The German Genius

planning the war. It was these regional planners, statisticians, and agronomists—many of whom were initially cool toward the new regime, but whose careers were rapidly advanced as a result of the many dismissals—who did so much to make respectable a policy that started out as mere prejudice on the part of Hitler, Himmler, and others.
    Poland had been singled out as a “population problem” as early as 1935 in a study by Dr. Theodor Oberländer at the Institute of East European Economic Studies in Königsberg, who argued that its system of smallholdings was chronically inefficient and ripe for an agrarian revolution “on the Russian model.” * This analysis was later widened, in 1939, by the social historian Werner Conze, into a “demographic structural crisis in eastern Central Europe.” 55 A corollary to the theory of overpopulation was the idea of “optimum population size,” the size that allowed the maximum possible return to be extracted from the economic resources of a region. 56 Using such reasoning, the academics calculated that somewhere between 4.5 million and 5.83 million Poles, “every second person in Polish agriculture…represented nothing but dead ballast.” So began the idea that a reduction in population numbers would help improve the efficiency of those areas that eventually came under German influence and control, together with the idea that enforced deportation would help ensure “social peace.”
    A second concept was spearheaded by the Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKF, the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood. This decided which minority ethnic groups were capable of “Germanization” and which weren’t. Himmler decided that one-eighth of the Polish population could be “Germanized” (“There are still a few Goths left in the Caucasus and the Crimea,” he said in 1942) and the population divided into:
     
a. Full-fledged Germans;
b. Persons of German origin who must be taught to become full-fledged Germans again, who therefore possess German nationality but not, initially, the rights and status of full Reich citizenship; this category was to be deported to Germany for Germanization;
c. Valuable members of the dependent minority races, and German renegades who “possess German nationality subject to revocation”
d. Foreign nationals who do not possess German nationality. These comprised 8 million, out of which 1 million were chosen in advance (and arbitrarily) to be included in category C.
     
    Himmler had another system, also dividing people into four classes, of which the most startling was Class 3, members of minority races who had married Germans and shown themselves prepared to “conform to German notions of orderliness” and to “show a willingness to better” themselves. This then was the German (or at least the SS) idea of Germanness. 57
    The classification systems were more than theoretical exercises: the long-term plan was to likewise classify Polish land so that only the “deserving classes” who wished to better themselves would be given the best soil, the plan being that the proportion of Germans working on the best agricultural land in the East would be raised from 11 to 50 percent. 58 Their homesteads would be the first to receive electricity and they were to be organized as the demographers saw fit—villages of 400–500 were judged the most efficient and cohesive. This really was a re-creation of the Volk . The figures amassed were designed to help the Government General produce a Polish petit bourgeoisie in place of the Jews, whose businesses had been closed or ransacked, the aim being that Poland would become “a purely German country within the space of fifteen to twenty years.” 59 To this end the ghettoes were as assiduously studied as other aspects of Polish society. The number of workers and the number of dependents were calculated, set against the minimal amount of nutritional requirements and the cost. Aly and Heim show that these calculations were made and remade until they showed a heavy loss, one that could in no way be recouped, and then the fate of the ghettoes was sealed, on economic if not on racial grounds. As one RKW report put it, “Conditions of undernourishment could be allowed to develop without regard for the consequences.” Much the same arguments were used in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia.
    The project of the economists and demographers that turned out to be the