Cruel World (43 page)

A thousand more came on both November 4 and on January 18, 1941. By now it was very cold:

The idea was not only to “splinter” the Poles and to put them in a “minority” role, but to physically reduce their numbers as surely, if more gradually, as was being done with the Jews. As the brutal evacuation process shows, the methods of attrition were manifold. Executions for a myriad of violations were a daily event. But there were far less obvious methods, beginning with the most basic one of lowering the birthrate and allowing an increase in infant mortality—just the reverse of the population laws instituted in the Reich.

The legal age for marriage was gradually raised to twenty-eight for men and twenty-five for women, well above the norms for that era, and consideration was given to banning marriage for Poles altogether. The result of this ruling was an increase in so-called illegitimate births, but it is clear
that many Poles simply kept their marriages secret.
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This development inevitably raised the question of abortion. A German doctor working in Poland told one of the
Osteinsatz
maidens that he would willingly perform abortions on Polish women, noting that “it is in fact murder, but it is finally the same if I shoot the enemy on the battlefield or if I kill his children while they are in their mother’s body.” The doctor, however, had not yet performed any such procedures, as they were still against both Polish and German law.
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His dilemma would soon be solved. On March 9, 1942, the Reich Health Leader, Dr. Leonardo Conti, wrote to Himmler and declared that punishment for performing abortions on Poles was “not in the interest of Germany, it rather is desirable from our point of view that as many Polish women as possible have abortions carried out or carry them out themselves.” Conti suggested that the right to punish abortions “be removed from the Polish courts.” Himmler agreed.
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Subsistence for “illegitimate” Polish children was made entirely the responsibility of the father. No German welfare funds were to be expended, as “it must be the primary principle not to spend one German penny for Polish welfare. This method of putting the racially undesirable Polish child at a definite disadvantage, even though it will not, in general, reduce the number of illegitimate children, will at least not encourage a rise in the number.” The fathers, if known, would be required to “make especially large payments” into a general fund from which all surplus would be “turned over to the
German
youth fund,” and subsistence claims were removed from the court system and handed over to the racial agencies.
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Welfare for pregnant Polish women and newborns was minimal indeed. Prenatal care and access to pediatric clinics were denied. Tuberculosis and rickets were left untreated. Food rations for Poles were in general lower than those for Germans, and pregnant or nursing mothers could only get an extra fat allowance with a doctor’s prescription. Children under the age of six were allowed a pint of milk a day and those up to fourteen, half that.

Not surprisingly, the death rate rose and the birthrate fell—but not enough to satisfy the Nazis. By 1942 it was clear that the only way to be rid of twenty million Poles (three or four million were to be kept as laborers) was mass deportation. One proposal calculated that if 700,000 to 800,000 Poles per year, using 100 to 120 trains, could be deported to Siberia, the “problem” would be solved in thirty years. The writer recognized the fact that the Polish problem could not be solved by liquidating the Poles like the Jews, as doing so “would burden the German people with guilt for years to come and lose us the sympathies of people everywhere,
particularly as our neighbors would be bound to reckon that they would be treated in the same way when the time came.” He also pointed out that he had suggested earlier that the problem might also be solved by “more or less voluntary emigration overseas,” perhaps to Brazil, which, “with its capacity for 1,200 million people,” urgently needed additional population.
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Getting rid of the Poles was important to the racial agencies, but they were determined to make quite sure that not a drop of possible German blood be wasted in the process of ethnic cleansing. The theory was that a great deal of German blood had flowed into Poland “through the mistakes of German history”
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and must be recovered for the Reich, especially when it came to malleable children. On October 23, 1939, Himmler ruled that certain small, well-defined ethnic groups in Upper Silesia, such as the obscure Slonzacs and Gorals, were to have “special racial examinations.” Their children were “to be screened in the schools for the purpose of a rough pre-selection.” If the children proved to be “of a low standard,” it would be considered “proof of the negative qualities of the parents” and the whole family would be “evacuated.” If the children were of a high standard and the parents were not, the parents would be evacuated without them.
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This was only the beginning. By November 1939, preliminary guidelines for the racial analysis and handling of the entire Polish population were forwarded to Himmler from Nazi Party offices in Berlin,
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ordering that, before deportation, all Poles, like the incoming
Volksdeutsche
, were to be given racial examinations, and those “suitable for Germanization” or “ethnic transformation” were to be kept segregated from those who were not. “Ethnic transformation” was again based on the proper racial qualifications. Officials were warned to be on guard against “pseudo–ethnic transformation” (wrong race, right language and politics), which even if “unconscious” would lead to “dangerous adulteration of the intellectual-psychical structure” of Germandom, as the inherited “slavonic” mind could never be “transformed into a Teutonic one.” While adults might be beyond salvation for Germandom, racially valuable children of untransformable parents should not be sent into limbo with their families, but were to be taken from them and educated in suitable institutions or be put in a German foster family. These children should not be older than eight or ten, as “ethnic transformation” was not usually successful after that age. Most importantly, such children were to be isolated completely from their Polish relatives. Other Poles could not adopt them, and Polish church institutions would not be permitted to keep “biologically healthy children.”However, Poles with a “neutral attitude” who were willing to send their children to German institutions could, in this wise, avoid immediate deportation themselves.

