"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (70 page)

Of course the “non-German” attorneys were placed under a much stricter system of control, based on Reich law practice. In contrast to the practice in the Reich, however, all corresponding control measures were implemented
without
any legal basis and solely on the basis of internal directives: it is evident that the issue and publication of corresponding normative legal regulations was felt to be superfluous, since impingement on the rights of stateless “non-Germans” did not require such a basis. The first right to be affected was their accreditation as attorneys. This was canceled for all “non-German” attorneys—in accord with the motto of every totalitarian regime that everything was prohibited that was not explicitly permitted. Reaccreditation by the relevant German authorities for admission before Polish and German courts was issued only to politically reliable Polish attorneys, with the strictest standards being applied;
⁸
in Warsaw, for instance, around half of the approximately fourteen hundred attorneys were reaccredited.
⁹
According to a directive issued by the Central Department of Justice, “non-German” attorneys were no longer entitled to bear the title
attorney at law;
as in the Annexed Eastern Territories, they were allowed to use only the term
advocate.
¹⁰
The numerous Jewish attorneys did not, of course, receive reaccreditation, since most of them had already been removed in 1939;
¹¹
German and Polish attorneys took over the free practices. The remaining Jewish attorneys
with dispensations
were permitted only to conclude current business before their accreditation was withdrawn. As the head of the Department of Justice in the office of the governor general put it during an internal meeting, because of the “move” to exclude Jews from all economic activities, “there was no requirement for Jewish legal advisers in the German legal system.”
¹²
Numerous members of the Polish legal profession, who had protested the exclusion of their Jewish colleagues without any basis in law, not only lost their accreditation but were also “treated by the Security Police,” that is, arrested and sent to prison or a concentration camp.
¹³
Despite the sanctions imposed, the German Security Service (SD) did not let the matter rest in the light of this demonstration of solidarity, as this would have run counter to the propaganda thesis of the hatred toward the Jews among the Polish population as well, which was frequently used to justify anti-Jewish measures in order to conceal the aims of the Germans. In the internal situation reports of the SD destined for the administrative authorities in the Reich, the reactions of the Polish legal profession were rephrased as support for the German measures (“gratitude for the nonaccreditation of the Jews”) by means of transparent manipulation of the figures.
¹⁴

The treatment of the other professions was also based to a large extent on models from the Reich. The Polish medical boards of registration were dissolved, their were assets confiscated, and they were consolidated to form the Chamber of Health of the General Government under the control of the Health Services Office in the (Central) Department of the Interior Administration.
¹⁵
Although the “non-German” physicians were generally allowed to retain their licenses, the usual special legislative restrictions still applied: Aryan (German) physicians were, of course, prohibited from treating Jews; physicians violating this prohibition could expect prosecution by the police, with removal from the General Government as the mildest form of punishment. The prohibition on treating Jews also applied to Polish physicians, who could lose their license by violating the ban. A further policy of the radically anti-Polish health administration was also to enforce the unequal treatment of Polish and German
patients.
The well-known case of the German physician Dr. Hagen, who provided the same treatment to Polish and German TB patients in a Warsaw hospital, sheds some light on the situation prevailing at that time;
¹⁶
it resulted in a full-blown confrontation between Dr. Hagen and the responsible authorities, and he was saved from the clutches of Himmler and the Security Police only by the intervention of the Reich chief health officer, Dr. Conti.
¹⁷
Additional employment restrictions on members of the Polish medical professions (physicians, dentists, pharmacists, etc.) consisted of their being subject to forced service within a particular district and with a particular residence (the emergency service obligation).
¹⁸

The most severe special-law measures were, of course, issued with regard to Jewish physicians. In view of the large number of Jewish physicians,
¹⁹
a drastic measure to segregate Aryans from non-Aryans was the directive, based on Reich regulations, that Jewish physicians were prohibited from bearing the professional designation
physician
and could only term themselves
medical practitioners.
It goes without saying that the prohibition on treating Aryans also applied to them, so they were solely dependent on Jewish patients. In addition, they were left with few opportunities for work; under a directive issued by the head of the Health Services Office in the Department of the Interior Administration of the government of the General Government in 1939, they had been deprived of all medical equipment;
²⁰
furthermore, during the course of the implementation of the aforementioned directive, they were also deprived of
all other
items (household effects, carpets, kitchen utensils, furniture, valuables, etc.) if these were of use to the private and professional requirements of German physicians.
²¹

There was similar drastic “segregation” between Poles and Jews on the one hand and Poles and Germans on the other in other professional employment regulations. Whereas the Poles were merely expelled from senior positions under the principle of “no senior positions for Poles” but had only been excluded down to middle-management level because of the lack of replacement German staff, Jews lost their posts in all professions, as well as jobs in industry and commerce (except retailing) and in the banking and insurance sectors.
²²
As was to be expected, the only result of these measures was to cripple and ruin trade and industry because the “absent Jews” could not be replaced.
²³

