priorities, for example, among the “ethnocrats” (to borrow an apt term from historian Michael Burleigh) who were working in the Wartheland. Already with the first instructions issued to the local bureaus of the DVL in January 1940, it was stated that “racial markers cannot be used as a reliable basis for assessing German ethnonational membership.”11 In the other two annexed provinces, Himmler’s directive would fail even more dramatically: in Upper Silesia, it was declared that the “induction of persons of German ethnonationality into the DVL can fundamentally not be made dependent on the result of a racial evaluation,” while in Danzig–West Prussia, the DVL offices were instructed that the results of racial appraisals, “for the decision making of the DVL, are not to be seen as binding.”12
The DVL was certainly not some minor undertaking but instead was at the heart of all Nazi efforts to Germanize the populace of annexed western Poland and establish a “German Volksgemeinschaft.” Founded in late October 1939 immediately after the civil administration was installed, it initially existed only under the Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor) of the Wartheland, before expanding a year and a half later to cover all of annexed western Poland, registering almost three million “Germans” by the war’s end—out of a total population of over seven million. This made it by far the largest Germanization project of the Nazi regime.13
Of course, Nazi Germanization policy in the annexed territories of western Poland was aimed not only at the inclusion of “Germans,” but also at the settlement of “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic Germans) who had been attracted from Eastern Europe by the “Homeward into the Reich” (“Heim ins Reich”) campaign and, above all, at the exclusion of the “Fremdvölkische” living there. At least in theory, this established a (coerced) circular flow of resettlement, an “organizational unity of so-called positive and negative population policy,” as Götz Aly described it.14 In this regard, I will confine my investigation to the treatment of the local non-Jewish populace; in terms of implementing bodies, I will focus on not only the DVL, but also the activities of the Resettlement Central Offices (each known as an Umwandererzentralstelle, or UWZ), which were tasked with the identification and deportation of the “Fremdvölkische.”15
After the murder sprees of the first two months had taken tens of thousands of victims, and before the anti-Jewish policy was ultimately radicalized with the establishment of the Kulmhof extermination camp (near Chełmno nad Nerem, Poland) in late 1941, the German occupiers had intended to get rid of unwanted population groups by deporting them to the territory of the General Government.16 To this end, UWZs were established in the targeted provinces, but unlike the DVL, these were subordinated not to the civil administrations, but to the local SS offices.17 Of course, they were confronted with the same question facing the DVL: According to what criteria should it be decided whether a person was to be exempted from deportation as a “German,” or should fall victim to it as a “Pole”? For persons not (or not yet) registered by the DVL, this decision was delegated to the ethnocrats of the SS apparatus. In view of Himmler’s attempt to reorient the selection practices of the DVL in favor of using racial criteria, one might expect that the criterion of “race” would dominate at least the selection practices of the UWZs.
But this too would be an overhasty conclusion. Although it is true that a few months later, Himmler’s direct orders would mean that those classified as “Deutschstämmige” (the “German-descended”) were to be exempted from deportation, it was otherwise generally not racial criteria, but instead pragmatic ones, that ultimately decided who would be deported and when. One consequence of this was that, despite instructions to the contrary from SS headquarters in Berlin, relatively few Jews were expelled from the annexed territories in the beginning.
* * *
This short outline may seem surprising, as it contradicts a historiographic trend that has asserted itself since the 1980s, one that stands against a research approach shaped by social history while instead attributing a new (and simultaneously old) explanatory power to the role of Nazi ideology, particularly—as claimed by this trend—its racial core.18 Although this “return of ideology” need not necessarily boil down to a narrow view that attributes violent policies solely to ideology, racism is nonetheless assigned the central role here, not only in terms of the demand to winnow “life unworthy of life” (“lebensunwertes Leben”) from persons deserving of life, but also in terms of legitimizing the state policies that implemented such demands.19 The appeal of this metanarrative is obvious: it enables an integrated representation of Nazi rule, so that large-scale atrocities like the Shoah, as well as the mass murders of Soviet POWs, “antisocial elements,” and all those declared a threat to the “German Volksgemeinschaft,” can be analyzed as various aspects of a single policy of violence, one aimed at establishing a racist utopia through “the final solution of the social question.”20 The widespread influence of this new paradigm is reflected in a multitude of studies in which Nazi Germany is now presented as primarily a “racial state,” to borrow the title of a 1991 book by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann.21
There are two dangers with this approach. First, it is often used as the basis for an understanding of ideology where the unquestionably irrational premises of völkisch (“folkish,” meaning ethnonationalist) or racial ideology are seen to also contaminate the policies they fuel and justify, thereby overlooking the fact that—as Werner Röhr wrote in regard to racism—its “delusional aspects . . . precludes neither their functionality in regard to its articulated goals nor the possibility of rational calculation within its framework.”22 The connection between ideology and power, so essential to the critique of ideology, threatens to be lost completely, so that ideology becomes an irrational force, one that instead of dressing up conduct serving the functional needs of power, works to threaten such conduct instead.23 The relationship between ideology and the rationale of power is no longer understood as a shifting field of contention, but is instead reduced to a straightforward dichotomy, resulting in a historiographically simplified confrontation between “ideologues” and “pragmatists.”
Second, a privileging of racism also threatens to obscure what Lutz Raphael described as the “weakly regulated pluralism within a whole array of Nazi worldviews,” although it was precisely this plurality that made the Nazi Party so attractive to contemporaries.24 This relates above all to the fact that a focus on race leads to a marginalization of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence, and begs the question why the regime chose genocide in the case of the Jews but was able to make compromises in the handling of other enemy groups. But even more relevant to the present investigation is the marginalization of the more “traditional” nationalist aspects of Nazi ideology, as embodied by terms like Volk (folk, but variously meaning people, nation, or ethnonation) and “Volksgemeinschaft.” Although the discursive framework within which the determinants of German identity could be articulated had certainly been narrowed after the 1933 Nazi takeover, one cannot say there had been a real paradigm shift. In neither the general public’s understanding nor in the multitude of official Nazi publications was membership in the German Volk defined in exclusively or even primarily racial terms: instead, it was built much more upon social practices and above all cultural ones as well, stretching as far back as to the German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
During World War II, this ideological patchwork would also turn Germanization policy into an ideological battleground, one in which the highlighting of “Volk” or “race” represented two contrasting rulership techniques for subjugating the local populace. This conflict was not a new one. As Cornelia Essner writes, völkisch ideologues like longtime Nazi Party and SA member Friedrich Merkenschlager had mobilized against the rise of racial anthropology and its popularization, even in its early days. In his 1926 polemic Götter, Helden und Günther: Eine Abwehr des Güntherschen Rassegedankens (Gods, heroes, and Günther: a refutation of Günther’s racial ideas), Merkenschlager attacked the work of Hans F. K. Günther, whose 1922 book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial science of the German people) had become by far the most popular racial anthropology
