement to make room in the newly annexed areas both for administrators and opportunists from the Reich and for the
Volksdeutsche
settlers. The following account is typical. And in fact the conditions under which this family from Gdynia was
moved were positively luxurious compared to those of later victims who would be deported in the dead of winter on a few minutes’ notice.
On October 17, 1939, at 8:00 a.m., I heard someone knocking at the door of my flat. As my maid was afraid to open it, I went to the door myself. I found there two German gendarmes, who roughly told me that in a few hours I had to be ready to travel with my children and everybody in the house. When I said that I had small children, that my husband was a prisoner of war, and that I could not get ready to travel in so short a time, the gendarmes answered that not only must I be ready, but that the flat must be swept, the plates and dishes washed, and the keys left in the cupboards, so that the Germans who were to live in my house should have no trouble.
The family was allowed to take along one suitcase and one bag of food. At noon the police came back to collect them and all their neighbors. Amid shouts and blows the Poles were loaded on trucks and then put in filthy cattle cars, which were locked. In this family’s car were forty people, including six children under ten. There were no sanitary facilities and no food. After three days they arrived in the General Gouvernement and were unloaded in Czestochowa, site of one of Poland’s holiest shrines, where the totally unprepared local population gave them immediate help, while the German soldiers who opened the car shouted, “What! Are these Polish swine still alive?”
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Different measures were used for the 2.2 million Polish Jews in the annexed areas. An SS plan, instituted on September 21, even before Poland had surrendered, decreed that all communities of Jews numbering 500 or fewer be removed from the villages and countryside and be concentrated in ghettos in larger towns and cities situated on main railway lines. From these holding areas the Jews could easily be moved to a projected “Reich Ghetto” near Lublin in the General Gouvernement or elsewhere. The process was to begin in early November 1939 and continue over the course of the following year. Meanwhile, Nuremberg-type laws were imposed, and the Polish Jews would have the distinction of being the first to be required to wear identifying badges: in the General Gouvernement a white armband with a blue Star of David, and in the annexed areas, a yellow star.
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The idea of sending Jews “to the East,” first suggested in September 1939, had the support of Hitler and seemed to be sanctioned in the same speech that had set off the resettlement of the
Volksdeutsche
. Once the
lines of demarcation between the Russian and German zones of Poland were established, Berlin authorized the immediate expulsion to the Lublin district of some 80,000 Jews already gathered in the newly annexed areas around Katowice, and gave orders for those of Mährisch-Ostrau in Czechoslovakia to be prepared to follow.
Rumors of the deportation plan and of this newly available disposal zone in Poland reserved specifically for Jews soon spread among the SS upper echelons in other German-controlled areas where the outbreak of war had now closed off most remaining routes to refuge.
In Austria, Adolf Eichmann saw a golden opportunity to speed up Jewish emigration. Without consulting his superiors, he decided to add the Jews of Vienna to the expellees and thereby win accolades for making the Austrian capital the first city to be completely “cleansed” of Jews, or
Judenrein
. Facilities in Poland were to be built by advance transports of poor Jewish men who were a drain on the Jewish communities that had to support them. Families would follow later. By October 13, 1939, everything from lists of deportees to train schedules had been organized; the only trouble was that, as had been the case with the Balts, no exact destination for the trains had been determined. In a hasty trip to the Lublin region Eichmann found a desolate, swampy area near the small town of Nisko that he decided was ideal.
Meanwhile, competition for dumping grounds had become fierce, and Eichmann was determined to get rid of his undesirables first.
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The first transport left Mährisch-Ostrau on October 17, the same day as that of the Polish residents of Gdynia. More followed from Vienna. Conditions on the trains were about the same as those for the Poles, but the Jews, when they arrived, had no local population to take care of them. There was not even a camp. The exhausted deportees were expected to build one themselves with materials that had been shipped along with them. The trains kept coming, and thousands of people, who by now included women and children, were driven away from the inadequate facilities and shot when they tried to come back after wandering about the surrounding countryside. It was reported in the American media that Polish peasants had been forbidden by the Gestapo to take Jews into their houses and that the object of the exercise was “not to settle the Jews, but to expose them to the peril of painful death from cold and famine.”
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Some of the more fortunate deportees managed to escape to the Russian-controlled zone. The publicity aroused panic among the Jews of Vienna, who even appealed to the Pope to stop the deportations.
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Himmler, under pressure from both the Wehrmacht and the civil authorities to maintain order and irritated by
Eichmann’s challenge to his control of the region, which he wished to use for his own deportations, quickly ordered a stop to the chaotic operation, and some of the unfortunates were actually sent back to Austria.
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Soon after this debacle Hitler removed the SS units in charge of deportations and police actions from the control of the disapproving Wehrmacht and replaced the military government in Poland with civilian administrations answerable only to their local Nazi governors, whose commitment to the programs of the Führer was unquestioned. The sidelining of the Wehrmacht suited Himmler very well. It was his dream to rid not only the newly annexed Reich territories, but also eventually all of Poland, of its twenty million Jews and Slavs. Himmler and his advisers recognized that this task would take a few years, and that while it was in progress, the greatest possible use should be made of the human assets now at the disposal of the Nazis. The magnitude of the operation would require enormous administrative and material resources, which immediately began to be organized. The madness of the chess game involving millions of people that the Nazis now proposed is staggering. Millions of Poles, useful as forced labor, would be moved into Germany proper, while millions of Reich Germans would be moved out of Germany to fight and to administer the newly conquered Eastern territories where the ejected Poles and sequestered Jews would be replaced by other millions of resettled ethnic Germans. And this project was to be set in motion even as the conquest of Western Europe and the attack on the Soviet Union were being planned. Hans Frank, appointed governor of the General Gouvernement, writing in his diary in the fall of 1939, gives some idea of just what Himmler had in mind:
By Spring 1,000,000 Poles and Jews … must be received by the General Gouvernement. The resettlement of the ethnic Germans and the taking on of Poles and Jews
(10,000
daily) must be accomplished according to plan. Especially urgent is the instituting of forced labor for Jews.… The critical questions of housing and feeding are still to be cleared up.… The families of good racial extraction in the occupied Polish territory (approximately 4,000,000 people) should be transferred into the Reich and individually housed and thereby uprooted as a people.… SS General Krueger explained that, starting 15 November, the entire railroad net of the General Gouvernement will be at the disposal of the resettlement transports.
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Himmler’s own planned deportations of Jews to their projected enclave in the General Gouvernement began soon after the redistribution of authority. But the operations were still not well organized and were far too
public. The ghastly conditions prompted negative reports from Nazi welfare authorities and even from the SS. Deportees arrived in the dead of winter, once again without money or supplies of any kind. From the cattle cars in which they were moved they frequently had to walk miles through snow to remote villages that had no facilities for them. Many died of exposure. Children were especially vulnerable:
The half-frozen body of a five-year-old girl was found wearing around her neck a cardboard sign with the words “Renate Alexander, from Hammerstein, Pomerania.” This child was visiting relatives in Stettin and was included in the deportation; her mother and father stayed in Germany. Her hands and feet had to be amputated at the Lublin hospital. The bodies of the deportees who had died of exposure were piled on sleds and buried in the Jewish cemeteries at Piask and Lublin.… The General Gouvernement has declined all responsibility for these occurrences.
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