Prelude to the Final Solution. The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (review)

The national conflict in the Polish-German borderlands emerged in its modern form during the revolution of 1848. The conflict intensified after the unification of Germany when, first under Bismarck and then, in a more intensified form, under his successors after 1890, attempts were made to Germanize the areas of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had been incorporated into Prussia following the partitions. An Ostmarkverein (Association for the Eastern Provinces) was set up to purchase (and later expropriate) Polish land and settle it with German colonists. During the First World War, after the occupation of much of the Russian partition of Poland, German planners even mooted the establishment of a broad strip between the areas they had controlled before the outbreak of war and the small satellite Polish kingdom they set up in November 1916, from which Poles and Jews would be expelled and which would then be settled by German colonists.

All these schemes were brought to naught by the German defeat and the establishment of an independent Polish state that incorporated broad areas of Prussia, including the port of Danzig. Large numbers of ethnic Germans were unwilling to live under Polish rule and left the territory. The settlement of the disputed frontier, particularly in Upper Silesia, was accompanied by the creation of German and Polish paramilitary groups and considerable violence. The call for the revision of the Polish-German frontier was almost universal among the politicians of the Weimar Republic, the only difference being between those like Gustav Stresemann, chancellor from 1925 to 1929, who hoped that this could be achieved peacefully with the support of the Western powers, and those who believed force was required.

Adolf Hitler broke with the anti-Polish traditions of Weimar. In spite of the centrality of schemes for the “colonization” of land in the east in his thinking and particularly in Mein Kampf, he saw the pragmatic advantages in reaching an understanding with Poland, concluding a non-aggression agreement with the Polish government on 26 January 1934. His goals were purely tactical. In this way, he was able to drive a wedge between France and its principal ally in the east and pursue without danger his policy of rearmament. After the death of the charismatic Polish dictator, Józef Piłsudski, in May 1935, Polish-German ties became still closer as Józef Beck, the Polish foreign minister, used the freedom of maneuver that these gave him to force Lithuania to establish diplomatic relations with Poland in March 1938 and to acquire after the Munich agreement a part of former Austrian Silesia from Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s goal was probably to recruit the Poles to participate in his plans for the conquest of the Soviet Union. However, when after Munich he put pressure on Poland in order to force it into an alliance that would make the country a de facto German dependency and would thus free him to move either east or west, Beck refused. The Poles sought a British guarantee of their independence, while Hitler was able to outbid the West and reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union for the partition of Eastern Europe. This led to the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and the defeat of Poland at German hands in September–October 1939.

The Poles by this point had become a major obstacle to Hitler’s plans for a great German empire in the east, and he was prepared to use the most drastic means to crush and eliminate them. Indeed he saw his rule in Poland as a prototype for the “colonial” regime of German masters ruling over Slav helots that he intended to establish in the areas he hoped to conquer in the east. The occupied territory was divided into two parts. One area, comprising former Prussian Poland, the Dąbrowa basin, and the areas around Łódź and Suwałki, was directly incorporated...