My time spent in Poland, specifically Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, got me thinking about Nazi policy in Poland during the Second World War. This is one of my main historical interests and is largely the reason for my having traveled to Poland in the first place.
Because of its Jewish population and location (in the way of the Nazis' desired expansion), present-day Poland was the location of all six extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek). Its non-Jewish population was also ravaged, as they were deported from their homes and requisitioned for forced labor. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave an order that the entire city was to be destroyed and its population slaughtered: indeed, 85% of the city was left in ruins and 200,000 people were killed.
German policy toward the Poles differed from their policies toward the nations it subsequently conquered in Western Europe, and in many ways presaged what was to come after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Gestapo had drawn up the names of 60,000 prominent Polish intellectuals, professionals, priests, etc. - these were hunted down and put against the wall. In a particularly infamous event, some 180 professors of Krakow's prestigious Jagiellonian University were arrested in one swoop. They subsequently died in Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps in the German Reich.
Because of its Jewish population and location (in the way of the Nazis' desired expansion), present-day Poland was the location of all six extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek). Its non-Jewish population was also ravaged, as they were deported from their homes and requisitioned for forced labor. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave an order that the entire city was to be destroyed and its population slaughtered: indeed, 85% of the city was left in ruins and 200,000 people were killed.
German policy toward the Poles differed from their policies toward the nations it subsequently conquered in Western Europe, and in many ways presaged what was to come after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Gestapo had drawn up the names of 60,000 prominent Polish intellectuals, professionals, priests, etc. - these were hunted down and put against the wall. In a particularly infamous event, some 180 professors of Krakow's prestigious Jagiellonian University were arrested in one swoop. They subsequently died in Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps in the German Reich.
Where did the Poles stand in Nazi theory? Hitler himself did not seem particularly interested in Poland or the Poles until the late 1930s, when he and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop tried unsuccessfully to extort the Poles into giving the Germans some of their newly-won lands. In the aftermath of the First World War, Germany had lost a swathe of its former territories, known as the Danzig Corridor, that sliced through Germany and gave the Poles access to the sea at Danzig (Gdansk in Polish), which was declared a Free City by the League of Nations. When the Poles did not agree to cede the lands to Hitler, the Nazi leader and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels vented their fury on the nation. They concentrated on Polish discrimination against ethnic Germans living in Poland (which was actually occurring, although Goebbels greatly exaggerated it). Further, Poland was necessary for Germanic settlement and as a launching pad for future aggression against the Soviet Union.
Hitler, with utter contempt for the Western Allies, who had not raised a finger as he renewed German conscription and rearmament, remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and finally swallowed up all of Czechoslovakia, decided to invade Poland, assured (especially by Ribbentrop) that France and Britain would not intervene. When they declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Hitler was furious; his desire for a limited war to expand German Lebensraum had now become a war involving the great European powers.
He did have an ace in the hole, however. On August 23, 1939, von Ribbentrop had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin's Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The two nations agreed not to fight one another and also, in a secret protocol, split Poland and the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia) between them. Following this, on September 17, 1939 the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. The Polish army fought bravely but futilely against the two great powers. While Britain and France had declared war, they did nothing to help.
The Nazis' administration was, in true Nazi fashion, fairly confusing, with various overlapping power centers. Two areas were annexed to the Reich: the Wartheland (today's Western Poland, centered in Posen) and Danzig-West Prussia. They were under the rule of, respectively, Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, two Old Fighters of the Nazi Party who loathed each other. The area between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers became known as the General Government, with its capital at Krakow, and was put under the leadership of Hans Frank, who ruled like a medieval despot from Wawel Castle. He clashed repeatedly with the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who reported directly to Himmler.
The Germans began almost immediately to send in Germans from the Baltic States to the Wartheland; room was made for them by shoving out the Poles and the Jews, who wound up in the General Government, much to Frank's chagrin. It was not yet known what would be done with the Jews: major ghettoes were set up in Lodz and Warsaw, into which hundreds of thousands were crammed, first to be concentrated for deportation to somewhere near Lublin, then to Madagascar (an absurd idea that, nonetheless, prompted serious thought in top Nazi circles), and then, finally, somewhere to the "East" after an invasion of the Soviet Union. At this point, Jews were being shot out of hand, their synagogues were burned to the ground, and Jewish men were humiliated by German soldiers who grinned as they cut their beards and sidecurls. However, at this time, there was no plan for their systematic extermination. The Lodz ghetto actually became productive, but overpopulation led to disease and starvation, and the Jews, concentrated to eventually go somewhere, were stuck after the failures of the Lublin settlement plan, the Madagascar plan, and of the stalled invasion in the Soviet Union, which petered out before Moscow in December 1941. What was to be done?
