At the end of the month, in his new capacity as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germandom, Himmler ordered all Jews to be cleared out of the incorporated territories. The deportation of around 550,000 Jews was envisaged. On top of that came several hundred thousand of the ‘especially hostile Polish population’, making a figure of about a million persons in all.209 From the largest of the areas designated for deportations and the resettlement of ethnic Germans, the Warthegau, it proved impossible to match the numbers initially charted for deportation, or the speed at which their removal had been foreseen. Even so, 128,011 Poles and Jews were forcibly deported under horrifying conditions by spring 1940.210 Sadistic SS men would arrive at night, clear entire tenement blocks, and load up the inhabitants — subjected to every form of bestial humilation — on to open lorries, despite the intense cold, to be taken to holding camps, from where they were herded into unheated and massively overcrowded cattle-trucks and sent south, without possessions and often without food or water. Deaths were frequent on the journeys. Those who survived often suffered from frostbite or other legacies of their terrible ordeal.211 The deportees were sent to the General Government, seen in the annexed territories as a type of dumping-ground for undesirables. But the Governor General, Hans Frank, was no keener on having Jews in his area than were the Gauleiter of the incorporated regions. He envisaged them rotting in a reservation, but outside his own territory. In November 1939 Frank had plainly laid down the intentions for his own province. It was a pleasure, he stated, finally to be able physically to tackle the Jewish race: ‘The more who die, the better… The Jews should see that we have arrived. We want to have a half to three-quarters of all Jews put east of the Vistula. We’ll suppress these Jews everywhere we can. The whole business is at stake here. The Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, from everywhere. We’ve no use for Jews in the Reich.’212 Around the same time that Frank was voicing such sentiments, the Reich Governor of the Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, speaking of encountering in Lodz ‘figures who can scarcely be credited with the designation “person” (Gestalten… denen man kaum noch den Namen “Mensch” zubilligen kann)’, was letting it be known that the ‘Jewish Question’ was as good as solved.213 However, by early 1940, his hopes (and those of Wilhelm Koppe, police chief of the Warthegau) of the quick expulsion of the Jews into the General Government were already proving vain ones, Hans Frank and his subordinates were starting to raise objections at the numbers of Jews they were being forced to take in, without any clear planning for what was to become of them, and with their own hopes of sending them on further to a reservation — an idea meanwhile abandoned — now vanished.214 Frank was able to win the support of Göring, whose own interest was in preventing the loss of manpower useful for the war effort. Göring’s strong criticism of the ‘wild resettlement’ at a meeting on 12 February ran counter to Himmler’s demands for room for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, already moved from their original homes. The very next day, Jews from Stettin were deported to the Lublin area to make way for Baltic Germans ‘with sea-faring jobs’.215 The police chief of the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, suggested that if the Jews coming to the General Government could not feed themselves, or be fed by other Jews, they should be left to starve.216 On 24 March, at Frank’s bidding, Göring felt compelled to ban all ‘evacuation’ into the General Government ‘until further notice’.217 Greiser was told that his request to deport the Warthegau’s Jews would have to be deferred until August.218 From 1 May 1940 the huge ghetto at Lodz, containing 163,177 persons, initially established only as a temporary measure until the War-thegau’s Jews could be pushed over the border into the General Government, was sealed off from the rest of the city.219 Mortalities from disease and starvation started to rocket during the summer.220 At a meeting in Cracow on 31 July, Greiser was told by Frank in no uncertain terms of Himmler’s assurance, under instructions by Hitler, that no more Jews were to be deported to the General Government.221 And on 6 November 1940 Frank informed Greiser by telegram that there were to be no further deportations into the General Government before the end of the war. Himmler was aware of this. Any transports would be turned back.222 The solution which to Greiser had seemed so close to hand a year earlier was indefinitely blocked.
