Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Before all this could happen, thousands of Soviet Ukrainians would have to be moved out to other villages 300 miles to the south. Internal documents from the offices of those who organized the operation reveal a distinct lack of enthusiasm for a project that promised to be very difficult.
In the course of the fall and winter, fifteen villages were to be resettled, with only enough people left behind to run the sawmills and the state collective farms, which the Nazis had inherited from Stalin and found quite convenient. There was no question of any “voluntary” resettlement. The population, estimated to be a mix of 10 percent Poles and 90 percent Ukrainians, would, the German officials noted, “resist being moved to large farms in the South.” Furthermore, since moving the Ukrainians by truck would consume 100,000 liters of valuable gasoline, they would have to go by train. And since these were, as usual, in short supply, one official proposed that the women and children go on one train and that the men and livestock “trek” on foot to the new locations. During the evictions, they gloomily noted, large numbers of police would be needed both to prevent people from “fleeing to the woods” and to guard the empty houses from bandits.
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None of these thoughts were revealed in the overly jolly notice posted in the targeted villages on October 10:
Farmers! The insuperable German army has finally freed you from the Bolshevik Plague. Never again will the hatred of the Jewish exploiters flow over the fertile earth of the Ukraine. Be grateful to the brave German soldiers who have made it possible for you to live a worthwhile human life again. Despite the war there is … renewal across the land which only aims at your welfare. German will and German love of order will guarantee the rights of every family.
Now the time has come to give you back your own lands. By doing so we will fulfill your most ardent wish to get back what the Bolsheviks swindled from you. But this wish cannot be fulfilled in this village at the present time, as the population is too dense. In the blessed regions of the Dnieper, of which your poets sing, we will give each family one hectare of its own to settle on. In addition, you will later have the possibility of sharing the common wealth. You will till better soil in the south of the Ukraine than in your old village. Later, when winter still reigns here … spring will come there and you can go to your fields earlier, which will give a greater harvest.
Transport will be by train. You can take your important possessions with you. In addition each family can take one cow or bull, and two families can take one horse.…
Think that by moving you are giving your children a new and happy Fatherland. Off to the Dnieper! Off to the sunny South!
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This lyrical document fooled no one. By the eleventh of November, 10,623 people, 1,230 horses, 2,133 cows, and 614 carts had been sent away
on fourteen trains, which were found despite the needs of the gigantic German offensive, which had just taken all of Stalingrad except a small strip along the Volga. An understated report on the deportation notes that problems of the first few days caused by “the flight of whole families” were solved by having Ukrainian security escorts describe the destinations in positive terms over loudspeakers at the train stations and by further “reassurances” from settlers who “returned temporarily” for various reasons. The report does not say so, but many of the evacuees clearly believed that the trains were going not to the Sunny South, but to forced labor or concentration camps.
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Such fears were well justified. Not far to the west, in the Polish provinces bordering on the USSR, Himmler had also ordered Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, to make plans for another SS colony near Zamosc. To the SS leaders, national distinctions in the Polish-Soviet border areas were irrelevant: their aim was to rid the entire region of Slavs, be they Polish or Soviet citizens. Zamosc, once a Hanseatic city, could now be completely re-Germanized. The planned string of villages and support bases would stretch from Galicia to Bialystok and include the city of Lublin, whose population of Reich Germans was to be increased, on Himmler’s orders, from 4,000 to 10,000. The Reichsführer SS had authorized Globocnik to bring in 27,300 top-class ethnic Germans, many of whom were still in holding camps, from a mind-boggling array of locations, which included Bessarabia, Bukovina, Romania, the Baltics, Leningrad, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Forty thousand more carefully vetted “borderline class A”
Volksdeutsche
from Croatia, Slovenia, Flanders, and Bulgaria would follow a few months later. Excited VoMi officials said they could take care of 98,300 settlers in Lodz en route.
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A research memo indicated that “space will be created by pushing out the Poles; the Jews will vanish from the city.”
