The Polish campaign and Operation Tannenberg

The war that Germany found itself fighting in September 1939 was not the war that Hitler intended. He originally hoped to isolate Poland diplomatically and pick it off in much the same way that he had gobbled up Czechoslovakia. He simply did not believe that Britain and France would stand by their guarantee of Polish territorial integrity, a delusion encouraged by Ribbentrop, who thought he knew the English well after his stint as ambassador in London. When he received news that Britain had declared war, Hitler was thrown into a panic. Germany now faced enemies on two fronts, a predicament that all Germans dreaded and potentially a rerun of the First World War. According to Paul-Otto Schmidt, his translator, the blood drained from Hitler’s face and he asked Ribbentrop, ‘What now?’ The Nazi leadership could only hope that the generals would deliver a speedy victory while the French and British took their time mobilizing for an assault on western Germany. With luck they would have enough time to switch the bulk of the German army from the east to the west before the French and the British were in a position to attack.¹

At another level, the war was exactly as predicted. It was a continuation of the struggle with world Jewry, only now fought with different weapons. Hitler and the Nazi leadership were sure the Jews had brought about the diplomatic calamity that resulted in hostilities. The debacle was further proof that Germany was encircled and threatened with destruction; therefore the war was being fought to defend the German people, defeat the Jews and punish them for warmongering. This was a major theme of Goebbels’ propaganda in the autumn of 1939. It explained not only Anglo-French belligerence but also America’s tilt towards the Allies. When it was not labelling President Roosevelt a Jew, the Nazi-controlled press routinely referred to the ‘Jewish Camarilla’ that supposedly controlled policy-making in Washington. In early November 1939, William Shirer copied into his journal a typical statement from a Nazi publication along these lines: ‘Behind all the enemies of the German ascendancy stand those who demand our encirclement – the oldest enemies of the German people, and of all healthy, rising nations – the Jews.’ Of course this explanation was grotesquely contradicted by the non-aggression pact with the USSR, a country that was also supposed to be under Jewish control. Instead, propaganda against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ gave way to a more appropriate trope. Shirer observed that in Hitler’s end-of-year message to the German people, the Führer referred to the ‘Jewish reactionary warmongers in the capitalist democracies’ who started the war. A few days later Robert Ley explained to readers of Der Angriff, ‘We know that this war is an ideological struggle against world Jewry. England is allied with the Jews against Germany … England is spiritually, politically, and economically at one with the Jews … For us England and the Jews remain the common enemy.’²

The fact that Jews were the enemy in what was now a real rather than a shadow war had immediate and grave ramifications. Within Germany they were potential spies and saboteurs. Wherever Jews were encountered on the battlefield or in occupied territory, they were regarded as actual or potential combatants. Jewish women and children were treated as part of the conspiracy against the German people: they were the biological matrix that produced Jews who were openly or secretly fighting the Germans and provided them with a support base for subversive activity. None could be trusted or spared the harshest treatment. However it ended, the result of the conflict was likely to be catastrophic for Jews whose fate placed them within reach of the Nazis. If the war went well, the Jews would face retribution for causing it; if it went badly, they would pay for German suffering.³

Nevertheless, despite the centrality of the Jewish threat to Nazi analysis of world-wide developments, the war was not launched by Hitler as primarily a war against the Jews, a war designed to eventuate in their annihilation. It quickly became apparent that anti-Jewish policy in Germany was laced with as many contradictions as before, paradoxes that were exported to newly conquered countries. For a while Jews were even able to exploit these disjunctions for their own salvation.⁴

Nor were anti-Jewish measures necessarily driven by anti-Jewish sentiment. The Third Reich at war faced inescapable geo-strategic and economic exigencies that required drastic expedients and stringent sacrifices. In 1939 the German economy had been revved up to breaking point. Hitler pressed for every arm of the military to be expanded as fast as possible, but the country lacked the financial reserves, resources or labour to meet such demands. These chronic inadequacies were aggravated by Hitler’s bellicose stance: no one would lend money to Germany while he courted a military confrontation with the most powerful, richly endowed, and best-resourced countries in Europe. German exports plummeted while imports soared to feed the resource-hungry war industries. The resulting credit crisis was so severe that on the eve of the conflagration the government was forced to cut back arms production and introduce rationing of certain foods. Paradoxically, this critical juncture only incited Hitler. Knowing that the German economy had reached its maximum capacity for producing munitions while the British and French had only recently started to build up their war machines, Hitler reasoned that Germany might as well fight them now. But this turned the war into a frightening gamble. It had to be won, and won quickly. Germany lacked the economic reserves to sustain a long, attritional conflict and could not survive a sustained blockade. If imports were interdicted, key raw materials, fuel (notably mineral oil) and essential foodstuffs for humans and livestock would run out after only a few months.⁵

Even in the most optimistic scenario, Jews would meet the bill for Hitler’s recklessness and Germany’s inferiority. They would soon be allotted less food than the Aryan population; they would be stripped of any remaining assets and usable items, including their homes; and they would be compelled to work at minimal rates of pay, while paying the maximum taxes. Wherever the German army conquered, Jews would face even more severe forms of exploitation. The Jews would, quite literally, be forced to pay for the war. And they would eat less so that Germans had full stomachs. Of course, it was not necessary for Jews to be penalized in this way. The hardships of war could have been spread evenly across the population in Germany and shared more fairly throughout the nations they overwhelmed. However, German economic and food policy was premised on Nazi racial-biological ideology. Within the Reich there was a racial pecking order: only those members of the Volksgemeinschaft fit to fight, work, and breed would be fed adequately. Racial aliens would receive only enough nutrition to perform tasks for the Volk and the war effort. The same principles were to be applied in occupied countries, even more sharply where the Germans considered the natives to be racially inferior to begin with. In every place the Jews were regarded as exploitable and expendable. Yet this policy cannot be reduced to racism alone. All the German leaders, civil and military, were seared by their experiences during the Great War. They were determined that civilian morale would not be eroded by hunger and that deprivation would never provide fuel for revolution. If they could agree that the Jews would go without, it was not because they all hated Jews in the same way for the same reasons. Pragmatists were quite able to work with fanatical adherents of racial-biological theory to square the circle of the Third Reich’s geo-strategic and economic dilemmas.⁶

Furthermore, how the war was fought and by whom it was fought meant that it was going to have a disproportionate, disastrous impact on the Jews. Between 1935 and 1939 the German army had grown from 100,000 to 2.6 million men. The bulk of this growth was accounted for by conscripts aged 18–21. They had been schooled, socialized and politicized under the Third Reich, spending their formative years in the Hitler Youth and Reich Labour Service even before they received military training and ideological preparation in the armed forces. Even if they were not card-carrying Nazis, to a very great extent they perceived the world through the lens of Nazi propaganda. Furthermore, the army had absorbed 106,000 former SA men. These were hardened street fighters from the ‘years of struggle’, imbued with a crude hatred of Jews that was already routinely expressed through violence. On top of this, the army had recruited, enlisted or promoted about 85,000 officers. These, too, were mainly young men. Their training involved mastery of Nazi ideology and their advancement increasingly rested on a capacity for fanaticism as well as operational competence.⁷

The army that prepared to invade Poland was primed to blame the Jews for causing war in the first place. It was imbued with animosity towards Jews, with a particular asperity reserved for the Ostjuden or eastern Jews who had featured so largely in pre-war hate-literature. In the figure of the Ostjude anti-Jewish prejudice melded with anti-Polish prejudice. Young Germans had been filled with a spirit of revenge against the Poles who allegedly oppressed their countrymen in the lands taken away in 1918–19. Youths were taught to despise Polish society for its mediocre living standards and supposed cultural backwardness. This was a poisonous combination that lent itself to brutality even before the fighting men had experienced the shock of combat and the loss of comrades.⁸

The invasion of Poland was not going to be an ordinary military campaign, either. In a clandestine briefing of the senior military leadership at Berchtesgaden on 22 August, Hitler had summed up the goal as ‘Annihilation of Poland’. In his record of the meeting the chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, noted, ‘Means to this end. It does not matter what they are. The victor is never called upon to vindicate his actions.’ Hitler demanded that the Wehrmacht should be ‘Harsh and remorseless. We must steel ourselves against humanitarian reasoning.’ After victory part of Poland would be incorporated into the Reich and the rest would become a protectorate; the country would cease to exist. On 17 October, Hitler declared: ‘The Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from forming itself into a ruling class’. Poland was ‘of use to us only as a reservoir of labour’.⁹

The liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia was assigned to the SS under the code name Operation Tannenberg. For this purpose Heydrich ordered the creation of four, then five, later seven Einsatzgruppen, or task forces, each subdivided into two to four Einsatzkommandos with 120 to 150 men to each subdivision. They were commanded by officers and men of the security police (Sipo, combining the Gestapo and the criminal police) and the SD. They were equipped with arrest lists totalling over 60,000 names and instructed to file regular reports to headquarters in Berlin charting their progress. A special unit under Udo von Woyrsch that deployed several battalions of order police (Orpo) was tasked with carrying out executions. Werner Best selected the senior personnel of these squads on the basis that they would act ‘ruthlessly and harshly to achieve National Socialist aims’. In a series of meetings on 25, 26 and 29 August 1939, Heydrich and Best conferred with Eduard Wagner, quartermaster-general of the army, to demarcate the spheres of responsibility for security and pacification between the SS and the Wehrmacht.¹⁰

These coordination meetings were left until the last minute. Surprisingly, even less thought was given to handling the Jewish population. Jews were not the target of Operation Tannenberg. Despite the fact that they bulked so large in the Nazi imagination, and the fact that Poland had a Jewish population of 3 million, there is no surviving record of any conferences to determine policy on Jewish questions. Instead, as in so much else, policy was drawn up on the hoof. What later appeared to be the first stage of a carefully thought-out strategy of anti-Jewish measures was in fact a set of hasty improvisations. On the eve of the invasion, other than treating Jews as a special security threat, the Nazi leadership and its minions did not have a clue about how the huge Jewish population should be treated as a whole.¹¹

Nevertheless, the SS and the army had together crossed a line of fundamental significance. Operation Tannenberg was conceived without any regard to human or civil rights, the Geneva Convention or the laws and usages of war. On the basis of ensuring immediate rear-area security and, in the longer term, defending the German people from threat, the SS proposed to arrest and execute tens of thousands of Poles on the thinnest of pretexts following the most rudimentary investigation and judgement (if any). It amounted to nothing less than a murderous expedition into occupied territory. As such, it was the first Nazi programme for mass murder and served as a template. The lessons learned by the SS in Poland would quickly lead to technical as well as operational refinements; but the basic tasks of the SS in wartime were laid down and, crucially, were accepted by the civil and military authorities in Germany.¹²

The Einsatzgruppen and the German army in Poland

The Polish campaign lasted little more than three weeks. The German armed forces were more numerous than the Polish defenders, better equipped and far better commanded. Although relatively few, the armoured and motorized units of the Wehrmacht caused disarray by rapidly breaking through the Polish main line of defence and striking into the rear of the Polish armies. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, outmatched the Poles in every respect (except courage) and established air superiority on the first day. German commanders were able to coordinate ground and air attacks with devastating ferocity; Polish communications and transport were fatally disrupted. Within three days, the German 4th Army had occupied the Polish Corridor and turned south-east, sweeping around Warsaw from the rear. Advanced elements of 4th Army reached the suburbs of the capital on 7 September. As the German 8th Army blasted its way into central Poland, the fast elements of 10th and 14th Armies burst out of Upper Silesia and Slovakia, swept through Galicia and swung north. A week later they met 4th and 3rd Armies, advancing south from East Prussia, and encircled the main concentration of Polish forces. Warsaw was now isolated. On 17 September, the Red Army crashed through a thin screen of Polish frontier forces and advanced to the River Bug, the demarcation line agreed between Molotov and Ribbentrop. The Polish capital held out until 27 September under a pitiless artillery and aerial bombardment. By that time the government had evacuated and the Polish high command had fled to Romania. Scattered resistance continued until 5 October when the last Polish units put down their weapons.¹³

The Einsatzgruppen broke down into smaller operational detachments that followed the German combat formations. On their own initiative and sometimes at the request of local army commanders they rounded up and shot Polish irregulars, often hastily mobilized militia who were not issued with uniforms. They also executed alleged bandits and partisans handed over to them by regular army elements. SS detachments carried out reprisals for the killing of hundreds of ethnic Germans in the first days of the war, notably in Bydgoszcz. In just two massacres between 5 and 17 September, Einsatzgruppe IV and military police units, assisted by sundry army formations, shot 900 Poles. By the end of the pacification process around 1,200 people had been executed in Bydgoszcz, including almost the entire Jewish population of the town. Approximately 1,500 Poles were murdered by Einsatzgruppe IV and the unit led by Woyrsch in East Upper Silesia. In addition to the targeted killings, executions and reprisal shootings by the Sipo-SD units under SS command, the army itself executed no fewer than 16,000 Poles before the fighting stopped.¹⁴

Indeed, as the historian Alexander Rossino has shown, during the initial onslaught the army took thousands of hostages and killed many more Poles than the Einsatzgruppen. According to German army doctrine, campaigns had to be prosecuted with overwhelming force and the utmost violence. Any manifestation of civilian unrest or guerrilla warfare was to be met with ruthless countermeasures. It was permissible to take hostages to guard against partisan activity and in the event that frontline or rear echelon troops came under attack by non-uniformed fighters, they could be shot. Regular army units therefore seized hostages as soon as the invasion commenced. Thanks to the pervasive hostility towards Jews and the conflation of Jews with the enemy, a disproportionate number of hostages were Jewish. Young enlisted men and officers did not require brutalization to facilitate the killing of civilians or the humiliation, torture and killing of Jews; it came quite easily to them. Older reservists were just as capable of indulging in rape, pillage and murder.¹⁵

