“Blonde Provinzen”: National Socialist Territorial and Homogenization Policies and the Murderous Consequences of Their Failure

Abstract

This article discusses the interaction between the national-socialist expulsion and resettlement programs, which emerged in the forefront of the so-called Generalplan Ost, and their disorganized and ultimately failed implementation on the basis of the German occupation policy in Poland between 1939 and 1941. The racial homogenization of the former Polish territories during this first phase of the war was used as a field of experimentation before the planners transferred the principle of “repopulation” with certain modifications to the occupied parts of the Soviet Union from June 1941 onward. Basically, it is argued that it was not primarily the implementation of existing expansion and occupation concepts that caused the radicalization of the extermination policy, but in particular the failure of the intended population exchange. The homogenization policy escalated into a historically unprecedented extermination program when the colonial space could no longer be populated “Aryan” even in its own imagination. The discrepancy between state planning and concrete implementation points to complex configurations of action that were not only fatal but decisive for the murderous radicalism of the National Socialist extermination policy as well as for the procedural decisions on the Holocaust.

In the 1970s, the international research on National Socialism was significantly shaped by the controversies between so-called intentionalists and functionalists. Historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher, Eberhard Jäckel, and Saul Friedländer primarily placed Hitler as a key agent and decision-making authority at the center of their explanatory models; identified the National Socialist worldview, in particular an eliminatory anti-Semitism linked to traditional prejudices, as the driving force behind the planning, organization, and execution of mass crimes; and saw the Nazi policy of extermination, especially in the occupied territories of the former Polish and Soviet states during the war, as a more or less direct realization of the ideological objectives of National Socialism. The functionalist school primarily took up structuralist explanatory concepts and saw the decisive causes for a cumulative radicalization process in the complex structure of rival operating elites as well as in situational dynamics driven by mostly self-inflicted constraints, and precisely not in an ideologically founded and systematically executed “Judenpolitik” with a general extermination order. ¹ Hans Mommsen stated in 1976 that the development of the Nazi regime was determined by a “gradual erosion of the traditional state structure and the progressive elimination of former allies and moderating influences of the traditional leading groups in the army, bureaucracy and economy.” In this context, “a process of cumulative radicalization of the supporting groups” of the regime and its “internal dissolution into a multitude of fiercely hostile power groups” took place. This dynamic did not require any kind of impulses from a dictator, but was driven by escalating power struggles, unclear responsibilities, and a lack of conflict regulation institutions. ²

The analysis of complex historical developments and events on the basis of one-dimensional models of explanation, as was common in the exchange of arguments between functionalists and intentionalists that lasted for years, was already judged by Peter Longerich a few years ago to be not expedient, “structuring the debates in the form of such dichotomies” is not useful because the confrontation of single-dimensional analyses could not do justice to the complexity of our research objects. ³ For example, confrontations of intention and function, center and periphery, or rationality and ideology are not very fruitful because they assume a principle of exclusivity that simply does not correspond to the historical conditions of action and decision-making. Rather, such categories are dialectically related to each other and therefore of relevance in several regards. ⁴ Consequently, it would only be consistent to question other common pairs of opposites, such as those of state planning authority and administrative implementation, because in these cases, too, a binary coding is focused on the realization of the planning objectives. There is no question that the planning-practice paradigm is in principle a productive and highly promising approach, but such an agenda often leads to a situation in which the consequences of a failure for the actors and addressees are no longer examined in detail.

