Читать книгу Ideology and the Rationality of Domination - Gerhard Wolf - Страница 14
ОглавлениеAmong those persons earmarked for induction into Section 3 of the Deutsche Volksliste [German People’s List], there are some who are racially unsuitable for incorporation into the German Volksgemeinschaft [ethnonational community]. But an influx of undesirable blood into the German Volkskörper [ethnonational body] must be prevented without fail.1
THESE THOUGHTS WERE written by Heinrich Himmler on September 30, 1941, as he tried to take control of the selection process applied to the local populace in occupied western Poland.
By this point, the “incorporated eastern territories” had long since become an arena of fierce wrangling between the various relevant German authorities. Occupied during the invasion of Poland and already incorporated into the Reich in October 1939, this territory was transformed into a “training ground” (“Exerzierplatz”) for Nazi population policy: here, the populace was subjected to a systematic selection process; here lay the focus of Nazi deportation policy; and here was also where the first steps were taken toward the mass murder of political opponents, sanitarium patients, and later the Jewish populace.2 The conceptual threads behind this explosion of violence intersected at two central concepts of Nazism: “Volksgemeinschaft” and “Lebensraum,” meaning “ethnonational community” and “living space.” Although Poland was not the first eastern neighbor to fall victim to the Reich’s aggressive policies, nor even its primary target, this country—or more precisely, its western part—was nonetheless the first one earmarked for Germanization, the first one upon which the Nazis projected their horrifying dystopian vision of a “German Lebensraum in the east.”
The Nazi project of Germanizing the annexed territories certainly covered a very wide range of activities, from the theft of Polish assets to attempts at replacing the local education system with a German one, and from stamping a “German character” onto towns to reshaping the rural landscape.3 But at the heart of all German efforts stood the Germanization of the populace. This essentially meant applying a selection process to the local populace, sorting them into those considered “Fremdvölkische” (the “ethnonationally foreign”), who were to be expelled or exterminated, and those considered “Germans,” who—together with the ethnic Germans brought here from Eastern Europe and the settlers from the Reich itself—were to form the core of the “Volksgemeinschaft” to be established here.
In view of the importance assigned to this particular complex in the ideology of Nazism and in the justification given for the war, it would not have been surprising if, immediately after annexation, this territory had been subjected to a coherent and systematic Germanization policy prepared long in advance.4 In fact, Hitler had already provided the relevant framework in 1922, fixing it in writing a few years later.5 According to him, if the “foreign policy of the ethnonationally oriented state [völkischen Staates]” is to establish “a healthy, viable, natural relationship between the number and growth of the population on the one hand, and the size and quality of the soil and territory on the other,” then a return to the borders of 1914 would not suffice.6 In fact, such a suggestion was “political nonsense,” as any potential success would still be so “miserable that it would not be worth it . . . to invest the blood of our people for this again.”7 Instead, a Nazi foreign policy would turn its “gaze toward the land to the east. We are finally ending the colonial and trade policy of the prewar period and moving to the territorial policy of the future.”8 In Mein Kampf, Hitler was still vague about what should happen to the populace already living there, although he did argue in brief passages for a strictly racial approach: “Germanization” must not be misinterpreted as chiefly the “superficial acquisition of the German language”—a criticism primarily alluding to attempts by Prussia and the Habsburg empire to assimilate their non-German-speaking populations, by force if necessary. He went on to write that “Germanization can be undertaken only with the soil, and never the people.” From a racial point of view, the failure of this earlier Germanization policy was neither surprising nor regrettable. After all, it was a “hardly credible error in reasoning to believe that . . . out of a negro or a Chinese a German emerges because he has learned German.” Furthermore, the necessarily associated “blood mixing” (“Blutsvermischung”) would have meant “the lowering of the level of the higher race” as well as the annihilation of the “cultural strengths” of the “German people,” and if that had happened, “it would hardly have been possible to call it a cultural factor anymore.”9 Hitler was even more explicit in his “second book” (although it remained unpublished in his lifetime): “The ethnonationally oriented state can under no circumstances annex the Poles with the intention of turning them into Germans one day. Instead, it must make a decision to either sequester these racially alien elements so that the blood of one’s own people is not undermined again and again, or else to immediately remove them entirely and thereby assign to one’s own ethnonational comrades [Volksgenossen] the land and territory freed as a result.”10
Even if these statements by Hitler were more about criticizing the previous Germanization attempts by Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy than about defining a political agenda, one thing was still clear: the areas in Eastern Europe to be occupied by a Nazi Germany had to be depopulated if they were to fulfill their function as an expanded “German Lebensraum” for a “people without space” (Volk ohne Raum, the well-known title of a 1926 right-wing novel), and they had to be settled by “Germans” in order to secure them in the long run.
Of course, the realities of Hitler’s Germany were something else. For example, the Nazi regime’s own structural idiosyncrasies were already hindering all attempts at defining long-term plans for the postwar future. After Poland’s capitulation, a multitude of actors immediately claimed precedence in taking charge of the territory’s Germanization: the most important of these included the Reich Interior Ministry (Reichsinnenministerium), the provincial administrations, and Heinrich Himmler in his new role as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV). This point also shows how misleading and simplistic it is to assume that the Nazi Party’s policies after its coming to power were simply a pure implementation of Nazi ideology, or even a direct translation of slogans contained in the party platform or in Mein Kampf, ideas written at a time when Hitler and his followers were little more than an insignificant faction in the Weimar Republic’s lunatic fringe, with no need or opportunity to actually realize their slogans on the national political stage.
This was particularly evident in the way that Nazi Germanization policy was formulated and implemented in annexed western Poland. With the diverging centrifugal forces of competing political interests built into this polycratically structured regime, there was no way they could be reconciled through common recourse to the central elements of Nazi ideology. On the contrary, it was precisely the incoherence of Nazi ideology that allowed rival actors to use it for legitimizing even contradictory policy proposals. The typical consequence was years of wrangling in which even the most basic questions could find no agreement, questions that were finally resolved not by a decision from the highest authority in Berlin, but by one from Moscow—with the invasion of the Red Army.
