"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (122 page)

A peculiarity in this escalation of the intensity of special law must be noted in the case of the General Government. The specific purpose of the General Government as an object of economic exploitation and a labor pool necessitated that the situation be made as orderly as possible. At least, this was the case in the area of general administration and the judicial system, if not for the terrorist actions of the organs of the Security Police and the SS, which were largely unfettered by administrative constraints. Administratively speaking, this region was largely modeled on the situation in the Altreich.

This includes the structuring of the administration after the pattern of the Reich, as well as the complete dependence upon the Reich for financing and staff
¹
and the adoption of Reich laws or the imitation of its legislative procedures and techniques. Thus, deviations from Reich law were not as far-reaching as in the Annexed Eastern Territories but were more moderate in character. One example of such borrowing from the legal system of the Reich is that the special-law provisions in the General Government—though perhaps in simplified form—were often still promulgated
in conformance with
legal procedure (decrees of the governor general), including complicated rules of publication,
²
not by means of secret guidelines, and that their scope and range of application were relatively distinct and clearly regulated. What is more, paradoxically, the war itself preserved a certain order in the General Government. Quotas and the requisition of laborers forced a kind of regulated administration at the expense of “ethnic” or ideological considerations, whereas in the Annexed Eastern Territories, which were less affected by the war, total “ethnic warfare” raged on regardless of the legal and economic consequences, its heedless mass persecutions setting a horrific example of “ethnic” discrimination policy.
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To this extent, the General Government showed far more legal clarity (in the procedural sense) than could be discovered in the absolutely totalitarian administration of the Annexed Eastern Territories. This contrast, by the way, was clearly perceived even at the time. There was constant tension and friction between the two regions (particularly between the General Government and the “model
Gau
” of Wartheland), because each side claimed to represent the only correct special-law policy for dealing with “non-Germans.”
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Where the escalation of special law in the administrative sector is concerned, therefore, the General Government must be ranked between, not after, the Altreich and the Annexed Eastern Territories.

This escalation of special law from west to east (allowing for the exception just mentioned) would be even plainer if measured against the discriminatory policies in the Occupied Soviet Territories (the Occupied Eastern Territories). Here, too, there are numerous points of departure for further studies whose outlines can only be hinted at in the present work. However, to round out the discussion of the escalation of rule by special law, and to stake out the terrain for future work, it should be noted that further studies would have to show that oppression of “non-Germans” under the Third Reich reached its zenith in the Occupied Soviet Territories (Occupied Eastern Territories. In particular, they would demonstrate that (whereas the economic and human substance of the General Government was to be largely preserved) the Occupied Eastern Territories were the object of exploitation and annihilation pure and simple, in which not even the barest allowances were to be made,
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politically,
⁶
legally, or economically, and where a senseless, unimaginative, and crude policy of violent domination was unleashed, not only against “non-Germans” (“if we can’t use them, let them perish”), but against
every
member of the population (including ethnic Germans).
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Thus, unlike the inhabitants of the Polish territories, the people of these regions were no longer permitted to subsist for the sake of preserving the labor force, but rather they were denied everything, “any sense of life,” and thus, in principle, the right to life itself.

In the Occupied Eastern Territories, the dominant ideas,
⁸
common practices (depopulation by means of epidemics,
⁹
starvation of “superfluous” population elements, etc.), and current expressions and attitudes would have been unthinkable in the other parts of the Reich even by contemporary standards.
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However, all this can only be hinted at in this study. It was here that principles of special law and discrimination, the totalitarian idea of the worthlessness of the individual, reached their high-water mark. Since the Nazi leadership’s simple-minded policy of violence rested on the assumption that there would always be an unlimited amount of new “human material” at its disposal in the East, the policy was not to secure the minimum standards needed to preserve the economy and the labor force; rather, there arose a spendthrift exploitation of existing recourses, starvation and annihilation of the work force after its labor had been exhausted.

Hence the National Socialist leadership not only planned but also put into practice a policy whose principles, it was hoped, could also be applied to the native peoples of still-to-be-conquered overseas territories,
¹¹
and whose rudiments were already in place in the occupied Polish territories.

4. The fourth and final aspect under which the problem of special law in the Nazi state must be considered concerns the division of responsibility, the question to what
degree
the traditional administrative and normative apparatus allowed itself to be employed for the purposes of the despotic regime of National Socialism.