Arthur Greiser, the hardline Gauleiter (regional leader) of the Wartheland, in whose territory Lodz was located, thought it best to have them murdered. Jews were sent from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno, not far from the city, where they were gathered into a manor house, made to undress, and loaded into vans. The back of the vans were hermetically sealed and the vehicles' exhaust was rerouted into them, killing the Jews via carbon monoxide poisoning. The van drove to a wooded location nearby and the dead Jews were buried in mass graves. This was the first of the death camps. It was established to "solve" a purely local "problem" in the Wartheland. This is a microcosm of the Nazi decision-making apparatus, which went as follows: Hitler gave the general parameters, but local leaders were given leeway in how to get it done. Hitler's role throughout the Second World War was always as a radical prod, as was the case with Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. When the latter two visited Einsatzgruppen killing sites in the East, invariably more radically murderous policies would follow.
Himmler appointed one of his most loyal and brutal henchmen, Odilo Globocnik, as the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of the Lublin district. The Lublin district contained Zamosc, a lovely Renaissance city southeast of the city of Lublin, the countryside around which contains fertile soil. Zamosc was to be the centerpiece of the German "warrior farmers" and was originally to be named Himmlerstadt. ("Himmler City"). Globocnik needed to make room for these "warrior farmers". The Poles and the Jews needed to go. At first he set about putting the Jews to work in building roads and entirely useless defensive military fortifications. After a meeting with Himmler, construction began on the Belzec death camp in November 1941. Stationary gas chambers disguised as showers were put to work here, building on the system used in Germany's euthanasia program.
Belzec was located in a remote location on the Lvov-Lublin railway. Jews were packed into trains from regions throughout Poland, especially the Lublin district but also from Krakow and elsewhere. Upon arrival, they were told that they had arrived at a transit camp on the way to a destination further east, and that they had to shower and delouse before continuing their journey. They were made to undress and women's hair was shorn. Then, naked and terrified, they were chased down the Schlauch ("tube") to the awaiting gas chambers. 600,000 or so Jews were murdered at Belzec. Another camp, in Sobibor, opened its doors in May 1942 and yet another, Treblinka, the graveyard of the Jews of Warsaw, in July 1942. They operated largely on the initial blueprint of Belzec, with Treblinka the most advanced of the three camps, which together operated under the aegis "Operation Reinhard," commanded by Globocnik. Altogether, these three camps killed some 1.7 million Jews by October 1943.
Today, there are hardly any physical remnants of these camps, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. There was not much to them. They were "primitive" relative to those much larger sites, and they had but one purpose: to murder the Jews. Some Jews were kept on hand to help deceive further victims, to cut their hair, to serve as tailors, shoemakers, maids, etc for the SS, and to remove the dead from the gas chambers, remove any valuables (including ripping gold teeth out of the corpses' mouths and searching vaginas for anything hidden), and at first bury, and later burn, them. Because these were pure murder factories, unlike Birkenau and Majdanek, which had slave labor purposes as well, no extensive infrastructure was needed and the camps' buildings were destroyed and trees were planted. In the case of Treblinka, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build a house for a Ukrainian guard, who was told to inform any inquirers that he had lived there throughout the war and that nothing had happened in the area.
While all of this was happening to the Jews of Poland, and abroad, the Nazis continued to deport Poles from their homesteads and drafted them into forced labor in the Reich. Here, they were subject to the most draconian of punishments: nearly any step "out of line" (which was defined very, very generously) warranted the death penalty. For example, obsessed as the Nazis were with race, if a Polish forced laborer had any sexual relations with a German woman, he would be executed. The Poles were treated little better than animals, which is how they were regarded by the Nazis.
This brings us to the main difference between the persecutory policies vis-a-vis the Jews and the Poles that were pursued by the Nazis. The Poles, as Slavs, were held in contempt as an inferior race that had no further purpose than to serve their German masters. They were to be kept uneducated and employed in industries that did not require much technical skill, such as road-building. They were to be fed, if at all, well after their German "superiors." The Nazis did not hesitate to shoot or to hang them at the slightest provocation, which is attested to by the massive death toll of the Polish population during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Jews suffered a very specific fate, which separated them from not only the Poles, but other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals.
The Nazis were obsessed with the Jews. Their hatred for them is astonishing for any reasoned, educated person. The frequency with which Hitler and Goebbels fulminated against the Jews in their private utterances is remarkable, and no other group of people came up nearly as much. In Hitler's political testament, dictated to Martin Bormann a mere days before the Führer's suicide, he rails against the "Jewish conspiracy" that he had tried his damnedest to fight. The Jews were the "poisoner" of all peoples. Their extermination is hinted at and justified for the defense of European civilization. Anti-Semitism was the linchpin of National Socialist ideological thought. The Slavs could be brushed aside as an inferior civilization but the Jews were seen as the only competing power structure that could compete with the Aryan race for global domination. While Hitler admired the English, he believed fervently that they were held in the grip of Jewish puppeteers, as were the U.S. (which Hitler held in contempt) and the Soviets (which Hitler loathed as the center of the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.") The hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of Hitler's worldview, which drove him from the beginning of his political career in Munich in 1919 to the final, pathetic days in his bunker in April 1945. They needed to be exterminated because, otherwise, they would triumph over the Aryan race. Indeed, Hitler saw the German defeat in both world wars as Jewish victories. The Nazis did not feel contemptuous of the Jews: they hated them with an inexplicable passion and feared them. While Hitler and Himmler thought very little of Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals, they were not the target of a systematic, obsessive project, as the Jews were, to wipe them off the face of the earth.