This article discusses this context on the basis of German occupation policy in Poland between 1939 and 1941, ⁵ focusing on the dynamics between the National Socialist expulsion and resettlement plans, that emerged in the preliminary stages of the so-called Generalplan Ost, and their chaotic and ultimately failed realization. The decisive instrument for this policy was first of all the replacement of the population, which was carried out against the will of the residents of the conquered areas. The racial homogenization of the former Polish territory was used as an experimental field in this first phase of the war, before the planning staffs transferred the principle of Umvolkung—despite the disastrous experiences in the incorporated regions and in the Generalgouvernement—with certain modifications to the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union from June 1941 onward. The homogenization of the conquered areas was and remained the central territorial model of the National Socialist policy, even if the militarily difficult conditions on the Eastern Front and in the occupied lands made certain transitional concepts—such as the establishment of Reichskommissariaten—necessary. In principle, the article will argue that it was not only the implementation of existing occupation and control concepts, such as the Planungsgrundlagen für den Aufbau der Ostgebiete [Planning principles for the construction of the Eastern territories] of January 24, 1940, that caused the radicalization of the reorganization and extermination policy, but also, and in particular, the failure of the population exchange. ⁶ The thesis of the cumulative radicalization, as Hans Mommsens originally formulated it in 1976, must be critically examined with regard to the planning, spatial, and practical conditions of the time. The discrepancy between state planning and the concrete realization of the Umvolkung points to complex configurations of action that were not only disastrous but also decisive for the murderous radicalism of the National Socialist expansion and extermination policy as well as for the processual decision-making toward the Holocaust. The homogenization policy escalated into a historically unprecedented extermination program when the colonial space couldn’t even be populated arisch in one’s own imagination. The transition to systematic mass murder was completed at that historical moment when all other spatial and demographic concepts of order failed and the systematic murder of all European Jews, as well as (at least in the long term) of all other groups classified as artfremd, won cynical persuasiveness as a required, if not unavoidable, solution to the question of one’s own Lebensraum. ⁷

One Can Only Germanize Soil

The political measures taken immediately after the National Socialist rise to power in 1933 and in the following years up to the Second World War to realize a racially homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft in Germany are well known. ⁸ Forced sterilizations, professional bans, arrests, boycott actions, and, last but not least, the Nürnberger Gesetze concretized the intention to change German society in accordance with racial-biological criteria. ⁹ Concentration camps, pogroms and the Aryanization of Jewish property marked the resoluteness with which the homogenization policy was not only propagated but also implemented. While some orders first gave the impression that the Nazi regime was pursuing a legally codified racial segregation, from 1938 at the latest there was no longer any doubt that the government was concerned with the systematic expulsion of the Jewish population, with the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” as Hitler later expressed it in his Reichstag speech on January 30, 1939. ¹⁰ The racially homogeneous space should be realized not only in the East, but with the same consequence also in the so-called Altreich. Hitler’s programmatic statement that one can only Germanize soil was aimed here as there at the deprivation of rights, persecution, and expulsion of the so-called Gemeinschaftsfremden. ¹¹

As a pedant to these persecution and expulsion measures, the Nazi state practiced a territorialization and spatial planning policy that sought, among other things, to implement the racial-biological renewal of the German peasantry by means of agrarian structural reforms in the Reich and to mobilize the necessary settler contingents for the Germanization of the territories that would soon be conquered. The Reichsnährstand, for example, planned the transfer of more than 100,000 farmers’ families from Baden and Württemberg to the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren to initiate the Germanization of the soil there. ¹² Scales of several hundred thousand people were not uncommon in such planning scenarios. As more willing and, above all, capable farmers were available for settlement, the goal of a racially homogeneous empire could be realized more rapidly. The agricultural and settlement program, initially pursued under the leadership of the Reichsminister für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft [Minister for Food and Agriculture] Richard Walther Darré, was based on the model of the peasant as the owner of the best “Germanic genetic material,” which was supposed to guide the “regeneration of German blood” and the “breeding of the German Volkskörper.” ¹³ With the Law on the reorganization of the German peasantry of June 14, 1933, and the Reichserbhofgesetz of September 29, 1933, race became the main principle of selection for social, legal, and political hierarchization. ¹⁴

