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3Consolidating Power

Reinforcing the German Occupation Regime through Population Policy

The Expulsion and Killing of Potential Opponents

The total defeat of Poland, alongside the agreement with the Soviet Union, gave the Nazis free rein on its side of the demarcation line, but also limited it to this.¹ Although this dependency on the Soviet Union was conceived from the outset as only a temporary arrangement, it nonetheless helped accelerate the projection of the “Lebensraum” dystopia onto Poland: if this central promise of Nazi ideology was not to be postponed even further, meaning to the time after the “final victory” in the west and the subsequent annihilation of the Soviet Union, then the only opportunity was in Poland.

The “Lebensraum” concept, although previously seen as a utopian daydream even by many Nazis, now became a driving force in conceiving occupation policy. Its political practicability seemed to face no obstacles, at least none that could not be overcome through the massive use of violence. Where a policy of ethnic cleansing had already begun during the war, the ethnocrats in Berlin and the occupied territories soon went a step further and prepared for a systematic selection process to be applied to the entire populace. The decision was who in the new “German east” was to be granted multitiered rights to residency as “Germans” or as members of the “intermediate class” (“Zwischenschicht”), which was a contemporary term for those who eluded ethnic classification; and denying those rights and even the right to life itself to the rest as “Fremdvölkische” (the “ethnonationally foreign”). These ideas were put into action with an unconditional readiness and radicalness that typified them as elements of a genuinely Nazi project. In essence, however, they can be traced back to intentions that had already been discussed at length in imperial Prussia and also in the debates over the “border strip,” that is, the annexation plans entertained by the German government during the First World War.

Unsuccessful Prelude: The Nisko Campaign

In the first weeks after the German invasion, the main locations for the “ethnic cleansing of the soil” were Danzig–West Prussia and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Wartheland. It was in the territories annexed to Silesia, however, that the ethnocrats undertook the first steps on the path toward a broader “Lebensraum” policy guided by the ideological premises of the Nazis.²

After his successes as the head of Vienna’s Central Agency for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung), Adolf Eichmann was tasked in July 1939 with bringing the same model to Prague. The outbreak of war had led to disruptions, however, forcing the relevant agencies to seek new strategies. Eichmann thought he had found his answer when he received an order from Reinhardt Heydrich on September 7, which mandated the arrest, dispossession, and expulsion of Polish Jews living within the Reich.³ But then, after Eichmann collaborated with Dr. Franz Stahlecker, Prague’s Commander of the Security Police and the Sicherheitsdienst (Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, or BdS), an alternative solution was put forward on September 10: instead of forced emigration, there would be state-organized deportation to a territory under German control.⁴ This was the birth of the Nisko Plan. Since Stahlecker’s idea also passed through Heydrich to reach Himmler, Claudia Steur may very well be correct in her interpretation of a remark made by Heydrich during a meeting on September 14, 1939.⁵ At the meeting, he told his departmental heads that Himmler was submitting proposals to Hitler “that only the Führer could decide, because they would also be of major consequence in policy terms.”⁶ It is very probable that he was referring to this radicalization of policy, shifting from forced emigration to guided deportation.

If the Nisko campaign did in fact represent a major turning point, one must still ask: In what way? Miroslav Kárný’s skeptical assessment from thirty years ago, that there are still “many unsettled questions in the history of Nisko,” has not lost its validity.⁷ These questions have remained unresolved because they were framed wrongly or, more precisely, based on false assumptions. Although scholars have explicitly emphasized that these deportations represented a radicalization of anti-Jewish policy, they also assume that this was simply the radicalization of an already existing policy—in other words, these were intensified efforts toward the same assumed goal, namely, to make the Reich “Jew-free” (“judenrein”). It is therefore no wonder that the deportation of Vienna’s Jews, that is, Jews from the Reich, is assigned special significance here, although the Vienna group was certainly not the largest one. But what if the deportations to the vicinity of Nisko on the San River, or more precisely, to the village of Zarzecze across the San, were conducted not primarily to expel German Jews from the Reich, but instead to remove Polish Jews from the annexed territories; that is, that it was about Germanizing the annexed western Polish regions, and not Germany proper?

