Ostkrieg (6 page)

Nazism and war were inseparable. Born of a lost war, energized by the desire to gain redemption for the stain of defeat, determined to achieve Lebensraum in Europe as the key to survival in a world of enemies, preoccupied with solving a self-imposed Jewish problem, the National Socialist regime had, from the time it assumed power, set in motion a process of building a “new man and new society” in order to prepare for war. The key to this much-vaunted Volksgemeinschaft was, as Ian Kershaw has stressed, “an attempt at a perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914,' ” a “true socialism” that would unite all racially valuable Germans and prepare them for the struggle ahead. Nor had Hitler left any doubt about the inevitability of conflict: the German future could be assured only by gaining living space, and it could be won only through force.
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Hitler's conception of Lebensraum had been informed and influenced not only by notions of social Darwinism but also by nineteenth-century European colonial and imperialistic practices. The European scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia had been justified not only by economic necessity but also by reference to the alleged racial inferiority of the “backward” and “uncivilized” peoples of those continents.
European domination thus seemed a natural and logical consequence, as did the brutalities inflicted on the native peoples. Since Hitler looked to Eastern Europe as the natural sphere of German expansion, and since he viewed the Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of the region as either inferior or threatening, his notion of Lebensraum harbored from the beginning murderous impulses. What had hitherto been done only to conquered populations overseas Hitler now stood ready to inflict on a European population.
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In some respects, then, Lebensraum could be seen as merely a belated continuation of the nineteenth-century Western policy of imperialism, with Eastern Europeans substituting for Africans or Native Americans. At its heart, however, Hitler's program would prove far more radical and far-reaching, a racialist and exterminationist scheme of limitless aims and brutality.

Poland would be the first country to experience the full harshness of this policy, a sort of dress rehearsal for what would come later in the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Hitler had done little to hide his radical notions regarding the treatment of Poland from his top generals. A 31 July agreement between the army and the SS gave its killing units, the
Einsatzgruppen
, special tasks for combating anti-German activities behind the front lines, which in practice meant a license to murder. Meeting with his top commanders at the Berghof on 22 August, Hitler stressed, according to the notes of one present, the “destruction of Poland in the foreground. The aim is elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line. . . . Have no pity. Brutal attitude. Eighty million people shall get what is their right. Their existence has to be secured. The strongest has the right. Greatest severity.”
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In part, army leaders raised no objections because they too longed for the destruction of Poland, that hated product of Versailles, and regarded Poles as racially and culturally inferior. Then, too, many likely regarded Hitler's rhetoric as mere hyperbole.