The homogenization and restructuring targets were therefore already ambitious before the war began, but in practice things went quite differently. The Nazi regime soon had to take note of the fact that the supposed Volk ohne Raum was far from enthusiastic about moving not only to the Elbe, but in perspective also to the Krim or the Urals. The limits of settler recruitment based on voluntarism became obvious soon and clashed with the growing need for suitable young farmers. Yet despite this disillusionment, a large research and planning apparatus was established whose primary purpose was to reconcile space and race in planning and factual terms. Although spatial planning had already developed into an independent scientific field of research and practice since the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the crisis phenomena of modernity, it became professionalized and institutionalized in Germany especially since the 1930s. ¹⁵ In response to the spatial planning needs of a crisis-shaken industrial society and the racial ideological assumptions of a policy of political reorganization, a body of expertise emerged that considered the formability of social space to be decisive. The expansion of the planning area during the war gave rise to a multitude of settlement, spatial and racial experts, most of them geographers, who from then on worked out radical concepts for the reorganization of Europe. While the possibilities in the Ostmark, which had been annexed since March 12, 1938, and in the Reichsgau Sudetenland, which had been annexed since October 1, 1938, remained limited, the eastern territories conquered in the war against Poland became spatial planning laboratories in which it should be possible, beyond established administrative and infrastructural structures, beyond existing legal and property relations, and irrespective of demographic conditions, to reorganize complete regions by rebuilding or by eliminating existing structures. In planning terms, such constellations were considered ideal. In this context, spatial planners already anticipated the extensive population shifts, which they simply presupposed for optimizing the regional economies. ¹⁶ Resettlement, expulsion, and deportation were regarded as drastic, but nevertheless justified measures if the unique opportunity for fundamental structural change in these areas should not be missed.

National Socialist territorialization and expansion policies thus received decisive impulses from institutionalized spatial planning, primarily by the SS planning staff established in 1939 in the Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (RKF), in which mainly geographers, architects, lawyers, and agricultural economists worked, but also by the Reichsstelle für Raumordnung led by Hanns Kerrl and by the affiliated Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung headed by the agronomist Konrad Meyer. ¹⁷ Simultaneously, the interdependence of race and space was clarified through a process of negotiation by the party and governmental bodies involved that was by no means free of contradiction and conflict. As a result, Lebensraum—as a factual synonym for space—was established as the central category of racial order planning. While Richard Walther Darré, the Reichsminister für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, intended to form a peasant elite through racial-biological Aufnordnung, thereby linking his own claim to leadership in the Germanization policy of the East, Heinrich Himmler pursued his own objectives of conquest, resettlement, and spatial planning. His radicalism consisted above all in the fact that it not only concerned the resettlement of Aryan peasants and the establishment of a large area dominated by Germans, but the “moving out of the German national border by at least 500 kilometers to the east, seen from the border of the year 1939. The aim is the settlement of this area with German sons and German families, with Germanic sons and Germanic families, becoming a planting garden of Germanic blood, to ensure that we continue to remain a Bauernvolk.” ¹⁸ Himmler’s prototype was not the farmer from Württemberg who left for the East because of an acute lack of space, but an armed Wehrbauer who was aware of his military mission and his racial-biological qualities. The Reichsführer SS left no doubt that the new order would mean the elimination of the grown structures and the violent expulsion of the resident populations. The radical nature of this intent to destroy and reorganize resulted in such a tremendous and violent challenge that Himmler did everything in his power to take full responsibility for leadership in matters of spatial and settlement planning, doubtless with the idea in mind that only the SS would ultimately be able and resolved to implement such plans systematically.

Ordering Space: Population Exchange as a Strategy of Racial-Biological Homogenization