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It was all to be done by the end of September 1942. The methodology for this ambitious project, known as Program Heinrich,
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was virtually the same as that for Hegewald, but, in this case, action on evicting the Poles was delayed by the fact that Himmler and Heydrich had simultaneously ordered the “resettlement” of the whole Jewish population of the General Gouvernement, not to mention that of Western Europe, which would mean that the area’s rail system would be fully booked.
Both Poles and Jews in the Zamosc region were by now used to sporadic arrests, disappearances, killings, and the evacuation of villages, but the rapidly increasing public violence aimed at the Jews in the spring of 1942, undoubtedly related to the actions that had been going on for
months in the USSR, soon created an atmosphere of terror. By early August it was rumored across Poland that 5,000 Jews a day were being killed in Warsaw. On August 8, in the small town of Szczebrzeszyn, all Jews were told to gather the next morning for deportation. Throughout the night, houses were searched and people were brought to the town square before being sent away. But thousands more still remained in hiding. In this town, and many like it, the hunting would go on and on, well into December, in a frenzy of killing that took place in full view of everyone.
Volksdeutsche
, Polish, and even Jewish police hoping to save themselves participated. By late October, the Germans had turned the pursuit over entirely to these local enforcers. On October 24, Jews were marched by the hundreds to the cemetery and killed. More came from surrounding towns. All Polish men over the age of fifteen were ordered to take shovels there to bury them. The process went on for nearly a week. Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary that most of the victims in the cemetery were women and children, as many of the Jewish men had managed to flee to the forests. He also observed that “people walking on the street are so used to seeing corpses on the sidewalks that they pass by without any emotion.” It did not matter anymore who the dead were: “The body of a Polish boy, killed for robbery, lay on the street for more than twenty-four hours” and was equally ignored.
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If the Poles believed the German purification urge would be satisfied by this orgy, they were wrong. Even as the last Jews were being killed or deported, Nazi attention and manpower had turned to the Poles. In one town the church was surrounded during Mass and all the young people were taken away. Dr. Klukowski wrote in his diary, “People were sure that the Germans were only interested in the complete liquidation of the Jews, so the new wave of arrests … came as a real surprise.”
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The height of the deportations of the Polish population came at the end of November. An elaborate instruction memo, containing minute details on feeding, escorts, and procedures, once again went to the relevant authorities. The Poles were to be brought in trucks to a transit camp in Zamosc. There they would be divided into the usual categories. Groups I and II would go to Lodz for re-Germanizing and then on to the Reich. “Good” working families would return to farming. Group III (“unworthy” for work) individuals, children under fourteen from Groups III and IV, as well as Group IIIs over sixty were to go in “special trains” to “retirement villages.” All Group IVs except children were to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau as laborers, probably in the huge I. G. Farben plant conveniently located next to the concentration camp. Careful records, described at some
length, must be kept of the classifications and assignments. It is in the course of reading these paperwork instructions that one notes that one of the designated groups is “unaccompanied children.” Indeed, with the exception of infants under six months, the children of all categories were to be taken from their parents. Even in this dry Nazi document it is clear that those involved knew that the separation, which would involve some 30,000 children, might cause terrible scenes, and require special measures at the railroad stations.
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As usual, reality bore little resemblance to the impeccable Nazi memo. In the winter cold, hundreds died in the transit camps even before they were loaded onto trains. There was little food. Arrangements at the receiving end were not efficient, and many more died on the trains. The exact fate of all the children is not known. A few were rescued. According to one witness, some small children from Group III were handed over to the Polish Central Welfare Organization.
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As word came that trainloads of children would be passing through their towns, inhabitants of Warsaw and Kutno, sometimes fired upon by SS security police, rushed to the stations, where they succeeded in “buying” or extracting some of the small, often dying, bodies.
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A few children were selected for Germanization from the thousands sent to a special new children’s camp at Lodz, where most would be used for forced labor. It is known that 119 went to Auschwitz, where all the boys were killed by lethal injection and most of the girls died of typhus and other causes.
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The evacuations continued for almost a year. In the end, 110,000 Poles were removed from some 350 villages in the Zamosc area, to be added to the thousands already displaced from other Polish regions.
