Heinrich Himmler : A Life (79 page)

Great emphasis was to be put on cleanliness: ‘I envisage that in every settler’s house there will be a room in the cellar where one can do the washing, where there will be a bath and a shower for the peasant when he comes home sweaty from the fields.’ There was always to be enough space for ‘healthy families with several children’. The houses were to be built

according to plans and drawings that we shall produce. All the kitsch and urban rubbish that there is such a lot of in this area must be got rid of and our settlers should live in a healthy, peasant milieu. The peasant houses should be neither luxurious nor primitive. [ . . . ] In fifty to eighty years’ time 20 million German settlers should be living in this vast settlement area in the east, of whom 10 million will be peasants with eight to ten children. The perpetuum mobile will then stand
still. If there is no more land to be distributed then, as is always the case throughout history, new land will have to be got with the sword.
³⁰

Himmler announced an initial comprehensive plan for the ‘resettlement of Poles and Jews’ on 30 October 1939. The following population groups were to be expelled to the General Government: ‘all Jews’ from the annexed territories, ‘all Congress Poles’ (in other words, all Poles who came from the parts of Poland that had belonged to Russia between 1815 and 1916) from the province of Danzig–West Prussia, as well as ‘a number, still to be determined, of particularly hostile Poles from the provinces of Posen, East Prussia, and eastern Upper Silesia’.
³¹

On 8 November Streckenbach, the commander of the security police in the General Government, who had been assigned the ‘central planning of settlement and evacuation in the east’, informed the Higher SS and Police Leaders who were responsible for carrying out the deportations that, by the end of February 1940, ‘all Jews and Congress Poles from the annexed territories’ should be ‘evacuated’, and the Polish population that remained should be divided into ‘Poles, ‘ethnic Germans’, as well as ‘Poles who are still regarded as desirable’. In all, it was now planned ‘initially, by the end of February 1940, to evacuate around 1,000,000 Jews and Poles [ . . . ] from the Old Reich and the newly occupied eastern territories’,
³²
of whom around 700,000 would come from the annexed territories.
³³

The RSHA produced a ‘long-range plan’: first, to deport all Jews and politically undesirable Poles to the General Government; then the ‘racial assessment’ and expulsion of the mass of the Polish population. A ‘short-range plan’ envisaged, to begin with, the deportation of 80,000 Poles and Jews from the Warthegau in order to resettle the Baltic Germans. They had been provisionally accommodated in camps following their repatriation after the occupation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union.
³⁴
These totals were actually exceeded, with the deportation of more than 87,000 people—‘politically compromised Poles, Jews, Polish intelligentsia, criminals, and asocials’
³⁵
—from the Warthegau to the General Government between 1 and 17 December.
³⁶

On 21 December Heydrich announced that he had appointed Eichmann to be his special adviser ‘to coordinate all security police matters involved in the implementation of the clearing of the eastern territory’.
³⁷
During the first months of 1940 Eichmann had to ensure that, in the process of
implementing a second short-range plan, 600,000 Jews would be deported into the General Government,
³⁸
an action that kept being postponed,
³⁹
while those responsible cited very different figures for those to be deported.
⁴⁰
Finally, on 23 January 1940 the head of the Settlement Commissariat’s main planning department produced a general plan for the settlement of the eastern territories that had been annexed, according to which, over the long term, 3.4 million Poles were to be deported. The deportation of the roughly 3.4 million Jews living in this area already formed part of the plan.
⁴¹

However, on 30 January 1940 Heydrich came up with a new idea. Now, between 800,000 and a million Poles were to be provisionally sent from the annexed Polish territories for ‘labour deployment’ in the Reich. Only 40,000 Jews and Poles were to be deported to the General Government from the ‘eastern Gaus’ to make room for the resettlement of the Baltic Germans, and only around 120,000 Poles were to be sent there to make room for the resettlement of the Volhynian Germans. Subsequently, all the Jews—not only those from the annexed Polish territories but also those from the whole of the Reich—as well as 30,000 Gypsies were to be deported to the General Government.
⁴²