With the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, not only the spatial dimensions of National Socialist conquest policies became concrete, Lebensraum now began to characterize the totality of a will to destroy and reorganize, which no longer fantasized the conquered territories as empty in a colonial sense, but intended to empty and reorganize them according to the principles of völkisch-racial selection. ¹⁹ In Berlin, the focus was on deciding which areas of occupied western Poland should be incorporated into the German Reich and which should constitute the Generalgouvernement, referred to as the Nebenland [side country]. After Hitler’s intervention, the Reichsinnenministerium [Ministry of the Interior] with its provisional border demarcation of October 20, 1939, aimed to incorporate not only the formerly Prussian territories but also those that had at least a certain percentage of ethnic German population. In addition, economically attractive companies and industrial sites were annexed, even if the majority of the population living there was Polish. The territorial demarcation from the Generalgouvernement proved to be particularly conflictual in this negotiation process, not only because it made a considerable difference for the populations whether they remained inside or outside the German state border, but also because the Gauleiter had a massive interest in claiming economically profitable regions for themselves while at the same time minimizing the proportion of non-German populations, because their most urgent task was—to use the words of the Ministry of the Interior—the “völkische Flurbereinigung” ²⁰ in their areas of responsibility. In doing so, they tried to integrate localities with often only marginal ethnic German populations, because they were regarded as a kind of biological capital. At the same time, however, there was a consensus from the outset that demarcation could not only be based on population proportions, but also on economic and military considerations. It was not possible to create racially homogeneous areas, as the German occupiers ideologically aspired to, only through border demarcation. This was not just indisputable; it was also clear to all those involved from the outset. Areas incorporated into the Reich with heterogeneous or even predominantly “fremdrassiger” populations were therefore to be Germanized first by population exchange as well as by specific Germanization programs. From the very beginning, the basic territorial principle linked the resettlement of ethnic German inhabitants from the now Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, as agreed in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, with the resettlement and expulsion practices in annexed western Poland. ²¹ The registration of resettlers, their removal and relocation in the Warthegau or in West Prussia was an elementary part of a homogenization process, which at the same time intended the expulsion, ghettoization, resettlement, and later also the murder of those who did not conform to the racial and political criteria of the Volksgemeinschaft. This concerned above all Polish Jews as well as the Polish intelligence, who were regarded as dangerous to the state by definition. But it also affected those who were not regarded as “eindeutschungsfähig” according to the patterns of the RKF, who had been marked and segregated as “Poles and other foreign nationals.” ²² The Gauleiters’ efforts to reduce this proportion of the population through expulsions to the Generalgouvernement, deportations to the Reich, and through shifting back the border line generated a considerable pressure of persecution and selection in the incorporated areas, which characterized the first phase of a racist spatial planning policy between September 1939 and June 1941.

How did that look in practice? Immediately after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, systematic persecution, arrest, and shooting campaigns began against Polish elites, Polish prisoners of war and Polish Jews. In this first phase, the latter were shot mainly during pogroms and at so-called acts of retaliation. SS, SD, police, and Wehrmacht operated hand in hand, although there were also protests by the Wehrmacht against the methods of the Einsatzgruppen. ²³ The most important target—apart from military subjugation—was the complete destruction of the Polish state, the elimination of its leadership, the confiscation of state and private property, and the suppression of any resistance. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of victims during the military administration until October 25, 1939. The first wave of terror up to the end of 1939 probably claimed at least 50,000 to 60,000 victims. ²⁴ Furthermore, the Reichsführer-SS, in close cooperation with the heads of the civilian administrations, pursued a radical “Judenpolitik,” which in this first phase primarily included the registration and labeling of Jewish inhabitants, their recruitment for forced labor, the plundering of their property, their arrest and execution as hostages, and their ghettoization. ²⁵ In this phase, the latter initially served as a transitional measure for later deportation to a “Judenreservat” ²⁶ that had yet to be determined. At the same time, however, the concentration of the Jews was also the consequence of the failed expulsions to the Generalgouvernement. The original intention had been to deport all Jews (and several hundred thousand Poles) to occupied Poland within a year. ²⁷ Therefore, mainly from Kalisz and Łódź, deportations started on December 1, 1939; a total of 87,883 Poles and Jews from the Warthegau reached the Generalgouvernement by December 17. In addition, there were about 30,000 expellees who were chased across the border outside the organized train transports. ²⁸ However, the capacities of the Generalgouvernement were soon exhausted. Even before the second wave of deportations in February/March 1940, in which more than 40,000 people were resettled from the Warthegau, there was complete chaos with disastrous conditions for those affected. General Governor Hans Frank protested vehemently, not out of concern for Poles and Jews, but because he feared an escalation in his area of responsibility. At the end of March, the deportations were interrupted, although the intended rates were not fulfilled at all. This “Lösung der Judenfrage” (“solution of the Jewish question”) had failed for the moment. However, in the course of this first wave, the western territories that had belonged to Prussia until 1919 had largely been made “judenfrei”. All Jews still residing in annexed western Poland at that time were then isolated in ghettos or similar districts. ²⁹

