Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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from the same day exactly what was envisaged in practice.

The Polish Jews

were initially to be ‘concentrated’ in large cities and then deported to an

area near the eastern border of occupied Poland, where a ‘Jewish state

under German administration’ was envisaged, as Heydrich explained to

Brauchitsch the following day.

In addition, Heydrich mentioned in his

telex a—top-secret—‘ﬁnal goal’ of the anti-Jewish measures. This presuma-

bly referred to the comprehensive programme that Heydrich had explained

to his departmental heads on 21 September in bullet-point form: the depor-

tation of the Jews from the ‘Greater German Reich’ into the ‘Jewish

reservation’ and their possible ‘expulsion’ into the part of eastern Poland

occupied by the Soviet Union.

The Soviets and the Germans reached agreement on 28 September about

the demarcation line between their respective occupation zones. The terri-

tory between the Vistula and the Bug, the later General Government district

of Lublin, had been assigned to the Germans, and the future ‘reservation’

was planned for this area, with its role expanded. The ‘Nature-conservation

area’ or ‘Reich ghetto’, as Heydrich called it, was intended to absorb those

Poles from the territories annexed to Germany who were regarded as

‘undesirable’ in addition to the Jews.

On 29 September Hitler informed Alfred Rosenberg that he wanted to

divide the newly conquered Polish territory into three parts. The area

between the Vistula and the Bug was to be separated from the west by an

‘eastern wall’, and the Jews from the whole of the R eich, as well as ‘all

elements who are in any way unreliable’, were to be settled there. A broad

strip on the old German–Polish border was to be Germanized and colo-

nized, and between these two territories there was to be a ‘form of state’ for

the Poles.

In fact, during the coming weeks the Nazi leadership treated the

idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’ as anything other than ‘top secret’.

At the beginning of October 1939 the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce

(RSHA) began to make concrete plans for the deportation of the Jews living

in the Reich to the ‘reservation’. As early as 6 October, the day before the

signing of the Decree for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation,

Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in

Prague, was ordered by Gestapo chief Heinrich Mu

ller to prepare for

the deportation of 70,000–80,000 Jews from the government district of

Kattowitz (Katowice)—in other words, from annexed Polish territory that

was now part of Silesia. According to Mu

ller, the Jews from neighbouring

hrisch-Ostrau (Ostrava) in the Protectorate could also be deported.

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Eichmann, however, was already engaged in a more far-reaching task.

Hitler, he told the Silesian Gauleiter, has, ‘to start with, ordered the transfer

of 300,000 Jews from the Old Reich [pre-1938 Germany] and the Ostmark

[Austria]’. He, Eichmann, had to report to Himmler on the ﬁrst deporta-

tions and, on the basis of this report, Hitler would then make a ﬁnal

decision.

In view of the wider perspective opened up by this, Eichmann

extended the preparations for deportation to include the Jews of Vienna and

requested a list of all the Jews who had been registered in the Reich.

The

deportations planned by Eichmann were also intended to include Gypsies.

In mid-October Eichmann and Walter Stahlecker, the commander of the

security police and SD in the Protectorate, decided on Nisko on the river

San as the railway station to which the Jews should be sent and as the

location for a ‘transit camp’. This camp, which lay directly on the border of

the district of Lublin, was intended to be a staging post through which the

Jews would arrive in the ‘Jewish reservation’.

A conscious decision was

taken not to go through with the original plan to house the deportees in

barracks.

Between 20 and 28 October 4,700 people from Vienna, Kattowitz, and

hrisch-Ostrau were in fact deported to Nisko, where their guards simply

forced them to disperse into the autumnal countryside.

However, on the

day of the very ﬁrst transport the RSHA banned further transports.

An important reason for the ban will have been the fact that, in the

meantime, Himmler, as Settlement Commissar, was developing much

more far-reaching resettlement plans which the Nisko action would have

interfered with. For Himmler was not primarily concerned with the rapid

deportation of the Jews from the Reich, but rather with his plan to deport

undesirable Poles and Jews from the annexed eastern territories so that they

could make room for the settlement of ethnic Germans. However, despite

Himmler’s new priority and despite the halt to the Nisko action, the RSHA

remained basically committed to the deportation of Jews from the Reich to

the district of Lublin.

Germanization in the annexed territories

With his intervention in the Germanization policy in the east Himmler had

in fact achieved a coup, as is clear from Darre

’s horriﬁed response. Up to this

point Himmler had strongly supported the rapid deportation of the Jews

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from the whole of the Reich. However, as we have seen, in his role as

Settlement Commissar he had called a halt to these measures after a few

weeks. The ‘Jewish question’ was now to be ‘solved’ within the much

wider framework of the ethnic ‘reordering’ of Poland.

