3

The Search for a Final Solution through Expulsion, 1939–1941

Two aspects of Nazi Jewish policy in Poland in the period between 1939 and 1941 are particularly prominent: expulsion and ghettoization. The first is what the Germans sought to do in this period, and the second is what they actually did. Too often, however, these policies and this period have been seen through a perspective influenced, indeed distorted and overwhelmed, by the catastrophe that followed. The policy of Jewish expulsion—and its relationship to resettlement policies in general—was for many years not taken as seriously by historians as it had been by the Nazis themselves.1 Conversely, the policy of ghettoization has all too often been seen as an integral, even conscious, preparatory step toward extermination, while to the Germans at the time it was a temporary improvisation, a “necessary evil” that followed from the failure of expulsion plans. These policies are the focus of the next two chapters. They will be studied not from hindsight but rather as the Germans conceived, implemented, and experienced them between 1939 and 1941. In short, an attempt will be made to see these policies in their own right, as the crux of Nazi Jewish policy in Poland before the Final Solution.

EICHMANN AND THE NISKO PLAN

Already in September 1939 many Polish Jews had fled into the eastern portions of Poland that fell into Soviet hands, and many others were deliberately pushed over the demarcation line by German police and army units.2 The protocol of Heydrich’s meeting with his Einsatzgruppen leaders on September 21 recorded Hitler’s approval of the “deportation of Jews into the non-German area, expulsion over the demarcation line.” Did this mean two sequential phases of one policy or two parallel policies?3 Heydrich’s and Hitler’s references to a Judenstaat or Reichs-Getto, first east of Cracow and then around Lublin, make it clear that they never seriously assumed that the Jewish question was going to be solved solely by expulsion over the demarcation line. The existence of a Jewish reservation at the furthest extremity of the German empire, therefore, was approved and encouraged. One participant in Heydrich’s September 21 meeting took that encouragement to heart. He was Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann, an obscure official in Heydrich’s SD working on the Jewish question, had risen to prominence as the organizer of Jewish emigration from Austria following the Anschluss.4 His Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration) in Vienna had become the prototype for SS policies between the Kristallnacht and the outbreak of the war, and Eichmann had also been placed in charge of a similar office in Prague in recognition of his achievements. However, emigration opportunities were rapidly diminishing in 1939, and prospects for continuing emigration after the outbreak of war were even dimmer. Eichmann was a man whose career faced a dead end unless he could adapt to the new situation. Many of his tactics—internment of one family member in a concentration camp until the rest had completed all preparations for emigration, sending Jews illegally out of Austria across the “green frontier”—already constituted expulsion. Formal approval for the continuing expulsion of Jews into the Soviet sphere opened a wide vista for the revitalization of Eichmann’s career. In a striking example of an ambitious Nazi seizing the initiative from below in response to vague signals emanating from above, Eichmann set out to prove himself the master deporter and expeller of Jews into the district of Lublin and beyond.

On October 6, 1939, Eichmann met in Berlin with Oberführer Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. According to Eichmann’s version of the conversation, Müller ordered Eichmann to contact Gauleiter Wagner in Katowice concerning the deportation of 70,000–80,000 Jews from East Upper Silesia. “These Jews shall be sent in an easterly direction over the Vistula for the purpose of expulsion.” Jews from nearby Mährisch Ostrau, a town in the eastern corner of the Protectorate, could be included, especially those who had fled over the border from Poland during the fighting. “This activity shall serve first of all to collect experiences, in order . . . to be able to carry out evacuations of much greater numbers.”5

Before going to Katowice, however, Eichmann first visited Mährisch Ostrau, where on October 9 he assembled his Prague staff—Rolf Günther, Theo Dannecker, and Anton Brunner—and explained their coming task. By order of Müller in Berlin, a Jewish transport from Mährisch Ostrau and another from Katowice were to be assembled to take an “advance party” to a region southeast of Lublin, where it would erect a village of barracks to serve as a “transit camp for all subsequent transports.” In contrast to subsequent deportations, in which no attention need be paid to the age or sex of the deportees, this first group was to contain only male Jews capable of physical labor, especially engineers, carpenters, artisans of various kinds, and at least ten doctors. These first trainloads were also to serve a second purpose as “model transports” (Mustertransporte). The Jews themselves were to be involved in carrying out an orderly implementation of German directives. “That is necessary in the interest of preserving a certain ‘voluntary character’ and also to obtain an unobtrusive as possible departure of the transport.”6

1. POLAND, 1940

On October 9 Eichmann and Rolf Günther traveled to nearby Katowice, where they met with Major General Knobelsdorf and the chief of the military administration, Fitzner, and on the following day with Gauleiter Wagner. In Katowice, Eichmann’s plans had suddenly grown. Now Mährisch Ostrau and Katowice were to provide two 1,000-man transports each, and after the four transports had been sent, a report would be submitted to Heydrich that would “probably” then be shown to the Führer. They would then wait “until the general deportation of Jews is ordered.” This could confidently be expected, because “the Führer has ordered first of all the shifting of 300,000 Jews from the Old Reich and Austria.” Wagner, Knobelsdorf, and Fitzner all promised their support.7

Eichmann’s expanding plans were not confined to Katowice and Mährisch Ostrau, however. While he was in Katowice, his deputy in Vienna, Hans Günther, was preparing both German officials and representatives of the Jewish community for deportations. On October 10 he informed Jewish leaders that they were to prepare a list of 1,000–1,200 workingmen, especially carpenters, cabinetmakers, and mechanics, for deportation. Moreover, four of the Viennese Jewish leaders were to report to Eichmann in Mährisch Ostrau with clothing for a three- or four-week stay.8 German officials received the “strictly confidential” information that the Führer had ordered the resettlement of 300,000 Reich Jews in Poland, in the course of which Vienna would be completely cleared of Jews in about three-quarters of a year.9 A week later Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, grateful at the prospect of getting rid of his Jews, invested Eichmann with “full powers” to carry out the resettlement action, and two transports per week were being planned.10

Eichmann was not only steadily increasing the number of transports but, in doing so, also changing the nature of the project. Müller had authorized him to carry out experimental deportations of Jews from the newly incorporated territory of East Upper Silesia, and allowed that Eichmann might add some Jews from the bordering areas of the Protectorate, especially Polish Jews who had recently fled there. Eichmann immediately put the Protectorate deportation on an equal basis with those from East Upper Silesia, and then began organizing for a steady stream of semiweekly trains from Vienna. The focus was clearly shifting to the regions where Eichmann had organized Jewish emigration in the prewar period and thus had his own trusted staff in place. And he was clearly hoping—indeed assuming—that his experiment would succeed, and these initial transports would become the basis for an ongoing deportation program.

Before this grandiose scheme could mature, however, Eichmann had to find a location for his “transit camp.” On October 12 he flew with the Sipo-SD inspector in the Protectorate, Oberführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker, to Cracow and Warsaw, and traveled by car to explore the area in question. On October 15 Eichmann reported his success. The deportation trains were to be sent to Nisko on the San, on the western border of the Lublin district.11

By now Eichmann was quite bursting with confidence that his experiment would mature into a full-fledged program. This can be seen in his reply to inquiries from Oberführer Arthur Nebe, chief of the Criminal Police (Kripo). On the day Eichmann had left for Poland in search of his transit camp, Nebe had called to ask when he could deport his Berlin “Gypsies.” If he could not do it soon, he might have to go to the expense of building a camp for them. The idea of deporting “Gypsies” was not new, of course, as Heydrich himself had mentioned deporting 30,000 “Gypsies” from Germany in the meeting of the Einsatzgruppen leaders on September 21. Upon his return Eichmann answered that “continuous transports now depart regularly,” for the present from Vienna, Katowice, and Mährisch Ostrau. “The simplest method . . . is to attach some train cars of Gypsies to each transport.” Nebe’s experts should contact Eichmann’s men, the Günther brothers (Hans in Vienna and Rolf in Mährisch Ostrau and Katowice), to work out the details. The start of deportations in the Old Reich would come in three to four weeks, Eichmann confidently concluded.12

The first transport from Mährisch Ostrau was loaded with 901 Jews on October 17 and departed on the morning of the 18th. The first transports from Vienna (912 Jews) and Katowice (875 Jews) departed soon after, on October 20.13 Eichmann was already back in Nisko when the Mährisch Ostrau transport pulled into the station at noon on October 19. Eichmann had taken great effort to disguise the true nature of the expulsion. Deportees had had to sign a document stating that they were voluntarily going to a “retraining camp.”14 In Vienna, Eichmann cynically painted rosy pictures of the Jews creating for themselves a new existence in the territory between the San, Bug, and Vistula, where they would be free of the legal restrictions imposed upon them in the Third Reich.15 But the reality proved quite different. The first transport was marched out of Nisko across the San River to a swampy meadow near the village of Zarzecze and put to work erecting barracks. The following morning the best workers were selected from the group, and the rest were marched away eastward and told never to return. The subsequent transports from Vienna and Katowice were treated similarly.16

But what Eichmann clearly hoped would blossom into a full-fledged ongoing deportation and expulsion program from all Reich territories was stopped in its infancy by Müller’s intervention from Berlin. While Rolf Günther was completing posttransport business in Katowice on October 20, a telegram arrived via Mährisch Ostrau conveying Müller’s order “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.” Günther inquired if the second transports from Mährisch Ostrau and Katowice planned for the next week could depart, and was informed that on the basis of an order from the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), “every evacuation of Jews had to be stopped,” including those planned from Mährisch Ostrau and Katowice.17

Eichmann hurried off to Berlin to salvage what he could of his ambitious dreams, with limited success. On October 24 he telephoned to Mährisch Ostrau that indeed the deportation of Jews from the Protectorate was to cease until further notice. In particular, the women intended for the next transport could not be included. However, Eichmann did agree to Günther’s suggestion that because preparations were already far advanced, at least the men could be deported “in order to preserve the prestige of the police here.” This could be done by attaching a partial transport of 400 Jewish men from Mährisch Ostrau to the transport still scheduled to leave Katowice on October 27. However, Eichmann warned from Berlin, the complete details of every transport had to be reported to Müller at least two days in advance.18 In addition to the transport of October 27, carrying 1,000 Jews from Katowice and 400 from the Protectorate, a second transport from Vienna with 672 Jews had departed on October 26.19 A small transport of 323 Jews from Prague was assembled and dispatched from Mährisch Ostrau on November 1, but it was halted in Sosnowiec (Sosnowitz) after a telegram arrived from Eichmann warning that a bridge was down over the San.20 An attempt to send yet another Vienna transport failed when the military claimed all transportation for itself on the day it was scheduled.21 With that, the Nisko experiment came to an end, although the camp itself remained in existence until the following April. Then the camp was dissolved on the order of HSSPF Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger in the General Government, and the 501 remaining Jews returned to Austria and the Protectorate.22

Why did the Nisko experiment come to such an abrupt halt? Certainly the local Landrat protested the “invasion,” and the military authorities in the area complained that they would have to protect the incoming Jews against the “justified displeasure” (berechtigten Unmut) of the local population or “tolerate and even encourage” pogroms.23 But this protest came after the fact and could not have influenced an SS decision sent from Berlin even as the first transport was arriving in Nisko. Likewise, Hans Frank later objected to deportations, but in mid-October he was traveling from Berlin to Poznan (Posen) to Lodz and back to Berlin, awaiting the imminent dissolution of the military administration and unsuccessfully fighting to have Lodz included in his future General Government rather than in the Warthegau. That he was in any position to know about, much less waste political capital on protesting, Eichmann’s scheme, is most unlikely.24 Russian protest could scarcely have been decisive, since local German authorities continued to shove Jews over the demarcation line well into December, when Frank finally ordered Krüger to put a stop to such expulsions in order to avoid endangering good relations with the Soviet Union.25 No doubt the military was placing great claim on rail transportation as it hurriedly shifted forces to the west for the offensive still scheduled for mid-November. But neither the military nor Göring, who was busy looting Poland, had forbidden all transports, as Eichmann himself found out upon inquiry.26 Nor had Eichmann been operating totally without Müller’s knowledge and was now being called to account. In that case Nebe would never have known about Eichmann’s impending deportations, nor would Eichmann have openly invited him to add train cars of “Gypsies” to his “continuous” transports.27

Clearly the stop order came from Himmler personally. Himmler let Gauleiter Bürckel in Vienna know this in no uncertain terms when the latter accused Arthur Seyss-Inquart, at that time Frank’s deputy in the General Government, of preventing the deportation of Viennese Jews that he so ardently desired. Himmler justified his decision on the basis of “technical difficulties.”28 Himmler had just gained jurisdiction over the resettlement of ethnic Germans, and for him the most decisive factor at the time was probably the arrival of the first Baltic Germans in Danzig on October 15.29 The problem of finding space in West Prussia and the Warthegau for the incoming Volksdeutsche now took priority over deporting Jews from East Upper Silesia and especially from Austria and the Protectorate. For the next year, in fact, the deportation plans of the Nazis in eastern Europe would be inextricably connected to the resettlement of the ethnic Germans, for whom space had to be found in the incorporated territories. Eichmann’s shift in emphasis to deporting Jews from Austria and the Protectorate simply did not provide lodging and livelihoods for incoming Volksdeutsche where Himmler needed it. Nor, as it turned out, did deporting Jews even from the Warthegau serve Himmler’s new priority, for it did not open up the kinds of lodging and livelihoods best suited to the newcomers. While the Nazis never wanted openly to admit it and struggled against such a conclusion for months, it turned out that, at least temporarily, consolidating Lebensraum in the incorporated territories and solving the Jewish question were not complementary but competing goals. The result was that for the time being priority was given to the consolidation of Lebensraum through ethnic German resettlement, and a solution to the Jewish question was either postponed or sought in forms other than deportation eastward. Eichmann’s Nisko experiment thus demonstrated not only the scope for local initiative within the Nazi system of government but also its limitations when it clashed with clear priorities set from above.

THE BALTIC GERMANS, THE FIRST SHORT-RANGE PLAN, AND THE WARTHEGAU DEPORTATIONS

When Germany reached agreement with the Soviet Union on September 28, 1939, to repatriate ethnic Germans from the Soviet sphere, Heinrich Himmler succeeded in obtaining from Hitler the jurisdiction over “strengthening Germandom.” This put Himmler in charge of both resettling the ethnic Germans and eliminating the “injurious” influence of alien populations in the areas to be “Germanized.” In short, Himmler now controlled population movements both coming and going. It was a classic example of those who best anticipated Hitler’s desires receiving their reward in new grants of power. Himmler was now in a position to overcome the obstacles to population transfers that Brauchitsch had placed in front of Heydrich on September 22. Himmler also moved to establish an economic base for his operations. Göring had already received the economic fruits of conquest, with jurisdiction over the seizure of all Polish and Jewish property in the incorporated territories. But Himmler used his new positions to insist on control over the distribution of agricultural land necessary for resettlement, which Göring conceded.30

On October 30, 1939, Himmler issued the overall guidelines for the activities of the RKFDV in the area of population expulsion. By February 1940, that is in four months, the following populations were to be transferred to the General Government: (I) from the incorporated territories, all Jews (estimated by the RKFDV deputy Creutz at 550,000); (2) from Danzig—West Prussia, all “Congress Poles,” that is, Poles who had moved to the former German areas after 1919; and (3) from the Warthegau, East Upper Silesia, and Southeast Prussia, a yet-to-be-determined number of especially anti-German Poles. The population transfers were to be arranged between the respective HSSPF, with Krüger of the General Government deciding which cities and districts received which transports. However, the Jews were to be transferred specifically to the territory between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers (to which the Jews of the General Government west of the Vistula were also to be sent the following year). Care of the deportees in the General Government was to be left to the local Polish administration. The Sipo-SD inspector of the General Government, Bruno Streckenbach, immediately reported to Frank that Himmler aimed to move no fewer than one million people in the next four months.31

While the HSSPF had to cope with the reality of moving even a fraction of the people targeted in Himmler’s orders, two officials of the Rassenpolitisches Amt (RPA or Office of Racial Policy), Erhard Wetzel and Gerhard Hecht, articulated the racial theories underlying this vast scheme of population movement. They produced a document that might easily be dismissed as sheer fantasy, except that much of its thrust was subsequently incorporated into Himmler’s own memorandum for Hitler on the treatment of foreign populations in the east.32 Wetzel and Hecht noted that in the newly incorporated territories, only 7% of the population was German, 5% was Jewish, and the rest Polish. “Consequently, the necessity arises for a ruthless decimation of the Polish population and, as a matter of course, the expulsion of all Jews and persons of Polish-Jewish mixed blood.” The German portion of the population had to be strengthened by the resettlement of the ethnic Germans, first from the Soviet Union but ultimately from southeastern Europe and even the western hemisphere, Palestine, and Australia. Only a small portion of Poles was suitable for “Germanization,” which was defined as a “genuine ethnic transformation” (echte Umvolkung), the “intellectually and spiritually complete entry” (geistig und seelisch mittragende Eintreten) into the ethnicity of another people, something that could be achieved only after one or two generations, not from the mere adoption of German language and culture. This was possible only for a small number of racially suitable Poles. If they were politically “neutral” and willing to send their children to German educational institutions, they could remain. Racially suitable anti-German Poles were to be deported, but their “racially valuable” (rassisch wertvolle) children, if not more than 8–10 years old, would be sent to the wholesome environment of a German family or military orphanage. Polish intelligentsia and political activists, Congress Poles, the racially unsuitable lower class, people of mixed Polish-Jewish extraction, and even first-degree German Mischlinge (Germans with two Jewish grandparents) would be deported without exception. Ultimately perhaps 1 million Poles would remain and 5.6 million Poles, along with 530,000 Jews from the incorporated territories as well as the Jews of Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate, would be sent east. The problem of overpopulation in the Polish Reststaat or rump state did not bother Wetzel and Hecht at all. The racially degenerate population there was increasing too quickly in any case. “If only for the purpose of preventing the rapid increase of the population in these areas, the expulsion of Poles from Reich territory into this area is urgently necessary.”

In the Polish Reststaat the Polish “national ideal” had to be combated ruthlessly by keeping education and culture to the most primitive level. Polish population growth would be kept down by restricting medical care to the bare minimum necessary to prevent the spread of epidemics to the Reich. Birth control would be encouraged and hygiene discouraged; homosexuality would be declared nonpunishable. While the Jewish population was also to be curtailed by such policies, Wetzel and Hecht felt that in other ways the Jews could be “treated more leniently” (erleichtert behandelt) than the Poles in order to maximize animosity between the two races. Better education would make the Jews “fit for emigration” and was less dangerous because “the Jews have no such real political force as the Poles, with their greater Poland ideology.”

If the German authorities in Poland, who were to be on the receiving end of this flood of uprooted people, were not about to entertain Wetzel’s and Hecht’s notion (bizarre only in retrospect) of preferential treatment for Jews over the Poles, they certainly were attracted to the idea that the magnitude of their Jewish problem would be lessened by decreases in the Jewish population brought about by depressing the Jews’ living conditions. Seyss-Inquart noted on returning from his inspection tour of the General Government in late November: “This territory [Lublin] with its extreme marshy nature can, in the view of the district governor Schmidt, serve as a Jewish reservation,” which “could induce a severe decimation of the Jews [eine starke Dezimierung der Juden].”33 Hans Frank, in a speech blustery even by his standards, informed a meeting of General Government officials in Radom on November 25, 1939, that one-half to three-quarters of the Jews, including also all those from the Third Reich, would be sent east of the Vistula. “Make short work of the Jews,” he exhorted. “What a pleasure, finally for once to be able to tackle the Jewish race physically. The more that die, the better.”34

In addition to Seyss-Inquart and Frank, the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels also grasped and recorded in his diary the nature and intensity of the racial struggle to be carried out in Poland. On October 10 he noted: “The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is devastating. More like animals than human beings, totally stupid and amorphous. . . . The Führer has no intention of assimilating the Poles. They are to be forced into their truncated state and left entirely to themselves.” A week later Goebbels watched with Hitler a screening of recent film footage from Warsaw. “And then footage from the ghetto film. Never seen anything like it. Scenes so horrific and brutal in their explicitness that one’s blood runs cold. One shudders at such crudeness. This Jewry must be destroyed [Dieses Judentum muss vernichtet werden].” A visit to Lodz on November 2 reinforced his conviction. “Drive through the ghetto. We get out and inspect everything thoroughly. It is indescribable. They are no longer human beings, they are animals. Thus our task is no longer humanitarian but surgical. One must cut here, and indeed quite radically. . . . This is already Asia. We will have much to do here to Germanize this region.” In early December Goebbels reported to Hitler on a trip to Poland. “He listens to everything very carefully and totally shares my opinion on the Jewish and Polish question. We must exorcise the Jewish danger. . . . The Polish aristocracy deserves its demise.”35

There were clearly many Nazis in Berlin and Poland who were intoxicated by Himmler’s vision of vast population transfers to be completed in four months and who welcomed the loss of life, particularly Jewish life, that this would entail. For the SS officials who had the impossible task of making performance match Himmler’s pronouncements, however, blustery speeches and bloodthirsty diary entries would not suffice. They had to develop the machinery and techniques to uproot and move thousands upon thousands of people. In the process of failing to meet Himmler’s unrealistic deadline, they learned a great deal about what was and what was not possible. These were lessons that were not forgotten, and eventually the Nazi machinery would be able to transform even-more-fantastic visions of Hitler and Himmler into reality.

