#36
Post
by gebhk » 30 Sep 2019, 16:08
Hi Sid
Again I think we are at cross purposes. The subject is Poles not citizens of the Soviet Union and on the question of AHs approach to the latter we are, I believe, in complete agreement.
Also, I think you would agree, AHs opinions, were not the sole operating lever in the implementation of policy. The Nazi state, while tolerating no challenge to the power of the party, overt dissent from its ideological principles and the will of its virtually deified leader, appears to have had limited control over how that power, ideology and will were implemented. Indeed this process can only be described as chaotic as the four highly stratified vertical structures of reich, state, armed forces and party fought each other (and indeed were encouraged to fight) for influence, jurisdiction and prestige with duplication, triplication and quadruplication of functions being the rule rather than the exception. In such an environment, it is hardly surprising that principles of policy impacted very differently on different groups of people. The whole Volksliste/DVL shambles is a classical example - and that is before we even begin to look into how people were signed up to the various lists and allocated to the various 'classes' within them.
Suffice to say that one of my grandmothers (a resident of Krakow in the General Government, not even of the annexed territories) was invited to sign up the DVL as a category I/II German with all the rights and practical privileges this entailed. Her only connection to Germany or Germanness was that she was the widow of a Polish career officer who had a distant German ancestor and hence a German surname. She showed the uniformed Nazi functionaries the door; they meekly complied. I only met her once and she was a formidable lady - I believe the story. Incidentally, she was subsequently hounded to an early fatal heart attack by functionaries of the UB - ie Polish communist state security thugs. There is a sad irony in that.
But I digress, the point is that Germany, as you say, needed cannon fodder and to achieve that, the pool of manpower available for conscription needed to be widened. Also not every 'satrap' of the newly-created Gaus in the annexed portions of Poland was keen to lose their skilled manpower by deportation into the General Government in the interests of 'racial purity'. Both these needs, of course, required the creation of more Germans. To this end, people in the annexed territories were 'invited' to sign the DVL. Who was invited and to what 'class' of German he or she was assigned to, varied wildly between territories. In Upper Silesia signing up was compulsory for all. Those invited who failed to avail themselves of this kind invitation were initially sent to concentration camps with their families and from 1944, executed.
The point is that an estimated 375k Polish citizens were conscripted into the armed forces of the 3rd Reich on the basis of being newly-minted 'Germans'; a perfect example of the 'if they have desirable attributes, they must have German antecedents' principle. Given that these people had families, the numbers of people thus becoming 'German' at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen were not inconsiderable (over 3 mil, it is estimated).
Interestingly, in the context of this discussion, the criteria for classification were heavily biased towards cultural rather than physical variables (such as membership of German clubs/associations, speaking German at home, pro-German political activity and such like). Ironically, Poles who had 'German' phycical characteristics (most of the tosh used to define/measure them has since been debunked, but that is besides the point in this context) and people of honest to goodness, genuine, provable German 'blood' who had become Polonised culturally, were placed at the bottom of this new class system. In other words, wanting to be a German made you more of a German in the eyes of the state than actually, genetically, being one.
Not something AH would have approved of I suspect, but there it was.