* * *

The historiography of the Nisko campaign is divided even in the determination of its beginnings. It starts with the question of who first advanced this idea, Eichmann or Stahlecker. But what is perhaps more important here is that both men responded to the assigned task with mass deportations to Poland, and at a time when this was not yet on the agenda even for the Reich Security Main Office.⁸ The “official” beginning of the Nisko campaign is also not entirely clear. Scholars often cite Eichmann’s memo of October 6, 1939, on an order from SS Senior Leader Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, in which Eichmann was asked to “make contact with the office of Gauleiter [Josef] Wagner in Kattowitz [Katowice].” The main goal of such discussions was to be the “deportation of seventy to eighty thousand Jews from the Kattowitz region . . . across the Vistula,” while “at the same time” Jews might “also be deported from the vicinity of Mährisch Ostrau” (today Ostrava).⁹ It should be noted: there was no mention of Vienna’s Jews here. And although Seev Goshen rightly points out that only the memo survives, and not the original order itself, Michael Wildt’s observation seems equally correct, that it is very likely an overestimation of Eichmann’s capabilities when Goshen writes of Müller’s “purported order” (emphasis added), thereby casting doubt on the existence of such an order and conjecturing instead that Eichmann was attempting to attach Müller’s blessing to the expulsion of Czech and Viennese Jews, thus providing it with the necessary authority.¹⁰ It is much more likely that Eichmann simply saw an opportunity to take Müller’s order and expand it to cover all territories he was tasked to rid of its Jewish populace. But no matter how exactly the operation started, this did not fundamentally change the course of events, which, in line with Müller’s order, placed the focus clearly on the region around Kattowitz and—as it would turn out—on Polish Jews.¹¹

This emphasis on Poland was mirrored by a shift in focus among the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, who at this point were already concentrating their efforts on the Germanization of the annexed western Polish territories. After the expulsions and killing campaigns conducted by the Einsatzgruppen and “self-defense” units, it was now time to embark on the first systematic steps toward expelling the remaining undesired population segments. And it was probably no accident that this reorientation in the policy of violence took place on October 6, the same day that Hitler announced to the Reichstag an ethnic reorganization of eastern Europe.

As both Moser and Goshen correctly assert, it was not by the most direct route that Eichmann now traveled from Berlin to Kattowitz. He probably did not, however, stop off in Vienna on October 7—as both scholars have stated without citing sources, a claim subsequently repeated by Longerich, among others—in order to then travel onward via Mährisch Ostrau to Kattowitz; that would have been indeed a “marathon tour.”¹² Instead, skipping Vienna, he made his way directly to Mährisch Ostrau, in order to inform his subordinates about Müller’s order, before traveling on to Kattowitz on October 9. Here he met first with the administration head dispatched by Wagner, Otto Pfitzner, along with the head of Border Commando III, Major General Otto von Knobelsdorff; then on the following day, he also finally met with the Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Silesia, Josef Wagner, and spoke of starting with two trains each from the areas around Kattowitz and Mährisch Ostrau.¹³ After that, Heydrich would write a progress report to Himmler that “would probably be passed on to the Führer,” before a decision would finally be made about the “general removal” of all Jews. In any case, the first ones earmarked for expulsion here were Jews from the annexed territories, and not those from Austria or Germany itself.¹⁴

It can be assumed that when Eichmann spoke to his meeting partners about his intention to deport four thousand Jews to or across the demarcation line, he was “preaching to the choir”; after all, Wagner himself had already been planning to initiate the expulsion of the Jewish populace.¹⁵ Somewhat unclear, however, was the figure of three hundred thousand Jews that Eichmann introduced here for the first time—and, specifically, Jews from Germany and Austria. In Kárný’s view, this probably did not mean a program for deporting all Jews from Germany and Austria, since the number was too low for this. And ultimately, the meeting minutes state that Hitler had ordered a “reallocation” (“Umschichtung”) of these persons but not their expulsion across the national border.¹⁶

With this train of events, it remains unclear how the deportations of Vienna’s Jews came to pass at all, since mention of Vienna was absent—according to Eichmann’s own records—from Müller’s order, as was mention of what were now three hundred thousand Jews to be deported. Steur traces the increasing radicalization to Heydrich’s visit with Hitler on October 7, when the topics under discussion included the “handling of Jews” (“Judenbehandlung”).¹⁷ And although it seems entirely possible that Heydrich thereby sought authorization to expand the deportations and passed the larger numbers on to Eichmann, who on that day was still in Berlin and not already on his way to Vienna, Steur’s evidence nonetheless remains questionable because her conjecture is based on an extremely short entry in Halder’s war diary. But the entry reveals little and seems to refer more to a conflict between the Wehrmacht and the SS over the killings conducted by a police unit in Mława.¹⁸ In the entry, Halder simply wrote, “Complaint about Mława. Handling of Jews.”¹⁹

