outlined a topological racial anthropology of the German people, which in this view no longer formed a single organic entity (as claimed by Merkenschlager and other völkisch ideologues), but instead represented a “racial mix” comprising the various racial components of unequal value, ranging from a “Nordic” race to an “East Baltic” one.26 Günther amplified this idea with his 1925 publication, Der nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (The Nordic idea among the Germans), which opened him to criticisms that his call for “Nordification” (“Aufnordung”) was driving a wedge in the German “Volk.”27 This clash of ideas was in full swing by the time the Nazis came to power and now also engulfed the party’s different wings and their respective organs. The party’s leaders soon realized that calls for a “Nordification” of the German “Volk” threatened the building of broad-based support for their new government—particularly as fears began to spread that new laws like the one permitting forced sterilization could be tied to the dystopian vision of a “Nordic Germany.”28
Essner claims that—with the help of influential allies like Heinrich Himmler and the new Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, and despite all pacifying efforts such as those by the Racial Policy Office (Rassenpolitisches Amt)—the “Nordics” soon achieved the upper hand, so that “race” and not “Volk” became the theoretical polestar for Nazi ideology.29 I find this highly questionable because there can be no doubt that völkisch criteria, in the imagination of the German “Volk,” had lost none of its plausibility. In fact, the present investigation of Nazi Germanization policy will instead demonstrate the opposite. This is despite such instances as when the racists at the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS, or RuSHA) quickly took the initiative as early as October 1939 by equipping its Poland-assigned suitability inspectors (Eignungsprüfer) with a racial criteria catalog that was meant to help them separate “Germans” from “Poles” in the annexed territories. For example, blue was not the only acceptable eye color: but if they were brown, it was important to carefully distinguish what shade. Here, “black-brown, which mostly looks sinister and tends more toward black,” was to be rejected. According to Berlin, this appeared “mostly in cases of a foreign blood element (non-European) and among colored races.” Meanwhile, “among us is . . . a rich, velvety brown (cow eyes) generally the darkest color.”30 This guidance was hardly practicable, as was the policy formulated on its basis. Neither this nor similar selection procedures would find wide application. In deciding who would now be considered “German,” the occupiers were not guided by racial anthropology criteria, but instead focused on the willingness to collaborate and perform, on submissiveness, and on the eagerness to acquire German language skills—a selection procedure that clearly harked back to Prussia’s Germanization policies.
* * *
The conflict over DVL selection criteria, as alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, not only illustrates the differences between the relevant actors in such a key area as Germanization policy, it also reveals the fruitlessness of trying to interpret the practices of German occupation organs by looking primarily at the Nazi regime’s central ideological writings. The structure and dynamics of the Germanization policy in annexed western Poland cannot be understood if they are read simply as the physical implementation of ideological dictates. Although Nazi Germanization policy clearly revolved primarily around the two ideologically loaded ideas of “Volk” and “race,” it is equally clear that the various actors did not use these terms in the same way and could not agree on how they related to one another.
It is against this background that I will analyze Nazi Germanization policy by situating it in the conflicted zone between ideological premises and the rational needs of power. Therefore, I will not treat the selection practices of the DVL and the UWZs as a linear implementation of doctrinaire demands by Nazi ideologues, nor will I analyze ideological justifications as purely window dressing for courses of action motivated by entirely unrelated rationales; instead, I will highlight the dialectic interplay between selection practices and their ideological justifications. In this context, I want to evaluate the effectiveness of völkisch and racial ideologies in shaping selection practices, while also showing, through examples of the relevant hegemonic practices, which ideologies were able to assert themselves as being particularly functional in terms of serving the needs of power. Specifically, the following questions will be at the heart of the investigation:
1) What was the process for formulating the selection criteria that separated “Germans” from “Poles,” and how were these criteria handled in practice? Why were the relevant actors unable to agree upon a common set of selection criteria valid for all provinces and for the entire duration of the war? Why were they constantly changing, often varying greatly according to time and region?
2) How important was the ideological justification for these selection criteria (whether only stipulated or actually implemented), and how “flexible” did Nazi ideology turn out to be, in giving an ideologically consistent face to the real-world necessities that faced the German occupiers?
3) How did these criteria, which could be fixed only temporarily in time and space, relate to the power politics between different institutions, as well as between the actors who tried to assert their interests? Can the actions of these institutions be understood as part of the German occupation strategy for establishing permanent possession of these territories and exploiting them economically? In this regard, did the relevant population policy measures prove to be functional for serving the needs of power?
Existing Scholarship
It is only gradually that such questions are being raised in research on Nazi Germanization policy in Poland. In the first writings on this topic, such as in the wartime underground press (as investigated by Andrzej Gąsiorowski) and the publications of the Polish government-in-exile in London, a prominent role was assigned to the DVL, which was often denounced as a tool for the occupiers to encourage collaboration in the Polish populace.31 The rapid expansion of the DVL seems to have precipitated a Polish reevaluation of Nazi occupation policy in annexed western Poland, as later publications by the government-in-exile perceptively observed that the German occupiers were increasingly orienting themselves toward a more “traditional German approach, the Germanization of the Poles themselves.”32 There was the mistaken assumption in London, however, that this shift was simply Berlin’s reaction to the failures of its deportation program, thus overlooking the bitter wrangling between various German agencies over competing strategies for achieving “German Lebensraum.”
After the war, this was another area that saw important advances initially in the courtroom.33 Especially significant here were the proceedings against the heads of the RKFDV Staff Main Office (Stabshauptamt des RKFDV), the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi), and RuSHA during the “subsequent” Nuremberg trials of 1946–49, when the spotlight already began turning to the “close connection between resettlements and evacuations,” as well as highlighting the rationale of the DVL and the “re-Germanization campaign” (“Wiedereindeutschungsaktion”) for serving the needs of power.34 After all, this allowed the Reich “to bring labor to Germany, at the same time depriving Poland of masses of its citizens and attempting to effect a forced Germanization of these foreign citizens.”35 But by assuming that this brutal population policy had been prepared long in advance in Berlin, the US prosecutors failed to understand the logic of its dynamics, which is why to them the gap between ideological dictates and policy practices necessarily appeared “somewhat inconsistent,” thereby remaining unexplained.36
For subsequent scholarly research, these trials were decisive trendsetters—in both positive and negative respects. Little attention was again paid to the ideological dimension and to its role as a battlefield for the Nazi power blocs competing for hegemony in this area. Instead, both Robert L. Koehl, in his 1957 study of Himmler’s RKFDV apparatus and its actions, and Martin Broszat, in his study of the Nazi regime’s Poland policy shortly thereafter, tended to emphasize the strategic importance of population