In his new sphere of activity, as the historian Isabel Heinemann puts it,

Himmler relatively quickly achieved a ‘strategic division of labour’ with the

Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Ofﬁce East).

This body, which

had been established by Go

ring in October 1939, had the task of registering,

conﬁscating, and administering commercial property in those parts of

Poland that were to be annexed. Go

ring respected Himmler’s responsibility

for the conﬁscation of agricultural property. Moreover, in the course of the

planning for South Tyrol, an agency for immigration and resettlement had

been established under Ulrich Greifelt, and this now developed into the

headquarters for carrying out the task of ‘consolidating the ethnic German

nation’. From June 1941 onwards it had the title Staff Headquarters of the

RKF (Reichskommisar fu

r die Festigung deutschen Volkstums).

Hardly had he been appointed when Himmler leapt into action. As early

as 11 October he signed ‘provisional planning guidelines’:

One Gau will be settled wit h Swabians, another with Franconians, and a third with

Westphalians, Lower Saxons, Schleswig-Holsteiners, and so on. A vi llage with

around twenty-ﬁve farms will have a hard core of ten to twelve farms from a

particular clan. These will be joined by ten to twelve ethnic German ones so that,

with the aid of the Germans from the Old Reich, the ethnic Germans can once

more be integrated into German life. Two or three SS military peasants will

be settled in each village who can ﬁll the posts of local peasant leader, parish

councillor, and suchlike.

On the same day he informed the heads of the main departments, Lorenz,

Heydrich, and Pancke as well as Greifelt and the Reich Governors, Artur

Greiser and Wilhelm Forster, of his views:

I envisage the [ethnic German] population of Riga forming the clan basis for the

cities of Gotenhafen [Gdynia] and Posen [Poz nan

]. The urban population of

Dorpat [Tartu] and Reval [Talinn] can be deployed in the same way. The selection

of the population will be carried out by the chief of the security police in agreement

with SS Obergruppenfu

hrer Lorenz. In order to settle Germans in those cities it

will be essential to expel the Poles and clear their dwellings. Members of the Polish

intelligentsia should be the ﬁrst to be expelled.

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On 24 October Himmler visited Arthur Greiser, recently appointed

Reich Governor in Posen. In the evening he spoke about settlement plans in

the club of the civil administration. To begin with, he tried to elucidate the

historical dimension of settlement:

As early as 3, 000 years ago and during the following period Teutons lived in the

eastern provinces in which we now ﬁnd ourselves. Despite the poor tran sport

conditions of those days and the other primitive conditions that existed, it was

possible to settle Germans. These ancient German settlements have more or less

survived racially to the present day in closed communities and as islands, even if in

some cases they no longer speak the language. What was possible then must be even

more feasible today.

Himmler explained the ‘concept of the military peasant’, for whose creation

concrete preparations had already been made: ‘It involves, among other

things, the compulsory saving that I introduced into the SS. An SS man,

who in due course saves 2,000 to 3,000 Reich marks, has thereby laid the

foundation for a settlement. The brickworks and stone quarries that I have

established were begun with the aim of providing the basis for future peasant

settlements.’ With his penchant for going into detail, Himmler explained to

his audience how he envisaged the life of the future settlers:

The settlements that I envisage should not be built of clay, with walls one course of

stone thick, but rather we should build houses as in the old days, two or three stone

courses thick and with good foundations. We don’t need to buy the land for

settlement; settlement land already exists [ . . . ]. Polish workers must provide the

cheap labour for settlemen t and for ploughing the ﬁelds. [ ...] The Germans will

always provide the leadership for everything; the Poles will do the dirty work.

Great emphasis was to be put on cleanliness: ‘I envisage that in every settler’s

house there will be a room in the cellar where one can do the washing,

where there will be a bath and a shower for the peasant when he comes

home sweaty from the ﬁelds.’ There was always to be enough space for

‘healthy families with several children’. The houses were to be built

according to plans and drawings that we shall produce. All the kitsch and urban

rubbish that there is such a lot of in this area must be got rid of and our settlers

should live in a healthy, peasant milieu. The peasant houses should be neither

luxurious nor primitive. [ ...] In ﬁfty to eighty years’ time 20 million German

settlers should be living in this vast settlement area in the east, of whom 10 million

will be peasants with eight to ten children. The perpetuum mobile will then stand

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still. If there is no more land to be distribut ed then, as is always the case throughout

history, new land will have to be got with the sword.