The practical work began in late September, even as the German-Russian agreement for the return of the ethnic Germans was being signed. The army was ordered to clear space in the city of Gdynia (Gotenhafen) and did so in a manner that “did not distinguish itself significantly” from the later eviction procedures of the SS. But within days Himmler was officially entrusted with all matters pertaining to resettlement, and he established an Einwanderungszentrale or immigration center in Gdynia to organize the entry of the Baltic Germans and the exit of Poles. As the first Baltic Germans arrived on October 15, the momentum picked up. Ultimately, some 40,000 people were forced out of Gdynia and deported to Radom and Kielce in the General Government. This constituted nearly one-half of the population of Gdynia, as well as almost one-half of those deported from Danzig—West Prussia by the end of January 1940.36 It was soon apparent that Gdynia would not suffice, and Himmler ordered that Poznan be prepared to receive Baltic Germans as well. As these Baltic Germans poured into Poznan, internment camps were feverishly prepared to hold the uprooted Poles until they could be deported. Internment, first of the intelligentsia, began on November 4, 1939.37

Coordination could not be delayed any longer, and on November 8, 1939, a meeting of all the HSSPF on former Polish territory met in Cracow. Krüger, who chaired the meeting, insisted from the beginning that the “wild resettlement [wilde Umsiedlung] must be stopped immediately.” With no fewer than one million Poles and Jews to be deported by the end of February, and with some 100,000 ethnic Germans from Volhynia and the Ukraine, 30,000 from the Lublin region, and 20,000 from other parts of the General Government in addition to the Baltic Germans to be resettled, the transfer of the population had to be undertaken “in a planned manner.” According to Krüger’s Sipo-SD commander, Bruno Streckenbach, ultimately all Jews and Poles in the Old Reich and incorporated territories would be deported, but only the Jews and Congress Poles of the incorporated territories were targeted for the end of February. The remaining Poles would be investigated, and the “undesirable” ones would be deported in 1941. The trains would begin running in mid-November (that is, when the redeployment of the German army was to be complete). One important exception was made. Because the retention of Lodz within the Warthegau had not been finalized, evacuations “even of Jews” were not to be undertaken from there for the moment. Thus because at that time Lodz might have remained a part of the General Government, making population transfers from there superfluous, what was to become the single largest concentration of Jews in the incorporated territories was not to be included in the impending deportations.38

HSSPF Koppe returned to Poznan to organize the population transfers. On November 11 a special staff for the placement of Baltic Germans was created under Reichsamtsleiter Dr. Derichsweiler, and a special staff for the evacuation of Poles and Jews was formed under Sturmbannführer Albert Rapp.39 Rapp composed the initial draft of a circular to various officials announcing the deportation of 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews between mid-November and the end of February for the “necessary cleansing and security” of the Warthegau. All politically active Poles were to be included. While economic considerations were to be subordinated to security concerns, the deportations were to be “coupled” with the arrival of ethnic Germans. Indeed, Poles removed from their homes and businesses in favor of the arriving ethnic Germans were to form the “nucleus” though certainly not the full quota of the deportees. The Warthegau Jews—except those in Lodz—could be deported within hours and thus included when expedient to fill gaps and prevent delays.40

The official circular sent on November 12, 1939, contained significant changes from Rapp’s initial draft. The goal of procuring housing and livelihoods for incoming ethnic Germans was placed on an equal footing with security and cleansing. In addition to politically minded and nationalistic Poles, the “intellectual leadership, the entire intelligentsia” (die geistig führende Schicht, die gesamte Intelligenz) as well as the criminal element were to be removed. Despite the earlier prohibition, 30,000 Jews from Lodz were also to be included. And much more concern was expressed for economic factors. If not implicated, Polish manual workers and minor employees were to be exempted because they were “urgently needed” for labor. Mayors, Landräte, and economic leaders were to be consulted to prevent the deportation of economically indispensable Poles. The evacuation of every Pole was “to be prepared individually,” and the “indiscriminate mass clearings” (wahllose Massenräumungen) of streets and neighborhoods was forbidden.41

Between November 16 and December 4 Rapp produced no less than twelve different sets of regulations covering every conceivable aspect of the deportations; held two coordinating conferences on the scheduling of transportation and the handling of property, respectively; and finally made a personal inspection tour to visit all Regierungspräsidenten, Oberbürgermeister, and Landräten.42 Only one set of regulations (of November 24) specifically referred to the deportation of Jews. In their case the Jewish councils were to be directly involved and held personally responsible for the assembly of the required number of Jews and for the orderly carrying out of the deportation.43 This was to be no “wild resettlement” but one meticulously prepared in every detail.

In West Prussia Gauleiter Forster was on less amicable terms with Heinrich Himmler and less enthusiastic about cooperating with his resettlement scheme. Forster had been heard to remark about Himmler, “If I looked like him, I would not speak about race at all” (Wenn ich so aussehen würde wie der, würde ich erst gar nicht von Rassen reden).44 Forster was openly critical of the way in which Himmler was handling the resettlement of ethnic Germans. To Goebbels he complained about “the hair-raising organizational abuses during the evacuation of the Baltic Germans. These cry out to high heaven.”45 Perhaps because of Forster’s lack of cooperation in resettling ethnic Germans, Himmler on October 28, 1939, ordered an end to the deportation of Poles from West Prussia.46

The ban was not permanent, however. On November 5, 1939, Ulrich Greifelt, Himmler’s deputy for the RKFDV, urged that full use be made of available transport to deport “Jews and Poles” in order “to create further lodging possibilities for the ethnic German repatriates from Latvia and Estonia.”47 In November HSSPF Richard Hildebrandt held a series of meetings in which he held out the prospect of deporting 400,000 people in the following year, but he announced that the target for December 1939 was a mere 10,000. These were to include as usual all Jews as well as families of executed Poles and those posing any security problem, radical and politically undesirable elements, and Polish peasants whose farms were suitable for ethnic German settlers. After the wild deportations of the preceding weeks, the thrust of Hildebrandt’s message was in fact quite conservative. “Unauthorized expulsions have to stop,” he noted. The economy was not to be disturbed. Those performing necessary economic functions had to be exempted. Moreover, there was little desire to take on more Baltic Germans. “In the Danzig district itself the Baltic Germans will no longer remain but rather be sent on.”48

On November 28 Heydrich intervened from Berlin, drastically scaling down the immediate task facing the Germans in the incorporated territories. In wording similar to his famous Schnellbrief of September 21, Heydrich distinguished between a “short-range plan” (Nahplan) and a “long-range plan” (Fernplan), which permitted the Germans to return to the realm of the possible while still keeping faith with their ideology. According to the short-range plan, “enough Poles and Jews are to be deported that the incoming Baltic Germans can be housed. The short-range plan will be carried out only in the Warthegau [italics mine], because for the moment Baltic Germans are being brought only there.” Since the expected number of Baltic Germans was 40,000, double that number, 80,000 Poles and Jews, had to be evacuated by December 16, 1939.49

If the other incorporated territories were temporarily reprieved, Koppe and Rapp still faced the formidable task of deporting 80,000 people in less than three weeks. In an extraordinary display of brutal efficiency, they surpassed their goal, deporting 87,833 people in 80 trainloads by December 17. Rapp summarized the operation in two lengthy reports.50 Numerous obstacles had had to be overcome, he boasted. The coordination of so many agencies—the Landräte were in charge of the local operations, the office of the HSSPF provided central planning, the Sipo-SD provided local help in selecting the victims, the Reichsbahn provided transportation, and the police and Selbstschutz carried out the evacuations themselves—meant that a breakdown anywhere threatened the entire operation. Communications had been very poor, and finally courier service was instituted. The behavior of the Landräte was mixed. “Where it was a question of a young officer or SS leader, the entire operation was tackled with personal verve. The older Landräte typical of the German administrative bureaucrat assured at least an orderly operation in the selection of the persons and the organization of the evacuations. Only in the individual cases did Landräte lack from the beginning the necessary hardness for the evacuation.”

The erection of internment camps had proved valuable for processing the deportees and reducing to a minimum the length of time the trains spent at the deportation stations. There had been considerable difficulty with the trains. Of the eleven that the operation was to use, only five came back, and in eight, not four, days; the rest were commandeered by the Wehrmacht or the authorities of the Polish railway system (Ostbahn) in Cracow. Almost insuperable difficulties stood in the way of finding substitute trains. Moreover, the train personnel of the Ostbahn, almost entirely Polish, were not interested in helping the operation run smoothly and in fact sometimes refused to work or sought to sabotage the operation. Officials in the General Government had also proven inadequate. Unsuitable arrival stations had been selected; local authorities there had not been informed, and the local preparations had been poor. “The taking over of transports was repeatedly refused, and in general little understanding was shown by the receiving officials.”

The selection of the deportees had been a difficult process as well. To be evacuated were Jews, anti-German and politically active Poles, and Poles who were of the intelligentsia and leadership elite. The deportees thus had a racial, a political, and a social component, but the priority was to include Poles who posed an “immediate danger to Germandom” in the Warthegau. Constructing reliable lists of politically active Poles had been difficult because their numbers had been “sharply reduced through flight, shooting or arrest,” and the census material on the intelligentsia and leadership elite was also inadequate. Thus, compiling lists of these two categories had required extensive preparation. Counting the Jews, including the 230,000 in Lodz who had not been hitherto included, the total number of potential deportees came to 680,000. With three trains daily, the 600,000 who still remained could be deported in six to seven months.

Strangely, nowhere in Rapp’s reports did he record how many Jews were among the 87,000 “Poles and Jews” deported from the Warthegau in December 1939. On several later occasions SS officials referred only to the deportation of Poles in this episode.51 Indeed, the primary thrust of what was to become known as the “first short-range plan” (1. Nahplan) had not been to solve the Jewish question but rather to remove dangerous Poles and find space for the Baltic Germans.

Nonetheless, the train that departed from Konin to Ostrowiec on December 1 carried 900 Jews.52 Moreover, most of the ten trains from Lodz under the first short-range plan carried Jews. This was not mentioned, much less proclaimed as a success in any of the summary reports, for it was in fact evidence of a breakdown in the system, namely, the failure of the local authorities in Lodz to identify and seize dangerous Poles. When one of Rapp’s men visited the city on November 30, 1939, he had been dismayed to find that absolutely no preparations had been made for the deportations. Stadtkommissar Schiffer seemed oblivious to the fact that he was responsible for coordinating the Lodz deportations. The orders containing the criteria for determining the list of deportees had just arrived, and no one could find more than a fraction of the earlier lists and files compiled by the Gestapo. The police president, SS-Brigadeführer Johannes Schäfer, suggested that one could always deport the “Jewish proletariat,” for which no list would be needed.53

Lodz was assigned a quota of 15,000 “Poles and Jews,” but “above all politically suspicious and intellectual Poles were to be evacuated.” Owing to the loss of the Gestapo materials, a card file of only 5,000 names could be compiled. In turn, these hurriedly composed lists proved hopelessly incomplete, and only 2,600 of those listed could be taken into custody. “In order to reach the quota of 15,000, one had to fall back upon Jews” (musste daher auf Juden zurückgegriffen merden). The Jewish council was used as an intermediary to solicit volunteers among Jews interned in a camp in Radogocz, which netted 1,000.

Police president Schäfer and the Oberbürgermeister then decided that the “only practical method” was nighttime raids on entire apartment buildings in the Jewish quarter. On the night of December 14–15 a raiding party of 650 Schutzpolizei (Schupo) and 80 men of the NSKK (National Socialist Drivers Corps) seized 7,000 Jews between 8:20 P.M. and 4 A.M. Between 5,600 and 5,850 were deported in three trains the following evening. On December 16 a second raid caught 2,000 Jews, who along with the remaining Jews from the first raid were deported in three trains on December 17.

Rapp’s representative Richter bitterly attacked the city administration in Lodz. The initial call for Jewish volunteers had been doomed to fail, because those responding to the call were made to stand in line for hours in the freezing cold. The first razzia or roundup, once in motion, was not stopped, even when twice as many Jews had been seized as planned. No holding camps were available, but to have released Jews already seized would have been an “intolerable loss of prestige” for the German authorities. Thus the trains had to be overfilled. Because the cattle cars were provided with neither straw nor provisions, Richter wrote in his report, “not all the deported persons, especially the infants, arrive at the destination alive.” The city officials had made no lists and did not even know how many people had been deported from Lodz. They estimated 8,400, but Richter estimated 9,600–9,900.54

Few other reports from the first short-range plan mentioned Jews at all. In Kreis Konin the local Landrat wanted to deport 6,200 Jews and 5,000 Poles. In the first of two trains from Konin, on December 1,900 of the 1,102 deportees were Jews.55 The Landrat of Kreis Schroda noted that while Jews had constituted just less than 1% of the prewar population, as of December 12, 1939, none remained.56 The police chief of Sieradsch had already arranged “on his own initiative” to deport 300–400 Jews in 16 train cars to Lublin in mid-November. Richter deemed the police chief to be “very competent.”57 In Kreis Weichsel a commando of Einsatzkommando 11 did not wait for such clever local initiative. On November 14, 1939, the mayor of Alexandrow had been ordered to force all the Jews in town to emigrate toward Warsaw within ten days.58

The first short-range plan concentrated on the expulsion of individual Poles who were placed on the deportation lists because of their particular political or social status or because they possessed lodgings and businesses needed for incoming Baltic Germans. Local Germans who had to “fall back” on indiscriminately seizing and deporting Jews were in effect admitting that they had not diligently carried out the identification and seizure of Polish activists and intelligentsia and thus were not eager to report the actual number of Jews deported. Likewise, Richter’s critical remarks on the Lodz deportations, primarily of Jews, were omitted from Rapp’s self-congratulatory reports.

But even if the thrust of the first short-range plan lay elsewhere, Berlin had in no way forgotten about the Jewish question. On December 19, in preparation for a meeting of RSHA division heads, Heydrich’s SD Jewish desk (Judenreferat) submitted an “in-house” note on the “Final Solution of the German Jewish problem.”59 Heydrich’s Jewish experts posed the question “whether a Jewish reservation shall be created in Poland.” The protocol of this RSHA meeting does not survive. However, four results are known. First, on December 21 Müller forbade “until further notice a deportation of Jews from the Old Reich including Austria and the Protectorate to occupied Polish territory.” Second, on the same day Heydrich announced that “the central preparation of security policy matters in carrying out evacuations in the east” was necessary. Therefore he was appointing Adolf Eichmann as his “special adviser” (Sonderreferent) in Amt IV (Müller’s Gestapo) of the RSHA.60 Thus the ban that had shut down the Nisko plan continued in force, but the originator of that plan had suffered no career setback. Third, an Einwandererzentralstelle (EWZ) or central agency for immigration was headquartered in Poznan, with branch offices in Gdynia and Lodz. The center of ethnic German resettlement had clearly shifted to the Warthegau.61

Fourth, the conference produced the first version of the “second short-range plan” (2. Nahplan), which was to entail “the complete seizure of all Jews without regard to age or gender in the German Ostgauen and their deportation into the General Government.”62 When Himmler had ordered the deportation of all Jews from the incorporated territories on October 30, 1939, the exact border between the expanded Third Reich and the General Government had not yet been determined. It was still unclear on which side of the boundary the two areas of greatest Jewish population—Lodz in the Warthegau and Sosnowiec-Bedzin in East Upper Silesia—would be placed, and hence whether such deportations would involve as few as 170,000 or as many as 550,000 Jews. By late December 1939 it was clear that both Lodz and Sosnowiec-Bedzin had been incorporated into the Third Reich.63 Thus, according to the even higher estimate of the second short-range plan, 600,000 Jews were to be deported by the end of April by “combing through” the new territories from the north and west, at a deportation rate of 5,000 Jews per day, beginning sometime after January 15, 1940. To ensure that the territories were “totally cleared of Jews,” in principle no deferments were to be granted for employer claims of economic indispensability.

On January 4, 1940, Eichmann held a meeting in Berlin attended by the Jewish experts of the Sipo-SD in the four Gaue of the incorporated territories as well as the General Government. In addition, representatives of the economic, transportation, and finance ministries and Göring’s HTO attended. It was the first of many such interministerial conferences that Eichmann would organize in the coming years. “On the order of the Reichsführer-SS the evacuation of all Jews from the former Polish occupied territories is to be carried out as a priority,” Eichmann announced.

Without explanation, Eichmann’s quotas for the “immediate evacuation of Jews” (sofortige Judenevakuierung) totaled only 352,000–357,000 instead of the 600,000 targeted in the first draft of the second short-range plan: East Prussia, 30,000; East Upper Silesia, 120,000–125,000; and the Warthegau, 200,000. Danzig–West Prussia would evacuate 10,000 Poles and 2,000 Jews. “The Warthegau will moreover immediately evacuate 80,000 Poles, in order to create space for the ethnic Germans from Galicia and Volhynia. The Warthegau has by now already evacuated 87,000 Poles.” A deadline could not yet be set, because arrangements in the General Government for reception were not yet complete. “A long-range plan would be worked out, which would be divided into a number of short-range plans.” In any case, the evacuees would be deported to all four districts within the General Government (and not just to Lublin). The evacuations would not begin before January 25, and a final conference would be held beforehand with the participation of Heydrich.64

By the turn of the year, therefore, the Nazi attempt to find a Final Solution to the Jewish question through expulsions into Polish territory had made little practical progress. Since Hitler’s statement to Rosenberg in late September that all Jews, including those in the Old Reich, would be sent to the region between the Vistula and the Bug, and Himmler’s orders of October 30 to deport all Jews from the incorporated territories by the end of February, very little had been accomplished, other than the almost complete disappearance (through flight, “wild deportations,” and murder) of the Jews from West Prussia and former German territory of the western Warthegau.65 But some clarity had been achieved. The deportation of Jews from the Old Reich had been indefinitely postponed, and top priority was given to Jews in the incorporated territories. Centralized coordination of the deportations had been established under Heydrich’s special adviser, Eichmann, who had tried to cut through the confusion, caused by mixing the deportation of Poles and Jews, which pervaded the German documents of these months. The Poles, he had said, were to be evacuated to make room for the ethnic Germans. All Jews were to be deported immediately and as a “matter of priority” because they were Jews. Eichmann assumed that both deportation programs could be carried out simultaneously. But in this he was to be thwarted once again.

THE CURBING OF NAZI DEPORTATION PLANS, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1940

Nazi deportation policy became the center of an internal debate in January and February 1940 that resulted in a considerable cutback in SS plans for massive transfers of population, including a near total postponement of deportations aimed at making even the incorporated territories judenfrei. Effective criticism was launched from a number of vantage points: by people within the SS itself, by officials of the General Government, by economists of both the army and Göring’s empire, and by some of the Gauleiters affected. Ultimately, an alliance between Frank and Göring forced concessions from Himmler, whose own concerns had also placed constraints upon the deportation program.

In the Warthegau the major targets of deportation had been Polish intelligentsia, political activists, and nationalists, not “Congress Poles,” who had emigrated there since 1919. This was in accord with Himmler’s October 30 order, in which Congress Poles had been targeted for deportation only in Danzig–West Prussia. Inevitably, the Polish elites targeted for deportation contained elements of the population that were well educated, spoke the German language, and knew German culture. There was a strong suspicion among the Nazis that many educated Poles were falsely trying to pass as ethnic Germans, and apparently much revenge taking among Volksdeutsche against those who had accommodated themselves to Polish rule. The result was that many people were deported who subsequently complained to officials of the General Government that they were really Volksdeutsche. For Himmler and his racial theorists, who were trying to maximize the ethnic German element in the incorporated territories and to save for Germandom those Polish elements capable of “Germanization,” this was an intolerable hemorrhage of valuable racial material. Himmler thus forbade deportation of cases of contested Volksdeutsch status without his specific permission and ordered that henceforth denunciation by other ethnic Germans was not sufficient to settle the issue. Himmler further ordered that only Congress Poles and Jews were to be deported for the moment, not longtime residents, who required more careful screening.

