* * *
The SS knew how to exploit its newly expanded opportunities. On September 21, it was once again up to Himmler and Heydrich to extrapolate a population policy program from Germany’s broader war objectives in Poland. As Heydrich announced to his departmental chiefs and gathered Einsatzgruppen leaders, the Polish territories in the German sphere of interest were to be divided: while “the former German provinces” were to be absorbed into the Reich, central Poland would see the establishment of “a Gau with a foreign-language populace” (a Gau was a geographic administrative subdivision)—not as a Polish rump state, but “as practically a no man’s land” under German control. In one big push, he then sketched a comprehensive program of ethnic cleansing, one that for the first time included the Reich’s own territory while also taking the “solution to the Polish problem” and tying it to a racial deportation policy.47 Thirty thousand German Sinti and all German Jews were to be deported “with freight trains” from the (expanded) Reich to central Poland, with the latter group to be ghettoized in larger municipalities alongside Jewish Poles. For at least a portion of the Jewish Poles, however, a further deportation across the demarcation line had apparently been “authorized by the Führer.”48 The “end goal,” as Heydrich put it in a letter to the Einsatzgruppen on the same day, was to be kept strictly confidential.49 It consisted of deporting all Jews to a “Jewish state under German administration,” as he wrote a day later to Brauchitsch.50 As for the remaining Polish populace, the surviving “Polish leadership class” was to be eliminated first; “in addition, lists of the middle class: teachers, clergy, nobility, legionnaires, returning officers, etc.” were to be compiled, so that they could be “arrested and deported to the leftover area.”51 On the other hand, the “primitive Poles” were to be “incorporated into the labor process as migrant workers and will be gradually relocated from the German Gaus into the foreign-language Gau.”52 Thus, while Phillip T. Rutherford is entirely correct in writing that Heydrich had thereby presented “the first detailed description of Nazi plans for a racial ‘New Order’ in newly conquered territory,” Heydrich’s designs were certainly not limited to that.53 In this meeting focused on pragmatic concerns, which was primarily meant to give immediate operational instructions to the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, Heydrich also addressed the organizational structure of the forced expulsion measures. Here, he was able to announce a further victory in reporting that Himmler had been installed as the Settlement Commissioner for the East (Siedlungskommissar für den Osten), which would make the SS complex a decisive actor in Nazi population policy.54
Germany’s war goals were further radicalized by developments in late September. As Hitler told Birger Dahlerus (a Swedish informal mediator between Germany and the United Kingdom) after the arrival of Schulenburg’s telegram, England would have to resign itself to the fact that “Poland could no longer be resurrected.” The only possible goal left was to ensure “order in the east” through a “reasonable regional arrangement of the nationalities.” For this, however, an “ethnonational cleansing of the soil” (“volksmäßige Flurbereinigung”) would be necessary—and this seems to be the first time the term was used—which would also involve the settling of Germans in the ostensibly thinly populated regions of western Poland.55
Although it is unclear from the transcript exactly what Germans Hitler was thinking about here, it was probably the ethnic Germans living in the Polish territories earmarked for the Soviet Union.56 That same night, however, this particular aspect would also become more concrete. According to the testimony of Dr. Erhard Kroeger, leader of the German minority organization in Latvia and later an SS senior leader, he was summoned by Himmler, who revealed to him at the Hotel Casino in Zoppot (today Sopot), which served for a few days as Hitler’s headquarters, that the Baltic states were now to be entirely left to the Soviet Union. To Kroeger’s surprise, the initial intention was not to evacuate all ethnic Germans from the region, but only those who belonged to the Nazi movement or had dangerously “exposed themselves in ethnopolitics.”57 Appalled, Kroeger urged Himmler not to let the remaining people “fall into the hands of the Bolshevists” and asked that he appeal to Hitler for the resettlement of all the ethnic Germans.58 The next day, Himmler communicated Hitler’s approval to him.59 A resettlement program had thus taken shape that just a few weeks later would discharge the first load of Baltic “Germans” at the port of Gdingen (today Gdynia).
It was probably only with the determination of Eastern Europe’s final partitioning between Germany and the Soviet Union, as laid out in the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty of September 28, that the decision to implement a large deportation program and the destruction of Poland had been finalized in Berlin. On the very next day, Hitler spoke to Alfred Rosenberg about wanting to divide Poland into “three strips,” with the western one annexed to the Reich as a “broad belt for Germanization and colonization,” thereby making room for “good Germans from around the world.” In contrast, the Jewish populace, along with all “somehow unreliable elements,” were to be deported to the eastern strip, while a space remained between for an unspecified “Polish statehood.”60 Heydrich chose blunter words in a briefing of his departmental heads, calling the eastern strip a “nature preserve or ‘Reich ghetto’” that was now to be established in the region around Lublin, after the modification of the demarcation line.61
It is against this backdrop that one must interpret Hitler’s well-known speech to the Reichstag on October 6, 1939, which was promulgated as a “speech for peace.”62 In a continuation of the argumentation that he had already tested on Dahlerus, Hitler claimed that his only concern was the “pacification of the entire region” through “a new ordering of the ethnographic circumstances.”63 Michael Wildt has pointed out that Hitler was seeking justification in terms of the rightful self-determination of peoples, a concept that had been used to justify the dismantling of Eastern Europe’s multiethnic empires after World War I.64 Hitler’s speech could be paraphrased as arguing that if an equitable and peaceful international order could be achieved only when each territory’s populace was ethnically homogeneous and thus had a right to its own state, an impossibility in an ethnically variegated Europe, then political leaders had to create the desired situation retroactively. For Hitler, this “new ordering of the ethnographic circumstances” meant nothing other than a “resettling of nationalities.” Such an effort could not be “restricted to this region,” and also had to include the retrieval of “unsustainable fragments of Germandom” from all of Eastern Europe, because it was “unrealistic to believe that one could readily assimilate these members of a high-grade Volk.”65 This passage is of central importance because it implied a deportation program that went far beyond Poland, while also offering legitimation for Germany’s expansion. It also makes clear that the envisioned “ordering of the entire Lebensraum according to nationalities” was aimed not only at an ethnic homogenization, but also at an ethnic hierarchization.66
Perpetuating the Reign of Terror: The Establishment of the German Occupation Regime
If Hitler had hoped that his speech