Himmler announced an initial comprehensive plan for the ‘resettlement

of Poles and Jews’ on 30 October 1939. The following population groups

were to be expelled to the General Government: ‘all Jews’ from the

annexed territories, ‘all Congress Poles’ (in other words, all Poles who

came from the parts of Poland that had belonged to Russia between 1815

and 1916) from the province of Danzig–West Prussia, as well as ‘a number,

still to be determined, of particularly hostile Poles from the provinces of

Posen, East Prussia, and eastern Upper Silesia’.

On 8 No vember Streckenbach, the commander of the security polic e

in the General Government, who had been assigned the ‘central planning

of settlement and evacuation in the east’, informed the Higher SS and

Police Leaders who were responsible for carrying out the deportations

that, by the end of February 1940 ,‘allJewsandCongressPolesfromthe

annexed territories’ should be ‘evacuated’, and the Polish population that

remained should be divided into ‘Poles, ‘ethnic Germans’, as well a s

‘Poles who are still regarded as desirable’. In all, it was now planned

‘initially, by the end of February 19 40,toevacuatearound1,000,00 0

Jews and Pol es [ . . . ] from the O ld Reich and the newly occupied eastern

territories’,

of whom around 700,000 would come from the annexed

territories.

The RSHA produced a ‘long-range plan’: ﬁrst, to deport all Jews and

politically undesirable Poles to the General Government; then the ‘racial

assessment’ and expulsion of the mass of the Polish population. A ‘short-

range plan’ envisaged, to begin with, the deportation of 80,000 Poles and

Jews from the Warthegau in order to resettle the Baltic Germans. They had

been provisionally accommodated in camps following their repatriation

after the occupation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union.

These totals

were actually exceeded, with the deportation of more than 87,000 people—

‘politically compromised Poles, Jews, Polish intelligentsia, criminals, and

asocials’

—from the Warthegau to the General Government between

1 and 17 December.

On 21 December Heydrich announced that he had appointed Eichmann

to be his special adviser ‘to coordinate all security police matters involved in

the implementation of the clearing of the eastern territory’.

During the

ﬁrst months of 1940 Eichmann had to ensure that, in the process of

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implementing a second short-range plan, 600,000 Jews would be deported

into the General Government,

an action that kept being postponed,

while those responsible cited very different ﬁgures for those to be de-

ported.

Finally, on 23 January 1940 the head of the Settlement Commis-

sariat’s main planning department produced a general plan for the settlement

of the eastern territories that had been annexed, according to which, over

the long term, 3.4 million Poles were to be deported. The deportation

of the roughly 3.4 million Jews living in this area already formed part of

the plan.

However, on 30 January 1940 Heydrich came up with a new idea. Now,

between 800,000 and a million Poles were to be provisionally sent from the

annexed Polish territories for ‘labour deployment’ in the Reich. Only

40,000 Jews and Poles were to be deported to the General Government

from the ‘eastern Gaus’ to make room for the resettlement of the Baltic

Germans, and only around 120,000 Poles were to be sent there to make

room for the resettlement of the Volhynian Germans. Subsequently, all the

Jews—not only those from the annexed Polish territories but also those

from the whole of the Reich—as well as 30,000 Gypsies were to be deported

to the General Government.

In fact, only part of this far-reaching scheme was achieved. By the

beginning of 1941 almost 308,000 Poles and Jews from the annexed eastern

territories had been deported to the General Government.

After that the

General Government was, to a large extent, no longer treated as a ‘reception

area’. Initially used as an assembly area for the invasion of the Soviet Union,

it was then declared to be a potential region for German settlement.

the end of 1942 another 57,000 ‘racially undesirable’ people had been

resettled from the annexed eastern territories. After that we have no more

statistics, but there cannot have been substantial population movements.

In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish inhabitants of the

annexed territories who were not deported, but ‘concentrated’ in ghettos

during 1940–1 and who, from the end of 1941 onwards, were to be

murdered in the extermination camps.

Himmler assigned the ‘racial assessment’ of the people who were to

be resettled, both Germans and Poles, to the R ace and Settlement Main

Ofﬁce, which, because of its role in the examination of SS members

and their wives, had accumulated years of experience in the sphere of

‘racial selection’, and, as a result of these new tasks, acquired considerable

importance.

