Oskar Schindler, page 11
Consequently, during the six years the Germans occupied Poland, they waged two wars against the Polish population: one against Polish Jews and one against non-Jewish Poles. Once in Poland, the Germans were determined to destroy the heart of the intellectual leadership or core of the Polish people and isolate the Jews from occupied Polish society. Specially trained Einsatzgruppen (special action groups) made up of 2,700 men from the SD, Sipo, and the SS were sent into Poland to combat so-called hostile elements. Initially used in the takeover of Austria in 1938 (the An-schluß) to establish police security, over time the Einsatzgruppen expanded their mission to include the neutralization or eradication of all societal elements deemed racially or physically dangerous to the German control of Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, and later, the Soviet Union. In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen became the principal killing squads the Germans used in their effort to mass murder all Jews in the Soviet Union.79
Five Einsatzgruppen swept into Poland behind the Wehrmacht in early September 1939. What Ian Kreshaw calls an “orgy of atrocities” followed; it put earlier Nazi brutalities in the Greater Reich “completely in the shade.” The Germans were determined to wipe out Poland’s religious, political, and intellectual leaders as well as the nobility. Ultimately, this campaign against Poland’s elite resulted in 60,000 deaths.80
Jews also suffered terribly during this period. In Kraków, which was occupied by the Fourteenth Army and Einsatzgruppe I under SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, many of the city’s 60,000 Jews fled the Nazi terror campaign. Yet the Jews in Kraków and elsewhere in Poland suffered not only from abuses at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen but also from atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht.81 One of the first Wehrmacht officers to voice concerns about this was Admiral Canaris, who ordered his Ab-wehr officers to watch the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and to report the atrocities they committed. Though Canaris was too cautious to lodge a formal complaint with Hitler, he did share his concerns with General Keitel on September 12 at the special armored “Führer Train” headquarters in Upper Silesia. Canaris told Keitel that he had heard of the shootings of Poles and Jews and of plans that the clergy and the nobility were to be “exterminated (ausgerottet).” Canaris seemed worried that the Wehrmacht would be blamed for these killings. Keitel said that Hitler had already decided on the matter and had told General Franz Halder, the army Chief of Staff, that if the military wanted no part in such actions, they should stand aside and let the Einsatzgruppen do their work. A month after this conversation, Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, where some of the worst atrocities had already taken place. As an active Abwehr officer, he was probably soon privy to the atrocities and to Canaris’s order that Abwehr keep an eye on the Einsatzgruppen.82
The Creation of the General Government
If Poland was the racial laboratory for the SS, then the General Government was its killing field. With the exception of the Russian front from 1941 onwards, the General Government was the most brutal place in the Third Reich. In a meeting with important Nazi and Wehrmacht leaders in mid-October 1939, Hitler laid out the practical and ideological framework for the General Government. It was not to be treated like a German province nor was it to have a strong economy. Hitler intended the quality of life for the Poles there to be low and viewed the General Government as a primary source for forced labor. He viewed German efforts there as a Volkstumskampf (hard ethnic struggle) that should have no legal restrictions. Nazi control of this part of Poland would “allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks.” German activity in the General Government, Hitler told the gathering, was “the devil’s work.”83 It was in this environment that Oskar Schindler would work so hard to save his Jewish workers in Kraków.
German plans for the administration and division of Poland after its conquest were put into place unevenly and reflected Hitler’s uncertainty over the future fate of the Polish nation. The Führer gave some thought to creating a rump Polish state, though he remained unsure about the exact nature of this entity until October 1939. His uncertainty centered around Stalin’s hesitancy to occupy his portion of Poland and the West’s response to German peace feelers in September and early October.84 In the meantime, the Wehrmacht wanted to restore to normalcy all the areas it had conquered as quickly as possible. Before the invasion of Poland, it set up special “CdZs enemy country” (Chef der Zivilverwaltung, chief of civil administration) offices attached to each of the invading armies to oversee this process.85
Almost immediately, conflicts began between Nazi Party officials and the military over the appointments and powers of the new CdZs. Sometimes, Hitler countered military appointments. The result was a growing conflict between the Wehrmacht and party officials that was to continue in various ways in occupied Poland throughout the war. Part of Oskar Schindler’s genius in saving his Jews was his ability to work within the shadows of this conflict and use it to his advantage.
