Bloodlands (26 page)

Polishness itself was to disappear from these lands, to be replaced by “Germandom.” As Hitler had written, Germany “must seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its people will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own national comrades.” In early October 1939, Hitler conferred a new responsibility upon Heinrich Himmler. Already the leader of the SS and the chief of the German police forces, Himmler now became the “Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom,” a kind of minister for racial affairs. In the regions that Germany annexed from Poland, Himmler was to remove the native population and replace it with Germans.
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Although Himmler embraced the project with enthusiasm, it was a difficult assignment. These were Polish territories. There had not been a large German minority in independent Poland. When the Soviets said that they were entering eastern Poland to defend Ukrainians and Belarusians, this had at least a demographic plausibility: there were about six million such people in Poland. There were, by contrast, fewer than a million Germans. In Germany’s newly annexed territories, Poles outnumbered Germans by about fifteen to one.
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By now Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had mastered the German press, so Germans (and those who believed their propaganda) had the impression that there were massive numbers of Germans in western Poland, and that they had been subject to horrible repressions. The reality was quite different. It was not just that the nine million or so Poles massively outnumbered the Germans in the new districts of the Reich. Hitler had just added significantly more
Jews
(at least 600,000) to his Reich than he had added Germans, and for that matter nearly tripled the population of Jews in Germany (from about 330,000 to nearly a million). If the General Government (with its 1,560,000 Jews) was included, he had added well over two million Jews to Berlin’s dominions. There were more Jews in the city of Łódź (233,000), which was added to Germany,
than in Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. There were more Jews in Warsaw, now in the General Government, than there had been in all of Germany. Hitler had added more Poles to the Reich in this annexation than he had added Germans in this and all previous annexations, including Austria and the border regions of Czechoslovakia. Taking into account the General Government and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia annexed from dissembled Czechoslovakia, Hitler had added about twenty million Poles, six million Czechs, and two million Jews to his empire. There were now more Slavs in Germany than in any other European state, except the Soviet Union. On a crusade for racial purity, Germany had become by the end of 1939 Europe’s second-largest multinational state. The largest, of course, was the Soviet Union.
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Arthur Greiser, placed in charge of the largest of Germany’s new regions, known as the Reichsgau Wartheland, was particularly receptive to the idea of “strengthening Germandom.” His province extended west to east from the major Polish city Poznań to the major Polish city Łódź. It was home to about four million Poles, 366,000 Jews, and 327,000 Germans. Himmler proposed to deport one million people by February 1940, including all of the Jews and several hundred thousand Poles. Greiser began the project of “strengthening Germandom” by emptying three psychiatric hospitals and having the patients shot. Patients from a fourth psychiatric hospital, at Owińska, met a different fate. They were taken to the local Gestapo headquarters in October and November 1939 and gassed by carbon monoxide released from canisters. This was the first German mass murder by this method. Some 7,700 Polish citizens found in mental institutions were murdered, beginning a policy of “euthanasia” that would soon be followed within the boundaries of prewar Germany as well. Over the course of the next two years, more than seventy thousand German citizens would be gassed as “life unfit for life.” Strengthening Germandom had an internal and an external dimension; aggressive war abroad allowed for the murder of German citizens. So it began and so it would continue.
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The goal of removing the Jews from Germany clashed with another ideological priority, that of resettling Germans from the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union had extended its borders west by taking eastern Poland, Hitler had to be concerned about the Germans (formerly Polish citizens) who then fell under Soviet rule. Hitler arranged for these people to be sent to Germany. They would live in the Wartheland, on the homesteads vacated by deported Poles. But this
meant that Polish farmers, rather than Jews, had to be deported in the first instance, to make room for these incoming Germans. But even if Jews were allowed, for the time being, to remain in their homes, they faced enormous suffering and humiliation. In Kozienice, Orthodox Jews were forced to dance next to a pile of burning books and chant that “the war is our fault.” In Łowicz on 7 November 1939, the entire male Jewish population was forced to march to the prison, to be ransomed by the Jewish community.
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In the first deportation from the Wartheland to the General Government, carried out from 1-17 December 1939, the vast majority of the 87,883 people expelled were Poles. The police chose in the first instance Poles who “represent an immediate danger to German nationhood.” In a second deportation, carried out between 10 February and 15 March 1940, another 40,128 people were sent away, again most of them Poles. The journey was rather short. In normal times, the journey from Poznań, the capital city of the Wartheland, to Warsaw, the largest city of the General Government, would take a few hours. Nevertheless, thousands of people froze to death on the trains, which were often left idle on side tracks for days. Commented Himmler: “It’s just the climate there.” The weather in Poland, needless to say, was essentially the same as the weather in Germany.