While the atrocities that army units committed against Jews were unmethodical, Einsatzgruppen, police and Waffen-SS units routinely focused their attention on Jewish communities. The Orpo battalions under Woyrsch caused havoc amongst the Jews of Katowice, Bedzin and Sosnowiec in south-western Poland. Jewish-owned property was wrecked and synagogues burned down. Jewish men were assaulted for no particular reason and dozens shot, sometimes on the alleged grounds that they were armed but more often because they posed some vague threat. During a rampage lasting several days 500 Jews were murdered in Bedzin, including women and children. In the Przemysl region, Einsatzgruppe I and men under Woyrsch conducted a series of massacres. In Dynow they forced a dozen Jews into the synagogue and set it on fire. Sixty more Jews were seized and shot in a forest outside the town. In Przemysl itself, Sipo-SD men pillaged Jewish homes and shops while hunting down rabbis and leading Jews. Most of them were shot at various sites. Between 500 and 600 Jewish men were murdered in and around the city. In Bialystok, in the north, Einsatzgruppe IV was responsible for looting the homes of Jews in the course of searching for arms. They also rounded up hundreds of Jewish men. Einsatzgruppe V, operating out of East Prussia, began assembling Jews and ordering them out of their towns. During at least one of these operations, Jews were shot. In Goworowo, artillery men belonging to a Waffen-SS armoured division joined with personnel from one of the army’s secret field police detachments to mount a reprisal action. Fifty Jews were seized and brutally forced into the town’s synagogue, which was then set alight. Another SS regiment, the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler, slaughtered fifty Jews who had earlier been detained in Błonie under army orders.¹⁶

Several of these incidents elicited formal complaints by senior army officers. After the atrocities in Katowice and Bedzin, Lieutenant General Georg Brandt, who was responsible for rear-area security for Army Group South, demanded that the Army Group commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, court-martial Woyrsch. The chief of staff of 14th Army, Brigadier General Eberhard von Mackensen, was so annoyed by the mayhem Woyrsch caused in Przemysl that he placed all SS and police units under army control. General List, commander of 14th Army, issued instructions for his officers to stop what appeared to be illegal acts by the Sipo-SD kommandos. Quartermaster-General Wagner later asked Heydrich to pull Woyrsch and his unit out of the area completely. General Georg von Küchler, commander of 3rd Army, in the north, was outraged by reports of security police driving Jews from their homes. When he heard that in Mława Jews were killed in the course of one of these actions, he ordered the nearest available army troops to disarm the Sipo-SD squads. He also demanded that General Werner Kempf discipline the men who perpetrated the outrage in Goworowo. Lieutenant General Lemelson, the commanding officer of the 29th Motorized Infantry Division, had the SS man who initiated the Błonie killings arrested. His order was subsequently confirmed by the head of 10th Army, General Walter von Reichenau.¹⁷

These objections were echoed and taken up by the most senior army officers in Berlin. Information about the atrocities had reached the capital within days of the campaign beginning. Halder noted in his journal on 10 September, ‘SS artillery of the armoured corps herded Jews into a church and massacred them. Court martial sentences them to one year’s penitentiary. Küchler has not confirmed the sentence, because more severe punishment is due.’ He was concerned that these outrages were a gift to the ‘English propaganda campaign on German atrocities’.¹⁸

Following a meeting with Heydrich, a week after the campaign opened, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence, learned of Operation Tannenberg and the extra-judicial killings. He immediately protested in person to General Wilhelm Keitel, head of the armed forces high command. On 19 September, Wagner obtained a meeting with Heydrich to discuss the testy relations between the field army and the Einsatzgruppen. The chief of the security police and SD reiterated that the Einsatzgruppen had been given special tasks of the highest order. Thwarted in his effort to curb their activity generally, Wagner insisted that the relevant army authorities had to be alerted to specific operations. In terms that signify the friction was more of an irritant than anything else, Halder later summarized the topic of the exchange as ‘Housekeeping: Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobility’. He reported that ‘Army insists that “housekeeping” be deferred until the army has withdrawn and the country has been turned over to the civil administration. Early December.’¹⁹

The next day, General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, intervened directly with Hitler in an effort to bring Heydrich’s security police under military jurisdiction. His only achievement was an agreement to greater consultation and coordination between the Einsatzgruppen and army units in their operational areas. Symbolically, though, he prohibited the military police, including the secret field police, from working with the Sipo-SD. The next day, Brauchitsch also met Heydrich, who was on a mission from Himmler to palliate the army high command. But Heydrich drew the line at placing his men under army law. To underline his desire that the SS should remain unfettered when carrying out missions that he deemed essential, at the end of the campaign Hitler ostentatiously pardoned every soldier and SS man who had successfully been prosecuted for war crimes by the army judicial authorities.²⁰

Many of the objections raised by army personnel against SS and Sipo-SD activities were, in any case, practical rather than legal or moral. Brandt was concerned to enforce the army’s responsibility for security matters and wanted to rein in the Einsatzgruppen rather than cancel their operations in toto. Mackensen was disturbed by the disruption they caused and the effect of looting on the morale of his troops. Officers at all levels were acutely aware that an overly permissive attitude towards plunder could result in the loss of discipline and the dissolution of entire units diverted by the opportunities for enrichment. List was worried that illegal acts were being committed on his turf, not the nature of the acts themselves. Only Küchler seems to have displayed moral anguish. Several of the complainants continued to work with the police formations in sweeps for partisans and pacification measures. List even recalled Einsatzgruppe I to his area of operations once he was assured that its murderous endeavours had been endorsed from on high. From senior commanders down to the rank and file, there was concurrence that the army, the SS and the Sipo-SD shared interests and common perceptions. The army valued the ruthless police work and effective countermeasures of the Sipo-SD while the average infantryman did not see Poles or Jews that differently from the SS trooper. Given that the fate of the Jews would rest in the hands of the military for weeks to come, and in subsequent campaigns, this was a grim development.²¹

The Polish Jews

The 3 million Polish Jews formed about 10 per cent of the country’s entire population, but were heavily concentrated in a few major cities and in small to medium-sized towns spread across Poland, with the largest proportion in the south and the east (which fell under Soviet rule). One tenth of Polish Jewry lived in Warsaw, with over 200,000 in Lodz, 60,000 in Lwow, nearly 60,000 in Cracow, and 40,000 in Lublin. They constituted 30 per cent of the inhabitants of these centres. Jews formed a similarly high proportion, often even comprising a majority of the residents in towns in rural districts. They dominated trade and commerce throughout the country and supplied a high proportion of the lawyers and doctors who served communities in the countryside and urban areas. While there was a wealthy elite of industrialists, merchants, bankers and professionals, the vast mass of Polish Jewry was extremely poor. Thirty per cent derived income from trade, which usually amounted to manning a market stall or peddling, and another third scrambled a living as craftsmen in overstocked occupations such as shoemaking. Almost 10 per cent had no jobs at all. In spite of this poverty, Polish Jewry supported an astonishingly rich and varied political, cultural and spiritual scene. The Jewish Socialist Bund and the Zionist parties flourished. Warsaw was the capital of a global linguistic empire, hosting dozens of Yiddish newspapers, journals, publishing houses, theatrical troupes and film companies. The most famous Talmudic academies were in Poland.²²

Yet the vivacity of Yiddish culture and the numerical preponderance of Orthodox Jewry – including the manifold adherents of Hasidic sects with their distinctive side-curls and quarter-length gabardine jackets (kapotes or caftans) – did not mean that Jews were separated from their environment by language, religion or custom. In 1935 only 19 per cent of the 425,566 Jewish children of school age attended Jewish schools (which included secular schools run by the Bund or Zionists). The Jewish population was heavily Polonized at all social levels, especially the middle and upper classes. A generation of brilliantly gifted Jewish writers, poets, novelists and essayists dazzled Polish readers. This did not stop anti-Semitism, though. On the contrary, since the late nineteenth century the development of a Christian Polish middle class caused increasing friction with the Jewish communities. The rebirth of independent Poland in 1918–19 was accompanied by vicious pogroms. Throughout the interwar years nationalist parties campaigned for Polonization of the economy and encouraged a boycott of Jewish businesses. On the eve of the German assault, Polish Jewry was socially stratified, politically divided, economically stretched, and at odds with the Christian majority.²³

Twenty-five years earlier, German troops invading the Russian Empire were received by Polish Jews as a benign force. The Kaiser’s men released them from a despotic regime that was responsible for anti-Jewish laws and pogroms. German Jewish soldiers, and rabbis attached to the German army, formed a bridge to the occupation authorities. In September 1939 things could not have been more different. German soldiers abused easily identifiable Orthodox Jews in the streets and looted Jewish-owned shops. When they needed hostages they made a beeline for the Jewish quarter. Private Grömmer of the 111th Mountain Artillery Regiment typifies the preconceptions that drove such behaviour. In an account of his campaign experience he described the Jews as ‘beasts in human form. In their beards and caftans, with their devilish features, they make a dreadful impression on us. Anyone who was not a radical opponent of the Jews must become one here. In comparison with the Polish caftan-Jews, our own Jewish bloodsuckers are lambs.’²⁴

Highly educated and humane Germans were just as prone to seeing Jews in the light of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Konrad Jarausch, a teacher and co-editor of a Protestant theological journal, was called up in 1939 and served as a sergeant in a reserve security division. On the way to manage a POW camp at the end of September 1939 he remarked in a letter to his wife that ‘the Jews have filled the scene with their miserable seediness. How squalid and pathetic. How sordid they are in their wretched humanity.’ Although Jarausch regarded the Jews as human, he could not help seeing them as anything other than dirty and furtive.²⁵

United by a common dread of the Germans, and filled with a surge of patriotism, Jewish Poles and their Christian co-citizens initially worked and fought side by side to repel the invasion. In Warsaw on 1 September, Chaim Kaplan, the principal of a Hebrew school and frequent contributor to the Hebrew press, joined with other journalists to dig trenches. He knew exactly what was now at stake: ‘Wherever Hitler’s foot treads there is no hope for the Jewish people,’ he wrote in his journal. Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who worked for Polish Radio, left the studios to answer the call for volunteers who could handle a spade. ‘On the first day an old Jew in kaftan and yarmulka was shovelling soil beside me. He dug with Biblical fervour … “I have a shop”, he whispered.’ Dawid Sierakowiak, a high school student in Lodz, signed up with an anti-aircraft unit. In the days before the attack he too excavated trenches. Excitedly he reported in his diary: ‘All Jews (Hassids too), the old, and the young, women, like all other citizens (except for the Germans), volunteer in droves. The bloody Kraut won’t pass!’ He revelled in the sensation of solidarity, cheered like his fellow Poles by the belief that the English and French would soon come to Poland’s aid.²⁶

This euphoria waned as they heard news of one city after another falling to the Germans. Rabbi Shimon Huberband in Piotrków was amongst the first to witness the consequences. After the city was bombed on 2 September he and his family took flight to Sulejow. It was a tragic decision. The small town had few sturdy buildings with cellars; when it came under German aerial bombardment his entire family was wiped out. Huberband limped back to Piotrków to find the city gripped by terror: German soldiers had shot twenty Jews as soon as they arrived. Over the ensuing days, Poles escorted Germans to Jewish-owned businesses and helped them loot. So many Jews were beaten up on the streets that they dared not go out. In notes he made shortly afterwards, Huberband recorded that ‘If a bearded Jew was caught, his life was in danger. They tore out his beard along with pieces of his flesh, or cut it off with a knife and bayonet.’ The occupiers were particularly savage towards anything symbolic of Judaism. Germans smashed mezuzot, the small cases affixed to the right-hand doorposts of Jewish homes and businesses containing words of scripture. ‘Woe unto the Jew found with tefillin and religious books!’ Jews caught wearing a tallit katan, a modified prayer shawl worn under the shirt, were ‘beaten horribly and cruelly’. Unusually, he also heard that in a couple of cases the local German military authorities actually seized and returned stolen property to Jews, apologizing to the victims.²⁷

On 9 September, Dawid Sierakowiak watched the Germans enter Lodz, Poland’s largest industrial centre. While ethnic Germans (about 10 per cent of the population) turned out to cheer the troops, Jews were rounded up for forced labour. ‘First signs of German occupation: they are seizing Jews to dig.’ Jewish shops were pillaged on a daily basis. With calculated perversity, on the eve of the Jewish New Year (13 September), when most Jews gather to pray, the Germans closed the synagogue and forced Jews to open their businesses. To Sierakowiak it was ‘the worst blow to the Jews here in centuries … To take away from a man his only consolation, his faith, to forbid his beloved, life-affirming religion is the most horrendous crime. Jews won’t let Hitler get away with it. Our revenge will be terrible.’²⁸

In Piotrków a week later the Germans marked the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, with a combination of racial, religious and sexual abuse. Straining for words that would not offend religious modesty, Huberband wrote, ‘Jews were forced to pull down their trousers and to beat and to whip a certain part of each other’s bodies. They were forced to crawl on their stomachs while looking at a certain point.’ This blend of traditional and modern antipathies, far removed from coldly scientific racism, was repeated elsewhere. Huberband heard that in one town Germans forced well-dressed Jewish women to cut the hair of bearded Jews and then eat it. They also forced shaven Jews to kiss Jewish girls. Despite the risks of attending a religious gathering, Huberband managed to observe the holy days between the New Year and Sukkot, the festival of tabernacles. His devotion was hardly isolated: rather, it exemplified the resistance of religious Jews in Poland to the assault on Judaism.²⁹

As the German spearheads approached Warsaw, Kaplan observed well-off Jews, including much of the communal leadership, fleeing eastwards. ‘The big shots have deserted us,’ he wrote scornfully. After the besieged and battered city surrendered he watched the Germans march in. Unlike the hungry, dirty and downcast citizens, the soldiers looked healthy and smart. It did not take long, though, before they started helping themselves to Jewish property, stopping Jews in the street and stealing from them whatever items they fancied. Bearded Jews were a favourite target for robbery and battery; they were also the first to be grabbed off the street for forced labour, clearing away bomb damage. Polish bystanders laughed at this sight. Kaplan noticed that some Poles started helping the Germans to identify Jews and their belongings. ‘The conquerors and the conquered find common cause in their hatred of Israel,’ he noted bitterly.³⁰

Helena Szereszewska lived in a modern house on a fine street in Warsaw. Her husband, Stanislaw, was the director of a distillery and they were thoroughly Polonized. This did not save them from depredations at the hands of the occupier. Within a few days of entering the capital, ‘The Germans were now coming for our furniture almost every day. They had teams of Jews to carry the furniture downstairs and load it onto a lorry.’ These teams were not volunteers. ‘The Jews were rounded up on the street and it sometimes happened that people took their own furniture.’³¹

On 4 October in Lodz, Dawid Sierakowiak was impressed into labour. ‘I have never been so humiliated in all my life’, he protested to his diary as he recalled the jeering onlookers. ‘Only one response remains: revenge.’ After a few days he was able to go back to school, but food and fuel began to run out and Jews were now prevented from shopping normally. Queuing at the few shops where they were permitted to make purchases was an invitation to casual violence from ethnic Germans or passing soldiers. The pillaging of Jewish homes and enterprises continued relentlessly. Eventually a German officer visited his family’s apartment to check out the contents but left disappointed. Others struck a rich vein of plunder, emptying homes with impunity. ‘Sometimes German officers bring trucks and load furniture, telling the owners to wait to be paid from heaven.’ A few days later an ethnic German guided soldiers to his father’s business and helped them strip it bare.³²