This raised considerable difficulties for the deportation technicians, however. The collecting camps were already mostly full of politically implicated Poles, and the long-term residents were the ones with the best apartments most suitable for the Baltic Germans. On the other hand, the Congress Poles were simple workers indispensable for keeping the economy going and without property suitable for the incoming Baltic Germans.66 In short, the Nazis had tied themselves in knots with conflicting demands concerning the deportations. Possible Volksdeutsche and Poles suitable for Germanization were not to be deported; yet places had to be found for the incoming ethnic Germans. The economy was not to be disrupted, but the Congress Poles—mostly laborers—were to be the first to go.

A second problem emerged over the methods of deportation. Rapp had, in typical SS style, expressed considerable sympathy and praise for the “overburdened” German officials who had surmounted great obstacles in accomplishing their task of evicting 87,000 people in 17 days, without once mentioning the catastrophic fate of the deportees. But other German officials, particularly those in the General Government who had had to cope with their arrival, did not mince words. At Eichmann’s January 4 conference in Berlin, Hauptsturmführer Mohr of the General Government summarized the complaints of his colleagues. Trains had arrived carrying far more than the stipulated contingent of deportees, and local officials were totally unprepared to provide for such numbers. The deportees had been locked in cattle cars for as many as eight days, without even the opportunity to remove their human waste. Owing to the extreme cold, one train had arrived with over 100 cases of frostbite. Other reports complained that the deportees had arrived without having received food or drinking water for the entire trip, and many had been robbed of even the most basic necessities, such as bedding and utensils, to say nothing of sufficient money to make a new start. Eichmann promised to remedy all these difficulties. Each transport would be strictly limited to 1,000 deportees, each of whom would be provided with ten days’ rations and 100 zloty. Timely notification to Cracow would be made of each departing train. In severe cold, the women and children would be protected “if possible” by sending them in passenger cars. “Disciplined” behavior by the guards would be ensured.67

In the Warthegau, Gauleiter Greiser shared his critical reaction with Goebbels, who noted that the Gauleiter was having “lots of problems with Himmler, who is behaving very autocratically, especially in regard to the evacuation question.” Goebbels wasted no time in discussing the Reichsführer’s difficulties with Hitler. “Himmler is shoving whole peoples around at the moment. Not always successfully.”68

The economic mobilization experts of the military’s Armaments Inspectorate in Poland also provided a barrage of criticism—although most certainly not from a moral or political point of view. When Rapp briefed one staff officer and one intelligence officer before the December deportations, he reported that they not only had “no objections at all” but expressed “their full understanding.”69 When local army officers intervened on behalf of Poles threatened with deportation, General Petzel made it clear that such behavior contradicted the prescribed attitude toward Poles and would “damage the prestige of the Wehrmacht.”70 But protest on economic grounds was vigorous. In the fall of 1939 the military had argued without success that Polish industrial capacity would best serve the German war economy if left in place. Frank and Göring had Hitler’s backing for a piratical policy of removing everything from Poland beyond what was necessary to assure a “bare existence” for the inhabitants. In December the Economic and Armaments Office (Rüstungswirtschaftsamt) of the OKW tried again and appealed directly to Himmler to take the interests of the war economy into account. Himmler’s resettlement schemes threatened economic paralysis in both the incorporated territories and the General Government by removing indispensable workers from the former and overfilling the latter.71 Such appeals apparently had no effect, however, until the catastrophic winter deportations caused Hans Frank to join his otherwise hated military rivals in protest.

Frank’s initial view of the resettlement potential of the General Government had been considerably more cautious than that of Himmler and the RPA theorists, Wetzel and Hecht. Frank estimated that ultimately the General Government could absorb no more than an additional 1–1.5 million people, because the land was relatively poor and already overpopulated. Thus the General Government might be able to absorb the Jews of the incorporated territories (600,000 in his estimation) and those of the Old Reich, Austria, Sudetenland, and Protectorate (bringing the total to 1 million). In addition, it could absorb the Polish intelligentsia and nationalists, as well as the Polish peasants whose land was needed for ethnic German resettlement. But any attempt to settle some 6 or 7 million Poles—as envisaged in the RPA memorandum—was possible only with “a revolutionary reorganization” (einer umwälzenden Neuordnung) of the east whereby superfluous Poles could be sent east, to Siberia for example. Additional space in the General Government could also be created, Frank noted, by resettling the millions of Jews, perhaps in Madagascar.72

The winter deportations sobered Frank and his associates considerably. At a meeting of leading officials in the General Government on January 19, 1940, Krüger noted that 80,000 Poles and Jews had been deported from the incorporated territories as quickly as possible as an emergency measure to make room for the incoming Baltic Germans, and at least another 30,000 Poles and Jews had been shoved into the General Government “illegally.” This was a “modern tribal migration” (moderne Völkerwanderung), the implications of which Berlin had unfortunately failed to recognize. Moreover, scheduled for 1940 were the movement of the Volhynian Germans from the Soviet zone, the exchange of 14,000 Ukrainians and Belorussians from the General Government for 60,000 Poles on the Soviet side of the demarcation line, the movement of 30,000 ethnic Germans from beyond the Vistula, the internal uprooting of some 120,000 Poles for Wehrmacht training sites in the General Government, and finally the shipping of some 1 million Poles for work in the Reich. Frank noted that according to the “long-range plan,” the deportation of 600,000 Jews into the General Government was to have begun on January 15. However, he had pointed out to all concerned the “absolute impossibility” of carrying out these deportations as in the past. The resettlement action had thus been postponed until March, which would allow for a considerable improvement in methods.73

If Frank and the Germans in the General Government opposed receiving a vast deportation of Jews at this time, German officials in the Warthegau were also concerned about finding housing and jobs for the renewed immigration of Baltic Germans, of whom 1,200 were scheduled to begin arriving daily from Stettin (Szczecin) to Poznan on January 7. Officials in Poznan calculated that it was “unconditionally necessary,” in order to ensure “the seizure of good housing,” that the first deportees be Polish intelligentsia who were also politically incriminated. Politically incriminated Poles without usable housing as well as “Gypsies” could be deported later, when the “housing action” had been concluded. The list of Poles to be evacuated for political reasons was thereupon divided into three categories, of good, average, and poor housing. Less than 10% of the proposed evacuees, however, were rated in the first category.74

As in Poznan, German officials in Lodz faced the renewed influx of Baltic Germans, due to arrive there beginning January 9, with trepidation. On January 11 Koppe pleaded with Heydrich for two trains daily to deport Poles and Jews in order to make room for the ethnic Germans. He was quickly informed that neither trains nor reception capacity in the General Government were available.75 Once again, officials in Lodz fell back on solving their problems through measures against the Jews. While “the evacuation of Poles had to be undertaken individually,” Jews could be cleared in mass from areas with “better Jewish apartments.” While Poles could not be sent into the General Government, the wealthier Jews chased out of their good apartments could be sent into the area of the prospective ghetto. The evacuation of Jewish apartments and the transfer of the former owners to the future ghetto were therefore ordered to begin “immediately.”76 Within days, teams of SS men from the “evacuation staff” and Schupo began clearing Jewish apartments with the goal of 50 per day. In one frantic stretch, they surpassed themselves and cleared 399 apartments in three days. The method was declared a success and continued.77

As of January 14, 1940, Koppe was already aware that for the moment the General Government could receive no deportations, but he still thought that the “second short-range plan . . . basically encompassed only the deportation of the Jews.” However, when the deportations were resumed, an exception was now to be made for those Poles who would be deported “in direct connection with the placement of Baltic and Volhynian Germans.”

Six days later, however, Koppe informed officials of the Warthegau of a further change of plans and priorities. By agreement of the RSHA, General Government, and Reich Transportation Ministry, the Jewish evacuation of the second short-range plan was now to be preceded by an “intermediate plan” (Zwischenplan) whose sole purpose was to provide housing and jobs for incoming Baltic Germans. But in the process of providing jobs and housing, no one either of possible German origin or vital to the economy was to be deported.78 Despite the “pervasive good will” of the Reichsbahn and Ostbahn, however, no trains could be allocated for the intermediate plan before February 10, and Lodz—now destined to be the center for receiving 100,000–130,000 Germans from Volhynia and Galicia79—could not be served before February 20.80

In addition to the arrival of the Volhynian Germans in January, several economic complications also arose in the same month—both attributable to the intervention of Hermann Göring. On the one hand, the official economic status of the General Government was revised. The conquered land was no longer merely to be pillaged but rather to be made productive. Frank’s bargaining position concerning the economic impact of the resettlement program was thus enhanced.81 On the other hand, 800,000 agricultural workers were to be brought into the Reich by mid-March 1940,82 and the Warthegau was assigned a quota of 100,000. It made sense, therefore, to avoid “a double resettlement” in which “racially suitable” Poles were deported to the General Government only to be shipped back to the Reich as agricultural laborers.83 As Rapp explained to a meeting convened in Poznan on January 11, 1940, to discuss the labor issue: “To the previous program of evacuation and placement of Baltic and Volhynian Germans, the deportation of the Polish agricultural workers demanded by the Reich has now been added.”

The Trustee for Labor, Obersturmbannführer Kenzia, declared the Warthegau quota of 100,000 “impossible.” By the end of 1939, 20,000 workers had already been sent to the Reich. As a result, Jews had had to be used for the harvest, but now there were no more Jews in the Poznan region. “First of all the Warthegau’s needs for agricultural labor had to be ensured, the evacuations to the General Government therefore had to be stopped.” Rapp informed Kenzia that in order to lodge 12,000–15,000 Volhynian Germans in the Warthegau, farms would have to be emptied. However, landless agricultural laborers, in contrast to landowners, would not be deported. Otherwise, for the moment only urban populations were being deported. Sturmbannführer Hans Ehlich of the RSHA conveyed Himmler’s desire that for security reasons all Polish labor reserves of the incorporated territories be exhausted before the more hostile Polish workers of the General Government were imported. Moreover, these workers were to be both volunteers and racially acceptable. The conference concluded that a sufficient number of volunteers was guaranteed if the Poles were given a choice between deportation to the General Government and work in the Reich.84

The Germans made an attempt to sort out the various conflicts and priorities of Nazi resettlement policy at a top-level meeting on January 30 that was chaired by Heydrich and attended by the leading police officials from the east as well as by representatives of the RKFDV, RSHA, and Göring’s HTO. Heydrich proclaimed that no fundamental objections had been raised against the deportations on the part of the General Government, only complaints against the way in which they had been carried out, in particular exceeding the announced numbers per train. With the creation of a Referat for Jews and Evacuation—IV D 4—within the RSHA under Adolf Eichmann, central direction would remedy this deficiency. It was now an urgent matter to deport 40,000 Jews and Poles to “make room” (Platzschaffung) for the rest of the Baltic Germans. This would be followed by “another improvised clearing” of 120,000 Poles to provide space for the Volhynian Germans. Since the Reichsführer had forbidden the deportation of anyone possibly of German origin, only Congress Poles were to be taken. While the Baltic Germans had been urban people (to be resettled in cities like Gdynia and Poznan), exclusively rural populations would have to be removed to provide space for the Volhynian Germans (which effectively eliminated Jews from consideration in this case).

After the deportation of 40,000 Poles and Jews for the Baltic Germans and of 120,000 Poles for the Volhynians, “the evacuation to the General Government of all Jews from the new eastern Gaue and 30,000 Gypsies from the Reich shall take place as the last mass movement [italics mine: als letzte Massenbewegung].” The Volhynian action would commence in March, and the deportation of Jews and “Gypsies” would in turn begin only after this was completed. Almost incidentally, Heydrich also announced that in mid-February 1,000 Jews from Stettin would be deported to the General Government because their apartments were urgently needed.

Concerning Polish agricultural workers for the Reich, Heydrich noted that between 800,000 and one million were needed in addition to the Polish prisoners of war. Heydrich also noted Himmler’s concession that a “racial selection” (rassische Auslese) of Polish workers was impossible for the moment. However, after all these deportations, a racial selection of those suitable for resettlement in the Reich would follow. Heydrich intended to create Central Agencies for Emigration (Umwandererzentralstellen) in the incorporated territories to examine and classify the entire population according to personality, race, health, security risk, and labor ability.

Although the deportation of Jews from the incorporated territories had been postponed, apparently the two highest ranking representatives of the General Government, Frank’s deputy Seyss-Inquart and his HSSPF Krüger, did not take kindly to their concerns being characterized as merely complaints against procedures, not basic objections. Krüger noted the tremendous difficulties caused by the Wehrmacht’s uprooting of 100,000–120,000 Poles within the General Government for its own purposes, and Seyss-Inquart mentioned transportation difficulties and food shortages within the General Government that would require imports from the Reich. Heydrich brushed their concerns aside, noting that 100,000 Jews could be put in work camps to build the Ostwall and their families could be distributed among the Jews already living in the General Government.85

Eichmann’s plan to deport all Jews from the incorporated territories had suffered not one but two setbacks in a single month. First, in mid-January the deportation of Jews called for in the second short-range plan had been postponed in favor of an intermediate plan to make room for incoming Baltic Germans. Then, at the end of the month, Heydrich had postponed the Jewish deportations once again, now to take place as the “last mass movement” after a further deportation of rural Poles to make room for the Volhynian Germans. Furthermore, the burden of selecting and deporting to the Reich vast numbers of Polish workers had been added to the tasks of the deportation technicians.

The situation became even more complicated when Göring met with Hans Frank and Heinrich Himmler, along with the Gauleiter of the incorporated territories and the state secretaries of the major ministries, at Göring’s Karinhall estate on February 12, 1940. The first priority, Göring stated unequivocally, was to strengthen the war potential of the Reich. The task of the new Gaue was to maximize agricultural production—to be the granary of Germany. The economy in these eastern territories could only be maintained if sufficient manpower were at hand. Moreover, the Reich itself needed manpower from these areas. “All evacuation measures are to be directed in such a way that useful manpower does not disappear.” But to Göring this did not mean a stop in Jewish deportation, both from Germany and the incorporated territories, as long as the trains were sent in an orderly manner and with prior notification.

The opinions of the Gauleiters were mixed. No deportations from his East Prussia had taken place so far, Koch said. Even Jewish labor was necessary for road construction, in addition to the Poles who worked in factories and on the land. If Polish prisoners of war were sent back to the Old Reich, East Prussia would need 115,000–120,000 additional Polish agricultural workers. Forster’s Danzig—West Prussia contained 300,000 recently immigrated Poles, Jews, and asocials, of which 87,000 had been sent off. Only 1,800 Jews remained. He was ready to deport shirkers on public support and could thus estimate deporting another 20,000 in the coming year. Greiser had likewise deported 87,000 from the Warthegau. Wagner in Upper Silesia had carried out no deportations, but was ready to part with 100,000–120,000 Jews and 100,000 unreliable, recently immigrated Poles. Frank insisted that the continuation of previous deportation methods would make restoration of orderly administration in the General Government impossible. Allying himself openly with Göring, Frank declared that even Himmler’s starkly reduced resettlement plan was conditional upon solving the food situation, and its tempo was dependent upon being reconciled with the “necessities of war.”

Faced with the decided lack of support for major deportations on the part of Göring, Frank, and at least several of the eastern Gauleiters, Himmler moved to save what he could. Of the eight million Poles on German territory, certainly no more than 300,000 had been evacuated so far, he noted. He needed space for 70,000 Baltic and 130,000 Volhynian Germans, and the latter had to be settled on Polish farms in a strip along the border with the General Government. Given the difficulties of resettlement and the necessities of war, Himmler conceded the temporary postponement of bringing in a further 40,000 Lithuanian Germans, 80,000–100,000 Bukovinian Germans, and 100,000–130,000 Bessarabian Germans, as well as the ethnic Germans west of the Vistula. However, the 30,000 ethnic Germans east of the Vistula would have to be taken into the eastern Gaue because their present homeland was destined to become the “Jewish reservation” or Judenreservat. In any case, Himmler assured them, he and Frank “would agree upon the procedures of future evacuations.”86

A consensus on just what had been decided at Karinhall seemed decidedly absent. Göring had opposed the further deportation of any Polish workers eastward and emphasized the absolute priority of agricultural production and strengthening Germany’s war potential. On the other hand, he had not opposed the orderly deportation of Jews. Himmler had announced his intention to complete the Baltic and Volhynian operations, and explicitly noted that the latter required dispossessing Polish peasants whom Göring did not want disturbed. On the other hand, he made no mention at all of any imminent deportation of Jews. Himmler seemed to think that by scaling back the pace of ethnic German resettlement and indefinitely postponing Jewish deportation, he could sufficiently minimize disruption in both the incorporated territories and the General Government so as to continue with his cherished project, despite Frank’s and Göring’s objections. For Himmler at this time, the consolidation of Germany’s new Lebensraum through Volksdeutsche resettlement clearly had priority over deporting Jews.

Frank related his own interpretation of what had transpired to officials of the General Government on several occasions in early March. “We shall still receive at least 400,000–600,000 Jews into the country. Only then can we gradually talk about what must happen to them. . . . First of all there is a plan to transfer all of them to the eastern part of the General Government on the border with Soviet Russia, and that we shall also carry through. . . . It is indescribable, what views have formed in the Reich that the region of the General Government east of the Vistula is increasingly considered as some kind of Jewish reservation.” In any case, Göring had decided in Himmler’s presence at Karinhall that “no resettlement actions may be undertaken in the General Government without the prior approval of each individual resettlement action by the Governor General.” He, Frank, now had full power to stop evacuation trains. “In general, the great resettlement ideas have indeed been given up. The idea that one could gradually transport 7½ million Poles to the General Government has been fully abandoned. It is now only a question of the transfer of some 100,000–120,000 Poles, some 30,000 Gypsies, and a still to be determined number of Jews from the Reich, because the final goal shall be to make the German Reich free of Jews. That that shall not occur in a year and especially not under the circumstances of war, Berlin also recognizes.”87 Given the contrasting views of Himmler and Frank over what had been decided, the clash between them was fated to continue. The struggle over Nazi deportation and resettlement policy was not over.

THE INTERMEDIATE PLAN, THE STETTIN DEPORTATIONS, AND THE VOLHYNIAN ACTION, FEBRUARY–JULY 1940

One reason Himmler at Karinhall acted as if Göring’s and Frank’s opposition did not apply to his scaled-down deportation plans was that two such operations were getting underway even as the meeting was taking place. Already on January 20 the branch offices of the Gestapo in the Warthegau had received instructions for an intermediate or Zwischen plan to procure lodging and employment for the rest of the incoming Baltic Germans. The deportation program, utilizing 40 trains, had began two days earlier on February 10 and was scheduled to conclude on March 3, 1940. The destinations were in the districts of Cracow, Radom, and Warsaw, but not Lublin.88 Every effort was made to ensure that the barrage of complaints over the first short-range plan would not be repeated. Each deportee was to have the proper allotment of food, clothing, and Polish currency, and each train—composed of passenger rather than box cars—was to carry only 1,000 people.89

Several problems emerged despite the careful planning. Even before the deportations began, the Reichsbahn tried to cut its commitment from 40 to 38 trains. And in mid-February the Reichsbahn confessed that it could not keep to the schedule and that the empty trains would not return on time.90 Various local authorities begged to include undesired Poles whose presence was considered a burden but whose removal would in no way “make room” for Baltic Germans. These requests were systematically rejected.91 As the program neared its end, even Rapp pleaded for its expansion. By adding five more trains, employment could be found for all the Baltic Germans. By overloading the last three trains by 10–15%, the camps could be emptied. Eichmann rejected both pleas.92 Frank complained as well, noting that “despite his protests even now Polish peasants from Poznan and West Prussia were being resettled in the General Government. . . . The methods by which the Warthegau is governed are not very likeable,” he concluded.93

The intermediate plan was completed on March 15, credited with a deportation total of 40,128 Poles.94 The final statistics made no mention of Jews at all, but once again this does not reveal the full impact of the resettlement program on the Jewish population of the Warthegau. In Lodz, Jews continued to be removed from the center of the city to the future ghetto to provide housing for the Baltic Germans.95 And 1,200 Jews were deported from Kreis Konin to Lodz on March 3.96 Subsequently, on March 7, the Jewish council in Cracow noted the arrival of 421 Jews.97 It is most likely that these 421 Jews were among the 999 deportees from Konin to the General Government attributed to the Zwischenplan.98 The fate of the other Konin Jews sent to Lodz at this time is not known, but most of them were presumably also deported to the General Government. It is not likely to have been a mere coincidence that on March 7 Rapp asked Eichmann to what destinations in the General Government Jews could be sent.99

On a far smaller scale than the intermediate plan but much more spectacular for the attention it drew was the deportation from Stettin that Heydrich had announced at the end of January. In the early hours of February 12, the very day that Göring, Himmler, and Frank were meeting at Karinhall, some 1,100–1,200 German Jews were rounded up in Stettin and transported to the General Government.100 Within days, foreign press reports gave graphic descriptions of how the Jews of Stettin, even the occupants of two homes for the elderly—some over 80 years old—were roused from their beds, forced to sign away all their property except one suitcase, a watch, and a wedding ring, and taken to the freight station by SS and SA men. According to a Swiss correspondent, preparations for similar deportations from other cities in northern Germany were being made. The State Secretary of the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, inquired whether there was any truth to the foreign press allegations that the Stettin deportation was the beginning of more-general measures.101 Both Walter Schellenberg and Heinrich Müller of the RSHA claimed that the Stettin affair was an individual action to make room for returning Baltic Germans, not a prelude to wider measures.102 The Foreign Office then requested that such deportations be carried out “in a noiseless and cautious way” so as not to excite attention abroad.103 This request was immediately followed, however, by the deportation of 160 Jews from Schneidemühl in Pommern on March 12.