In fact, only part of this far-reaching scheme was achieved. By the beginning of 1941 almost 308,000 Poles and Jews from the annexed eastern territories had been deported to the General Government.
⁴³
After that the General Government was, to a large extent, no longer treated as a ‘reception area’. Initially used as an assembly area for the invasion of the Soviet Union, it was then declared to be a potential region for German settlement.
⁴⁴
By the end of 1942 another 57,000 ‘racially undesirable’ people had been resettled from the annexed eastern territories. After that we have no more statistics, but there cannot have been substantial population movements.
⁴⁵
In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish inhabitants of the annexed territories who were not deported, but ‘concentrated’ in ghettos during 1940–1 and who, from the end of 1941 onwards, were to be murdered in the extermination camps.

Himmler assigned the ‘racial assessment’ of the people who were to be resettled, both Germans and Poles, to the Race and Settlement Main Office, which, because of its role in the examination of SS members and their wives, had accumulated years of experience in the sphere of ‘racial selection’, and, as a result of these new tasks, acquired considerable importance.
⁴⁶

*

The compulsory resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people required the creation of an elaborate organization. A ‘Central Office for Immigration’ (Einwandererzentralstelle = EWZ) was established in the middle of October 1939 on Heydrich’s orders, and from January 1940 onwards it was based in Ł
ó
ódź, with a number of branch offices. With the help of the RuSHA experts assigned to it, it undertook a ‘racial assessment’ of the ethnic Germans and decided where they were to be ‘settled’.
⁴⁷
It had a counterpart in the shape of the Central Office for Resettlement (Umwandererzentralstelle = UWZ) in Posen, also with several branch offices,
⁴⁸
which was responsible for the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the annexed Polish territories. The three Race and Settlement adviser units, which the RuSHA had sent to Poland at the start of the war, now formed SS Land Offices, which were run from the Central Land Office in Berlin. By the end of 1942 they had confiscated a total of 686,054 farms with 6,043,901 hectares of land, which amounted to 91.7 per cent of farms.
⁴⁹
Moreover, in March 1940 so-called SS settlement staffs were created to organize the expulsion of the indigenous population and the settlement of ethnic Germans in the various localities.
⁵⁰
These staffs were filled with former Selbstschutz leaders,
⁵¹
who had experience in exercising terror. Terror and resettlement policy were inextricably linked.

On 13 December 1939, on a visit to the transit camps in the Ł
ó
ódź district (on the previous day he had witnessed how people were gassed in a gas chamber), Himmler declared that the racial assessments were designed to prevent ‘mongrel types from emerging in the territories that are to be newly settled. I want to create a blond province.’
⁵²
On the same day he took advantage of an inspection of the EWZ in Ł
ó
ódź to comment on the racial classification of ‘returnees’, and ordered the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office to work out binding guidelines for this procedure. The results of the examination and assessment process were, according to Himmler, ‘of decisive importance for the fate of the individual and of the German east’. The work should be carried out ‘not bureaucratically but with generosity of spirit’. A careful distinction should be made in judging personal appearance between ‘physical and racial characteristics. The racial appearance of all members of the family should be assessed.’
⁵³

In response Pancke worked out guidelines for the ‘selection of people who are to be earmarked for the newly won eastern territories’, according to which there were four categories who came into consideration for this project: ethnic German returnees, indigenous ethnic Germans, Reich applicants for
settlement, as well as people whom the Reich Food Estate had already registered as applicants to become peasants.
⁵⁴
The head of the Clans Office (Sippenamt), Hofmann, had already issued ‘Instructions for Assessing the Suitability of Returnees’, which followed the SS’s principles for selection and divided people into four categories.
⁵⁵

