5

Poland: The Nazi Laboratory of Genocide

Introduction

As for the Jews, their danger is seven times greater. Wherever Hitler’s foot treads there is no hope for the Jewish people.

CHAIM KAPLAN, Diary Entry September 1, 1939, Warsaw¹

When the German Army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the plans and systems that would become the Final Solution were not envisioned, let alone agreed upon by most Nazi leaders, but, as Kaplan noted with foreboding, there could be no positive outcome for Jews. What the German occupation of Poland became, however, was a learning laboratory for those involved in the larger Nazi genocidal project and the Holocaust in the East. For the first time, the Nazis had occupied eastern territory. They had taken the first steps toward realizing his vision of Lebensraum in the East with the conquest of the part of Poland allocated to Germany by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. While the Soviets sought to reimagine their new territories, the Nazis did the same in theirs. The Nazis divided the western half of Poland into several sections: incorporated and occupied territories. Incorporated territories deemed most historically (and ethnically) “German” immediately became part of the Greater Reich. These were East Prussia, Danzig-West Prussia, Upper Silesia, and the Warthegau. The Nazis designated the remaining portion, the Generalgovernment, an occupied territory that might one day be incorporated into the Reich proper. In the meantime, it would function as a sort of colony under the control of Hitler’s former lawyer, Hans Frank. In Poland, we see the first instances of the mass killing of Jews and unwanted Slavs, the expropriation of property for use by the Greater Reich, and attempts by local Nazi leaders to implement anti-Jewish policy. This often meant conflict between administrators as local considerations clashed with ideological priorities. We must keep in mind that, for all the virulent Nazi antisemitism, German Jews represented less than 0.75 percent of the population (roughly 505,000 out of a population of 67 million.) By 1939, that number had decreased by half through emigration. When the Nazis took their Polish territories, they became responsible for over 1.7 million Jews, not to mention Ukrainians and Poles. The “Jewish Question” and Nazi racial policy ceased to be abstract concepts and became pressing reality.² So, too, did notions of “Germanization” and the daunting prospect of demographic engineering facing the Nazi conquerors. This chapter will discuss the invasion and occupation of Poland up to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It explores the fits and starts with which Nazi policy toward Jews and other “inferior” people proceeded. It briefly examines the initial stages of ghettoization, which will be covered in depth later. Finally, it reveals the “lessons” learned by the Nazis at the local and national level and how they influenced later anti-Jewish policy. Indeed, some of the cast of characters introduced here become key figures later, in part, due to their experience in Poland.

“Have No Pity:” The German Invasion of Poland

Destruction of Poland in the foreground. The aim is elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line: Even if war should break out in the West, the destruction of Poland shall be the primary objective . . . In starting and making a war, not the Right is what matters but Victory. Have no pity. Brutal attitude. 80 million people shall get what is their right. Their existence has to be secured. The strongest has the Right. Greatest severity.

ADOLF HITLER, August 22, 1939³

Sometime during the night of August 31, 1939, failed mechanic turned SD Agent Alfred Naujoks drove with five or six other men to a small radio station flanked by two tall radio antennas near the small town of Gleiwitz on the German-Polish border. On Heydrich’s orders, they arranged the dead bodies of German concentration camp prisoners from Dachau (callously code-named “canned goods”) around the station. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller supplied the bodies that were dressed in Polish army uniforms. Naujoks broadcast a short message in which the “Poles” called for confrontation with the Germans. Then he and his men then fired several pistol shots and left.⁴ This “attack” by Poland served as Hitler’s pretense for war.

The following morning the German Army or Wehrmacht crossed the German-Polish border. Echoing his feelings on the fate of Poland above, Hitler had informed the commander in chief of the German Army, Walther von Brauchitsch in March that “Poland would have to be so thoroughly beaten down that, during the next few decades, she need not be taken into account as a political factor.”⁵ At 4 am on the 1st, three million German soldiers, 400,000 horses, 200,000 vehicles, and 5,000 trains hurled themselves at Poland.⁶ The Poles fought back with what one Waffen-SS officer called “enormous tenacity.”⁷ The innovative German Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics based on fast and deep combined arms assaults overwhelmed the poorly equipped Polish Army and Air Force. Though an oft-repeated story, Polish cavalry only engaged German tanks twice and not on purpose (and the Germans had their fair share of horse-mounted units.)⁸ Some Polish reactions were less than honorable as they fell upon ethnic Germans living among them, killing thousands. The most egregious of these was in the town of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) where Poles murdered several thousand ethnic Germans.

From Berlin, CBS Correspondent William Shirer noted that “there is no excitement here . . . no hurrahs, no wild cheering, no throwing of flowers . . . It is a far grimmer German people that we see here tonight than we saw last night.”⁹ This was not August 1914. Ironically, the capitals of France and Britain buzzed with indignation and promises to support their Polish allies. However, tough talk and a small French advance into Germany were the sum total of Allied guarantees of Polish security. The Allies provided no tangible support. The Poles fought and fell alone, their fate firmly decided by the Soviet invasion on September 17.

It soon became clear that this war would be more brutal than perhaps anticipated. Some Nazi propaganda had filtered into the ranks of ordinary soldiers. After the beginning of the attack, the commanding general of the Wehrmacht issued a pamphlet to his soldiers. “The German soldier,” he wrote, “in the occupied territories is a representative of the German Reich and its power. He should think and act as such. [ . . . ] Each insult and each attack on the German Wehrmacht and the German people should be dealt with through the harshest means . . . It is not necessary to mention how the soldiers are to behave toward the Jews.”¹⁰

FIGURE 5Local Jews are arrested in Poland. Note Wehrmacht photographer in foreground. Ustrony/Opatow, Poland, September 1939.

Source: Bundesarchiv.

The behavior of at least some soldiers bore out that the intent of these instructions was clear. The Army began almost immediately to violate the most basic laws of war for, in the eyes of many, these racially inferior people did not count. After the battle for the town of Ciepelow, regular German soldiers machine-gunned three hundred captured Polish soldiers.¹¹ German military brutality was not limited to combatants. Four days into the invasion, in Częstochowa, German soldiers murdered more than three hundred civilians in reprisal for what was likely friendly fire. Luftwaffe planes frequently strafed civilians. One Polish officer recalled a teacher trying to lead her class to shelter when a German plane attacked. “The children scattered like sparrows . . . but on the field some crumpled and lifeless bundles of bright clothing remained.” He concluded that “the nature of the new war was already clear.”¹² That officer, Wladislaw Anders, would go on to command a Polish army fighting for the Soviets against the Nazis. Undisciplined looting also accompanied the invasion. A Jewish schoolboy in Łodz´ recalled that “Every few days there would be a knock on the door and invariably there would be a German soldier, often with a Volksdeutsche (a Pole of German origin) with a swastika on his lapel, and they would simply come and rob: the wedding ring from my mother’s finger, look into a cupboard and take whatever they wanted.”¹³ A Pole remembered a German officer looting the neighbors’ house of “radios, mattresses, comforters, carpets” and taking the family’s only down quilt.¹⁴

Warsaw surrendered on September 28. All organized resistance ceased by October 5. After an air raid on Krzemieniec, a Pole observed a lone Jew mourning his wife, killed by the bombs. “There is no God,” he screamed,” Hitler and the bombs are the only gods! There is no grace and pity in the world!”¹⁵ The Polish people, Jew and non-Jew alike, would soon discover just how prophetic this lamentation was.

