The German War (25 page)

For Poles who did not manage to be reclassified into one of these categories, the lessons in subservience came thick and fast. Whatever the variations from Gau to Gau and between the annexed territories and the General Government, the objective remained the same. A string of German decrees banned Polish schools from teaching all the subjects which were regarded as central to shaping a sense of patriotism: sport, geography, history and national literature. In the Wartheland even instruction in Polish was prohibited; yet schools were also forbidden to teach German grammar properly, lest ‘Poles should succeed in passing themselves off as Germans’. After most Polish teachers and priests had been executed or expelled, the authorities in the Wartheland turned large classes, which met for only a couple of hours a day, over to the wives of German farmers and non-commissioned officers, who drilled the Polish children in ‘cleanliness and order, in respectful conduct and obedience to the Germans’.
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The enormous numbers of Poles forcibly ‘resettled’ to the General Government – a ‘native reservation’, as Hitler dubbed it – were surpassed by the numbers of Poles shipped to Germany. To start with, 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were sent to help bring in the harvest in 1939; and there was no initial shortage of civilian volunteers, as Poles looked for employment under German occupation. By the end of May 1940 there were over 850,000 foreign workers in Germany, nearly two-thirds of whom were employed in agriculture, which had a long tradition of drawing on seasonal migrant Polish labour. For a regime which focused on national – and racial – purity, there was much greater reluctance to see Poles working and living in German cities, even though the armaments industry was so desperately short of labour that many factories depended on the Wehrmacht releasing skilled workers after the French campaign in order to keep going.
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In Nazi eyes, the whole ‘home front’ was a female, domestic space, into which threatening foreign men were now intruding. This sexualised and gendered concept drew on the nineteenth-century ideal of separate male and female spheres, in which work, politics and public life had been affairs of men while women concentrated on creating a Biedermeier idyll of family and home. This notional divide had already broken down during the First World War when women had taken over men’s jobs in engineering and armaments production, driven trams and become nurses for the Red Cross. Despite the Nazis’ espousal of patriarchal ideals, the same pattern of female involvement had immediately emerged even more strongly in this war. The number of female students at university had never been higher, and more women were entering the professions than ever before. But instead of giving up on the notion of separate male and female destinies, the Nazis merely redefined them. The traditional ‘female sphere’ of the home was thus enlarged to include the whole of the home front, while men’s activities ‘out there’ no longer referred to associational life or work but to guarding the borders of the Fatherland. This dramatic extension of the female sphere to include almost every social and economic activity from which women had previously been excluded only made sense because there was still one thing they were not meant to be part of: the military. In fact, women had served in the police before the war and, alongside the 400,000 nurses drafted into the Red Cross, another 500,000 women were recruited by the Wehrmacht itself, most to work for its telephone and postal services after attending a two- to three-month training course at Giessen.
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The idea of women actually bearing arms, however, remained anathema and had already legitimised the most extreme counter-measures on the part of German soldiers during the Polish campaign. Male honour became entirely bound up with military service, comradeship and calmness under fire; so much so that ‘war neurotics’, cowards and deserters were seen as neither honourable nor real men. Female honour continued to be measured in terms of chastity and sexual virtue. The Reich Ministry of Justice issued guidelines in 1943 which merely repeated the basic axiom that ‘German women who engage in sexual relations with prisoners of war have betrayed the front, done gross injury to their nation’s honour, and damaged the reputation of German womanhood abroad’. In these very different ways, the bodies of individual men and women were seen as carrying the honour of the German people.
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The moral guardian of national honour became the Nazi Party, with the head of the Office of Racial Policy asserting in August 1940 that

There can be little doubt that racial policy considerations demand that we combat with all available means the extraordinary threat of contamination and pollution this concentration of foreign workers poses . . . to our Germanic lineage. This alien population was until recently our most bitter enemy, and inwardly remains so today, and we can and may not stand idly by while they invade the vital essence of our people, impregnate women of German blood, and corrupt our youth.

