Heinrich Himmler : A Life (80 page)

What is more, although the ‘racial assessment’ of the ethnic Germans produced such disappointing results, there were not enough farms available
for the ethnic Germans who had been selected as being ‘of good racial quality’, despite the ruthless expulsion of the indigenous population. By the end of 1940 the settlement staffs had allocated farms in the Warthegau to more or less all the 5,000 Baltic Germans with farming backgrounds (the majority of ethnic Germans from this region lived in urban centres) and also to more than half the Volhynian, Galician, and Narev Germans from eastern Poland and also to those from Chelm and Lublin, in other words, the vast majority of the agrarian population from these territories. However, the more members of the indigenous population they expelled, the more the planners ran the risk that these measures would affect people who might in fact have been categorized as ‘capable of being Germanized’ (and indeed, after the opening up of the General Government to German settlement in the summer of 1941, the search began for such ‘Germanizable’ people among those who had been ‘de-settled’ in 1939 and 1940).

At the beginning of 1941, however, it became clear that the Poles could no longer be expelled from the annexed territories to the General Government in such large numbers, because of the pressures on space created by the mobilization of the Wehrmacht for the Russian campaign, a situation that was to persist after the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union. This meant that there was now hardly any chance of accommodating the next wave of resettlement of over 200,000 ethnic Germans from Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Dobrudscha in farms in the annexed territories. By April 1941 there were already 275,000 settlers stuck in VoMi reception camps, 228,000 of them in the Old Reich, representing more than half the people who had hitherto been resettled.
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In March 1942 Himmler’s population experts reckoned that, of the total of 510,000 people who were being resettled, only barely 287,000 had been ‘settled’ in the annexed eastern territories and 93,000 in the Old Reich (most of them housed in provisional accommodation). That meant there were still 131,000 people in the camps.
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In view of this situation the SS leadership had the idea of employing young ethnic German girls as housemaids in the Old Reich, especially in large families or working for people connected with the SS leadership. Frau Himmler herself received household staff from Volhynia. In the summer 1940 Karl Brandt reported to Koppe that the Reichsführer’s wife—who, as we have seen, generally placed heavy demands on her servants—appeared to be ‘satisfied with the girls’, but required ‘another girl because one of the girls wants to marry soon’.
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Moreover, according to Brandt, ‘the Reichsführer-SS
[ . . . ] requires a second girl, who must be sent as soon as possible for a well-known family’. But that was not the end of it: ‘Furthermore, SS-Gruppenführer Wolff requests a cook and a housemaid for SS-Sturmbannführer Sachs in Schweinfurt.’ It is clear from the same letter that the Cosmic Ice Theory researcher in the Ahnenerbe, Scultetus, also wanted to be provided with servants. Wilhelm Koppe was able to meet all five requests.
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And the numbers of those who were interested in acquiring servants grew: in May 1941 Himmler asked Greifelt ‘to supply 12 ethnic German girls for the SS sanatorium Hohenlychen and three more girls who are to be employed by members of the Reichsführer’s family’.
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All the measures for settling ethnic Germans described hitherto have referred to the annexed eastern territories, the enlarged ‘living-space’ of the Nazi Reich. By contrast, at that time the General Government was envisaged in the minds of the planners as simply an area in which to dump people who were ‘inferior’. In summer 1940 Himmler included the General Government for the first time in his plans for Germanization in another way, and in the form of an experiment strictly limited to the SS. He assigned to Globocnik the task of establishing what the latter termed a model ‘military settlement’. Himmler decided that this type of settlement should be given the name ‘SS and police base’ (SS- und Polizeistützpunkt), and on 2 November ordered Globocnik to establish six such bases. In March 1941 the latter had transformed six former rural estates into bases. They were administered by SS members, and when necessary could be occupied by police units.
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At this point it was not planned to turn them into core areas for substantial settlement projects.

Apart from racial assessment of ethnic German returnees, ‘racial assessment’ of the indigenous population of the annexed Polish territories also formed part of the duties of the SS. On 25 May 1940 Himmler gave Hitler a memorandum with the title ‘A Few Thoughts on the Treatment of the Ethnically Alien Population in the East’. Himmler’s basic idea was that ‘in the east we must endeavour to recognize and foster as many individual groups as possible’, in other words, ‘to divide them up into as many
segments and splinter groups as possible’. For ‘only by dissolving this ethnic mishmash of 15 million people in the General Government and 8 million in the eastern provinces will we be able to carry out the racial screening process that must form the basis on which we can fish out the racially valuable people from this mishmash, bring them to Germany and assimilate them there’.

Within four or five years, ‘for example, the term “Kaschubian” will be unknown because there will no longer be a Kaschubian people’. ‘I hope to see the term “Jew”, Himmler continued, ‘completely eliminated through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some colony’; and that it will be possible, ‘over a slightly longer period [ . . . ] to ensure the disappearance of the ethnic categories of Ukrainians, Gorales, and Lemkes from our territory’. The same should also apply, ‘making allowances for the larger area involved, to the Poles’.