Himmler’s directive, cited at the beginning, points to one instance of this wrangling. At issue was the selection criteria used by the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste, or DVL), an institution meant as a tool for cataloguing the local “Germans.” His directive brings up a number of questions. For one, how could it be that in September 1941—after two years of German occupation—the relevant German agencies had still not agreed on a set of selection criteria? But more important, how did it come to pass that the implemented selection process did not actually conform to Hitler’s guidelines and limit itself to the “Germanization of the soil,” but had instead apparently aimed at the assimilation of non-Germans, so that Himmler then found it necessary to issue this course correction and demand the exclusion of “undesirable blood”? What role was played by “race” as a selection criterion? And was Himmler’s intervention actually successful?
In fact, not so much. As I will show, there were other priorities, for example, among the “ethnocrats” (to borrow an apt term from historian Michael Burleigh) who were working in the Wartheland. Already with the first instructions issued to the local bureaus of the DVL in January 1940, it was stated that “racial markers cannot be used as a reliable basis for assessing German ethnonational membership.”11 In the other two annexed provinces, Himmler’s directive would fail even more dramatically: in Upper Silesia, it was declared that the “induction of persons of German ethnonationality into the DVL can fundamentally not be made dependent on the result of a racial evaluation,” while in Danzig–West Prussia, the DVL offices were instructed that the results of racial appraisals, “for the decision making of the DVL, are not to be seen as binding.”12
The DVL was certainly not some minor undertaking but instead was at the heart of all Nazi efforts to Germanize the populace of annexed western Poland and establish a “German Volksgemeinschaft.” Founded in late October 1939 immediately after the civil administration was installed, it initially existed only under the Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor) of the Wartheland, before expanding a year and a half later to cover all of annexed western Poland, registering almost three million “Germans” by the war’s end—out of a total population of over seven million. This made it by far the largest Germanization project of the Nazi regime.13
Of course, Nazi Germanization policy in the annexed territories of western Poland was aimed not only at the inclusion of “Germans,” but also at the settlement of “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic Germans) who had been attracted from Eastern Europe by the “Homeward into the Reich” (“Heim ins Reich”) campaign and, above all, at the exclusion of the “Fremdvölkische” living there. At least in theory, this established a (coerced) circular flow of resettlement, an “organizational unity of so-called positive and negative population policy,” as Götz Aly described it.14 In this regard, I will confine my investigation to the treatment of the local non-Jewish populace; in terms of implementing bodies, I will focus on not only the DVL, but also the activities of the Resettlement Central Offices (each known as an Umwandererzentralstelle, or UWZ), which were tasked with the identification and deportation of the “Fremdvölkische.”15
After the murder sprees of the first two months had taken tens of thousands of victims, and before the anti-Jewish policy was ultimately radicalized with the establishment of the Kulmhof extermination camp (near Chełmno nad Nerem, Poland) in late 1941, the German occupiers had intended to get rid of unwanted population groups by deporting them to the territory of the General Government.16 To this end, UWZs were established in the targeted provinces, but unlike the DVL, these were subordinated not to the civil administrations, but to the local SS offices.17 Of course, they were confronted with the same question facing the DVL: According to what criteria should it be decided whether a person was to be exempted from deportation as a “German,” or should fall victim to it as a “Pole”? For persons not (or not yet) registered by the DVL, this decision was delegated to the ethnocrats of the SS apparatus. In view of Himmler’s attempt to reorient the selection practices of the DVL in favor of using racial criteria, one might expect that the criterion of “race” would dominate at least the selection practices of the UWZs.
But this too would be an overhasty conclusion. Although it is true that a few months later, Himmler’s direct orders would mean that those classified as “Deutschstämmige” (the “German-descended”) were to be exempted from deportation, it was otherwise generally not racial criteria, but instead pragmatic ones, that ultimately decided who would be deported and when. One consequence of this was that, despite instructions to the contrary from SS headquarters in Berlin, relatively few Jews were expelled from the annexed territories in the beginning.
* * *
This short outline may seem surprising, as it contradicts a historiographic trend that has asserted itself since the 1980s, one that stands against a research approach shaped by social history while instead attributing a new (and simultaneously old) explanatory power to the role of Nazi ideology, particularly—as claimed by this trend—its racial core.18 Although this “return of ideology” need not necessarily boil down to a narrow view that attributes violent policies solely to ideology, racism is nonetheless assigned the central role here, not only in terms of the demand to winnow “life unworthy of life” (“lebensunwertes Leben”) from persons deserving of life, but also in terms of legitimizing the state policies that implemented such demands.19 The appeal of this metanarrative is obvious: it enables an integrated representation of Nazi rule, so that large-scale atrocities like the Shoah, as well as the mass murders of Soviet POWs, “antisocial elements,” and all those declared a threat to the “German Volksgemeinschaft,” can be analyzed as various aspects of a single policy of violence, one aimed at establishing a racist utopia through “the final solution of the social question.”20 The widespread influence of this new paradigm is reflected in a multitude of studies in which Nazi Germany is now presented as primarily a “racial state,” to borrow the title of a 1991 book by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann.21
There are two dangers with this approach. First, it is often used as the basis for an understanding of ideology where the unquestionably irrational premises of völkisch (“folkish,” meaning ethnonationalist) or racial ideology are seen to also contaminate the policies they fuel and justify, thereby overlooking the fact that—as Werner Röhr wrote in regard to racism—its “delusional aspects . . . precludes neither their functionality in regard to its articulated goals nor the possibility of rational calculation within its framework.”22 The connection between ideology and power, so essential to the critique of ideology, threatens to be lost completely, so that ideology becomes an irrational force, one that instead of dressing up conduct serving the functional needs of power, works to threaten such conduct instead.23 The relationship between ideology and the rationale of power is no longer understood as a shifting field of contention, but is instead reduced to a straightforward dichotomy, resulting in a historiographically simplified confrontation between “ideologues” and “pragmatists.”