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The winter of 1939-1940 in Poland and Germany was unusually cold. The winter in Ukraine, Russia, and northern Kazakhstan was even colder. As the days shortened in the Soviet special settlements, thousands of Polish citizens fell ill and died. In the three camps in Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine where the Soviets held the Polish prisoners of war, the men followed their own political and religious calendar. In Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk, people found ways to commemorate the 11th of November, Polish independence day. In all three camps, the men planned to celebrate Christmas Day. These prisoners were generally Roman Catholics, with a considerable admixture of Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Greek Catholics. They found themselves in desecrated Orthodox monastic complexes, praying or taking communion in quiet corners of crumbling cathedrals.
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The prisoners saw the signs of what had happened to the Orthodox monks and the nuns during the Bolshevik Revolution: skeletons in shallow graves, outlines of human bodies traced in bullets against the walls. One prisoner at
Starobilsk could not help but notice the clouds of black ravens that never seemed to leave the monastery. Nevertheless, prayer seemed to bring hope, and the people of various faiths worshipped together—until 24 December 1939, when the priests, pastors, and rabbis were taken away, from all three camps, never to be seen again.
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The three camps were a sort of laboratory for observing the behavior of the Polish educated classes. Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk became Polish in appearance. The prisoners had no other clothes but their army uniforms, with white eagles on their caps. Needless to say, no one wore that particular emblem in public in the former eastern Poland, where the public space was now graced by the hammer, sickle, and red star. Even as Polish universities were closed on the German side or made Ukrainian and Russian on the Soviet, camp inmates organized lectures led by the prominent Polish scientists and humanists who were among the reserve officers. Officers organized modest credit unions, so that poorer officers could borrow from richer. They declaimed by heart the poetry that they had learned at school. Some of them could recite from memory the massively long novels from the period of Polish realism. Of course, the prisoners also disagreed, fought, and stole. And a few people—as it turned out, a very few—agreed to cooperate with the Soviets. The officers disagreed about how to comport themselves during the long nighttime interrogations. Yet the spirit of national solidarity was palpable, perhaps to the Soviets as well.
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The men were nevertheless lonely. They could write to their families, but could not discuss their situation. Knowing that the NKVD read everything they wrote, they had to be discreet. One prisoner at Kozelsk, Dobiesław Jakubowicz, entrusted to his diary the letters he wished to write to his wife, his dreams of watching her dress, and of playing with their daughter. The prisoners had to give a sanatorium as their return address, which led to much painful confusion.
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The prisoners befriended the dogs who served as sentries, and the dogs from nearby towns. Dogs would visit the camps, entering through the gate past the guards or through holes in or under the barbed-wire fences too small for a man. One of the reserve officers at Starobilsk was Maksymilian Łabędź, the most famous veterinarian in Warsaw. An older gentleman, he had barely survived the transport. He looked after the dogs, and occasionally even performed surgeries. His special pet was a mutt that the officers called Linek, which was short for Stalinek—“Little Stalin” in Polish. The favorite among the dogs that visited was
called Foch, after the French general who was supreme commander of the allied armies that defeated Germany in 1918. This was a time, in late 1939 and early 1940, when a Polish government in exile had established itself in Paris, and when Poles generally hoped that France could defeat Germany and rescue Poland. They attached their own hopes for contact with the outside world to the little dog Foch, who seemed to have a home in town. They would tuck notes under his collar, hoping for a response. One day, in March 1940, they got one: “People say that soon you’ll be released from Starobilsk. People say that you’ll go home. We don’t know if that’s true.”
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It was not true. That month in Moscow, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria had come to a conclusion, perhaps inspired by Stalin. Beria made clear in writing that he wanted the Polish prisoners of war dead. In a proposal to the politburo, and thus really to Stalin, Beria wrote on 5 March 1940 that each of the Polish prisoners was “just waiting to be released in order to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.” He claimed that counterrevolutionary organizations in the new Soviet territories were led by former officers. Unlike the claims about the “Polish Military Organization” a couple of years before, this was no fantasy. The Soviet Union had occupied and annexed half of Poland, and some Poles were bound to resist. Perhaps twenty-five thousand of them took part in some kind of resistance organization in 1940. True, these organizations were quickly penetrated by the NKVD, and most of these people arrested: but the opposition was real and demonstrable. Beria used the reality of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners—“to apply to them the supreme punishment: shooting.”
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Stalin approved Beria’s recommendation, and the mechanisms of the Great Terror began again. Beria established a special troika to deal rapidly with the files of all of the Polish prisoners of war. It was empowered to disregard the recommendations of the previous interrogators, and to issue verdicts without any contact with the prisoners themselves. It seems that Beria established a quota for the killings, as had been done in 1937 and 1938: all of the prisoners at the three camps, plus six thousand people held in prisons in western Belarus and western Ukraine (three thousand in each), plus especially dangerous elements among noncommissioned officers who were not in captivity. After a quick examination of the files, ninety-seven percent of the Poles in the three camps,
about 14,587 people, were sentenced to death. The exceptions were a few Soviet agents, people of ethnic German or Latvian background, and people with foreign protection. The six thousand from the prisons were also condemned to death, along with 1,305 other people who were arrested in April.
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