Even if Halder’s war diary is not enough to show that Hitler himself had approved large-scale deportations of Jews from the Reich itself, the likelihood that Eichmann received the number three hundred thousand from Müller or Heydrich before leaving Berlin is nonetheless much greater than the possibility that he simply invented it, thereby mentioning it to Wagner without any backing from above. Such a rapid escalation would not have been otherwise unusual for the overall Nisko campaign, nor for the subsequent deportation actions. In Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz, Eichmann did name Poland as the destination for the deportation trains, but what the exact locality would be, he did not know. It was only after the discussion with Wagner that Eichmann, along with Stahlecker, set out for Poland to settle this question as well. The initial ruminations focusing on the area around Kraków were made obsolete by the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty of September 28, which is why the area around Lublin now came into consideration. It was from there that Eichmann’s wireless message of October 15, 1939, then reached the Gestapo in Mährisch Ostrau: “Railroad station for transports is Nisko on the San”—just in time to keep the entire operation from grinding to a halt.²⁰ It was only two days later that the Gestapo assembled the first transport, which left Mährisch Ostrau on October 18 as the first train in the Nisko campaign. On board were some nine hundred male Jews, who were considered by the Gestapo to be in good physical condition, and who were predominately Polish nationals—a crucial aspect, for it underlines the focus of the Nisko campaign.²¹

Just like its origins, the sudden termination of the Nisko campaign by an order from Berlin also raises some fundamental questions. The day after a train had left Mährisch Ostrau (which was to be followed by another from Vienna on October 20), a telex arrived in Kattowitz from Müller at the Reich Security Main Office. Sent only an hour after the transport had departed Mährisch Ostrau, Müller’s message made clear that for every further transport, there needed to be, “in general, an authorization from this office.”²²

Since Eichmann, the addressee of this message, had already left the city, it was passed on to his deputy, SS Head Assault Leader Rolf Günther, who was at that moment supervising the dispatch of a deportation train carrying Jews who had fled from Kattowitz across the border after the German invasion and sought refuge in Mährisch Ostrau.²³ Günther decided against stopping the departure of the train and instead forwarded the telex to Eichmann. As a result, the latter immediately returned from Vienna to Mährisch Ostrau, where he learned from Günther that, in the meantime, the Reich Security Main Office had now ordered that “all transports of Jews are to be stopped.”²⁴ After that, Eichmann immediately traveled on to Berlin in order to clarify the situation, for only half the originally planned transports had been sent. Nevertheless, it was no longer possible to undertake any more transports. Although one more train did leave Prague on November 1 with three hundred predominantly Polish Jews, it nonetheless had to be stopped at Sosnowitz (today Sosnowiec), especially since the bridge over the San had also collapsed in the meantime.²⁵ A third transport from Vienna also failed to come about.

Scholars have generally reckoned Eichmann to have been “successful,” at least to the extent that the first deportation wave of October 18 and 20 was followed by a second one on October 26 and 27, during which—according to Moser—4,760 Jews were deported from Mährisch Ostrau, Kattowitz, and Vienna.²⁶ On the deportations from Vienna, the Austrian State Archive holds what would seem to be the most informative summary, one bearing the notation “Correct Nisko Lists,” which shows a first transport on October 20 and a second one on October 26, with 669 persons assigned to the latter, recorded with car and seat numbers.²⁷