Himmler appointed one of his most loyal and brutal henchmen, Odilo Globocnik, as the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of the Lublin district. The Lublin district contained Zamosc, a lovely Renaissance city southeast of the city of Lublin, the countryside around which contains fertile soil. Zamosc was to be the centerpiece of the German "warrior farmers" and was originally to be named Himmlerstadt. ("Himmler City"). Globocnik needed to make room for these "warrior farmers". The Poles and the Jews needed to go. At first he set about putting the Jews to work in building roads and entirely useless defensive military fortifications. After a meeting with Himmler, construction began on the Belzec death camp in November 1941. Stationary gas chambers disguised as showers were put to work here, building on the system used in Germany's euthanasia program.
Belzec was located in a remote location on the Lvov-Lublin railway. Jews were packed into trains from regions throughout Poland, especially the Lublin district but also from Krakow and elsewhere. Upon arrival, they were told that they had arrived at a transit camp on the way to a destination further east, and that they had to shower and delouse before continuing their journey. They were made to undress and women's hair was shorn. Then, naked and terrified, they were chased down the Schlauch ("tube") to the awaiting gas chambers. 600,000 or so Jews were murdered at Belzec. Another camp, in Sobibor, opened its doors in May 1942 and yet another, Treblinka, the graveyard of the Jews of Warsaw, in July 1942. They operated largely on the initial blueprint of Belzec, with Treblinka the most advanced of the three camps, which together operated under the aegis "Operation Reinhard," commanded by Globocnik. Altogether, these three camps killed some 1.7 million Jews by October 1943.
Today, there are hardly any physical remnants of these camps, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. There was not much to them. They were "primitive" relative to those much larger sites, and they had but one purpose: to murder the Jews. Some Jews were kept on hand to help deceive further victims, to cut their hair, to serve as tailors, shoemakers, maids, etc for the SS, and to remove the dead from the gas chambers, remove any valuables (including ripping gold teeth out of the corpses' mouths and searching vaginas for anything hidden), and at first bury, and later burn, them. Because these were pure murder factories, unlike Birkenau and Majdanek, which had slave labor purposes as well, no extensive infrastructure was needed and the camps' buildings were destroyed and trees were planted. In the case of Treblinka, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build a house for a Ukrainian guard, who was told to inform any inquirers that he had lived there throughout the war and that nothing had happened in the area.
While all of this was happening to the Jews of Poland, and abroad, the Nazis continued to deport Poles from their homesteads and drafted them into forced labor in the Reich. Here, they were subject to the most draconian of punishments: nearly any step "out of line" (which was defined very, very generously) warranted the death penalty. For example, obsessed as the Nazis were with race, if a Polish forced laborer had any sexual relations with a German woman, he would be executed. The Poles were treated little better than animals, which is how they were regarded by the Nazis.
This brings us to the main difference between the persecutory policies vis-a-vis the Jews and the Poles that were pursued by the Nazis. The Poles, as Slavs, were held in contempt as an inferior race that had no further purpose than to serve their German masters. They were to be kept uneducated and employed in industries that did not require much technical skill, such as road-building. They were to be fed, if at all, well after their German "superiors." The Nazis did not hesitate to shoot or to hang them at the slightest provocation, which is attested to by the massive death toll of the Polish population during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Jews suffered a very specific fate, which separated them from not only the Poles, but other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals.
The Nazis were obsessed with the Jews. Their hatred for them is astonishing for any reasoned, educated person. The frequency with which Hitler and Goebbels fulminated against the Jews in their private utterances is remarkable, and no other group of people came up nearly as much. In Hitler's political testament, dictated to Martin Bormann a mere days before the Führer's suicide, he rails against the "Jewish conspiracy" that he had tried his damnedest to fight. The Jews were the "poisoner" of all peoples. Their extermination is hinted at and justified for the defense of European civilization. Anti-Semitism was the linchpin of National Socialist ideological thought. The Slavs could be brushed aside as an inferior civilization but the Jews were seen as the only competing power structure that could compete with the Aryan race for global domination. While Hitler admired the English, he believed fervently that they were held in the grip of Jewish puppeteers, as were the U.S. (which Hitler held in contempt) and the Soviets (which Hitler loathed as the center of the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.") The hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of Hitler's worldview, which drove him from the beginning of his political career in Munich in 1919 to the final, pathetic days in his bunker in April 1945. They needed to be exterminated because, otherwise, they would triumph over the Aryan race. Indeed, Hitler saw the German defeat in both world wars as Jewish victories. The Nazis did not feel contemptuous of the Jews: they hated them with an inexplicable passion and feared them. While Hitler and Himmler thought very little of Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals, they were not the target of a systematic, obsessive project, as the Jews were, to wipe them off the face of the earth.
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