The Reich Chancellery and the German Foreign Office received copies of a report—mailed anonymously in Berlin and allegedly based upon the findings of a Polish-Jewish relief committee, the Quakers, and the Red Cross—providing a ghastly description of both deportations.104 The deportees were forced to march on foot from Lublin in temperatures of −22° centigrade in deep snow to villages without food or lodging. By the time the Schneidemühl deportees had arrived, 230 of the Stettin Jews had already died. The anonymous reports claimed that the district governor of Lublin, Zörner, had disclaimed any responsibility and that Göring had been informed. Upon inquiry by the Foreign Office, Eichmann claimed that the Schneidemühl Jews had been sent only as far as Poznan, and had then been brought back to the Reich, though not to Schneidemühl itself, where their apartments were needed by others.105

Helmuth Wohlthat of Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan informed the Foreign Office that rumors continued to circulate among foreign diplomats, including the Americans, of imminent large-scale deportations. The Foreign Office noted that “because of the special attention that President Roosevelt gives to the development of the Jewish question,” and in view of Germany’s interest in U.S. neutrality, some unofficial statement was desirable that the deportation of the Jews from the Old Reich was not under consideration. Wohlthat was prepared to be the vehicle for such informal reassurances. This became unnecessary, however, when Göring himself intervened on March 23, 1940, notifying Himmler: “The Governor General has complained to me about the fact that even now deportations of Jews from the Reich are being carried out, although the reception possibilities do not yet exist. I hereby forbid such deportations without my permission and without proof of agreement on the side of the Governor General.”106 Göring’s intervention, enforcing his position at the Karinhall conference, threatened to stop Himmler’s deportations totally unless the latter now lived up to his own Karinhall promise to carry out deportations only in agreement with Frank. At first some of the Nazis, particularly Greiser in the Warthegau, were reluctant to face this unpleasant fact. Greiser’s initial reaction, upon hearing of Göring’s stop order, was to insist that it applied only to the Stettin affair and not to the Jews of Lodz, whom he was planning to deport. This, he insisted, had been agreed upon at Karinhall.107 But once again Himmler gave priority to ethnic German resettlement over the deportation of Jews. He reached agreement with Frank on the second short-range plan for the immediate deportation of 120,000 Poles and 35,000 “Gypsies” to make room for the Volhynian Germans. Fully in accord with the sequence announced by Heydrich on January 30, the deportation of the Jews from the Warthegau would follow the Volhynian action and thus was not expected to begin until August. When the Jews did arrive, Frank still intended to send them over the Vistula.108

The “Volhynian action,” or more precisely the expulsion of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans from Volhynia and Galicia, for which preparations had been underway for two months, was to be carried out in an even more organized manner than outlined in the intermediate plan. In early February members of Rapp’s staff had visited the Landräte of the eastern areas of the Warthegau to prepare for the “simultaneous” evacuation of Poles and resettlement of the Volhynian Germans.109 Many problems were noted, especially in relation to the novelty of dealing with rural rather than urban Poles. There were few medium-sized Polish farms and even fewer large estates. Farms suitable for German settlers could only be created by dispossessing on average three Polish farm families and consolidating these parcels for a single German family.110 Preparations had to be disguised. German commissions had to stop openly investigating Polish villages, for the Poles would be warned of their imminent deportation and thereupon slaughter their livestock and destroy their crops. In any case, the exchange of possession should take place either before or after, not during, the spring harvest.111

Koppe ordered the compilation of a “farm file” (Hofkartei) in each county or Kreis, registering the best Polish farmsteads. The departure of settlers from Lodz was to be timed so that the Germans arrived early in the morning and could be installed in their new farms the same day. “Evacuations and installations must take place in rapid succession for tactical reasons.” However, care was to be taken that the German settlers be kept out of sight at the moment of dispossession to be spared psychological stress.112

The Germans also had to devise methods of screening and selection to accommodate both Himmler’s concern for people of possible German origin and Göring’s demands for Polish agricultural workers. For this a system of three camps was devised. All dispossessed Poles would be brought to Camp I on the Wiesenstrasse in Lodz, which served as a “processing camp” (Durchschleusungslager) for racial and medical examinations. Those destined for deportation to the General Government would be sent to Camp II, a “transition camp” (Übergangslager) on Luisenstrasse. Those deemed suitable for work in the Reich would be sent to Camp III (Konstantynow). In both Camps I and II extreme care was to be exercised that no one of possible German origin was deported, which included anyone—regardless of political views—who had applied for membership on the German Volksliste; were members of the German Evangelical, German Catholic, or Polish Evangelical churches; or had relatives who were German citizens or were serving in the German military. Entire families could be sent to Camp III if they appeared racially suitable for Germanization. Otherwise only temporary or “seasonal” or “migrant” workers were sent to Camp III without families.113

Despite all these preparations, the first transports of the second short-range plan did not involve the seizure of farms and the processing of Poles through the three-camp system. In the first week of April, three trains carrying 2,663 Jews departed the camp at Glowno outside Poznan.114 Thereafter the new procedures for deporting Poles to either the General Government or labor in the Reich were put to the test—initially without great success.

On April 20 Rapp wrote a blistering memorandum summarizing the magnitude of the failure. Few Poles—“frequently only 10%” of the evacuation quota—were actually being taken. Even in the Kreise merely neighboring on the evacuation sites, Polish farmers spent only a few hours on their farms feeding the livestock, which not only thwarted the evacuation program but also endangered the harvest. At the present rate, only 20,000 of the 120,000 Poles targeted for resettlement would be seized. The other 100,000 would be roving the villages and presenting an intolerable security risk. Rapp recommended suspending the operation until the “resettlement staffs” (Ansiedlungsstäbe) were removed from the villages, where their presence gave early warning and their work provided inadequate information for the Umwandererzentralstelle (UWZ) in any case; evacuation and resettlement could then be carried out suddenly across entire Kreise.115

Himmler was furious at the delay, for to him the key issue was not how many Poles were evacuated but how many ethnic Germans were settled and how quickly. Himmler wrote Greifelt, insisting that the placement of the Volhynian Germans had to be carried out “as unbureaucratically and thereby as quickly as possible,” for conditions in their camps were “very bad.” Moreover, the Volhynians had suffered the shock of leaving their homes, trekking through the harsh winter, living in squalid camps, and suffering illness and often even the loss of a child. His goal was to settle 100 families per day and be finished by the end of August. This placement was not final and could be adjusted the following spring.116 At the same time, Albert Rapp was removed from his position in Poznan and replaced by Rolf-Heinz Höppner; Herman Krumey, head of the office of the UWZ in Lodz, was placed in charge of resettlement in the Warthegau.117

Indeed, Himmler had reasons for displeasure that transcended the slow pace of Volhynian resettlement. His grandiose design for a sweeping racial reorganization of eastern Europe had been steadily whittled away. In the fall of 1939 he had envisaged the deportation of about one million people (including all Jews) from the incorporated territories into the General Government by the end of February 1940, and eventually the removal of all so-called racially undesirable elements from these lands. By March 1940, however, Frank was boasting that the idea that one could gradually transport 7½ million Poles to the General Government had been “fully abandoned.” Moreover, the Jewish deportations had been postponed repeatedly—most recently to August—and Göring had invested Frank with a virtual veto power over them. Even the resettlement of ethnic Germans had been scaled back and was now bogged down. But if Frank could go over Himmler’s head to Göring, Himmler now sought to relegitimize his threatened dream by going over Göring’s head to Hitler.

Since his pronouncements of the previous autumn, Hitler had played no visible role in shaping racial policy. In a typical example of the “institutional Darwinism” of the Third Reich, implementation had been left to a struggle between his subordinates while the Führer himself turned his attention to loftier matters of grand strategy, in particular preparations for the offensives into Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. But by spring Hitler seemed to have lost faith in his resettlement plan, at least insofar as it concerned the Jews in Lublin. According to the Foreign Office liaison to Führer headquarters, Walther Hewel, Hitler told Colin Ross on March 12, 1940, that

the Jewish question really was a space question which was difficult to solve, particularly for him, since he had no space at his disposal. Neither would the establishment of a Jewish state around Lublin ever constitute a solution as even there the Jews lived too close together to be able to attain a somewhat satisfactory standard of living. . . . He, too, would welcome a positive solution to the Jewish question; if only he could indicate a solution; this, however, was not possible under present conditions when he had not even sufficient space for his own people.118

Word of this change of heart on Hitler’s part must have reached Himmler very quickly, for already in early April HSSPF Krüger in the General Government rejected the expulsion of Jews from Warsaw to the Lublin district.119 The brilliant success of German arms in the first two weeks of the French campaign, however, gave Himmler the opportunity in late May to seek Hitler’s approval for his racial design, which stood in stark contrast to the pragmatic arguments of Göring and Frank and included an even more radical solution for the Jews than the now faltering Lublin reservation.

On May 9, 1940, Himmler reemphasized in an order the task of selecting from the populations of the incorporated territories and the General Government those people of alien nationality who on the basis of their “racial fitness” (rassischen Eignung) were suitable for “Germanization.” This racial “Auslese” (a German term for special wine made from the choicest late-gathered grapes) was to be brought to the Reich and placed in a work environment separate from other foreign workers and conducive to the most rapid Germanization.120 As for the other Poles, he remained committed to the notion that those who were not “racially amalgamable” (rassisch verschmelzbar) could remain in the eastern provinces only as long as their labor was needed. Thereafter they were “in the course of the next 5–10 years, without exception and mercy, to be deported into the General Government, the catchment basin [Sammelbecken] of Germany’s racially unfit.”121

Himmler then proceeded to draft his May 1940 memorandum “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Populations in the East,” which was reminiscent of the Wetzel-Hecht memorandum of November 1939.122 The 15 million people of the General Government and the 8 million of the incorporated territories—“ethnic mush” (Völkerbrei) in Himmler’s view—were to be splintered into as many ethnic groups as possible for “screening and sifting” (Sichtung und Siebung). “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.” (Das Fundament in unseren Erwägungen sein muss, die rassisch Wertvollen aus diesem Brei herauszufischen, nach Deutschland zu tun, um sie dort zu assimilieren.) The key to this sifting process was education. Schooling for the non-German populations was to be minimal—arithmetic calculations to 500, writing their names, lessons in obedience to Germany, honesty, and industriousness, but no reading. Racially valuable children would be permitted higher schooling, but only in Germany. Their parents would have to choose between parting with their children or coming to Germany themselves. Deprived of their racially valuable stock and dumped together in the General Government along with those from Germany “of the same racial and human type,” the various ethnic groups would gradually disappear—the smallest like the Kaschubs within four or five years, then the Ukrainians, Goralians, and Lemkos, and finally the largest, the Poles, over a considerably longer period of time. This nondescript population of “denationalized” peoples would then serve as a reservoir for migrant labor to Germany.

Along with the denationalization (in fact, cultural genocide) of the various ethnic groups of eastern Europe, the Jews were also to disappear, but in a different way. “I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.” (Den Begriff Juden hoffe ich, durch die Möglichkeit einer grossen Auswanderung sämtlicher Juden nach Afrika oder sonst in eine Kolonie völlig auslöschen zu sehen.) Concerning this systematic eradication of the ethnic composition of eastern Europe, Himmler concluded: “However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.” (So grausam und tragisch jeder einzelne Fall sein mag, so ist diese Methode, wenn man die bolschewistische Methode der physischen Ausrottung eines Volkes aus innerer Überzeugung als ungermanisch und unmöglich ablehnt, doch die mildeste und beste.)

On May 25—that is, a week after the German army reached the English Channel and just as it was closing in on the best units of the French and British armies trapped at Dunkirk—Himmler discussed his memorandum with Hitler. Himmler’s timing was impeccable, and he scored a great triumph. “The Führer read the six pages through and found them very good and correct [sehr gut und richtig],” Himmler noted. Moreover, “the Führer desires that I invite Governor General Frank back to Berlin, in order to show him the memorandum and to say to him that the Führer considers it correct.” Himmler then asked if Hitler would authorize Lammers of the Reich Chancellery to distribute copies to the eastern Gauleiters. Also to be initiated was Göring’s man in the incorporated territories, Winkler, among others, with the message that the Führer had “recognized and confirmed” (anerkannt und bestätigt) the memorandum as setting out authoritative guidelines. Hitler agreed.123

This episode is of singular importance in that it is the only firsthand account by a high-ranking participant—Himmler—of just how a Hitler decision was reached and a Führerbefehl, or Hitler order, was given in respect to Nazi racial policy during this period. The initiative came from Himmler. However, he did not present Hitler with a precise plan; it was rather a statement of intent, a set of policy objectives. The details of implementation would be left to Himmler. Hitler indicated both his enthusiastic agreement and the men with whom the information could be shared, but he himself gave no specific orders to the likes of Göring, Frank, and the eastern Gauleiters. He simply allowed it to be known what he wanted or approved. Presumably business was often conducted in such a way in the Third Reich.

Himmler’s enthusiastic memorandum writing on this subject continued into June, when he countered the argument that Polish labor would always be necessary in the incorporated territories for economic reasons. He set out as his guiding principle: “One only possesses a land when even the last inhabitant of this territory belongs to his own people.” Anything less only invited “blood mixing” (blutliche Vermischung). Thus the alien population had to be forced off the land into the cities for construction work. Then gradually seven-eighths of them would be deported to the east and one-eighth would be Germanized. Agricultural labor would be supplied by young German men and women eager to save money for their own farms. “I am convinced that in the east we can get by without native Polish labor in the long run, and that we cannot and must not leave Poles in the eastern provinces for economic reasons.”124

Frank was still under the impression that the idea of deporting 7½ million Poles to the General Government had been “fully abandoned.” He had agreed with Himmler to accept a few hundred thousand Poles and all the Jews, and even this prospect was daunting enough:

We will in the future have to accept several hundred thousand Poles, and there is no doubt that we will have to do it in the coming years, if one wants to solve the Polish problem in the Reich. If we do not accept them directly and legally, then it will proceed in an illegal way. However, we must make this sacrifice to the German Reich. I have declared to the Führer and also to the Reichsführer-SS Himmler that we have no other interest other than to be ready to the furthest limit of our ability as the receptacle of all elements that stream into the General Government from outside, be they Poles, Jews, Gypsies, etc.

As for the Jews, not hundreds of thousands but millions would burden the General Government when the Reich’s eastern provinces were cleared of them. This was a great dilemma for Frank, because these Jews were not rich. “In the General Government there are no rich Jews anymore, rather for the most part only a Jewish proletariat.” He, like Himmler, could still not envisage a solution of physical extermination, however. “In the end one cannot simply starve them [the Jews] to death,” his Sipo-SD commander Streckenbach confessed to a meeting of the SS and police, to whom Frank had just given orders for the liquidation of thousands of Polish intelligentsia.125

Frank did not meet with Himmler (as Hitler had suggested), but he did meet with Heydrich on June 12, 1940. Frank must have made a convincing case for his difficulties in the General Government, since it was agreed for the time being—“in view of the dire situation there”—not to go beyond the deportations already agreed upon, that is, the Volhynian action then in progress and the Jewish deportations to begin “presumably” in August.126 But this was scant consolation to Frank, who was becoming increasingly desperate. In a letter to Lammers of the Reich Chancellery, he lamented the economic crisis in the General Government and added: “Just as impossible, in its catastrophic effects no longer bearable, is the continuation of resettlement.” The General Government was far more densely populated than Germany. “It is quite impossible, in view of the totally wretched food situation in the General Government, that the resettlement actions can be continued beyond the amount of the last resettlement plan agreed upon with the RFSS.” A “comprehensive discussion” of the “eastern problems” was thus “urgently necessary.”127 For the beleaguered Frank, therefore, a surprising order from Himmler suddenly stopping the impending evacuation of Jews into the General Government was a veritable deliverance.128 Himmler had found his colony in Africa for the Jews—the island of Madagascar!

THE ARMY, FROM ABDICATION TO COMPLICITY

In October 1939 the German army had washed its hands of responsibility in Poland, and the military administration had been dissolved. Nonetheless, military personnel remained in the east not only to perform strictly military functions but also to continue administrative tasks for the as yet inadequately staffed civil administration. While the top army commanders knew perfectly well that a policy of systematic liquidation of Polish elites and mass deportation was to ensue, this information had not been shared with the officer corps at large or even with the generals who would be left behind in Poland. The latter in particular found themselves witnesses to mind-boggling atrocities, which they could only comprehend as the arbitrary and unauthorized actions of local SS units or the product of Himmler’s sinister designs. To a few generals at least, such atrocities all too clearly revealed the sordid nature of certain elements within National Socialism but did not necessarily reflect state policy. To their credit they protested vociferously, though in the end ineffectively, for not only Hitler but also Brauchitsch and Halder were unreceptive to such objections from the east.

For a brief period, however, these graphic reports of the Polish horrors were not only permitted but also widely circulated among the generals on the western front. This was due to an unusual combination of circumstances. The generals had been dismayed in late September when Hitler announced his intentions for a fall offensive against France. The mud and fog of November threatened to neutralize the armor and air power upon which any chance of military success depended. For most of the generals, it was Hitler’s mad determination to risk all under the least propitious conditions, not the criminal nature of the regime so clearly revealed in Poland, that fueled their discontent. In this atmosphere of discontent and even tentative intrigue and opposition, real resisters of conscience were able to collect and disseminate information on events in Poland among an officer corps briefly receptive to such evidence.

When the weather was so bad that it forced cancellation of the autumn offensive and saved Hitler from himself, the generals took hope that military victory was again possible. In these circumstances Brauchitsch, who himself had temporarily faced a “crisis of confidence,” was able to silence the messengers of atrocities in Poland, and the protesting generals were abandoned to face the ruination of their military careers. For the vast majority of the officers, the spectacular victory in France then seemed to confirm the genius of the man they had considered mad six months earlier. It is this tragic descent of the army from an abdication of responsibility to the brink of active complicity that we must now trace.129

October was a month of growing consternation among the generals. Only the most ardent Nazi among them, Walter von Reichenau, was capable of openly confronting Hitler and urging a cancellation of the fall offensive.130 Unwilling himself to confront Hitler, Halder at least tolerated tentative preparations for a coup to be undertaken by men such as Lt. General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Colonel Hans Oster, and Major Helmuth Groscurth, if the offensive could not be postponed. Stülpnagel frequently visited the western front but could find only Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb among the three army group commanders (the others being Fedor von Bock and Gerd von Rundstedt) ready to act against the regime, though they all opposed the fall offensive. Before Brauchitsch and Halder also toured the west to collect testimony against the offensive, the latter confessed to Groscurth “with tears” in his eyes that for weeks he had gone to Hitler with a pistol in his pocket but could not bring himself to shoot the man. But he did indicate to Groscurth as late as November 2, 1939, that if Hitler did not cancel the offensive within three days, he would support the coup. At a climactic meeting on November 5, when Brauchitsch submitted to Hitler a memorandum opposing the fall offensive, Hitler exploded into one of his famous tirades. After 20 minutes an “ashen-faced” (kreidebleich) Brauchitsch emerged and told Halder of Hitler’s threat to stamp out “the spirit of Zossen” (the OKH headquarters). Halder inferred that the plot was known, hurried back to headquarters to burn all evidence, and henceforth progressively distanced himself from all forms of opposition.131

What the military advice of the generals could not accomplish, the weather did—successive postponements of the western offensive into January 1940. When on January 10 an airplane carrying German military plans strayed off course and landed in Belgium, Hitler ordered a definite postponement until May while new plans were devised. During this prolonged “phony war” the disturbing reports from the east multiplied.

