Hitler

understanding’ in the army of what was required in the ‘ethnic struggle’. Hitler told Goebbels on 13 October that the military in Poland were ‘too soft and yielding’ and would be replaced as soon as possible by civil administration. ‘Only force is effective with the Poles,’ he added. ‘Asia begins in Poland.’ On 17 October, in a step notably contributing to the extension of the SS’sautonomy, Hitler removed the SS and police from military jurisdiction.
    The most forthright – and courageous – denunciations of the continuing horrendous outrages of the SS were made in written reports to Brauchitsch by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, following the ending of military administration the commander of the army in Poland. His reports condemned the ‘criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering carried out by the SS, police, and administration’, castigating the ‘animal and pathological instincts’ of the SS which had brought the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Blaskowitz feared ‘immeasurable brutalization and moral debasement’ if the SS were not brought under control – something, he said, which was increasingly impossible within Poland ‘since they can well believe themselves officially authorized and justified in committing any act of cruelty’. General Wilhelm Ulex, Commander-in-Chief of the southern section of the front, reported in similar vein.
    The weak-kneed response of army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch – in effect an apologia for the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ policy authorized by Hitler – was fateful. It compromised the position of the army, and pointed the way to the accommodation between army and SS about the genocidal actions to be taken in the Soviet Union in 1941. Brauchitsch spoke of ‘regrettable mistakes’ in the ‘difficult solution’ of the ‘ethnic-political tasks’. After lengthy discussions with the Reichsführer-SS, he was confident that the future would bring a change. Criticism endangering the ‘unity and fighting power of the troops’ had to be prohibited. ‘The solution of ethnic-political tasks, necessary for securing German living space and ordered by the Führer, had necessarily to lead to otherwise unusual, harsh measures against the Polish population of the occupied area,’ he stated. ‘The necessarily accelerated execution of these tasks, caused by the imminently decisive struggle of the German people, naturally brought about a further intensification of these measures.’ Doubtless anticipating the inevitable explosion at the inadequacies of the army, Brauchitsch did not even deliver Blaskowitz’s reports in person to Hitler, but passed on at least the first report on 18 November 1939 via Hitler’s army adjutant Gerhard Engel. The expected ferocious denunciation of the ‘childish attitudes’ in the army leadership inevitably followed. ‘You can’t wage war with Salvation Army methods,’ Hitler raged.
    The inquiries Himmler had set in train following the army complaintspredictably concluded that it was a matter only of ‘trivialities’. But the Reichsführer-SS was angered by the attacks. In March 1940 he eventually sought an opportunity to address the leaders of the army. He accepted responsibility for what had happened, though played down the reports, attributing the accounts of serious atrocities to rumour. According to the memory of one participant, General Weichs, he added that ‘he was prepared, in matters that seemed perhaps incomprehensible, to take on responsibility before the people and the world, since the person of the Führer could not be connected with these things’. Another participant, with more cause than most to take a keen interest in Himmler’s comments, General Ulex, recalled the Reichsführer-SS saying: ‘I do nothing that the Führer does not know about.’
    With the sanctioning of the liquidation programme at the core of the barbaric ‘ethnic cleansing’ drive in Poland, Hitler – and the regime he headed – had crossed the Rubicon. This was no longer a display of outright brutality at home that shocked – as had the massacre of the SA leadership in 1934, or even more so the November Pogrom against the Jews in 1938 – precisely because the structures and traditions of legality in the Reich, whatever the inroads made into them, had not been totally undermined. In what had once been Poland, the violence was unconstrained, systematic, and on a scale never witnessed