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, but had to be established first before it could unleash a radicalizing dynamic that has been correctly demonstrated by Aly.47
Even with the decision to evacuate the ethnic Germans, one can already see the inadequate state of preparation that typified Nazi projects, as shown, for example, in Hitler’s promise to the leader of the German minority organization in Latvia, Erhard Kroeger, that all members of the German minority would be resettled, an action that was then carried out virtually overnight. But even here, Hitler’s sudden decision can hardly have come as a surprise, in view of a policy proposal that had repeatedly surfaced over the decades, namely, to transfer Russia’s “Volga Germans” to Germany’s eastern provinces. In any case, the project progressed apace, so that by February 1940, two hundred thousand ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe had already been resettled in the annexed territories—a vanguard for the almost one million “Volksdeutsche” who were still to follow, celebrated by Nazi propaganda as “returners” (“Rückkehrer”).48
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The arrival and departure point for this forced population exchange was to be Gdynia, the most important Polish port city, formerly named Gdingen in German and now renamed Gotenhafen by the Nazis. On the same day that Himmler was appointed (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV; Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom), early rumors were already making the rounds that the city would soon be the first target for the settlement of ethnic Germans from the Baltics. Groscurth made this note in his diary: “Latvia: directive from the Führer: evacuate Germans regardless of situation. Organization of reception in Gotenhafen, which will be cleared of Poles for this.”49 These rumors were confirmed shortly thereafter by Heydrich on October 9, when he communicated to Ribbentrop that he considered a “substantial removal of the Polish populace from the city to be necessary.”50
The reason for choosing Gdynia in particular cannot be conclusively ascertained. Certainly, it would seem natural to settle the inhabitants of Baltic port cities in yet another port city. But it seems likely that the choice was also influenced by Gdynia’s symbolic significance in the German-Polish conflict. The place had long been an insignificant fishing village, until the Sejm (the parliament of the reestablished Polish state) resolved on September 23, 1922, that a deepwater port would be built there—within sight of Danzig—to host Poland’s battle fleet and merchant marine and also to free the Upper Silesian mining areas from their dependence on German seaports, soon achieved with the construction of the Coal Trunk Line (Magistrala Węglowa).51 By 1932, when Gdynia had caught up with the neighboring port of Danzig, it had long since become vital to Poland’s foreign trade, and as the “pride of the Second Polish Republic,” it came to symbolize Poland’s success and will to survive.52 Therefore, it might have been not only for pragmatic reasons that Gdynia had been selected: by choosing it in particular for launching the Germanization of the territories to be annexed, the occupiers were also making a symbolic statement. In any case, two days after Heydrich’s message to Ribbentrop, Himmler also argued in favor of Gotenhafen, and ordered that members of the Polish elite were “to be expelled first of all.”53
This dictate, that the first to be expelled should be those residents considered undesirable for political and ideological reasons, would have actually required a precise surveying of Gotenhafen’s inhabitants, as had already been launched in other occupied locales.54 But when Forster’s agencies took over the organization