In Europe

between have been forgotten.
    Zamość was once a lively place. In 1939 the city had 28,000 inhabitants, including some 10,000 Jews. There was a preparatory school, a cathedral, a courthouse, a synagogue, an orchestra and two local papers, the
Zamojski Kurier
and the
Gazeta Zamojska
. The old synagogue, now part of the municipal library, is behind the town hall. There are no Jews in Zamość now.
    That, in fact, is the most striking thing about the town: the municipal museum stops at 1939, the Rotunda – the jail complex outside the town – rightly honours and commemorates the local partisans, but nowhere is the real drama of Zamość told or remembered.
    Zamość was to serve as a model for the Nazis’ first ethnic resettlements, the site of the first new, pure German SS colony in Poland: Himmlerstadt.
    On 16 October, 1942, all the Jews of Zamość were loaded into lorries and taken to the Belzec death camp. The original Polish inhabitants of the town died by the thousands during a wintry exodus. The cruelty towards the children was devastating. Of the younger children from Zamość and the surrounding areas, approximately 10,000 died during the deportations, and some 30,000 were taken away from their parents because of their blue eyes, blond hair and other ‘pure’ racial traits. They were sent to the
Lebensborn
centres that had been set up all overGermany. There they were ‘Nazified’ and ‘Germanised’, then sent to live with SS families. A great number of those children never returned to Poland.
    Zamość was a high-handed initiative on the part of the SS, the fanatical ideologists of racial purity. And the consequences of that high-handedness were not long coming. Partisan units began operating all around Zamość, mounting one raid after another. Eighteen months later, by spring 1943, the German colonists were begging to be allowed to return to the West. Their farms were under constant attack, they slept in the fields at night from fear of being killed by partisans. The
Wehrmacht
suspended its military operations against the local resistance: the divisions were sorely needed at the front. In July 1944 the Red Army finally took the city.
    Very little is known outside Poland about Zamość and the surrounding villages. Yet it was here that the twentieth century's greatest liquidation of towns and villages took place.
    In most cases of ethnic cleansing, a second process began after the deportations: cultural purification. A new past was invented to go along with the new future, and every memory of the original inhabitants was obliterated as carefully as possible. Monuments were taken down, signs and inscriptions removed, school curricula altered, native languages banned, and sometimes even churchyards were rearranged.
    In Poland and the Baltic States, the gauleiter was ordered to make German provinces of the occupied territories within ten years. The old German names of all of the villages and towns were restored, or new ones were dreamed up. Lódź became Litzmannstadt, Poznań became Posen once more, Zamość became Himmlerstadt.
    When a series of treaties between Germany, the Soviet Union and Italy forced hundreds of thousands of German-speaking nationals to leave South Tyrol, Bessarabia, Poland and the Baltic States, Himmler turned it around into a glorious story: the old blood brothers were returning at last to the ethnic fold.
    Rosie Waldeck, who visited a camp for Bessarabian Germans in Rumania, described how old men sat on benches in the sunshine, how the verandas were covered in greenery, how the women chatted away as they did their laundry, how the young people sang cheerfully and marched aroundunder SS supervision. ‘Now and then a young SS man would affectionately pick up a small child and carry it around on his shoulders, or dangle it on his knee.’ Meals were taken at long tables in the warm afternoon sun.‘These typical descendants of typical colonists, who spoke the antique German of Württemberg from Schiller's day, returned to Hitler's Germany as to the Promised Land.’ In the end, almost half a million German-speaking Europeans took part in this mass migration, and 200,000 of them were assigned a new home in Eastern Europe.
    On Friday, 27 March, 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary:
    Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being pushed east out of the General Government. A rather barbaric method, too grisly to mention, is applied, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. Generally