Blond children with “Germanizing” potential are taken by force from their “bad blood” parents
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(photo credit 9.1)

The Nazis were determined, after they eliminated the existing Polish intelligentsia, to prevent the training of replacements. Only a “primitive agricultural class” would be allowed to remain. Their children would go to school only up to the age of ten, and the admittedly “outstanding native female teachers,” who were “representatives of Polish chauvinism” with “a far greater influence on the political education of the child than the male teacher,” would be replaced by retired policemen.

In “Reflections” written some months later, Himmler refined these policies. Pure Polish children, he mused, need not learn to count higher than 500 (one wonders how they could be prevented from doing so) or be required to read, but should only be taught to write their names. Other than that, it would suffice for them to know that it was “a divine law to obey the Germans.” But Himmler did have some doubts: apparently inspired by the sight of numerous “Nordic”-looking families in the deportee holding camps, he reiterated that all Polish children between six and ten must be “sifted” in order to find those with “valuable blood.” Their parents, he wrote,

Once in Germany the chosen children, whose names would be Germanized and who would be kept under careful surveillance, should be made comfortable and not be “treated as lepers” or called “Polacks.” This oddly human touch contrasted sharply with recent instructions to the German press requiring that “articles dealing with Poland must express the instinctive revulsion of the German people against everything which is Polish” and “must be composed in such a way as to transform this instinctive revulsion into a lasting revulsion.… It must be suggested that Gypsies, Jews and Poles ought to be treated on the same level.”
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Himmler’s order referred, of course, only to Poles with signs of “good blood,” but the distinction was too difficult for the average German to fathom, particularly as the chosen children, in fact, usually had no German “blood” whatsoever.

Himmler, very good at grandiose theories and romantic visions, would leave the details of implementation of this massive “sifting” to others, though the documents show he frequently intervened in decisions at the lowest levels. Racial officials now scrambled to implement the guidelines. Luckily, the bureaucratic rules for racial processing, already set up to deal with the resettlers and ethnic Germans of Polish citizenship, were easily extended to the rest of their countrymen.

Among the first groups to be analyzed were the defenseless children who were residents of Polish orphanages and children’s homes. The Nazis had immediately begun searching for ethnic German children in these institutions, as it was widely believed that the Poles had systematically and deliberately been Polonizing such children. Now, all children in public institutions or in foster care “whose appearance indicates Nordic parents” were to be brought in for racial and psychological testing by the Nazi Youth Department. Acceptable ones aged two to six would be sent to German foster families while those aged six to twelve would go to German boarding schools.
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Teams of SS doctors toured the institutions. When they arrived the children were lined up and looked over. Possible candidates were then sent off for physical exams. Only perfect bodies were acceptable: a crooked ear or flat feet were disqualifiers. If a child was chosen, the fact that it was already in foster care, or even was occasionally taken care of by blood relatives, was not grounds for exemption. The absence of any rights
on the part of parents or guardians soon became cruelly evident. If the child was in a home, visiting rights were ended: parents could only look at their children “through the grate of the enclosure.”
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If the child was with foster parents they were ordered to bring it in for racial testing; should the child not appear, it would be forcibly retrieved by workers from the Youth Department.
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Foster mothers who unsuspectingly responded to the summons of the authorities had devastating experiences:

This woman found out where her daughter was and persuaded an official to let her take the child out for one day so that she could be baptized. The two fled to a friend’s house and hid there for six months, but were eventually denounced by an ethnic German woman who had once been their neighbor. The child was taken away and the mother was beaten. When the war ended four years later, she heard that her daughter had been sent to a family in Hamburg. The record does not indicate if the girl ever came back.
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The Youth Department did not accept excuses. One guardian who appeared at the office without her niece, to explain that the child’s parents had died from lung disease and left the girl in her care, was thrown out and threatened with prison if she did not come back with the child and her three sisters. More formal appeals, no matter how polite, were equally useless. Multiple letters written by both the aunt and grandmother of nine-year-old Halina Bukowiecka, in which the relatives went so far as to pledge not to request further welfare from the state, were brusquely rejected. An office memo indicated that little Halina had long since been sent to Munich.
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