The Austrian archive’s list has not been mentioned in scholarship to date. But it is in fact also of questionable reliability, for it proves only that German ambitions to expel Vienna’s Jews had already ripened quite far. It does not, however, answer the question of whether this second transport actually departed, or whether it too was halted at the last moment. Neither H. G. Adler nor Herbert Rosenkranz provide evidence about this, and neither do Moser or Goshen.²⁸ Goshen quotes a telegram sent from Berlin by Eichmann on October 24, in which the latter confirmed the cessation of deportations, but he nonetheless announced to his subordinates in Mährisch Ostrau that there would be one more, final, transport, “in order to maintain the prestige of the local [i.e., Mährisch Ostrau] Gestapo.”²⁹ Meanwhile, Moser bases his claim on a telegram from the next day, in which Günther forewarned the camp superintendent in Nisko, Theodor Dannecker, of the arrival of a combined transport from Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz, which would depart from Kattowitz on October 27—but there is no mention of Vienna in the telegram.³⁰ More important: In a report on the history of the Austrian Jews under Nazism, compiled after the war by two members of the organized Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or IKG), Nisko is indeed mentioned—but with only the one transport that departed Vienna on October 20.³¹ The same is true of the fifty-page report prepared by the former head of the IKG, Dr. Josef Löwenherz. He too describes Nisko as a traumatic wound and also lists one by one the deportations to Poland that started again in early 1941—but here too, there is no mention of a second transport to Nisko.³² In the scholarly literature, however, apart from Tuviah Friedmann and Götz Aly, the second transport is taken for granted; for example, by Christopher R. Browning, Sybille Steinbacher, and Wolf Gruner.³³ No reliable evidence, in fact, exists for the second transport from Vienna apart from the aforementioned declarations of intent by the Nisko campaign’s protagonists, which means they can be more convincingly seen as simply reflecting their eagerness to actually complete the project as envisaged. But at a time when the deportations had already come under heavy fire from Berlin, eagerness probably no longer sufficed to set more trains in motion.

Moreover, my doubts about the departure of this second transport from Vienna are further compounded by a message to Himmler on March 1, 1940, written by the state secretary at the Reich Transport Ministry, Dr. Wilhelm Kleinmann, listing all transports conducted since October 18, 1939, and still scheduled to happen by March 15, 1940.³⁴ Only three of them might have been part of the Nisko campaign: a transport carrying three thousand persons from Mährisch Ostrau on October 18 and two trains carrying a total of a thousand persons from Vienna on October 20. This would roughly match Moser’s figure of 4,760 Jews deported to Poland, with the difference based on the lower number of Jews deported from Vienna, namely, a thousand persons instead of more than fifteen hundred.³⁵ Although Kleinmann’s summary also raises some questions, in that it does not mention a train from Kattowitz, and the number of persons transported from Mährisch Ostrau appears somewhat high at first, both these discrepancies could be explained by the transport from Mährisch Ostrau having gone through Kattowitz, where it gained additional cars.³⁶ Furthermore, the entry for this transport differs from all others on the list in two regards: first, the train is not labeled a “Sonderzug” (“special train”) but instead as a Wehrmacht train; second, it includes the notation “fifty freight cars.”³⁷ Since the Wehrmacht also moved its troops in freight cars, each carrying around forty soldiers with all their gear, it is entirely conceivable that fifty freight cars were used in this case to deport three thousand persons.³⁸

Kleinmann had compiled this summary after a meeting hosted by Göring, whose participants included the Gauleiters of the annexed eastern provinces, the head of the General Government Hans Frank, and Himmler. Discussions focused on the deportation of the Polish populace, and not least the question of available transport capacities. Here, it was Himmler who argued most strongly for a continuation of the deportations, and Kleinmann’s summary was now intended to prove just how much the Reich Railroad had already done. This is why it can be safely assumed that Kleinmann really made an effort to list all transports known to Berlin—and, nonetheless, there is no mention here of a second set of deportations departing Vienna in late October 1939.

Unlike with the origins and early days of the Nisko campaign, the scholarly literature is in agreement about what forced its suspension: the resettlement of “Volksdeutsche” from Eastern Europe.³⁹ As early as October 15, 1939, the Reich had already signed an agreement with Estonia that provided for the emigration of its ethnically German populace. Similar agreements followed, with Latvia on October 30 and with the Soviet Union on November 16.⁴⁰

As a consequence, the train with three thousand Jews from Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz was not the only deportation transport on October 18 that had been assembled by the Germans. That same day also saw the first “Volksdeutsche” from Estonia landing in Gdynia, which the occupiers had renamed Gotenhafen, and to make room for them, Forster’s agencies had ordered the filling of a deportation train, which left the city—also on October 18—with 925 Poles bound for Kielce in central Poland, later to be followed by more.⁴¹ The Reich Security Main Office, which had previously contravened Eichmann’s original plan by shifting the Nisko campaign’s focus to the deportation of Jews from Kattowitz along with Polish Jews in general, found itself forced to quickly change gears, for it had now become clear that tens of thousands of “Volksdeutsche” would be arriving in occupied western Poland in the coming weeks. With the strained transport situation, Himmler had to decide whether Eichmann’s deportation of Jews or the accommodation of the “Volksdeutsche” should take priority. It is hardly surprising that Himmler decided to prioritize the deportation of the Polish populace in and around Gotenhafen, in order to free up the necessary housing and jobs for the “Volksdeutsche” who were now rolling in.