Decapitation: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland

I hear of events from the “colonization” of the east that frighten me.

Diary Entry, Commanding General of Army Group North, FEODOR VON BOCK, 1939¹⁶

Accompanying the general brutality of the military invasion was a more calculated organ of violence: the Einsatzgruppen (EG) or “operational groups.” Von Bock’s frightening events are the murders they carried out. These small groups of Security Service (SD) personnel had deployed in Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia a year later. Then, their task had been to secure sensitive material, set up an initial SD presence, and locate potential enemies of the Nazis. The Einsatzgruppen that entered Poland in September 1939 were vastly expanded in size and mission.

Five Einsatzgruppen (I-V) were initially established for the Polish campaign, though this number eventually expanded to seven, with the inclusion of EG VI and an Einsatzgruppe für besondere Verwendung (EG z.b.V.) or EG for special assignment. Each EG was made up of smaller Einsatzkommandos (EKs). The approximately three thousand of the EG came from the three German police organizations: Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei or Kripo), Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo), and the intelligence service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD).

The choice of leadership was much less haphazard. Twenty-one commanders came from leading Gestapo offices in Germany. These leaders represented the “the cream of the crop in Himmler’s circle of executive leaders.”¹⁷ Devout National Socialists, a third of them were World War I veterans and almost all had experience in the right-wing Freikorps.¹⁸ They were also surprisingly well educated: fifteen of twenty-five Einsatzgrupppen and Einsatzkommando leaders held PhDs in law or the humanities.¹⁹

TABLE 3Einsatzgruppen units and initial commanders deployed to Poland, September 1939.

Unit	Commander(s)
Einsatzgruppe I	SS-Standartenführer Bruno Streckenbach
Einsatzkommando 1/I	SS-Sturmbannführer Ludwig Hahn
Einsatzkommando 2/I	SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Müller
Einsatzkommando 3/I	SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Hasselberg
Einsatzkommando 3/I	SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Brunner
Einsatzgruppe II	SS-Obersturmbannführer Emanuel Schäfer
Einsatzkommando 1/II	SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Sens
Einsatzkommando 2/II	SS-Sturmbannführer Karl-Heinz Rux
Einsatzgruppe III	SS-Obersturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Hans Fischer
Einsatzkommando 1/III	SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Scharpwinkel
Einsatzkommando 2/III	SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Liphardt
Einsatzgruppe IV	SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger (Oct 1939)
Einsatzkommando 1/IV	SS-Sturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Helmut Bischoff
Einsatzkommando 2/IV	SS-Sturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Walter Hammer
Einsatzgruppe V	SS-Standartenfürer Ernst Damzog
Einsatzkommando 1/V	SS-Sturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Heinz Gräfe
Einsatzkommando 2/V	SS-Sturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Robert Schefe
Einsatzkommando 3/V	SS-Sturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Walter Albath
Einsatzgruppe VI	SS-Oberführer Erich Naumann
Einsatzkommando 1/VI	SS-Sturmbannführer Franz Sommer
Einsatzkommando 2/VI	SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Flesch
Einsatzgruppe z. B.V	SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch and SS-Oberfürer Otto Rasch
Einsatzkommando 16 (recruited from ethnic Germans)	SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Tröger

The mission of these groups was inextricably Intertwined with Nazi plans for Poland. Hitler and his leading subordinates never recognized Poland as a legitimate state, seeing it as an aberration of the Versailles treaty and in the historical context of its many dissolutions. Hitler wrote in his 1928 second book that “The ethnic state, in contrast, could under absolutely no circumstances annex Poles with the intention of turning them into Germans one day.” It would be necessary to “isolate” or “have them [Poles] removed entirely.”²⁰ On March 25, 1939, Hitler told his generals that, “Poland would have to be so thoroughly beaten down that, during the next few decades, she need not be taken into account as a political factor.”²¹ Speaking later, a Nazi administrator called his area of Poland “the first colonial territory of the German nation.”²² Moreover, he emphasized “that this area remains firmly under German control, that the backbone of the Poles remains broken for all time and that never again can there be even the slightest resistance from this area to German Reich policy.”²³ The goal of removing any and all potential resistance drove the Einsatzgruppen in their murderous activities in Poland.

The Einsatzgruppen executed Operation Tannenberg (named after a great German World War I victory). Tannenberg demanded the decapitation of Polish leadership, intelligentsia, and anyone deemed a potential resister. Highly mobile EGs followed closely behind military units, carrying out their deadly tasks. Here, the ideological goals of the SS and the military coincided. The Wehrmacht suffered from an almost pathological fear of armed civilian resistance behind the lines and appreciated the help securing those areas. To this end, the SS coordinated with the German Army. In an agreement of July 31, 1939, the army High Command (OKH) confirmed that “the mission of the Security Police Einsatzkommandos is to combat all elements hostile to the Reich and to Germans in enemy territory to the rear of the combat troops.”²⁴ This suited the military just fine.

Einsatzgruppen commands themselves were to “perform certain ethnic-political tasks in the occupied territory on behalf of the Führer and in accordance with his instructions.” What were these tasks? The military informed its members that “The Führer’s tasks encompass, above all, ethnopolitical measures. The details of the performance of these tasks are left to the discretion of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and are outside the responsibility of the military commanders.”²⁵ If these instructions seem vague, it is because they are. Indeed, after the war, the leader of Einsatzgruppe IV, Lothar Beutel, recalled that “no clear directive to kill the Polish intelligentsia had been issued.” Rather, Himmler and Heydrich had explained that the overall goal was “pacifying” the occupied area.²⁶ A bit more specific was the September 7 order by Heydrich that “The leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless.”²⁷ Explicit orders were likely not required because Himmler and Heydrich knew their men and knew that they would work toward the Führer. Himmler trusted his underlings to grasp the true meaning of his guidance.

EG leaders did this and directed their violence against broadly defined categories of potential resisters: intelligentsia, politicians, party leaders, clergy, academics, and professionals. At times, they had actual lists of individuals to be hunted down. Actions taken ranged from arrest to executions. For example, on November 10, 1939, EK Bromberg reported the following:

TABLE 4Einsatzkommando Bromberg Operational Report, November 10, 1939.

	Liquidated	Evacuated	Released
Teachers	73	68	66
Lawyers and Notaries	3	2	1
Pharmacists	2	-	5
Judges	-	1	1
Tax Officials	13	3	10
City Administration	1	-	4
Miscellaneous Professions	2	1	4

Source: “Situation Report by Einsatzkommando Bromberg, November 10, 1939,” in War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland, ed. Jürgen Matthäus and Jochen Böhler (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 150.

Another EG report from Warsaw in October 1939 reported the arrest of 354 clergymen and teachers. “Because of their demonstrated Polish chauvinism,” it continued, “they represent a danger, not to be underestimated, to the security of the German troops, German civilian officials, and the German civilian population.” It continued, noting that the EG had acquired a list which “shows the elite of Warsaw, who naturally have to disappear!”²⁸ Sometimes charges of resistance were tenuous at best, as illustrated by a September 1939 report: “Among those arrested is Father Trzaskome. He was arrested because he told German troops that within a week they would disappear like dust. He also stated that the French have already occupied half of western Germany. Within his close circle of friends, he accused the German military of looting.” For these transgressions, the Nazis deported Father Trzaskome to a concentration camp.²⁹ A Polish woman recalled the September 12 murder of her husband by the EGs:

Around 3:00 p.m., Germans entered our house . . . The Germans had a list with names of Limanowa inhabitants, and at the top of this list was my husband, Jan Semik. The other names on the list were those of Jews, rich craftsmen, and businessmen from Limanowa . . . [My brother] came to my house around 5pm, he told me that the Germans had murdered my husband and ten Jews, and that the corpses were in the quarry at Mordarka.³⁰

One hundred Polish civilians were executed in Wawer near Warsaw as a reprisal for the killing of two German policemen.³¹ Exact death tolls are difficult to come by. For the early period, the best estimates are that 10,000 Polish civilians were executed during the fighting. The Wehrmacht, SS, police, and EGs murdered 16,000 Poles (and an unknown number of Jews) by October. Estimates of civilians murdered in former Polish territory by the end of 1939 exceed 60,000.³² As the war ended and a more stable occupation began, the liquidation of the Polish leadership did not stop.

While most of the initial actions were directed at non-Poles, thousands of Jews were attacked and murdered by the EG, the military, and police. Polish leadership capable of resistance had to be eliminated to facilitate immediate occupation and destroy future resistance; Jews and their leadership had to be eliminated as part of the larger Nazi genocidal project of removing Jews from a space intended for German settlement. As such, EG leaders correctly interpreted their orders to include Jews, predominantly male, and those in leadership positions. As one former EG member stated after the war, “Our EK was deployed in Białystok to round up all male Jews between about 15 and 60 years of age in a schoolyard.”³³ The largest killing during the initial period took place in Przemyśl around September 20, when members of EG I and EG z.b.V. killed more than 500 Jews. An eyewitness later stated that these were “mostly from the intelligentsia.”³⁴ It is an important distinction. The wholesale murder of Jewish men, women, and children was not yet Nazi policy, so Jews murdered by the EGs in Poland still fell loosely into the category of elites and “potential resisters.” However, murders of Jews were often more brutal and horrifying, as one survivor testified. In the town of Mielec, EG members “doused the synagogue with gasoline and set it on fire. The Jews in the bathhouse and the slaughterhouse were locked inside, and the buildings were set on fire. Those who tried to escape and save themselves were shot at and thrown back into the fire.”³⁵ The burning of synagogues had become part of standard Nazi anti-Jewish violence since Kristallnacht in 1938, and frequently accompanied the murder of Jews in Poland. The problem became so bad that only a week into the campaign, Himmler prohibited the burning of synagogues in major urban areas to prevent fire from spreading and destroying non-Jewish property.³⁶

FIGURE 6Famed Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (second from left) and her film crew observe a killing of Jews by German soldiers during the invasion of Poland. Konskie, Poland, September 1941.

Source: Bundesarchiv.

Actions against Jews in 1939 had a secondary motive that may partially explain their brutality and public nature. As the Nazis were still pursuing a territorial solution to the “Jewish Question,” many hoped they could free their newly acquired territories of Jews by driving them into Soviet territory. This may have been part of the motivation at Przmyśl, which straddled the border. The commander of EK 3/1 drove 18,000 Jews across the river into the Soviet zone.³⁷

It should be noted that the mass murder of both Jews and Poles did not go without objection in Poland, though these complaints were not numerous. The violence distressed several Wehrmacht officers. Some inquired if orders had been given to shoot Jews. Army colonel Helmut Stieff wrote his wife that “this extermination of entire families with women and children is only possible through subhumans who do not deserve the name German. I am ashamed to be a German.”³⁸ (He would go on to participate in the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler.) One general reported to his commander that “The selection [of those to be executed] in these instances was completely disparate and often incomprehensible, and the carrying out of the shootings was often dishonorable.”³⁹ Another decried the “incomprehensible lack of human and ethical sensitivity” on the part of the police and suggested the problem could only be solved if all police units and their officers were removed from Poland.⁴⁰

One of the most outspoken was General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of occupied Poland. He wrote several reports which made their way to Hitler himself. Blaskowitz noted that “surprisingly quickly the like-minded and the deviant personalities come together, as is the case in Poland, in order to give full vent to their animalistic and pathological instincts.”⁴¹ He also marshaled a utilitarian disagreement, saying that the EGs had “so far accomplished no visible task of keeping order but rather only spread terror among the population.”⁴² An Army major refused to hand over 180 Polish civilians to the SS when he learned they would be shot.⁴³

Clearly, such resistance, though rare, required a response. It was swift and unequivocal. Hitler dismissed Blaskowitz’s criticisms as “a childish attitude” and derided his military as operating with “Salvation Army methods.”⁴⁴ Blaskowitz was the only Army colonel general from the Polish campaign to not receive the rank of Field Marshal; he was removed from Poland and relegated to the backwaters of the German military. On October 25, 1939, Army commander in chief, Field Marshal Brauchitsch, ordered his officers to “refrain from any form of criticism of the actions of the state leadership,” even going so far as to suggest their wives do the same.⁴⁵ Brauchitsch reiterated this guidance in February 1940, telling his generals that “harsh measures against the Polish population” were “made necessary by the forthcoming battle of destiny of the German people.”⁴⁶ General Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces (OKW) put it even more cynically. “The Wehrmacht,” he said, should be glad if it can distance itself from administrative questions in Poland.”⁴⁷ Himmler himself addressed the generals a month later commenting that “I do not do anything that the Führer does not know about.”⁴⁸ The implication was clear: Hitler had approved the actions of the EGs and any resistance to them was resistance to the Führer. On the whole, resistance to the more murderous Nazi policies in Poland was in short supply, but its presence in 1939 ensured that extra measures would be taken in 1941 to avoid the same problem.

Regardless, the German military did actually support the mission of the Einsatzgruppen. Cooperation rather than resistance predominated. Moreover, at least some objections to EG behavior stemmed not from moral objections to Nazi policy but from questions of decorum, practical effects on the local population, or impacts on troop morale. Indeed, in some instances, Army officers requested that EGs be deployed to their areas to “pacify” the population. A directive from the commander of the 14th Army, Wilhelm List, serves as a damning counterpoint. “You are asked,” he told his commanders, “to explain this to the subordinate units in an appropriate way. Extensive support for the Einsatzkommandos in their border policing and their state security tasks is in the interest of the troops.”⁴⁹

The Einsatzgruppen experience in Poland from 1939–41 differed greatly from Czechoslovakia or Austria. In Poland, these units engaged for the first time in the mass shooting of targeted civilians. While the magnitude of future killings in the Soviet Union would drastically increase, the EGs and their leaders gained valuable experience in the practical and administrative tasks required in Poland. SS leadership also recognized the need for a clearer relationship with the Army, one allowing for greater support. They also learned how to carry out these mass shootings and became acclimated to the levels of sheer brutality necessary. It should come, then, as little surprise that many of the same men who directed and committed murder in Poland would do the same in the Soviet Union.

The Division and Occupation of Poland

All of them want to unload their rubbish into the Generalgovernment. Jews, the sick, slackers, etc. And Frank is resisting. Not entirely wrongly. He wants to create a model country out of Poland. That is going too far. He cannot and should not.

JOSEF GOEBBELS, diary entry, November 1940⁵⁰

The occupation and dissection of Poland brought Nazi ideologues and officials face to face with practical challenges to their massive demographic project. Conflict was not always cordial, as Goebbels indicates regarding the Generalgovernment. In Poland, the Nazis attempted to make their vision of Lebensraum a reality on the ground. They also honed their skills at moving large groups of people; skills that would be particularly useful as the Holocaust progressed.

When the Germans occupied Poland, they were immediately confronted with a set of competing demands stemming from their own ideological goals. They wanted to “Germanize” these new territories as quickly as possible through the settlement of ethnically acceptable Germans and the “salvaging” of any such individuals in the local population. They also wanted to remove undesirable “races” like the Poles to make space for these new arrivals. Finally, they also had to solve the “Jewish Question” as soon as possible by removing the new, 1.7 million Jews Germany had now added. All of these aims required a demographic engineering project of massive proportions and, logistically and politically, all of them could not be accomplished at once. This resulted in conflict between Nazi leaders.

All of occupied Poland was not treated equally. The Nazis considered certain areas of western Poland to be originally German or sufficiently German that they were immediately annexed and became formally part of the Greater Reich with the same standing as existing provinces or Gaus. The following regions constituted the incorporated territories established by Hitler orders in 1939:

•Danzig-West Prussia—Gauleiter Albert Forster

•Wartheland or Warthegau—SS-Obergruppenführer and Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) Arthur Greiser

•Silesia—Gauleiter Josef Wagner

The leaders of these territories focused on making their province a model German state as soon as possible, and this inevitably led to conflict between Gauleiters and also with the administrator of the final region: the Generalgouvernement (GG), Hans Frank. Civilian administrators took control from the military of these regions on October 25, 1939.

The Polish territory remaining after the annexation of the incorporated territories became the Generalgouvernement, an area not directly annexed by the Reich, but seen more as a colonial holding, at least for the time being. The GG was placed under the control of Hans Frank, thirty-nine year old veteran of the Freikorps and early Nazi party follower. As the German Army invaded Poland, Hitler summoned Frank to Potsdam to offer him the position of governor of the forthcoming GG. He accepted on September 15.⁵¹ Frank arrived in Krakow on November 7 after a grand torchlit parade through town. He took up residence in the ancient royal Wawel Castle, a stone’s throw from the church where the kings of Poland were buried, and overlooking the historic Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. He and his wife, Brigitte, filled the castle with valuable objects looted from his new fiefdom. As one visitor noted, the fourteenth-century castle “was now crammed full, from the subterranean caves to the top of its highest tower with furniture stolen from the palaces of the Polish gentry” as well as objects acquired via “crafty raids through France, Holland and Belgium.” His own son, Niklas, derisively wrote after the war that “ghettos had to be created so that Mother could have all her tailors in one place.”⁵²

FIGURE 7Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank (right) hosts Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler at a dinner held at Wawel castle during his visit to Krakow. Krakow, Poland, 1940.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We will focus primarily on the GG, but also touch on the incorporated territories. After all, the massive ghetto of Łodz´ was located in the Warthegau. Governor-General Frank, however, controlled a massive region. He further divided this area into districts: Krakow, Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw Districts. District Galicia in eastern Poland would be added in 1941, after the invasion of the USSR. Approximately 11.5 million people lived in the GG, a third of Poland’s pre-war population. This included 1.3 million Jews and around 500,000 Ukrainians. Unfortunately, Frank only had 100,000 ethnic Germans at his command.⁵³ This was a huge obstacle, as he hoped at some point to sufficiently Germanize his territory to be incorporated into the Reich. Goebbels recognized Frank’s ambition and discounted it. In any case, Frank had another more pressing central problem. The incorporated territories considered the GG a dumping ground for their unwanted, racially inferior populations (mainly Jews). Frank would spend much of the next two years fighting off these deportations.

Initial priority for Nazi leadership was Germanization of the incorporated territories. While ideally this would have involved large immigration of Reich Germans, at least initially, administrators would have to settle for the movement of ethnic Germans to their territories. Himmler, in his capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, ordered on October 30, 1939, that all Poles and Jews be removed from the incorporated territories.⁵⁴ The Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) for Greiser’s Warthegau elaborated on these plans in November 1939, stating that their purpose, according to Himmler, was “a) cleansing and securing of the new German territories, b) creation of dwellings and work opportunities for the ethnic Germans immigrating.”⁵⁵ Suddenly, everyone wanted to send their unwanted populations to the GG, from not just the incorporated territories, but also Germany proper. Adolf Eichmann hoped to deport his Viennese Jews. A Nazi police official asked if he could add Berlin’s Sinti/Roma to Eichmann’s transports.

In the minds of many, the GG was a Jewish “reservation” where Europe could dump its unwanted Jewish populations and a “Polish work camp” for a steady supply of slave labor. This concept crystallized into the first of three territorial solutions to the “Jewish Question.” Territorial solutions sought to remove Jews by physically transporting them someplace else. The first of these, known as the Nisko or Lublin plan ultimately encompassed several intermediate deportation plans. Under this plan, the Nazis would deport all the Jews of Europe to a specific region near Lublin, where they would be consolidated, much like Native Americans reservations in the United States. The Nisko/Lublin plan was no more benign than the American one. While Nazi planners did not aim to systematically murder the Jews, they certainly recognized that confining so many people to a small region would result in a large loss of life. This was absolutely acceptable to them. Almost immediately, the gulf between Himmler’s imagination and the realm of possibility in occupied Poland became apparent. The GG was simply not prepared to handle the influx of people required by Germanization and anti-Jewish policies. 45,000 Jews arrived in this Lublin reservation in November 1939. There were no facilities for them. An SS officer told them matter-of-factly that “There are no dwellings. There are no houses. If you build, there will be a roof over your heads. There is no water; the wells all around carry disease. There is cholera, dysentery and typhoid. If you bore and find water, you will have water.”⁵⁶ The resulting high number of fatalities was entirely predictable.

Governor-General Frank fought these deportations, arguing not without reason that he was simply unprepared to accommodate such an influx. He also did not want his territory to become a squalid, poverty-stricken land of refugee camps and sickness. Dr. Fritz Arlt, head of “Population Affairs” in Krakow, later described the days of the Lublin plan, saying: “The people were thrown out of the trains, whether in the marketplace or on the train station or wherever it was and nobody cared about it . . . We received a phone call from the district officer and he said, ‘I don’t know what to do any more. So and so many hundreds have arrived again. I have neither shelter nor food nor anything.’”⁵⁷

Hans Frank impressed upon Hermann Goering the problems deportations caused and successfully halted them in 1940. Himmler cited “technical difficulties.”⁵⁸ Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller killed Eichmann’s plan of deporting Austrian Jews, stating that “that the resettlement and deportation of Poles and Jews in the territory of the future Polish state requires central coordination. Therefore permission from the offices here must on principle be in hand.”⁵⁹ Frank himself described the conditions of the first transports, reminding his officials in 1942:

You remember those terrible months in which day after day goods trains, loaded with people, poured into the Generalgovernment; some wagons were filled to overflowing with corpses. That was terrible when every District Chief, every County and Town Chief, had his hands full of work from early morning to night to deal with this flood of elements which had become undesirable in the Reich and which they wanted to get rid of quickly.⁶⁰

By early 1940, Himmler conceded that all future deportations would require Frank’s approval. This effectively ended the future of the Nisko/Lublin plan. In addition, the Germany victory over France in May 1940 breathed new life into another proposal. This territorial solution would deport European Jews to the formerly French island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa. This plan also helped pause deportations to Poland, as it seemed that the Jewish question would be solved in Madagascar. In any case, by the time deportations more or less ended, 400,000 Poles and Jews had been deported into the GG. The Nazis floated a plan to send their Jews to the Soviet Union, which had an “autonomous Jewish province” in Birobidzhan. The Soviets politely declined.

Massive deportations planned for the Generalgouvernment in 1939 and 1940 failed for a variety of reasons. First, the scale and scope of demographic change desired by Himmler and the civil administrators simply failed to match the reality of the logistically possible. Second, Frank mounted a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to oppose deportations of Poles and Jews into his area. He based his objections both on the real unfeasibility of the project as well as on his own ambitions for the region. Third, Himmler placed a greater emphasis on the movement of ethnic Germans to newly occupied territories, and devoted more of his resources and attention there. The deportation of Poles, and particularly Jews, received lower priority in 1939 and 1940. Finally, the Madagascar Plan, which the Nazis took very seriously, seemed to better solve the Jewish problem and therefore removed the urgency of deporting Jews to the GG.

Frank’s Kingdom: Occupation Policy in the Generalgovernment, 1939–41

We have decided to behave, as officials, exactly the other way round than at home, that is, like bastards.

FRITZ CUHORST, Stadthauptmann, Lublin, December 1939⁶¹

Hans Frank’s Generalgovernment served as an incubator for a variety of policies that would be replicated elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but as Cuhorst’s statement shows, these policies would be carried out with brutality and indifference. While some of the same policies would appear in the incorporated territories, Frank had a degree of freedom to operate in the GG precisely because it was technically not part of Germany. Conversely, many his policies did not appear from thin air but reflected previous experience, particularly, domestic German anti-Jewish policy. For these reasons, the unfolding of the Holocaust and the larger Nazi genocidal project in the GG add critical elements to our understanding of the evolution of these processes over time.

As time progressed, the Einsatzgruppen’s mobile killing mission ended. They were officially dissolved on November 20, 1939. The leaders and men of the EGs shifted into a more stationary, permanent role in the police bureaucracy of the four districts of the GG: Warsaw, Lublin, Radom, and Krakow. The position of Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) was carried over from the Reich. In the GG, the HSSPF was forty-five-year-old SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger. His immediate superior was the Reichsführer SS (RFSS) himself, Heinrich Himmler, but, in the usual byzantine Nazi bureaucracy, he was also theoretically under the control of Frank. Each district had its own SS and Police Leader (SSPF) as well as a police office headed by a Commandant of Police (KdS). In turn, major cities and regions had their own police offices. Former EG members held a large number of these positions. Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommando leaders from the Polish campaign led all KdS district offices in the GG.

However, the killing did not stop. The clearest example of this was the so-called AB Aktion, from the German Ausserordentlich Befriedungsaktion or “Extraordinary Pacification campaign.” It began in May 1940 and, again, targeted Polish leadership. The start date was no coincidence. Frank hoped the military campaign in France would distract the world from events in the GG. HSSPF Krüger led this operation, which killed several thousand people. Frank addressed his men plainly, saying, “I confess quite openly that it will cost several thousand Poles their lives, above all from the intellectual leadership of Poland. But for us all as National Socialists this time brings the obligation to make sure that no more resistance emerges from the Polish people.” Oddly, he concluded by saying, “Gentlemen, we are not murderers.”⁶² In the same speech, he referred to the mass arrest of professors from the famous Jagiellonian University in November 1939 and their deportation to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which had generated significant public protest. “The trouble we had with the Kraków professors was terrible,” he lamented. “Had we dealt with the matter here, it would have gone differently. I would therefore urgently entreat you to deport no one else to the concentration camps in the Reich but to undertake the liquidation here or to impose a proper punishment.”⁶³ And so began the second wave of decapitation of Polish intelligentsia.

The SS and police conducted other mass killings as well in Poland. They marked the mentally and physically handicapped in the GG and the incorporated territories for death. This was in keeping with the Aktion T-4, which murdered these same people in Germany proper. However, in occupied Poland, the killings lacked most of the subterfuge associated with their German counterparts. In Pomerania (part of Danzig-West Prussia), a psychiatric hospital in the town of Swiece became a killing site when an SS unit and an ethnic German militia arrived and murdered 1,000 patients, including the hospital director.⁶⁴ In Chełm in the Wartheland, an SS unit murdered 300 men, 124 women, and 17 children in the local psychiatric hospital on January 12, 1940. The SS men threw those who resisted out the windows.⁶⁵ One SS man recalled a mass killing in the port city of Gdynia, in Danzig-West Prussia: “On another occasion, between 80 and 90—as I recall, 82—Polish women and men from the Hospital for Epidemic Diseases at Hexengrund near Gdynia, who had venereal diseases, were shot. So far as I know, this execution took place in November 1939.” He then went on to explain that “To my knowledge, they were shot because the Navy wanted to establish a torpedo school in the building.”⁶⁶ This last statement illustrates an important difference between the T-4 program and similar killings in the East. Often, the killings had little to do with eugenics and much more to do with the cold calculus of creating space for the German military, civil administration, and civilian “settlers.” The hospital in Chelm, where 400 had been murdered, became an SS barracks and military hospital.⁶⁷ Another important historical moment in the murder of the handicapped in Poland was the use of gas vans by SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Lange. Lange, a veteran of EG VI, commanded his own Sonderkommando, or special detachment, which murdered over 4,000 mentally ill individuals in the Wartheland. Some of these people were murdered in specially constructed gas vans where victims were placed in a sealed compartment into which carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust was piped. Some of the vans had “Kaiser Coffee Company” painted on the side in order to deceive victims. Historian Henry Friedlander described one killing in East Prussia: “The Lange Kommando loaded forty patients into its gas van on each trip, killed the victims during the trip, disposed of their bodies in the surrounding countryside, and returned with the empty van about three hours later.”⁶⁸ Lange’s operations were the first use of mobile gas vans in occupied Poland but not the last. Gas vans would be employed at the Chełmno extermination camp, which would be commanded by Herbert Lange. In addition, carbon monoxide would be the gas of choice for most of the extermination centers.

For Frank, occupation of the Generalgovernment also meant attempts at Germanization. This required two tasks: the suppression of Polish life and culture and the cultivation of German culture and settlement. Both proved to be daunting. A Central Emigration Office (UWZ) was set up in order to find ethnic Germans among the general population. The SS Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) included racial “examinations” of the local population to rate the ethnic value of individuals and seek “valuable bloodlines.”⁶⁹ Academics and scientists such as anthropologists and ethnologists actively participated in this task. At least some of their equipment and resources had been stolen from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.⁷⁰ The quality of the Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans found in occupied Poland did not always impress the SS. Often, they did not speak German or act particularly German at all. Good Volksdeutsche were given privileged positions in local government and police forces.

Himmler was particularly interested in finding ethnic German children who could be raised German, a special kind of brutality that saw children ripped from their parents’ arms and taken to families in Germany. In May 1940, Himmler wrote that “The basis of our considerations must be to fish out of this mush the racially valuable, in order to bring them to Germany for assimilation.”⁷¹ These children were renamed and often left with no knowledge of their parents or origins. Sometimes, this abduction of children was haphazard. As this policy was carried over into the Soviet Union, a member of the Einsatzgruppen there found an eleven-year-old “Aryan looking” Belarussian girl and sent her home to live with his parents in Berlin.⁷² Attempts at the settlement of ethnic Germans in occupied Poland had mixed results by January of 1941. 500,000 Volksdeutsche had been identified to take over Polish land, but most of them remained living in less than comfortable transit camps awaiting placement.⁷³

The uprooting of Polish culture was perhaps more successful than the fertilization of the German. As noted, many of the human pillars of Polish culture had been murdered, forced to flee, or driven underground by deadly attacks on the intelligentsia and leadership. The Nazis suppressed education and the Polish language. Clergy were not systematically targeted for extermination, but a very large number had been murdered or deported to concentration camps. The occupiers removed Poles from all but the lowest level of government and cultural institutions. In addition, Frank directed a physical assault on Polish culture, what the Polish government in exile in London called “the war on statues.” In Krakow, a statue commemorating a Teutonic defeat by Poles and Lithuanians in 1410 was demolished.⁷⁴ Hitler, through Frank, ordered the Royal Castle in Warsaw destroyed. Throughout Poland, German art historians and experts systematically looted of cultural treasures from museums and private collections, not least those owned by Jews.

The attempted destruction of Polish culture was not limited to “high” art and architecture. Cities were renamed: Rzeszów became Reichshof, Gdynia became Gottenhafen, Łodz´ became Littmanstadt, Częstochowa became Tschenstochau, and so on. Streets were renamed. Cities and towns in the GG abounded with Adolf Hitler Streets and Adolf Hitler Squares. German was the official language and German culture the only accepted form of expression. With the suppression of Polish culture came a deluge of all things German. Jan Karski, emissary for the Polish government in exile, visited Poznan (then renamed Posen) and reported that “the city with the finest historical tradition in all Poland was now, to all appearances, a typical German community. Every sign on stores and banks and institutions was in German. The street names were in German. German newspapers were being hawked on the corners.”⁷⁵

Hans Frank himself later asked for a special volume of the popular German tourist guidebook, Baedeker’s, to be printed for tourists to the Generalgovernment. The preface of the guide aimed to introduce the reader to “the extensive . . . reconstruction that has already been achieved or is still in progress, under difficult wartime conditions, in the three and one half years since Germany took over the administration of the Vistula Region”, and “to point out the innumerable vestiges, often hidden, of old German cultural and pioneering activities-above all, the creations of German architecture.”⁷⁶ Intrepid tourists to the Generalgovernment in 1943 learned that Krakow was “a predominantly German city, in which one everywhere encounters the traces of German labour and German culture.” The St. Mary’s Church, home to the Trumpeter of Krakow, now located on Adolf-Hitler-Platz, was the “most magnificent construction of Kraków’s German citizenry in which German was preached until 1537.”⁷⁷ Such revisionist history was certainly wishful thinking, but clearly demonstrated the Nazi elimination of Polish culture from a future Germanized space.

Several Polish resistance movements sprung up to oppose the Nazis in Poland, the most well known being the Polish Home Army (AK). In this early period of occupation, resistance, severe reprisals, and repression drove most resistance underground. Though the Polish Underground State wrote in December 1939 that “preparations [should be made] for an armed uprising at the rear of the armies of occupation, to occur at the moment of entry of regular Polish forces into the country,” it also recognized that any major actions before that time “would in no way be proportionate to the repression that it would necessarily bring down on the country, giving the occupant an excuse for the ruthless extermination of the Poles.”⁷⁸ Frank’s decree on Polish Freedom Day (November 10, 1939) that one male would be shot in any house that displayed Polish flags or symbols exemplified this repression. He also ordered that 120 civilian hostages be taken in Krakow to prevent any unrest.⁷⁹

On April 30, 1940, a young SS captain arrived in the town of Oświeçim to build a concentration camp from a set of abandoned Polish military barracks.⁸⁰ The German name for the town was Auschwitz and the thirty-nine-year-old SS captain was Rudolf Höss. The camp was intended to hold Polish political prisoners who first arrived on June 14 and were assigned numbers 31–758.⁸¹ Many of these first prisoners were university students and their first task was to construct their own prison.⁸²

In order to govern and police the GG, a flood of Nazi functionaries arrived to handle every facet of public life from music to lumber. One of the most important functions was the economic management, or better, exploitation of the new territory. In the incorporated territories, the path was perhaps clearer, as businesses and the economy were expected to be integrated into Germany as quickly as possible. Hans Frank, on the other hand, in the Generalgovernment faced a conflict between the desire of some to simply loot and strip his territory of everything of value and his goal of creating a valuable, functioning state worthy of eventual inclusion in the Reich. Frank succeeded in halting the wholesale destruction of the Polish economy via exportation to Germany. He was able to show that he could harness the economic resources of the region on the ground to benefit the German economy. This is not to say that Nazi occupation did not devastate Polish and Jewish businesses. The occupiers established an office known as the Treuhandstelle Ost or Trust Office East, which took control of economic concerns, distributed them to German ownership, and brought them in line with larger German economic policy. The Treuhandstelle Ost was quite effective in its work; by February 1941, it had seized 5,246 industrial concerns and 121,120 commercial businesses from the Poles.⁸³ As one scholar puts it, the result was “the attempted subjugation and reorientation of the entire Polish economy for the purpose of its consistent exploitation to the benefit of the German war effort.”⁸⁴ This policy privileged businesses that could be used in the defense industry over non-defense operations, many of which were closed down. Here, the government either directly controlled defense industries or handed them to contractors such as Oskar Schindler who were able to buy distressed Jewish, businesses and produce items for the military.

The severest of the economic measures in the Generalgovernment was the shipment of Poles to Germany to perform forced labor. Though, as we will see, the use of slave labor would have the most drastic influence on Jews, the conscription of Poles was no small matter. In June 1940, authorities deported 20,000 Polish forced laborers to Germany. Initially, the Germans hoped to entice Polish volunteers, but this soon failed as word of the treatment of foreign workers reached Poland. The labor policy was, itself, closely connected to Nazi racial conceptions of the East, which we have already seen. Slavs were useful only as forced laborers for the superior Germans. In Poland, we see that abstract concept became harsh reality. By August 1944, there were 7.5 million foreign forced laborers from across Europe working for the Reich. Even the labor terms Frank chose were based on race: Poles had Arbeitspflicht (a duty to work) while Jews had Arbeitszwang (forced labor.)⁸⁵ These were not idle words; while conditions for Polish laborers were harsh, they were worse for Jews.

Darkening Skies: Initial Anti-Jewish Policy in the Generalgovernment and Incorporated Territories

The gigantic catastrophe which has descended on Polish Jewry has no parallel, even in the darkest periods of Jewish history.

CHAIM KAPLAN, diary entry, March 10, 1940⁸⁶

For two long years, the Generalgovernment would be at the heart of Nazi planning and discussions on how to solve the so-called “Jewish Question.” It would also begin the catastrophe that Chaim Kaplan so feared. It was logical that many important parts of anti-Jewish policy evolved here, as Polish Jews constituted half the future victims of the Holocaust. However, Nazi administrators also imported many of the discriminatory policies that had already been tested in Germany. Thus, anti-Jewish policy in the Generalgovernment (as throughout the occupied East) was a combination of local initiatives and guidance from Berlin. This is often described by scholars as a sort of symbiotic relationship between center and periphery: the center being Berlin and the high-level leadership while the periphery represents the distant lands where local officials developed their own initiatives. At times, these two forces pulled together and, at times, they pulled apart. Sometimes, directives from the top drove policy while at others, experimentation and local choices on the ground deeply influenced those same directives. The Holocaust and larger Nazi genocidal project were thus connected with events and individuals across Europe.

As we have already seen, anti-Jewish violence accompanied the German invasion of Poland, beginning with the military itself. German soldiers routinely humiliated Jews by cutting their side locks or shaving their beards. In another town, soldiers gathered Jews in the courtyard of the synagogue and burned them with hot wax.⁸⁷ These humiliations often turned deadly. On September 4, 1939, members of an infantry unit killed Jews in retaliation for what was likely friendly fire.⁸⁸ In Wroclawek, unidentified Germans (likely soldiers) broke into a house where Jews were praying and killed five or six of them.⁸⁹ One Jewish survivor recalled the impunity of soldiers and others after the invasion of Poland, saying, “Any German who wore a uniform and had a weapon could do whatever he wished with a Jew in Warsaw. He could compel him to sing or to dance or to shit in his trousers, or to go down on his knees and beg for his life.”⁹⁰

The Wehrmacht also actively persecuted Jewish soldiers among its prisoners of war. Approximately 60,000 Jewish soldiers in the Polish army were captured. By the spring of 1940, 25,000 of them were dead. Jewish prisoners were separated and given the most exhaustive labor. Unlike their Christian counterparts, Jews were often transferred from POW camps into civilian Nazi custody, where they almost certainly would be killed.⁹¹ Regular German military units often established ghettos and instituted antisemitic measures in the areas under their control as well. This military complicity with the murderous policies of the regime would only escalate later.

In addition to the deadly violence that accompanied the invasion and then tapered off, Nazi authorities began implementing familiar antisemitic regulations on the Jewish population. From his palace in Krakow, Hans Frank and his administrators issued a steady stream of rules and decrees aimed at removing Jews from the social, cultural, and economic life of the GG. On November 23, 1939, Jews were required to wear a blue star on a white background. In typical Nazi fashion, the orders specified that the armband be at least ten centimeters wide and appear on the right sleeve.⁹² Regulations forbid Jews from changing residences and curfews limited Jews to very short periods of time in which they could shop and leave their houses. Jewish doctors could not see non-Jewish patients. In Łodz´, one survivor remembered that “Jews were not allowed to walk on the main street which was renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse. They were not allowed to go into parks, swimming pools, or cinemas and theatres.”⁹³ Mandatory slave labor was required on October 26, 1939, for all Jews between the ages of 14 and 60.⁹⁴ The Aryanization of businesses began in conjunction with the larger economic exploitation described above. This process entailed the registration of Jewish business assets and their forced handover to the Nazi state. This included cash in bank accounts as well. Jews were allowed to keep some personal belongings and 1,000 RM, by Göring’s decree.⁹⁵ As ghettos were established, Jewish homes and apartments were stolen, complete with their contents. During one three-day period, the SS men responsible for this systematic eviction and theft “cleared” 399 apartments in Łodz´ in the Wartheland; similar activities were taking place across the GG.⁹⁶

These apartments became available as Jews were increasingly forced into Nazi-designated areas of towns and cities. This policy was known as ghettoization. We will examine both the policy and life in the ghettos in a future chapter, but it is important to briefly discuss the origins of the policy here as the GG and the incorporated territories provided the testbed for the concept. Nevertheless, before we can approach the topic of ghettos, we must first examine (briefly) the larger Nazi policies regarding the “Jewish Question” in Europe as they are directly tied to ghettoization.

Nazi antisemitic ideology, as noted, rested on a belief that the continued existence of Jews in Europe was unacceptable. The “Jewish question” was very simply how to remove the Jews from Europe. The answer evolved through several iterations, influenced both by events, as well as by shifts in the approach of Nazi leaders, above and below. The first solution proposed to rid Germany (and eventually) Europe of Jews was forced emigration. Adolf Eichmann’s systematic efforts at forcing the emigration of Jews from Vienna as well as the intolerable conditions created by the Nazis in Germany are excellent examples of this policy in action. In many ways, this policy was stymied, at least in terms of emigration out of Europe. More than half of Germany’s Jews did manage to escape Nazi Germany, but only to areas which would later be conquered. A combination of antisemitic foreign immigration policies and the Nazi demands that Jews be stripped of all wealth before emigration (which made them even more unattractive to potential areas of refuge) denied Jews access to Britain, America, and other countries safely off the European continent. This was the first territorial solution, meaning a solution that involved the movement of Jews but not their complete extermination. The second territorial proposal, the Lublin or Nisko plan, involved the permanent and forced consolidation of Jews in the Generalgovernment on a reservation. This plan was derailed by Nazi administrative resistance, not least, on the part of Frank himself. Finally, during this period, the last idea was the Madagascar Plan that, after the fall of France in 1940, suggested the mass deportation of Jews to the east African island of Madagascar. This plan was delayed and eventually shelved when Germany failed to master the seas. And so, ghettoization in Poland was a policy affected by the tension between applying permanent solutions to the Jewish question and stopgap measures until a final solution could be agreed upon.

In any case, the forced collection and confinement of Jews first began in occupied Poland to consolidate the Jewish population in preparation for whatever final plan would be decided upon. The impetus for ghettoization came from Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the RSHA and eventual architect of the Final Solution. Less than a month after the invasion of Poland, he wrote to EG commanders on September 21, 1939, that “For the time being, the first prerequisite for the final aim is the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities.” He noted that this was a short-term measure prior to an undescribed “final aim.”⁹⁷ Heydrich also ordered the consolidation of smaller Jewish communities into larger ones and the creation of Jewish councils.

The first ghetto was established in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939, but the process of mass ghettoization proceeded in fits and starts, with the Łodz´ ghetto being established in February 1940, Warsaw in October, and, in the large cities of Krakow, Lublin, and Radom, only in the spring of 1941. As one scholar has noted, fewer than thirty ghettos were established by September 1940.⁹⁸ This phenomenon owed as much to the decentralized role of local Nazi authorities as it did to evolving plans for the final disposition of the Jews. Hans Frank, for one, hoped to avoid the creation of large permanent Jewish residential areas in his territory, particularly as it seemed that they would soon be sent elsewhere. Eventually, ghettos became seen as a necessary evil to consolidate Jews as new plans were made. As Adolf Eichmann made clear in December 1940, the final solution to the Jewish question “will be achieved by way of transfer of the Jews out of the European economic space of the German people to a still-to-be-determined territory.” He projected that 5.8 million Jews would need to be deported.⁹⁹

Nazi authorities established ghettos either in the poorest and most run-down areas of town or in areas which already had a large Jewish quarter. Non-Jews were evicted (but compensated by the Jews forced to move in). As we will see later, not all ghettos fit the stereotypical image of Warsaw or Łodz´; many were quite small, temporary, or unguarded. Overcrowding, mass theft, disease, hunger, and forced labor characterized them all. In addition to the loss of homes and apartments, often, Jewish communities were forced to pay exorbitant sums for their own confinement. When Hans Frank attempted to “cleanse” his capital city of Kraków of Jews, he demanded that the Jews pay for their own deportation.¹⁰⁰

Jews could no longer be owners or decision-makers in economic affairs, but they were increasingly forced to function as slave labor, particularly as ghettoization began to appear more permanent and Nazi administrators sought to benefit. At first, such slave labor was demeaning and not particularly productive. In fact, the main goal appeared to be humiliation. Jews were forced to clean streets, gutters, and toilets with their bare hands. Eventually, however, as we will see, ghettos across Eastern Europe were transformed into pools of slave labor for a myriad of German economic concerns. For the time being, they served as a way to continue the larger Nazi project of demographic engineering by beginning the process of removing Jews from the local population.

Until the invasion of Poland, Nazi policy—in terms of both the Holocaust and the larger genocidal project—had been relatively limited in its execution. When Germany invaded Poland and a world war began, the regime was free to begin realizing its imperial and racist goals, particularly in the East. Occupied Poland, and especially the Generalgovernment, presented Nazi leaders with large populations of non-German “subhuman” Slavs as well as almost two million Jews. For the first time, the Nazi state was faced with actually executing what had been empty rhetoric until September 1939. They soon became personally acquainted with the very real logistical, political, and economic challenges associated with that rhetoric. They quickly discovered the massive gulf that lay between ideology and execution. How they navigated these challenges had important repercussions as the opening act for the massive murderous system that followed. The experimentation with different solutions by Nazi authorities at every level made occupied Poland a laboratory for genocide. The lessons learned here would accompany the Nazis as they moved further east and as their actions became more extreme and more deadly.

Selected Readings

Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Łódź ghetto, 1941–1944. Abridged ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

Kaplan, Chaim. The Warsaw Diary of Chaim Kaplan. Trans. Abraham I. Katsh. New York: Collier Books, 1973.

Kochanski, Halik. Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Matthäus, Jürgen, and Jochen Böhler, eds. War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.