Recent years have finally seen a number of studies that, in analyzing specific fields of activity or policy by the German occupiers, such as the invasion of Poland, economic policy, labor policy, and policies on education and culture, also investigate how these connect to Germanization policy or else make it their main topic.62 When these studies do focus on population policy issues, they tend to concentrate more on deportation, resettlement, and colonization aspects, leaving the DVL in a kind of blind spot. The only exception here is an article by Werner Röhr on Nazi population policy in the Wartheland, which also contradicts for the first time the widespread scholarly assumption that the DVL conducted its selection process according to racial criteria. Even Röhr, however, gives few details about what this selection process looked like in practice.63
Source Materials
Since a basic premise of my study is that any analysis of Nazi Germanization policy must start with the practices actually conducted on the ground, I have striven from the very start to consider not only the planning and decision-making processes undertaken by the top-level authorities in Berlin and at the various provincial administrative capitals, but also and especially the happenings in the governmental regions and rural counties (Regierungsbezirken and Landkreisen, Germany’s mid- and low-level administrative divisions). Overall, the source materials of three institutional complexes have proven to be decisive: those of the top-level Reich authorities, particularly the Reich Interior Ministry; those of the SS apparatus, ranging from the various SS main offices in Berlin to the individual SS posts and police stations on the periphery; and, above all, those of the civil administrations in the annexed regions, here too ranging from the administrative capitals down to the cities and rural counties.
The greatest part of these materials is housed in Polish archives, often in astonishing amounts. This is most conspicuous in the surviving materials on the DVL. For reasons of economy, my study focuses on the records left by the top-level heads of the three provinces in the annexed western Polish territories, one or two midlevel heads in each province, and selected low-level heads of urban and rural counties, each of whom supervised a DVL central office, a regional office, or a branch office. The surviving records of the civil administration in Posen (today Poznań, during the war the capital of the Wartheland) are exceptionally extensive and include an enormous number of DVL membership files, but those of the civil administrations in Danzig–West Prussia and Upper Silesia are somewhat scantier. The main developmental stages of selection policy in Danzig–West Prussia can be reconstructed through the parallel records of multiple sources, particularly those of the local Gauleiter’s offices, as well as those of the Regierungspräsident (governmental region president) and various city and county administrations in Bromberg Governmental Region, in addition to the postwar trial documents of Albert Forster, former Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Danzig–West Prussia. This was more easily done for Upper Silesia, where documentary gaps—particularly in the records of its Oberpräsident (senior president, the head of a province)—could be filled by the “Special Archive” holdings at the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow.
The particular weight given to events in the Wartheland are explained not only by its particularly extensive surviving records, but even more by the great importance the province had for Germanization policy. The province is where the DVL and UWZ were first established, it is where by far the greatest number of locals suffered expulsion, and it was also the location of the RuSHA field office whose analysis would prove invaluable for understanding not only the selections that RuSHA did for the UWZ but also those done at the DVL.
Whereas Michael Alberti, in his investigations of the annihilation of the Jews in the Wartheland, was often frustrated to discover that the destruction of files at the end of the war primarily involved those records that documented the most heinous of German crimes, my experience was a very different one.64 To understand just how selective the Germans must have been in destroying incriminating evidence, one can examine the surviving records of the ethnonationality unit (Volkstumreferat) at the Wartheland Reichsstatthalter’s offices, which includes not only the documents of the local DVL central office, but also a number of memoranda about the future of the Wartheland’s German and Polish populations, dystopian fantasies that eclipsed all DVL measures conducted to that date while also sketching out the ways in which the entire remaining populace would be subjected to a complicated selection process. Therefore, although the surviving source materials may have occasional gaps on specific institutions and regions, it nonetheless appears complete enough on most key issues to attempt a comprehensive analysis of Nazi Germanization policy in the annexed territories of western Poland.
Notes
1. Directive 50/I by Himmler as RKFDV, September 30, 1941, APP 406/1114, 5–6, reprinted in Pospieszalski, Hitlerowskie “prawo” okupacyjne, 144–45.
2. The term “Exerzierplatz” (“training ground”) was already used during the war to describe (for example) the Wartheland, in order to highlight the trailblazing role of the province (Alberti, “Exerzierplatz des Nationalsozialismus”; Röhr, “Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945”; Hansen, “Damit wurde das Warthegau”).
3. Recent studies of the confiscations include Dingell, Zur Tätigkeit der Treuhandstelle Ost; Rosenkötter, Treuhandpolitik. On the education system, see Kleßmann and Długoborski, “Nationalsozialistische Bildungspolitik”; Harten, De-Kulturation und Germanisierung; Hansen, “Schulpolitik im besetzten Polen.” The stamping of “German character” is specified in the confidential guidelines of Chief of Civil Administration Arthur Greiser, September 29, 1939, AGK NTN/11, 1–2. On the rural landscape, see Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften.
4. In the following investigation I will speak of the ideology of Nazism, although it was of course a theory complex drawing on very diverse streams of thought while trying to combine often contradictory approaches whose relative importance was generally not decided through intellectual debate, but instead through confrontations between various factions of the regime. For a broader look at Nazi ideology, see, for example, Weber, Faschismus und Ideologie; Raphael, “Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung”; Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie; Jäckel, Hitlers Herrschaft.
5. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 246–50. See similarly Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung, 37–57.
6. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 728.
7. Ibid., 738.
8. Ibid., 742.
9. Ibid., 429–30.
10. Hitler, Zweites Buch, 81.
11. Guidelines for registering German ethnonationals in the DVL, headquarters copy, official use only, undated (probably late January 1940), APP 406/1106.
12. Memo from Bracht, undated (probably January 25, 1943), APK 117/140, 16; Forster to DVL regional and branch offices, February 9, 1943, APB 9/380, 243.
13. Besides the annexed regions of western Poland, a DVL has also been shown to exist in Ukraine and northern France, while a comparable model was similarly launched in the General Government and in southeastern European territories under German occupation civil administrations.
14. Aly, Endlösung, 381. Although such terminology is frequently used by researchers, it is also misleading, because it helps veil the frequently violent character of even “inclusivist” measures.
15. For an investigation of the selection process applied by the UWZ to the “Volksdeutsche” destined for settlement in the occupied territories, see Strippel, Einwandererzentralstelle.
16. On the early murder sprees, see particularly Jansen and Weckbecker, “Der Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz”; Mallmann, Böhler, and Matthäus, Einsatzgruppen in Polen; Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg; Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland; on the origins and function of Kulmhof, see Kershaw, “Improvised Genocide?”
17. UWZs were later established for the same purpose in the annexed territories of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola with logistical and staffing support from the Polish bureaus, whose personnel were also involved with the deportations out of Moravia, Hungary, and