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The compulsory resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people required

the creation of an elaborate organization. A ‘Central Ofﬁce for Immigra-

tion’ (Einwandererzentralstelle = EWZ) was established in the middle of

October 1939 on Heydrich’s orders, and from January 1940 onwards it was

based in Ło

, with a number of branch ofﬁces. With the help of the

RuSHA experts assigned to it, it undertook a ‘racial assessment’ of the ethnic

Germans and decided where they were to be ‘settled’.

It had a counterpart

in the shape of the Central Ofﬁce for Resettlement (Umwandererzentral-

stelle = UWZ) in Posen, also with several branch ofﬁces,

which was

responsible for the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the annexed Polish

territories. The three Race and Settlement adviser units, which the RuSHA

had sent to Poland at the start of the war, now formed SS Land Ofﬁces,

which were run from the Central Land Ofﬁce in Berlin. By the end of 1942

they had conﬁscated a total of 686,054 farms with 6,043,901 hectares of land,

which amounted to 91.7 per cent of farms.

Moreover, in March 1940 so-

called SS settlement staffs were created to organize the expulsion of the

indigenous population and the settlement of ethnic Germans in the various

localities.

These staffs were ﬁlled with former Selbstschutz leaders,

who

had experience in exercising terror. Terror and resettlement policy were

inextricably linked.

On 13 December 1939, on a visit to the transit camps in the Ło

district

(on the previous day he had witnessed how people were gassed in a gas

chamber), Himmler declared that the racial assessments were designed to

prevent ‘mongrel types from emerging in the territories that are to be newly

settled. I want to create a blond province.’

On the same day he

took advantage of an inspection of the EWZ in Ło

to comment on the

racial classiﬁcation of ‘returnees’, and ordered the head of the Race and

Settlement Main Ofﬁce to work out binding guidelines for this procedure.

The results of the examination and assessment process were, according to

Himmler, ‘of decisive importance for the fate of the individual and of the

German east’. The work should be carried out ‘not bureaucratically but

with generosity of spirit’. A careful distinction should be made in judging

personal appearance between ‘physical and racial characteristics. The racial

appearance of all members of the family should be assessed.’

In response Pancke worked out guidelines for the ‘selection of people who

are to be earmarked for the newly won eastern territories’, according to which

there were four categories who came into consideration for this project:

ethnic German returnees, indigenous ethnic Germans, Reich applicants for

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settlement, as well as people whom the Reich Food Estate had already

registered as applicants to become peasants.

The head of the Clans Ofﬁce

(Sippenamt), Hofmann, had already issued ‘Instructions for Assessing the

Suitability of Returnees’, which followed the SS’s principles for selection

and divided people into four categories.

Originally it was envisaged that only those who were classiﬁed in cate-

gories I and II would be settled in the east; anyone who was in category III

was to be deported to the Old Reich and anyone in category IV would be

deported to the country from where they came. However, on the occasion

of a visit to Ło

in January 1940, Himmler gave instructions that people in

category III were also to be settled in the east.

As a result, the criteria for

membership of this group were made stricter.

During this visit Himmler also ordered that ‘those returnees placed in

category IV are to be transferred to the Old Reich without exception [ . . . ]

The returnees in categories I and II are to be settled in the new eastern Gaus

without exception.’ He himself determined the size of farms to be allocated

to the farmers in groups I to III.

Any ‘returnees’ who were deﬁned as ‘ethnically alien’ (for whom the

special category IVf had been created) were to be sent to the General

Government. In January Himmler ordered that each such ‘evacuation’ of

‘dubious ethnic Germans’ was to be submitted to him for approval.

Those

affected were obliged to await his decision in camps, ‘probably in Franconia’.

Himmler also reserved for himself the decision on ‘applications for citizenship

from those in categories I and II with professional occupations’.

As always when a project particularly interested him, Himmler

concerned himself with the smallest details. When a form which had been

sent to him for ﬁnal evaluation had, in his view, not been ﬁlled in correctly,

the RuSHA representative at the Central Ofﬁce for Immigration in Ło

was instructed to remind his assessors that Himmler paid particular attention

to ‘the information concerning body size, hair colour, colour of eyes, the

mongol wrinkle, the epicanthus, slit eyes’.

Himmler’s habit of reserving certain decisions for himself or of personally

intervening in individual cases once again illustrates the arbitrary nature of

the racial assessments that took place. They were not made on the basis

of objective criteria but were basically determined by the value-judgement

of the individual assessor, for whom the ‘overall impression’ not only of the

individual subject but of the whole family being assessed was decisive.

