Hitler spoke little over a week later to Rosenberg of the Germanization and deportation programme to be carried out in Poland. The three weeks spent in Poland during the campaign had confirmed his ingrained racial prejudices. ‘The Poles,’ Rosenberg recalled him saying: ‘a thin Germanic layer, below that dreadful material. The Jews, the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns covered in dirt. He has learnt a lot in these weeks. Above all: if Poland had ruled for a few decades over the old parts of the Reich, everything would be lice-ridden (verlaust) and decayed. A clear, masterful hand was now needed to rule here.’ Hitler then referred, along similar lines to Heydrich’s address to his Einsatzgruppen chiefs, to his plans for the conquered Polish territories. ‘He wanted to divide the now established territory into three strips: 1. between the Vistula and the Bug: the entire Jewry (also from the Reich) along with all somehow unreliable elements. On the Vistula an invincible Eastern Wall — even stronger than in the West. 2. Along the previous border a broad belt of Germanization and colonization. Here there would be a great task for the entire people: to create a German granary, strong peasantry, to resettle there good Germans from all over the world. 3. Between, a Polish “form of state” (Staatlichkeit). Whether after decades the settlement belt could be pushed forward will have to be left to the future.’76
A few days later, Hitler spoke to Goebbels in similar vein. ‘The Führer’s judgement on the Poles is annihilatory (vernichtend),’ Goebbels recorded. ‘More animals than human beings… The filth of the Poles is unimaginable.’ Hitler wanted no assimilation. ‘They should be pushed into their reduced state’ — meaning the General Government — ‘and left entirely among themselves.’ If Henry the Lion — the mighty twelfth-century Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who had resettled peasants on lands in northern and eastern Germany — had conquered the east, the result, given the scope of power available at the time, would have been a ‘slavified’ German mongrel-race, Hitler went on. ‘It’s all the better as it is. Now at least we know the laws of race and can act accordingly.’77
Hitler hinted in his Reichstag speech of 6 October, though in the vaguest terms for public consumption, at ‘cleansing work’ (Sanierungsarbeit) and massive ethnic resettlement as preparation for the ‘new order of ethnographical relations’ in former Poland.78 Only in confidential dealings with those in the regime’s leadership who needed to know — a characteristic technique of his rule not to spread information beyond essential limits — did Hitler speak frankly, as he had done to Rosenberg and Goebbels, about what was intended. At a meeting on 17 October in the Reich Chancellery attended by Keitel, Frank, Himmler, Heß, Bormann, Lammers, Frick, and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, Hitler outlined the draconian policy for Poland.79 The military should be happy to be freed from administrative responsibility. The General Government was not to become part of the Reich. It was not the task of the administration there to run it like a model province or to establish a sound economic and financial basis. The Polish intelligentsia were to be deprived of any chance to develop into a ruling class.80 The standard of living was to remain low: ‘We only want to get labour supplies from there.’ The administration there was to be given a free hand, independent of Berlin ministries. ‘We don’t want to do anything there that we do in the Reich,’ was ominously noted. Carrying out the work there would involve ‘a hard ethnic struggle (Volks-tumskampf) that will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will not be compatible with our normal principles.’ Rule over the area would ‘allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks’. Cooperation of the General Government with the new Gaue of Posen and West Prussia was to take place only for resettlement purposes (through Himmler’s new role as Commissar for Settlement). ‘Cleverness and hardness in this ethnic struggle,’ Hitler ended, with usual recourse to national needs as justification, ‘must save us from again having to enter the fields of slaughter on account of this land.’81 ‘The devil’s work’, he called it.82