A large part of the Polish intelligentsia was shocked by such instances of collaboration. In his daily record of the occupation, Zygmunt Klukowski, the superintendent of the county hospital in Zamość, coolly detailed the modus operandi of both the invaders and local opportunists. ‘The usual routine went like this. A few German soldiers would enter the open store and, after taking some items for themselves, start throwing everything else out onto the street. There some people waited to grab what they could. These people are from the city and the neighbouring villages. They would take home their loot, and the soldiers would move on to the next store.’ He observed that the German order police and the Sipo-SD men were far worse than the soldiers. But they were outdone by the militia raised from local ethnic Germans, the Selbstschutz. ‘The Germans are treating the Jews very brutally. They cut their beards; sometimes they pull the hair out.’ Once they sensed the permissive attitude of the new rulers, Poles joined in the violence. ‘Sorry to say, some citizens are as equally brutal as the Germans are towards the Jews.’³³

It was hardly surprising that under these circumstances many Jews initially welcomed the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of Poland. Kaplan wrote, ‘When the news reached us that the Bolsheviks were coming closer to Warsaw, our joy was unlimited.’ Thousands of mainly young Jews made for the Soviet zone. ‘They looked upon the Bolsheviks as redeeming Messiahs.’ This was not how most Poles saw it, least of all when the Soviet occupation authorities unleashed their own terror. But Kaplan saw a key difference. ‘The Russians plunder one as a citizen, and as a man, while the Nazis plunder one as a Jew.’ Even the Polish patriot Zygmunt Klukowski was relieved when the Russians briefly occupied Zamość. ‘I have to admit, I like them better than Germans.’³⁴

German plans for Poland

As the campaign wound down, Hitler and the Nazi leadership faced the question of what to do with their victory. Beyond vague aspirations to wipe out the Polish nation and reduce the population to virtual slavery they had no concrete, detailed plans for the future of what had been Poland. For a brief period, Hitler even entertained the idea of allowing Poland to exist as an entity under German suzerainty. Then, around 26 September, in the course of settling the demarcation line between the two powers, Stalin hinted that in addition to the occupation of eastern Poland he had designs on the Baltic states. The prospect that substantial numbers of ethnic Germans would fall under Russian rule in both Poland (notably Volhynia in the south-east) and the Baltic jolted Hitler into a snap decision to seek an exchange of population for land. Stalin got the territory he wanted in the Baltic, while Hitler obtained the right to evacuate ethnic Germans and bring them ‘home to the Reich’. Ribbentrop was dispatched to Moscow to confirm the deal while a programme and the machinery to implement it were hurriedly stitched together.³⁵

In conversation with confidants Hitler now declared that occupied Poland would be divided into three zones or belts of land. The first strip, consisting of the areas lost in 1918, was to be annexed to the Reich. Poles and Jews would be cleared out and replaced by repatriated ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche. The second zone would be placed under some sort of colonial regime and contain the bulk of the Polish population, held in subjection as a pool of labour. At the very edge of the new imperium, there would be a ‘Reich ghetto’ to which the Jews of Germany and Austria would be sent. It all sounded very tidy and logical but it was actually another case of improvisation dressed up as policy. With little idea of what they were getting into, Himmler and Heydrich immediately offered the services of the SS to realize Hitler’s vision. The SS had already established its expertise at getting rid of Jews and was acknowledged as the pace setter on matters of racial policy. So vetting ethnic Germans and helping them to settle seemed a logical extension of its remit. More to the point Himmler was desperate to expand the role of the SS in wartime and to extend his power into the occupied lands.³⁶

In a victory speech before the Reichstag on 6 October, Hitler announced his intention to preside over ‘a reordering of ethnographic relations, a resettlement of nationalities’ in eastern and south-eastern Europe, where there were many settlements of ethnic Germans. His statement came in the course of a long justification for the war in which he claimed he was doing the world a favour by completing the reversal of the Versailles Treaty. The misguided and vengeful statesmen of 1919 had bequeathed numerous points of ethno-national friction to Europe; Poland was one cause of instability. But now Poland would cease to exist and the borders of the Reich would be redrawn to conform with the distribution of ethnic groups. In the course of disposing of Poland, Hitler also briefly mentioned ‘an attempt to reach a solution and a settlement to the Jewish problem’.³⁷

The next day, following the usual struggle between ministerial rivals, Himmler was appointed to the newly created post of Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom) and charged with bringing ethnic Germans ‘home to the Reich’. Now, in addition to clearing the annexed areas of Poles and Jews, Himmler’s men had to find homes, farms and jobs for Volksdeutsche settlers in the east. Within a matter of hours and days, a project of colossal dimensions had been conjured up without giving any thought to the nuts and bolts, let alone the human dimension.³⁸

It was characteristic of his impulsive style that when Hitler triggered this momentous and destabilizing project the division of the occupied territories and the establishment of a civil administration had barely been settled. Josef Wagner, Gauleiter of Silesia, temporarily assumed the running of East Upper Silesia, now restored to the Reich and attached to his Gau. Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, was given control of the former Polish corridor through West Prussia plus the district of Zichenau. On 8 September, Hitler appointed Arthur Greiser, previously the president of the Danzig senate (and rival of Albert Forster), to head the civil administration in the other areas of western Poland due for incorporation into the Reich. For a while, however, he was nominally under the authority of the Nazi jurist Hans Frank, minister without portfolio, whom Hitler placed in overall charge of occupied Poland. On 12 October, Frank’s domain was limited to the zone of central Poland, roughly equivalent to the second belt envisaged by Hitler, dubbed the General Government. Ten days later, Greiser was appointed Reichsstatthalter, governor, of the newly christened Reichsgau Posen (later renamed Reichsgau Wartheland and commonly referred to as Warthegau), that now included a prime chunk of what had been Frank’s real estate, containing the industrial city of Lodz and surrounding districts.³⁹

Each of the new rulers brought into his domain teams of administrators, usually on secondment from their original office. Ministries in the Reich assigned men to fill cognate positions in the east, usually mediocre or incompetent staffers whom they could afford to lose. A goodly share of posts went to opportunists and adventurers. The essential qualification was a strong track record as a National Socialist activist. Consequently, while they may have been corrupt and inefficient the administrations were filled with men who hated Jews and loathed Poles. At the same time, the security apparatus was extended eastwards. In late September 1939, Himmler created the Reichssicherheitshauptamt – the SS Head Office, usually abbreviated to RSHA – ostensibly to harmonize the activities of the SD, the Gestapo and the police. The RSHA, whose first head was Heydrich, actually did little more than add a layer of management on top of an already confused and overlapping array of agencies. But it added clout to his insistence that the Sipo-SD operate independently in the new areas. Soon 500–600 Sipo-SD men were based in occupied Poland. While technically under the Interior Ministry or the civilian authorities, the police forces were actually controlled by Himmler and Heydrich. In addition, Himmler assigned five Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer (HSSPF or Higher SS Police Leaders), to the new regions to oversee SS work and report personally to him. As if this was not enough cause for confusion, Himmler claimed further powers for himself and his subordinates in his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom. Finally, Göring exercised sweeping authority over economic matters through the eastern projection of the Office of the Four-Year Plan. Within their respective domains and spheres of responsibility, Göring, Himmler, Gauleiter Forster, Reichsstatthalter Greiser and General Governor Frank pursued different policies towards the Poles. There was little uniformity or coordination.⁴⁰

Remarkably, the treatment of Poland’s Jews had not received much more consideration than the Polish question as a whole. Heydrich held briefing sessions with Einsatzgruppen leaders on 7 and 21 September, respectively one week and three weeks into the military campaign, at which he set forth his ideas. He also held meetings with Himmler on 14 and 21 September at which, amongst other things, they discussed anti-Jewish measures. To begin with, the SS leaders seemed to assume that anti-Jewish policy would continue along the lines obtaining in the Reich and as implemented in Austria and the Czech lands. Jews who were deemed a security risk would be arrested, imprisoned or executed; the Jewish population as a whole would be subjected to discriminatory laws and segregated; their property and assets would be seized for the Reich; where possible groups would be driven across the nearest border or obliged, under pressure, to emigrate. But the implementation of these measures depended in part on where the demarcation line between the Reich and the USSR would fall. Deporting Jews to the east, outside German territory, could not be undertaken until the SS knew where ‘the east’ would be.⁴¹

Heydrich gained the impression that Hitler envisaged the removal of the entire Jewish population from the Reich, including areas that were to be annexed to it, into some sort of reservation, possibly in the province of Galicia in southern Poland. Later that was amended to a ‘Reich ghetto’ in the Lublin area. Hitler certainly broached the subject with the army. Halder noted in his war diary on 20 September 1939, ‘Ghetto plan exists in broad outline; details are not yet settled; economic needs are prime consideration.’ Halder did not express a view one way or the other about the moral standing of such an outlandish suggestion; he merely reiterated the army’s insistence that no major population movements should be undertaken until military operations had ceased. At this point it would only be appropriate to explore ‘which population groups must be resettled and where’.⁴²

At Gestapo headquarters in Berlin the next day, Heydrich inducted his field commanders into the fast-crystallizing policy. Because not all were able to attend he subsequently compiled a Schnellbrief, a summary for express distribution. Heydrich began by distinguishing between the ‘final goal (which will require a lengthy period) and the stages leading to the fulfilment of the final goal (which can be carried out in short periods)’. The ‘overall measures (i.e. the final goal)’, were to be kept ‘strictly secret’. This ultimate objective was never clearly explicated. But it would require ‘the most thorough preparation in both the technical and the economic sense’. The first, immediate prerequisite was ‘the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities’. This was to be carried out rapidly according to a set of territorial priorities. Danzig, West Prussia, Poznan, East Upper Silesia were to be ‘cleared of Jews’ or, if that was not possible, the number of concentration points was to be kept to a minimum. In the rest of the conquered land the number of places where Jews would be gathered should also be held down. The cities appointed to receive the Jews should be on rail junctions or located on railroad routes ‘so as to facilitate subsequent measures’. Small communities of under 500 souls were to be dissolved and transferred to these larger ones.⁴³

Heydrich mandated that ‘In each Jewish community a Council of Elders is to be set up which, as far as possible, is to be composed of the remaining leading persons and rabbis.’ Councils were to comprise up to twenty-four members, depending on the size of the community. Their members were to be made ‘fully responsible, in the literal sense of the word’ for the implementation of existing and future directives. ‘In case of sabotage of such instructions, the Councils are to be warned that the most severe measures will be taken.’ They were to carry out a census of the Jews in their area and then organize the evacuation of small communities to the cities. If asked why, ‘The reason to be given for the concentration of the Jews in the cities is that the Jews have taken a decisive part in sniper attacks and plundering.’ The councils were also given responsibility for housing Jews brought in from rural areas. Jews being moved to the cities would be allowed to bring with them whatever they could carry. They would be warned of the most severe penalties for not complying.

In the only paragraph that mentioned how the German authorities should manage the ‘concentration of Jews’ Heydrich proposed that the demands of policing and security ‘will probably call for regulations which forbid their entry to certain quarters completely and that – with due regard for economic considerations – they may, for instance, not leave the ghetto, not leave their homes after a certain hour in the evening etc.’

All these measures were to be taken in the closest consultation with the army and the civilian regimes. Economic requirements had to be taken into account, too. ‘For instance, for the time being it will scarcely be possible to avoid, here and there, leaving behind some trade Jews who are absolutely essential to the provisioning of troops, for lack of other possibilities.’ In such cases ‘the prompt Aryanization of these enterprises is to be planned’. Jewish-owned munitions factories and other essential industries, along with enterprises important to the Four-Year Plan, had to be ‘maintained for the time being’. Eventually they were also to be Aryanized ‘and the move of the Jews completed later’. Heydrich’s instructions took equal cognizance of the food situation in the occupied territories. Land farmed by Jews had to be handed over to neighbouring Germans ‘or even Polish farmers’ to ensure the harvest was brought in and crops planted for the next season. In the event of conflict between the security police and the civil administration Heydrich was to be informed at once so that he could reach a decision about what to do.

The last section of the Schnellbrief stipulated that the Einsatzgruppen commanders were to report continuously on the numbers of Jews in their operational zones and the pace of evacuations from the countryside to the cities. Heydrich wanted to know where the Jews were to be concentrated, when they would be transferred, details of their major economic enterprises and Aryanization proceedings. How many Jews worked in specific enterprises and could they be kept running without them? If not, how would they be replaced? No district was left untouched. To notify the relevant state agencies, and also to signify his authority in these matters, copies of the Schnellbrief were sent to the provisional civil authorities in the occupied territories, the army high command, the office of the Four-Year Plan, the Reich Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Food.⁴⁴

Although the summary left the ‘final goal’ unstated, in this meeting on 21 September and at a later briefing at the RSHA on 29 September, Heydrich did elaborate on the eventual fate of the Jews. They were to be removed from the Reich and deported to a ‘foreign Gau’ (that is to say, a district under German control reserved for aliens) or forced over the demarcation line into Soviet territory. Hence, all the actions specified in the Schnellbrief were temporary and designed to culminate in the removal of the Jews within the next twelve months. Partly for this reason, Heydrich devoted little attention to details or definitions. Although the word ghetto was used, his summary never elaborated on what it meant. Rather than requiring the construction of enclosed Jewish districts, part of the message actually suggested that Jews would be allowed to wander anywhere in cities apart from specifically prohibited zones. The Jewish councils were made responsible for the enumeration, removal and rehousing of Jews from the countryside, but apart from that they had no other functions. The Schnellbrief shows that Heydrich was still obliged to pay obeisance to the civil authorities and the army, as well as the economic agencies of the Reich. Notwithstanding the affirmation of a coordinated multi-agency approach, there was no hint about how the Jewish communities would be supervised or maintained until the ‘final goal’ was attained or by whom.⁴⁵