Second, a privileging of racism also threatens to obscure what Lutz Raphael described as the “weakly regulated pluralism within a whole array of Nazi worldviews,” although it was precisely this plurality that made the Nazi Party so attractive to contemporaries.24 This relates above all to the fact that a focus on race leads to a marginalization of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence, and begs the question why the regime chose genocide in the case of the Jews but was able to make compromises in the handling of other enemy groups. But even more relevant to the present investigation is the marginalization of the more “traditional” nationalist aspects of Nazi ideology, as embodied by terms like Volk (folk, but variously meaning people, nation, or ethnonation) and “Volksgemeinschaft.” Although the discursive framework within which the determinants of German identity could be articulated had certainly been narrowed after the 1933 Nazi takeover, one cannot say there had been a real paradigm shift. In neither the general public’s understanding nor in the multitude of official Nazi publications was membership in the German Volk defined in exclusively or even primarily racial terms: instead, it was built much more upon social practices and above all cultural ones as well, stretching as far back as to the German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
During World War II, this ideological patchwork would also turn Germanization policy into an ideological battleground, one in which the highlighting of “Volk” or “race” represented two contrasting rulership techniques for subjugating the local populace. This conflict was not a new one. As Cornelia Essner writes, völkisch ideologues like longtime Nazi Party and SA member Friedrich Merkenschlager had mobilized against the rise of racial anthropology and its popularization, even in its early days. In his 1926 polemic Götter, Helden und Günther: Eine Abwehr des Güntherschen Rassegedankens (Gods, heroes, and Günther: a refutation of Günther’s racial ideas), Merkenschlager attacked the work of Hans F. K. Günther, whose 1922 book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial science of the German people) had become by far the most popular racial anthropology work in Germany during the interwar period, and it also made a lasting impact on political debate.25 In it, in response to contemporary research, Günther outlined a topological racial anthropology of the German people, which in this view no longer formed a single organic entity (as claimed by Merkenschlager and other völkisch ideologues), but instead represented a “racial mix” comprising the various racial components of unequal value, ranging from a “Nordic” race to an “East Baltic” one.26 Günther amplified this idea with his 1925 publication, Der nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (The Nordic idea among the Germans), which opened him to criticisms that his call for “Nordification” (“Aufnordung”) was driving a wedge in the German “Volk.”27 This clash of ideas was in full swing by the time the Nazis came to power and now also engulfed the party’s different wings and their respective organs. The party’s leaders soon realized that calls for a “Nordification” of the German “Volk” threatened the building of broad-based support for their new government—particularly as fears began to spread that new laws like the one permitting forced sterilization could be tied to the dystopian vision of a “Nordic Germany.”28
Essner claims that—with the help of influential allies like Heinrich Himmler and the new Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, and despite all pacifying efforts such as those by the Racial Policy Office (Rassenpolitisches Amt)—the “Nordics” soon achieved the upper hand, so that “race” and not “Volk” became the theoretical polestar for Nazi ideology.29 I find this highly questionable because there can be no doubt that völkisch criteria, in the imagination of the German “Volk,” had lost none of its plausibility. In fact, the present investigation of Nazi Germanization policy will instead demonstrate the opposite. This is despite such instances as when the racists at the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, or RuSHA) quickly took the initiative as early as October 1939 by equipping its Poland-assigned suitability inspectors (Eignungsprüfer) with a racial criteria catalog that was meant to help them separate “Germans” from “Poles” in the annexed territories. For example, blue was not the only acceptable eye color: but if they were brown, it was important to carefully distinguish what shade. Here, “black-brown, which mostly looks sinister and tends more toward black,” was to be rejected. According to Berlin, this appeared “mostly in cases of a foreign blood element (non-European) and among colored races.” Meanwhile, “among us is . . . a rich, velvety brown (cow eyes) generally the darkest color.”30 This guidance was hardly practicable, as was the policy formulated on its basis. Neither this nor similar selection procedures would find wide application. In deciding who would now be considered “German,” the occupiers were not guided by racial anthropology criteria, but instead focused on the willingness to collaborate and perform, on submissiveness, and on the eagerness to acquire German language skills—a selection procedure that clearly harked back to Prussia’s Germanization policies.
* * *
The conflict over DVL selection criteria, as alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, not only illustrates the differences between the relevant actors in such a key area as Germanization policy, it also reveals the fruitlessness of trying to interpret the practices of German occupation organs by looking primarily at the Nazi regime’s central ideological writings. The structure and dynamics of the Germanization policy in annexed western Poland cannot be understood if they are read simply as the physical implementation of ideological dictates. Although Nazi Germanization policy clearly revolved primarily around the two ideologically loaded ideas of “Volk” and “race,” it is equally clear that the various actors did not use these terms in the same way and could not agree on how they related to one another.
It is against this background that I will analyze Nazi Germanization policy by situating it in the conflicted zone between ideological premises and the rational needs of power. Therefore, I will not treat the selection practices of the DVL and the UWZs as a linear implementation of doctrinaire demands by Nazi ideologues, nor will I analyze ideological justifications as purely window dressing for courses of action motivated by entirely unrelated rationales; instead, I will highlight the dialectic interplay between selection practices and their ideological justifications. In this context, I want to evaluate the effectiveness of völkisch and racial ideologies in shaping selection practices, while also showing, through examples of the relevant hegemonic practices, which ideologies were able to assert themselves as being particularly functional in terms of serving the needs of power. Specifically, the following questions will be at the heart of the investigation:
1) What was the process for formulating the selection criteria that separated “Germans” from “Poles,” and how were these criteria handled in practice? Why were the relevant actors unable to agree upon a common set of selection criteria valid for all provinces and for the entire duration of the war? Why were they constantly changing, often varying greatly according to time and region?
2) How important was the ideological justification for these selection criteria (whether only stipulated or actually implemented), and how “flexible” did Nazi ideology turn out to be, in giving an ideologically consistent face to the real-world necessities that faced the German occupiers?
3) How did these criteria, which could be fixed only temporarily in time and space, relate to the power politics between different institutions, as well as between the actors who tried to assert their interests? Can the actions of these institutions be understood as part of the German occupation strategy for establishing permanent possession of these territories and exploiting them economically? In this regard, did the relevant population policy measures prove to be functional for serving the needs of power?
Existing Scholarship
It is only gradually that such questions are being raised in research on Nazi Germanization policy in Poland. In the first writings on this topic, such as in the wartime underground press (as investigated by Andrzej Gąsiorowski) and the publications of the Polish government-in-exile in London, a prominent role was assigned to the DVL, which was often denounced as a tool for the occupiers to encourage collaboration in the Polish populace.31 The rapid expansion of the DVL seems to have precipitated a Polish reevaluation of Nazi occupation policy in annexed western Poland, as later publications by the government-in-exile perceptively observed that the German occupiers were increasingly orienting themselves toward a more “traditional German approach, the Germanization of the Poles themselves.”32 There was the mistaken assumption in London, however, that this shift was simply Berlin’s reaction to the failures of its deportation program, thus overlooking the bitter wrangling between various German agencies over competing strategies for achieving “German Lebensraum.”