The terror unleashed on the Polish population from the first days of the invasion left no doubt, however, that Hitler's intentions matched his venomous words. Even as local militias composed of ethnic Germans (
Volksdeutsche
) began vigilante actions against Poles who had committed outrages against the German minority, Heydrich's units swept into action, armed with lists of perhaps thirty thousand people to be arrested or executed. On 9 September, Franz Halder confided to Major Helmuth Groscurth the chilling news that “it was the intention of the Führer and Goering to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Apart from a few mild and scattered protests, however, the army leadership accommodated itself to the new reality. Rather than object in principle to
this planned, wholesale murder, Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, blandly informed his subordinates that the Einsatzgruppen had received orders from Hitler to carry out “certain ethnic tasks” that “lay outside the responsibility” of the army. Indeed, despite occasional mild protests about “excesses” committed by the Einsatzgruppen, most army commanders welcomed them as protection against presumed security threats. Although this campaign of ethnic cleansing had clearly been authorized by Hitler, it was Himmler and Heydrich, the ambitious leaders of the SS, as well as party radicals such as Hans Frank, Arthur Greiser, and Albert Forster, who grabbed the opportunity to expand their power. Hitler now made it clear that a “harsh racial struggle” would be carried out in Poland, the essence of which, as Groscurth succinctly noted, was to “exterminate.” Within days of the outbreak of war, the initiative had passed to Nazi radicals who now sought, in the words of Hans Mommsen, the “realization of Utopia.”
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Although Hitler's fixation on Lebensraum and intention to promote a “harsh racial struggle” in Poland had set the general direction of Nazi policy, surprisingly little practical consideration had been given to how to implement a comprehensive racial policy or to how best to “Germanize” this new Lebensraum. Such discussions began only in early September, with the resulting plans largely a consequence of two factors. The first was Hitler's characteristic method of ruling, in which he would set broad goals or the direction of policy and then allow his subordinates to compete among each other by submitting proposals for turning policy into reality, a process that quickly produced a manic dynamism as eager Nazis sought to prove themselves and gain a step up the career ladder. Moreover, these schemes tended to be highly ambitious, radical projects since no one was going to be punished for being too ruthless. The second key factor involved ongoing discussions with Soviet officials on a final delimitation of the spheres of interest in the Baltic region agreed on in the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
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As a result of the interplay of these two factors, by the end of September 1939 the Nazis had formulated a stunningly ambitious demographic scheme of racial reordering that involved millions of people. Though improvised at the time, these policies were fully consistent with Hitler's underlying ideological assumptions of the need to secure living space, life as a Darwinian struggle, the unequal racial value of ethnic populations, and a determination to solve the rapidly expanding Jewish problem. While, ultimately, the last of these obsessions came to dominate Nazi policy, in the autumn of 1939 securing and Germanizing the newly won living space clearly took precedence. Moreover, an agreement
on 28 September between German and Soviet officials on a revision of their respective spheres of influence in the Baltic meant that Lithuania would now fall into the Soviet orbit. In exchange, however, the Germans secured the right to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Soviet sphere. Nazi leaders now envisioned a comprehensive racial restructuring of Eastern Europe in which Germans would be consolidated in the newly annexed territories of formerly western Poland, Poles would be concentrated in a vassal state to the east, and Jews would be shoved to the outer reaches of the German domain. In order to make room for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans in West Prussia and the Wartheland, both former Polish provinces, the Nazis needed to clear the areas of their Polish and Jewish inhabitants. What had begun at the beginning of September as the intended liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia had now grown into a plan for the dispossession of millions of Poles. As Goebbels noted in his diary on 10 October, “The Führer's verdict on the Poles is devastating. More like animals than human beings.”
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This question of living space was also inextricably connected with the search for a resolution to the Jewish question. Until 1939, the preferred Nazi solution for German Jews entailed emigration and occasional expulsion. The outbreak of war, however, changed the situation in fundamentally radical ways. Not only did the already diminishing avenues for emigration constrict even further, but the Nazis also now found themselves faced with an even greater problem. The spectacular military triumph in Poland left them with perhaps 2 million Jews under their control, a number that promised to overwhelm the already feeble strategy of emigration. Moreover, many Germans, especially young soldiers, for the first time encountered the seemingly alien eastern Jews, the
Ostjuden
, who had for years been the target of scurrilous Nazi propaganda. The reality, and staggering numbers, of these strange people seemed to confirm the Nazi message that they were the biological and spiritual antithesis of German culture. Finally, and of key significance, the outbreak of war both fueled party radicals and freed the Nazi leaders from various restraints in their handling of the Jewish problem. Hitler had long defined international Jewry as the enemy of Germany, and, now that the nation found itself in a war allegedly provoked by that same Jewish conspiracy, harsh measures against Jews under German control seemed necessary. Poland thus became, as Christopher Browning has put it, a “ ‘laboratory' for Nazi experiments in racial imperialism, an area where [the Nazis] tried to turn into reality ideological slogans such as Lebensraum.”
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This process eventually involved much trial and error, and growing frustrations, before the Nazis settled on the Final Solution.