A key to solving this problem was the ‘question of schools’. The non-German population in the east should have only elementary schools with four classes and no schools at a higher level. The elementary schools should simply teach: ‘Basic counting up to 500 at the most, how to write one’s name, and that it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans and to be honest, hardworking, and well-behaved. I consider it unnecessary to teach reading.’ Parents who wanted to give their children a better education would have to apply to the Higher SS and Police Leader, whose decision would be primarily determined by racial considerations:

If we recognize such a child as being of our blood then the parents will be informed that the child will be placed in a school in Germany and will remain in Germany indefinitely. However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people on the grounds that it is fundamentally un-German and impossible, then this method is the kindest and the best one.

Himmler sketched the future as follows:

After these measures have been systematically implemented over the next decade, the population of the General Government will inevitably consist of an inferior remnant, which will include all the people who have been deported to the eastern provinces as well as from those parts of the German Reich which contain the same racial and human type (for example, the parts containing the Sorbs and Wends). This population will be available as a leaderless labouring class [ . . . ] it will get more to eat and have more from life than under Polish rule and, while lacking culture itself, under the strict, consistent, and fair leadership of the German people will be
called upon to participate in their eternal cultural achievements and monuments. Indeed, in view of the amount of hard labour required to produce them, it may even be indispensable.
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Himmler noted that Hitler had endorsed the memorandum in principle, and had agreed that it should be given to a small group of top functionaries for them to read as a guideline authorized by him, but that it should not be handed out generally.
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Himmler had already developed two Germanization programmes. Since, according to the memorandum, the General Government was to be reserved for ‘inferiors’, these applied only to the annexed territories. In the first place, there was the ‘re-Germanization’ of those Poles who, because of their ‘positive’ racial characteristics, were to be excluded from the mass of people who were to be deported to the General Government. Secondly, there was the tracking down of ‘people of German origin’ in the annexed Polish territories through the procedure of racial screening, which acquired the title ‘Ethnic German List’ (
Volksliste
).

Re-Germanization had the dual function of, ‘on the one hand, utilizing racially valuable families for the German programme of labour mobilization and, on the other hand, removing from the Polish nation those Nordic families from which, experience has shown, the Polish leadership is predominantly drawn’.
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In order to carry out this task, Himmler, in his role as Settlement Commissar, had already established a special office of the Race and Settlement Main Office in the Ł
ó
ódź branch of the Central Office for Resettlement [UWZ] in March 1940.
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Since the summer of 1940 a total of around 30,000–35,000 Poles had been re-Germanized.
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This figure was far below Hitler’s and Himmler’s guidelines. They had originally envisaged up to a million Poles ‘capable of being re-Germanized’, a figure that matched calculations produced by the NSDAP’s Office for Racial Policy.
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In October 1940 Himmler reduced the target to around 100,000, and justified this by the need for careful ‘racial selection’.
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In May 1941 he explained his position once again to the Higher SS and Police Leaders based in Poland:

People can’t be Germanized by the party taking them in hand and politically indoctrinating them, for the German administration and the German military have been trying this kind of thing in West Prussia and Posen for over a hundred years in a different form, with the result that during the period of German rule people served as Germans and were German citizens and during the period of
Polish rule they served as Poles and were Poles. This old method has historically been proved to be the wrong one.

Germanization of the eastern provinces can be done only on the basis of racial theory and that is by screening the population of these provinces. The racially valuable people, who in terms of their bloodline can be absorbed into our national body without causing damage (in some cases even with positive results), must be transferred to the old Reich as individual families. The other group, who on racial grounds cannot be absorbed, will remain in the country for as long as we need its labour for the development of the provinces and will then, in the course of the next 5–10 years, without exception or mercy be got rid of to the General Government, which is the place for people for whom on racial grounds Germany has no use.
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Ill. 19.
Between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1941 Himmler regarded settlement policy in Poland as his most important task. He not only pushed these plans forward to a megalomaniacal extent but involved himself in every detail from the installation of showers in settlement houses to the criteria for racial examinations. Here he is explaining an exhibit at the exhibition ‘Construction and Planning in the East’ to the head of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP, Philipp Bouhler, Reich Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess, and Heydrich.

In view of the slow results, in the middle of 1940 Himmler ordered the Race and Settlement Main Office to look for re-Germanizable families also among the Polish agricultural workers who had come to the Reich after the outbreak of war and whom Himmler had been obliged to let in ‘un-screened’ because of the shortage of time.
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The aim was to select several thousand who would be able to live in Germany over the long term.
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As far as the introduction of the Ethnic German List was concerned, Reich Governor Arthur Greiser had already begun the process in 1939 by introducing a list in the Warthegau, for which, however, the decisive criteria were political and cultural, a line that was clearly contrary to the racial policy of the SS.
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On 12 September 1940 Himmler issued his own guidelines for an ethnic German list in the annexed Polish territories based on the principle that any ‘attempt at a general Germanization of the eastern provinces that is not based on racial principles will, in the end, lead to failure and to the loss of the eastern provinces’.

Once again Himmler envisaged four categories: groups I and II would include those who were clearly categorized as Germans; these people would be given German citizenship. Group III was intended for those who, ‘over the years, had established links with the Poles’ but nevertheless had the ‘racial potential’ to become ‘full members of the German national community’. This group would receive German citizenship, but without the privilege of being a ‘Reich citizen’. However, this had little practical importance since the status of Reich Citizen, which had been introduced by the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, was never precisely defined and in practice never materialized. Ethnic Germans who had ‘thrown in their lot with the Poles politically’ belonged to group IV and received German citizenship only on a provisional basis. Members of groups III and IV were obliged to move to the Old Reich.
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