In the scholarly literature, there is now general agreement that the debarking of the Baltic Germans in Gotenhafen and Danzig was what stopped the deportations to Nisko. But the stoppage has often been mistakenly interpreted as a situation in which Nazi aspirations to expel Jews from the Reich had been subordinated, if only temporarily, to the needs of the ethnic Germans, when in fact the Nisko campaign should itself be seen as an early attempt to Germanize the annexed western Polish territories. Accepting this hypothesis also has implications for the position assigned to the Nisko campaign in the history of the annihilation of the Jews. David Cesarini, for example, suggests that Müller was already thinking ahead at this early date and had ordered the Nisko campaign in order to “broach an entirely new policy”: the deportation of all Jews from the Reich, which included the annexed territories.⁴² Michael Alberti likewise sees Nisko as “part of a much larger plan.”⁴³ In this view, the Nisko campaign appears to be a first step toward a more comprehensive, but primarily anti-Jewish, policy. As far as could be found in the scholarly literature, it is only Ludmila Nesládková who contradicts this interpretation, viewing the stopping of the Nisko campaign as an effort to press ahead with what was the “most urgent concern” of the Reich Security Main Office at the time, making the annexed Polish territories “Jew-free.”⁴⁴ I expressly concur with this analysis and would like to suggest situating the stopping of the Nisko campaign primarily within the context of the Germanization policy aimed at the western Polish territories. It is certainly true that Eichmann’s and Stahlecker’s initiative was originally aimed at deporting Jews from their area of responsibility and would have also signified a further step in the radicalization of the Reich’s anti-Jewish policy. But it is equally true that these two men ultimately failed to push their plan through at the Reich Security Main Office. Here I would argue that Heydrich’s and Himmler’s attention had meanwhile become completely focused on the developments in Poland and on removing all people considered racially or politically undesirable from the annexed territories. Eichmann’s plans for the deportation of Jews were a good fit here, but not in their original form, because the point was to expel Polish Jews, not German ones.⁴⁵

The stopping of the Nisko campaign was the result of efforts by Heydrich and Himmler to fit this plan as well into the wider policy directed at Poland. Although their intentions cannot be used to also explain the inclusion of Viennese Jews, the Gestapo did nonetheless concentrate on selecting Jews with Polish citizenship in the deportations completed from Mährisch Ostrau and the one planned for Prague. The arrival of the “Volksdeutsche” in Poland certainly did force the Reich Security Main Office to reconsider the existing measures and ultimately to halt the Nisko campaign. But, as I have shown, and in contrast to the common view in the scholarly literature, it cannot be said that a project had thereby been stopped that had nothing to do with the Germanization of the annexed territories. If, as I have argued, the Nisko campaign is to be viewed more as a continuation of the Germanization policy begun by Udo von Woyrsch’s Einsatzgruppe and the Wehrmacht’s expulsion order, then the shifting of the deportation focus from Upper Silesia to Danzig–West Prussia, as necessitated by the arrival of the “Volksdeutsche,” would have been an even easier choice for Heydrich and Müller to make, for in their eyes it would have simply been a shift in geographic focus for the Germanization policy from the south to the north of annexed Poland.

The Gotenhafen Model: Establishing a Circular Flow of Resettlement

The stopping of the Nisko campaign represented the failure of the first attempt by the Reich Security Main Office at also targeting an ideologically defined enemy—the Jewish populace—after having already subjected the Polish political elite to arrest and also murder. For the planners in Berlin, the debarkation of the Baltic Germans in northern Poland pushed Upper Silesia off the agenda for the moment, and the increasing dependency of the German economy (and its war machine) on the industrial zones there would further ensure that the local populace—and this also applied to the Jews for a while—was largely spared throughout the war from interventions like those in the two northern provinces.⁴⁶

In the following months, the focus of the Nazi regime’s Germanization policy would initially shift to Poland’s northwest. The situation there was quite different from the one in Upper Silesia, and in many ways. Even during the interwar period, the Polish “Corridor” (i.e., the territory that separated East Prussia from the Reich) had already held a special place in German revanchist demands. After the conquest of Poland, the possibilities for a brutal course of action seemed greater here than in industrially important Upper Silesia, for example. Equally important was certainly the institutional framework, which remained considerably less solidified until late 1939 in the two newly established provinces of Danzig–West Prussia and the Wartheland, than in Upper Silesia or the Zichenau region. While these latter two territories were annexed to already existing provinces and immediately incorporated into their administrative structures, such structures—along with the relationship between the SS apparatus and the civil administration—were yet to be established in the two new “Reichsgaus” (meaning Gaus under the direct control of Berlin, allowing more overlaps between party and state).