After the war, this was another area that saw important advances initially in the courtroom.33 Especially significant here were the proceedings against the heads of the RKFDV Staff Main Office (Stabshauptamt des RKFDV), the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi), and RuSHA during the “subsequent” Nuremberg trials of 1946–49, when the spotlight already began turning to the “close connection between resettlements and evacuations,” as well as highlighting the rationale of the DVL and the “re-Germanization campaign” (“Wiedereindeutschungsaktion”) for serving the needs of power.34 After all, this allowed the Reich “to bring labor to Germany, at the same time depriving Poland of masses of its citizens and attempting to effect a forced Germanization of these foreign citizens.”35 But by assuming that this brutal population policy had been prepared long in advance in Berlin, the US prosecutors failed to understand the logic of its dynamics, which is why to them the gap between ideological dictates and policy practices necessarily appeared “somewhat inconsistent,” thereby remaining unexplained.36
For subsequent scholarly research, these trials were decisive trendsetters—in both positive and negative respects. Little attention was again paid to the ideological dimension and to its role as a battlefield for the Nazi power blocs competing for hegemony in this area. Instead, both Robert L. Koehl, in his 1957 study of Himmler’s RKFDV apparatus and its actions, and Martin Broszat, in his study of the Nazi regime’s Poland policy shortly thereafter, tended to emphasize the strategic importance of population policy for German occupation policy and the Reich’s war capacities, although the latter scholar did also address the DVL in more detail for the first time.37 Without access to the archives of Eastern Europe, both Koehl and Broszat were left to rely on the records of the regime’s central authorities in Berlin, which is why they only had a rough sense of the major role played by each local Gauleiter (Gau leader, the head of a Nazi Party regional subdivision known as a Gau).38
Despite its shortcomings, Broszat’s study was nonetheless remarkable in the German context, representing an early attempt to confront German crimes in Eastern Europe at a time when Germans were more interested in discussing their own sufferings: after all, it was more advantageous during the Cold War to highlight the mass expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, thereby scoring political points against the Soviet Union.39 This phenomenon is reflected in the multitude of studies on population groups that had been brought into the occupied territories for settlement during the war and who in this view were equally counted among the “Vertriebene” (“expellees”), an appellation that is both misleading and symptomatic.40 But because of a failure to adequately situate these resettlement efforts within the broader totality of Nazi population policy, the self-contradictions of these actions could be interpreted only through the racial worldview of the occupiers themselves, making them seem like—as described for example by Jachomowski—“one of the strangest escapades of Nazi ethnopolicy.”41 In a framework like this, questions about how such population transfers served the rational demands of power within German occupation strategy cannot even be asked in the first place.
What has proved more important in this regard are the scholarly contributions from those countries most affected by Nazi plans for more “Lebensraum,” scholarship so often overlooked in Western historiography. After the war, Poland saw determined efforts to rebuild and expand its institutions of historical research, which soon came out with several important volumes of reprinted source materials, alongside a number of publication series.42 In the early postwar period, these institutions were in demand as centers for scholarly policy advice.43 For example, while the Polish authorities may have found it easy to deport people registered in Sections 1 and 2 of the DVL, meaning those who seemed particularly loyal to the Germans, it did not seem the right way to handle the more than two million people registered in Sections 3 and 4, who were considered “Germans on probation.” They had been enrolled by the Germans because the region’s economy would have collapsed without them, and now Zygmunt Izdebski, as a rapporteur for Poland’s Ministry for the Recovered Territories (and also the head of the Polish Western Association in Silesia and a member of the Silesian Institute), used similar reasoning to argue vehemently against their expulsion, pointing to his study of the massive terror that had left many with no alternative but to apply for DVL membership.44 After it was generally decided to integrate members of Sections 3 and 4 into Poland’s postwar society, discussion of the DVL faded away, as did scholarly research into it.45
Research efforts, particularly in Poland, into German occupation policy then shifted in the subsequent period to its even more violently imposed aspects and took three fundamental hypotheses as their basis. The first one claimed that “the German imperialists . . . had detailed plans for expansion and conquest and tried to implement them consistently,” with examples ranging from the preinvasion compilation of extensive wanted-person lists to detailed geopolitical plans in the form of the “General Plan for the East” (“Generalplan Ost”).46 The second hypothesis, because of the “General Plan for the East” and the great number of persons murdered, assumed that German policy aimed at the genocide of the Polish people and of Slavic populations in general who stood in the way of the dystopian vision of a “German Lebensraum” in the east. Borrowing from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and particularly from Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, but generally without mentioning him, many scholarly studies spoke of a “direct annihilation” and an “indirect annihilation” of the Polish people, citing the targeted liquidation of its elites, the mass deportations, and the measures for the repression of Polish culture.47 In that line of reasoning, it was not uncommon to additionally claim that those measures were even more urgent for the German occupiers than, for example, their anti-Jewish goals.48 In the studies following the third hypothesis, insights into the functional aspects of Nazi population policy were frequently and unquestioningly placed alongside the claim that they had been predetermined by the racist ideology of the occupiers and had been guided by “National Socialist race theory.”49 In these studies, theoretical ideology and practical interest stand alongside one another, but their interrelationship is not explained and remains unexplored.
The results of my investigation diverge from these hypotheses, sometimes considerably. As I will show, it is hard to identify any uniform Germanization policy, as the SS apparatus was unable—and the Reich Interior Ministry even less so—to maintain control over the wayward powers on the periphery and the competing power blocs in Berlin or to steer them onto prescribed paths. In this regard, my study is more inspired by Czesław Madajczyk’s work Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939–1945 (Nazi Germany’s occupation policy in Poland, 1939–1945), still considered a standard reference today.50 To a much greater degree than most Polish researchers before him, he investigates not only the relevant Berlin head offices, but also their interactions with regional and local offices. As Madajczyk later stated in a personal rereading of his research, it was this approach that first allowed him to unravel the “discrepancy between the program formulated in advance . . . and the modifications forced on it by the actual conditions of war.”51 Nonetheless, Madajczyk’s research also has gaps, with only fragmentary analysis of the roles played by the UWZ and the DVL.
It was after the implosion of Eastern Europe’s states that the wider research field experienced a quantum leap. The reasons are easy to identify, ranging from the so-called “deideologization” of historiography in a post–Cold War world to the greater accessibility of Eastern Europe’s archives.52 It is often the more narrowly focused in-depth studies that have proved the most innovative, with investigations of specific policy areas leading to more generalized conclusions about Nazi rule.
