"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (72 page)

Nonetheless, various measures were initiated to achieve some form of compensation for the nonintroduction of the German Ethnic Classification List in the General Government, with the aim of registering German blood and raising it above its “non-German” environment. For instance, the registration was started of persons belonging to the German
Volk
(“ethnic Germans”), who were to be naturalized as soon as possible.
¹²
Integrated into
Deutschtum,
for instance, were around one hundred thousand so-called persons of German origin (corresponding to those in group 4 of the German Ethnic Classification List),
¹³
who were raised “out of their Polish environment” (awakening “pride in their origins”),
¹⁴
with the intention of naturalizing them
later
“on behalf and by order of the Reich.”
¹⁵
As in the Annexed Eastern Territories, persons resisting naturalization were threatened with protective custody,
¹⁶
essentially because the authorities were dependent on every instance of naturalization since the military service was associated with naturalization.

However, this hunt for “German blood” and “German nature” met with no more than moderate success.
¹⁷
The old unsettled differences of opinion between the administration and the SS and police leadership about who should be regarded as an ethnic German flared up again; and the declared belief in
Deutschtum
on the part of the individuals in question was not particularly great.
¹⁸
Because of these difficulties, the number of naturalizations was relatively small. Only the “ethnic Germans” were naturalized,
¹⁹
and the countless bureaucratic conditions and examinations to which Poles “of German extraction” were subjected meant that these persons were not naturalized at all;
²⁰
on the orders of the RFSS/RKF, they therefore remained stateless unless they volunteered for service in the Wehrmacht;
²¹
but they were treated as Germans by being subject to German personal, family, and criminal law as well as to German jurisdiction.
²²
However, the issue that was much more critical at that time, their treatment with regard to food rations, welfare benefits, and so forth, was never settled.
²³

With the administrative segregation of Germans and “non-Germans” now in place, the actual special legislation itself could be implemented. It was much milder than in the Annexed Eastern Territories, because the dependence on Polish labor and the uncertainty about the constitutional status of the population
after
the was meant that much was omitted that was enforced at all costs in the Annexed Eastern Territories to achieve rapid Germanization. This is shown, for instance, in the fact that where the coexistence of Germans and “non-Germans” was involved, the prime principle applied was not that of subjugation at all costs (Jews excepted) but initially the principle of segregation.

VI. Marriage Law

In particular with regard to marriage law, which, together with the identification and segregation measures, formed one of the cornerstones of
völkisch
inequality, many of the restrictions introduced in the Annexed Eastern Territories were not adopted in the General Government. For instance, there were no general prohibitions on marriages between Germans and “non-Germans” (except for Jews), as long as there were no objections from the “racial aspect.” Germans who married Polish women were forced to leave the General Government,
¹
so that the official line of the segregation of Germans and “non-Germans” could be maintained. Marriages between civil servants of the General Government and “non-Germans” were regarded as undesirable, but marriages to Ukrainian and Polish partners were normally approved if the result of the racial examination of the “non-German” partner was positive, but a number of sanctions applied to such marriages: these persons too had to leave the General Government; they were also threatened with dismissal from office and the loss of all pension entitlements.
²
Marriages between Poles were also probably regarded as undesirable in line with the political principle of checking the Polish birthrate as much as possible; at least this can be derived as a converse conclusion, taking into account the maxim “what is not allowed is prohibited” applied by the SS agencies, from a circular decree of the RFSS/RKF of January 10,1944, under which no restrictions were placed on marriages between Poles—that is, as in the Reich, between Poles registered in the German Ethnic Classification List and protected subject status Poles.
³
According to another circular decree of August 4, 1944, neither were there any reservations about marriages between Ukrainians; marriages between Poles and Ukrainians, however, were undesirable because this would not achieve any “fragmentation of Polishness,” since the “children were normally brought up as Poles.” The marriageable age also remained unchanged in the General Government, only being raised—in line with the regulations in the Annexed Eastern Territories—to 28 (for men) and 25 (for women) by the central authorities of the SS (for the purpose of “weakening Polishness”).
⁴

VII. Public Health

Whereas the segregation concept governing marriage law largely avoided any form of discrimination (in the sense of general prohibitions), measures were tightened appreciably when it came to the treatment of “non-Germans” in routine administrative matters, where the concept of
völkisch
inequality led not only to segregation but also to overt discrimination in favor of German state subjects or ethnic Germans, true to the aforementioned policy of the political leadership that the population of occupied territories in the East should be reduced to the lowest possible standard. This applied all the more where areas were involved that were of no direct use for the German
Arbeitseinsatz
but served the subsistence of the local population itself. A characteristic example is the health sector, which originally came under the jurisdiction of the internal administration and was expanded in 1943 to an autonomous central department in the government of the General Government.
¹
Apart from the general search for undesirable persons in terms of health policy,
²
there was initially a policy of unequal treatment for the German and Polish population to the extent that the nonlicensing of Polish physicians and the small number of Polish physicians allowed into medical training meant that medical support and provision was withdrawn to a very large extent,
³
causing a rapid rise in the sickness rate and the risk of epidemics, which—in view of the low number of Polish physicians, decimated still further by arrests—was of crucial importance.
⁴
The facilities for controlling tuberculosis were deliberately reduced. In Kraków, for instance, only three Polish hospitals, with a total of around one hundred beds, were licensed for this purpose. According to the testimony of Polish physicians, the Health Services Department had also prohibited prophylactic medical and dental examinations of “non-German” children and mothers;
⁵
according to this testimony, medical experiments (measurements and examinations of “racial purity”), including forced gynecological examinations, were conducted on Polish girls.
⁶
For the Jewish population, nothing was done to provide medical treatment; existing treatment facilities were eliminated or drastically reduced. As with medical practices, Jewish hospitals were robbed of almost their entire supply of medical and other equipment. Jews were prohibited from seeking medical assistance in any hospital.
⁷

