Bloodlands (25 page)

West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, where Germany ruled, methods were even less subtle. Now that the Wehrmacht had defeated a foreign army, the methods of the SS could be tried against an alien population.

The tool of persecution, the Einsatzgruppe, was the creation of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich. The Einsatzgruppen were special task forces led by Security Police and including other policemen, whose apparent mission was to pacify the rear areas after military expansion. As of 1939 they were subordinate to Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office, which united the Security Police (a state institution) with the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (the intelligence service of the SS, a Nazi party institution). Einsatzgruppen had been deployed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but met little resistance in these countries and had no special mission to kill selected groups. It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as “ideological soldiers” by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.) In Operation Tannenberg, Heydrich wanted the Einsatzgruppen to render “the upper levels of society” harmless by murdering sixty-one thousand Polish citizens. As Hitler put it, “only a nation whose upper levels are destroyed can be pushed into the ranks of slavery.” The ultimate goal of this decapitation project was to “destroy Poland” as a functioning society. By killing the most accomplished Poles, the Einsatzgruppen were to make Poland resemble the German racist fantasy of the country, and leave the society incapable of resisting German rule.
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The Einsatzgruppen approached their task with murderous energy, but lacked the experience and thus the skills of the NKVD. They killed civilians, to
be sure, often under the cover of retaliatory operations against supposed partisans. In Bydgoszcz the Einsatzgruppen killed about nine hundred Poles. In Katowice they killed another 750 in a courtyard, many of them women and girls. All in all, the Einsatzgruppen probably killed about fifty thousand Polish citizens in actions that had nothing to do with combat. But these were not, it seems, the first fifty thousand on their list of sixty-one thousand. They were very often groups selected on the spur of the moment. Unlike the NKVD, the Einsatzgruppen did not follow protocols carefully, and in Poland they did not keep careful records of the people they killed.
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The Einsatzgruppen were more successful in missions against Jews, which required much less discrimination. One Einsatzgruppe was tasked with terrorizing Jews so that they would flee east from the German occupation zone to the Soviet side. As much of this as possible was to be accomplished in September 1939, while military operations were still taking place. So in Będzin, for example, this Einsatzgruppe burned down the synagogue with flamethrowers, killing about five hundred Jews in two days. Einsatzkommandos (smaller detachments) fulfilled similar missions. In the city of Chełm one of them was tasked to rob wealthy Jews. The Germans carried out strip-searches of women who looked Jewish on the street, and cavity searches in private. They broke fingers to get at wedding rings. In Przemyśl between the sixteenth and the nineteenth of September Einsatzkommandos shot at least five hundred Jews. As a result of such actions, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to the Soviet occupation zone. In the vicinity of the city of Lublin more than twenty thousand Jews were simply expelled.
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After the conquest of Poland was complete, the Germans and their Soviet allies met once again to reassess their relations. On 28 September 1939, the day Warsaw fell to the Germans, the allies signed their treaty on borders and friendship, which changed the zones of influence somewhat. It assigned Warsaw to the Germans and Lithuania to the Soviets. (It is this border that appears on the maps as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop line.”) It also obliged the two sides to suppress any Polish resistance to the regime of the other. On 4 October Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a further protocol, defining their new common border. Poland had ceased to exist.