By the end of September, Hitler had approved the army’s “Organization of the Military Administration in the Occupied, formerly Polish, Territories.” Southern East Prussia and eastern Upper Silesia were given special provisions; the rest of German-occupied Poland was divided into four military districts (Danzig-West Prussia, Posen, Łódź , and Kraków) overseen by the military aided by a civilian administration. The four districts were overseen by Commander in Chief East Gerd von Runstedt, who also commanded the Łódź military district. The senior civilian administrator under Runstedt was Hans Frank, a Nazi “Old Fighter” and its most powerful legal expert. Other prominent Nazis such as SS-Obergruppenführer Albert Forster (Danzig) and future SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser (Posen) held the chief administrative positions in the other military districts. The Kraków military district’s civilian administrator was to be SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Seyß-Inquart, a former Austrian chancellor who would later hold important administrative positions as deputy governor of the General Government and Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands. Each of these men were tried and convicted as war criminals after World War II.86
Hitler’s appointment of top Nazis to these administrative positions in Poland meant that the traditional party infighting that had so plagued German administration elsewhere now would become rampant throughout Poland. Petty jealousy and backbiting now became the hallmarks of a Nazi Party-dominated administrative system that was about to undergo another major change as Hitler agreed to a new administrative structure for Poland that transferred governing power to the Nazi Party. Wehrma-cht leaders had never been comfortable about administering a civilian area once a conflict had ended and order was restored. Administration was something best left to civilians, not soldiers. Germany’s military leaders were particularly glad to be rid of the political responsibilities of such administration.87
Friction between the army and Nazi administrators intensified as army commanders became more and more critical of the brutality of the Einsatzgruppen against the Polish population. Hitler sided with the SS and told Joseph Goebbels on October 13 that the army was “too soft and yielding.” Four days later, he took the SS and the police out from under the military’s jurisdiction in Poland. The SS and other Nazi Party organs and functionaries would now be given a free hand to expand their experiments in what remained of the Polish “racial laboratory.”88
The transformation of Poland into a civilian-administered area did not end army protests. Over several months, Generalleutnant Johannes Blaskowitz, Commander in Chief East, sent his superior, army commander Walther von Brauchitsch, two memos severely criticizing the reign of terror unleashed by the SS in Poland against civilians. Blaskowitz was fearful that if these activities were not halted, they could severely damage the German nation. Blaskowitz felt that the “brutalization and moral depravity” practiced by the SS could easily “spread like a plague among valuable German men.” The person principally responsible for spreading news among the officer corps about Blaskowitz’s memorandums was Major Helmut “Muffel” Groscurth, former head of Abwehr Untergruppe IS and a close associate of Hans Oster, Admiral Canaris’s Chief of Staff.89
Hitler, who saw Blaskowitz’s first memo, called his ideas childish. According to the Führer, you could not fight a war using Salvation Army methods. The army leadership responded weakly to Blaskowitz’s complaints and worked out a compromise with Himmler and General Fedor von Bock sent a memorandum to all army commanders that decried the “unfortunate misinterpretations” of the security forces in Poland but said that their “‘otherwise uncommonly harsh measures towards the Polish population of the occupied areas’ were justified by the need to ‘secure German Lebensraum and the solutions to ethnic political problems ordered by the Führer.’” In the spring of 1940, Himmler spoke to senior army leaders in Koblenz and said that though he never saw such harsh actions himself, the policies were necessary to deal with the subversive actions of Polish nationalists and Bolsheviks. Though Blaskowitz remained in the army, he held secondary posts and was never promoted to Generalfeldmarschall.90
Within days after the Wehrmacht had defeated the last pockets of Polish resistance in early October, plans began in earnest for the final territorial realignment of German-occupied Poland. Wilhelm Stuckhart, a state secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry, prepared several decrees for Hitler dealing with Polish regions that were to be integrated into the Greater Reich and the creation of a General Government for central and southern Poland. With Hitler’s approval, the new General Government for the Occupied Areas of Poland (Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was to come into existence on October 26, with Hans Frank as governor general (Generalgouverneur). Part of northwestern Poland was integrated into the Danzig-West Prussia Reichsgau under Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Albert Forster, and East Prussia was governed by Gauleiter Erich Koch. The area around the Polish city of Łódź was integrated into the Warthegau under Reichstatthalter and Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, and eastern Upper Silesia became East Upper Silesia. Two years later, East Upper Silesia was divided into two Gaue: Lower Silesia, its capital in Breslau (today Wrocław); and Upper Silesia, its capital in Kattowice (Katowice).91
Within weeks after Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, the creation of the General Government, with Kraków as its capital, was almost completed. Hitler had personally chosen Hans Frank to rule the new General Government. For the next five years, Schindler worked with officials close to Frank and lived literally in the shadows of Frank’s headquarters and official residence, Wawel Castle. Born in Karlsruhe in 1900, Frank was a legitimate “Old Fighter” who joined the Nazi Party in the fall of 1923. A law student in Munich, he took part in the legendary Beer Hall Putsch on November 8 and 9, 1923, when Hitler tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the Bavarian state government. He became Hitler’s personal lawyer and founded what later became the National Socialist League of Law Guardians (NSRB; Nationalsozialistischer Rechtwahrerbund). As the Nazi’s top lawyer, Frank was involved in several thousand cases involving the Nazi Party before Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. 92