Eichmann and the Nisko project

Several of Heydrich’s subordinates took these early aspirational statements to be policy guidelines, ignoring the caveats uttered by high-ranking officers such as Halder and the reservations included by Heydrich in the short summary. In mid-September, Adolf Eichmann (based in Vienna) and Franz Stahlecker (now commanding the Sipo-SD in Prague), discussed the removal of 300,000 Reich Jews to the reservation that had been mooted in Berlin. Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, was closer to the epicentre of decision-making. On 6 October he ordered Eichmann to prepare the deportation of 70,000–80,000 Jews from the Protectorate and the districts annexed to Silesia. Eichmann wasted no time initiating practical steps in the cities initially designated for the operation: Katowice in East Upper Silesia and Ostrava in the Protectorate. Vienna was soon added to the list. The German authorities there and in Katowice were thrilled at the prospect of substantially diminishing their Jewish populations. Eichmann deputed his staff at the central emigration office in Vienna to handle the logistics. Theo Dannecker and Alois Brunner set about obtaining the necessary trains, while Rolf Günther briefed the hapless Jewish leaders in each place about what was expected of them. On 10 October, Josef Löwenherz, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, was told to select over 1,000 able-bodied men and equip them with food, clothing and tools. They would prepare the way for the masses to follow. Similar instructions were issued in the other centres.⁴⁶

However, with just a week to go before the transports were due to leave, Stahlecker and Eichmann still had no idea where the Jews would go. On 12 October they flew from Ostrava to Cracow to begin looking for a suitable reception area. Eichmann disliked flying, so the choice of transportation suggests the pressure they were under. Having spent three days scouting locations in the Lublin area, some still patrolled by Red Army units, they alighted on Nisko and Zarzecze, two villages on opposite sides of the River San. Both were on a railway line and close to unused marshy ground that stretched from the edge of town to the river bank. Satisfied that they had found the spot, Eichmann telexed the basic details to his officials. Twenty-four hours later he was back in Vienna, where he hastily briefed his aides before travelling to Ostrava to do the same there. The very next day, 916 Czech Jewish men clambered aboard a train with twenty-two passenger carriages and twenty-nine freight cars for the provisions and equipment – all paid for by local Jews. As if to underline the random nature of the enterprise, Eichmann agreed to a last-minute request by Arthur Nebe, head of the criminal police in Berlin, to add a few freight cars to take away unwanted Gypsies. A second trainload, with over 1,000 Jews, was dispatched from Vienna on 20 October. A third left from Katowice. Then things started to go wrong. The first train was held in a siding overnight and several men had to be removed due to sickness. No sooner had it arrived at Nisko than Rolf Günther got information from the SD Head Office that the initiative required central approval and the cooperation of other agencies. This admonition was quickly succeeded by an unequivocal order from Berlin to stop any more trains going east. Amidst the confusion Eichmann sent off two more trainloads, one from Vienna and one from Ostrava. A trainload also departed from Prague but was turned back due to floods. Little more than a week after its inauguration the plan foundered. Instead of 80,000 Jews, a mere 4,700 had been removed. Müller later explained to Eichmann that the army had priority on rail transport; it was more important to extract Polish POWs from the war zone than to dump Jews there. The high command also objected to the creation of a massive Jewish population adjacent to what might become the next front line.⁴⁷

Although short-lived, the Nisko scheme was horrendous for the Jews caught up in it. At breakneck speed and considerable cost, the Jewish communities had obtained the materials for prefabricated huts, building tools and provisions for several weeks. When the first trainload arrived, Eichmann greeted them in person. He announced that they were there to begin constructing ‘a new homeland’ for the Jews. But there was no infrastructure, the ground was marshy, and there was no shelter for the workers. The SS and police guards had no interest in the project and after Eichmann had left they attempted to drive several groups across the demarcation line into the Soviet zone. As more Jews arrived, a few huts were erected and the camp took shape, but the men could not survive without help from the Jewish community in Lublin. The harsh winter weather decimated their ranks. Without any form of sustenance or work some made their way to the city or transferred to labour camps in East Upper Silesia. In April 1940 the camp was wound up and the 300 survivors were allowed to return home.⁴⁸

The abortive Nisko venture came to be seen by historians as a policy departure, or at least an experiment that led to the perfection of techniques for the mass deportation of Jews. In fact, it was an attempt to continue on a larger scale the policy that had led to the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany almost exactly a year earlier. The only new ingredient was in the nature of the destination: a peripheral territory under the control of the Reich. The men who hatched the scheme lazily assumed that this would obviate the problems experienced in October 1938. Instead, this brashly conceived ‘territorial solution’ was stymied by protests from the army. It was also cut short by Himmler, who was trying to cope with a far more pressing movement of population: the influx of Volksdeutsche and the expulsion of Poles whose farms and homes were required for their resettlement. The failure was an evil portent, but for Himmler and Heydrich rather than the Jews. It became the first in a catalogue of disasters that autumn which threatened to tarnish their careers and the reputation of the SS.⁴⁹

In mid-October the first Volksdeutsche arrived in Danzig. Greiser was keen to receive them in his Gau because he presided over a province with 325,000 Germans and 4.9 million Poles. The number of Jews alone was roughly equal to the number of Germans. On his appointment as Reichsstatthalter he proclaimed that he would create a ‘model Gau’ that would be productive, modern, and thoroughly German. But he faced an uphill battle. The only way he could hope to realize his dream was by working with Himmler and utilizing the manpower and resources of the SS, even if that involved ceding a degree of sovereignty. Indeed, at first Greiser was almost a spectator to the upheavals in his own back yard.⁵⁰

At the end of the month, Himmler issued guidelines for the purification of the incorporated territories. He entrusted Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in Posen, with the mission to displace 1 million Poles and 300,000 Jews from Danzig-West Prussia and the Wartheland into the General Government within four months. Koppe delegated the job to Albert Rapp, who quickly revised the figure down to more manageable proportions. Ten days later he announced that the target was now just 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews. A little over two weeks later, Heydrich intervened. He limited the operation to the Warthegau and stipulated that the goal should be 80,000 Poles and Jews. Retaining, if only on paper, the intent to cleanse the new lands of their entire alien and hostile population, he chopped up the operation into stages. The opening phase was dubbed Nahplan, or short-term plan, 1.⁵¹

The entire process was haphazard. The security police set about identifying and registering Poles, often erroneously. On appointed days in particular districts thousands were given a few hours’ notice that they had to leave. However, the SS lacked the personnel for an endeavour of this scope so that order police, ethnic German militia, the civil authorities, and even students at a Nazi leadership school were drafted in to help. Between 1 and 17 December eighty trains were sent out of the Gau carrying 87,833 Poles. When the transports arrived in the General Government the freezing, hungry refugees were deposited into the care of the local population. Chaos mounted in the districts where refugees piled up. Hundreds made their way back to their homesteads, in some cases with the intention of vandalizing the properties rather than see them taken over by strangers.⁵²

About 10,000 Jews were included in this first wave, uprooted mainly from Posen, Kalisch and Lodz. The inclusion of Lodz in the Warthegau, with its Jewish population of approximately 200,000, posed a massive headache for Greiser and his officials. Could they be extracted without wrecking the local economy and where could they go? Only around 5,000–6,000 were forcibly located to the General Government before Nahplan 1 ended. Greiser and his advisers realized that Jews were not the priority when it came to settling Volksdeutsche: the incomers needed farms and manual employment whereas the Jews were urban dwellers and hardly any worked the land.⁵³

It also became clear to Heydrich that things were not going well. Just before Christmas he brought in Adolf Eichmann to review the deportations and devise a more efficient system. Eichmann had already convened a meeting of the SD Referenten to discuss how to deal with the Reich Jews in the light of new opportunities in the east and the competing obligation to rid the annexed territories of undesirable populations. When the Jewish Department II/112 of the SD Head Office was transferred to the Gestapo and reclassified office IVD4 – with responsibility for emigration and evacuations – Polish policy and anti-Jewish policy became fatefully entangled.⁵⁴

In the second phase, Nahplan 2, Heydrich envisaged the deportation of 600,000 Jews from the new portions of the Reich to a reservation in the General Government where they would be held as hostages against the good behaviour of the Americans. The operation would commence on 15 January 1940, assuming that the Transport Ministry provided trains sufficient for 5,000 deportees per day. This time the details were to be worked out in advance and coordinated between the necessary agencies. However, when Eichmann convened the first coordination meeting early in the new year he lowered the target to 350,000 Jews and now included Poles. A sudden flood of Volksdeutsche from Volhynia had revived the urgency of finding room on the land for incomers by evicting Polish farmers. Once again a revised programme had to be delayed. Due to the parlous condition of the Reichsbahn and the priority demands of the Wehrmacht, there wasn’t enough available transport. Furthermore, Hans Frank had developed ambitions for making the General Government economically productive and resented his fiefdom being treated as a rubbish bin for unwanted populations. In the end, Nahplan 2 was shelved and an interim plan was set in motion to remove 40,000 Poles to make way for ethnic German settlers. Even this limited evacuation, conducted between 10 February and 15 March 1940, was a shambles. Despite the sweeping goals outlined by Heydrich, only a very small proportion were Jews.⁵⁵

The Nazi leadership was reluctantly forced to concede the impossibility of achieving everything at once. A meeting of the key Gauleiters at Göring’s private estate in mid-February voiced concern that uncontrolled resettlement was disrupting the economy in the areas whence Poles were being removed and where they were being deposited. Göring reiterated that the smooth production of munitions and food had to take priority over population movements. While everyone agreed that it was desirable to deport Jews from the incorporated territories to some kind of Jewish reservation in a corner of the General Government, Himmler was boxed in. Frank accepted his role, with the proviso that he was offering a temporary solution. Yet two comparatively minor expulsions of Jews, from Stettin on 12 February (the day of the meeting) and Schneidemühl a month later, were the straws that broke the camel’s back. Frank declared that he could not tolerate further uncoordinated resettlements and, this time, Göring backed him up forcefully. On 23 March he told Himmler to desist from further removals of Jews to the General Government.⁵⁶

Nahplan 2 was resurrected in March 1940 and continued in fits and starts until January 1941, by which time 143 transports had carried 133,508 Poles to the General Government. Only three trains were used to deport Polish Jews, chiefly from Posen. The majority of Jews in the incorporated territories ended up staying where they were. Apart from Stettin and Schneidemühl, as shocking as these expulsions were, the Jews of the Reich remained undisturbed. Himmler and Heydrich, along with Greiser and Frank, discovered that they had taken on objectives that actually frustrated one another. It was all very well to talk about clearing the Wartheland of Poles, but Poles were the labour force and farm evictions disrupted agricultural production. The settlement of 360,000 ethnic Germans created all sorts of challenges that would have strained the agencies of the Reich even had they not taken on other responsibilities. Removing Jews was ideologically satisfying, but did not materially assist the fulfilment of other goals. Moreover, Greiser and Frank discovered that the Jewish question, in the form it assumed in Poland, was more complicated than they thought.⁵⁷

Anti-Jewish policy and Jewish responses in occupied Poland

While the Nazis wrestled with a knot of intertwined problems caused by their long-term population policies, the Jews had to cope with German rule in conquered Poland on a day-to-day basis. There was little consistency or uniformity to their experiences. At first they lived in a war zone, then under military rule, and finally under civilian authority. The treatment meted out to them varied in each phase and, confusingly, from one region to another. Jews had no way of knowing what caused this muddle, but they couldn’t help noticing the barrage of orders and counter-orders transmitted down the chain of command, the unrealistic nature of many policy declarations, the dissonance between what Berlin decreed and what local rulers did, and the regional variations. German ordinances were all the more terrifying because they were so baffling. At the start of December 1939, Chaim Kaplan observed shrewdly, ‘The liquidation of Polish Jewry is in full force, but it is not proceeding everywhere at a uniform rate. It is a mistake to think that the conqueror excels in logic and orderliness. We see quite the opposite of this. Everything that is done by those who carry out his exalted will bears the imprint of confusion and illogic. The Nazis are consistent and systematic only with regard to the central concepts behind their actions – that is, the concept of authoritarianism and harshness; and in relation to the Jews – the concept of complete extermination and destruction.’⁵⁸

Initially the army presided over the acts of violence, destruction and despoliation. In addition to the thousands of Jews killed in security actions or reprisals, 25,000 of the 60,000 Jewish soldiers in the Polish army who became prisoners of war were dead by the following spring. Several thousand were sent to Germany for forced labour, where they were treated better than in the POW camps. After about a year some were even repatriated to Poland. Meanwhile, army commanders were the first to impose discrimination and segregation on Jewish communities. On 8 October 1939 the military authorities in Piotrków Trybunalski decreed that the 15,000 Jews in the city were to be confined to a ghetto. It was the first of its kind, but did not indicate a trend and was hardly a model for what followed. Jews continued to live outside the Piotrków ghetto even after the boundary was set. Although ghettos became the iconic feature of German anti-Jewish policy in Poland they were established sporadically, over a long period, and rarely for the same reasons. Regardless of the instructions issued by Heydrich only seven other cities or towns had ghettos by the end of 1939.⁵⁹

In the Wartheland, Greiser’s aim was to eject the Jews as quickly as possible, so he had no particular interest in setting up ghettos. It was only towards the end of 1939, when it became apparent that the Jewish population could not be deported within a few months, that Friedrich Übelhör, the chief of the Kalisz district, first gave serious consideration to means of segregating Jews from the German and Polish populations.⁶⁰

As long as there was a prospect of a Jewish reservation in the Lublin district Hans Frank showed even less interest in forming ghettos. On 4 November, the SS in Warsaw summoned the Jewish leadership and informed them that the German authorities intended to create a ghetto on a number of streets in the city. The Jews were appalled and refused to accept the blow meekly. Adam Czerniaków, an engineer who had been appointed by Warsaw’s mayor to chair a committee representing its Jewish population during the siege, led a delegation to General Karl von Neumann-Neurode, military commander of the city. It turned out that Neumann-Neurode had not been consulted about this momentous and potentially disruptive move. The army put a stop to the plan and it remained on the shelf for months until the civil authorities, in consultation with experts and the security police, came up with a more considered proposal. The Germans did however put up notices barring their troops from Jewish districts on the grounds that they were seething with infectious diseases. This was a dangerous precedent, but for the moment the 360,000 Jews counted in the census conducted at German insistence continued to live all over Warsaw. In Cracow, which he made his capital, Frank was content for the time being to designate the part where most Jews lived a ‘Jewish residential district’.⁶¹

Despoliation on a small and large scale was more ubiquitous. Looting by German soldiers continued for months. In October, Michael Zylberberg, headmaster of a Jewish school in Warsaw, recorded that Germans were still ‘breaking into homes and looting’. In Lodz the havoc all but prevented the young diarist Mary Berg from celebrating her fifteenth birthday on 10 October. Her father’s art dealership was ransacked and paintings by Poussin and Delacroix carried away from their apartment. They were ‘visited by German soldiers’ again at the start of November. The Germans re-enacted the Reich pogrom of November 1938 by torching the city’s synagogues at the same time as carrying on with their wild plundering. Dawid Sierakowiak exclaimed, ‘There’s something sick about the Germans. Yesterday they started horrible, chaotic looting.’⁶²

Across the Warthegau and the General Government the civilian powers froze the bank accounts of Jews, emptied their safety deposit boxes, and confiscated the securities they owned. Göring’s Central Trust Office East moved with alacrity to seize the homes, businesses and enterprises of Jews in the incorporated territories. Greiser, who was thereby cheated of the richest pickings, was reduced to pillaging their movable property and personal assets to fund his administration. Frank vigorously resisted Göring’s ambition to achieve the same monopoly in the General Government and set up his own Trust Organization to expropriate and dispose of Jewish-owned property. By the end of the year Göring was forced to agree to a compromise whereby Frank became his plenipotentiary for economic matters. The Trust eventually sold off 3,600 businesses and 50,000 properties. It was also common practice to impose fines on Jewish communities, often accompanied by the taking of hostages. In Lodz the Germans levied a fine of 25 million zloty; in Warsaw it was just 1 million. Jewish councils desperately collected the money, often making up the amount with appeals for Jews to hand over foreign currency, gold rings and precious stones.⁶³

Decrees by the military authorities, echoed and extended by the civilian rulers, forced Jews out of one livelihood after another. Jewish civil servants were immediately dismissed. The suppression of Jewish schools left thousands of teachers idle. Jews who worked for newspapers, publishers, theatres and concert orchestras were denied a livelihood. Chaim Kaplan estimated that the ban on Jews manufacturing or trading in textiles and leather affected about half of all the Jews employed in Warsaw. Soon 70,000–80,000 were unemployed.⁶⁴

The Germans continued to seize Jews for forced labour. Army units, the SS and civilian agencies competed to obtain and keep Jewish workers. In the Lublin area the HSSPF Odilo Globocnik was quick to establish a monopoly on Jewish muscle power, thereby creating the basis for an economic empire of his own. In the rest of the General Government Frank’s officials tussled with the Sipo-SD for control of this lucrative resource. Since the toil was accompanied by beatings and arbitrary killings many Jewish men preferred to flee into the Soviet sector and take their chances there.⁶⁵

Women abducted for labour were frequently abused. Kaplan reported that in Lodz ‘girls were compelled to clean a latrine – to remove the excrement and clean it. But they received no utensils. To their question “With what?” the Nazis replied: “With your blouses.” The girls removed their blouses and cleaned the excrement with them. When the job was done they received their reward; the Nazis wrapped their faces in the blouses, filthy with excrement, and laughed uproariously.’ Mary Berg heard that Germans (she did not identify whether they were soldiers, SS or local militia) gathered couples in a room and forced them to strip and dance naked. Two young girls she knew from school who were compelled to perform in this way returned to their homes bruised from the ensuing struggle. Berg did not elaborate on what had happened to them.⁶⁶

Random kidnappings such as these terrified the Jewish population and were one of the first things that the newly appointed Jewish councils sought to ameliorate. Typically, although these institutions were supposed to be standardized they emerged chaotically and varied widely. Like his instruction to concentrate Jews, Heydrich’s directive to establish a Judenrat, or Jewish council, in every community was hazy. He did not specify who was eligible or how members should be chosen. Sometimes the military authorities took the initiative, sometimes commanders of the Einsatzgruppen or Sipo-SD officers. In Radom, the Einsatzgruppe chief plucked Jews from the street to serve on a council. Frequently, Jews offered their services to the occupiers in the hope of mitigating the looting and arbitrary forced labour. In most cases these individuals came from the ranks of pre-war communal activists or civic committees set up to deal with war damage and refugees, but in some they were opportunists with no qualifications except chutzpah. In late November 1939 Hans Frank issued his own decree stipulating the formation of Jewish councils in the General Government, requiring that they should be elected. Hardly any were. Jewish councils did not even have uniform titles. In East Upper Silesia they were known as the Council of Elders of the Jewish Religious Community.⁶⁷

The composition of the councils was not only the consequence of an erratic appointments process. Flight and emigration, along with indiscriminate and targeted killings, decapitated many Jewish communities. Political activists, especially on the left, and members of the intelligentsia fled to Lithuania, the Soviet zone, or to Romania. Wealthy Jews, who typically presided over welfare and cultural organizations, had the means to escape or to emigrate. So the leadership pool was denuded even before the Germans began selecting men to establish or serve on Jewish councils. Nevertheless, almost everywhere local leaders were drawn from men who had held pre-war positions in communal organizations and frequently included members of the local rabbinate.⁶⁸

In Warsaw the military authority agreed to the appointment of Adam Czerniaków as head of the Jewish community. Czerniaków was a chemical engineer with a wealth of experience in civic affairs. He had been selected by the capital’s mayor as the chief representative of Warsaw Jews during the siege and already chaired a Jewish civic committee. After Hans Frank issued his own directive for the formation of a council, Czerniaków recruited two dozen representatives of the main welfare organizations, political parties and religious groups to serve alongside him. They were honourable men with years of public service between them. Unfortunately, several chose to escape abroad over the following months. These included Dr Henry Shoskes, Apolinary Hartglas and Shmuel Zygielbojm, who together had taken a courageous stand against the formation of a ghetto. As the council lost men of such standing and acquired the task of implementing ever harsher German decrees it steadily lost prestige and respect amongst ordinary Jews.⁶⁹

One of the first tasks of the Warsaw Jewish council was to provide the Germans with a census of Jews in the city. The head count at the end of October 1939 revealed a Jewish population of approximately 360,000, although it grew daily due to the inflow of refugees and Jews expelled from the Warthegau. To prevent the chaotic and violent raids to seize Jews for work details the council organized labour battalions that could be provided to the Germans when they needed manpower. Soon the labour office of the Warsaw Judenrat was supplying the German railways, garrison, municipal authorities and SS with 1,000 workers per day. In January 1940 the Germans ordered the council to register Jews aged 14–60 who were fit for work. Over 112,000 Jews were tallied (including converts), although only a fraction of them ever carried a pick or a shovel. The labourers were not remunerated by their employers; instead, the Jewish council paid them a small sum, 3–4 zlotys per day, with which to maintain themselves and any dependants. It was a paltry amount, sufficient only to act as an inducement to refugees who had no other hope of employment. Better-off Jews preferred to buy their way out. Instead of rejecting such practices for the sake of equality, the Jewish council used the sale of exemptions to provide an urgently needed revenue stream. While the Germans blocked access to the bank accounts of community organizations as well as Jewish individuals, they expected Czerniaków to secure funds for a mammoth budget covering the cost of services provided by the Warsaw municipality, the wage bill for forced labour (which indirectly maintained tens of thousands of Jews), welfare, health, and emergency housing for refugees. It was an impossible task and even with money from overseas aid agencies Czerniaków staggered from one financial crisis to another.⁷⁰

The next most urgent priority of the councils was to house and feed refugees from the fighting, those bombed out of their homes, or families evicted from the incorporated territories. When the Germans started pushing Jews out of small rural settlements into larger towns or cities, the councils had to care for them as well. Overcrowding meant that the councils were soon compelled to take sanitation in hand, too. As more Jews were deprived of a livelihood or forced from their places of work, councils took up the task of providing emergency meals in communal canteens or soup kitchens. This obliged them to seek and manage food supplies. Gradually the councils also assumed responsibility for health services, welfare for the elderly and the young, and education.⁷¹

Aid from Jews in the USA was crucial to sustaining Jewish life in Poland. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee continued to send funds to Warsaw, where they were used locally or parcelled out to communities across the country. In the capital its local representatives worked with a central coordinating committee that brought some order to myriad overlapping and competing Jewish welfare organizations. The Coordinating Commission of Jewish Aid and Civil Society was set up in the early days of the war as a sub-section of a national relief effort. It was chaired by Michael Weichert, a lawyer and a well-known pre-war figure, and included representatives from the main welfare agencies, political parties and religious groups. Czerniaków met several times with Weichert to plead for increased funding. At the start of 1940, the Germans severed Jewish relief work from national and local Polish aid organizations. Weichert nevertheless continued to coordinate Jewish activity across the General Government while a separate Welfare Work Section in Warsaw provided the liaison between separate agencies. Its secretary was Emanuel Ringelblum, a schoolteacher better known as an historian and activist in the left-wing Zionist movement. In mid-1940 the Germans insisted that US aid had to be funnelled through Cracow, capital of the General Government. Thanks to the manipulated rate of exchange only about 20 per cent of the value of the money transferred to Poland actually reached the Jews. Most went into the coffers of Frank’s administration.⁷²

The yellow star, which like ghettoization became a signature of Nazi policy, was also introduced unevenly and Jewish reactions were far from uniform. Greiser’s administration officially required Jews to wear a star made of yellow cloth on their outer garments from 11 November 1939. When he learned of the decree Dawid Sierakowiak railed in his diary, ‘We are returning to the Middle Ages. The yellow patch once again becomes a part of Jewish dress.’ Despite the latest indignity and a draconian curfew from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m., he was convinced ‘we will live through this action to see a fine, shining future’.⁷³

Frank did not ordain a similar measure in the General Government until a month later, when decrees required Jews to wear an armband printed with a blue Star of David and to mark all Jewish businesses. Wladyslaw Szpilman later recalled his indignation. ‘So we are to be publicly branded as outcasts. Several centuries of humanitarian progress were to be cancelled out, and we were back in the Middle Ages.’ In stark contrast, as an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist, Chaim Kaplan relished the edict. ‘[T]he conqueror is turning us into Jews whether we like it or not. Nobody is being discriminated against. The Nazis have marked us with the Jewish national colours, which are our pride.’ He observed the difference between Warsaw and Lodz. ‘The “yellow badge” of medieval days has been stuck to them, but as for me I shall wear my badge with personal satisfaction.’ In a further echo of medieval antipathies, the Germans banned Jewish schooling and forbade worship in synagogues or use of ritual baths.74

Constant harassment and the fear of compulsory labour encouraged those who could to escape German rule and for the meantime the borders of German-occupied Poland remained relatively porous. About 350,000 Jews who fled eastward during the fighting inadvertently ended up in the Soviet zone. They were joined by a steady stream of fugitives, usually young men who preferred Russian rule. ‘In tens of thousands our youths flee to this “Russian” territory from the inferno awaiting them under the rule of Nazism’, Kaplan commented on 27 November 1939. At first they were welcomed as ‘excellent material for Bolshevism’ until the Soviets lost patience with the flood and closed the border. Still, many were willing to risk getting shot by Red Army patrols as against the danger of staying put. Yet not everyone found the Soviet system to their taste. Mary Berg’s father went east, but then returned. Lots of young left-leaning Jewish men like Dawid Sierakowiak would have chosen socialism over Nazi tyranny, but felt bound to stay with their families. Meanwhile, those with the means and the necessary papers were still able to emigrate. Having taken part in the defence of Warsaw, Helena Szereszewska remarked that ‘some people were leaving for Russia, others via Italy for Brazil, and some via Japan for the United States. And there were even some who managed to get to Palestine, via Wilno [Vilnius], Odessa and Constantinople.’ Yitzhak Zuckerman, a youth worker in the left-wing Zionist movement HeHalutz Ha-Tsair, slipped into the Soviet zone and began to secretly organize groups of young Zionists for emigration to Palestine via Romania.⁷⁵

Ghetto building in Lodz and variations elsewhere

During the first months of 1940 the persistence of dense Jewish populations under their charge drove the Germans to more drastic and often self-contradictory measures. On 10 December 1939, Übelhör informed Nazi Party representatives in Lodz, the municipal government, and the security police that ‘Their immediate evacuation is not possible.’ As a strictly temporary expedient Jews would be confined to a ghetto. ‘The establishment of the ghetto is of course a transitional measure. I reserve to myself the decision at what point in time and with which means the ghetto and the city of Lodz will be cleansed of Jews. In any event, the final goal must be that we completely cauterize out this pestilential boil.’⁷⁶

Übelhör’s initial conception was a tightly constricted ghetto for those who could not work combined with guarded barracks scattered across the city for the essential Jewish labour. This was no more practicable than removing the entire Jewish population to the General Government. Instead, Greiser agreed to proposals by city officials to move all the city’s Jewish residents into the slum districts of Baluty and the Old Town, where 60,000 Jews already lived. An outbreak of typhus supplied a pretext for designating the ‘Jewish residential area’ and establishing control points for entering and leaving. On 8 February 1940, the Lodz police president published an ordinance condemning about 100,000 Jews to leave their homes for the cramped, squalid Baluty district within thirty days. At first the relocation proceeded voluntarily, but it was too slow for the Germans so it was speeded up by police raids and shootings in which hundreds died. By early March most Jews were inside the assigned area and the Germans began sealing it off with fences and barbed wire. The Jews within were forbidden to leave on pain of death. When the last stretch was completed on 1 April 1940 the ghetto was hermetically closed to the outside world. To symbolize the Germanization of the city it was renamed Litzmannstadt.⁷⁷

In the eyes of German urban planners, Lodz could only be turned into an ideal German city if the Jews were shunted out of sight and tightly contained. As a consequence of their racialized understanding of space and progress, 164,000 people were crammed into 4.13 square kilometres. The ghetto contained just over 48,000 residential rooms, creating a density of 3.5 persons per room. Most of the buildings were old and poorly built; 95 per cent of residences lacked running water or toilets. Only 49 apartments had a bathroom. The flip-side of modernization and Germanization was thrusting the Jews back into a bygone era of squalor and deprivation.⁷⁸

The internal organization of the ghetto was equally slapdash. On 13 October 1939 the Germans had appointed the sixty-three-year-old Chaim Rumkowski as the Elder of the Jews. Rumkowski was not such a bad choice. Having failed at business he became the director of an admired orphanage and achieved much in the field of education and child welfare. An odour of scandal hung around him, but he was one of the few members of the pre-war elite who had stayed at their post. His mandate was sweeping: ‘to carry out all measures of the German civil administration with regard to all persons belonging to the Jewish race’. He was commanded to dissolve the existing communal organizations, recruit a council and levy taxes on the Jewish population. Rumkowski picked over two dozen solid, experienced citizens to assist him, only for them to be arrested and shot or imprisoned within weeks. He and two others were the only survivors of the first Council of Elders. Its next incarnation was hardly distinguished. After the ghetto was sealed, the mayor of Lodz awarded him wide powers ‘to maintain an orderly public life in the Jewish residential area’. Unfortunately this brought out the worst in his character. A vain, autocratic type at the best of times he now became dictatorial, convinced that he alone could save the Jewish community.⁷⁹