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So terrible were the events of these evacuations that even SS General Globocnik confided to his assistant, Hermann Höfle, that he could not look at his own little niece without “thinking about the others.” And when Höfle’s own twin babies died of diphtheria a short time later, he is said to have broken down at their interment, screaming that their deaths were “the punishment of heaven for all my misdeeds.”
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There was no dearth of elaborate planning for bringing the incoming
Volksdeutsche
to the new Zamosc and Hegewald settlement regions; indeed, an eager young SS staff had been working on proposals for these colonies for many months. Their first setback came in Zamosc, for which, by October, only 3,900 families, some unsuitable, were even available. Everything had been held up by the lack of trains, the fact that the settlers were to come from hundreds of small camps all over Europe, and the shortage of racial examiners. To make things harder, those employing the settlers where they were currently living often did not want them to leave.
By December, some 17,000 Croatians had arrived but were stuck in the Lodz transit camps. Himmler was outraged and demanded that the situation be resolved by the spring of 1943.
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But the Reichsführer’s anger was of little comfort to the hapless
Volksdeutsche
being brought into the evacuated villages who were rightly terrified by the threat of partisan raids. Dr. Klukowski reported that settlers coming “from Bessarabia … are so afraid of staying that shortly after receiving their new houses they escape to the towns, particularly Zamosc,” since “many times the evacuees come back to burn down their own houses or kill the newcomers.”
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The transfers to Hegewald were less geographically challenging. Most came from Polish and Ukrainian areas and once again were moved there in treks with cattle and mattresses piled high. Renovation of the houses, left in particularly bad shape by the departing Ukrainians, was behind schedule due to the shortage of lumber, but it was felt that most could be made livable “before snowfall.” The SS economic office and RKFDV folkdom officials pledged stipends and household equipment to help the families set up. Clothes and shoes were more difficult to procure, but Hegewald officials were excited to get a telex on November 4 reassuring them that clothing, shoes, and stockings for “10,000 Volksdeutsch,” which had been put “at our disposal by the Reichsführer SS,” was on its way from the “train station Auschwitz-East.”
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Even Christmas was to be adapted for the new SS world. Early in December a memo was issued on “Organizing Volks Christmas Eve Ceremonies in the Villages of the Hegewald Settlement.” In no uncertain terms it stated that the SS and VoMi, with the aid of numerous other agencies, must divide up responsibilities and organize the festivities, which were set for very specific days and hours between December 23 and December 26 to allow for the presence of “important” guests. VoMi must procure two trees for each village. One would be in the room where the party would take place and the other in the village square. The indoor tree must be “especially beautifully decorated with apples, cookies, candles, homemade ornaments of straw, garlands, runes, and pine cones.” The apples and cookies would be supplied by the local SS garrison. Tree stands must be made in the villages in the shape of a cross or “sunbeams.” Every family would get presents of flour, sugar, or baked goods. For the children there would be candy (to be procured by the Hegewald supply office). Children under ten would get toys (supplied by Waffen-SS construction units). These must be nicely arranged about the room and would not be handed out until the end of the party.
A proposal for the ceremony itself, to be put on by the children and
teachers with the help of BDM maidens, was also helpfully appended. The theme was to be the idea of a Volks Christmas, as “is usual at home”—where that might be for the uprooted new settlers not being specified. The memo writer stated that “we do not want a religious ceremony”; instead, participants should think of the winter solstice, the return of light, and life freeing itself from frozen winter. The struggle of “our people surrounded by the dark powers” should be emphasized and the soldiers and, especially, the Führer remembered. After these instructions come two long pages of suggested poems, carols, and pageant text. A few old standbys such as “O Tannenbaum” and “Silent Night” were allowed. The poems, for the most part, evoke rather beautifully the universal longing for spring and the end of cold and darkness, and provide reassurances that the eternal order of nature will continue and the warm sun will return, most of which was probably wasted on listeners whose German was often marginal. It is in the lines to be spoken by the children lighting the candles on the Christmas tree that war propaganda takes over, as indeed it had, by now, in every belligerent country: