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,
