Introduction
Among those persons earmarked for induction into Section 3 of the Deutsche Volksliste [German People’s List], there are some who are racially unsuitable for incorporation into the German Volksgemeinschaft [ethnonational community]. But an influx of undesirable blood into the German Volkskörper [ethnonational body] must be prevented without fail.1
THESE THOUGHTS WERE written by Heinrich Himmler on September 30, 1941, as he tried to take control of the selection process applied to the local populace in occupied western Poland.
By this point, the “incorporated eastern territories” had long since become an arena of fierce wrangling between the various relevant German authorities. Occupied during the invasion of Poland and already incorporated into the Reich in October 1939, this territory was transformed into a “training ground” (“Exerzierplatz”) for Nazi population policy: here, the populace was subjected to a systematic selection process; here lay the focus of Nazi deportation policy; and here was also where the first steps were taken toward the mass murder of political opponents, sanitarium patients, and later the Jewish populace.2 The conceptual threads behind this explosion of violence intersected at two central concepts of Nazism: “Volksgemeinschaft” and “Lebensraum,” meaning “ethnonational community” and “living space.” Although Poland was not the first eastern neighbor to fall victim to the Reich’s aggressive policies, nor even its primary target, this country—or more precisely, its western part—was nonetheless the first one earmarked for Germanization, the first one upon which the Nazis projected their horrifying dystopian vision of a “German Lebensraum in the east.”
The Nazi project of Germanizing the annexed territories certainly covered a very wide range of activities, from the theft of Polish assets to attempts at replacing the local education system with a German one, and from stamping a “German character” onto towns to reshaping the rural landscape.3 But at the heart of all German efforts stood the Germanization of the populace. This essentially meant applying a selection process to the local populace, sorting them into those considered “Fremdvölkische” (the “ethnonationally foreign”), who were to be expelled or exterminated, and those considered “Germans,” who—together with the ethnic Germans brought here from Eastern Europe and the settlers from the Reich itself—were to form the core of the “Volksgemeinschaft” to be established here.
In view of the importance assigned to this particular complex in the ideology of Nazism and in the justification given for the war, it would not have been surprising if, immediately after annexation, this territory had been subjected to a coherent and systematic Germanization policy prepared long in advance.4 In fact, Hitler had already provided the relevant framework in 1922, fixing it in writing a few years later.5 According to him, if the “foreign policy of the ethnonationally oriented state [völkischen Staates]” is to establish “a healthy, viable, natural relationship between the number and growth of the population on the one hand, and the size and quality of the soil and territory on the other,” then a return to the borders of 1914 would not suffice.6 In fact, such a suggestion was “political nonsense,” as any potential success would still be so “miserable that it would not be worth it . . . to invest the blood of our people for this again.”7 Instead, a Nazi foreign policy would turn its “gaze toward the land to the east. We are finally ending the colonial and trade policy of the prewar period and moving to the territorial policy of the future.”8 In Mein Kampf, Hitler was still vague about what should happen to the populace already living there, although he did argue in brief passages for a strictly racial approach: “Germanization” must not be misinterpreted as chiefly the “superficial acquisition of the German language”—a criticism primarily alluding to attempts by Prussia and the Habsburg empire to assimilate their non-German-speaking populations, by force if necessary. He went on to write that “Germanization can be undertaken only with the soil, and never the people.” From a racial point of view, the failure of this earlier Germanization policy was neither surprising nor regrettable. After all, it was a “hardly credible error in reasoning to believe that . . . out of a negro or a Chinese a German emerges because he has learned German.” Furthermore, the necessarily associated “blood mixing” (“Blutsvermischung”) would have meant “the lowering of the level of the higher race” as well as the annihilation of the “cultural strengths” of the “German people,” and if that had happened, “it would hardly have been possible to call it a cultural factor anymore.”9 Hitler was even more explicit in his “second book” (although it remained unpublished in his lifetime): “The ethnonationally oriented state can under no circumstances annex the Poles with the intention of turning them into Germans one day. Instead, it must make a decision to either sequester these racially alien elements so that the blood of one’s own people is not undermined again and again, or else to immediately remove them entirely and thereby assign to one’s own ethnonational comrades [Volksgenossen] the land and territory freed as a result.”10
Even if these statements by Hitler were more about criticizing the previous Germanization attempts by Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy than about defining a political agenda, one thing was still clear: the areas in Eastern Europe to be occupied by a Nazi Germany had to be depopulated if they were to fulfill their function as an expanded “German Lebensraum” for a “people without space” (Volk ohne Raum, the well-known title of a 1926 right-wing novel), and they had to be settled by “Germans” in order to secure them in the long run.
Of course, the realities of Hitler’s Germany were something else. For example, the Nazi regime’s own structural idiosyncrasies were already hindering all attempts at defining long-term plans for the postwar future. After Poland’s capitulation, a multitude of actors immediately claimed precedence in taking charge of the territory’s Germanization: the most important of these included the Reich Interior Ministry (Reichsinnenministerium), the provincial administrations, and Heinrich Himmler in his new role as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV). This point also shows how misleading and simplistic it is to assume that the Nazi Party’s policies after its coming to power were simply a pure implementation of Nazi ideology, or even a direct translation of slogans contained in the party platform or in Mein Kampf, ideas written at a time when Hitler and his followers were little more than an insignificant faction in the Weimar Republic’s lunatic fringe, with no need or opportunity to actually realize their slogans on the national political stage.
This was particularly evident in the way that Nazi Germanization policy was formulated and implemented in annexed western Poland. With the diverging centrifugal forces of competing political interests built into this polycratically structured regime, there was no way they could be reconciled through common recourse to the central elements of Nazi ideology. On the contrary, it was precisely the incoherence of Nazi ideology that allowed rival actors to use it for legitimizing even contradictory policy proposals. The typical consequence was years of wrangling in which even the most basic questions could find no agreement, questions that were finally resolved not by a decision from the highest authority in Berlin, but by one from Moscow—with the invasion of the Red Army.
Himmler’s directive, cited at the beginning, points to one instance of this wrangling. At issue was the selection criteria used by the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste, or DVL), an institution meant as a tool for cataloguing the local “Germans.” His directive brings up a number of questions. For one, how could it be that in September 1941—after two years of German occupation—the relevant German agencies had still not agreed on a set of selection criteria? But more important, how did it come to pass that the implemented selection process did not actually conform to Hitler’s guidelines and limit itself to the “Germanization of the soil,” but had instead apparently aimed at the assimilation of non-Germans, so that Himmler then found it necessary to issue this course correction and demand the exclusion of “undesirable blood”? What role was played by “race” as a selection criterion?