The resettlement and expulsion policies against Jews and Poles as well as the recruitment of about three million Polish forced laborers for the Reich were elemental components of the spatial homogenization practiced between 1939 and 1941. The systematic, although not always coordinated, interlocking of concentration, expulsion, deportation, removal, and resettlement policies was concretized in the Planungsgrundlagen für den Aufbau der Ostgebiete [Planning principles for the reconstruction of the Eastern territories], which were developed under the leadership of the RKF and discussed at a meeting on January 24, 1940. ³⁰ This first planning draft defined the general principles of spatial reconstruction and, in addition, formulated basic settlement, agricultural, and territorial principles of a spatial planning policy that was later differentiated in the so-called Generalplan Ost. The key principles of the occupation of the territory, which at that time covered about 87,600 square kilometers, were population replacement, settlement building and land reform. The new formation of the German peasantry was regarded as the “decisive and most important element in the reorganization,” because only “work on the soil” would guarantee the Germanisation of the conquered lands. The farmland was subdivided hierarchically: on the one hand, there was an order of family farms with 20- to 30-hectare holdings (Hufenordnung), and on the other hand, there were superior military farms of 60 to 200 hectares. Central to this was the establishment of new villages with about 300 to 400 inhabitants, the expansion of the transport infrastructure and the support of “rural craftsmanship.” The planning principles emphasize the agrarian focus of the land seizure, in which urban forms of life were considered at best in the form of “country and district towns.” The existing Polish structure of settlement was deemed unsuitable because it lacked “any sense of community spirit.” The plans were based on the “Theory of Central Places” developed by the geographer Walter Christaller as early as 1933, although it underwent some adjustments due to the violent takeover of the land, especially with regard to racial homogenization: The fact that the “Judenfrage” had priority, at least for the incorporated territories, was evident in the planning principles of the RKF as a pure numerical balance. The settlement plans were “based on the assumption that the entire Jewish population of this area of about 560,000 has already been evacuated or will leave the area in the course of this winter.” ³¹ The population size on which the planning approach was based was therefore reduced by the appropriate number from the outset. Mathematically, the “Judenfrage” had already been solved in the areas incorporated into the Reich. The second planning objective concerned the proportion of the German population in the former Prussian provinces. Through the expulsion of about 3.4 million Poles and the simultaneous arrival of ethnic Germans, a situation similar to that which had existed in 1914 should be established over the next few years. ³² For the time after the complete expulsion/deportation of the Jewish inhabitants, after the resettlement of about half of the Poles residing there, and after the relocation of several million ethnic Germans, the plan relied on state-launched displacement mechanisms such as economic competition, cultural assimilation, and a racial-biological birthrate policy to create “blonde Provinzen.” ³³ Assuming an agricultural population of about one third, there would be a need for settlers of “about 200,000 families for the new foundation of the German peasantry.” ³⁴ No one had any illusions about the dimensions of such a project, and in the end, the planners already knew that the existing reserve of settlers in the Altreich did not even come close to satisfying the requirements in the East.

“Umvolkung” as a Utopia of Racial Homogeneity

A considerable part of the planning drafts could no longer be executed during the war and had to be postponed or modified due to the military situation. In this respect, the Lebensraum concept was in many aspects a spatial planning utopia that was never realized in this form. However, this explicitly does not apply to the economic and demographic “sanitation works,” as Hitler cynically called them. The ordering of space was a murderous reality in parts of occupied Poland. ³⁵ In 1940/1941, therefore, the first steps of a völkisch-racial homogenization were executed in the core zones of settlement policy on the basis of local plans. By March 1940, the German occupiers had already deported more than 100,000 Poles and Jews from the Reichsgau Wartheland to the Generalgouvernement. After an interruption of several weeks, the expulsions continued in May. Another 121,594 Poles and Jews were again deported to the Generalgouvernement by January 1941. ³⁶ Including the 20,000 deportees until March 1941, the total number of deportees was about 280,000, but this figure can only be regarded as a minimum, since the transports from Danzig-Westpreußen and the Warthegau can no longer be fully reconstructed, and thousands of people were driven across the borders into the Generalgouvernement beyond the organized transports. Therefore, some estimates put the number of deportees up to 650,000. ³⁷ As neither the logistics nor the receiving regions in the Generalgouvernement were equipped to handle such dimensions, the expulsions took place under catastrophic circumstances. The deportees lost their livelihoods, lived in completely insufficient conditions in transit and collection camps, or were crowded into ghettos. It is impossible to estimate how many did not survive the hardships of the deportations.