In West Prussia Lt. General Max Bock first sought to negotiate with the HSSPF Hildebrandt for an end to the extensive executions being carried out by Alvensleben’s Selbschutz. Executions were to be carried out only for reasons of security and in an orderly manner by appropriate units. When this had no effect, Bock complained directly to Forster that reports from his commanders uniformly warned of the “vast agitation and powerful emotional stress” (ungeheuere Erregung und starke seelische Belastung) on the troops. Moreover, continuation of such actions threatened the security of the area “because the Poles, aside from the necessarily harsh measures of confiscation and eviction, were driven into desperation by the closing of churches, the shootings of priests, through the destruction of Saints’ images before their eyes, through the constant threat that all Poles must disappear as quickly as possible from this country and through the constant insecurity of their own lives, which would only intensify with the approaching winter and increasing distress.” In an area where 10% of the population were Germans scattered on individual farms, German troop strength did not suffice to ensure security against understandable acts of desperation by Poles who had nothing more to lose.132

In the neighboring Warthegau, General Walter Petzel noted in a report that reached both the OKH and OKW that “reconstruction work” was endangered by SS units that displayed a tendency to form a “state within a state” and carried out their “special racial tasks” without regard for the effects upon the troops.

In almost every large town public shootings took place through these units. The selection was totally nonuniform and often incomprehensible, the implementation frequently disgraceful. In many districts all Polish peasants were arrested and interned with their families. . . . In the cities evacuations were carried out in which entire apartment buildings were indiscriminately cleared. . . . In many cities actions were carried out against the Jews, which degenerated into the worst excesses. In Turek . . . a number of Jews were driven into a synagogue, forced to crawl through the bench seats while singing and constantly being beaten by SS men with whips. They were then forced to take down their pants, to be beaten on their naked behinds. One Jew, who out of fear had gone in his pants, was forced to smear excrement in the faces of the other Jews.133

Col. General Johannes Blaskowitz, the commander in chief in the east, was likewise impressed by the raging terror in the General Government. When Lt. Colonel Helmuth Stief from the Operations Division of the General Staff visited, Blaskowitz opened his heart for three-quarters of an hour and urged him to “make use of it” with the OKH. Stief himself was deeply shaken and wrote his wife: “The most prolific invention of atrocity propaganda is in poor comparison to what an organized murdering, robbing, and plundering band is doing there, with supposed tolerance from the highest quarters. . . . 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” (italics mine).134

Blaskowitz sent off his own report on November 27, 1939. He noted that the Einsatzgruppen worked “almost exclusively as execution commandos” and that the police had “so far accomplished no visible task of keeping order but rather only spread terror among the population.” This “blood lust” (Blutrausch) was an intolerable burden for the army, “because all this happens in the ‘field grey’ uniform.” The present situation was making it impossible to utilize the country for the benefit of the troops and the war economy, for “with violence alone the security and peace of the land cannot be restored.”135 When this report reached Hitler, he dismissed it as evidence of the “childish attitude” (kindliche Einstellung) and “salvation-army methods” (Heilsarmee-Methoden) of the military leadership.136

Men like Groscurth gathered the information from Poland and sought to mobilize the officer corps into action. But “a decision to act is not taken. One is a soldier, bound by his oath, loyal to the Führer, etc., but above all one clings to his position and has an elegant wife,” Groscurth noted in a particularly scornful reference to Brauchitsch, whose divorce and remarriage to an ardent Nazi woman had been made possible by a large cash gift from Hitler.137 Groscurth sought to prevail upon Halder, once again in vain. The chief of staff now spurned all such importuning with a ready list of six reasons for following Hitler to the end: Such resistance in wartime was against tradition. There was no successor. The younger officers were not reliable. The internal mood was not ripe for opposition. It was intolerable that Germans remain the “slaves” (Helotenvolk) of England. And Ludendorf had carried out his 1918 offensive against the advice of others, without the judgment of history going against him.138

Unsuccessful in Berlin, Groscurth visited the western front from December 18 to 22 in an attempt to stir some response there with his Polish materials, including yet another Blaskowitz report delivered to Berlin in six copies on December 8.139 Groscurth noted some success in arousing “great agitation.”140 Even the cautious Fedor von Bock wrote in his diary: “I hear of events from the ‘colonization’ of the east that frighten me.” Furthermore, Bock discussed with other generals the need for a fuller clarification of the situation in Poland, though this was temporarily countered by assurance from Brauchitsch that Blaskowitz had subsequently settled his difficulties through discussions with Frank.141

On January 13, 1940, Groscurth tried to move Halder once more, but the latter was increasingly intoxicated by “the great possibilities for success” militarily and “railed at all those people, who thought of a putsch . . . most were only reactionaries and wanted to turn back the wheel of history.”142 Blaskowitz also saw Brauchitsch on January 17, but the commander in chief flatly refused to submit anything from Blaskowitz to Hitler. His meeting with Halder the following day was likewise futile.143

Unable to persuade Brauchitsch and Halder, the protestors were at least able to create the mood of a “crisis of confidence” vis-à-vis the commander in chief by virtue of his weak leadership and a broad antipathy toward the SS. Major General Kurt von Tippelskirch of the OKH noted in his diary: “In the case that a different attitude is not taken, the commander in chief has no guarantee that it will not explode.”144 To exercise some damage control Brauchitsch asked to meet with Himmler. Before the meeting both Himmler and Heydrich tried to secure a copy of the apparently now famous Blaskowitz report that Groscurth had circulated among the western commanders.145 What transpired at the Himmler-Brauchitsch meeting of January 24 is not known, but Brauchitsch attempted to give a pacifying report to the western commanders: Himmler had said there was nothing to do about the past, but he would do everything in his power to prevent further occurrences in the future.146 Brauchitsch also sent his own “neutral objective emissary,” Major Kossman, to investigate matters on the spot but got no comfort when the latter returned with a “devastating report.”147 In late February Brauchitsch then turned—in Groscurth’s words—to “negotiate again with Himmler over tea.”148

Himmler was conciliatory. As Brauchitsch reported to Halder, Himmler admitted that “mistakes” had been made but said that it was his “intention to carry out his difficult tasks as discreetly as possible with little shedding of blood. He wants good relations with the army.” To show his good will, Himmler offered the labor of 2½ million Jews to dig antitank ditches on the eastern border, a possibility Brauchitsch promised to look into.149 The behavior of the army was not beyond reproach either, Himmler added. There were cases of slaughtering animals and socializing with Poles!150

With alacrity Brauchitsch hurried to pass on the good tidings from Himmler in order to pacify his generals and to repress his critics. On February 7, 1940, he sent a letter concerning the “Army and the SS” to all his army and army group commanders. He asserted that “harsh measures against the Polish population” were inevitable for securing German Lebensraum and demanded that all criticism of Nazi racial policy, a policy “made necessary by the forthcoming battle of destiny of the German people,” cease.151

In addition to meeting with Himmler twice and issuing this apologia for Nazi racial policies in Poland, Brauchitsch took one other measure to stifle his critics: he sacked Groscurth from his position in the OKW. Before his ignominious departure to a battalion command—“insolence and degradation,” he noted—Groscurth received yet further discouraging news about Halder. The chief of staff had claimed “the situation in the east would later be forgotten—it was after all not so bad” (italics mine). Groscurth concluded, “It is pitiful and beyond understanding.” Brauchitsch would believe nothing, and “in the decency of Halder I no longer believe in any form—from these people nothing more is to be expected.”152

Despite the departure of Groscurth there was one more round to be fought in this unequal struggle for the conscience of the German army. Since his unsatisfactory meeting with Brauchitsch in mid-January, Blaskowitz had continued to accumulate material on events in Poland. When Brauchitsch visited the headquarters of the eastern command on February 20, Blaskowitz had his ammunition ready—26 pages of notes including a report from General Alexander Ulex, commander of the southern border region, and a list of 35 specifically dated incidents of flagrant atrocity.153 The Ulex report noted that the violent actions of the police displayed an “incomprehensible lack of human and ethical sensitivity, so that one could almost speak of animalization” (unbegreiflichen Mangel menschlichen und sittlichen Empfindens, so dass man geradezu von Vertierung sprechen kann), and his headquarters knew of only a “tiny fraction” of the violence taking place. “The only way out of this disgraceful situation that stained the honor of the entire German people” was the total removal of all police units with their officers, Ulex concluded.

The Blaskowitz notes were worded more circumspectly to appeal to some remnant of utilitarian rationality, but given the context, the condemnatory thrust was quite clear. “It is a mistake to slaughter some 10,000 Jews and Poles, as is now happening, for in view of the size of the population neither the idea of the Polish state will be eliminated nor the Jews removed in that way. On the contrary, the manner of this slaughter causes the greatest harm, complicates our problems and makes the situation far more dangerous than it would have been with a considered and purposeful behavior.” The counterproductive results were many. Enemy propaganda was given the most effective material imaginable. What the enemy radio reported so far was only a minute fraction of what was taking place, and one had to assume that the outcry abroad would grow “all the more as the abominations had actually happened.” The public violence against the Jews caused the “deepest revulsion” and even aroused sympathy for the victims among the previously anti-Jewish Poles, thus threatening to unite Poles and Jews in common hatred against Germany. The prestige of the army, which was forced to stand by helplessly in the face of these atrocities, could never be restored in the eyes of the Polish population. But worst of all was the “moral depravity that will spread like a plague in the shortest time” among good Germans. At the moment “the attitude of the troops to the SS and police wavers between loathing and hate,” but “when the highest officials of the SS and police demand violence and brutality and praise it publicly, then in the shortest time only the brutes rule. 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.”

Finally, such behavior could only lead to Polish resistance. Especially disruptive were the deportations, in which people were torn from their houses and sent off “totally without means.” That the widespread fear and panic caused by the resettlement turned to “measureless hatred through the numerous children starved to death on every transport and train cars full of frozen people” was only too obvious. “The view that one could intimidate and repress the Polish people with terror will surely be proven false. The capacity for suffering of these people is much too great for that. . . . The often expressed view that a small Polish resistance is quite desirable, because one then has the opportunity to decimate the Poles in grand style, is looked upon lightheartedly.” But in fact the danger of resistance, to which the Poles were being driven irresponsibly, was real. It would jeopardize the military security and economic exploitation of the east and, thanks to the many weapons still hidden about the land, would cost much German blood.

Upon returning to Berlin, Brauchitsch was confronted with a letter from the 90-year-old World War I hero and oldest living field marshal August von Mackensen expressing concern over the “outrages” in Poland and urging that something be done to prevent “the prestige and honor” of the German army from being besmirched by the deeds of “hired subhumans and released criminals.”154

At this point Brauchitsch did nothing short of enlisting the services of Himmler himself to put an end to the carping and criticism. Himmler had earlier sent an indirect feeler to Brauchitsch about the possibility of his clarifying the Polish situation to the western commanders, but Brauchitsch had declined. Brauchitsch now reversed himself and on February 20 invited Himmler to speak before all the army and army group commanders. Himmler initially refused, saying he had no desire to appear before a large group to “excuse himself.” Brauchitsch’s intermediary, Tippelskirch, assured him that it was not to “excuse but enlighten.” Himmler was still reluctant and proposed speaking only to a small group of sympathetic men. In particular, he did not want Georg von Küchler (who had referred to an SS unit in Poland as a “blot” or Schandfleck on the army), Leeb, Blaskowitz, or Ulex present.155 After some further delay, however, Himmler accepted the invitation, proposing an evening meeting with dinner because the atmosphere “would be more conducive to the possibility of a comradely discussion of these still difficult problems.” Brauchitsch obliged, and the meeting was scheduled for March 13 at Rundstedt’s headquarters in Koblenz.156

In Koblenz Himmler made it clear that SS actions in Poland were not unauthorized excesses by either subordinate commanders or himself. “No wild actions by lower officers—even less so by me,” his handwritten notes insisted.157 “In this group of the highest officers of the army I can quite openly say it: I do nothing that the Führer does not know,” General Ulex remembered Himmler stating. General von Weichs recalled, “In conclusion, he [Himmler] emphasized that he always followed the orders of the Führer, but he was prepared in some things that perhaps appeared incomprehensible to take responsibility for the Führer before the people and the world, because the person of the Führer cannot be connected with these things.” Apparently no one chose even to raise the question of events in Poland in the ensuing discussion, although Blaskowitz was there and at least one of his reports was well known to virtually all of the officers present.158

Brauchitsch’s tactic was successful. Himmler’s speech to the generals brought to an end the simmering discontent of many and the overt criticism of a courageous few concerning German policy in Poland. Increasingly the generals turned their attention to the impending attack on France, and the spectacular victory there had a mesmerizing effect on them, for many had experienced the formative stages of their military careers in the four horrendous years of stalemated trench war on the western front. In their eyes Hitler was confirmed as a man of genius and destiny, who to the great good fortune of Germany had triumphed over the hesitation of the generals. As Quartermaster General Wagner—a onetime critic—put it, “to the Führer alone is due the fame, because without his will it would never have come to such a course of action.”159

The fates of the protestors varied. Blaskowitz continued to collect evidence on SS atrocities, which he tried to submit to Keitel in late April in two folders. The latter would not read them. Blaskowitz was removed from Poland in early May 1940. He was the only colonel general of the Polish campaign never to receive the field marshal’s baton.160 General Georg von Küchler, who had so angered Himmler in the fall of 1939, was far more supportive of Nazi racial policy when he returned to the east in the following summer. On July 22, 1940, he issued orders to the 18th Army forbidding any criticism of “the ethnic struggle being carried out in the General Government, for instance, the treatment of the Polish minorities, of the Jews, and of Church matters” because the “final ethnic solution” (endgültigen völkischen Lösung) to the centuries-old struggle on the eastern boarder required “unique, harsh measures.”161

Between September 1939 and the summer of 1940 a fatal transformation had occurred in the position and attitude of the army, the one organization capable of removing Hitler from within, or at least setting limits on Nazi depravity abroad. Faced with the knowledge of the regime’s intentions to carry out systematic murder and deportation in Poland, the top commanders had followed a policy of washing their hands. Brauchitsch had put it euphemistically, that he would shield the army from events that threatened to impair its discipline and spirit. The panic over the fall offensive in the west briefly moved some to consider a coup, but these plans collapsed as precipitously as the broken nerves of Brauchitsch and Halder in the face of a 20-minute Hitler tirade. Those few who were motivated more by revulsion over the atrocities in Poland and the criminal nature of the regime in general than by panic over the ill-considered fall offensive in the west tried unsuccessfully to keep the flames of discontent alive. As the prospects for a successful western offensive rose and Brauchitsch enlisted Himmler himself to legitimize Nazi policies in Poland, the critics were silenced. The victory in France only completed a process long underway. Abdication of responsibility by the army for the fate of the civilian populations that their military conquests brought under Nazi sway was complete.

The capacity to measure events by the traditional moral norms of the military caste, which, however antidemocratic and anti-Semitic, still involved notions of honor and chivalry and entailed certain obligations toward unarmed civilians, was still alive in 1939. So was the ability to articulate moral indignation. This ability to describe the policies of the regime in terms of dishonor and shame threatened to puncture the Nazis’ world of moral inversion, in which they were able to hollow out and pervert traditional German values such as loyalty, obedience, and law and order and to enlist the bulk of the German population in either active support or passive acceptance of their murderous policies. By the summer of 1940, however, this capacity to measure events by the moral standards of a bygone world—to recall Germany to its senses—had been effectively smothered, and a major obstacle to the radicalization of Nazi racial policy had been removed.

Thus long before the Final Solution became the centerpiece of Nazi racial policy and the Jews its primary victims—but when the murderous nature of such racial policies was nonetheless already clear—criticism of these policies was no longer tolerated within the army. But the long descent of the army was not complete. In 1941, with the “war of destruction” against the Soviet Union and the Final Solution, the army would move from abdication of responsibility and passive complicity to outright participation in this crusade against the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy.

THE MADAGASCAR PLAN

The German victory in France provided an impetus for the radicalization of Nazi racial policy in a number of ways. Himmler’s stance vis-à-vis Göring’s and Frank’s inhibitive arguments based on economic pragmatism was greatly strengthened, and the euphoria of victory provided the perfect moment for Himmler to elicit Hitler’s reconfirmation of sweeping plans for the total removal not only of all Jews but also of all Poles from the expanded territory of the Third Reich, and for the reduction of the east European populations under German occupation to a denationalized helot status. Victory had likewise completed the transformation of the attitude of the army officer corps to one of adulation for Hitler’s military genius and self-strangulation of any anti-Nazi criticism, particularly of Nazi racial policy. But the victory radicalized the situation in other ways as well. The occupation of territory in western Europe, with hundreds of thousands of additional Jews, ensured that the Nazis would no longer seek a solution to the Jewish question solely in terms of the Third Reich and the General Government. It was now a Europe-wide Jewish question that they would feel obligated to solve. This had always been implied in theory; now it was the case in practice as well. And finally, the expectation of an imminent peace settlement not only with France but also with Great Britain seemed to place at Germany’s disposal both the colonial empire of the former and the merchant shipping of the latter. It was out of this conjuncture of factors that the Madagascar Plan was born, offering the prospect of a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe through the total removal of the continent’s entire Jewish population. It was a heady and intoxicating vision to those who had experienced the bottlenecks of demographic engineering in eastern Europe over the past nine months and thus rekindled the flames of Nazi determination and fanaticism in this regard. However fantastical in retrospect, the Madagascar Plan was an important psychological step on the road to the Final Solution.

Among those advocating the removal of European Jewry from the continent, no potential resettlement area exercised such a faddish attraction in the years before World War II as the island of Madagascar, a French colony off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. The idea was huckstered by the British anti-Semites Henry Hamilton Beamish and Arnold Leese, as well as by the mysterious Georg de Pottere (using the pseudonym Egon van Winghene).162 The Polish, French, and British governments all toyed with the idea in the late 1930s, as did the Joint Distribution Committee, however briefly.163 The Poles, with the concurrence of the French, even sent a three-man investigating team (the Lepecky commission) to study the feasibility of relocating Polish Jews there. After a 13-week investigation, Lepecky concluded that 5,000–7,000 families could be settled on Madagascar, although the more optimistic of the two Jewish members of the commission thought a mere 500 families was the maximum.164

If such a fantastic idea was seductive even to the French and the Poles, obviously it could not escape attention in Germany. From 1938 to the spring of 1940, various Nazi luminaries—Streicher, Göring, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and Frank—and even the fellow traveler Hjalmar Schacht mentioned the idea.165 Just ten days before the Anschluss Eichmann had been instructed to collect material for a “foreign policy solution” to the Jewish question, along the lines being explored by Poland and France.166 Presumably after the Anschluss Eichmann was too busy with coercing emigration in Vienna. There is no evidence that actual planning for a Jewish resettlement in Madagascar, as opposed to mere references to the possibility, took place among the Nazis until June 1940, when imminent French defeat seemed to place the territories of the French empire at Germany’s disposal.

