Black Earth(47)

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The nullification of statehood and law was no technicality, but rather a matter of life and death. Traditionally, European states understood one another’s regimes as legitimate. Even when they were at war, they recognized one another’s existence and the distinctiveness of one another’s constitutional traditions. Citizenship is meaningful only when recognized reciprocally; Hitler was destroying the principle of citizenship when he destroyed a neighboring civitas, moving Germany along with Europe towards lawlessness. Germany was treating Poland as European states in their most destructive moments treated settler colonies: as a bit of earth inhabited by ungoverned and undefined beings. SS publications described Poland, a country where more than thirty million people lived, as “virgin territory.” Italians quickly got the message, comparing Poland to Ethiopia, their own African conquest.

Coordinating this utopian colonial image with twentieth-century political reality in the middle of Europe required not just the subjugation of people, but also the destruction of the institutions that were, in fact, present. The bulk of Germany’s imperial work in Poland would involve not so much the creation of something new, as the removal of what was actually there. Restoring the law of the jungle in a country where forests had been cleared a thousand years earlier would require an enormous amount of work.

The destruction of the Polish state was achieved in both ink and blood. As the lawyers worked their typewriters, the murderers worked their guns. Hitler called for a “massive extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.” Insofar as Polish culture existed at all, thought Hitler, it would disappear with the physical elimination of its relatively few “bearers.” Hitler foresaw a “resolution of the Polish problem” by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human. The invasion of Poland gave the state destroyers of the SS the cover of war for their lawless mission. Heydrich organized the Einsatzgruppen, task forces of policemen and SS members usually led by party and SS members of long standing. He instructed his subordinates to murder the Polish leading classes in order to render Polish resistance impossible. Thus, for example, all veterans of the Polish Legions and the Polish Military Organization were to be found and killed. The major operation of the Einsatzgruppen was known as Tannenberg, the plan to murder some sixty-one thousand Polish citizens.

The Einsatzgruppen killed about as many people as expected in Poland in autumn 1939, although they were at first inept in the actual tracking of particular individuals. Nevertheless, they kept up the killing of targeted groups after military operations concluded in October and as they established themselves in Polish cities as the stationary German police. Heydrich expected the “liquidation of leading Poles” to be complete by November. When the shooting of tens of thousands of Poles in 1939 seemed not to suffice, further “leadership elements” were identified in order to be “liquidated” in mass shootings in forests outside the major cities in spring 1940. Heydrich imagined that the killing of the elites would leave the Poles as a mass of laborers. Himmler predicted that the very idea of a Polish nation would disappear.

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The first thrust of the German offensive—military, political, and racial—was directed against Poland as a political entity rather than against its Jewish citizens. But the destruction of the Polish state had the greatest consequences for Poland’s Jews. Minorities depend the most on the protection of the state and upon the rule of law, and it is usually they who suffer most from anarchy and war. The Jews of Poland, to be sure, had to fear official and popular antisemitism in Poland in the late 1930s. Yet they had much more to lose than other Polish citizens from the destruction of Poland. The annihilation of the Polish state by Nazi power was not a simple disappearance, but rather a shattering of existing institutions, and the resulting fragments had sharp, cutting edges.

The first fragmentation was that of national authority. The German-Soviet Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939 spoke of “the collapse of the Polish state”; subsequent German legal language denied that there had ever been a Polish state. All at once Jews were no longer citizens of anything. For that matter, neither were Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, or anyone else with Polish documents (except members of the German minority, who were suddenly privileged). Much of the subject population adapted immediately to German racial expectations. The moment the Germans entered Polish cities to allocate food, some Poles pointed out the Jews waiting in line so that Poles would get more and Jews less (or nothing). Racism and materialism were intertwined right from the beginning. With the principle of citizenship abolished and the principle of race established, no one wanted to be treated worse than the Jews.