In particular, the Gestapo and SD liked to think of themselves as occupying the place vacated by absent husbands, fathers, brothers and fiancés. In the face of the influx of foreign workers, the Gestapo upheld a blanket injunction against ‘forbidden contact’, investigating specific offences such as ‘personal, intimate/friendly relations’, ‘friendly or sociable behaviour towards Poles’ and ‘giving to Poles’. All of this made sense to officials steeped in notions of a ‘slippery slope’ towards ‘degenerate’ behaviour. Just as playing truant from school would lead boys to a life of theft and petty crime and girls to promiscuity, venereal disease and prostitution, so all social contact with Poles would inevitably end in bed. In this pessimistic view, police intervention was necessary, even in cases of mild transgression, to avoid greater disorder.
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From June 1940 onwards, the Gestapo began to hang Polish men in public for ‘forbidden contact’. In early July, in Ingeleben near Helmstedt a Polish prisoner of war, who had been remanded to the military prison for sexual intercourse with a German woman, was handed over to the Gestapo and ‘hanged from a tree as a warning to others’. On 26 July, Stanislau Smyl was hanged on the order of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, even though the local Gestapo office in Paderborn advised against it on mental grounds. He had apparently approached a married woman in the street, made ‘strange sounds’ and displayed his penis. On 24 August, the Gestapo took a 17-year-old Polish worker from the court prison in Gotha and hanged him by the roadside. Fifty Poles were forced to witness the execution, alongside a large crowd of Germans who had come along to watch. He was accused of having had intercourse with a German prostitute, and his body was left hanging for twenty-four hours.
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These public and degrading forms of capital punishment were designed to deter others. Although the Nazi state in principle penetrated as far down as the ranks of concierges, porters and schoolchildren, it lacked the active manpower to do more than demonstrate the risks of ‘forbidden relations’. The Gestapo might enjoy its omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent reputation but its totalitarian aspirations were curtailed by staff shortages, which became worse during the war. Just as when policing contact between Jewish men and ‘Aryan’ women before the war, so now the Gestapo depended on inquisitive neighbours denouncing those who broke the norms of the ‘national community’. By turning to terrifying, exemplary public executions, the political police were also admitting that they were far too weak to enforce the norms of the Nazi racial order universally. For the entire war, the Gestapo generated a mere 165 case files on ‘forbidden relations’ in Düsseldorf, 150 in the Palatinate, and another 146 cases in Lower Franconia.
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There was a populist side to these new rituals of public punishment. As early as March 1940, the Jena higher court complained that it had become normal in Thuringia to shave the head of a woman accused of ‘forbidden relations’, hang a placard on her proclaiming her crime and parade her through the village, even before she was charged. On 15 November 1940, people crowded into the town square of Eisenach to mock a German woman and her Polish lover, tied back to back to a post on a small platform. Above her shaven head, the placard proclaimed, ‘I let myself go with a Pole’; his read, ‘I am a race-defiler’. Mothers brought their young children to the front or lifted them up so that they could see too.
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Often there were calls for the woman to be forced to attend the execution of her lover, or even for her to suffer the same fate. Sometimes she was held to be the ‘seducer’; at others, people pointed out that she should have known better. As the kerbside judgement of a case in Regensburg would have it, ‘the larger part of the city population actually apportioned the greater guilt to the German girl’. For, it was said, ‘the Polish man was simply satisfying his sexual need, while the German girl, from whom more could be expected than the Pole, had damaged the honour of the nation’. In this view, the woman bore greater responsibility because she represented the ‘higher culture’. While the authorities slipped between notions of ‘honour’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ and hesitated over how far to trump the rights of husbands, the details of its citizens’ sex lives were presented as local news stories. In the case of married women, the husband – usually absent on military service – would be asked if he forgave his wife: if he did, then she might be given a lighter sentence or even be released.
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Re-erecting the pillory and gallows in public inevitably created problems. In Straubing, people complained that the gallows was set up too close to a youth-training camp for girls. In Lichtenfels district, it was said to ruin a ‘beautiful’ hill. The Nazis clearly intended to mobilise communities by reconnecting them with early-modern rituals of spectacular punishment but the cultural tradition had been broken and social responses were mixed.
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The new vogue for public executions was most successful in Thuringia. Even the SD was disturbed by the scale of popular enthusiasm when 800–1,000 spectators flocked to watch the mass hanging of twenty Poles in Hildburghausen – and that was not counting the 600–700 women and children whom the police prevented from attending. But this was a region conspicuous for its early conversion to National Socialism and where Protestant pastors had embraced the German Christian movement wholesale: there were no institutions here which encouraged any other view of things.
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Elsewhere, especially in Catholic areas, things were not so straightforward. Instead of creating social unity, the new scapegoating might provoke dissent. German women were not slow to voice their resentment at the sexual double standard. Spectators to a woman being paraded in the streets of Bramberg near Ebern in early 1941 for having taken a French lover ‘ventured to ask’, the SD noted, ‘whether the same would be done to a man who had an affair with a French woman while in France’. Most women in the crowd, even Party members, joined in the criticism and someone was heard shouting that ‘Thumbscrew and torture chambers are all that is needed: then we shall be fully back in the Middle Ages.’ Meanwhile, some of the men in the crowd retaliated, calling for ‘a beating’ to be added to the woman’s punishment.
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One reason for the humanitarian revulsion against the new rituals in Catholic areas was that the Poles and French were treated as coreligionists. In Kempen-Niederrhein near Düsseldorf the Gestapo ascribed the fairly hostile response to the hanging of a Pole to the influence of the Church and its rejection of such forms of public execution. The Rhineland and Ruhr had also absorbed many Polish migrants since the industrial revolution. In Schweinfurt the local Gestapo decided to move the execution of two Poles, one of whom had made a 15-year-old girl pregnant, to a concentration camp, so as to avoid the ‘great agitation’ that ‘would have resulted among the Catholic population’. In October 1941, Hitler banned the public shaming rituals and punishments, though not the public execution of foreigners. But by this time he was dealing with a humanitarian outcry of a different kind altogether, in which the country’s Catholic bishops played a leading role.
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On 9 March 1941, Konrad von Preysing, the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, used the celebration of Pius XII’s enthronement to remind his congregation at St Hedwig’s Cathedral that the Pope had ‘reaffirmed the doctrine of the Church, according to which there is no justification and no excuse for the killing of the sick or of the abnormal on any economic or eugenic grounds’. It was the first public repudiation of the Nazis’ secret ‘euthanasia’ programme. Both Protestant and Catholic bishops had been well informed of its progress, because directors of Church-run psychiatric asylums had found themselves on the front line, some fervent adherents, others deeply critical. But for the last year and a half the annual Conference of Catholic Bishops at Fulda continued to follow the lead of Cardinal Bertram and send mildly phrased and private letters asking the government if the rumours could be true. In the summer of 1941, however, legitimate petition gave way to more radical public confrontation. On 3 August, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August, Count von Galen, used his pulpit in the Lamberti church to preach publicly against euthanasia. Whereas Preysing had merely reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to killing the infirm in abstract and general terms, Galen mounted an impassioned attack:

Fellow Christians! . . . for some months we have been hearing reports that, on the orders of Berlin, patients from mental asylums who have been ill for a long time, and may appear incurable, are being compulsorily removed. Then, after a short time, the relatives are regularly informed that the corpse has been burned and the ashes can be delivered. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called ‘worthless life’, that is kill innocent people, if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state.