The initiative in this case came not from within the SS or the circle of Streicher’s Der Stürmer, but rather from Franz Rademacher, the newly appointed head of the Jewish desk of the German Foreign Office (the so-called Referat D III or Judenreferat). Rademacher was an ambitious young jurist and diplomat, a self-made man of proletarian origins who had just returned from the German embassy in Montevideo.167 Surveying the tasks of his new domain, Rademacher wanted to escape the humdrum paperwork involved in resolving specific cases of individual Jews with foreign policy implications. This had been the main task of the Judenreferat in the prewar period, but it seemed of little significance to Rademacher now that the war had broken out. He wanted to get down to fundamental questions. “In my opinion, therefore, the question in Jewish affairs is to be decided in accordance with German war aims,” he wrote on June 3, 1940, in a memorandum to his superior, Undersecretary Martin Luther of Abteilung Deutschland, the most nazified division of the German Foreign Office. “One question must be clarified, whereto with the Jews?” Rademacher posed several possibilities: “a) all Jews out of Europe. b) separation between eastern and western Jews; the eastern Jews, which supply the regenerative and Talmudic recruits for the militant Jewish intelligentsia, stay, for example, in the district of Lublin as a pledge in German hands, so that the American Jews remain paralyzed in their fight against Germany. The western Jews on the other hand are removed from Europe, to Madagascar for example.” Rademacher wanted to undertake a detailed feasibility study of these possibilities, so that the less nazified and more traditional Political Division of the Foreign Office did not preempt all planning for the peace treaty with France and, with its “inherently imperialistic way of thinking,” ignore the racial question. Rademacher thus asked Luther to ascertain Ribbentrop’s basic war aim in regards to the Jewish question.168

If the possible concentration of east European Jews around Lublin was an idea already tried and found wanting, the concept of shipping all European Jews to Madagascar appeared all the more a panacea to Germany’s frustrated demographic engineers. The idea spread like wildfire. Two weeks after Rademacher broached it to Luther, both Ribbentrop and Hitler himself mentioned the plan to use Madagascar for a Jewish reservation to Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano and Mussolini in their talks in Munich on June 18 over the fate of the French empire.169 Two days later, on June 20, Hitler repeated his intention to resettle the European Jews in Madagascar to the head of the German navy, Admiral Raeder.170

The well-informed Heydrich got wind of the Foreign Office brainstorm and moved quickly to protect his jurisdiction. On June 24, 1940, he wrote Ribbentrop to remind the foreign minister that in January 1939 Göring had placed him in charge of Jewish emigration from all Reich territory, a policy he had successfully pursued until the outbreak of the war. Now the “whole problem” (Gesamtproblem) of some three and a quarter million Jews in the German sphere could no longer be solved by emigration, and “thus a territorial final solution becomes necessary” (Eine territoriale Endlösung wird daher notwendig). Heydrich asked to be included in any forthcoming discussions on the subject that the foreign minister might be planning. Ribbentrop immediately conceded Heydrich’s jurisdiction. Rademacher was informed that the foreign minister had “in principle agreed to the preparation of an expulsion of the Jews from Europe,” which was to go forward “in closest agreement” with the agencies of the Reichsführer-SS.171

By early July the word on Madagascar had reached Hans Frank in the General Government. On July 10 his HSSPF Krüger reported on the new plan. Jewish deportations would no longer take place from Germany into the General Government, including “the expulsions that were to have begun in August.” Now all Jews, including those already in the General Government, were to be sent to an African colony “that the French government must turn over to Germany for this purpose.”172 The situation of the Germans in the General Government was thus vastly transformed. Not only were they freed from the expected deluge of Jews from the Third Reich scheduled to begin in August, but they now expected to be relieved of the Polish Jews already in the General Government as well. The suddenly reprieved Frank could hardly contain his glee as on several occasions he boisterously expounded upon this astonishing turn of events—this “colossal relief” (kolossale Entlastung)—to the “amusement” (Heiterkeit) of his assembled court.173

The word on Madagascar naturally spread to all levels of the German administration in the General Government. As early as July 1 the SD man Gerhard Mende blurted out to Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Jewish council in Warsaw, “that the war would be over in a month and that we would all leave for Madagascar.”174 In Warsaw plans to commence building two ghettos on the edge of the city, beginning in July, were brought to an immediate standstill. An “order from Cracow was issued to stop all work on ghetto construction in view of the fact that, according to the plan of the Führer, the Jews of Europe were to be sent to Madagascar at the end of the war and thus ghetto building was to all practical purposes illusory [daher eine Gettobildung praktisch illusorisch sei].”175 The Kreishauptmann (county chief) of Krasnystaw reported in early September that many of the Jews in his district had German names that they now spelled according to Polish conventions, for example, Zygelszyper instead of Ziegelschipper. For ease of record keeping, he was ordering the use of German spelling. In his view this did not endanger any German interests, for “when they go to Madagascar after the war, they can get themselves Madagascar-style names there.”176

If the German officials of the General Government were greatly relieved, the implications of the Madagascar Plan were less gratifying to those of the incorporated territories, especially Greiser in the Warthegau. In a meeting between Greiser and Frank at the end of July, the Gauleiter of the Warthegau noted that according to Himmler the Jews were now to be sent overseas. “That depends naturally upon the duration of the war.” But in the Warthegau the deportation of the Jews had been expected for the summer of 1940, and a solution to the Jewish question there, where allegedly 250,000 Jews (in fact 160,000) were packed into the ghetto in Lodz, could not remain unresolved through the winter:

Should the war last still longer, then one will have to find an interim solution. . . . It had been planned to transport them in a suitable manner to the General Government, and it had been intended to clarify the form of this transfer today. In the meantime the new decision had arrived, and he greatly valued the possibility of the transfer being cleared up, because for the Warthegau . . . it would be an impossible situation [ein unmöglicher Zustand] to keep these Jews, packed together in the ghetto, over the winter. In any case, therefore, one had to find an interim solution that offered the possibility of deporting these Jews to some other territory.

But Frank, Krüger, and Streckenbach were not about to oblige Greiser. They were now preparing to deport their own Jews to Madagascar. As plans were being drawn up for this move, they advised Greiser to see that the Lodz Jews were considered first in line. As for the General Government, according to Himmler it still faced the influx of some 30,000 “Gypsies.” Moreover, only 58,000 of the 120,000 Poles of the Volhynian action had arrived so far, and after that there were population exchanges involving 20,000–30,000 ethnic Germans from Lithuania and 41,000 Poles from Gdynia. To the final plea of Greiser’s HSSPF, Wilhelm Koppe, “that the situation regarding the Jews in the Warthegau worsened day by day” and that the ghetto there “had actually only been erected on the condition that the deportation of the Jews would begin by mid-year at the latest,” Frank was unmoved. The Warthegau might have priority when it came to Germanization; but his territory also had important tasks to fulfill for the Reich, and its food situation was desperate as well.177

Meanwhile in Berlin work on the Madagascar Plan proceeded feverishly in Rademacher’s Judenreferat in the German Foreign Office and now also in Eichmann’s office for Jews and evacuations in the RSHA.178 Rademacher made contact with agencies of the SS and the Interior Ministry as well as with the party. By early July he submitted his first reports.179 “The imminent victory gives Germany the possibility and, in my opinion, also the obligation to solve the Jewish question in Europe,” he wrote. “The desirable solution is: All Jews out of Europe.” (Der bevorstehende Sieg gibt Deutschland die Möglichkeit und meines Erachtens auch die Pflicht die Judenfrage in Europa zu lösen. Die wünschenswerte Lösung ist: Alle Juden aus Europa.) In the peace treaty France would be forced to cede the island of Madagascar to Germany as a mandate. Strategic points would be placed under a police governor of the SS. “The Madagascar solution means, as seen from the German point of view, the creation of a superghetto [Grossgettos]. Only the Security Police has the necessary experience in this area.” The Jews would be held financially liable for the real estate given them on Madagascar, and all their European property would be transferred to a special bank for this purpose. On the island they would not be subjected to a colonial administration. This would be a “superfluous overlap of authorities” with the police governor; moreover, their treatment as a colonial people would cause an uproar among American Jews. Instead they would be given autonomy under the police governor, with their own mayors, police, postal administration, and so on. Rademacher thought such “generosity” (Grossmut) toward the Jews could be used as propaganda to Germany’s benefit.

Rademacher continued his researches over the next several months. Consultations with the well-known demographer and president of the Bavarian State Office of Statistics, Dr. Burgdörfer, revealed that even if 4.9 million Jews from Europe and 1.6 million Jews from elsewhere in the world, excluding the United States and the Soviet Union, were resettled in Madagascar and the native population were left in place, it would still create a population density of only 16 per square kilometer. This was about average for the earth’s surface and one-tenth of the population density of Germany. Burgdörfer and Rademacher, in total disregard of the realities, fecklessly concluded that this population density could preserve itself within the natural capacity of the island. Dr. Schumacher of the Freiburg Mining Academy assured Rademacher that, aside from graphite, there were no significant mineral deposits on Madagascar. In Meyer’s Lexicon Rademacher read that the hot and humid coastal climate of Madagascar was “very unhealthy for Europeans,” but that the highlands were cooler and more wholesome.180

But above all Rademacher became intrigued by the economic side of the Madagascar Plan and drew up, for submission to Helmuth Wohlthat of Göring’s Four-Year Plan, a memorandum on the foundation of an intra-European bank for the utilization of Jewish property. The main idea was to replace Jewish economic influence in Europe with that of Germany in one blow, without disrupting the economy of any country. Jewish assets would be administered in trusteeship by the bank and gradually liquidated to pay for the entire cost of the resettlement operation. Property in Madagascar would likewise be administered by the bank in trusteeship and gradually transferred to the Jews. The bank would then continue to function as the economic intermediary between the Jewish reservation in Madagascar and the outside world, since no direct economic contact between the Jews and others would be permitted.181 On August 15, 1940, Rademacher received word via Luther of a conversation between Hitler and the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz, in which the Führer had stated his intention to evacuate all Jews from Europe after the war.182 Rademacher thus had every reason to believe in the full seriousness of the plans he was concocting.

Eichmann and his Jewish experts in the RSHA were also busy. Already on June 25, one day after Heydrich’s letter to Ribbentrop and a week after Hitler first mentioned Madagascar to Mussolini, a minor official of Eichmann’s office, Jagusch, informed Dr. Paul Eppstein of the Reich Union of Jews in Germany that a plan existed for a total solution to the Jewish question through the removal of all Jews from the German sphere in Europe (“and insofar as possible also England”) to a colonial territory.183 On July 3 Eichmann and Dannecker met with Jewish leaders from Berlin, Prague, and Vienna (Josef Löwenherz, Jakob Edelstein, and Frantisek Weidmann in addition to Eppstein) and declared that after the war a total solution to the Jewish question would be pursued, for which individual emigration would not suffice. Eichmann assigned the Jewish leaders the task of compiling (within 24 hours!) a list of considerations that would have to be taken into account for such a solution involving four million Jews. But the Jewish leaders showed interest only in Palestine, which the two Nazis rejected as a possibility.184

Eichmann and Dannecker proceeded unperturbed by the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Jewish leaders and by mid-August had completed their own draft of a plan—a neatly printed brochure, complete with table of contents and maps, entitled “Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt.” A copy was sent to Rademacher on August 15.185 Eichmann and Dannecker noted that “with the addition of the masses of the east, a settlement of the Jewish question through emigration had become impossible. . . . To avoid the lasting contact of other peoples with Jews, an overseas solution of insular character must be preferred above all others.” Thus the four million Jews in the German sphere—one million per year over four years—were to be sent to Madagascar.186 The RSHA plan contained no nonsense about demonstrating Germany’s generosity to the world by granting Jewish autonomy. Internally, the mandate would be a “police state.” Jewish organizations would be created, but their sole function would be to enforce SS orders as quickly as possible. Above all the plan emphasized that the total direction of the project—from financing to transport to security—would be under Reinhard Heydrich, who had been named special deputy for Jewish emigration by Göring in January 1939. In addition to discussing the administrative apparatus for deportation from the various countries in the German sphere, the report proposed sending an advance party to Madagascar to ascertain, among other things, the possibility of erecting camps to increase reception capacity. A special deputy of Himmler’s was to be named to take part in the peace negotiations insofar as the Madagascar Plan was involved.

Rademacher was not deterred by Eichmann’s evident determination to monopolize all aspects of the Madagascar Plan and exclude the participation of other agencies. In a late-August summary of the development of the plan, Rademacher proposed an extensive division of labor: (1) the Foreign Office would be in charge of negotiations both for the peace treaty and for special treaties with other countries to regulate the Jewish question; (2) the SS would be in charge of collecting the Jews in Europe and administering the island ghetto; (3) the utilization of Jewish property through a special bank would be supervised by Wohlthat of the Four-Year Plan; (4) propaganda would be prepared internally by Dr. Eberhard Taubert of Antisemitische Aktion under Goebbels and externally by the Information Division of the Foreign Office; (5) Viktor Brack in the Führer’s Chancellery would coordinate transportation. Rademacher requested Ribbentrop’s approval to invite the various participating agencies to a conference at the Foreign Office to put together a preparatory commission.187

There is no record of Ribbentrop’s response to Rademacher’s last proposal. No Foreign Office conference was held; no preparatory commission was sent. Further work on the Madagascar Plan within the Foreign Office ceased. Moreover, Rademacher’s counterpart in the RSHA, Adolf Eichmann, fared no better. As late as December 1940 he told Bernhard Lösener of the Interior Ministry that the Madagascar Plan was still sitting on Heydrich’s desk, awaiting his signature.188 The Madagascar Plan was born and died of military circumstances. The defeat of France and seemingly imminent victory over Great Britain promised both the colonial territory and the merchant fleet necessary for a massive overseas expulsion of the European Jews. Just as quickly, the failure to defeat Great Britain, fully apparent in September 1940, made realization of this plan impossible. The frenetic urgency behind its preparation in the summer months suddenly dissipated.

Like a spectacular meteor, the Madagascar Plan blazed across the sky of Nazi Jewish policy, only to burn out abruptly. It was no less real for its brief existence. There can be “no doubt that during this period both Rademacher and Eichmann tackled the plan in full earnest.”189 More important, it was also taken seriously by the Nazi leadership. To Frank’s great relief and Greiser’s disappointment, the impending deportations from the Warthegau to the General Government were canceled. Frank in turn temporarily ordered the end of ghetto construction as pointless. These men were not carrying out an elaborate sham; they were making real decisions based on the Madagascar Plan as a real part of Nazi Jewish policy in the summer of 1940.

It is also clear that had the Nazis carried out the plan as they intended, it would have been a murderous operation.190 Whatever the illusions of the naive and dilettantish Rademacher, the Nazi demographic engineers in east Europe had already demonstrated that “decimation” of the uprooted was not only no deterrence but even an added attraction to their population policies. This was not yet the Final Solution—a compulsive and comprehensive program to murder every last Jew that the Nazis could lay their hands on—but it was nonetheless genocidal in its implications. As such, it was an important psychological step toward the Final Solution that emerged a year later. In the fall of 1939 the Nazis had assumed a rapid solution to the Jewish question through deportation to the region of Lublin, only to find the task more difficult and much more time-consuming than they had anticipated. The alacrity with which the Madagascar Plan was seized upon as a panacea for the Nazis’ inability to solve the Jewish question is a measure of the frustration level that had been reached. Once again the alluring vision of a quick and total solution to the Jewish question cast its magic spell, only once again to disappoint. The desire, indeed the “obligation,” to solve the Jewish question still weighed heavily upon them, and the greater the frustration the lower the threshold to systematic mass murder.

THE LAST SPASMS OF EXPULSION POLICY, FALL 1940–SPRING 1941

As prospects for the imminent realization of the Madagascar Plan declined with Germany’s military fortunes in the Battle of Britain, Germany’s Jewish policy based upon expulsion faced a dead end. The idea of a Polish reservation had proven impossible to realize immediately; no new vistas had opened up overseas. Yet old habits, thought patterns, and temptations died hard, and from the fall of 1940 through the spring of 1941 the expulsion policy spasmodically revived as local Gauleiters along the borders of the Third Reich—in both east and west—successfully prevailed upon Hitler to rid them of some of their unwanted Jews through piecemeal deportations into Vichy France and the General Government. Hitler’s open encouragement inspired the demographic engineers to produce yet further plans for the massive population transfer of Poles in 1941, and also induced Frank’s grudging acquiescence. Once again, however, practical obstacles proved too great, and the plan remained mostly unrealized. But the key obstacle to the massive transfer of Poles—preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union—also fueled further planning for the expulsion of Jews. Expulsion remained the central theme or leitmotiv of Nazi demographic engineering well into the spring of 1941.

West

With the defeat of France, Alsace and Lorraine had been annexed to the Third Reich and joined to the Baden and Saarpfalz Gaue of Robert Wagner and Josef Bürckel, respectively. Beginning in July the Germans began deporting Jews, “Gypsies,” “asocials,” criminals, the mentally ill, and ardent French nationalists out of those newly annexed territories into France. That Himmler saw these population expulsions in the same light as the expulsions from the incorporated territories in the east can be seen in his speech to officers of the Waffen-SS in Metz: “Exactly the same thing took place in Poland at 40° below zero, where we had to ship out thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, where we had to have the toughness—this you should hear but then immediately forget—to shoot thousands of leading Poles.”191 By mid-November the Germans had deported 47,187 people from Lorraine and by December 23,790 from Alsace (including 3,259 Jews). Another 71,537 who had fled Alsace (including 17,875 Jews) were barred from returning.192

In this massive upheaval of humanity, it is not surprising that someone perceived the possibility of including the German Jews of Baden and Saarpfalz, thus making these Gaue judenfrei. According to Eichmann, it was the Gauleiter of Baden, Wagner, who made the proposal to Himmler, and the latter, without even considering the possible complications, was “too impulsive” not to agree.193 However impulsive the decision may have been, preparations for the deportations were secretly and carefully made well in advance, and involved close cooperation between the local authorities of the Gauleiter, the police, and the experts of Heydrich’s RSHA. According to Lösener, on the basis of a Hitler order, Himmler authorized the deportations on September 30, that is, very soon after it must have become apparent that the war with Britain was not going to be won that fall. On the basis of a decree of the Ministry of the Interior in Baden dated October 15, local authorities were to be informed on October 21 of measures to be taken the following day.194

Early on October 22, teams of police equipped with lists descended upon the Jews in every village in Baden and Saarpfalz and with no more than two hours’ notice brought them to collection points. The roundup proceeded according to very precise guidelines. The deportees were permitted 50 kilograms of baggage and 100 RM in cash; everything else was confiscated. The closing up of apartments was carefully regulated, even to the point of obtaining receipts for pets turned over to obliging neighbors. During the arrests the Jews were to be properly treated; excesses were to be avoided.195 In Walldorf near Heidelberg, four Schupo and four men of the reserve police took part in the roundup of 19 Jews, indicating that the ratio of police to deportees was quite high.196

To Heydrich’s satisfaction the roundups proceeded “without friction or incident” and were “scarcely noticed by the population.” Nine trains—two from Saarpflaz and seven from Baden—departed with the 6,504 German Jews on October 22 and 23 for Vichy France. The trains had been arranged by Eichmann in conjunction with the Transportation Ministry, and he sat anxiously in his car at the demarcation-line crossing point in Chalon-sur-Saône “bathed in sweat” until the last train passed into Vichy territory. When the French discovered whom they had allowed over the border, they lodged the German Jews in camps at Gurs and Riversaltes in the Pyrenees and Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence—camps originally constructed for Republican refugees from Spain.197

But if the deportation had run smoothly, the ensuing diplomatic and political complications quickly made clear the limits of such an expulsion policy in the west. Vichy France, like Hans Frank’s General Government, had no desire to become a “dumping ground” for the Jews of the Third Reich. On October 27 General Doyen, head of the French delegation to the armistice commission meeting in Wiesbaden, protested to the German delegation. Nine trains, with over 6,000 German citizens, registered as “expellee transports” (Transporte Ausgewiesener) had been accepted by French officials in the mistaken belief that they contained French citizens from Alsace-Lorraine. There were rumors that these transports of German Jews were destined for Portugal, but the French government wanted immediate information concerning “what final travel goal the Reich government planned for these expellees.”198

The German armistice commission delegation, wanting to know how to respond, asked the Foreign Office for information and instructions. The Foreign Office, likewise uninformed, consulted the RSHA. First Eichmann’s deputy Rolf Günther verbally and then Heydrich formally in a letter conceded that the reported deportation had indeed been carried out and without any warning to the French. It had been done by order of the Führer, they insisted. Ribbentrop thereupon ordered that the French demand be handled “dilatorily.”199

As in the case of the Stettin/Schneidemühl deportations in the spring, the Foreign Office was also informed in gruesome detail by an anonymous letter, this time sent to Friedrich Gaus of the Legal Division, whose wife was one-quarter Jewish. He sent it to Undersecretary Luther, whose Judenreferat forwarded it to the Gestapo. In addition to alleging that the action had taken place under the initiative of Gauleiters Bürckel and Wagner, the writer claimed that plans for a similar deportation from Hessen had been temporarily postponed owing to the French protest. Among the victims transported were World War I veterans and the residents of old people’s homes, including some who had to be carried to the trains on stretchers. Several people—eight in Mannheim alone and in Karlsruhe three—had committed suicide when faced with the deportation notice. Because suitable accommodation and provisions were lacking in the Pyrenees camps for the deportees—mostly elderly men and women—the French government was considering sending them to Madagascar as soon as the seaways were open. By this last comment, Luther scribbled, “Very interesting!”200

Another interested party emerged in the form of officials of the Interior Ministry. Ministerialrat Hans Globke requested a copy of the French protest note from Rademacher, noting that the Interior Ministry was the competent agency for the Jewish question inside Germany. When Rademacher protested that the deportations to France were primarily a foreign policy question and that the Interior Ministry had not even had the courtesy to inform the Foreign Office beforehand, Globke replied that the Interior Ministry would gladly have done so, but it had had no foreknowledge of the deportations either.201

Meanwhile the French persistently returned to the issue at Wiesbaden. The issue climaxed with a note of November 18, 1940: “The French government can in fact no longer provide asylum to these foreigners. It most urgently proposes that the Reich government immediately take the necessary measures so that they are transported back to Germany and the expenditures arising from their stay in France are repaid.”202 General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, head of the German delegation, complained bitterly that the current negotiations were extraordinarily overburdened and aggravated by this issue, on which he had been waiting nearly a month for instructions.203 But Ribbentrop continued to insist that the matter be handled dilatorily. Stülpnagel was to be informed that the deportation had taken place by the order of the Führer and that the return of the deported Jews, as proposed by the French, was out of the question.204

If the French were powerless to force the Germans to take back the Jews deported from Baden and Saarpfalz until the Germans wanted to murder them in death camps in Poland nearly two years later, the Vichy regime was not so powerless that it could not prevent further large-scale deportations now that it was forewarned. On November 14, 1940, a train carrying 280 Luxembourg Jews reached Portugal under an ongoing agreement between that country and Germany that if further transportation to the Americas did not work out, the Jews would be returned. Such was the case this time, and the unfortunate Luxembourg Jews were sent back to Bayonne in German-occupied France on November 20. There the SD-Sonderkommando chief in Bordeaux, Herbert Hagen, Eichmann’s erstwhile colleague at the Jewish desk of the SD and traveling companion to Palestine in 1937, took charge. On November 26 he sent the Luxembourg Jews in four train cars toward unoccupied France, only to have the French authorities at Orthez on the demarcation line refuse entry.

