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?
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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,