Originally it was envisaged that only those who were classified in categories I and II would be settled in the east; anyone who was in category III was to be deported to the Old Reich and anyone in category IV would be deported to the country from where they came. However, on the occasion of a visit to Ł
ó
ódź in January 1940, Himmler gave instructions that people in category III were also to be settled in the east.
⁵⁶
As a result, the criteria for membership of this group were made stricter.
⁵⁷

During this visit Himmler also ordered that ‘those returnees placed in category IV are to be transferred to the Old Reich without exception [ . . . ] The returnees in categories I and II are to be settled in the new eastern Gaus without exception.’ He himself determined the size of farms to be allocated to the farmers in groups I to III.
⁵⁸

Any ‘returnees’ who were defined as ‘ethnically alien’ (for whom the special category IVf had been created) were to be sent to the General Government. In January Himmler ordered that each such ‘evacuation’ of ‘dubious ethnic Germans’ was to be submitted to him for approval.
⁵⁹
Those affected were obliged to await his decision in camps, ‘probably in Franconia’.
⁶⁰
Himmler also reserved for himself the decision on ‘applications for citizenship from those in categories I and II with professional occupations’.
⁶¹

As always when a project particularly interested him, Himmler concerned himself with the smallest details. When a form which had been sent to him for final evaluation had, in his view, not been filled in correctly, the RuSHA representative at the Central Office for Immigration in Ł
ó
ódź was instructed to remind his assessors that Himmler paid particular attention to ‘the information concerning body size, hair colour, colour of eyes, the mongol wrinkle, the epicanthus, slit eyes’.
⁶²

Himmler’s habit of reserving certain decisions for himself or of personally intervening in individual cases once again illustrates the arbitrary nature of the racial assessments that took place. They were not made on the basis of objective criteria but were basically determined by the value-judgement of the individual assessor, for whom the ‘overall impression’ not only of the individual subject but of the whole family being assessed was decisive.

From November 1939 to March 1940, to start with around 62,000 ethnic Germans from Latvia and Estonia were ‘transited’. During the winter they were followed by those being resettled from the eastern Polish territories occupied by the Soviet Union, 128,000 in all, followed by around 30,000 ethnic Germans from the General Government (the area round Chelm and Lublin), and 137,000 ethnic Germans from the Romanian territories annexed by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940 (Bessarabia and North Bukovina), to whom were added, at the request of the Romanian government, a further 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania. At the beginning of 1941 they were followed by 48,000 Lithuanian Germans, as well as 12,000 ethnic Germans who were subsequently being resettled from Estonia and Latvia. By the end of 1940 Himmler’s racial assessors had dealt with half-a-million, by the end of 1944 more than a million ethnic German ‘returnees’.
⁶³

However, the results of the assessment of the returnees by SS assessors turned out to be far poorer than anticipated, given the high expectations that had been placed on the racial standards of the ethnic Germans who were being resettled. The assessment of the ‘racial value’ of the Estonian and Latvian Germans was all in all a positive one: of 55,600 people over 6 years of age, somewhere between 60.1 and 74.4 per cent were placed in the categories I and II and were thereby considered ‘suitable for settlement’.
⁶⁴
But of the ethnic Germans from Volhynia and Galicia, more than 45,500 people in all, only 44 per cent met the criteria for placement in groups I and II.
⁶⁵

The following comment by a racial assessor can be read as a declaration of bankruptcy for a population policy based on racial ideology:

In racial terms the average is a more or less balanced mixture of the Falian race with various elements of the main European races, of which the East Baltic race represents a high proportion. If strict criteria had been applied then the proportion of families in category IV would have been considerably larger. It was only as a result of repeated and urgent requests by the senior officials that many families on the borderline were categorized as III.
⁶⁶

The SS assessors also assigned the majority of ethnic Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dobrudscha to group III.
⁶⁷
But this figure may also have been the result of subsequent adjustment, for at a meeting there was mention of a figure of between 40 and 60 per cent being in group IV.
⁶⁸