However, there was more in the public health sector than the mere reduction of the local population to the lowest possible level of provision; the prime objective was rather to prepare and conceal the subsequent drastic special measures against the Jews under the innocuous guise of medical prophylaxis against epidemics and diseases and thus ultimately to increase the sickness and death rates. In this respect, the exclusion of the Jews from any medical attention was only the first step on the long road to isolation, ghettoization, and deportation.

In preparation for the subsequent Final Solution, the risk of epidemics (e.g., typhus) spread by the Jews was invented or considerably exaggerated; it was used primarily to justify all anti-Jewish measures right up to the ghettoization of the Jews, because the pretense that precautionary medical measures had to be adopted was most readily believed and accepted by the public. Even in the Central Department of Interior Administration, however, it was known that the head of the health department was merely “painting a picture” of the “risk of epidemics”
⁸
to find an excuse for the plans to lock up the Jews. Based on the practice in the Reich, “actions” were first initiated under this camouflage; their main purpose was to denounce the Jews as the cause of dangerous epidemics; anti-Semitic posters portrayed the Jews as typhus carriers,
⁹
to justify to the public their drastic segregation from the rest of the population (exclusion from public transport and communications, residence bans, etc.) right up to their total isolation in the ghettos.
¹⁰
That these pretenses were absurd is obvious, but they do show the reversal of cause and effect so characteristic of National Socialist tactics. It was not the Jews themselves but the very overpopulation in the ghettos that was the cause of epidemics. Even Josef Walbaum, the head of the Health Services Department in the Governor General’s Office, was forced to admit the “unbelievable result” of a very
low
rate of typhus in the General Government in early 1940, before Jewish “residential quarters” were established.
¹¹
However, the Jews were now herded together in the ghettos to promote the outbreak of epidemics through overpopulation and thereby provide further proof of the “typhoidal” Jews;
¹²
once the ghettos had been established, numerous complaints had been raised about the risk of epidemics they posed, and ever more measures were demanded and adopted, which appeared to those contemporaries who believed the propaganda as a consistent consequence of the health policy “precautions” adopted by the administration; the “non-German” population, however, had no illusions about the real intentions concealed behind the camouflage of health policy. The isolation of the Jews in the ghettos was still being justified to the outside world by the pretense of protection against typhus, but this was no longer an adequate guise
inside
the administration as early as 1941. At a conference in Krynica on October 13–16, 1941, the head of the Health Services Department proposed, to the acclaim of those present, that since the ghettos were the sources of typhus, the only possible measure to control this risk was to shoot the Jews, as the “German
Volk
” should not be allowed to be “infected by the parasites.”
¹³

VIII. Freedom of Movement and Personal Liberty

The aforementioned practices in the public health sector should be viewed in conjunction with restrictions on freedom of movement, whose actual target was the Jews—against the background of their pending resettlement or evacuation (deportation to the extermination camps).
¹
There is no evidence of general residence bans and restrictions on entry or change of residence for Polish “non-Germans,” as existed frequently in the Annexed Eastern Territories, except in cases of eviction for the establishment of Jewish residential quarters.

1. Residential Restrictions and Ghettoization of the Jewish Population

Jews had been prohibited since December 1939 from leaving or changing their place of residence without police approval and from using public paths, roads, and squares between 9 P.M. and 5 A.M. without permission, unless they could demonstrate a “public or personal emergency.”
²
However, the corresponding directive of December 11, 1939, was issued not by the internal administration, responsible for residence issues, but by the HSSPF
Ost
(in Kraków), for under a decree on forced labor for Jews issued by the governor general on October 26,1939, the HSSPF was empowered to issue implementing regulations, including those with regard to residence. In this respect, the jurisdiction of the police, which was to usurp all Jewish affairs at a later date, had already been firmly established in the most important area, residence rights for Jews (ghettoization). Additional
general
residence restrictions or restrictions for particular groups,
³
authority to issue which had been given to the
Kreishauptleute (Stadthauptleute),
the district chiefs, or the Central Department of Interior Administration (depending on the scope of the restrictions) under the First Decree on Residence Restrictions in the General Government of September 13, 1940, were not affected by the directive of December 11,1939.
⁴
This authorization was merely a neutrally worded circumscription of the powers of the administration to establish ghettos (“Jewish residential quarters”),
⁵
use of which was made from the first months of the civil administration, with experiments first in the
Kreishauptmann
towns
⁶
and later in the larger towns and cities of the General Government from the fall of 1940,
⁷
in particular in Warsaw, where the largest ghetto in the General Government was established.
⁸
The official pretenses for the establishment of ghettos were principally the protection of the Germans and the Poles against infectious diseases (e.g., typhus), the exclusion of the Jews from economic life, the need to restrict the freedom of movement of the Jews because of the risk of black market activities, and so forth.
⁹