Of particular importance for me have been—first—investigations of the role played by Germany’s intelligentsia and scholarship in formulating plans. In this regard, particular praise goes to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, whose book Architects of Annihilation (originally published as Vordenker der Vernichtung in 1991) not only highlighted a “new” class of perpetrators, but also contextualized the regime’s decision to annihilate the Jews within the wider framework of Nazi population policy, which itself was no longer treated as merely an addendum to occupation policy, but instead put at the focus of investigation.53 But the question of how important scholarly advice was in shaping policy, as explored in that and later studies, remains largely unresolved.54 On this point, I will argue more cautiously, because scholarship was often requested only when the purpose was to legitimize decisions already made.
Tied closely to those investigations are—second—studies that, while focusing on the Shoah, depart from earlier approaches that tried to explain it solely as a dynamic of antisemitic violence and embed it instead within the dystopian project of expanding “German Lebensraum.” Worth noting here is another work by Götz Aly, which spotlights the relationship between wider population planning and the annihilation of the Jews, with the faltering program of deportation and resettlement then made responsible for the decision to commit mass murder.55 Although Aly may have overstated the causative connection, he nonetheless achieved an important advance in uncovering the radicalizing influence of deportation and resettlement policies.56
The detailed demonstration of the importance of Nazi population policy has had a decisive impact, with—third—most published studies in the last two decades on the German occupation of Eastern Europe likewise devoting more attention to that aspect. The effect can be seen first and foremost in scholarly investigations of the various SS main offices (SS-Hauptämter, the top-level departments of the SS) that were directly involved in Germanization policy as a result of Himmler’s parallel roles as the RKFDV and as overall head of the SS. Noteworthy examples here include the study by Valdis O. Lumans on VoMi, and especially Michael Wildt’s study of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which had a major role in the planning of population policy.57 Building on Wildt, who has already highlighted the importance of the Reich Security Main Office in the expulsion of local “Fremdvölkische” and the selection of the “Volksdeutsche,” I will demonstrate for the first time that it also played an important role in the wrangling over the DVL. Another gap in research was addressed by Isabel Heinemann with her investigation of RuSHA; although I think she overestimated its importance, for it did not in fact become the “coordination headquarters for the settlement and race policy of the SS” or the “key institution” of Nazi population policy.58 Instead, the marginalization of all racially oriented selection processes would also push RuSHA to the sidelines.
Also proving helpful are—fourth—regionally focused studies that show, to a greater or lesser degree, the close connection between Nazi Germany’s racist plans for the east, its resettlement policy, and its mass murder of Jews. While Czesław Łuczak, for example, fails to examine more closely the difference between the regime’s racial theories and its actual policies on the ground, taking instead the former as an explanation for the latter and thus mistakenly claiming that the selection practices of the DVL were oriented toward the “racial criteria applicable to Germans in the Reich,” Sybille Steinbacher takes this complicated relationship as a defining topic.59 For her, it is clear that the German occupation’s selection and deportation policies certainly did not represent some strange “wartime experiment by irrational fantasists,” but instead must be analyzed as an undertaking “founded upon the concrete interests of power politics.”60 In all these studies, the central roles played by the UWZ and the DVL are made quite clear. None of them, however, conducts a deeper study of these institutions.61
Recent years have finally seen a number of studies that, in analyzing specific fields of activity or policy by the German occupiers, such as the invasion of Poland, economic policy, labor policy, and policies on education and culture, also investigate how these connect to Germanization policy or else make it their main topic.62 When these studies do focus on population policy issues, they tend to concentrate more on deportation, resettlement, and colonization aspects, leaving the DVL in a kind of blind spot. The only exception here is an article by Werner Röhr on Nazi population policy in the Wartheland, which also contradicts for the first time the widespread scholarly assumption that the DVL conducted its selection process according to racial criteria. Even Röhr, however, gives few details about what this selection process looked like in practice.63
Source Materials
Since a basic premise of my study is that any analysis of Nazi Germanization policy must start with the practices actually conducted on the ground, I have striven from the very start to consider not only the planning and decision-making processes undertaken by the top-level authorities in Berlin and at the various provincial administrative capitals, but also and especially the happenings in the governmental regions and rural counties (Regierungsbezirken and Landkreisen, Germany’s mid- and low-level administrative divisions). Overall, the source materials of three institutional complexes have proven to be decisive: those of the top-level Reich authorities, particularly the Reich Interior Ministry; those of the SS apparatus, ranging from the various SS main offices in Berlin to the individual SS posts and police stations on the periphery; and, above all, those of the civil administrations in the annexed regions, here too ranging from the administrative capitals down to the cities and rural counties.
The greatest part of these materials is housed in Polish archives, often in astonishing amounts. This is most conspicuous in the surviving materials on the DVL. For reasons of economy, my study focuses on the records left by the top-level heads of the three provinces in the annexed western Polish territories, one or two midlevel heads in each province, and selected low-level heads of urban and rural counties, each of whom supervised a DVL central office, a regional office, or a branch office. The surviving records of the civil administration in Posen (today Poznań, during the war the capital of the Wartheland) are exceptionally extensive and include an enormous number of DVL membership files, but those of the civil administrations in Danzig–West Prussia and Upper Silesia are somewhat scantier. The main developmental stages of selection policy in Danzig–West Prussia can be reconstructed through the parallel records of multiple sources, particularly those of the local Gauleiter’s offices, as well as those of the Regierungspräsident (governmental region president) and various city and county administrations in Bromberg Governmental Region, in addition to the postwar trial documents of Albert Forster, former Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Danzig–West Prussia. This was more easily done for Upper Silesia, where documentary gaps—particularly in the records of its Oberpräsident (senior president, the head of a province)—could be filled by the “Special Archive” holdings at the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow.
The particular weight given to events in the Wartheland are explained not only by its particularly extensive surviving records, but even more by the great importance the province had for Germanization policy. The province is where the DVL and UWZ were first established, it is where by far the greatest number of locals suffered expulsion, and it was also the location of the RuSHA field office whose analysis would prove invaluable for understanding not only the selections that RuSHA did for the UWZ but also those done at the DVL.