Parallel to the expulsions, the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Soviet-occupied parts of Eastern Europe to the German-occupied territories began as early as October 1939. Institutionally, Himmler installed a dense network to advance the projected “Umvolkung”: Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, and the RKF’s Stabshauptamt were the central instances of homogenization, along with the Höhereren SS- und Polizeiführer. The relocations coincided with the systematic expulsion of Poles and Jews. ³⁸ In November 1939, German-Soviet resettlement treaties were signed, and based on these agreements, about 128,000 ethnic Germans from Galicia, Volhynia, and the Narew region were transferred to the German Reich by February 1940. From the Generalgouvernement, about 30,000 ethnic Germans were transferred by December 1940. Moreover, by spring 1941, about 72,000 resettlers had arrived from Latvia and Estonia, and another 48,000 from Lithuania. ³⁹ By the end of the war, a total of more than one million ethnic Germans had been registered in collective and interim camps and were subjected to racial-biological, health, political, and social selection. The technical term for this procedure was “Durchschleusung.” The Einwandererzentralstelle (EWZ) in Posen (later in Litzmannstadt), which was established in mid-October 1939, was responsible for this process. Its Rasseexperten examined the ethnic German resettlers, defined their racial characteristics, recommended or rejected their naturalization and settlement, and thus decided on the destiny of hundreds of thousands of people. ⁴⁰ Those with a negative classification had to reckon with forced labor, deportation to the Generalgouvernement or to their country of origin, and even the ordering of forced sterilizations lay within the competence of the aptitude examiners, who sometimes operated on a mobile basis. ⁴¹ In view of the increasing demand for settlers and the growing shortage of labor, the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt also screened those Poles who should be deported to the Generalgouvernement. For this purpose, the RSHA and RKF created the Umwandererzentralstelle (UWZ) with its headquarters in Posen. However, only about five percent of these people, who were screened in a multi-stage procedure, were classified as “wiedereindeutschungsfähig.” ⁴² They were transported to the Reich—even against their will—and deployed there for work.

Ideally, the settlement of the ethnic Germans, who were patterned as valuable, should immediately follow the expulsion of Polish and Jewish inhabitants. ⁴³ The owners of the previously registered and tagged farms were expelled with their families, transported away either on foot or by truck and taken to transit camps. If possible, the expropriated property was assigned to the new owners on the same day, primarily with the provision of ensuring the continuous management of the farms. In many cases, the SS grouped together several neighboring farms, increasing the size of the agricultural holdings to provide the German settlers with a better standard of living. According to this pattern, even the first “farm-to-farm resettlements” took place in Upper Silesia. Entire villages were cleared, expropriated, and the Poles living there were deported. Their property went to resettled ethnic Germans from Galicia, who took possession of the farms, businesses, and buildings immediately after their departure. Hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from the incorporated territories, where the conquered space was brutally emptied in front of the eyes of the beneficiaries. The resettlements were carried out by so-called Arbeitsstäbe, which usually comprised about thirty to forty people. After the inhabitants, soil conditions, farms, and the agricultural land had been recorded, the expulsion of the inhabitants was carried out in a relation of about 1:20, which implied that for one new settler, about twenty Polish or Jewish inhabitants were expelled. In the district of Turek in the Warthegau, for example, the staff, with support of the Gestapo and the police, made sure that the expulsion of the Polish farm owners was already completed when the settlers arrived. The expulsions were usually carried out in the early morning to prevent any escape and to guarantee the continuous supply of the animals. One person involved stated on record:

