Cruel World (46 page)

Luckily for this girl, her mistress was not a Party member and told her all about the surveillance. She also did not allow her to go to the carefully controlled social events laid on by the Nazi Servants’ Association, and warned her to stay away from nearby Polish forced labor camps and German soldiers. Three years after Zofia arrived, she was told that she now had official permission to go out with German soldiers, and that if she married one she would receive German citizenship after the war; but the Gestapo inquiries did not cease, and Zofia resisted this kind offer.

Zofia was fortunate in her placement; many of the other domestics had major problems. And it is clear that, after a time, even quite loyal Nazis did not want rebellious, miserable help who spoke no German, and that the problem was not so much finding “racially suitable” girls, but households that would take them.

On November 9, 1944, apparently unimpressed by the fact that the Russians were in East Prussia and the American Third Army was crossing the Moselle at that very moment, one of Himmler’s aides wrote to a Baron in Westphalia, who was also a high-ranking member of the SS, to ask if he would be willing “to employ Polish women of German stock.” The girls in question, two sisters, had not only refused to register for screening, but had insisted they were Polish and, on order of Himmler, had been sent to Ravensbrück. The official noted that “the Camp Commandant was instructed to take care personally of the sisters and to influence them humanely in order to win them over to Germanism.” There is no explanation of how this was done, but after six months in the camp the sisters decided to apply for German citizenship after all. The officer confessed, “Admittedly, it cannot yet be said whether the personal attitude of the sisters is solidified.” But Himmler had apparently decided that “in order to further influence the sisters in the German way of life, it has been proposed to grant them greater liberty and to employ them in households where there are many children.” “In this connection,” the aide continued rather lamely in his letter to the Baron, “the Reichsfuehrer-SS has thought of you.”
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The Baron’s reply is a masterpiece of evasion, which also gives us a telling glimpse of the “bitter reality” of German life in 1944:

The exact number of “Germanizable” young people who were actually placed in foster families, schools, or jobs requiring racial purity is not known. Recovered German documents indicate that the numbers of acceptable children were not vast, while postwar claims from the affected countries indicate that hundreds of thousands of children were taken to Germany. The fact is that Germanization involved only a small, physically “perfect” group; many thousands of other Polish young people would not be so pampered, but would be used very differently by the Nazis.

Despite their pathological insistence on racial purity within Reich borders, the Nazis, well before they streamed into Poland in September 1939, had cast their gaze upon the huge potential labor pool that conquest of Poland would make available to them. Absorption of the Austrian and Sudeten industrial labor forces had done wonders for the German economy, but shortages of manpower were still enormous. First consideration was given to the utilization of Polish prisoners of war in agricultural areas, as had been done in World War I.
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Once on Polish territory, German labor officials wasted no time bringing in employment functionaries; within a month some 115 labor offices had been set up. Meanwhile, 300,000 newly captured Polish POWs were being rushed into the Reich to help bring in the 1939 harvest. But this was not nearly enough. In November, Göring, chief of Hitler’s ambitious economic Four Year Plan, and Agriculture Minister Walter Darré requested the massive conscription of 1.5 to 2 million more workers. By January 1940, even as all the other ethnic rearrangements were going on, Hans Frank was ordered to recruit and transfer 750,000 Poles into the Reich, of whom 50 percent were supposed to be women. Obligatory quotas of workers were to be provided by each town and village in the General Gouvernement.
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Auschwitz mug shots of a young Polish prisoner destined for forced labor
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(photo credit 9.2)

This hasty process, which would introduce hordes of foreigners of alien blood into the Reich, did not fit in at all with Nazi racial theory. But economic necessity ruled. Himmler, who was just getting his racial classification system under way in Poland, huffed that he could not “screen a million individuals in four weeks,” but conceded that the labor was needed. The Polish workers, unlike the “Germanizable” children, would have to be transferred unanalyzed and upon arrival be “treated en bloc as Poles.” Just what this entailed was made clear in a body of regulations approved by Hitler, Himmler, and Göring known as the Polenerlasse, or Decrees for Poles.
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The rules were drastic indeed. The Poles were to be totally segregated from the German population and would be required to wear, at all times, a badge identifying their social status: a purple-and-yellow square emblazoned with the letter P. Poles could not patronize German restaurants or barbers, ride on public transportation, or go to movies. Their church services must be completely separate, and they were subject to a curfew at night. To prevent fraternization with the natives, they were to be housed separately in camps containing balanced numbers of men and women. If there were not enough women, Polish brothels should be provided, for,
above all, sexual contact between the Slavic Poles and the Nordic Master Race had to be prevented. Indeed, intercourse with a German was punishable by death.