Whereas Michael Alberti, in his investigations of the annihilation of the Jews in the Wartheland, was often frustrated to discover that the destruction of files at the end of the war primarily involved those records that documented the most heinous of German crimes, my experience was a very different one.64 To understand just how selective the Germans must have been in destroying incriminating evidence, one can examine the surviving records of the ethnonationality unit (Volkstumreferat) at the Wartheland Reichsstatthalter’s offices, which includes not only the documents of the local DVL central office, but also a number of memoranda about the future of the Wartheland’s German and Polish populations, dystopian fantasies that eclipsed all DVL measures conducted to that date while also sketching out the ways in which the entire remaining populace would be subjected to a complicated selection process. Therefore, although the surviving source materials may have occasional gaps on specific institutions and regions, it nonetheless appears complete enough on most key issues to attempt a comprehensive analysis of Nazi Germanization policy in the annexed territories of western Poland.
Notes
1. Directive 50/I by Himmler as RKFDV, September 30, 1941, APP 406/1114, 5–6, reprinted in Pospieszalski, Hitlerowskie “prawo” okupacyjne, 144–45.
2. The term “Exerzierplatz” (“training ground”) was already used during the war to describe (for example) the Wartheland, in order to highlight the trailblazing role of the province (Alberti, “Exerzierplatz des Nationalsozialismus”; Röhr, “Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945”; Hansen, “Damit wurde das Warthegau”).
3. Recent studies of the confiscations include Dingell, Zur Tätigkeit der Treuhandstelle Ost; Rosenkötter, Treuhandpolitik. On the education system, see Kleßmann and Długoborski, “Nationalsozialistische Bildungspolitik”; Harten, De-Kulturation und Germanisierung; Hansen, “Schulpolitik im besetzten Polen.” The stamping of “German character” is specified in the confidential guidelines of Chief of Civil Administration Arthur Greiser, September 29, 1939, AGK NTN/11, 1–2. On the rural landscape, see Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften.
4. In the following investigation I will speak of the ideology of Nazism, although it was of course a theory complex drawing on very diverse streams of thought while trying to combine often contradictory approaches whose relative importance was generally not decided through intellectual debate, but instead through confrontations between various factions of the regime. For a broader look at Nazi ideology, see, for example, Weber, Faschismus und Ideologie; Raphael, “Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung”; Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie; Jäckel, Hitlers Herrschaft.
5. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 246–50. See similarly Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, 37–57.
6. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 728.
7. Ibid., 738.
8. Ibid., 742.
9. Ibid., 429–30.
10. Hitler, Zweites Buch, 81.
11. Guidelines for registering German ethnonationals in the DVL, headquarters copy, official use only, undated (probably late January 1940), APP 406/1106.
12. Memo from Bracht, undated (probably January 25, 1943), APK 117/140, 16; Forster to DVL regional and branch offices, February 9, 1943, APB 9/380, 243.
13. Besides the annexed regions of western Poland, a DVL has also been shown to exist in Ukraine and northern France, while a comparable model was similarly launched in the General Government and in southeastern European territories under German occupation civil administrations.
14. Aly, Endlösung, 381. Although such terminology is frequently used by researchers, it is also misleading, because it helps veil the frequently violent character of even “inclusivist” measures.
15. For an investigation of the selection process applied by the UWZ to the “Volksdeutsche” destined for settlement in the occupied territories, see Strippel, Einwandererzentralstelle.
16. On the early murder sprees, see particularly Jansen and Weckbecker, “Der Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz”; Mallmann, Böhler, and Matthäus, Einsatzgruppen in Polen; Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg; Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland; on the origins and function of Kulmhof, see Kershaw, “Improvised Genocide?”
17. UWZs were later established for the same purpose in the annexed territories of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola with logistical and staffing support from the Polish bureaus, whose personnel were also involved with the deportations out of Moravia, Hungary, and other occupied territories (Marczewski, Hitlerowska koncepcja, 267).
18. See here particularly Caplan and Childers, Reevaluating the Third Reich, which brings together many newer research articles. Also see, for example, Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide; Proctor, Racial Hygiene; Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie; Bock, Zwangssterilisation; Bridenthal, Grossmann, and Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny.
19. Stone, “Beyond the Auschwitz syndrome,” 454.
20. Peukert, “Genesis der Endlösung,” 25.
21. Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State. This book restricts its investigations to the inside of the Reich itself, without making any assertions about Nazi population policy in occupied Eastern Europe.
22. Röhr, Faschismus und Rassismus, 64. In the present investigation, I will use the word “racial” to denote those exclusionary practices that, from the perspective of the relevant actors, were the direct products of a—however internally coherent—“race theory.” This applies particularly to the proponents of racial anthropology, which presumed that primarily somatic and biometric markers can be used to divide humanity into distinct groups, while also defining them, attributing immutable characteristics to them, and establishing a hierarchy for them. Thereby, I also intend to establish a certain distance from the otherwise commonly used term “racist,” because this has acquired a considerably wider meaning not only in common parlance, but also increasingly among scholars as well: in this view, “racist” is basically every argumentation or behavior that discriminates against targeted groups by attributing such “immutable” personal traits—even when these are argued at least formally in cultural terms. For this expanded usage, see those studies that particularly emerged in response to the rapid rise in antimigrant attacks seen in many Western countries during the “crisis decades” (Hobsbawm) that followed the 1973 oil crisis. For example, see Taguieff, “From Race to Culture,” highlighting the central role played by New Right thinkers (especially Alain de Benoist) in France. Similarly, for the UK, see Martin Barker, The New Racism. In both cases, the conceptual thrust was clearly the same: through the biologization of divergent social practices, one could justify not only expulsions, but also assaults and lethal attacks. This inclusion of cultural differences, be they alleged or real, makes such an expanded definition of “racism” largely unusable for my investigation, because it excessively blurs the distinctiveness of another social differentiation practice that took as its reference point not “race” but “Volk” (folk here meaning ethnonation).
In a similar vein, the term “völkisch” (folkish, meaning ethnonationalist) describes in-group selection practices that, from the perspective of the relevant actors, derive from a theory, however coherent, that revolves around “Volk” as its central reference point, framing it as a historical subject and as a community of both descent and destiny, one united by shared traits and a shared language, as well as an awareness of being carriers of a historical “mission.” Although such an invocation of a community of descent clearly has essentialist elements and therefore overlaps with racial ideologies, nonetheless, as Manfred Hettling recently asserted: “Descent is not to be equated with race.” Instead, from the viewpoint of a völkisch population policy (and key to the present investigation), the Germanization of Poland was not only possible, it was virtually demanded—and not only during the German Empire period, but also the Nazi one.
