Greiser was clever and ambitious enough to work his way through the intrigues of the Danzig Party to become Forster’s deputy and President of the Senate in the Free City, surviving scandals about financial corruption, his membership of a Freemasons’ Lodge in the 1920s, and the stormy break-up of his first marriage. Greiser’s survival owed not a little to his good connections with Himmler. He was also already prepared to do anything to retain favour with Hitler. ‘For this favour,’ recalled Carl Burck-hardt, ‘no price was too high. A wish expressed by Hitler counted for even more than an order.’111 When appointed by Hitler Reich Governor and Gauleiter of the Warthegau, Greiser’s ‘gratitude knew no bounds’, according to one contemporary.112 He lost no opportunity to emphasize ‘that he was
The combined headship of state and party in the incorporated area, following the structure used in the ‘Ostmark’ and Sudetenland, provided far greater influence for the Party than was the case in the ‘Old Reich’.114 Greiser met any obstacles by pointing to ‘the special plenipotentiary powers personally given to me by the Fuhrer’ which, he claimed, according to his mandate had to be more extensive than in other areas of the Reich.115
Greiser demanded of his own subordinates that they be ‘brutal, harsh, and again harsh’ in the ‘ethnic struggle’.116 Brutality reproduced itself; it became the norm. Leniency was banned. The climate in the Warthegau can be gauged from the directive of the head of the constabulary (not the dreaded Security Police) in one district of the Posen province. Speaking of what he called the ‘Polacks’, he laid down that he did not ‘want to see any officer showing mildness to such elements’.117 The same constabulary chief added, some months later: ‘The Pole is for us an enemy and I expect from every officer… that he acts accordingly. The Poles must feel that they do not have the right to put themselves on the same level as a people of culture.’118 This ethos was passed on to and adopted by practically every one of the 25,000 or so police and 22,500 members of the civil administration — mostly drawn from the Reich — who controlled the Warthegau.119
Hitler’s attitude towards policy in the incorporated territories was typical. He placed great value on giving his Gauleiter the ‘necessary freedom of action’ to carry out their difficult tasks. He stressed ‘that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German. He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the area German, and it was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty
The Warthegau turned years of indescribable torment for the subjugated people into the nearest approximation to a vision of the ‘New Order’ in the east. The vast deportation and resettlement programmes, the ruthless eradication of Polish cultural influence, the mass-closing of Catholic churches and arrests or murder of clergy, the eviction of Poles from their property, and the scarcely believable levels of discrimination against the majority Polish population — always accompanied by the threat of summary execution — were carried out under the aegis of Greiser and Koppe with little need to involve Hitler. Not least, the vicious drive by the same pairing to rid their Germanized area of the lowest of the low — the Jewish minority in the Warthegau — was to form a vital link in the chain that would lead by late 1941 to the ‘Final Solution’.123
The rapidity with which the geographical divisions and administrative structure for the occupied territories of former Poland had been improvised, the free hand given to Party bosses, the widespread autonomy which the police had obtained, and the complete absence of legal constraint, had created a power free-for-all in the ‘wild east’. But where conflict among the occupying authorities was most endemic, as in the General Government, the greatest concentration of power was plainly revealed to lie in the hands of the Security Police, represented by the Higher SS-and-Police Chief, backed by Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler’s ‘Black Order’, under the Reichs-fuhrer’s extended powers as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, and mandated by Hitler’s to ‘cleanse’ the east, had come into its own in the new occupied territories. The unlimited power that war and occupation had brought, and the lessons in barbarism rapidly learnt in former Poland, would be put to immediate use during the onslaught on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
III
Meanwhile, within the Reich itself the beginning of the war had also marked a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism. Here, too, Hitler now authorized mass murder.
Parallel to the murders in occupied Poland, it was an irreversible advance in the direction of genocide. The programme — euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia action’ — to kill the mentally ill and others incurably sick that he launched in autumn 1939 was to provide a gangway to the vaster extermination programme to come. And, like the destruction of European Jewry, it was evidently linked in his own mind with the war that, he was certain, would bring the fulfilment of his ideological ‘mission’.
It was some time in October that Hitler had one of his secretaries type, on his own headed notepaper and backdated to 1 September 1939 — the day that the war had begun — the single sentence: ‘Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr med. Brandt are commissioned with the responsibility of extending the authority of specified doctors so that, after critical assessment of their condition, those adjudged incurably ill can be granted mercy-death.’ He took a pen and signed his name below this lapidary, open-ended death-sentence.124
By this time, the killing of mental patients, already authorized verbally by Hitler, was well under way. It suited neither Hitler’s style nor his instinct to transmit lethal orders in writing. The reason he did so on this one and only occasion was because of the difficulties, in a land where the writ of law was still presumed to run, already being encountered by those attempting, without any obvious authority, to build an organization in conditions of secrecy to implement a murderous mandate.125 Even then, knowledge of Hitler’s written authorization was confined to as few persons as possible. It was ten months later, on 27 August 1940, before even the Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, faced with growing criticism of the illegality of what was inevitably leaking more and more into the open, was shown a facsimile of it.126
Indeed, there was no basis of legality for what was taking place. Hitler explicitly refused to have a ‘euthanasia’ law, rejecting the prospect of a cumbersome bureaucracy and legal constraints.127 Even according to the legal theories of the time, Hitler’s mandate could not be regarded as a formal Fuhrer decree and did not, therefore, possess the character of law.128 But an order from the Fuhrer, whatever its legal status, was nonetheless seen as binding.129 That applied also to Reich Justice Minister Gurtner. Once he had seen with his own eyes that Hitler’s will stood behind the liquidation of the mentally sick, and that it was not the work of Party underlings operating without authority, he gave up his attempts on legal grounds to block or regulate the killings.130 To a courageous district judge, Lothar Kreyssig, who had written frank protest letters to him about the crass illegality of the action, and on being shown Hitler’s authorization had exclaimed that even on the basis of positivist legal theory wrong could not be turned into right, Gurtner gave a simple reply: ‘If you cannot recognize the will of the Fuhrer as a source of law, as a basis of law, then you cannot remain a judge.’ Kreyssig’s notice of retirement followed soon afterwards.131
The exchange between Gurtner and Kreyssig shows how far the acceptance of ‘Fuhrer power’ had undermined the essence of law. The genesis of the ‘euthanasia action’ that Hitler authorized in writing in October 1939 provides, beyond that, a classic example of the way ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ converted an ideological goal