Segregation was not all. It was also necessary to establish the fact that Poles were lesser beings. Their wages and food rations were set lower than those of their German coworkers, they had no access to the normal legal system, and a vicious propaganda campaign, complete with nasty posters, proclaimed that “the Pole can never be your comrade,” and advised German citizens who had been working with Poles for years that “there is no such thing as a decent Pole—just as there is no such thing as a decent Jew.”

News of these conditions soon got back to Poland. At first the idea of working in Germany had appealed to many in Poland, where unemployment had been high for years and was now exacerbated by the war. Within three months recruitment had fallen off so badly that German authorities in the General Gouvernement made registration for labor in Germany compulsory for everyone aged fifteen to twenty-five. Coercive measures, which included taking people off the streets, or surrounding whole villages and raiding each house, were begun to fill the local quotas. This caused panic in many a town:

Governor Frank, worried about potential unrest, stopped short of “excessive measures” and massive roundups, and by June 1940, only about a third of the targeted 750,000 had been sent to Germany.
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The process did not stop, however, and by mid-1944 over a million “pure Polish” laborers had been sent to Germany from the General Gouvernement. The methods of recruitment became more and more “excessive,” especially for the young. During the massive continuing deportations of Poles from the German annexed areas to the General Gouvernement in 1940, thousands of young people were removed from the transports and sent to unknown places in Germany.

In the towns the most vulnerable to forced recruitment were teenagers who were not yet employed. At the age of fourteen they were required to
register with the Labor Office. If they did not, they were easy to find: in many areas, despite Himmler’s theories, the Germans had restarted the schools as a way of keeping tabs on children. As the war wore on, “recruiting” would include loading a whole class onto trucks direct from the classroom, and the registration of children as young as thirteen. To protect their offspring, parents tried to find them jobs, but this often did no good.

The day fourteen-year-old Julian Nowak of Posen
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went to register, proof of employment in hand, all present were locked into a dark hallway at the Labor Office until everyone had been “certified” for departure to the Reich. To prevent defection before their train left, the Nazis kept everyone’s ID cards. Julian and ninety-seven other boys from Posen were sent to a textile factory in Bremen. There they were lodged at first in a barracks with no bathing facilities. Soon they were covered with lice, which they would keep until their liberation in 1945; even when they were moved into better housing, they had very few changes of clothing. In the first days, indoctrination sessions made clear to the young boys the drastic punishments that would result from not wearing one’s badge, or from having sexual relations with German or even Polish girls. The former were of a superior race; the latter, if they became pregnant, would be a loss to German industry. To make the gravity of this clear, the boys were later taken to witness the double hanging of a fellow worker and a German girl who had broken the rules.
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In the factory the boys were mixed in with adult workers from many countries, whose barracks were segregated by nationality. There were a few ways out of their situation. One boy’s parents declared themselves to be
Volksdeutsche
, and he was released; another was sent home when he lost several fingers. At eighteen, no longer considered children, boys were moved to a different camp, not necessarily an improvement. There was nothing childish about the work. The factory ran day and night in eight- and twelve-hour shifts. Much of the work was far too heavy for fourteen-year-olds, and some was deadly. In one area the air was so full of lint and dust that noses and mouths became clogged within minutes. The boys noticed that no Germans worked in that room.

Julian Nowak was at first put in a room with ten carding machines. Fortunately for him, his supervisor was an elderly German woman who spoke Polish and who patiently trained him. She was friendly and told him “that she felt sorry that such a small boy had to work so hard, so young and so far away from his family.” Sometimes she let him sit down or sleep a few hours on the night shift. This kindness made the boy relax a bit too much, and at one point, when he did not respond quickly enough to an order
given in German, which he did not yet understand, the foreman kicked him and hit him in the head.

There were other disciplinarians too. The camp commander had a punishment room in one of the basements. Here the boys were whipped for such infractions as not saying good morning in German loudly enough. The number of lashes depended on the crime. When the commandant was in a jolly mood, he let the boys choose which whip would be used from the extensive collection hung on the wall.
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For more serious offenses, such as getting into fights with Hitler Youth in town, stealing food, or trying to run away, the boys were sent to a special punishment camp, where for six weeks they would shovel sand out of dump trucks or do other hard labor for ten hours a day until their hands swelled up and they were so weak they could not climb stairs. In this place, shaved bald and dressed in shirts with a fluorescent stripe visible in the dark, they dreamt only of escape. But at night guard dogs and armed SS, who did not hesitate to shoot, patrolled the camp, and the boys knew there was no way to flee.
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