23. Actions serving the rational (or functional) needs of power are here understood as actions in the political sphere that are calculated to not only secure the continued existence of the relevant institution or political regime, but also, if possible, increase its power.
24. Raphael, “Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung,” 31.
25. Essner, “Im Irrgarten der Rassenlogik,” 90–91. Furthermore, Merkenschlager was not alone in his critique, with similarly oriented ones also expressed by other scholars, especially those from southern Germany and Austria (certainly not by chance, as southerners were often deemed racially inferior to northerners), see ibid., 88–89; also Weisenburger, “Rassepapst,” 170–71 and 179.
26. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 39–73, 171–78, and 230–45. Günther relied particularly on the research of Eugen Fischer, Erwin Baur, and Fritz Lenz, with their 1921 work Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (see Essner, “Im Irrgarten der Rassenlogik,” 82–83). But Günther certainly took a few liberties in interpreting this research, as seen in his hierarchical ranking of the races allegedly existing in the German populace. This seemed not to disturb the original authors, with at least Eugen Fischer (who would later support Günther) commenting benevolently: “The poet always resonates within him” (cited in Weisenburger, “Rassepapst,” 173). For a more detailed overview of Günther’s “research results,” see Hutton, Race, 35–55; on Fischer’s relationship with Günther, see Massin, “Rasse und Vererbung,” 190–94.
27. Essner, “Im Irrgarten der Rassenlogik,” 88–97; Essner, Nürnberger Gesetze, 62–63; Weisenburger, “Rassepapst,” 175–79; Hutton, Race, 113–29. Writing later on the corrosive effect of racism, see also Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge, 271, who drew a critical response in Moses, “Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, and the Holocaust.”
28. Essner, “Im Irrgarten der Rassenlogik,” 92–97; Essner, Nürnberger Gesetze, 63–64. For a more detailed look at the confrontation between völkisch and racial ideologues, see Breuer, Völkischen in Deutschland, 113–25; Breuer, Radikale Rechte, 234–44.
29. Essner, “Im Irrgarten der Rassenlogik,” 92–97.
30. Directive from Hofmann giving instructions for suitability assessment of returnees (Rückwanderer), confidential, October 14, 1939, SMR 1372–6/26, 16–19.
31. Gąsiorowski, “Niemiecka lista narodowa.”
32. Polish Ministry of Information, The Quest for German Blood, 8. See also other ministry publications: German Invasion; Black Book; German New Order.
33. This refers not only to the Nuremberg trials, but also the Eichmann trial and especially those conducted in Poland.
34. Trials of War Criminals, 5:129.
35. Ibid., 5:132.
36. Ibid., 4:624.
37. Koehl, RKFDV, 3. On the re-Germanization program, see ibid., 123. His accounts of the DVL and the UWZs were quite cursory, see ibid., 104–7, 119–21, and 139–41. The book drew on several of his earlier articles, for example, Koehl, “Colonialism inside Germany,” “Politics of Resettlement,” and “Deutsche Volksliste in Poland.” Here also Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 86–90 and 95–96. Two years later, Broszat embedded this study in a broader outline of modern German-Polish relations, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik.
38. A good example of this is Broszat’s accounts of the DVL, which always become fuzzy in its concrete activities on the ground (such as his account of the DVL’s founding in the Wartheland, which he wrongly attributed to the local Sicherheitsdienst) and Broszat also gives no details of its selection practices (Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 115).
39. See the multivolume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (Documentation of the expulsion of Germans from east central Europe), published by West Germany’s Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons (under Minister Theodor Oberländer), and compiled by a commission that included Werner Conze, Theodor Schieder, and Hans Rothfels. This documentation project brought together people who knew each other when they used their scholarly arguments first to justify German supremacy in Eastern Europe and then during wartime to offer direct support to Nazi population policy (with the exception of Rothfels, who was forced into exile), even—as in the case of Oberländer—helping to impose it with gun in hand. On the various individuals, see Haar and Fahlbusch, Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften.
40. See, for example, Frensing, Umsiedlung der Gottscheer Deutschen; Loeber, Diktierte Option; von Hehn, Umsiedlung der baltischen Deutschen; Jachomowski, Umsiedlung der Bessarabien-, Bukowina- und Dobrudschadeutschen; Stossun, Umsiedlung der Deutschen aus Litauen; Döring, Umsiedlung der Wolhyniendeutschen.
41. Jachomowski, Umsiedlung der Bessarabien-, Bukowina- und Dobrudschadeutschen, 137.
42. For example, the Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce (Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, founded by Poland’s Ministry of Justice), the Instytut Zachodni (Western Institute) in Poznań, and the Instytut Śląski (Silesian Institute) in Opole (formerly in Katowice). These organizations released several volumes of reprinted source materials, which were often the only way for Western researchers to access the holdings of Polish archives. Of particular importance here are the multivolume Documenta Occupationis Teutonicae from the Western Institute and the Biuletyn of the Central Commission. Similarly important are the journals of the Western Institute, such as its flagship Przegląd Zachodni, whose offshoot was soon published in English, French, and German. See also the journals Studia Historica Slavo-Germanica and Studia Historiae Oeconomicae from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, which published articles in various languages and became important conduits for knowledge transfer between Polish and international scholars. For a general overview, see Czubiński, “Polnische historiographie des Zweiten Weltkrieges”; Haubold-Stolle, “Imaginative Nationalisierung.”
43. For example, see Hadler, “Drachen und Drachentöter.”
44. Izdebski, Niemiecka lista narodowa. For example, the Bishop of Katowice, Stanisław Adamski, encouraged his German-speaking clergy and parishioners to enroll in the DVL as a way to protect them against the feared negative consequences and saw this as not a “betrayal” but a “defense” of Polish identity in difficult times, see Adamski, Pogląd na rozwój sprawy narodowościowej, 17. See also the article by Adamski’s personal secretary, Romuald Rak, “Deutsche Volksliste.”
45. Scholarly interest shifted in subsequent years more toward the postwar reintegration of DVL Section 3 and 4 members into Polish society. See, for example, Boda-Krężel, Sprawa volkslisty; Romaniuk, Podzwonne okupacji; Stryjkowski, Położenie osób wpisanych. One exception is Dzieciński, Łódż w cieniu swastyki, whose study of Łódź under German occupation also contains a relatively detailed section on the wartime DVL, including a short description of its selection criteria.