Having said that, the task facing the Elder of the Jews required a man of enormous energy and inexhaustible self-belief. Rumkowski presided over a vast, impoverished population with no obvious means of sustenance. The ghetto contained three hospitals, four orphanages and thirty-two primary schools amongst other institutions, all of which required supply and maintenance. Thousands of people who scurried into the ghetto at the last moment, with shots ringing in their ears, lacked accommodation or means of support. How could the ghetto afford to pay teachers and doctors, or purchase provisions and medical supplies? On top of this expenditure, since October 1939 the Jewish council had been paying wages to 2,000–3,000 Jewish workers whose services were demanded by the Germans each day. The Germans cynically declared that the ghetto would manage on the basis of ‘autarky’, meaning that Jews would draw on their mythologized wealth to purchase what they needed. In fact, ‘autarky’ was a polite word for extortion and cannibalization. Rumkowski was forced to be ruthless and ingenious in order to generate sufficient revenue to obtain medicine, food, fuel and raw materials.⁸⁰

Shortly after the ghetto was sealed, he wrote to the city mayor proposing that 8,000–10,000 skilled Jewish workers could be put to work for the benefit of the authorities if they were supplied with raw materials and paid a wage. He offered to establish an office to allocate work in the ghetto and undertook to deliver products that could be exchanged for cash or food. Rumkowski also asked for a loan: ‘I hope that I and my co-workers in all this will succeed in obtaining a subvention from the authorities in order to carry out the budget in the ghetto.’ He specifically mentioned the upkeep of an Order Service that he had been instructed to establish to police the ghetto’s inhabitants and also funds to ‘keep the poor and needy viable’. For the moment, though, the Germans scoffed at the thought of extending finance to Jews, in a ghetto, but they saw the point of putting Jews to work if it meant that the ghetto would pay for itself. In May, the first sewing workshop started to operate. Within four months the number of clothing workshops rose to seventeen. Around 40,000 Jews, out of 146,000, found work. Unfortunately, because the Germans refused to supply machinery to the ghetto, production was almost entirely manual, unskilled, and dogged by low productivity. This state of affairs was somewhat improved by the arrival of Hans Biebow, a businessman from Bremen, to run the Food and Economy Office of the German ghetto administration. Biebow was technically an employee of the municipality which, up to that time, had been responsible for supplying the ghetto with food in exchange for products and labour. Under him the office solicited orders for enterprises located inside the ghetto and exercised close supervision over all aspects of production and labour. As the ghetto became an accepted fact, his bureau evolved into a full-scale ghetto administration employing 400 staff. Biebow was not averse to profiting personally from contracts and soon identified his own interests with the fate of the ghetto.⁸¹

Although the Lodz ghetto became a model that other German officials in Poland would seek to emulate, it was never the fulfilment of a deliberate, long-term policy formulated by the Nazi leadership. Rather, it was a desperate expedient launched by local administrators in response to the failure of deportation plans and the impoverishment of the Jewish population which was, itself, the by-product of German measures. Stuck with a mass of unemployed, indigent, malnourished Jews the best solution that Greiser and Übelhör could come up with for the moment was pushing them behind a wall where they would be out of sight. It was a spectacular solution, yet it was not adopted throughout the Wartheland, anywhere in East Upper Silesia or as a rule in the General Government.⁸²

In early April 1940, the thirteen-year-old David Rubinowitz travelled freely between the village of Krajno, where he lived with his family, and the city of Kielce, where his uncle had a house. David’s father, an Orthodox Jew, owned a dairy and continued to run it almost untroubled by the new regime. Around the very time that the Kielce Jews were being bottled up in a ghetto, he wrote in his diary, ‘I went into the woods with my brother to search for mushrooms.’⁸³

Gerda Weissmann was fifteen when the Germans occupied Bielitz in East Upper Silesia. Her father had a stake in a factory producing furs and though he lost the business, his family managed to retain their large house on the edge of town. When Gerda’s brother, aged nineteen years, was obliged to register for forced labour he made his way to the Russian zone, but the rest of the family stayed put. Like the other 90,000–100,000 Jews in the region, mainly concentrated in Katowice, Bedzin and Sosnowiec, they were not confined. Fritz Bracht, the Gauleiter of the newly created Gau of East Upper Silesia, preferred to exploit his Jews as a valuable labour resource. Instead of being uselessly penned up they were organized into labour units by Albrecht Schmelt and assigned to armaments plants, engineering works and textile factories.⁸⁴

As the unusually harsh winter turned to spring, Jewish life in Warsaw assumed a new normality. The Judenrat became more elaborate, with over twenty departments assuming functions previously carried out by the municipality. A census conducted in February at the behest of the Germans revealed that it was now responsible for the fate of 395,000 Jews. Amongst its most pressing concerns was finding accommodation and food for the 40,000–50,000 Jews displaced into the ghetto from the western parts of the region or expelled from the annexed territories. On arrival they were given baths, quarantined and then quartered in hostels. Since the council could only manage to house a maximum of 17,000, soon they were forced to find places themselves or live on the streets. In order to earn something, even if only a pittance, hundreds volunteered for work in the labour battalions run by the Jewish council’s labour office (and escorted by its own unarmed guards, the Order Service). Czerniaków had only limited access to funds and had to rely on endless improvisations to cover this burgeoning cost.⁸⁵

The Judenrat instituted and managed an elaborate rationing system. The entire Jewish population was registered for ration cards, although only the poorest got them for free: others had to pay a tax. The card entitled the holder to purchase flour, bread, sugar (or a substitute), kasha (buckwheat porridge), jam, soap and matches. The official ration amounted to an average of 503 calories per day, falling to below 450 in April–June 1940. However, Jewish council officials and workers were awarded far more, respectively 1,665 and 1,229 calories per day. Refugees got just 807 and those without work or means received even less. Consequently, Jews had to supplement the official ration with food obtained on the black market. This was plentiful, but expensive.⁸⁶

Thousands of the unemployed jostled for work in strange, new occupations, such as the manufacture and distribution of armbands, translating German documents, queuing for ration cards or food parcels on behalf of someone else. They joined the already overcrowded trades in which Jews were permitted to serve other Jews, notably tailoring, shoemaking, hairdressing and photography. The majority became hawkers on the street.⁸⁷

Relief organizations began to get a grip on the effects of unemployment and the influx of refugees. But welfare work exposed as much as it alleviated social divisions. Bodies funded by the AJJDC enjoyed a measure of autonomy and competed with each other for influence as well as posing as rivals to the Jewish council. Leadership positions were often taken by members of the pre-war intelligentsia, such as teachers, writers and actors, or left-wing activists. The Bund, guided by men like the veteran activist Bernard Goldstein, mounted its own relief effort and marshalled the employees in workshops and factories. Observing the proliferation of bodies, each with its own constituency, and the character of the men who managed them, Chaim Kaplan lamented, ‘The Jew lacks community feeling and a sense of collective responsibility.’ Rather than help the neediest first, they aided members of their own parties, unions, cultural circles, or families. Corruption was widespread. Refugees who arrived from the Wartheland with no means or connections were quite literally lost; unless they were fortunate enough to be housed and fed in a hostel they ended up on the streets, obtaining money for food by selling their possessions and, once these were gone, by begging.⁸⁸

Few were as lucky as Mary Berg, who arrived in Warsaw at the end of 1939 with her family, money, and her mother’s US passport. They were able to move into a two-room apartment and did not have to wear the Jewish armband. Mary’s mother stuck one of her visiting cards on the door of their apartment to indicate that they were also immune to calls for forced labour. For the moment, they pinned their hopes on being able to emigrate.⁸⁹

Cultural life sprang back into existence and schooling resumed, albeit covertly. There were approximately 48,000 children of school age in the Jewish population. Teachers from every one of the pre-war educational streams stealthily established gymnasia or religious schools. The kitchens set up to feed orphans and children of the poor also ran classes. Eventually, about 20 per cent of children received schooling. This resurgence was testimony to the resilience and optimism of the population. Yitzhak Zuckerman returned to Warsaw from the Russian sector in April 1940 to begin reorganizing Zionist youth. He turned an apartment into a social and educational centre that simultaneously dispensed free meals to young comrades displaced from other towns. Years later he explained that ‘The idea was “iberlebn” [Yiddish: survival] – we’ll get through this. We tried to solve the problems of reinforcing the spirit and education of the young, and so we cared about schools.’ Shimon Huberband, now in Warsaw, observed the defiant attitude of religious Jews. Although the festival of Purim fell in the midst of Polish incursions into the Jewish neighbourhoods, Jews were not deterred from raucous celebrations. Every courtyard rang with recitations from the Book of Esther, during which Jews relished the downfall of their tormentors in a previous age. The following month Huberband noted that Passover was celebrated almost universally. Czerniaków was able to win permission for the manufacture of matzoh, unleavened bread, and there was no shortage of this or other foods. Kaplan recorded defiantly that ‘The synagogues are closed but in every courtyard there is a holiday service, and cantors sing the prayers and hymns in their sweet voices. As to holiday provisions, without question even the poorest Jew does not lack for matzoh.’⁹⁰

At the start of 1940, realizing that the Jews were not going anywhere for the time being, the Sipo-SD began to exploit their economic potential as a source of labour. The security police set up a string of camps at sites were workers were needed and started filling them with able-bodied Jewish men from the towns and cities. To Kaplan the system of forced labour was received as a ‘catastrophe’. It spelled nothing less than ‘complete annihilation’.⁹¹

Women continued to be the most vulnerable to abuse through forced labour. Class-, race- and gender-hatred merged in these acts. Ringelblum recorded that the Germans targeted ‘women in fur coats. They’re ordered to wash the pavements with their panties, then put them on again, wet.’ Mary Berg remarked that women dared not go onto the streets for fear of being seized. ‘Better-dressed Jewish women have been forced to scrub the Nazis’ headquarters. They are ordered to remove their underclothes and use them as rags for the floors and windows. It goes without saying that often the tormentors use these occasions to have some fun of their own.’ Doctrines of racial purity actually served to mask the frequent occurrence of rape. According to Ringelblum, women were abducted from cafes ‘no one knows where to; it is said that about one hundred came back a few days later, some of them infected’. A month later he wrote that ‘At Tlomacki Place three lords and masters ravished some women; screams resounded through the house. The Gestapo are concerned over the racial degradation … but are afraid to report it.’ Even if German men did not assault Jewish women directly they had other ways to abuse them. Berg recalled that German police entered a building to conduct a search for valuables and forced men and women to strip ‘hoping to find concealed diamonds’. ‘The women were kept naked for more than two hours while the Nazis put their revolvers to their breasts and private parts and threatened to shoot them all if they did not disgorge dollars or diamonds.’ Ringelblum heard of a German soldier who went from house to house ‘forcing men to have sexual relations with women in his presence’. Eventually he was arrested.⁹²

The permissive atmosphere induced unscrupulous and criminal elements in the Polish population to grab what they could. Berg recorded that ‘Polish hooligans’ led Germans to the homes of well-off Jews and joined in the ‘looting in broad daylight’. Appeals by Jews in the name of patriotism were useless. German propaganda drove the communities further apart and Jews were increasingly perceived as outside the Polish nation. For several days in late March 1940, gangs of Polish ruffians pillaged Jewish shops and assaulted Jews on the streets. Kaplan saw German influence behind the outbreak: ‘The Jewish quarter has been abandoned to toughs and killers who were organised for this purpose by some invisible hand.’ Military patrols stood idle while German army newsreel-teams filmed the riots. In several quarters the Bund mobilized ‘slaughterhouse workers, transport workers, party members’ in self-defence. Bernard Goldstein crowed that ‘When pogromists appeared in these sections the following morning, they were surprised to find our comrades waiting for them. A bloody battle broke out immediately.’ Poles clashed with Jews bearing iron pipes and brass knuckles, leading to casualties on both sides. Emanuel Ringelblum condemned the Polish intelligentsia, the Church and the underground for failing to dissociate themselves from such behaviour, even when it was clearly engineered by the occupier. Such incidents scared Jews into believing that maybe a ghetto would be safer.⁹³

The Germans had not given up the idea of ghettoization. In January 1940 Ludwig Fischer, the Warsaw district governor, established a Resettlement Office and brought in experts to plan the removal of Jews from the city. They encountered endless difficulties. By now Jewish workers were performing valuable services for the occupiers. Relocating nearly 400,000 Jews to the outskirts would be hugely disruptive, while closing off inner-city areas would interrupt traffic and trade. Nevertheless, the fear of a typhus epidemic stemming from the Jewish inhabitants spurred them on. Cases began to multiply at the start of the year. As waves of undernourished refugees were jammed into poor housing with inadequate sanitation, the disease spread. On 27 March, when the epidemic reached its climax, Czerniaków was instructed to cordon off a large area encompassing the most densely populated Jewish wards. It was designated a ‘Seuchensperrgebiet’, a ‘plague-quarantine area’. Czerniaków’s arguments disputing the necessity for such a measure and the extent of the boundary were unavailing. Nor was he able to deflect the requirement that the Jewish council pay for the materials and labour that would be needed. Construction began at the start of April and went on fitfully for weeks while Czerniaków contested the demarcation of every street and house. On 10 May he wrote despondently in his journal, ‘A ghetto in spite of everything.’ Suddenly, however, the war took a dramatic turn. It seemed as though there were new prospects for removing Polish Jews, German Jews and potentially all the Jews in the German sphere of influence.⁹⁴

War and persecution in the Reich

While war overturned the lives of Jews in Poland, for the Jews in Germany initially little changed. There were still around 240,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Greater Reich, with roughly 185,000 in Germany, of whom 30,000 were in Berlin. A third of them were aged over sixty, three-quarters had no jobs, and a quarter depended on welfare from the Jewish aid agencies. Nearly 11,000 Jewish children remained in the Reich. Those of school age were crammed into a small number of educational institutions. There were just two Jewish schools in Berlin for 3,000 pupils; Cologne, Frankfurt and Hamburg each had one school. Few students stayed beyond their sixteenth birthday. Under wartime conditions the policy towards converts and non-Jews in mixed marriages created endless anomalies. According to the tenth supplement to the Reich Citizenship Law, establishing the Reichsvereinigung, even converts like Freddy Solmitz and their spouses now had to belong to the Jewish community. There were thousands of Jewish women who had husbands or sons in the German army. Conversely, there were soldiers fighting for the Reich who had a Jewish father labouring under discriminatory legislation. Yet, at the same time that Jews were being murdered in Poland by the Einsatzgruppen and army units, German Jews suffered nothing worse than a severe curfew. Ex-civil servants still got their pensions. Most Jews still lived in their own homes. Those who wanted to leave and who were fortunate enough to have somewhere to go were able to emigrate. Only Polish Jews in the Reich were subjected to arrest and imprisonment according to a decree by the chief of the Sipo-SD issued a week after the outbreak of war.⁹⁵