The French immediately lodged a complaint at Wiesbaden, and the military in Bordeaux complained that the continued presence of the Jews in that strategic zone was intolerable.205 Thirty-eight of the Luxembourg Jews were then successfully infiltrated into unoccupied France on a regular passenger train on December 21, and when the Germans refused to take them back, France protested repeatedly.206 To Foreign Office requests for information, armistice delegation complaints, and army demands that the Luxembourg Jews be removed from Bayonne, the RSHA replied only in late February 1941 that the SD in Bordeaux was gradually deporting the Jews stranded in Bayonne and that most of them were already gone.207 The Bordeaux military confirmed in May that all the Luxembourg Jews had been dispersed, some over the Spanish border and some into Vichy France.208 The German armistice commission delegation wanted assurances not only that the episode of the Luxembourg Jews was over but also that the SS would refrain from deporting other Jews over the demarcation line. The RSHA promised that these had been “special individual measures: These actions are concluded.”209 But this assurance did not come until July 9, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen were rushing into the Soviet Union, on the verge of carrying out a quite different policy from expulsion toward the Jews.

Poland

Though not without some conflict and misunderstanding, Himmler, Heydrich, Göring, and Frank had reached agreement on the resettlement schedule for 1940. Under the intermediate plan and the second short-range plan, the General Government was to accept uprooted and dispossessed Poles from the incorporated territories in order to make room for the repatriation and settlement of Baltic and Volhynian Germans. The deportations were to be completed by late July and then followed by the massive expulsion of all Jews from the incorporated territories. This agreement, reconfirmed between Heydrich and Frank on June 12, 1940, was subsequently changed in three ways. First, the pace of the Volhynian resettlement was much slower than expected, and this action was not in fact completed until January 1941. Second, the Madagascar Plan led to the cancellation of the total expulsion of the Jews of the incorporated territories, despite Greiser’s attempts in both March and July to at least empty the Lodz ghetto. And third, with the cancellation of the mass expulsion of Jews, first Himmler and then Hitler prevailed upon Frank to accept a modest expansion of the second short-range plan to include four additional small resettlement programs over the last four months of 1940.

The expulsion of Poles from the Warthegau to make room for Volhynian Germans began on May 6, 1940, and ended more than eight months later on January 20, 1941. Over this span, 92 trains carried 89,293 Poles and 2,663 Jews (the latter in three transports from Poznan) from the UWZ in Lodz into the General Government.210 As anticipated in Rapp’s critical and pessimistic report of late April, catching the Poles designated for resettlement proved difficult. The branch office of the UWZ in Gostynin reported an average capture rate of 44% in late May, but noted that this average disguised a significant variation. On the first day of an action, the capture rate could reach 75%, but it would drop precipitously the next day to 25%. Many Poles were not sleeping at home at night, and a search of the nearest forest significantly improved numbers.211 Two months later the capture rate remained around 40%. The Poles were frequently forewarned, indeed all too often by greedy Volksdeutsche who tried to use the impending deportations to extort the sale of livestock and equipment at bargain prices.212

HSSPF Koppe proposed that the SD set up an extensive network of agents to uncover the Poles’ warning system, and the Order Police requested reinforcements.213 The latter were indeed heavily engaged. For instance, between September 9 and December 13, units of Police Battalion 44 participated in 71 resettlement actions, often in overwhelming force. It was not unusual for 200–300 policemen to descend on an area to seize less than half that number of Polish families.214 In three of these actions in Kreis Schroda, the battalion had capture rates of 81%, 59%, and 87%.215

Apparently Police Battalion 101 enjoyed less numerical superiority over its prey: “In actions night and day without pause, 100% of the battalion’s strength was employed in all the districts of the Warthegau. On average some 350 Polish peasant families were evacuated daily. . . . During the peak of the evacuation period they [the men of the battalion] could not return to quarters for eight days and nights. The men had the opportunity to sleep only while traveling at night by truck. . . . In the biggest action, the battalion . . . evacuated about 900 families.” In all, the battalion evacuated 36,972 people out of a targeted 58,628—a capture rate of 63%.216

An intensified search for escapees also met with success. By early November the UWZ in Lodz reported to Eichmann that over 4,000 Poles had been captured who had earlier evaded resettlement and then been placed on wanted lists.217 But Höppner held out no hope that Poles would not continue to be forewarned of German resettlement actions as long as every agency in the Warthegau had no choice but to hire Polish employees.218

The deporters encountered additional problems arising from the behavior of ethnic Germans already living in the eastern provinces at the time of their incorporation, many of whom saw the repatriates less as racial comrades than as unfairly favored competitors for Polish property. They not only attempted to extort property from Poles designated for deportation, thus giving them early warning, but also descended on the farms of the newly settled Volhynian Germans and helped themselves to items they claimed to have lent to the former Polish owners.219

Even more significant, the local ethnic Germans resented the priority given to the repatriates in receiving the pick of Polish farms and demanded an “improvement” (Besserstellung) of their own position by having Poles dispossessed and deported on their behalf as well. The resettlement authorities rejected this demand on several grounds: trains for additional deportations were not available, the placement of the repatriates was urgent, and Polish farmers would have no incentive to keep up their farms if that merely led to their property being given to covetous neighboring ethnic Germans. The resettlement authorities asked for patience, since it was the Führer’s order that ultimately these regions be cleared of all Poles. In reality, local German officials winked at and even abetted the widespread practice of ethnic Germans taking over Polish farms. As one SD officer reported quite simply, “The Poles were made to understand they had to disappear.”220

Another problem emerged from the policy, presumably insisted on by Frank, that old and sick Poles were not to be included in the deportations. Local German authorities in the Warthegau complained that such a practice was untenable in the long run because those left behind without family support were destined to become a “burden” on public welfare. While one German SS officer thought most sick and elderly Poles could be left with relatives and only “quite few” Poles would become a welfare burden, Höppner took the problem more seriously. He noted ominously, “Under the circumstances other measures must be taken against nontransportable people.”221 The problem must have remained on Höppner’s mind, for the following spring he asked that all Poles suspected of having tuberculosis be registered and deported.222

Another problem the Germans faced was the constant temptation to increase the deportations. Even as the Volhynian resettlement action was just beginning, different German agencies attempted to expand the second short-range plan. In mid-May the military approached the UWZ branch office in Konin for help in clearing the southern half of that Kreis to create a vast training ground and shooting range.223 By late June the staggering dimensions of the project involving the resettlement of 80,000 people (including 8,000 Volksdeutsche and 4,000 Jews) were clear.224 Both Höppner in Poznan and Eichmann’s deputy in Berlin, Rolf Günther, noted that no deportations to the General Government could take place without the agreement of Göring, Frank, and the Reich Transportation Ministry. Höppner advised Krumey in Lodz to make it clear that without such prior agreement, the UWZ camps would accept no transports sent to them. And Günther advised “local resettlement measures” (örtliche Umsiedlungsmassnahmen) within the Warthegau in place of deportation to the General Government.225 In late July the issue became moot when the military decided to postpone constructing the extensive training grounds in Konin until after the war.226

In the fall of 1939, when the Lublin district was first being considered as the future Judenreservat, Frank’s HSSPF Krüger concluded that this would necessitate moving the ethnic Germans living there (estimated at 22,000) back to the Reich, and Frank had obtained Himmler’s approval.227 This project took on a life of its own and expanded even after the Lublin reservation was first canceled and then superseded by the Madagascar Plan. Just as Himmler was meeting with Hitler on May 25 to present his plan to resume the demographic restructuring of east Europe, his demographic engineers in Poznan learned of Himmler’s intention to resettle ethnic Germans from the General Government in the Warthegau. However, in contrast to the procedure for repatriating Baltic and Volhynian Germans from outside the German sphere, by which Poles in the incorporated territories were dispossessed and simply dumped into the General Government, Himmler now proposed an orderly exchange of farms between Poles and ethnic Germans, with each family taking its own personal possessions, equipment, and livestock, beginning in August 1940.228

By late June the plan had expanded to encompass not just ethnic Germans from the Lublin district—the so-called Cholmer Germans—but all ethnic Germans in the General Government, estimated at 80,000.229 Eichmann and Günther in Berlin seem to have not yet been informed, for on July 1, 1940, Günther wired Höppner that according to the Heydrich-Frank agreement of June 12, no deportations beyond the Volhynian action and the evacuation of Jews scheduled for August could take place. Höppner telephoned in reply that the RSHA had already sent a team from the Einwandererzentralstelle to Lublin, so Heydrich must have already taken the decision.230 One week later Höppner was at Eichmann’s Referat IV D 4 in Berlin, where the “halt to the evacuation of Jews into the General Government” was announced. Höppner was assured that once facts and figures had been collected on resettling the Cholmer Germans in the Warthegau, Frank’s approval would be obtained.231 Thus it can be suspected that Himmler and Heydrich had already secured Frank’s acceptance in principle of the Cholmer Aktion as a reciprocal concession for canceling the evacuation of the Jews.

When the figures were gathered, the prospective number of ethnic Germans to be resettled dropped first to 34,000 and then 30,000 (from the earlier estimate of 80,000). The number of Poles was set at 50,000, so that some smaller Polish farms could be consolidated. Himmler’s notion of an “exchange settlement” (Tauschsiedlung) was also modified. Poles and Germans would still trade farm for farm and take their personal possessions. However, because the Polish farmers of the Warthegau were often more prosperous than their German counterparts in the General Government, equipment and livestock would remain in place. The action was scheduled to begin in early September.232

The decision to resettle the ethnic Germans of the General Government in the summer of 1940 is significant because of the insight it provides into Himmler’s outlook at the time. Unlike the Baltic, Volhynian, and Bessarabian Germans, the ethnic Germans of the General Government were not being rescued from territories conceded to the Soviet sphere by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact and partition agreement. Residing within the German sphere, the Cholmer Germans were in no imminent danger. And after the cancellation of the Lublin plan, even the prospect of their having to live within a Jewish reservation, which had provided the initial impetus for their repatriation, was no longer a concern. In short, Himmler’s desire to repatriate these ethnic Germans and settle them in the incorporated territories was not just a reactive rescue measure. This was not a program imposed simply by circumstance but rather one to be carried out for its own sake. The vision of Germanizing the new borderlands—both east and west—fired Himmler’s imagination as a historic mission of great consequence. This was the construction of German Lebensraum as understood at the time. The scope of these resettlement and Germanization schemes would soon be dwarfed by the Generalplan Ost, and two years later the Germans would be attempting to reverse their resettlement work of 1940 by expelling Poles from the Lublin district and creating new German settlements in the very areas from which ethnic Germans had been so recently removed. With ethnic German resettlement as with the Madagascar Plan, hindsight is not the proper yardstick by which to measure Himmler’s ideological horizon in the summer of 1940.

The first train of the Cholmer Aktion departed from Lodz to the Lublin district on September 2, 1940, and the last departed December 14. The total number of expelled Poles was 28,365 in 48 trains, considerably less than the 50,000 initially envisaged.233 The slow pace of the Volhynian resettlement, the cancellation of the Jewish evacuations, and the reduced scale of the Cholmer Aktion apparently paved the way within the framework of the second short-range plan for three more expulsion programs from incorporated territories other than the Warthegau. In the Saybuscher Aktion 17,413 Poles were deported in 18 trains from East Upper Silesia between September 23 and December 14. In the Mlawa Aktion of November 10–20, 10,700 people were deported in 11 trains, at least one of which carried Jews, from the Zichenau district annexed to East Prussia. And finally, in the Litauer Aktion of December 5–17, 6,607 Poles and 3,259 Jews were deported from East Prussia via Soldau in 10 trains.234

In June 1940 Frank had been frantic over the desperate conditions in the General Government and the imminent massive deportation of Jews from the incorporated territories. By the fall of 1940, the expulsion of Jews into the General Government had been canceled and that of Poles had remained at a relatively modest level. Frank had reason to be pleased with himself, and at a rare meeting of the eastern Gauleiters in Hitler’s apartment on October 2, 1940, he could not resist boasting to Hitler about his success in the General Government. He noted in particular that the Jews of Warsaw and other cities were now all sealed in ghettos. Baldur von Schirach, the attentive Gauleiter of Vienna sitting on the other side of Hitler, immediately burst in that he had 50,000 Jews that Frank must take. Koch of East Prussia noted that so far he had deported neither Jews nor Poles from the Zichenau region; “obviously” the General Government must take them now. Frank protested that this was impossible. Hitler as usual took no explicit decision and did not even mention the Jews specifically, but he did indicate his general line of thinking to the assembled Gauleiters. The population density of the General Government, he noted, was unimportant. It was only to be a “Polish reservation, a great Polish work camp” (eine polnische Reservation, ein grosses polnisches Arbeitslager). Polish leaders and intelligentsia were to be killed and the people kept at such a low standard of living that they would have to export migrant labor to the Reich to survive.235

To resist the growing pressure, Frank cited the army’s opposition to further expulsions and informed both Himmler and Greiser on November 2 that before the end of the war any further shipments of Jews and Poles to the General Government were impossible. He had thus instructed his officials to halt and turn back any transports from neighboring areas.236 Two days later, however, Frank met with Hitler, only to learn of his “urgent wish” that more Poles be taken into the General Government.237 Hence presumably the addition of the Mlawa and Litauer Aktionen at this time. In December Hitler was even more insistent, declaring to Frank that “Polish resettlement in the General Government was in line with his policy and that measures necessary to carry out this resettlement had to be taken during the war, because after the war they would involve international difficulties.”238

The renewed deportations were to include not only Poles but also Jews. Baldur von Schirach’s pleas for Frank to take the Austrian Jews off his hands had fallen on fertile ground. On December 3, 1940, Lammers informed Schirach that “the Führer had decided after receipt of one of the reports made by you” that the 60,000 Jews still in Vienna would be “deported most rapidly, that is, still during the war, to the General Government because of the housing shortage prevalent in Vienna.”239 For Frank the handwriting was on the wall; the floodgates of expulsion, so nearly closed just several months earlier, now threatened to open and swamp the General Government once again. The best he could do was bargain over the methods of deportation and for more economic support. As he conceded to his state secretary, Josef Bühler, he “still saw fit to put up some resistance in this matter, even if this resistance could not be maintained in the long run.”240

With Hitler’s encouragement, expulsion fever among the Germans was clearly on the rise. Eichmann’s resettlement experts in the east were summoned to Berlin on December 17 for a meeting to plan the “third short-range plan” (3. Nahplan) for the resettlement of ethnic Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dobrudja, and Lithuania.241 On January 8, 1941, Heydrich told Frank’s HSSPF Krüger what had been decided at that meeting. To make room for the ethnic Germans, Heydrich intended to deport no less than 831,000 people in the coming year. In addition, the army wanted 200,000 people relocated to the General Government to create vast training areas. Thus over one million people were to be moved to the General Government within the framework of the third short-range plan, some 238,500 by May. This was to be accomplished with two trains, each of 1,000 deportees, per day. On top of this, 10,000 Jews from Vienna were also to be resettled in the General Government.242

By its own statistics—that is, not including the refugees who fled on their own and the “wild” deportations—the SS had deported a total of 286,161 people to the General Government between December 1939 and January 1941 (87,833 in the first short-range plan of December 1939, 40,128 in the intermediate plan of February/March 1940, and 120,321 in the second short-range plan—all from the Warthegau—and 37,879 in the three small actions from Upper East Silesia, Zichenau, and West Prussia that had just been concluded).243 Thus Heydrich was actually planning to deport almost as many people into the General Government in the next four months as had been deported in the previous thirteen, and four times as many in the coming year as had been in the last. In short, the Nazis hoped in 1941 to dwarf the demographic upheavals they had already engineered.

Once again, however, the grandiose schemes of the Nazis reflected their ambitions more than their capacities. Unlike the previous year, the problem was no longer opposition from Frank. Hitler’s wishes in this matter were all too clear, and Frank accepted the expulsions as “one of the great tasks that the Führer has set for the General Government.” He therefore explicitly forbade any criticism of the expulsions “out of any rudiments of humanitarian convictions or considerations of expediency.”244 Nonetheless the transportation situation in the months before Barbarossa made realization of the expulsions on the planned scale unattainable.

Between late January and the end of March, 17,086 Poles and 2,140 Jews were deported through the UWZ in the Warthegau.245 At least one trainload of Jews from a collection camp at Dirschau (Tczew) in West Prussia, near Danzig, was sent to Warsaw in early March.246 On February 1 the Jewish community in Vienna was told of the plans to deport 10,000 Jews from there by May. In fact, five trains took approximately 5,000 Jews to small villages in southern Poland between February 15 and March 12.247 As in the case of the deportation of German Jews from Stettin and Baden-Saarpfalz, the departure of the first train from Vienna brought forth another anonymous letter. It claimed that most of the Jews sent from Stettin and Vienna the previous year were already dead; that many, including 35 women, in the first transport had committed suicide; and that 8,000 “non-Aryan” Christians in Vienna were also marked for deportation. Rademacher in the Foreign Office complained to the Gestapo that “with every Jewish measure such a complaining letter arrived.” Could not the sender be discovered, so that he could no longer send his “songs of lament” (Klaglieder) to the world?248

The German military in Poland, preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union, was dismayed by the increased strain on the housing shortage and disruption within the army’s security zone threatened by the vast deportations of the third short-range plan. Since Frank’s state secretary Bühler declared that “he was powerless” to prevent them, the 17th Army in southern Poland appealed to the OKH to contact the RSHA directly. Perhaps heartened by finding allies among the military, Bühler also protested to the RSHA, citing a Göring letter of February 28, 1941, stating that necessities of war must have precedence over racial policies no matter how desirable the latter might be in their own right.249

But the end of the deportation was in sight. On February 21 Eichmann’s deputy Günther informed the resettlement experts in the east of a “confidential” communication from the Transportation Ministry that the Reichsbahn “for obvious military reasons” was no longer able to provide the full number of evacuation trains agreed upon for the first part of the third short-range plan. In the near future even a limited allocation of trains for evacuation might no longer be possible. Despite this warning, two trains per day were promised by the Reichsbahn for early March.250 But on March 15 Heinrich Müller issued the decisive stop order: “For reasons already known” no more evacuations from the incorporated territories and Vienna could be carried out until further notice. As to how long that might be, Müller could offer no information.251

A week later Krüger announced that the resettlement of Poles and Jews into the General Government had been stopped. Frank was able to relay the even more gratifying news “that the Führer had informed him in a discussion on March 17 that in the future resettlement in the General Government would be made dependent upon the possibilities of this territory.” At the same time, moreover, Hitler had brought up a related topic and “promised that in recognition of its achievements the General Government would be the first territory made free of Jews” (zugesagt, dass das Generalgouvernement in Anerkennung seiner Leistungen als erstes Gebiet judenfrei gemacht werde). This would occur “within a reasonable space of time” (in absehbarer Zeit).252

Indeed, since the Madagascar Plan and the cancellation of the expulsion of Jews into the General Government in the summer of 1940, the resettlement programs of the Germans in the east had taken little account of the Jews. But the top Nazis had not ceased to ponder the issue, particularly following the decision to attack the Soviet Union. In February 1941 Hitler ruminated openly about the Jewish question in front of Martin Bormann, Keitel, Albert Speer, Robert Ley, and Hewel. The war would speed a solution, he noted, but it also brought forth many more difficulties. Originally he had only thought of breaking the power of the Jews in Germany, but now his goal had to be the exclusion of Jewish influence in the entire Axis sphere. In many countries, such as Poland and Slovakia, this could be done directly by the German authorities. In a country like France, however, it would be much more difficult, but all the more important. “If he only knew where one could put several million Jews, there were not so many after all.” (Wenn er nur wüsste, wo man die paar Millionen Juden hintun könnte, so viel seien es ja gar nicht.) When he remarked that he would make France provide Madagascar, Bormann questioned how the Jews could be sent there during the war. Hitler replied that one would have to consider that problem. He would provide the entire German navy for that purpose, except that he would not subject it to the risk of torpedo attack. “He was thinking of many things in a different way, not exactly more friendly.” (Er dächte über manches jetzt anders, nicht gerade freundlicher.)253 What did Hitler mean?