A few days later Germany formally annexed some of the territories in its zone, leaving the rest as a colony known as the General Government. This was
to be a dumping ground for unwanted people, Poles and Jews. Hitler thought that Jews could be held in some eastern district in a kind of “nature preserve.” The general governor, Hitler’s former lawyer Hans Frank, clarified the position of the subject population in two orders issued in late October 1939. One specified that order was to be maintained by the German police; the other, that the German police had the authority to issue a death sentence to any Pole who did anything that might appear to be against the interests of Germany or Germans. Frank believed that Poles would soon realize the “hopelessness of their national fate” and accept the leadership of the Germans.
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East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Soviets were extending their own system. Moscow enlarged its Ukrainian and Belarusian republics to the west, forcing their new populations, the residents of what had been eastern Poland, to participate in the annexation of their own homeland. When the Red Army entered Poland, it presented Soviet power as the great liberator of the national minorities from Polish rule, and the great supporter of the peasants against their masters. In eastern Poland, the population was about forty-three percent Polish, thirty-three percent Ukrainian, and eight percent each Jewish and Belarusian, with a small number of Czechs, Germans, Russians, Roma, Tatars, and others. But now everyone from every nation and every class would have to express a ritualized support of the new order. On 22 October 1939, all adults in what the Soviets called “Western Belarus” and “Western Ukraine” had to vote in elections to two assemblies, whose provisional character was revealed by their one legislative undertaking: to request that the lands of eastern Poland be incorporated by the Soviet Union. By 15 November, the formalities of annexation were complete.
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The Soviet Union was bringing its own institutions and practices to eastern Poland. Everyone now had to register for an internal passport, which meant that the state had a record of all of its new citizens. With the registration of citizens came the military draft: some 150,000 young men (Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews) soon found themselves in the Red Army. Registration also allowed for the smooth pursuit of a major Soviet social policy: deportation.
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On 4 December 1939 the Soviet politburo ordered the NKVD to arrange the expulsion of certain groups of Polish citizens deemed to pose a danger to the new order: military veterans, foresters, civil servants, policemen, and their families.
Then, on one evening in February 1940, in temperatures of about forty below zero, the NKVD gathered them all: 139,794 people taken from their homes at night at gunpoint to unequipped freight trains bound for special settlements in distant Soviet Kazakhstan or Siberia. The entire course of life was changed before people knew what had happened to them. The special settlements, part of the Gulag system, were the forced-labor zones to which the kulaks had been sent ten years before.
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Because the NKVD defined
family
very expansively, the trains were full of aged parents as well as the children of people who were thought to be dangerous. At halts on the journey east, guards would go from car to car, asking if there were any more dead children. Wiesław Adamczyk, an eleven-year-old child at the time, asked his mother if the Soviets were taking them to hell. Food and water were given very irregularly, and the cattle cars were without facilities and extremely cold. As time passed, the children learned to lick the frost from metal nails, and watched as the elderly began to freeze to death. Now the adult dead would be taken out and thrown into a hastily dug mass grave. Another boy looked out and tried to remember them, writing later that even as the dead disappeared, “in our thoughts remained their dreams and their wishes.”
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During the passage alone, some five thousand people would die; about eleven thousand more would perish by the following summer. One little Polish girl in a Siberian school described what happened to her family: “My brother got sick and in a week died from hunger. We buried him in a hill on the Siberian steppe. Mom from worry also got sick from hunger swelled up and lay in the barrack for two months. They didn’t want to take her to the hospital until it was the end. Then they took her mama lay in the hospital for two weeks. Then her life ended. When we learned this we were seized by a great despair. We went to the burial twenty-five kilometers away we went to the hill. You could hear the sound of the Siberian forest where two of my family were left.”
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Even more than the kulaks who had preceded them, these Poles were alien and helpless in central Asia or the Russian north. They usually did not speak Russian, let alone Kazakh. The locals, especially in central Asia, saw them as one more imposition coming from the center. “The natives,” as one Pole recalled Kazakhstan, “spoke little Russian and greatly resented the whole arrangement and the new mouths to feed; and would at first sell us nothing, nor help in any way.” Poles could not have known that a third of the population of Kazakhstan
had starved to death only a decade before. One Polish father of four was murdered for his boots on a collective farm. Another father died of starvation in Siberia. As his son remembered, “He swelled up. They wrapped him in a sheet and threw him in the ground.” A third father died of typhus in Vologda, the north Russian city of death. His son, age twelve, had already learned a kind of philosophy: “A man is born once and dies only once. And so it happened.”
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Deported Polish citizens had probably never heard the Russian word
kulak
before, but now they were discovering its history. In one Siberian settlement Poles found the skeletons of kulaks deported in the 1930s. In another, a sixteen-year-old Pole realized that the foreman at his work camp was a kulak. “He told me frankly,” the boy remembered, “what was in his heart”: faith in God. Because Poles were thought to be Roman Catholics and thus Christian believers, their presence elicited such confessions of faith from Ukrainians and Russians. But even in the distant east the Soviet authorities reacted with great hostility to any sign of Polishness. A Polish boy who came to town to sell his clothes for food met a policeman who struck the cap from his head. The cap had a white eagle, the symbol of the Polish state. The policemen would not let the boy pick it up from the ground. As Soviet journalists kept writing and teachers kept saying, Poland had fallen and would never rise again.
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With calculation, classification, and practiced violence, the Soviets could force Poles into a system that already existed. After a few weeks of chaos, they had extended their state westward, and dispensed with the most dangerous of possible opponents. In the western half of Poland, west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans could take no such approach. Hitler had enlarged his Reich very recently, into Austria and Czechoslovakia, but never into territories populated by quite so many non-Germans. Unlike the Soviets, the Nazis could not even claim to be bringing justice and equality to oppressed peoples or classes. Everyone knew that Nazi Germany was for the Germans, and the Germans did not bother to pretend otherwise.

The premise of National Socialism was that Germans were a superior race, a presumption that, when confronted by the evidence of Polish civilization, the Nazis had to prove, at least to themselves. In the ancient Polish city of Cracow, the entire professoriate of the renowned university was sent to concentration
camps. The statue of Adam Mickiewicz, the great romantic poet, was pulled down from its pedestal on the Market Square, which was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Such actions were symbolic as well as practical. The university at Cracow was older than any university in Germany. Mickiewicz had been respected by the Europeans of his day as much as Goethe. The existence of such an institution and such a history, like the presence of the Polish educated classes as such, was a barrier to German plans, but also a problem for Nazi ideology.
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