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From November 1939 to March 1940, to start with around 62,000 ethnic

Germans from Latvia and Estonia were ‘transited’. During the winter they

were followed by those being resettled from the eastern Polish territories

occupied by the Soviet Union, 128,000 in all, followed by around 30,000

ethnic Germans from the General Government (the area round Chelm and

Lublin), and 137,000 ethnic Germans from the Romanian territories annexed

by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940 (Bessarabia and North

Bukovina), to whom were added, at the request of the Romanian govern-

ment, a further 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania. At the beginning of

1941 they were followed by 48,000 Lithuanian Germans, as well as 12,000

ethnic Germans who were subsequently being resettled from Estonia and

Latvia. By the end of 1940 Himmler’s racial assessors had dealt with half-a-

million, by the end of 1944 more than a million ethnic German ‘returnees’.

However, the results of the assessment of the returnees by SS assessors

turned out to be far poorer than anticipated, given the high expectations

that had been placed on the racial standards of the ethnic Germans who

were being resettled. The assessment of the ‘racial value’ of the Estonian

and Latvian Germans was all in all a positive one: of 55,600 people over 6

years of age, somewhere between 60.1 and 74.4 per cent were placed in the

categories I and II and were thereby considered ‘suitable for settlement’.

But of the ethnic Germans from Volhynia and Galicia, more than 45,500

people in all, only 44 per cent met the criteria for placement in groups

I and II.

The following comment by a racial assessor can be read as a declaration of

bankruptcy for a population policy based on racial ideology:

In racial terms the average is a more or less balanced mixture of the Falian race with

various elements of the main European races, of which the East Baltic race

represents a high proportion. If strict criteria had been applied then the proportion

of families in category IV would have been considerably larger. It was only as a

result of repeated and urgent requests by the senior ofﬁci als that many families on

the borderline were categori zed as III.

The SS assessors also assigned the majority of ethnic Germans from

Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dobrudscha to group III.

But this ﬁgure may

also have been the result of subsequent adjustment, for at a meeting there

was mention of a ﬁgure of between 40 and 60 per cent being in group IV.

What is more, although the ‘racial assessment’ of the ethnic Germans

produced such disappointing results, there were not enough farms available

448 anewracialorder

for the ethnic Germans who had been selected as being ‘of good racial

quality’, despite the ruthless expulsion of the indigenous population. By the

end of 1940 the settlement staffs had allocated farms in the Warthegau to

more or less all the 5,000 Baltic Germans with farming backgrounds (the

majority of ethnic Germans from this region lived in urban centres) and also

to more than half the Volhynian, Galician, and Narev Germans from eastern

Poland and also to those from Chelm and Lublin, in other words, the vast

majority of the agrarian population from these territories. However, the

more members of the indigenous population they expelled, the more the

planners ran the risk that these measures would affect people who might in

fact have been categorized as ‘capable of being Germanized’ (and indeed,

after the opening up of the General Government to German settlement in

the summer of 1941, the search began for such ‘Germanizable’ people

among those who had been ‘de-settled’ in 1939 and 1940).

At the beginning of 1941, however, it became clear that the Poles could

no longer be expelled from the annexed territories to the General Govern-

ment in such large numbers, because of the pressures on space created by the

mobilization of the Wehrmacht for the Russian campaign, a situation that

was to persist after the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union. This meant

that there was now hardly any chance of accommodating the next wave of

resettlement of over 200,000 ethnic Germans from Bukovina, Bessarabia,

and Dobrudscha in farms in the annexed territories. By April 1941 there

were already 275,000 settlers stuck in VoMi reception camps, 228,000 of

them in the Old Reich, representing more than half the people who had

hitherto been resettled.

In March 1942 Himmler’s population experts reckoned that, of the total

of 510,000 people who were being resettled, only barely 287,000 had been

‘settled’ in the annexed eastern territories and 93,000 in the Old Reich (most

of them housed in provisional accommodation). That meant there were still

131,000 people in the camps.

In view of this situation the SS leadership had the idea of employing young

ethnic German girls as housemaids in the Old Reich, especially in large families

or working for people connected with the SS leadership. Frau Himmler herself

received household staff from Volhynia. In the summer 1940 Karl Brandt

reported to Koppe that the Reichsfu

hrer’s wife—who, as we have seen,

generally placed heavy demands on her servants—appeared to be ‘satisﬁed

with the girls’, but required ‘another girl because one of the girls wants to

marry soon’.

Moreover, according to Brandt, ‘the Reichsfu

hrer-SS

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