Black Earth(48)

Much of Poland’s west was annexed to the Reich—or, officially, de-annexed back to the Reich. The new German districts drawn from Polish territories, the new Gaue, were governed by Hitler’s cronies, old Nazi party men. These leaders had much more freedom of action than their colleagues in the prewar German districts, who always had to deal with the burdens of law and bureaucracy. The largest and most important of the new Gaue was the Warthegau, home to 4.2 million Poles, 435,000 Jews, and only 325,000 Germans. This was a new kind of German district. Prewar Germany was overwhelmingly German; here Germans were a colonial elite and the majority population were “protected subjects.” Polish children, for example, were to be taught a pidgin German in school, so that they would be distinguishable as racial inferiors but capable of taking orders from Germans. Much of central Poland was transformed into a colony known as the “General Government.” It was initially called the “General Government of the Occupied Polish Lands,” but this qualification was dropped because of its suggestion that Poland had once existed. According to Nazi logic there was no occupation, but rather a colonization of legally “empty” territory. The degree of freedom was even greater here than in the new Gaue, since there was not even the pretense of German law.

In the annexed zones and in the General Government, Polish civil law was replaced by anti-Jewish repression, which accelerated at a pace impossible in prewar Germany. In October 1939, the Germans seized “the property of the former Polish state” and all Jewish property. Jews were banned from practicing professions, and Jewish males were required to report for labor. Jews lost the right to remain where they were. Both Heydrich and the new governor-general Hans Frank ordered ghettoization of Polish Jews. This proceeded differently in different regions; by the end of 1941 most Polish Jews were behind the walls of a ghetto. Crucial everywhere was the simple assumption that Jews could be separated from the protection of the law: They had no power to decide where their bodies would be, and no claim to possessions. Beginning in Poland, the Germans would establish ghettos in every country where they attempted to destroy a state, and in no country where they carried out a conventional occupation. The ghetto was the urban expression of state destruction.

The creation of ghettos in the cities meant a basic transformation of the Polish landscape. Jews, who had been almost everywhere in prewar Poland, were now concentrated in a small number of urban neighborhoods. This made possible the theft by Germans of all of the Jewish property that they could take (as well as the rape of Jewish girls and women). The signal to the surrounding population was unambiguous. Jews had often been beyond the world of moral concern in interwar Poland; now they were beyond the reach of law and indeed the ambit of daily life. By the time ghettos were established and Jews deported to them, their Polish neighbors had been pauperized by German rule for about a year. This presumably made Poles more likely to steal from Jews when the opportunity arose. As was the case everywhere, people in Poland tended to hate those from whom they stole because they had stolen from them.

For most Poles, the ghettoizations of 1940 and 1941 were the moment when Jews disappeared from their lives. Hundreds of years of mixed settlement were suddenly over, from one day to the next. Jews, once seen every day in every setting, were now seen only in work columns or through walls—or, very rarely, in hiding. Their houses in the villages and their apartments in the city were there for the taking. The traditionally Jewish vocations, in commerce and the professions, would now be performed by others. German occupation obviously did not mean social advancement for Poles as such, since educated Poles were killed and the rest were treated as a mute proletariat. Poles in the General Government were seized on the streets and sent to camps as forced labor. All of this created a setting of relative deprivation, wherein many Poles found it acceptable to seize what they could from Jews as the Jews disappeared. Polish theft of Jewish property did not make Poles allies of the Germans, but it did make them seek to justify what they had done and tend to support any policy that kept the Jews from regaining what had been theirs. In any event, helping Jews who left the ghettos was punishable by death in the General Government.

The second fragmentation brought by the German destruction of the Polish state was that of local authority, both that of the prewar village and county administrations and the prewar Jewish autonomous bodies. The Polish central government was destroyed, Polish law was abolished, and the Polish state was declared never to have existed. Polish local authorities did remain in place, but were now unmoored from prior law and tradition. Removed from the previous institutional hierarchy by German practice, their function was fundamentally altered by Nazi priorities. They no longer executed orders from central ministries or represented the interests of local citizens. There were no longer ministries and there were no longer citizens. Instead, local authorities were made personally responsible for the implementation of German racial policies. They oversaw the deportations of Poland’s Jews to ghettos and the distribution of property not taken by the Germans.