88 The commanders on the ground in Poland, harsh though their own military rule was, did not see the atrocities which they acknowledged among their own troops — in their view regrettable, if inevitable, side- effects of the military conquest of a bitter enemy and perceived ‘inferior’ people — as part of an exterminatory programme of ‘ethnic struggle’. Their approach, draconian though their treatment of the Poles was, differed strikingly from the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
Gradually, in the second half of September the unease among army commanders in Poland at the savagery of the SS’s actions turned to unmistakable criticism.89 Awareness of this fed complaints from the Nazi leadership about the ‘lack of understanding’ in the army of what was required in the ‘ethnic struggle’.90 Hitler told Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland were ‘too soft and yielding’ and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil administration. ‘Only force is effective with the Poles,’ he added. ‘Asia begins in Poland.’91 On 17 October, in a step notably contributing to the extension of the SS’s autonomy, Hitler removed the SS and police from military jurisdiction.92 Two days later an unpublished decree stipulated that military administration of Poland would cease on 25 October, to be replaced by civilian rule. This had already been anticipated a fortnight earlier by Hitler’s decision to establish civilian administration in Danzig and West Prussia — a decision directly prompted, it seems, by Forster’s complaints about the army’s ‘lack of understanding’ for the measures being taken there.93
The transfer of responsibility from the army did little to affect the deteriorating relations between army and SS in Poland. The most forthright — and courageous — denunciations of the continuing horrendous outrages of the SS were made in written reports to Brauchitsch by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, following the ending of military administration the commander of the army in Poland.94 His reports condemned the ‘criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and administration’, castigating the ‘animal and pathological instincts’ of the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Blaskowitz feared ‘immeasurable brutalization and moral debasement’ if the SS were not brought under control — something, he said, which was increasingly impossible within Poland ‘since they can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in committing any act of cruelty’. General Wilhelm Ulex, Commander in Chief of the southern section of the front, reported in similar vein.95.
The weak-kneed response of army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch — in effect an apologia for the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy authorized by Hitler — was fateful.96 It compromised the position of the army, and pointed the way to the accommodation between army and SS about the genocidal actions to be taken in the Soviet Union in 1941. Brauchitsch spoke of ‘regrettable mistakes’
The inquiries Himmler had set in train following the army complaints predictably concluded that it was a matter only of ‘trivialities’.99 But the Reichsfuhrer-SS was angered by the attacks. In March 1940 he eventually sought an opportunity to address the leaders of the army. He accepted responsibility for what had happened, though played down the reports, attributing the accounts of serious atrocities to rumour.100 According to the memory of one participant, General Weichs, he added that ‘he was prepared, in matters that seemed perhaps incomprehensible, to take on responsibility before the people and the world, since the person of the Fuhrer could not be connected with these things’.101 Another participant, with more cause than most to take a keen interest in Himmler’s comments, General Ulex, recalled the Reichsfuhrer-SS saying: ‘I do nothing that the Fuhrer does not know about.’102
With the sanctioning of the liquidation programme at the core of the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ drive in Poland, Hitler — and the regime he headed — had crossed the Rubicon. This was no longer a display of outright brutality at home that shocked — as had the massacre of the SA leadership in 1934, or even more so the November Pogrom against the Jews in 1938 — precisely because the structures and traditions of legality in the Reich, whatever the inroads made into them, had not been totally undermined. In what had once been Poland, the violence was unconstrained, systematic, and on a scale never witnessed within the Reich itself. Law, however draconian, counted for nothing. The police were given a free hand. Even the incorporated areas were treated for policing terms as outside the Reich.103 What was taking place in the conquered territories fell, to be sure, still far short of the all-out genocide that was to emerge during the Russian campaign in the summer of 1941. But it had near-genocidal traits. It was the training-ground for what was to follow.
Hitler’s remarks to Rosenberg and Goebbels illustrated how his own impressions of the Poles provided for him the self-justification for the drastic methods he had approved. He had unquestionably been strengthened in these attitudes by Himmler and Heydrich. Goebbels, too, played to Hitler’s prejudices in ventilating his own. In mid-October Goebbels told him of the preliminary work carried out on what was to become the nauseating antisemitic ‘documentary’ film
In a most literal sense, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazis were ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, whose authority allowed the realization of their own fantasies. The same was true of countless lesser figures in the racial experiment under way in the occupied territories. Academics — historians at the forefront — excelled themselves in justifying German hegemony in the east.106 Racial ‘experts’ in the Party set to work to construct the ‘scientific’ basis for the inferiority of the Poles.107 Armies of planners, moved to the east, started to let their imagination run riot in devising megalomaniac schemes for ethnic resettlement and social restructuring.108 Hitler had to do no more than provide the general licence for barbarism. There was no shortage of ready hands to put it into practice.
This began with the heads of the civil administration in occupied Poland. Forster in Danzig-West Prussia, Greiser in the Warthegau, and Frank in the General Government were trusted ‘Old Fighters’, hand-picked for the task by Hitler. They knew what was expected of them. Regular and precise directives were not necessary.
The Warthegau provides clear illustration of the ways ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ — anticipating Hitler’s presumed wishes and intentions — translated into ever more radical actions. Hitler’s man in Posen, head of the civil administration in ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’ (as it was officially known from January 1940 onwards), was Arthur Greiser. For Greiser, a native of the Posen area, the way to Hitler had been the classical one. As with Hitler himself, the war had been a formative experience. He identified completely with the ‘front-soldier’ mentality. Defeat and the loss of his home province left a searing mark on him. Service in the Freikorps was followed by years where he scraped by, earning a living as best he could, including running boat-rides round Danzig harbour.109 His resentment at his parlous financial situation doubtless helped drive him further into the