“A Territory Yet to Be Determined”

Did Hitler and his closest associates, such as Heinrich Himmler, arrive at a fundamental decision for the systematic mass murder of all European Jews in the German sphere already in the early months, perhaps even in January, of 1941?254 I would argue otherwise. The decision for Barbarossa did not alter the existing determination to create a Europe free of Jews, but expulsion and commensurate population decimation—not systematic extermination—remained the central vision. What did change, clearly, was the destination of the expelled Jews. Active consideration of Madagascar had ceased the previous fall, although occasional references to that island as a future destination continued to surface for months.255 For those privy to the secret preparations for Barbarossa and the presumed rapid defeat of the Soviet Union, however, territory to the east now beckoned as a possible solution to the question once posed by Foreign Office Jewish expert Franz Rademacher: “Whereto with the Jews?”

In a circular of October 30, 1940, to all major police headquarters in Germany, Heydrich wrote about “plans for the settlement of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe after the conclusion of peace.” This would take the form of “evacuation overseas.”256 The vision of an overseas evacuation was still officially maintained by Eichmann more than a month later. On December 3, 1940, he explained to the Interior Ministry’s racial expert Bernhard Lösener the relatively small role that the Jews played in the latest deportations to Poland. “The deportation of the Jews will be carried out according to several short-range plans and one long-range plan.” The short-range plans concerned only the deportations of Jews that were necessary to make room for repatriated Germans. For example, he noted, 3,000 Jews were being included in the deportations from East Prussia into the General Government to make room for Germans from Lithuania, and another 1,700 would follow. But such deportations were to be as limited as possible, because within a “reasonable space of time” (absehbarer Zeit) the long-range plan—which provided “that the Jews would be deported from the entire European sphere dominated by Germany to Madagascar within the framework of a four- or five-year plan after the end of the war”—would make them “superfluous.”257

The following day, December 4, Eichmann submitted to Himmler a very brief summary of the current status of “the Jewish question.” Through emigration, 501,711 Jews had already departed from the Altreich, Austria, and the Protectorate. Following the imposition of Nazi control in those areas, Jewish deaths had exceeded births by 57,036. In total, 315,642 Jews remained. In contrast, with regard to all of Europe and “the final solution of the Jewish question,” no similar progress to date could be reported. Eichmann wrote cryptically: “Through resettlement of Jews from the European economic sphere of the German people to a territory yet to be determined. [Durch Umsiedlung der Juden aus dem europäischen Wirtschaftsraum des deutschen Volkes in ein noch zu bestimmendes Territorium.] In regard to this project, some 5.8 million Jews must be taken into consideration.”258 Clearly, the Jews targeted for resettlement now also included those of Germany’s new allies in southeastern Europe, thus increasing the total from 4 million in the Madagascar Plan of August 1940 to 5.8 million. And now Madagascar was no longer mentioned. In its place, for the first time the destination of Jewish expulsion was designated vaguely as “a territory yet to be determined.”

It can be inferred from Himmler’s address to the Gauleiters on December 10, 1940, that this “territory yet to be determined” was not Poland. In his notes for the speech, Himmler wrote that the General Government, ruled “ruthlessly” by Germany, was to be a “reservoir of labor” for Germany. He then added: “Jewish emigration and thus yet more space for Poles.” (Judenauswanderung und damit noch mehr Platz für Polen.)259 This was on the eve of the finalization of two important policies of which Himmler was presumably already aware: the third short-range plan for sending more than a million Poles from the incorporated territories into the General Government, and the decision to invade the Soviet Union by the following spring. The latter, though it obviously could not be mentioned much less talked about openly, was to provide the “territory yet to be determined” for Jewish expulsion. This in turn would break the demographic logjam in the General Government and create space for the realization of the former. At the turn of the year the Nazi demographic engineers thus had not one but two plans to prepare, one relatively openly (expelling Poles into the General Government) and one secretly (expelling Jews into conquered Soviet territory).

Outside the inner circle, of course, references to plans for expelling Jews into the Soviet Union could not be made openly without compromising the secrecy surrounding the preparations for Barbarossa. Thus the continued use of code language about “a territory yet to be determined.” The most detailed reference to this planning is contained in a document written by Eichmann’s close associate Theodore Dannecker on January 21, 1941.

In conformity with the will of the Führer, at the end of the war there should be brought about a final solution of the Jewish question within the European territories ruled or controlled by Germany.

The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service [Heydrich] has already received orders from the Führer, through the Reichsführer-SS [Himmler] as well as the Reichsmarschall [Göring], to submit a project for a final solution. On the basis of the present extensive experience of the offices of the Chief of Security Police and the Security Service in handling Jewish issues, and thanks to the preparatory work carried out for so long, the project in all its essentials has been completed. It is now with the Führer and the Reichsmarschall. It is certain that its execution will involve a tremendous amount of work whose success can only be guaranteed through the most painstaking preparations. This will extend to the work preceding the wholesale deportation of Jews as well as to the planning to the last detail of a settlement action in the territory yet to be determined [italics mine].260

Such references continued to be made by personnel of the RSHA in the following month. In a letter to Undersecretary Martin Luther of the Foreign Office on February 5, Heydrich himself referred to a “later total solution to the Jewish question” (späteren Gesamtlösung des Judenproblems) to be achieved through “sending them off to the country that will be chosen later” (nach dem zukünftigen Bestimmungslande abzutransportieren).261 On February 14, 1941, Bruno Streckenbach also wrote Luther from the RSHA, confirming that a “total evacuation from Europe” was planned “after the conclusion of peace.”262

That Heydrich had indeed prepared and submitted a plan to Göring is confirmed in a meeting of the two on March 26, 1941. Point 10 of Heydrich’s memorandum recording the meeting stated: “Concerning the solution to the Jewish question, I reported briefly to the Reichsmarschall and submitted my draft to him, which he approved with one amendment concerning the jurisdiction of Rosenberg and ordered to be resubmitted.”263 The reference to Rosenberg’s jurisdiction—he was soon to be designated the future minister of the occupied Soviet territories—indicates once again that the proverbial territory yet to be determined in regard to the “evacuation” of European Jews was the Soviet Union.264

Awareness of Heydrich’s plan and especially its timing do not seem to have been widespread, and Hitler’s own statements at this time, even in confidential circles, were sufficiently unclear as to be open to conflicting interpretations contingent upon the predisposition and wishful thinking of his listeners. After meetings with Hitler and Frank on March 18, 1941, Goebbels confided to his diary: “Vienna will soon be entirely Jew-free. And now it is Berlin’s turn. I am already discussing the question with the Führer and Dr. Frank.”265

Goebbels wasted no time in pressing the matter. Two days later, on March 20, his deputy Leopold Gutterer met with Eichmann and a representative from Albert Speer. Gutterer told his colleagues of Goebbels’s recent “conversation at the lunch table of the Führer.” Goebbels had drawn Hitler’s attention to the fact that 60,000–70,000 Jews still resided in Berlin. “One gathered from the conversation that it was no longer tolerable that this very day the capital city of the national socialist empire lodged such a large number of Jews. . . . In this conversation the Führer admittedly did not personally decide that Berlin had to be made free of Jews immediately, but Dr. Goebbels was convinced that an appropriate proposal for evacuation would certainly win the Führer’s approval” (italics mine). Eichmann noted that Heydrich, “who is entrusted by the Führer with the final evacuation of the Jews” (der vom Führer mit der endgültigen Judenevakuierung beauftragt sei), had made a proposal to Hitler eight to ten weeks earlier that could not yet be carried out only because the General Government was not in a position at the moment to take a single Jew or Pole “from the Altreich.” There was, however, a “written order of the Führer” for the evacuation of 60,000 Jews from Vienna whom the General Government had to accept. But only 45,000 Jews from Vienna were on hand at the moment, so possibly one could remove 15,000 Jews from Berlin. One could not, however, consider working Jews needed for production. Speer’s deputy backed Goebbels’s position, noting that the Jews used 20,000 apartments in Berlin at a time when the city had a shortage of 160,000–180,000. At the end of the discussion, Eichmann was asked to prepare for Goebbels a proposal for the evacuation of the Jews from Berlin.266

Goebbels’s interpretation of Hitler’s remarks as a signal soliciting immediate evacuation proposals was incorrect, and his hopes for an early evacuation of Berlin were dashed. On March 22 he noted that “the Jews, it turns out, cannot be evacuated from Berlin because 30,000 of them are working in armaments factories.”267 Goebbels sought consolation. “Because the evacuation of Jews from Berlin unfortunately cannot at the moment proceed to the desired degree, Dr. Goebbels has given instructions to prepare a badge for the Jews.”268 On his orders, the Propaganda Ministry pressed the issue, only to learn that a marking proposal from Heydrich was still tied up in negotiations with Göring.269 Goebbels’s marking proposal, like his deportation initiative, remained for the moment without result.

Hans Frank, who had attended the same Hitler luncheon as Goebbels on March 18, came away with a very different impression of Hitler’s expectations and intentions. A week later he related his own version to his followers in the General Government. Over the next “several decades” (einigen Jahrzehnten) or “15–20 years” the General Government was to be completely Germanized. For the moment the resettlement of Poles and Jews there was to be stopped. Moreover, Hitler had promised that in the future the General Government would be the first territory made judenfrei. This would occur “within a reasonable space of time” (in absehbarer Zeit).270 Frank clearly understood this to be a long-term, not a short-term project. In the following month he approved the establishment of a self-sufficient ghetto economy in Warsaw, based on the assumption that the ghetto would still be there in five years. Coincidentally, when Eichmann had used the same expression about “a reasonable space of time” with Lösener the previous December, he too had referred to making Europe judenfrei “after the end of the war within the framework of a four- or five-year plan.”271

If Heydrich was busy drafting and submitting plans in the early months of 1941, what did Himmler think about this? There is an indication that at least in one regard he was somewhat troubled. In early 1941 Himmler approached Viktor Brack of the Führer Chancellery and expressed concern that “through the mixing of blood in the Polish Jews with that of the Jews of western Europe a much greater danger for Germany was arising than even before the war.” Such a concern made sense in Himmler’s bizarre thinking only if a massive concentration of eastern and western Jewry was actually being envisaged in some area of resettlement. A man privy to an alleged Führer decision to murder all the Jews of Europe in the near future would scarcely have worried about the political and biological implications of offspring who would not reach adulthood for twenty years! Himmler asked Brack, who had been working with the “many scientists and doctors” assembled by Bouhler for the euthanasia program, to investigate the possibility of mass sterilization through X-rays. Brack submitted a preliminary report on March 28, 1941, which the Reichsführer acknowledged positively on May 12.272 Thereafter, however, Himmler showed no further interest. This could be one hint, given the dearth of other evidence, that at this time Himmler and Hitler, at least in private, began discussing the possibility of solutions even more radical than expulsion and sterilization.

Between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1941 the Nazis envisaged for their newly won Lebensraum a convulsive population policy based on racial principles. In the minds of Hitler, Himmler, and others, the western portions of Poland were to be annexed to the Third Reich and totally Germanized through the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Soviet sphere and the expulsion of “harmful” and “undesirable” elements of the population, meaning most Poles and all Jews. Central Poland was to be a vast reservoir of cheap Polish labor—deprived of its present and potential leadership through extensive executions, denationalized by a systematic repression of Polish culture, raided for what the Nazis considered its most valuable biological elements by a process of selection and “Germanization” (Eindeutschung) or “re-Germanization” (Wiedereindeutschung), and forced to work on German terms by means of a deliberately depressed standard of living. The Jews fit into this scheme only partially. Like the Poles, they had to be removed from German territory, but what then? Unlike Poles, Jews could not be recruited for labor in the Third Reich; Jews could not be subject to selection for Germanization. Jews ultimately had to be separated even from the Polish population and insofar as possible simply “disappear,” although so far Himmler rejected the “Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.” Thus the idea of expelling the Jews first to a special reservation at the easternmost edge of the German sphere (Lublin), then to a “super-ghetto” on the island of Madagascar, finally into the Soviet Union captured the imagination of the Nazis.

If the ultimate inspiration and authority for Nazi racial policy was Hitler, this did not preclude an important role for his subordinates. Hitler proclaimed and legitimized goals and, when he chose, refereed disputes. The initiative for particular actions and the drawing up of plans were usually in the hands of Hitler’s close followers—his vassals. It was Heinrich Himmler who, in the euphoria of victory over Poland in mid-September 1939 and again over France in late May 1940, obtained Hitler’s approval for the most sweeping plans for the demographic reorganization of eastern Europe along racial lines. It was the Gauleiters, Wagner and perhaps Bürckel in the west, Schirach in Vienna, and Koch in the east, who prevailed upon Hitler to permit the resumption of piecemeal deportations in the fall of 1940. Hitler’s open encouragement quickly induced Himmler and Heydrich to plan once again for mass expulsions of Poles and Jews in 1941.

Despite Hitler’s support for radical racial policy and his undisguised obsession with the Jewish question, however, the polycratic Nazi system left considerable maneuvering room for his vassals to criticize, modify, or even within limits oppose policies sanctioned by the Führer in the name of other recognized needs and priorities. Hitler’s approval allowed policies to be tried but did not make them immune from political reality. Thus Himmler’s plans for extensive demographic engineering through massive expulsions proved easier to imagine than to carry out. Nazis like Göring were concerned to maximize rational economic exploitation for the war effort, and Nazis like Frank resisted the limitless dumping of Poles and Jews into the General Government. The need to provide those ethnic Germans repatriated from further east with housing, farms, and businesses required a pragmatic selection of propertied Poles for deportation. As Eichmann told his officials in the Warthegau in June 1940, it made no sense to deport landless agricultural laborers because that made no farms available for incoming ethnic Germans.273 The same could be said for the Jews, who were already deprived of their property and crowded into miserable ghettos in the Warthegau. Therefore, although the Jews were at the bottom of the Nazis’ racial hierarchy, they were relatively ignored in the expulsions that the Nazis actually carried out in this period. Many Jews fled before the Nazi advance in the fall of 1939, and many were either killed or deported in the chaotic terror that followed. Many others fled subsequently, often after they had lost their homes, land, and businesses. About 10,000 Jews were included in the deportations of the first short-range plan of December 1939, 1,000 Jews were deported from Stettin in February 1940, and more than 3,800 from Konin and Poznan that spring. And nearly 24,000 Jews were deported in late 1940 and early 1941 from the incorporated territories, Baden-Saarpflaz, and Vienna. It was clear that this in no way constituted a solution to the Jewish question, however, for this was a pittance in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of Poles, Frenchmen, and ethnic Germans being moved about by the Nazis at this time. Eichmann’s attempts to get full-scale Jewish deportations underway in October 1939, January 1940, and again in the summer of 1940 all came to naught. Other priorities and considerations always intervened. The Nazis’ self-imposed Jewish problem was proving itself intractable to solution through expulsion.

But the relatively small numbers of Jews deported so far did not mean an open repudiation of the Nazis’ avowed ideology. The concept of Lebensraum, as articulated and practiced between late 1939 and early 1941, implied a long-term process of consolidation. On several occasions Hitler remarked that his eastern Gauleiters had ten years to tell him that Germanization of their provinces was complete, and he would ask no questions about their methods.274 Likewise Hitler told Rosenberg in September 1939 that only time would tell if Germanization would “after decades” expand beyond the incorporated territories. Himmler’s concept that a land belonged to the German people only when every last tiller of the soil was German also implied years, even generations, of consolidation. The removal of ethnic Germans from the General Government to the Warthegau, especially the Cholmer Aktion in the last half of 1940, shows that Himmler’s resettlement schemes of 1939–40 were undertaken in their own right, not just as improvised rescue operations, and that he was not yet thinking beyond racial consolidation in the incorporated territories.

In such a time frame the Nazis could keep faith with their anti-Semitic principles by planning to eventually expel the Jews to Lublin, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union while temporarily conceding priority to the need to rescue and resettle endangered ethnic Germans, though not without rising frustration among the zealots. The Jewish question was just as important, though temporarily not as urgent, as the resettlement of ethnic Germans.

The decision to invade the Soviet Union, however, would put the concepts of Lebensraum and racial policy in a different light. Driven on by his own fervent anti-Bolshevism, his vision of Soviet territory as the fated land of German expansion, his increasing sense of himself as a man of destiny who must accomplish everything in his own lifetime, his frustration with the military stalemate in the west, and the pervasive and ceaseless activism that possessed his own psyche as well as the Nazi movement, Hitler opted for Barbarossa. This had an intensely radicalizing effect. The ideology of Lebensraum put into practice between 1939 and 1941 was a policy of gradual racial consolidation, a policy quite radical in its methods but less so in its foreign policy implications. The invasion of the Soviet Union transformed Lebensraum from the practice of gradual racial consolidation into one of limitless expansion.

NAZI EXPULSIONS: SEPTEMBER 1939–APRIL 1941

Expulsions	Dates	Total No.	Jews
“Wild deportations” over the San and Bug	Sept. 1939	20,000	20,000
“Wild deportations” from West Prussia	Sept. 1939–Jan. 1940	87,000	?
Nisko	Oct. 1939	5,035	5,035
1. Nahplan	Dec. 1939	87,833	10,000
Stettin (Szczecin)	Feb. 12, 1940	1,100	1,100
Zwischenplan	Feb. 10–Mar. 15, 1940	40,128	1,200
2. Nahplan
Volhynian Aktion	May 1940–Jan. 1941	91,956	2,663
Cholmer Aktion	Sept.–Dec. 1940	28,365	none
Saybuscher Aktion	Sept.–Dec. 1940	17,413	none
Mlawa Aktion	Oct. 10–20, 1940	10,700	1,000
Litauer Aktion	Dec. 5–17, 1940	9,766	3,259
Alsace	July–Dec. 1940	23,790	3,255
Lorraine	July–Dec. 1940	47,187	?
Baden-Saarpfalz	Oct. 22–23, 1940	6,504	6,504
Luxembourg	Nov. 1940–April 1941	280	280
3. Nahplan
Warthegau	Jan.–Mar. 1941	19,226	2,140
Vienna	Feb. 15–Mar. 12, 1941	5,000	5,000
Danzig–West Prussia	Mar. 1941	2,000	2,000
Totals		503,000	At least 63,000
			(approx. 12.5%)

The Nazi view of the Jewish question could not help but be radicalized as well, on both practical and ideological grounds. Limitless expansion into the Soviet Union meant ever more Jews. A problem that had proved intractable even in the Old Reich, incorporated territories, and General Government threatened to reach immense proportions with the addition of Belorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic, and beyond. The whole sequence of thwarted expulsion plans between 1939 and 1941 had both accustomed the Nazis to thinking in terms of an imminent final solution to the Jewish question and frustrated them as, like a mirage, this vision of a judenfrei German empire continually receded before their advance. The time was ripe to break the vicious circle, to ensure that further gains in territory did not mean an increasing burden of Jews. Murder was in the air as the Germans prepared for a Vernichtungskrieg or “war of destruction” against the Soviet Union, and in these circumstances the Soviet Jews could hardly be spared the fate awaiting so many others.

This tendency was intensified by the fundamental position of the Jewish-Bolshevik identity in Nazi ideology. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, the fate of the Polish Jews could wait but the fate of the Polish intelligentsia could not. Even before Hitler’s and Himmler’s vision of vast demographic upheaval emerged in the euphoria of victory, the Einsatzgruppen had been targeted to carry out the immediate genocidal elimination of all potential carriers of the Polish national ideal. As the Nazis prepared to confront communism in 1941, neither the Soviet commissars nor Soviet Jews could wait; both would have to be eliminated by the onrushing Einsatzgruppen, for ultimately they were perceived as one—the political and biological manifestations of the same Jewish-Bolshevik menace. Insofar as the Nazi solution to the Jewish question was concerned, the era of expulsion ended when military preparations for Barbarossa brought the last evacuation transports in Poland to a halt in mid-March 1941. The era of mass murder was about to begin.