But the occupiers went a step further in Poland’s northwest and attempted for the first time to establish a systematic circular flow of resettlement, meaning that the local population segment considered “undesirable” would be deported and then replaced by “Volksdeutsche” immigrants from Eastern Europe. The development and implementation of these resettlement flows, which used Gotenhafen as their gateway, would prove characteristic of the future course of Nazi Germanization policy.

The decision to terminate the Nisko campaign, occurring just as another project in Nazi ethnopolicy was delivering its first successes at Gotenhafen, was at the same time a decision to combine two undertakings, originally conceived independently of one another, into a unified Germanization policy. As Wildt has noted, the decision to combine them tempers Aly’s claim of a causal relationship between the immigration of the ethnic Germans and the deportation and ultimate annihilation of the Jews. Such a relationship did not exist, and neither was it intended at the very start, but had to be established first before it could unleash a radicalizing dynamic that has been correctly demonstrated by Aly.⁴⁷

Even with the decision to evacuate the ethnic Germans, one can already see the inadequate state of preparation that typified Nazi projects, as shown, for example, in Hitler’s promise to the leader of the German minority organization in Latvia, Erhard Kroeger, that all members of the German minority would be resettled, an action that was then carried out virtually overnight. But even here, Hitler’s sudden decision can hardly have come as a surprise, in view of a policy proposal that had repeatedly surfaced over the decades, namely, to transfer Russia’s “Volga Germans” to Germany’s eastern provinces. In any case, the project progressed apace, so that by February 1940, two hundred thousand ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe had already been resettled in the annexed territories—a vanguard for the almost one million “Volksdeutsche” who were still to follow, celebrated by Nazi propaganda as “returners” (“Rückkehrer”).⁴⁸

* * *

The arrival and departure point for this forced population exchange was to be Gdynia, the most important Polish port city, formerly named Gdingen in German and now renamed Gotenhafen by the Nazis. On the same day that Himmler was appointed (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV; Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom), early rumors were already making the rounds that the city would soon be the first target for the settlement of ethnic Germans from the Baltics. Groscurth made this note in his diary: “Latvia: directive from the Führer: evacuate Germans regardless of situation. Organization of reception in Gotenhafen, which will be cleared of Poles for this.”⁴⁹ These rumors were confirmed shortly thereafter by Heydrich on October 9, when he communicated to Ribbentrop that he considered a “substantial removal of the Polish populace from the city to be necessary.”⁵⁰

The reason for choosing Gdynia in particular cannot be conclusively ascertained. Certainly, it would seem natural to settle the inhabitants of Baltic port cities in yet another port city. But it seems likely that the choice was also influenced by Gdynia’s symbolic significance in the German-Polish conflict. The place had long been an insignificant fishing village, until the Sejm (the parliament of the reestablished Polish state) resolved on September 23, 1922, that a deepwater port would be built there—within sight of Danzig—to host Poland’s battle fleet and merchant marine and also to free the Upper Silesian mining areas from their dependence on German seaports, soon achieved with the construction of the Coal Trunk Line (Magistrala Węglowa).⁵¹ By 1932, when Gdynia had caught up with the neighboring port of Danzig, it had long since become vital to Poland’s foreign trade, and as the “pride of the Second Polish Republic,” it came to symbolize Poland’s success and will to survive.⁵² Therefore, it might have been not only for pragmatic reasons that Gdynia had been selected: by choosing it in particular for launching the Germanization of the territories to be annexed, the occupiers were also making a symbolic statement. In any case, two days after Heydrich’s message to Ribbentrop, Himmler also argued in favor of Gotenhafen, and ordered that members of the Polish elite were “to be expelled first of all.”⁵³

