KLAUS-MICHAEL MALLMANN and BOGDAN MUSIAL (EDS.)

Genesis des Genozids. Polen 1939-1941
On behalf of the German Historical Institute Warsaw and the Ludwigsburg Research Center, University of Stuttgart (Veröffentlichungen der Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg der Universität Stuttgart, Vol. 3). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2004. 240 pp.

The dozen essays in this collective volume derive from a Ludwigsburg conference in the late summer of 2003. In their introduction, the editors espouse the thesis that ‘the September campaign [of the Wehrmacht 1939] can be seen as the prelude to the war of annihilation, and with it the genesis of the genocide,’ because the attack at the time was not only on the military adversary, but was ‘directed rather against (almost) all of Polish society’ (p. 8).

The editors here criticize the deplorable state of affairs in policy on the past in Poland, namely that 15 years after the end of communism ‘a great many falsifications and distortions have still not been corrected.’ But they themselves fall prey to these distortions when they suggest a total number of 5.5 million victims for the country (p. 7). In his paper on differences between and shared features of the National Socialist and Soviet occupation regimes in Poland, Bogdan Musial divides these figures into ca. three million (uncontested) Jewish and 2.5 million (much exaggerated) non-Jewish victims.¹ So there is a decided lack here of critical distance to the false data repeated over decades by historians of the Polish People’s Republic, who in line with the dictates of a national-communist policy on history sought to make the equivalence of the two groups of victims a cornerstone of their narratives. It should also be noted that Musial appears to overlook the fact that the figure of 46,500 Polish citizens murdered between September and late December 1939 does not correspond to the figure on the book jacket of 60,000 Poles and 7,000 Jews ‘killed external to combat activities’ at the time. (By contrast, Jochen Böhler writes later that the number of Jews who died violently in September 1939 ‘can scarcely be estimated’ [p. 54, fn. 52]). It also should be pointed out that of the 600,000 Jews resident before the beginning of the war in the western Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany, far more than just ‘a number in the tens of thousands’ were expelled into the Generalgouvernement (see the figures cited by Michael Alberti for the Warthegau, p. 120). Co-editor Musial’s statements on the industrial and agricultural policy of the German occupiers (pp. 19f. and 29, 31) are contradictory. Moreover, the situation in the countryside was far more complex than Musial presents it here, and it is not true that ‘Poles and Jews’ equally were both ‘left to starve’ (p. 21). After all, when the Jewish population was compelled to living isolated and confined in derelict neighborhoods behind fences, barbed wire and walls, the overwhelming majority of agricultural enterprises remained in Polish hands. His description of the Soviet occupation lacks a necessary reference to the fact that the stereotype of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was virulent in Poland long before 1939. In his conclusion, Musial contends, at odds with current commonly held views, that the National Socialist policy of violence unrolled ‘in an comparatively ‘dilettante’ and ‘unprofessional’ manner,’ while the Soviet perpetrators were far superior to the Germans […] technically and in terms of organization’ (pp. 30f.). However, the SS’s security organs entered Poland in September 1939 with a ‘wanted persons list (Sonderfahndungsbuch)’ containing the names of 61,000 citizens due to be eliminated. And during the conquest they were eager to confiscate all card files of local organisations they could lay their hands on -- in order to complete their murderous search.