a. The basic idea of the present work can be set forth as follows, namely, that the readiness of civil service and judiciary to be used in the implementation of what was (in all respects) a limitlessly expandable concept of special law was very great indeed. Nor did they balk at technical, economic, or bureaucratic difficulties in their oppression of and discrimination against “non-German” persons and groups. Thus, for example, the expulsion of tens of thousands of Poles from the Annexed Eastern Territories to the General Government was carried out within the shortest possible time despite all technical, climatic, and economic difficulties and in the face of all objections from responsible authorities, simply because the resettlement quota had to be met at all hazards. The expropriation of Jewish property put an extraordinary burden on the authorities. From an economic standpoint, this operation led to significant losses and, particularly in the East, to senseless squandering, indeed even to economic ruin. Not only was this predictable, but, as we have demonstrated, it actually turned out to be the case. There is another factor whose significance can hardly be overestimated: even the most important measures of “ethnic” and racial discrimination were deliberately carried out by the leadership
during the war
and were railroaded through without regard to “objective” or economic considerations, something that the authorities who were oriented to such considerations could never bring themselves to understand. Yet this had its deeper reason, since, as Himmler once put it to the president of the Central Department of the Internal Administration in the General Government, such operations were much easier to manage during the war, in times of general privation and insecurity, “when everything is at sixes and sevens,” than they would be in orderly circumstances.
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For the administrative authorities, however, the limits of discriminatory practices were to be found where the economic
substance
of their respective objects of exploitation was attacked or where economic considerations were entirely disregarded. In this connection let us recall, for instance, that the authorities in the Annexed Eastern Territories protested the all-too-stiff fines imposed as summary sentences by the police against Polish peasants, since the fines were exhausting the Poles’ holdings. After the radical expulsion and compulsory resettlement operations of 1939–40 had subsided, they also objected to the deportation of Poles (or at least of those who belonged to the workforce) to the General Government or their transfer to the Reich. Instead, every attempt was made to keep them in the region. The authorities in the General Government may have expressed no objection to maintaining the native “non-German” population on the lowest possible wages and provisions and literally exposing the Jewish laborers to death by starvation (“starvation status”); however, they came out against the
annihilation
of the Jewish workforce, since this deprived the manufacturing sector of a large number of qualified specialists. In many cases, such objections on the part of the administrative authorities were able to delay annihilation operations already planned; of course they could not be altogether prevented, since according to the ideas of the Nazi leadership, fanaticism was mightier than expertise, and rational economic or political considerations were always obliged to give way before the postulates of ideology. All of the senseless acts of oppression, terror, expulsion, and annihilation in the occupied Polish territories can be traced to this “primacy” of political considerations, or, more precisely, to the primacy of the irrational—an essential feature of the National Socialist system of government, which reveals its incapability of following the dictates of (political, military, economic) reason even when these sprang directly from its own interests. Humanitarian considerations, of course, never even entered the picture.

The limited readiness of the traditional apparatus of legal standards and administration to be manipulated for the purposes of the regime meant, in turn, that functional aspects took on ever greater significance. Hand in hand with the increasingly discriminatory practices in the Reich and the occupied Polish territories, therefore, went a shift in jurisdictions, as numerous examples have shown. As long as it was somehow possible to locate the discriminatory special laws within the framework of traditional administrative thinking and traditional administrative technique, jurisdiction generally remained within the purview of the
administrative and judicial authorities
. But where naked acts of violence such as expulsions, kidnappings, and annihilation were concerned, the
exceptional powers
of the National Socialist regime came into play; that is, the Party headquarters, the police under the command of Himmler in his role as
Reichsführer
-SS, the SS itself, and the special authorities of the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, which were also concentrated in the person of Himmler. Thus, for instance, the total political, economic, and cultural disfranchisement of Jews in the Reich took place for the most part under the aegis of the authorities of the
general and inner administration
as well as of the finance and labor departments; whereas those responsible for the immediate preparation and all questions pertaining to their deportation, as well as for all expulsions from the occupied Polish territories, were the Security Police (whether by virtue of their original brief or by dint of jurisdictional usurpation) and the special authorities vested in the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood. The more extreme the tasks expected of discriminatory special law, therefore, the more likely they were to be discharged by the extraordinary powers within the Nazi regime and not by the traditional administration.

This “division of responsibilities” between administration and judiciary, on the one hand, and the extraordinary powers of the Third Reich on the other, was intended from the beginning by the political leadership. Hitler himself, significantly enough, saw Himmler’s preeminent importance not in his capacity as
Reichsführer
-SS and police leader, but rather in his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (RKF), since this invested him with the entire responsibility for expelling “non-Germans” in the East and settling their lands with Germans and included the necessary
authority to issue directives
to the functionaries of the general and inner administration.
¹³

In this “division of responsibilities,” too, one can discern an east-west gradation; that is, the further east the occupied territories lay, the greater the use of special authorities to the detriment of the traditional administration. The great extermination and concentration camps lay in the East, the great resettlement operations were directed thence or took place there. Even in the Annexed Eastern Territories, as we have seen, the Party apparatus and the special authorities of the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (in the form of the centers for migration and immigration, etc.) had established themselves beside the traditional administration as powers of equal or superior standing; and, whereas the administrative authorities in the autonomous General Government were able with some success to defend themselves against such interference, they ultimately proved largely powerless against the terror of the police and the SS and their operations aimed at expulsion and annihilation.

Here, too, further investigation of the situation in the Occupied Eastern Territories would be profitable; it would show that in the National Socialist system of government, questions of jurisdiction, which are the basis of any administration, steadily decreased in significance and that the balance of power shifted in favor of whichever power was most ruthless in sweeping aside such questions. Detailed studies would simultaneously provide insight about the degree to which the policy of disfranchisement and discrimination was capable of
intensification
once the extraordinary powers of National Socialism came into play, with their previously unthinkable reign of terror perpetrated against all unpopular “non-Germans” by the offices of the SS and the police as well as the Reich commissars (who answered solely to Hitler)—a process against which the responsible administrators (of the ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) were condemned to fight a losing battle.
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