Hitler

with a ‘foreign-speaking population’ would be established, with its capital in Cracow. An ‘eastern wall’ would surround the German provinces, with the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’ forming a type of ‘no man’s land’ in front of it. The Reichsführer-SS was to be appointed Settlement Commissar for the East (an appointment of vital importance, giving Himmler immense, practically unrestricted powers in the east, confirmed by secret edict of Hitler on 7 October). ‘The deportation of Jews into the foreign-speaking Gau, expulsion over the demarcation-line has been approved by the Führer,’ Heydrich went on. The process was to be spread over a year. As regards ‘the solution of the Polish problem’, the 3 per cent at most of the Polish leadership in the occupied territories ‘had to be rendered harmless’ and put in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were to draw up lists of significant leaders, and of various professional and middle-class groups (including teachers and priests) who were to be deported to the designated ‘dumping-ground’ of the General Government. The ‘primitive Poles’ were to be used as migrant workers and gradually deported to the ‘foreign-speaking Gau’. Jews in rural areas were to be removed, and placed in towns. Jews were systematically to be transported bygoods-train from German areas. Heydrich also envisaged the deportation to Poland of the Reich’s Jews, and of 30,000 gypsies.
    Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall – even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state”. Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.’
    A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in similar vein. ‘The Führer’s judgement on the Poles is annihilatory,’ Goebbels recorded. ‘More animals than human beings … The filth of the Poles is unimaginable.’ Hitler wanted no assimilation. ‘They should be pushed into their reduced state’ – meaning the General Government – ‘and left entirely among themselves.’ If Henry the Lion – the mighty twelfth-century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had resettled peasants on lands in northern and eastern Germany – had conquered the east, the result, given the scope of power available at the time, would have been a ‘slavified’ German mongrel-race, Hitler went on. ‘It’s all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws of race and can act accordingly.’
    Hitler hinted in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in the vaguest terms for public consumption, at ‘cleansing work’ and massive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the ‘new order of ethnographical relations’ in former Poland. Only in confidential dealings with those in the regime’s leadership who needed to know – a characteristic techniqueof his rule not to spread information beyond essential limits – did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended. At a meeting on 17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Frank, Himmler, Heß, Bormann, Lammers, Frick, and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, Hitler outlined the draconian policy for Poland. The military should be happy to be freed from administrative