At about 3 a.m., the police forces arrived; they received final instructions for evacuation from Capt. Kreuzhofer, and between 3.15 a.m. and 4.00 a.m., they left either on motorized vehicles or on foot, guided by Volksdeutsche familiar with the area and by the trek leaders to their destinations. The evacuation went as planned and without disruption. Only in the village of Mokradolna did a Pole manage to escape during the evacuation. The police is investigating this case. ⁴⁴

The fact that this “Umvolkung” by no means went as smoothly as the SS had planned changed nothing. “Himmler is instantly displacing the peoples. Not always with success,” Joseph Goebbels commented on January 23, 1940, not without mockery. ⁴⁵ Overloaded or destroyed rail connections, insufficient transport capacities, the lack of suitable businesses, paralyzing wrangling over competencies, and miscalculations in settlement policy resulted in a considerable discrepancy between the status quo and the target situation. The resettled people from the Baltic States, Volhynia, and Bessarabia had to wait out months, sometimes years, in interim camps without adequate supply. However, the provisional camps were not equipped for longer stays, here the settlers’ reserve piled up. This blockage had devastating consequences for those affected, but above all for the Jewish population. ⁴⁶ When the deportation of the polish and Jewish populations to the Generalgouvernement was interrupted in March 1940 and finally stopped completely one year later, the whole machinery of “Umvolkung” went off the rails. The homogenization of space created intolerable living conditions, even for those who were actually intended to be integrated into the Volksgemeinschaft. But above all, it also created a context in which the spatial segregation of those classified as racially inferior was considered unfeasible and a genocidal solution increasingly appeared conceivable, if not unavoidable. ⁴⁷

The concept of racially homogeneous spaces was not only based on radical selection measures that separated the “desired human material” from the “undesired,” it also followed a biopolitical logic that in the long run relied on the up-breeding of the Volksgemeinschaft. In thirty, fifty, or one hundred years, millions of blond and blue-eyed Volksgenossen should populate the Lebensraum in the East. For this reason, the German authorities not only selected the Polish population and the resettlers from Eastern Europe, but also the ethnic Germans already residing in the incorporated territories were screened accordingly. ⁴⁸ The “Deutsche Volksliste” (DVL) differentiated into four groups. Those in the first two categories were classified as unambiguously “german” and were collectively naturalized. They received citizenship with full rights, were subject to military service, and allowed to keep their property in the incorporated territories. Meanwhile, the nearly two million people assigned to groups three and four were considered ambiguous. Their whereabouts depended on the assessment whether they could be “educated or re-Germanized over time into full Germans through intensive educational work in the Altreich” or devalued as “Schutzangehörige” with only limited rights of self-determination. ⁴⁹ At least the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt advocated such a racial-biological approach and demanded its rigorous implementation, while others, such as Reichsstatthalter Arthur Greiser, preferred a more pragmatic approach to be able to naturalize as many ethnic Germans as possible, regardless of their racial value. ⁵⁰ However, such an understanding of affiliation was difficult to reconcile with the SS’s racial-biological criteria. ⁵¹ Due to the differing handling in the Warthegau, in Danzig-West Prussia, Upper Silesia and East Prussia, the Germanization turned out inconsistently. Himmler faced massive resistance to enforcing the racial screening of Group 3. ⁵² The idea that people with ambiguous origins could be educated to become fully German after all, through years of indoctrination, did not follow a deterministic thinking but rather a political-cultural concept of assimilation. Nazism never emerged from this basic ideological contradiction, what, however, did not moderate its murderous consequences, but rather increased them. Diffuse criteria of distinction, divergent handling, and chaotic conditions in the camps and ghettos caused the Nazi functional elites to resort ever more radical measures toward those who—like Jews and Roma/Sinti—should not be part of it at all, while toward “unsafe candidates,” as it was called in SS jargon, the standards softened further in the course of the war because of a lack of military as well as labor supplies. In the context of a racial-biological selection and extermination program, a political-cultural re-education and assimilation policy, a war-related mobilization, and the establishment of a völkisch-racial social order, a homogenization was striven for, whose failure was probably one of the most decisive steps on the way to the Holocaust. ⁵³

