Hitler was still contemplating the possibility of some form of Polish political entity at the end of the month.33 He held out the prospect of re-creating a truncated Polish state — though expressly ruling out any re-creation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement — for the last time in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, as part of his ‘peace offer’ to the West.34 But by then the provisional arrangements set up to administer occupied Poland had in effect already eliminated what remained of such a prospect. Even before the formality of Chamberlain’s rejection of the ‘peace offer’ on 12 October, they had created their own dynamic militating towards a rump Polish territory — the ‘General Government’, as it came to be known — alongside the substantial parts of the former Polish state to be incorporated in the Reich itself.
By 26 October, through a series of decrees characterized by extraordinary haste and improvisation, Hitler brought the military administration of occupied Poland to an end, replacing it by civilian rule in the hands of tried and tested ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement. Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, was made head of the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia. Arthur Greiser, former President of the Danzig Senate, was put in charge of the largest annexed area, Reichsgau Posen (or ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, as it was soon to be renamed, though generally known simply as the ‘War-thegau’). Hans Frank, the Party’s legal chief, was appointed General Governor in the rump Polish territory.35 Other former Polish territory was added to the existing Gaue of East Prussia and Silesia. In each of the incorporated territories, most of all in the Wartheland, the boundaries fixed during the course of October enclosed sizeable areas which had never been part of the former Prussian provinces. The borders of the Reich were thereby extended some 150—200 kilometres to the east. Only in the Danzig area were ethnic Germans in the majority. Elsewhere in the incorporated territories the proportion of Germans in the population seldom reached much over 10 percent.36
It was imperialist conquest, not revisionism. The treatment of the people of the newly conquered territory was unprecedented, its modern forms of barbarism evoking, though in even more terrible fashion, the worst barbaric subjugations of bygone centuries. What was once Poland amounted in the primitive view of its new overlords to no more than a colonial territory in eastern Europe, its resources to be plundered at will, its people regarded — with the help of modern race theories overlaying old prejudice — as inferior human beings to be treated as brutally as thought fit.
