Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

saying that the ‘Polish thing’ would soon be over, and that the West would not move. ‘There were food cards and soap cards and you couldn’t get any petrol and at night it was difficult stumbling around in the blackout,’ he reported. ‘But the war in the east has seemed a bit far away to them.’³⁹ A week later, fears of the conflagration in the west had not materialized. Leisure pursuits were not affected by the war raging in the east. Two hundred football matches were played in Germany that weekend. Berliners flocked to cinemas, to the opera to see Madame Butterfly and Tannhauser, or to the State Theatre, where Goethe’s Iphigenie was playing.⁴⁰ Shirer listened to a crowd of mainly women who had come out of the opera. They ‘seemed oblivious of the fact that a war was on, that German bombs and shells were falling on the women and children in Warsaw’, he observed.⁴¹ ‘I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime,’ he added on 20 September, ‘who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland… As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.’⁴² Reports from the exiled Social Democrat leadership (the Sopade), resting on information filtered out from within Germany, told much the same tale.⁴³ The propaganda version of a war forced on Germany was widely believed. So were lurid stories — mainly wild exaggeration — of Polish atrocities against the ethnic German minority in western Poland. Many approved of the ‘rigorous approach’ towards the Poles.⁴⁴ This stance was given encouragement by letters sent home by soldiers. One, not exceptional, ran: ‘Anything more vile than Polish soldiers has never been seen in a war. They’ve taken hardly any prisoners. Those falling into their hands have been butchered in a horrible fashion, and the Polacks have been treated in such brotherly fashion by us.’⁴⁵ People followed the military advance with keen interest.⁴⁶ They rejoiced in the victory.⁴⁷ But the military triumph in Poland was taken largely for granted. Hitler’s popularity was undiminished.⁴⁸ Most people hoped that the West would now see sense, and that the war would then be over.

II

The terror unleashed from the first days of the invasion of Poland left the violence, persecution, and discrimination that had taken place in the Reich itself since 1933 — dreadful though that had been — completely in the shade.⁴⁹ The orgy of atrocities was unleashed from above, exploiting in the initial stages the ethnic antagonism which Nazi agitation and propaganda had done much to incite. The radical, planned programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that followed was authorized by Hitler himself. But its instigation — everything points to this — almost certainly came from the SS leadership. The SS had readily recognized the opportunities there to be grasped from expansion. New possibilities for extending the tentacles of the police state had opened up with the Anschlu?. Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of the Security Police had been used there for the first time. They had been deployed again in the Sudeten territory, then the rest of Czecho-Slovakia, where there was even greater scope for the SS’s attack on ‘enemies of the state’. The way was paved for the massive escalation of uncontrolled brutality in Poland. Once more, five (later six) Einsatzgruppen were sent into action. They interpreted most liberally their brief to shoot ‘hostages’ in recrimination for any show of hostility, or insurgents’ — seen as anyone giving the slightest indication of active opposition to the occupying forces. The need to sustain good relations with the Wehrmacht initially restricted the extent and arbitrariness of the shootings.⁵⁰ It probably also at first constrained the ‘action’ aimed at liquidating the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.⁵¹ This ‘action’ nevertheless claimed ultimately an estimated 60,000 victims.⁵² Plainly, with the occupation of Poland, the barbarities of the Einsatzgruppen had moved on to a new plane. The platform was established for what was subsequently to take place in the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.⁵³

There was no shortage of eager helpers among the ethnic Germans in the former Polish territories. The explosion of violence recalled, in hugely magnified fashion, the wild and barbarous treatment of ‘enemies of the state’ in Germany in spring 1933. But now, after six years of cumulative onslaught on every tenet of humane and civilized behaviour, and persistent indoctrination with chauvinistic hatred, the penned-in aggression could be let loose externally on a downtrodden and despised enemy.

There had been undoubted discrimination against the German minority — around 3 per cent of the total population — in pre-war Poland, mounting sharply during the summer crisis of 1939. The Germans had also been economically disadvantaged. The incorporation of Austria and the Sudeten-land had then raised expectations among the Germans in Poland of their own ‘return to the Reich’.⁵⁴ And, in a climate of mounting ethnic conflict, Goebbels’s propaganda, grossly exaggerating or simply fabricating incidents of sporadic violence against the German minority (while of course keeping quiet about worse outrages on the German side), contributed immensely to inciting venomous antagonism towards the Poles.

For their part, immediately following the German invasion the Poles, reacting to real or alleged cases of sabotage by the German minority — taken to be a ‘fifth column’ — arrested some 10–15,000 ethnic Germans (1–2 percent of the German minority) and force-marched them eastwards.⁵⁵ Though the brutality accompanying the marches was later hugely magnified for propaganda purposes, the prisoners were indeed often beaten, or otherwise maltreated, and subjected to violence by the local population as they passed through Polish towns and villages. In some cases, those unfit to walk any further were shot.⁵⁶

Outrages against the minority German population occurred in numerous places. Most notoriously in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), attacks on Germans on 3 September had the character of a local pogrom. Precisely how many died at Bromberg has never been satisfactorily established.⁵⁷ For German propaganda, the attacks on ethnic Germans were exploited as an apparent justification for a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had surpassed in its first days anything that could be regarded as retaliation.⁵⁸ The Germans claimed in November 1939 that 5,400 had been killed in the ‘September Murders’ (including what they dubbed the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’). Then, in February 1940, on Hitler’s own instructions (it was later claimed) this was simply multiplied by around ten-fold and a figure of 58,000 German dead invented.⁵⁹ The most reliable estimates put the total number of ethnic Germans killed in outrages, forced marches, bombing and shelling at around 4,000.⁶⁰ Terrible though these atrocities were, they were more or less spontaneous outbursts of hatred that took place in the context of panic and fear following the German invasion. They did not remotely compare with, let alone provide any justification for, the calculated savagery of the treatment meted out by the German masters, directed at wiping out anything other than a slave existence for the Polish people.⁶¹

Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS.⁶² Himmler’s adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization’s other branches.⁶³ Tens of thousands of male ethnic Germans between seventeen and forty-five years of age served in the Selbst-schutz.⁶⁴ Von Alvensleben told his recruits, at a meeting in Thorn on 16 October: ‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’⁶⁵ Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. On 7 October, von Alvensleben reported that his units had taken the ‘sharpest measures’ against 4,247 former Polish citizens.⁶⁶ When one subordinate Selbstschutz leader reported to von Alvensleben that no executions had been carried out that week, he was asked whether there were no more Poles left at all in his town.⁶⁷ The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up — in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 — but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.⁶⁸

The rampaging actions of the Selbstschutz were only one element of the programme of radical ‘ethnic struggle’ (Volkstumskampf) designed by the SS leadership for the ‘new order’ in Poland. More systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations, involving widespread liquidation of targeted groups, were mainly in