If it was customary in the early decades after the war in West Germany that few wished to recall the Nazi crimes in looking back to the National Socialism during the war, it becomes clear in some of the essays here that this situation has changed fundamentally. German ‘perpetrator research,’ as it dubs itself, now has no lack of perpetrators. As if there were some sort of competition here, the generation of the children and grandchildren seems to vie in a bid to edge one another out in showing which of the Nazi formations they analyze were worst: which committed the greatest crimes and the largest number of murders in the subjugated population. In this vein, Jochen Böhler sees the actions of the Wehrmacht in late summer and early autumn of 1939 as the ‘prelude to the war of annihilation.’ Initially he revises the image of the ‘tragic entanglement’ of the Wehrmacht in the crimes of the September campaign. Rather, in the form of mass executions of civilians and POWs, German soldiers running amok ‘in hundreds of Polish villages and towns’ (p. 41), and the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish population, the Wehrmacht played an independent role of its own in connection with numerous murder operations, grounded on deeply anchored biases, ideological indoctrination and ‘fateful directives’ from superiors. Co-editor Mallmann attributes the ‘prelude to the war of annihilation’ to the ‘terror’ perpetrated by German police formations ‘motivated by racial ideology.’ Using material from the files of investigative proceedings by state prosecutors against Nazi suspects, he sketches the role of the police, the so-called Ordnungspolizei in green uniform, from the ‘campaign in Poland’ to the beginning of the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union. He argues that the approximately 10,000 police had substantial latitude in connection with the ‘‘nationality struggle (Volkstumskampf)’ and ethnic ‘land clearance project (Flurbereinigung)’, and ‘previous biases […], ethnic constructs, stereotypes and phobias that determined perception’ (p. 72) impacted on the realization of this in a fateful way. All” these factors gave rise to a ‘habitualized [exercise of] force’ (p. 82).

Dorothee Weitbrecht focuses on the Einsatzgruppen. She analyzes the guidelines for the SS Einsatzgruppen before and during the offensive war, and their behavior against potential or only imagined opponents, which deviated markedly from these guidelines and was extremely brutal. By contrast, Martin Cüppers thinks the Waffen-SS was the ‘decisive means of power of the Germans to realize their [….] occupation policy aims’ (p. 105). When Cüppers, in his distinctive diction, calls the murders committed by the Waffen-SS of unarmed civilians the ‘first planned attempt of the Germans [sic] to destroy groups of human beings on the basis of “racial” and social characteristics attributed to the victims by their murderers,’ he apparently has forgotten the war of the German colonial troops against the Herero and Nama tribes.² Moreover, Cüppers falsely suggests that the traveling exhibitions in Germany on the ‘crimes of the Wehrmacht’ were meant to prove ‘that the German war of annihilation did not begin until the attack on the Soviet Union’ (p. 106). That is not quite correct. The exhibitions sought to raise and sharpen the awareness more generally and in a broader public that in 1941 a war was launched bound up not only with extensive planning, but also with countless acts aimed at exterminating the inhabitants of Eastern Europe.³ In his regional study on the Wartheland under the control of Arthur Greiser, Michael Alberti exemplifies and explains that ‘this parade ground of National Socialism already possessed all characteristics of a war of annihilation’ (p. 122). Volker Rieß deals with the killing of sick and handicapped patients in sanatoria in the north and west of Poland.

The essays in the first section of the volume on the character of the conquest and foreign domination of Poland show once again, as far as the German and Austrian actors are concerned, that the generation of the decision-makers and those who implemented policy -- men of the expertise of a Dr. Best, Dr. Dr. Rasch and the rest, combining an often excellent formal education and technical ability with fanatic convictions of contempt for human beings -- simply proved a failure.