2. Labor Law

a. Polish and Jewish Personnel

Whereas the expulsion measures described above more or less represented the closure of the senior levels of the professional hierarchy to “non-Germans,” an extensive administrative and legislative machinery was set in motion to achieve the desired ultimate goal, the quickest possible reduction of the local population to a leaderless mass of cheap labor for the objectives of the Reich.
¹
Under the leadership of the Central Department of Labor, with its field offices in the districts and the
Kreise,
which were the first civil authorities to function and certainly the most important administrative agencies in the General Government, a completely new system of labor law was developed “to replace the existing individualistic foundations.”
²
Its principal features comprised the introduction of the piece-rate and bonus system to achieve the “greatest possible output,” setting the minimum working hours per week at fifty-four, the requirement of the “strictest work discipline,” and so forth.
³
As mentioned above, the General Government was treated in practice sometimes as Reich territory and at other times as foreign territory, depending on requirements. In this case it appeared expedient not to regard the General Government as a part of the Reich in order to bypass any obligations to the principles of Reich labor law. The treatment of the “non-Germans” was therefore oriented solely toward the objective of the mobilization of labor (
Arbeitseinsatz
[forced-labor squads]) and the availability of the General Government for the economy of the Greater German Reich. In contrast, the local Germans were treated as if the General Government was an immediate part of the Reich, in that they were paid German rates.

A condition for the introduction of the new system, which resulted in fundamental changes to the structure of the labor market and the social structure,
⁴
was the introduction of compulsory labor for all Poles age 14 and over,
⁵
which was justified in all seriousness by Governor General Frank with the argument that this served as compensation for the damage caused by the Poles “because they had abducted Polish money abroad.”
⁶
The special legislative treatment of Poles was not so much found in the compulsory labor
⁷
in all its forms (which included “construction service”)
⁸
and further obligations to perform services, to which the Germans were also liable to a certain extent,
⁹
but related to the sphere of working conditions and individual regulations of labor law,
¹⁰
which, in conjunction with the lack of provisions, contributed greatly to the impoverishment of the workers, the poor efficiency, and work performance, which was estimated at 50 percent of German labor productivity. Contemporary reports by German authorities speak of working conditions that were rarely encountered in the Reich, and of “nigger-like” working methods.
¹¹

The wages paid to Polish compulsory laborers differed from those of German employees. The standard wage system based on fixed statutory wage scales was abandoned; instead, the Compulsory Labor Decree of October 26, 1939, provided for remuneration “by rates appearing to be equitable,”
¹²
but these were never specified in a binding new standard wage structure, so that wages could be changed at any time to meet labor market conditions. Polish workers and their families were no longer entitled to welfare benefits; these were merely to be “safeguarded” wherever possible.
¹³

However, the new wage system was not introduced
uno actu
; in contrast to what was done in the Annexed Eastern Territories, the former Polish regulations remained provisionally in force; deviations from the earlier statutory wages and salaries required the approval of the district chief
¹⁴
and, if they were also to apply outside the district, the approval of the Central Department of Labor in the governor general’s office, with the aim of preventing uncontrolled wage changes. The district chiefs and the head of the Central Department of Labor themselves were also authorized to issue new statutory wage scales for individual enterprises or groups of enterprises.
¹⁵
However, such revisions were issued in a relatively large number only from the beginning of 1942;
¹⁶
they introduced the piece-rate system and thus complied with the policy of the governor general and his departments that the Poles should be paid less than normal rates and without further benefits: remuneration (net wage) was to be paid only for work
actually
performed—exactly the wording of the piece-rate and bonus system
¹⁷
—as was the practice for Poles and Jews in the Reich. In fact, the new wage system now practiced, namely, the rejection of the function of the wage to safeguard a “socially balanced standard of living” and the introduction of the piece-rate and bonus system,
¹⁸
was more than a break with the system of guaranteed minimum wages, because of the hope that it would reduce costs and bring about a substantial rise in productivity.

Poles were also gradually placed under the provisions of special law in other areas of labor law, with the tacit abolition of Polish regulations. The Polish vacation regulations
¹⁹
were suspended for the year 1940, all vacation entitlement was dismissed, and (as in the Reich) the “granting” of a vacation of normally six paid working days was ordered. The periods of notice for “non-German” employees were reduced, opportunities to extend working hours were introduced, maternity protection regulations for Polish and Jewish women were abolished, and severe sanctions were threatened—but only in 1943—for violations of labor law regulations.
²⁰
From 1942, in addition to the existing compulsory labor, general compulsory service for all “non-German” inhabitants of the General Government was ordered for “urgent tasks of particular importance to the state,” soon followed by a general compulsory service for all German state subjects in the General Government.
²¹

The Poles were thus subject to mixed law, that is, partly Polish law, partly the new (special) law of the German civil administration, but Poles of Jewish extraction were subject exclusively to special law,
²²
which suspended all previous regulations and far exceeded the regulations in force in the Reich. The most significant feature was the introduction of forced labor for all Jews between the ages of 14 and 16 in the form of guarded forced-labor squads (
Arbeitseinsatz
) with “camp accommodation” or by employment in free jobs.
²³
The introduction of forced labor, with which the freedom of movement of those affected was also abolished, marks the beginning of the unrestricted police power over the Jews, since the organization of forced labor (and thus of residence: ghettoization) was no longer exclusively the province of the administration but also a matter of the HSSPF (there was a change in jurisdiction).