Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

ministers, Hitler was keen to avoid meetings which were not orchestrated from above. According to Baldur von Schirach, appointed in summer 1940 as Gauleiter of Vienna, Hitler regarded any unofficial meeting of more than three Gauleiter as a conspiracy.¹⁹⁴

At the top of the Party, He?’s control over the Gauleiter was no greater than it had been before the war.¹⁹⁵ His office continued to have no more than a sporadic influence on policy, but did not cease in its attempts to exert pressure on the state in areas, such as racial questions, which were central to National Socialist ideology.¹⁹⁶ During 1940 such questions had reached nowhere near the intensity they would develop over the next year and a half. Bormann’s takeover of the de facto leadership of the Party from May 1941, and the launch of the Russian campaign the following month, would take the Party’s interference and scope for intervention in shaping the direction of policy on to a new plane. But the internal contradictions and incoherence would remain. They were beyond any individual, however powerful, to resolve. They were intrinsic to the very nature of the Party and the aims of the Leader it was striving to serve.

The greatest scope for the Party was in the occupied territories. We noted in the previous chapter the wide powers that Hitler bestowed upon Gauleiter Forster and Greiser in the incorporated areas of Poland. Building on the model already developed in Austria and the Sudetenland, the Party leaders were at the same time heads of the civil administration in their capacity as Reich Governors. This afforded the Party a far more decisive input in such areas than in the ‘Old Reich’.¹⁹⁷ Hitler expressly emphasized in September 1940 that his Gauleiter in the east were ‘alone responsible for carrying out the tasks required of them’, and were not to be hemmed in by legal restrictions as in the Reich itself.¹⁹⁸ After the western offensive, the same special status was granted to the Chiefs of the Civilian Administration in Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxemburg. But the ambitions of Gauleiter Josef Burckel to head a new Reichsgau Westmark through the addition of Lorraine (where he was Chief of Civilian Administration) to his Party Gau Saar-Palatinate were unfulfilled. His powers as Party boss in his Gau continued to exist side by side (and frequently conflicting) with those of the civil authorities in Lorraine.¹⁹⁹

Even in the East, where the Party-State dualism appeared resolved, there was no lessening of power struggles and organizational conflict.²⁰⁰ Here, any tension between government ministries in the Reich and Hitler’s appointees to run the occupied territories could only have one outcome. But the Party bosses, and Hans Frank as Governor General, had to reckon with the near-unconfined power of the SS running alongside their own fiefdoms. Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor of the Wartheland, was on good terms with Himmler, as he was with the Higher SS and Police Leader in Posen, Wilhelm Koppe. A member of the SS himself, Greiser was fully committed to the most radical lines of ‘ethnic struggle’ advanced by Himmler (for whom, in his new capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom, presiding over the brutal resettlement programme in the East, the ‘War-thegau’ was the most important province). The conflicts in Greiser’s area were, therefore, minimal. In the neighbouring Gau of Danzig-Westprussia Albert Forster, no less keen than Greiser in his backing for Hitler’s racial programme, was less compliant in his relations with Goring, Goebbels, Bormann, and, not least the Reichsfuhrer-SS (of whom he is reported to have said: ‘If I had a face like Himmler, I wouldn’t speak of race at all’).²⁰¹ And in the General Government, Hans Frank had increasing difficulties with the SS, especially the Higher SS and Police Leader there, Wilhelm Kruger, who could in the early years of the occupation always count upon the superior backing of Himmler, and, through him if necessary, Hitler himself.²⁰²

The clashes in the occupied territories of Poland, as the cases of Forster and Frank illustrate, were not about conflicting ideological aims. However bitter the rivalries, all those involved could have recourse to the ‘wishes of the Fuhrer’, and claim they were working towards the fulfilment of his ‘vision’. At stake were not aims, but methods — and, above all, realms of power. The very nature of the loose mandate given to Hitler’s paladins, the scope they were given to build and extend their own empires, and the unclarity of the divisions of competence, guaranteed continued struggle and institutional anarchy. At the same time, it ensured the unfolding of ceaseless energy to drive on the ideological radicalization. Governmental disorder and ‘cumulative radicalization’ were two sides of the same coin.