Final Option: Genocide

In March 1941, Hitler promised Hans Frank that the Generalgouvernement “would be the first area to be made free of Jews.” Furthermore, it had been clearly decided that the Generalgouvernement “will be a German living area in the future. Where twelve million Poles live today, four to five million Germans” will live one day. ⁵⁴ This could only mean that not only all the Poles and Jews residing there, but also all those already deported would not remain in Frank’s jurisdiction. ⁵⁵ Quite obviously, spatial solution concepts and extermination options already merged in such considerations, for no one seriously believed that there would be sufficient livelihoods for 30 or 40 million deportees in Siberia or elsewhere. By the end of 1941, the territorial question of where to send millions of “Fremdvölkische” and “Fremdrassige” had turned into a supposed practical necessity to remove them completely from the zones to be Germanized as quickly and efficiently as possible. ⁵⁶ If these were Soviet Jews, this was mainly done after 22 June 1941 by shooting. Already in the first weeks of the war against the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen of the Sicherheitspolizei and the SD, in cooperation with units of the Höheren SS und Polizeiführer, the Ordnungspolizei, the Waffen-SS, the Wehrmacht and the Civil Administration, had begun to murder male Jews before they switched to shoot the entire Jewish population, including all women, children, and old people, in the summer of 1941. ⁵⁷ At the same time, the SS experimented with killing by poison gas. Thus, on December 8, 1941, Jews were murdered by carbon monoxide for the first time in Kulmhof/Chełmno. Simultaneously, the SS gassed about 900 Soviet prisoners of war in the morgue of the crematorium in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Since the end of July 1941, Reinhard Heydrich had been making “all necessary preparations in organizational, factual and material terms (. . .) for a total solution of the Jewish question in areas of German influence in Europe.” ⁵⁸ To all appearances, the decisive steps toward the general decision to murder all European Jews without exception took place in the second half of 1941. So, not at the beginning, but at the end of this decision-making process and in the transition to its actual implementation, Heydrich invited fifteen representatives of the ministries, the NSDAP and the SS to the Wannsee in Berlin to coordinate and expand the murder actions that had already begun, initiated in part, as well as those that were still outstanding, and to transform them into a systematic extermination program. ⁵⁹ In addition, it now seemed indispensable to define clearly and as unambiguously as possible who was to be considered a Jew and who was not. The synchronization of mass expulsions and resettlements had failed at this point and due to the devastating consequences, not only regional but many of the authorities involved in the territorial reorganization of the East pressed for a “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” ⁶⁰ That the catastrophe caused in annexed western Poland itself could not be remedied by the gigantic spaces in the Soviet Union became apparent at the very moment when the Nazi government moved the targeted settlement border to the Urals and the Blitzkrieg stalled in autumn/winter of 1941. The reasons that had led to chaos in annexed western Poland could not be compensated spatially, so the war against the Soviet Union did not open up any room for maneuver, but rather exacerbated the crisis significantly. To be able to launch a settlement project up to the Urals during the war, flexible occupation concepts were necessary. But according to this logic, moreover there must be now “a clean sweep against the Jews,” as Himmler phrased it. ⁶¹ The decision to systematically mass murder the European Jews was not taken by chance at the very moment when the reorganization plans assumed spatial dimensions of previously unimaginable proportions. Those who wanted to establish a “Greater Germanic Empire” as far as the Urals within thirty years perceived the Jews crammed into the ghettos of the Generalgouvernement and Warthegau as an old load which they wanted to get rid of quickly, efficiently, and definitively. Much more decisive than the specific point in time is therefore the historical moment when the murder of the European Jews turned into a program. The Wannsee Conference marked the transition from a decision-making process characterized by rather uncoordinated murder actions to a systematic, institutionally organized extermination program that marked the National Socialist occupation policy from 1942 onward. Aktion Reinhardt was symptomatic of this qualitative leap: Between July 1942 and October 1943, almost 1.8 million Polish Jews from the Generalgouvernement as well as about 50,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered by gas in the extermination sites Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor, which had been built only for this purpose. The fact that the National Socialist policy of “Umvolkung” with its concept of racial homogenization was a complete failure should not hide the fact that this policy achieved enormous efficiency, especially in its murderous practices against Jews.