This dictate, that the first to be expelled should be those residents considered undesirable for political and ideological reasons, would have actually required a precise surveying of Gotenhafen’s inhabitants, as had already been launched in other occupied locales.⁵⁴ But when Forster’s agencies took over the organization of resettlement efforts in mid-October, there was no longer enough time for a survey. On October 14, a set of selection criteria was presented by Wilhelm Huth and Wilhelm Löbsack, the former being Forster’s deputy (later a Regierungspräsident and the head of Department I at the Reichsstatthalter’s offices), and the latter his ethnonationality officer (Volkstumsreferent).⁵⁵ These criteria demonstrated the pressure under which the authorities in Danzig–West Prussia were working, thereby contradicting Włodzimierz Jastrzębski’s assessment of the deportations as a “carefully prepared evacuation measure.”⁵⁶ Huth did not even bother to specify which groups were cleared for deportation and instead only stipulated those who could remain in the city: “Volksdeutsche” and—with some exceptions—Kashubians. In the process, he put down on paper what may well have been the first definition of the “Volksdeutsche” (singular: Volksdeutscher) in the annexed territories: “To be considered a Volksdeutscher is anyone who has belonged to one of the German organizations in Poland, or who as a nonorganized person has acknowledged German as his language, sent his children to a German school or raised them German, and can provide an impeccable ethnic German guarantor.”⁵⁷

The inhabitants of Gotenhafen and the adjacent locality of Adlershorst (today Orłowo) who had been labeled Kashubian by the Germans were to be spared if they had been born in the city. “The other Kashubians would be treated the same as the Poles, insofar as their dwellings are required for the Baltic Germans.”⁵⁸ In this case, the German occupiers were not so interested in how much a dwelling’s residents might be suitable for Germanization, but instead whether the dwelling itself was needed.

The emphasis on the housing question demonstrates how much the first deportation actions were shaped by the imperative to accommodate the incoming “Volksdeutsche”—a circumstance that would soon be repeated in the Wartheland. Tens of thousands were expected, and if they were to be accommodated here, then most of the roughly eighty thousand residents of Gotenhafen had to be expelled. A more nuanced survey, as had recently been begun in the rest of the province—dividing the local populace into “Volksdeutsche,” autochthonous Poles, Poles that had migrated here in the interwar period, politically dangerous Poles, and finally Jews—was deemed unworkable here. Huth clearly felt it necessary to emphasize this in particular: “There exists no directive . . . according to which the populace born in West Prussia is to remain there.” In view of the associated risk from the ethnonationalist perspective, Huth nonetheless sounded a note of caution: “But special attention must be given to the facts of whether there are German speakers among them and if these have raised their children German. If yes, then these cases are to be handled as borderline cases, in the sense that such are not to be treated as Poles.”⁵⁹ According to Huth’s instructions, the local municipal administration was solely responsible for the implementation of these measures—a provision that was intended to shut out the Immigration Central Office of the SS (Einwandererzentralstelle, or EWZ).⁶⁰

That same day, Gotenhafen’s police chief, SS Senior Assault Unit Leader Manfred Körnich, delegated the relevant responsibilities.⁶¹ The Security Police were to select the “Volksdeutsche,” register them, and provide them with identity documents—and to do so in accordance with the Gauleiter’s guidelines. In his orders to the municipal police, however, Körnich inserted one more selection criterion. Although the housing needs of the immigrants had become virtually overnight the top priority dominating all others, it still needed to be balanced against economic necessities, and so he ordered that officers should identify not only the “Volksdeutsche,” but also the Poles who worked in vital operations, in order to exempt them from deportations as well. Just a few days later, and after the first transport had already left the city, Körnich’s instructions were further refined. Whereas the Gestapo-selected “Volksdeutsche”—along with some eighty long-established Kashubian fisher families and around five thousand skilled workers—were to be exempted from deportation, “all welfare benefit recipients” were to be rounded up, thereby adding social selection criteria to the ethnic and economic ones.⁶²

The city lost around thirty-six thousand residents in total. Besides the 13,171 persons who were deported to Radom, Kielce, Lublin, and Siedlce in the General Government from October 18 to 26, another twenty-three thousand took matters into their own hands and simply fled—mostly to Posen and its vicinity.⁶³ The project could not have been judged a great success. First, not even half the city’s residents had been expelled, and most of those had ended up not in the General Government, but in other parts of the annexed territories.⁶⁴ Second, even these first deportations had put the Reich Security Main Office into conflict with the German army’s Chief Commander of the East (Oberbefehlshaber Ost), who gave his consent only “grudgingly,” for he feared the loss of “irreplaceable workers.”⁶⁵