Hitler

responsibility. The General Government was not to become part of the Reich. It was not the task of the administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a sound economic and financial basis. The Polish intelligentsia were to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling class. The standard of living was to remain low: ‘We only want to get labour supplies from there.’ The administration there was to be given a free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. ‘We don’t want to do anything there that we do in the Reich,’ was ominously noted. Carrying out the work there would involve ‘a hard ethnic struggle that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles.’ Rule over the area would ‘allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks’. Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement purposes (through Himmler’s new role as head of the programme for the ethnic reordering of Poland). ‘Cleverness and hardness in this ethnic struggle,’ Hitler ended, with usual recourse to national needs as justification, ‘must save us from again having to enter the fields of slaughter on account of this land.’ ‘The devil’s work,’ he called it.
    Hitler’s approval for what Heydrich had set in motion cannot be doubted. Referring back several months later to the chequered relations of the SS and police in Poland with the army leadership, Heydrich pointed out that the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland was ‘in accordance with the special order of the Führer’. The ‘political activity’ carried out in Poland by the Reichsführer-SS, which had caused conflict with some of the army leadership, had followed ‘the directives of the Führer as well as the General Field-Marshal’. He added ‘that the directives according to which the police deployment took place were extraordinarily radical (e.g. orders of liquidation for numerous sectors of the Polish leadership, going into thousands)’. Since the order was not passed on to army leaders, they had presumed that the police and SS were acting arbitrarily.
    Indeed, the army commanders on the ground in Poland had been given no explicit instructions about any mandate from Hitler for the murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy of the SS and Security Police, though Brauchitsch, like Keitel, was well aware of what was intended. This was in itself characteristic of how the regime functioned, and of Hitler’s keenness – through keeping full knowledge to the smallest circle possible, and speaking for the most part even there in generalities, however draconian – to cloud his own responsibility. The army’s hands were far from unsullied by the atrocities in Poland. Brauchitsch’s proclamation to the Poles on 1 September had told them that the Wehrmacht did not regard the population as its enemy, and that all agreements on human rights would be upheld. But already in the first weeks of September numerous army reports recounted plundering, ‘arbitrary shootings’, ‘maltreatment of the unarmed, rapes’, ‘burning of synagogues’, and massacres of Jews by soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The army leaders – even the most pro-Nazi among them – nevertheless regarded such repellent actions as serious lapses of discipline, not part of a consistent racially motivated policy of unremitting ‘cleansing’ to be furthered with all means possible, and sought to punish those involved through the military courts. (In fact, most were amnestied by Hitler through a decree on 4 October justifying German actions as retaliation ‘out of bitterness for the atrocities committed by the Poles’.) The commanders on the ground in Poland, harsh though their own military rule was, did not see the atrocities which they acknowledged among their own troops – in their view regrettable, if inevitable, side-effects of the military conquest of a bitter enemy and perceived ‘inferior’ people – as part of an exterminatory programme of ‘ethnic struggle’. Their approach, draconian though their treatment of the Poles was, differed strikingly from the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
    Gradually, in the second half of September the unease among army commanders in Poland at the savagery of the SS’s actions turned to unmistakable criticism. Awareness of this fed complaints from the Nazi leadership about the ‘lack of