The combined headship of state and party in the incorporated area, following the structure used in the ‘Ostmark’ and Sudetenland, provided far greater influence for the Party than was the case in the ‘Old Reich’.114 Greiser met any obstacles by pointing to ‘the special plenipotentiary powers personally given to me by the Führer’ which, he claimed, according to his mandate had to be more extensive than in other areas of the Reich.115
Greiser demanded of his own subordinates that they be ‘brutal, harsh, and again harsh’ in the ‘ethnic struggle’.116 Brutality reproduced itself; it became the norm. Leniency was banned. The climate in the Warthegau can be gauged from the directive of the head of the constabulary (not the dreaded Security Police) in one district of the Posen province. Speaking of what he called the ‘Polacks’, he laid down that he did not ‘want to see any officer showing mildness to such elements’.117 The same constabulary chief added, some months later: ‘The Pole is for us an enemy and I expect from every officer… that he acts accordingly. The Poles must feel that they do not have the right to put themselves on the same level as a people of culture.’118 This ethos was passed on to and adopted by practically every one of the 25,000 or so police and 22,500 members of the civil administration — mostly drawn from the Reich — who controlled the Warthegau.119
Hitler’s attitude towards policy in the incorporated territories was typical. He placed great value on giving his Gauleiter the ‘necessary freedom of action’ to carry out their difficult tasks. He stressed ‘that he only demanded a report from the Gauleiter after ten years that their area was German, that is purely German. He would not ask about the methods they had used to make the area German, and it was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty
The Warthegau turned years of indescribable torment for the subjugated people into the nearest approximation to a vision of the ‘New Order’ in the east. The vast deportation and resettlement programmes, the ruthless eradication of Polish cultural influence, the mass-closing of Catholic churches and arrests or murder of clergy, the eviction of Poles from their property, and the scarcely believable levels of discrimination against the majority Polish population — always accompanied by the threat of summary execution — were carried out under the aegis of Greiser and Koppe with little need to involve Hitler. Not least, the vicious drive by the same pairing to rid their Germanized area of the lowest of the low — the Jewish minority in the Warthegau — was to form a vital link in the chain that would lead by late 1941 to the ‘Final Solution’.123
The rapidity with which the geographical divisions and administrative structure for the occupied territories of former Poland had been improvised, the free hand given to Party bosses, the widespread autonomy which the police had obtained, and the complete absence of legal constraint, had created a power free-for-all in the ‘wild east’. But where conflict among the occupying authorities was most endemic, as in the General Government, the greatest concentration of power was plainly revealed to lie in the hands of the Security Police, represented by the Higher SS-and-Police Chief, backed by Himmler and Heydrich. Himmler’s ‘Black Order’, under the Reichs-fuhrer’s extended powers as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, and mandated by Hitler’s to ‘cleanse’ the east, had come into its own in the new occupied territories. The unlimited power that war and occupation had brought, and the lessons in barbarism rapidly learnt in former Poland, would be put to immediate use during the onslaught on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
Meanwhile, within the Reich itself the beginning of the war had also marked a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism. Here, too, Hitler now authorized mass murder.