46. Czubiński, “Poland’s Place in Nazi Plans,” 21. This debate was triggered by Pospieszalski, “Hitlerowska polemika,” and Madajczyk, Generalplan Ost. For an attempt to relate the deportations conducted in the Wartheland and especially in the General Government to the evolving General Plan, see Marczewski, Hitlerowska koncepcja, 263–78. Around the same time in West Germany, scholars like Helmut Heiber downplayed the General Plan as the “daydreams” of German bureaucrats drunk on power (Heiber, “Dokumentation: Der Generalplan Ost”). But in East Germany, this discussion resulted in an eight-volume series (begun a year before the Berlin Wall fell and completed in unified Germany) on Nazi occupation policy, in which the authors likewise assigned great significance to the General Plan (Schumann and Nestler, Europa unterm Hakenkreuz). In 1994, Czesław Madajczyk finally put out a compilation of original source materials on the General Plan for the East, uniting all the versions found until that point, along with submitted commentaries by various other bodies (Madajczyk, Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan).
47. On genocide and its implementation in Poland, see Lemkin, Axis Rule, 79–81.
48. For precisely such sentiments, see, for example, Datner, Gumkowski, and Leszczyński, Genocide 1939–1945, 41; Łuczak, Polityka ludnościowa i ekonomiczna, 29; Marczewski, “Nazi Nationality Policy,” 33; Marczewski, “Hitlerowska polityka narodowościowa,” 59; Chrzanowski, “Wypędzenia z Pomorza.” This discussion was continued more recently by two US historians: Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust; Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust. Here, see also Dobroszycki, “Polish Historiography.”
49. Marczewski, Hitlerowska koncepcja, 248. Marczewski is atypical in his assertion that the Germans did not invade Poland with a preformulated occupation plan. He does, however, believe that one was completed within the first few months of the occupation (see ibid., 11), an interpretation that does not really allow enough space for the evolutionary changes seen in German occupation policy. Marczewski is also more explicit than others in emphasizing the differences in Nazi population policy that separated the Wartheland from the other two provinces of annexed western Poland; see ibid., 11 and 253.
50. Madajczyk, Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands. This is an adapted German translation of his two-volume study Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce.
51. Madajczyk, “Zur Besatzungspolitik der Achsenmächte,” 304.
52. Instead of a “deideologization” of historiography, it would probably be more accurate to describe it as an ideological shift. Especially among East German and Polish historians, one can see that the prehistory of the war, the Soviet Union’s relationship with the Reich, and the even the implementation of antisemitic policies, had now acquired a very different meaning. At the same time, the collapse of “actually existing socialism” put into question all Marxist-inspired historiographies, leading to, for example, a regional revival of totalitarianism theory, which had been rejected for good reason: see Wippermann, Totalitarismustheorien; Roth, Geschichtsrevisionismus.
53. Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. It says much about the atmosphere in West Germany during the 1960s (including the academic one) that the first studies in this area were published abroad: for example, Goguel, Über die Mitwirkung deutscher Wissenschaftler; Goguel, “Bedeutung der Reichsuniversität Posen”; Goguel, “Nord-und ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” ; Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. See also Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst; Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus; Roth, “Heydrichs Professor”; Mackensen, Reulecke, and Ehmer, Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen.
54. A good example of this are the investigations into the General Plan for the East, particularly into the relationship between its two planning centers, with one run by Dr. Hans Ehlich at the Reich Security Main Office and the other run by Prof. Konrad Meyer at the RKFDV Staff Main Office, as well as their relationship with the criminal practices of the SS units, especially their murder sprees in the Soviet Union. Putting it simply, the unresolved question is: Who led the way in these massacres, the planning groups in Berlin or the murderers on the ground? Did German units follow a plan, be it finished or not, or was it the dynamics of violence on the ground that forced the agenda for Berlin’s geopolitical planners, who in many ways were always one step behind the realities and constantly having to adjust their plans accordingly? On this, see Roth, “Generalplan Ost—Gesamtplan Ost.” On skepticism about the influence of scholarly policy advisers, see also Leniger, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumsarbeit, 13.
55. Aly, Final Solution. Here, Aly was able to build on earlier scholarship, because this link was already described in Broszat’s Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik and even more exhaustively in Christopher Browning’s research. Nonetheless, Aly’s analysis is a new one, in that Broszat primarily highlights the link between deportation and resettlement policies without discussing the effects it had on the course of anti-Jewish policy; meanwhile, although Browning does underline the radicalizing effects that the former’s failure had on the decision to commit mass murder, he does not explicitly point out that the problems of resettling ethnic Germans may have accelerated or otherwise influenced this process; see Browning, “Nazi Resettlement Policy.”
56. See also the critical counterpoint in Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 462.
57. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries; Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten.
58. Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut, 42 and 10. Also worth mentioning here is Longerich’s biography Heinrich Himmler, which devotes much space to population policy.
59. Łuczak, Pod niemieckim jarzmem, 60.
60. Steinbacher, Musterstadt Auschwitz, 94; see also 118–19.
61. See, for example, Esch, Gesunde Verhältnisse; Kaczmarek, “Zwischen Altreich und Besatzungsgebiet.” See also the biographies written about the Gauleiters (who were simultaneously the Reichsstatthalters) of Danzig–West Prussia and the Wartheland: Schenk, Hitlers Mann; Epstein, Model Nazi.
62. On the invasion of Poland and the population policy aspects of the Reich’s warfare, see, for example, Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland; Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. On economic and labor policy, see Röhr, “Zur Rolle der Schwerindustrie”; Röhr, “Zur Wirtschaftspolitik der deutschen Okkupanten”; Kaczmarek, “Die deutsche wirtschaftliche Penetration”; Stefanski, “Nationalsozialistische Volkstums- und Arbeitseinsatzpolitik.” On educational and cultural policy, see Harten, De-Kulturation und Germanisierung.
63. Röhr, “Reichsgau Wartheland.” See also Kaczmarek, “Niemiecka polityka narodowościowa”; Leniger, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumsarbeit; Lempart, “Deutsche Volksliste”; Strippel, NS-Volkstumspolitik.
64. Alberti, Verfolgung und Vernichtung, 17.