However, this lull did not last long. The population greeted news of the war coolly and were soon obliged to cope with rationing, price inflation and higher taxes. In addition to the inconvenience of travelling during the blackout, ordinary Germans began to notice the shortage and declining quality of public transport. There was almost no petrol for private cars, and taxis began to disappear from city streets. Everyone dreaded bombing and with Britain and France in the war there was no confidence that the conflict would be either swift or successful. In this turbid atmosphere the Jews were the object of fears and fantasies amongst the population at large. The SD office in Worms reported that ‘the population find it exceedingly unpleasant to observe that the Jews are shopping once more in all stores with their food ration cards; their comportment is marked by a striking air of security and confidence’. It did not matter that German Jews like Victor Klemperer were petrified by the thought of what lay in store for them whether Germany won or lost. While events hung in the balance Jews acted as a lightning conductor for popular emotions. Hence their fate depended not only on Nazi beliefs about the culpability of the world Jewish conspiracy against the Reich; as ordinary Germans experienced the vicissitudes of war, they projected their aspirations and anxieties onto the Jews.⁹⁶

The authorities now began to subject Jews to a succession of restrictions. They were subjected to a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. and only allowed to shop at certain times at specific retail outlets. They were ordered to hand over their radios; the delivery day was fixed for the Jewish Day of Atonement. Elderly and infirm Jews were evicted from care homes, such as the Jewish old-age home in Breslau, that the authorities coveted for other purposes. In order to free up individual apartments and houses, local authorities pressured Jews to move into Jew-houses. By the start of December, Victor Klemperer found himself limited to buying groceries in one shop and struggling to keep his home. ‘The sadistic machine simply rolls over us,’ he wrote in his diary.⁹⁷

Although an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler on 8 November 1939 led to a spasm of attacks on Jewish communities in Bavaria, paradoxically there were few outbreaks of violence connected with the war itself. Expulsion, assault and murder began at the Reich’s eastern borders. Word of these actions soon filtered back into German society, though. The SD in Bad Kissingen reported ‘animated discussion’ about news that ‘Jews, the whole lot of them, are being resettled in the territory between the San and Bug rivers around Lublin … These measures have been welcomed by members of the party and a large proportion of the Volksgenossen.’ Klemperer did not remark on the deportation of Jews from Vienna to Nisko, but the eviction of the Stettin Jews to Lublin in March 1940 shook him. It triggered another, desperate attempt to secure emigration to the United States. The SD reported that terrified Jews in the eastern parts of the Reich were moving to Berlin, Breslau and Leipzig in response to the news.⁹⁸

In April 1940, Klemperer finally lost his house. He and his wife had to move into a villa occupied by several Jewish families. Even though he was relieved to discover that it was a handsome, well-appointed building it still felt like a ‘superior concentration camp’. He was oppressed by the ‘lack of space, promiscuity, chaos’ and ‘never-ending washing-up’. Several of the residents treated him with undisguised contempt because he was a convert. Like other converts and Mischlinge, he felt caught between two worlds, neither of which wanted him. ‘No one will help us. To the Jews I am an apostate …’⁹⁹

All over Germany, Jews were disappearing. The mayor of Bad Nauheim boasted, ‘A majority of Jews have sold their property … at the insistence of the Gestapo. Some have since left or found shelter in the Jewish Home for Men and Women. Recently, the number of Jews present in the town has declined substantially as Jews have moved away. Provision of food for the Jews is likewise handled by the Gestapo so that the Jewish element is no longer a notable presence in public transport and in economic life. As a result of the new curfew laws, they are forced to remain more or less out of sight in the city.’ The mayor of Schwandorf in eastern Bavaria reported that ‘there are only three Jewish hags left here. They too will soon disappear.’ The erasure of full Jews exposed Mischlinge to greater scrutiny. A showdown on this policy was looming in any case, partly because men who had fought in the army demanded the right to be able to marry whomsoever they chose. Consequently, in April 1940 the Nazi Party began to clamour for tighter controls on mixed-race Jews of the first degree. By the end of the year, most service men with a Jewish parent had been dismissed, notwithstanding their war record.¹⁰⁰

Yet Jewish emigration continued. That this should be so was not self-evident to some in the SD and Gestapo. The SD office in Leipzig checked with headquarters whether the legal, orderly departure of Jews should still be promoted. Indeed, it remained official policy and the Emigration Consulting Office in Cologne reported brisk business as long as it was possible for Reich Jews to leave via Italy or Holland. The problem was not getting out, it was finding somewhere to go to. William Shirer heard that 248,000 Jews were on the waiting lists to enter the United States. Instead, Jews aimed for Shanghai or used the corrupt services of diplomats representing Honduras and Haiti. In Hamburg, Max Plaut, head of the local branch of the Reichsvereinigung, worked with the Gestapo officer responsible for Jewish affairs in the city to secure the legal and illegal departure of hundreds of Jews. Adolf Eichmann formed a working relationship with Berthold Storfer, who had put his business acumen at the disposal of the Viennese Jewish community after March 1938 and worked on numerous emigration projects. Two years later, Eichmann placed him in charge of organizing and financing illegal transports of Jews to Palestine. While the mainstream Zionist organizations operating clandestine emigration routes from neutral countries (notably Romania) still preferred to take only trained and ideologically motivated young pioneers, Storfer sent anyone who could pay. There was no love lost between them. Despite this discord and the British blockade, around 10,000 Jews reached Palestine between 1939 and 1940 in a variety of dubious craft. About 37,000 Jews reached the USA legally and 10,000 found refuge in other countries. Some 20,000, though, made it no further than Portugal or French North Africa where they were stuck awaiting the correct papers or funds to move on.¹⁰¹

Compulsory euthanasia

German Jews who were trapped in the Reich may have lived in miserable conditions, but apart from the relatively small numbers in the concentration camps they were not in immediate danger of death. By contrast, the sense of urgency and ruthlessness engendered by the war had lethal consequences for certain members of the German racial community. For several years the regime had been considering the introduction of compulsory euthanasia; Hitler had discussed the matter several times with medical advisers. Eliminating those with severe physical and mental disabilities was a potential cost-saving measure, would free up space that could be converted to the care of wounded soldiers, and in the long term could contribute to the creation of a biologically pure, healthy Volk. Regardless of any alleged material benefits that might accrue from getting rid of those considered a ‘burden’ on the state, war created the circumstances for implementing an ideologically driven policy that was close to the core of Nazi beliefs.¹⁰²

In early 1939, Hitler’s private office, the Führer Chancellery, received a petition from a family begging for permission to terminate the life of a cruelly deformed child. The plea prompted the reactivation of a secret committee founded late in 1936 or early in 1937 to investigate the viability of euthanasia as a whole. As usual in the Third Reich there was an extended period of planning, during which rival factions jockeyed for control of a programme that personally interested the Führer. Initially, the project operated out of Hitler’s Chancellery. It had no legal basis and was run covertly under the auspices of Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s office. Viktor Brack, who was the liaison between the Führer Chancellery and the Health Ministry, developed the organization and recruited the necessary personnel. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, muscled his way into the business and effectively displaced Leonardo Conti, who was head of the Nazi medical association and, more pertinently, the Reich Health Ministry. The team then drew on the expertise of the committee responsible for overseeing the compulsory sterilization of those deemed to have severe hereditary mental or physical illnesses. On 18 August 1939, the committee required the compulsory registration of severely malformed infants, but the scheme quickly evolved beyond the ‘mercy killing’ of children. Within a few weeks of the invasion of Poland, special task forces, led by SS officers Herbert Lange and Kurt Eimann, massacred nearly 13,000 inmates of clinics and asylums in the areas annexed to East Prussia. In addition to mass murder by shooting, Lange used mobile gas chambers. These were removal vans converted so that bottled carbon monoxide could be piped into the cargo compartment inside which forty to fifty souls had been packed. The murders in Poland had a blowback effect in the Reich; by October, the compulsory euthanasia programme had been extended to adults and was too large to run from the Chancellery. It obtained premises in a villa that had been expropriated from its Jewish owner, overlooking the leafy Tiergarten. The address provided the code name for the now much-expanded operation: T-4. At around this time, Bouhler obtained from Hitler a signed authorization to give some legal cover to the operatives. It was a rare example of Hitler recording his explicit sanction for an otherwise illegal measure and gives a key insight into how his personal system of government worked, as well as how delegated authority enabled subordinates to establish elaborate undertakings without referring back to the Führer or involving him at any level of detail. No less important, the authorization was backdated to 1 September 1939, tying the murderous operation to the outbreak of war and thereby exemplifying the symbiosis between war and ruthless domestic policies that prevailed in Nazi minds.¹⁰³

Using the pretext of economic necessity in time of war and operating under the cloak of a charitable foundation, the central office at Tiergarten 4 required asylums and sanatoria to register all adults incapable of work and report on their condition. Doctors chosen for their political reliability then processed the forms en masse, denoting those ‘unworthy of life’. Meanwhile, Bouhler’s men identified several clinics that could be adapted as killing centres and set up a transport company to ship the selected inmates to these locations for what was dubbed ‘special treatment’. In addition to the specially recruited doctors and nurses, plus the stokers who manned the crematoria, the SD provided staff to deal with security matters. Initially, the disabled were murdered using injections of poison; in early 1940 the clinics were equipped with gas chambers. Between October 1939 and August 1941, over 70,000 men, women and children deemed ‘unworthy of life’ by the physicians and psychiatrists who were supposed to be caring for them were driven in grey buses (with blacked-out windows) to the clinics. On arrival they were undressed and led into airtight gas chambers that appeared to be innocuous shower rooms; bottled carbon monoxide was piped through false shower-heads until they were asphyxiated. The corpses were incinerated in crematoria on site, but not before gold teeth had been removed. This dental gold provided a handy bonus to the staff who were, in any case, paid above average wages for their secret work.¹⁰⁴

The clandestine nature of the operation was impossible to sustain. People living in the vicinity of the clinics could not fail to notice the volume of inbound traffic, as compared with the absence of departures. Some noted a correlation between the arrival of the grey buses and the appearance not long afterwards of smoke from the clinic chimneys. The odour of burning flesh was itself a giveaway. Relatives and legal guardians began to receive death certificates giving unlikely reasons for the demise of loved ones or persons under their protection. The sheer number of these deaths was a cause for concern. Since many asylums from which inmates were taken were run by religious foundations, church leaders were drawn into the circle of concern. Yet, even after it was clear that the disabled were being killed, there were few public protests. In August 1940, the Protestant Bishop Theophile Wurm of Württemburg addressed a letter to Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior, expressing his reservations about what was happening. His anxiety was echoed by Cardinal Adolf Bertram, leader of the Fulda conference of bishops, who contacted Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. A few weeks later Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich expressed his objections to Franz Gürtner, the minister of justice. These private communications triggered apprehension within the regime, but nothing more. Officials examined the possibility of legislation to validate the programme, although no steps were actually taken and the killing went on for another year regardless of the flimsy legal basis on which it rested. It was finally stopped on Hitler’s orders after Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, delivered a well-trailed sermon on 3 August 1941, roundly condemning the taking of life on such grounds. However, the T-4 action was not suspended primarily because of church protests. The invasion of Russia had temporarily stalled, casualties were high and morale on the home front was dented by shortages as well as increased bombing by the Royal Air Force. These considerations, rather than the moral indignation of church leaders, induced Hitler to call off the murder of the severely disabled.¹⁰⁵

By this stage, compulsory euthanasia was an open secret in Germany and news of it had reached the outside world. On 21 September 1940, William Shirer recorded that an informant, designated as ‘X’ had ‘told me a weird story. He says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them “mercy deaths”.’ The following month, Paul Dutko, the United States vice-consul in Leipzig, sent the State Department a long dispatch headed ‘Mysterious Deaths of Mental Patients from Leipzig Consular District and the Connections with the SS’. According to Dutko, people in the city were ‘shocked beyond description’ by rumours that people were taken to a clinic at Grafeneck that was run by the SS and done to death. Opinion held that the SS was out of control. By November 1940, Shirer had uncovered more or less the whole sordid episode and was also able to report pressure on the regime to curtail the killings.¹⁰⁶

Although the so-called ‘euthanasia campaign’ did not centre on Jews, they were affected by it. Hundreds of Jewish inmates were taken from care homes to be killed. Even if they could show some capacity for work or economic value, for them there was no reprieve. Being Jewish was a more certain death sentence than being disabled. Max Plaut, in Hamburg, figured out what was going on because he was the guardian of someone slated for removal from an asylum, and the Reichsvereinigung did its utmost to get vulnerable Jews out of the targeted institutions. Even Victor Klemperer, stuck in a Judenhaus, got wind of T-4. On 2 November 1941 he noted in his diary how a visitor told him that Galen had ‘preached publicly against the Gestapo and the killing of the mentally infirm’.¹⁰⁷

In time, the techniques used to kill biological outcasts in the Reich would be applied to the racial enemy, the Jews. But there was no inherent or logical connection between T-4 and what came later. T-4 certainly honed techniques of mass murder and created a corps of experienced killers. Although the programme was suspended in August 1941, the use of gas vans and lethal gas chambers did not stop. Rather, the killing was transferred to the concentration camps under the designation 14f13. Just as inmates of sanatoria and asylums who were deemed unfit for work and hence ‘unworthy of life’ had been separated out and consigned to the murderers, the prisoner population was culled to remove those estimated by SS medical staff to be useless for hard labour. Nor did Brandt desist from his homicidal activities. Instead, he launched an ‘action’ to clear space in asylums that could be used to replace hospitals damaged by bombing and accommodate the increasing number of civilians injured in air raids. It is thought that around 35,000 people were murdered under this ‘wild euthanasia’ programme. Brack, too, continued in his murderous ways: he would provide personnel who had served in T-4 and equipment to kill Jews. However, the continuity of personnel and methodology is not the same as cause and effect.¹⁰⁸