Even as the deportations of Poles and the resettlement of Volksdeutsche began in mid-October a host of problems ensued: Poles targeted for deportation were not provided the most basic necessities of life; German officials had not anticipated likely Polish resistance; Himmler's insistence on screening Poles for possible Germanization raised difficulties; and the whole operation threatened a serious disruption of economic life in the occupied territories. The latter objection, along with transportation shortages occasioned by the growing demands of army authorities for rolling stock to prepare the campaign in the west, resulted in a curbing of, if not a halt to, the deportations. Typical of the improvised nature of this demographic scheme, little thought had been given to what to do with the Jewish population of the affected areas. Nazi officials initially thought in terms of expelling them over the demarcation line between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland, then, after that idea failed, decided to place them in ghettos as a temporary measure until a final decision was made.
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While Poles could simply be dumped in the General Government, such a solution for Jews faced numerous obstacles, not least objections from Nazi occupation authorities such as Hans Frank. This oversight provided an opening for ambitious subordinates like Adolf Eichmann to find a more suitable long-term solution, which involved resettlement of Jews from the areas to be annexed into Germany to a reservation near Nisko in the Lublin district of southeast Poland. Concurrently with the resettlement actions under way elsewhere, Eichmann began organizing deportations of Jews. His plan foundered on many of the same difficulties as the other scheme, however, and by early 1940 the grand demographic projects had ground to a virtual standstill.
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In characteristic fashion, the Nazis had tried to do everything at the same time, without assigning priorities, with the result that inadequate resources led to limited achievements. Along with their frustration, however, Nazi officials had gained valuable understanding of the problems involved in such a complicated scheme.

Events in Poland also demonstrated how Hitler's own radicalism could be reinforced through personal observations and contact with subordinates as well as how his prejudices could be exploited by officials pursuing ever more radical policies. Hitler's view of Jews as an active, predatory threat had certainly been intensified by his observations from Poland, but discussions with Goebbels that autumn fanned his anti-Jewish hatreds while allowing the latter an opportunity to regain the Führer's approval. Shortly after his humiliation in connection with Kristallnacht in November 1938, the propaganda minister had begun
planning a series of films designed to instill and intensify anti-Jewish attitudes in the German public. Work had begun in 1939 on the notorious “documentary” film
Der ewige Jude
(The eternal Jew), which Goebbels intended as both a demonstration of the parasitical nature of the Jews and a justification for drastic measures against them.
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With the defeat of Poland, Goebbels seized the opportunity to have footage made of the detested Ostjuden in their habitat as well as to see the situation firsthand. His observations not only confirmed his own radical hatred of the Jews but exacerbated those of Hitler as well. In mid-October, Goebbels and Hitler viewed recent footage filmed in Warsaw, with the former's impression likely mirroring that of the latter: “Footage from the ghetto film. . . . Images so dreadful and brutal in their details that one's blood runs cold. . . . This Jewry must be destroyed.” At the end of October, Goebbels once again viewed footage with Hitler, this time of ritual slaughter, scenes that left them “deeply shaken.” A visit to Lodz a few days later only reinforced Goebbels's impressions while also emphasizing the connection in the Nazi mind between Lebensraum and the Jewish question: “Lodz itself is a hideous city. . . . Drive through the ghetto. We get out and inspect everything thoroughly. It is indescribable. They are no longer humans, they are animals. Therefore we no longer have a humanitarian but rather a surgical task. One must cut here, and indeed quite radically. Otherwise Europe will perish from the Jewish disease. . . . This is Asia already. We will have much to do to Germanize this area.”
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Goebbels took pains to keep Hitler informed of the film's progress and of his own escalating radicalism, both of which the Führer approved. On 2 November, Goebbels exulted, “My explanation of the Jewish problem finds his complete agreement. The Jew is a waste product.” On 19 November, he noted in his diary, “I inform the Führer about our Jew film. He gives some ideas for it. . . . The film is a very valuable propaganda medium for us just now.” Finally, on 5 December, he reported more extensively to Hitler on his trip to Poland, recording with satisfaction, “He listens to everything very carefully and totally shares my opinion on the Jewish and Polish question. We must exorcize the Jewish danger.”
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If, in Ian Kershaw's famous formulation, Hitler's subordinates were clearly “working toward the Führer” in implementing racial policy, their own radicalism could, as the example of Goebbels showed, in turn inform and affect Hitler's views, reinforcing his radical ideological predispositions.