A second smaller section of essays deals with the interior life in the society of the occupied country. Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk initially examines the ‘nation torn apart,’ meaning Polish society under Nazi and Soviet rule. In contrast to Musial, he also deals with the antisemitic sentiments and the widespread notion of ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism in the Polish population. And he correctly points to groups in the population which initially could reap material benefit from the German rule, such as the peasants and war-profiteers of every stripe. He notes ‘even an open push in some locales toward voluntary de-Polonization’ (p. 148). But overall here an idealization predominates, familiar from historiography in the Polish People’s Republic, of a supposedly steely attitude of resistance in the whole Polish nation which allegedly was unsurpassed in solidarity. Its core discursive statement, as Jan Gross aptly characterized it already back in the 1970s, was ‘to picture the war period as one of heroic struggle by a united society against the “Hun invasion”’. ⁴ So even now Mlynarczyk tells us that supposedly ‘the overwhelming majority of all social groups disappeared from sight,’ and in addition, ‘participated actively in the creation of the [so-called] Polish Underground State,’ and that ‘an almost united Polish front formed against the National Socialists’ and their Polish helpers (pp. 149, 151). And this was achieved, as Mlynarczyk later states, contradicting himself, by an ‘atomized society’ -- one in which there was ‘no chance for the formation of a uniform attitude toward the occupiers’ (p. 162)! This indissoluble tension between the oppressive reality of occupation, replete with anxiety, and its heroization (generally post factum), a myth where the occupiers were unable to frighten ‘anyone,’ also characterizes the utilization, according to Mlynarczyk, of some statements by contemporaries that lay claim to ‘general validity’ (on pp. 157 f.). Finally, in regard to events under Soviet occupation, the author neglects to mention that already after the first few months of Soviet rule, the strict anti-Polish line was weakened, giving way to an attempt by the Soviet authorities to win over the Polish population, especially by concessions in cultural life.

Marek Wierzbicki (p. 200) points briefly to this in his study on Polish-Jewish relations in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. Here it becomes clear once again that the perception widespread in Polish society that ‘the Jews’ had enthusiastically collaborated with the occupiers was largely driven and distorted by prevailing traditional anti-Semitic views, especially that of the stereotype of the ‘zydokomuna’ (pp. 198 f.).

Barbara Engelking provides a summary of her careful study of letters written by Polish informers from the first years of occupation in the Generalgouvernement. ⁵ Many of these informed on ‘Jews’ and their ‘violations and transgressions.’ By contrast, Adam Dziurok’s paper on the problem of the ethnic Germans describes the situation of the eastern Upper Silesians, a population the occupiers wished to exploit for their owns ends. Andrea Löw provides the only essay dealing exclusively with the fate of the Jewish population. Utilizing numerous reports from contemporary witnesses and their memoirs, she illuminates several aspects of Jewish reactions to conquest, occupation and the National Socialist persecution of the Jews.

The volume lacks an index. Since various authors name a whole series of persons a number of times, the volume could substantially have benefited from at least an index of persons. In view of the confusion in place name designations, a concordant German-Polish place name index would also have been a welcome addition.

Despite these and other deficiencies (such as in the false spelling and localization of places), and the at times serious contradictions in content, this collective volume, along with other new publications in recent years, ⁶ has the merit of providing the necessary greater attention to the crimes associated with the attack by Nazi Germany on Poland and the crimes under Nazi and Soviet occupation from 1939to 1941, long a desideratum in historiography. We can agree with the editors that the crimes of the attackers during the German-Polish War 1939 have been given far too little space and salience in the collective memory of the Germans. At the same time, however, it is necessary to correct the assertion by the editors in their introduction that when the occupation regimes are compared, the main difference is that only the Soviets tried to play off ethnic groups in Poland one against the other (see the more correct view of this in Mlynarczyk, p. 146).

The editors also fail to make clear that in regard to the number of victims in 1939/40, the figures involved were quite different from those in the National Socialist (actual) genocide of Soviet POWs, Jews and other groups of civilians that commenced in mid-1941. And this is true despite the fact that the numerous summary mass executions of POWs and civilians in 1939/40, often members of the leadership stratum of the country, were in serious violation of the norms of international law.

However, in Poland down to 1941, the occupiers were concerned with recklessly implementing by brute force a battery of restrictions for groups in the populations defined as enemies, utilizing primarily the means of mass expulsion and internment in concentration and forced labour camps. The figures for victims of ‘the German terror in the autumn of 1939’ (p. 15) given by Musial himself already make this clear. In any case, the anti-Soviet murder operations by the National Socialist forces in 1941 cost far more lives than the anti-Polish operations in 1939. That is doubtless also attributable to the factor of time: the fact that the war in Poland only lasted a few weeks.

Klaus-Peter Friedrich (Marburg) Institut für Zeitgeschichte München - Berlin
Translated by Bill Templer