There had been undoubted discrimination against the German minority — around 3 per cent of the total population — in pre-war Poland, mounting sharply during the summer crisis of 1939. The Germans had also been economically disadvantaged. The incorporation of Austria and the Sudeten-land had then raised expectations among the Germans in Poland of their own ‘return to the Reich’.54 And, in a climate of mounting ethnic conflict, Goebbels’s propaganda, grossly exaggerating or simply fabricating incidents of sporadic violence against the German minority (while of course keeping quiet about worse outrages on the German side), contributed immensely to inciting venomous antagonism towards the Poles.
For their part, immediately following the German invasion the Poles, reacting to real or alleged cases of sabotage by the German minority — taken to be a ‘fifth column’ — arrested some 10–15,000 ethnic Germans (1–2 percent of the German minority) and force-marched them eastwards.55 Though the brutality accompanying the marches was later hugely magnified for propaganda purposes, the prisoners were indeed often beaten, or otherwise maltreated, and subjected to violence by the local population as they passed through Polish towns and villages. In some cases, those unfit to walk any further were shot.56
Outrages against the minority German population occurred in numerous places. Most notoriously in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), attacks on Germans on 3 September had the character of a local pogrom. Precisely how many died at Bromberg has never been satisfactorily established.57 For German propaganda, the attacks on ethnic Germans were exploited as an apparent justification for a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had surpassed in its first days anything that could be regarded as retaliation.58 The Germans claimed in November 1939 that 5,400 had been killed in the ‘September Murders’ (including what they dubbed the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’). Then, in February 1940, on Hitler’s own instructions (it was later claimed) this was simply multiplied by around ten-fold and a figure of 58,000 German dead invented.59 The most reliable estimates put the total number of ethnic Germans killed in outrages, forced marches, bombing and shelling at around 4,000.60 Terrible though these atrocities were, they were more or less spontaneous outbursts of hatred that took place in the context of panic and fear following the German invasion. They did not remotely compare with, let alone provide any justification for, the calculated savagery of the treatment meted out by the German masters, directed at wiping out anything other than a slave existence for the Polish people.61
Some of the worst German atrocities in the weeks following the invasion were perpetrated by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Protection), a civilian militia established on Hitler’s directions in the first days of September and within little more than a week coming under the control of the SS.62 Himmler’s adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben, took over its organization, and later led the Selbstschutz in West Prussia, where the extent of its brutality stood out even in the horrific catalogue of misdeeds of the organization’s other branches.63 Tens of thousands of male ethnic Germans between seventeen and forty-five years of age served in the Selbst-schutz.64 Von Alvensleben told his recruits, at a meeting in Thorn on 16 October: ‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Führer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’65 Especially in West Prussia, where ethnic conflict had been at its fiercest, the Selbstschutz carried out untold numbers of ‘executions’ of Polish civilians. On 7 October, von Alvensleben reported that his units had taken the ‘sharpest measures’ against 4,247 former Polish citizens.66 When one subordinate Selbstschutz leader reported to von Alvensleben that no executions had been carried out that week, he was asked whether there were no more Poles left at all in his town.67 The Selbstschutz was eventually wound up — in West Prussia in November, and elsewhere by early 1940 — but only because its uncontrolled atrocities were becoming counter-productive on account of the resulting conflicts with the army and German civil authorities in the occupied areas.68