Some historians, notably Robert Jay Lifton and Henry Friedlander, have seen the forced euthanasia programme as a crucial step towards the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Lifton described it as a ‘medical bridge to genocide’, while for Friedlander T-4 was ‘Nazi Germany’s first organised mass murder’ and the ‘opening act of Nazi genocide’. But the Germans crossed that line when they crossed the border into Poland on 1 September 1939, taking with them plans to target sections of the Polish population for mass execution. By the end of 1939, more Poles, including Polish Jews, had been shot to death in Poland than would die in the T-4 gas chambers over a comparable period. The Einsatzgruppen operations in Poland created the model for mass murder, not T-4. Operation Tannenberg, not compulsory euthanasia, was the bridge to genocide.¹⁰⁹

Reactions to the persecution of Polish Jews

The unease that spread through the German population when confronted by evidence of mass killing within the Reich stands in contrast to the insouciance with which most Germans greeted information about the treatment of Poles and Jews in the occupied territories. Few German servicemen in Poland exhibited qualms about the humiliation, torture and murder of Jews. Despite being deeply religious, Konrad Jarausch expressed little indignation about the torching of a synagogue in Zgierz where he was based with his battalion. ‘Last night here’, he remarked matter-of-factly in a letter to a colleague in Germany, ‘the Jewish synagogue was set on fire. Today the Jewish meeting house is in flames. In Lodz Jews and Poles have been strung up in the market places because they were putting up anti-German posters.’ He was similarly neutral about the exploitation of Jewish forced labour and the menace of sexual abuse. A few days later he wrote home, ‘It’s amazingly clean in our quarters. Jewish girls and women have to scrub the barracks and clean the windows. Many come from good families. The comrades behaved themselves. The Nuremberg race laws can perhaps serve to protect Jewish women …’ His bland commentary extended to the displacement of Jews from their homes. ‘Since the Wolhynian Germans are to arrive over winter, the Jews are being driven out in large numbers. There’s a concentration camp on the road between Lodz and Zgierz that holds almost 5,000 Jews of all ages. On the roads you can see trucks heading off. Of course all this doesn’t occur without victims.’¹¹⁰

Jarausch accepted the results of brutal political decisions almost as if they were acts of nature. However, by comparison with other officers, he was a compassionate observer. He was moved by the sight of a desecrated Jewish cemetery and commented on the clash between the SS spirit and the traditional Prussian, Christian values that he espoused. He also noted generational differences, as evidenced by attitudes towards a field service. ‘The older comrades are generally tolerant … the younger ones felt entirely different about it – they expressed intolerance toward everything – the church, the Jews.’¹¹¹

Melita Maschmann exemplified those ‘younger ones’. In late 1939 she was assigned to the Warthegau, where she worked with ethnic German farmers collecting the harvest before taking up a post as head of the Hitler Youth press office in Posen. She interpreted everything in Poland according to National Socialist ideology, so what she saw confirmed what she had been taught. When she observed Jews in the Kutno ghetto she ‘fiercely suppressed any kind of metaphysical consideration’. A group of Jewish men reminded her of ‘a flock of crows’. The fact that Jews were deprived of their livelihoods and stood around with nothing to do was translated into proof of the Jewish reluctance to engage in useful work. When she indulged the fashion for ghetto tourism and visited Lodz, she saw ‘well-dressed women’ in fur coats. Conversely, she felt a sense of connectedness with Volksdeutsche and relished her part in the mission to Germanize the east. It gave her a warm sense of belonging because ‘release from the ego and simultaneous identity of myself with something greater than myself, the nation or the national community, created an inner attachment’. Her hatred of Jews was the obverse of her love for Germans.¹¹²

Ulrich von Hassell, the retired diplomat, stood at the opposite end of the generational spectrum. To him the invasion and occupation of Poland spelled disaster. He doubted whether Germany could win the war and was perturbed by reports reaching him about the behaviour of German soldiers. In his diary he confessed to ‘the disgrace that has sullied the German name through the conduct of the war in Poland; namely, the brutal use of air power and the shocking bestialities of the SS, especially towards the Jews’. Admittedly Hassell was well connected, but his case demonstrates that if they wanted to, Germans could learn a great deal about the atrocities in Poland. ‘When people use their revolvers to shoot down a group of Jews herded into a synagogue,’ he added, ‘one is filled with shame.’ At the end of 1939, he commented grimly on the ‘shameless actions in Poland, particularly by the SS’ as well as the appalling conditions in ‘the Jewish district’. Hassell knew about the eviction of Jews from Stettin to the ‘Jewish reservation in Poland’ almost as soon as it had taken place.¹¹³

The presence in Berlin of journalists from the USA and other neutral countries ensured that information about the goings on in Poland was transmitted to western Europe and across the Atlantic. Shirer’s journal illustrates just how much was available to the curious. In mid-November 1939 he recorded that ‘Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland today decreed that the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw henceforth must be shut off from the rest of the capital by barricades and placed under sharp police control. He says the Jews are “carriers of disease and germs”.’ An American who returned from Warsaw told him the German policy was ‘simply to exterminate Polish Jews. They are being herded into eastern Poland and forced to live in unheated shacks and robbed of any opportunity of earning bread and butter. Several thousand Jews from the Reich have also been sent to eastern Poland to die.’ This was an exaggeration, but the general trend was accurate. If anything, the outrage at early German measures blunted sensitivity to what came later; just as in 1933 the volume of news and the horror it aroused provoked a response that could not be sustained – even when things worsened. And they soon did. In the new year, Shirer noted ‘The greatest organised mass migration since the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the last war is now coming to an end in Poland.’¹¹⁴

The Times and the London Jewish Chronicle carried extensive coverage of anti-Jewish measures in German-occupied Poland. On 24 October 1939, The Times reported that three million Jews were destined for Lublin, a fate that ‘would doom them to famine’. Readers learned within days about the deportations to Nisko. At the end of the year, The Times concluded that the reservation scheme ‘envisages a place for gradual extermination’. News about the establishment of ghettos and the conditions in Warsaw and Lodz was accurately transmitted to the breakfast tables of newspaper readers in the UK. In March 1941, the Jewish Chronicle carried photographs of the Warsaw ghetto.¹¹⁵

But the main channel of information to western governments was the Polish government-in-exile, which had set up shop in France. The official exile leadership was routinely fed intelligence from across the country by its underground representatives, the Delegatura. All parties and factions were represented on the exile Polish National Council, including Polish Jews. Nevertheless, the two Jewish delegates, Henryk Rosmarin and Ignacy Schwarzbart, sometimes felt that they were there just to give the British and French the impression that the Poles were inclusive. In fact, many members of the Polish exile leadership – and not just adherents of the ethno-nationalist Endek party – were anti-Jewish. Their attitude was hardened by allegations that Jews had welcomed the Soviet invasion and were collaborating with the Red regime. A key report on conditions in Poland, carried to the west by the courier Jan Karski in February 1940, fortified this impression. After a gruelling journey Karski reached Angers in France, where he told Stanislaw Kot, the interior minister in the exile government, that most Poles believed the Jews had welcomed the Soviet occupier and were now colluding in the oppression of Polish patriots. Whatever the truth was or whatever the explanation for Jewish responses, so many Poles believed the Jews had behaved treacherously that the leadership in exile considered it would be unwise to make pro-Jewish gestures. Official publications aimed at western audiences or Allied governments stressed the appalling treatment of Poles and ignored what was happening to Jews. It was not until the government-in-exile relocated to London after the fall of France that it began to issue statements specifically addressing the Jewish plight.¹¹⁶

The Poles, though, were not the only government keen to play down the extent of Jewish suffering. For reasons connected with its Middle East policy the British government, too, was reluctant to highlight the fate of Jews in eastern Europe. In May 1939 the government issued a White Paper maintaining that it had fulfilled its obligations to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. The entire population of the territory – 450,000 Jews and 1 million Arabs – would be given self-government in ten years’ time. Jewish immigration would be limited to 75,000 for the first half of that period and there were stringent limitations on the amount of land that could be purchased for future Jewish settlement. These stipulations virtually guaranteed the emergence of an Arab state with a Jewish minority. The White Paper, approved by the House of Commons on 22 May 1939, was intended to appease Arab feeling in Palestine and the independent Arab governments across the region so as to minimize the need to commit British troops for peace-keeping purposes and prevent any threat to oil supplies. However, it alienated Jewish opinion in Palestine and outraged Zionist supporters across the world. They naturally summoned the spectre of Jewish refugees in Europe as a potent argument for increased immigration.¹¹⁷

The British government was not merely fighting a propaganda war: it used diplomatic tools and military assets to block the flow of Jews to the putative national home. The Foreign Office tracked the progress of refugees who were able to leave the Reich as they passed through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania to ports where Zionist organizations had secured boats to transport them onward to Palestine, and leaned heavily on national governments to obstruct their passage. Between October 1939 and March 1940 Jewish immigration to Palestine was suspended entirely on the grounds that illegal entrants had effectively filled the quota. From April to September 1940, the Palestine administration distributed 9,060 immigration certificates, of which only half were actually used since it was almost impossible to get them to those in greatest need. Thanks to British rather than Nazi policy, legal emigration to Palestine offered an infinitesimally small segment of the Jewish population subjected to German persecution a chance of escape.¹¹⁸

Whitehall was also apprehensive about pressure to allow Jewish refugees to enter the United Kingdom. On 25 September 1939, the Cabinet Committee on Refugees resolved that the defeat of Germany took priority over succour for fugitives from Nazi mistreatment. Only special cases would be allowed into the country; the mass of Jews fleeing Nazi rule were excluded. To actually reduce the numbers that had piled up in the UK during the last months of peace the government decided to offer funds to refugees for the purposes of on-migration. It was a helpful, if not a hospitable, gesture. As a separate measure, tribunals assessed the cases of over 74,000 refugees and foreign nationals who were now ‘enemy aliens’ to determine whether they had to be interned as a threat to security in the event of a national emergency. Of these, 64,244 mainly German and Austrian Jews were exempted from any restrictions. Nevertheless, wartime stringency did not prevent refugee aid organizations pleading for government assistance and a relaxation on immigration controls.¹¹⁹

The British government was sensitive to any publicity or official statements likely to increase public sympathy for Jews. On the eve of the war the Ministry of Information advised the BBC that ‘no special propaganda addressed to Jews is necessary outside Palestine’. For the purposes of reporting to UK audiences and European service listeners, Jews were to be treated as citizens of the countries in which they lived. As part of the propaganda war against the Third Reich, in October 1939 the government issued a White Paper on the concentration camps that touched briefly on the vicious treatment of Jewish inmates. This collation of reports by consular officials and released prisoners charted the brutality of the camps in the late 1930s, but skirted any discussion of the anti-Jewish legislation that led to Jews, specifically, ending up in them. The unwillingness to pay special attention to the widening persecution of Jewish populations was underpinned by a deep-seated scepticism in Whitehall about the nature and truth of such reports. Although the Foreign Office was well supplied with information, senior officials tended to discount much of what landed on their desks. In April 1940, one civil servant minuted ‘Jewish sources are always doubtful’. Rex Leeper, head of the Political Intelligence Department (later the director of the Political Warfare Executive), commented a few months later that ‘as a general rule Jews are inclined to magnify their persecutions’.¹²⁰

Similar prejudices coloured the perception of officials in the US State Department. Until the outbreak of war they had been at loggerheads with the White House over its marginally more generous policy towards Jews seeking asylum in America. However, with the coming of hostilities Roosevelt and the State Department concurred that national security was now the paramount concern. The president ordered the FBI to enhance its monitoring of refugees and immigrants in order to guard against an influx of spies. In April 1940, Roosevelt approved the transfer of responsibility for immigration and naturalization to the Justice Department. Visa controls were tightened and consular officials were instructed to assess whether admission of an aspiring immigrant ‘would or might be contrary to the public safety’. The risk of racial persecution was not in itself a sufficient reason to be granted entry to America. Predictably, the number of Jews granted permits and arriving in the United States fell precipitously. With a presidential election looming in November 1940, Roosevelt was even less inclined to challenge isolationists and advocates of immigration restriction.¹²¹

American Jews, like Jews in Britain, did not lack for information about their immiserated co-religionists in Germany and Poland. However, the nature and treatment of the news shifted perceptibly. The New York Times transferred its European bureau to London and withdrew most of its correspondents from the war-torn continent. Instead, it relied on the wire services, notably AP’s man Louis Lochner and UP’s Frederich Oeschsner, who remained in Berlin. Stories from occupied Poland about the Jews rarely, if ever, made the front page in 1939–40. To papers whose editorial line and political attachments meant that they favoured isolation, anything that smacked of warmongering was frowned upon. Reports of Nazi atrocities were reminiscent of the atrocity propaganda foisted on the US by the Allies during the First World War, and easily dismissed as sabre-rattling. Since much of the news now came from wire services and drew on unofficial sources, it lacked the authority of coverage by ‘our own correspondent’. Ultimately, the content came from a far-away place and frequently seemed quite unbelievable.¹²²

The security crisis engendered by the war made Jews in the Nazi domain ever more vulnerable, but it simultaneously weakened the influence of Jews in the democracies. At just the moment the Nazis believed they were girding their loins to fight the hydra of ‘international Jewry’, Jews around the world were never more fragmented, powerless and bemused. The councils of British Jews were divided between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox, the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists. It was hard to find an agreed policy to deal with the plight of Jews in Germany and Poland while there were, anyway, pressing demands closer to home. The cost of maintaining tens of thousands of refugees week after week was staggering. One of the first tasks that the British Jewish leadership set itself was persuading the government to share some of this burden. By 1940, the taxpayer was contributing half of the costs of care for refugees. But this generosity (soon to rise to 100 per cent) made it hard for British Jews to contest other aspects of government policy.¹²³

American Jews were even more unprepared for the scale of the challenge. They were unused to confronting international issues of such complexity and found it hard to agree a common approach. Their main response was philanthropic: the AJJDC channelled $8.5 million to Europe in 1939, although only a sixth of this was allotted to the hard-pressed Jews of Poland. Nearly half was committed to supporting Jewish refugees in various countries. The international Jewish relief agencies met in Paris a few days before the war erupted but spent most of the meeting squabbling over how or whether to maintain a neutral stance towards Germany.¹²⁴

The Jewish population of Palestine was fixated by its own travails, too. The Zionist leadership considered its first duty was to contest the White Paper and to maintain levels of immigration, illegally if need be. The events in Europe seemed distant, while communication with Jews in Poland became increasingly strained. To many it seemed that the main problem there was one of starvation, to which the answer was food parcels. It was regarded as a temporary affliction and less significant than the long-term fate of the Yishuv. Under the guidance of David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, the quasi-government of Jewish Palestine, the Hebrew press focused on immigration, diplomatic issues, and the future. The day-to-day plight of Jews in Poland and the Reich receded into the distance.¹²⁵