IV

Radicalization of the National Socialist ‘programme’, vague as it was, could not possibly subside. The ways different power-groups and important individuals in positions of influence interpreted the ideological imperative represented by Hitler saw to it that the dream of the new society to be created through war, struggle, conquest, and racial purification was kept in full view. At the grass-roots level, banal — though for the individuals concerned certainly not unimportant — material considerations like the chronic housing shortage, the growing scarcity and increasing cost of consumer goods, or an acute shortage of farm labourers could produce resentments easily channelled towards disparaged minorities and fuelled by petty greed at the prospect of acquiring goods or property belonging to Jews. The flames of such social antagonisms were fanned by the hate-filled messages of propaganda. The mentalities that were fostered offered an open door to the fanaticism of the believers. The internal competition built into the regime ensured that the radical drive was not only sustained, but intensified as fresh opportunities were provided by the war. And as victory seemed imminent, new breathtaking vistas for rooting out racial enemies, displacing inferior populations, and building the ‘brave new world’ opened up.

With scarcely any direct involvement by Hitler, racial policy unfolded its own dynamic. Within the Reich, pressures to rid Germany of its Jews once and for all increased. In the asylums, the killing of the mentally sick inmates was in full swing. And the security mania of the nation at war, threatened by enemies on all sides and within, coupled with the heightened demands for national unity, encouraged the search for new ‘outsider’ target groups. ‘Foreign workers’, especially those from Poland, were in the front line of the intensified persecution.²⁰³

However, the real crucible was Poland. Here, racial megalomania had carte blanche. But it was precisely the absence of any systematic planning in the free-for-all of unlimited power that produced the unforeseen logistical problems and administrative cul-de-sacs of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which in turn evoked ever more radical, genocidal approaches.

Those who enjoyed positions of power and influence saw the occupation of Poland as an opportunity to ‘solve the Jewish Question’ — despite the fact that now more Jews than ever had fallen within the clutches of the Third Reich. For the SS, entirely new perspectives had emerged. Among Party leaders, all the Gauleiter wanted to be rid of ‘their’ Jews and now saw possibilities of doing so. These were starting points. At the same time, for those ruling the parts of former Poland which had been incorporated into the Reich, the expulsion of the Jews from their territories was only part of the wider aim of Germanization, to be achieved as rapidly as possible. This meant also tackling the ‘Polish Question’, removing thousands of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans from the Baltic and other areas, classifying the ‘better elements’ as German, and reducing the rest to uneducated helots available to serve the German masters. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ to produce the required Germanization through resettlement was intrinsically connected with the radicalization of thinking on the ‘Jewish Question’.²⁰⁴

Beginning only days after the German invasion of Poland, Security Police and Party leaders in Prague, Vienna, and Kattowitz — seizing on the notions expounded by Heydrich of a ‘Jewish reservation’ to be set up east of Cracow — saw the chance of deporting the Jews from their areas.²⁰⁵ Eichmann’s own initiative and ambition appear to have triggered the hopes of immediate expulsion of the Jews.²⁰⁶ The Chief of the Reich Criminal Police, Arthur Nebe, asked Eichmann around the same time, in mid-October 1939, when he could send Berlin’s Gypsies into the reservation. Between 18 and 26 October Eichmann organized the transport of several thousands of Jews from Vienna, Kattowitz, and Moravia to the Nisko district, south of Lublin. Gypsies from Vienna were also included in the deportation. At the same time, the resettlement of the Baltic Germans began.²⁰⁷ Within days of the Nisko transports beginning, the lack of provision for the deported Jews in Poland, creating chaotic circumstances following their arrival, led to their abrupt halt.²⁰⁸ But it was a foretaste of the greater deportations to come.

At the end of the month, in his new capacity as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, Himmler ordered all Jews to be cleared out of the incorporated territories. The deportation of around 550,000 Jews was envisaged. On top of that came several hundred thousand of the ‘especially hostile Polish population’, making a figure of about a million persons in all.²⁰⁹ From the largest of the areas designated for deportations