Frank won a Reichstag seat in the 1930 elections and served as Bavarian Minister of Justice from 1933 to 1934. He created the Academy for German Law (Akademie für deutsches Recht) in 1933 and served as its president until 1941. In 1934, Frank became a Reich Minister without Portfolio. Yet despite his numerous positions and awards, Frank never entered Hitler’s inner circle. Generally, Hitler disliked lawyers. More important, throughout his Nazi career, Frank made moves and statements that alienated the Führer. For example, in 1934, Frank argued that the SA leaders murdered in the Röhm Purge (Night of the Long Knives) should have received trials.93
At a distance, none of this seemed seriously to affect Frank’s career. When the war began, he had joined the reserve battalion of the Potsdam Ninth Infantry Regiment. When he became the chief administrative head (Oberverwaltungschef) of the Wehrmacht’s occupied Polish territories, he lobbied hard for the governor general’s position and hoped it would increase his power. Even before he became governor general, he began to transform the administrative structure he had inherited from the military.Chaos abounded, which later worked to Oskar Schindler’s advantage. Technically, only Frank and Hermann Göring, the chair of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich (Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidi-gung), could issue decrees in the General Government. Yet it was not Göring, who was also head of the Four Year Plan (Vierjahresplan), which oversaw economic war planning, who became a threat to Frank. Early on, Göring made Frank his defense commissioner in the General Government to oversee his interests there. Instead, the threats came from elements in the Party, government, and military who longed for access to the General Government’s resources and manpower.94
Frank and the SS in the General Government
Frank brought considerable power and prestige to his position as governor general. From his perspective, he was answerable only to Hitler and tried to adopt the Führerprinzip of absolute authority under one leader throughout the General Government. To underscore his imperial pretensions and to reduce the significance of the Poles’ modern capital, Warsaw, Frank chose Kraków, the political and intellectual seat of Polish kings, as the capital of the General Government. He chose as his official residence Wawel Castle, the medieval home of Poland’s Catholic prelates and monarchs. But Frank preferred to spend as much time as possible in the neo-Gothic castle once owned by the Polish architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohuzs on the outskirts of the city in Przegorzały overlooking the Vistula River. Nazi Party officials in Berlin jokingly referred to the Government General as the “Frank-reich” (Hans Frank’s kingdom), a play on the German word for France and a reference to the early medieval German-French kingdom. Frank’s imperiousness affected his family. His wife, Brigitte, saw herself as the “Queen of Poland” and acted out the part in a most corrupt way; in fact, charges of corruption against Frank and his family seriously undermined his authority. In the spring of 1942, Frank met with Hitler, Dr. Hans Lammers, the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, and Martin Bormann, the Führer’s alter ego and private secretary, over charges of corruption. When Frank promised to reform, particularly with regard to his wife’s family, Hitler seemed satisfied. Frank got away with his crimes because other Nazi officials, who were as corrupt as Frank, feared that pressing their charges too firmly against him could backfire. We shall see that this was not the last of Frank’s troubles with his enemies or with the Führer.95
Frank’s cronies in crime and genocide were the officials he appointed to help him run the General Government. His first deputy governor was Arthur Seyß Inquart, an Austrian-trained lawyer who had earlier served as the Reich governor (Reichsstatthalter) of Austria and Reich Minister without Portfolio. After the conquest of The Netherlands in the spring of 1940, Seyß Inquart became the Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, a position he held until the end of the war. In the fall of 1945, Seyß In-quart and Frank were tried and convicted of several of the four counts of the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trial of twenty-two major Nazi war criminals: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Both were hanged on October 16, 1946, in Nuremberg.96
After Seyß Inquart’s departure, Dr. Josef Bühler, who testified at Frank’s trial and was himself later tried and executed in Poland for war crimes, ran the day-to-day affairs of the General Government as its state secretary (Staatssekretär). Bühler oversaw the twelve (later fourteen) major administrative divisions of the “Frank-reich.” The central administration of the General Government was divided into major divisions (Hauptabteilungen) that dealt with education, railways, postal service, the economy, and so forth. Because these divisions were similar to those in the Reich, German officials in Berlin and elsewhere often went directly to the General Government’s divisions to do business, thus bypassing the power-hungry governor. Bühler made matters worse by occasionally setting up offices that conflicted directly with the work of the General Government’s major divisions.97
The General Government was divided into four, and then later, five districts: Kraków, Lublin, Radom, Warsaw, and Galicia. Each district was ruled by a Gouverneur, who was usually a Party member, and a civilian Amtschef. Each district’s governor enjoyed an absolute local authority that occasionally conflicted with the interests of the General Government. During his five years in Kraków, Oskar Schindler had to deal frequently not only with General Government officials headquartered in Kraków but also with the Kraków district’s governor, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Gustav Freiherr Wächter and his successors, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Richard Wendler and Dr. Curt Ludwig von Burgsdorff.98
Frank’s efforts to wield absolute control over the General Government were complicated not only by the bloated administrative system he tried to govern but also by his limited authority over key elements in the Nazi dictatorship—the SS and the military. Though Frank was able to hold his own with the Wehrmacht, he was, according to Hans Umbreit, “on a losing ticket from the start” when it came to Himmler and the SS. Himmler was the Reich Führer-SS and Chief of the German Police (Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei). He had under him the newly created Reich Main Security Office (RSHA; Reichssicherheitshauptamt), Germany’s new super police organization, and was also Reich Commissioner for the Fortification of the German Volk-Nation (Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums). This latter position gave Himmler considerable authority to press his claim as the guardian of police and political authority in the Nazis’ new “racial laboratory.” Because Himmler was much closer to Hitler than Frank when it came to dealing with the “Jewish question,” the Reich Führer’s position in the General Government was further strengthened.99
