General Government

• 1. Introduction

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  The General Government was a zone of German occupation carved out of the defeated Polish state in 1939, and for nearly six years it served as one of the most brutal administrative experiments in the history of modern Europe. Hitler announced its legal basis on the 8th of October 1939, claiming that the Polish government had entirely collapsed. That claim was a fiction, and everyone in Berlin knew it. The Polish government had not collapsed; it had gone into exile in London. But the fiction allowed German authorities to strip every Polish national of their citizenship and reclassify them as stateless subjects. What followed was not the administration of a conquered people but a systematic attempt to erase them. By the time Soviet forces entered the region in late 1944, four million of the territory's inhabitants had lost their lives. The questions that hang over this history are not simply about violence. They are about how a modern bureaucracy organized mass death, how ordinary institutional mechanisms became instruments of genocide, and how a place that was home to millions of people was turned, in the words of one senior Nazi official, into a Polish reservation and a great Polish labor camp.

• 2. A Territory With No Name

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  Hans Frank, the governor-general, shortened the official name of the territory on the 31st of July 1940, dropping the words "for the Occupied Polish Territories" by Hitler's authority. What remained was simply Generalgouvernement, a word borrowed from French, cognate with the Dutch Generaliteitslanden. The shift was not trivial. German authorities deliberately avoided the word Poland in legal correspondence. The one exception was the territory's Bank of Issue in Poland, and even that name was rendered in both Polish and German as though acknowledging two parallel realities. Poles nicknamed the territory's currency Mlnynarki, and the region itself was known colloquially as Restpolen, or the Remainder of Poland. That name tells you everything about German intent: what lay within the General Government was what was left over after the parts worth annexing had been stripped away. The territory's government seat was placed in Krakow rather than Warsaw, chosen for security reasons. Warsaw was seen as too dangerous, too resistant, too Polish. Geographical locations across the territory were renamed in German, and a decree on the 15th of September 1941 mandated that most major cities adopt either historical German names or Germanified versions of Polish and Soviet names.

• 3. The Plan to Erase a People

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  In March 1941, Frank told his subordinates that Hitler had decided to turn the region into a purely German area within fifteen to twenty years. He was specific about the numbers: where twelve million Poles then lived, four to five million Germans would eventually settle. Notes from Martin Bormann recorded the policy with startling bluntness, calling for the killing of all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia. Bormann wrote that for Poles there could be only one master, and that master was German. All secondary education in the General Government was abolished. All Polish cultural institutions were closed. Germans burned a number of Warsaw libraries, including the National Library of Poland, destroying roughly 3.6 million volumes. Museums were plundered. In 1943 the government selected the Zamojskie area for accelerated Germanization because of its fertile black soil. Zamość was renamed Himmlerstadt, then Pflugstadt, though neither name was formally implemented. Himmler planned for the city of Lublin to have a German population of between twenty and twenty-five percent by the beginning of 1944, rising to thirty to forty percent the following year, at which point Lublin was to be declared a German city and given a German mayor.

• 4. The Architecture of Control

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  Josef Bühler served as Chief of the Government and State Secretary from October 1939 through January 1945, acting as Frank's deputy for most of that period. Arthur Seyss-Inquart held the deputy position briefly, from October 1939 to May 1940, before departing. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger held the role of Higher SS and Police Leader until October 1943, when SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe took over. The territory was divided for administrative purposes into four original districts, Warschau, Lublin, Radom, and Krakau, with a fifth district, Galizien, added after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. No Polish representatives sat above the local administration level. The Polish police force was reorganized as the Blue Police, with all high-ranking Polish officers arrested or demoted, and made subordinate to the German Ordnungspolizei. The Polish fiscal system survived, including the zloty, but revenues flowed directly to the German state. The Polish educational system was nominally retained but stripped of its higher institutions. On the 6th of May 1940, Frank established the Sonderdienst, a special service unit made up primarily of ethnic German Volksdeutsche who had lived in Poland before the invasion. Some three thousand men eventually served with the Sonderdienst.

• 5. Hunger as Instrument

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  By December 1941, the daily caloric allocations across the General Government had been sorted into a precise hierarchy of deprivation. Germans received 2,310 calories per day. Foreigners received 1,790. Ukrainians received 930. Poles received 654. Jews received 184. In December 1941 it was recognized by the Generalgouvernement administration that starving Jewish people to death was, in their language, an inexpensive and expedient solution. In August 1942 the required food shipments from the General Government to the Reich were increased, and it was decided that the roughly 1.2 million Jews not completing jobs deemed important to Germany would no longer receive food at all. The black market became a matter of survival. In the ghettos of eastern Europe, the Jewish population recognized by August 1941 that continued confinement meant death by hunger. People in ghettos traded with the outside world through black market middlemen who profited by connecting buyers and sellers across the ghetto wall. Deportees on trains fared worse still. In December 1940 alone, some 87,833 Poles and Jews were deported, forced to remain on trains for days while cold and malnutrition killed those who could not endure the journey.

• 6. Reinhard and the Camps

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  At the Wannsee conference on the 20th of January 1942, Josef Bühler pressed Reinhard Heydrich to implement the Final Solution as quickly as possible within the General Government. Bühler had a practical argument: the disbanded Polish State Railways had placed their entire network under Ostbahn, the Krakow-based Deutsche Reichsbahn branch, making a ready network of transport available to the SS. Within months, three top-secret camps were constructed with stationary gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Operation Reinhard, as it was called, targeted the Jewish population of the General Government first. Treblinka was described in the source as the deadliest of the three Reinhard camps. The General Government's territory ultimately contained four of the seven extermination camps used during World War II, including Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzec. The genocide of chiefly millions of Jews from Poland and other countries was carried out by gassing between 1942 and 1944. Most of the Jews in the territory, perhaps as many as two million people, had been rounded up and murdered by the time the war ended.

• 7. Resistance and Reckoning

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  The Home Army, known in Polish as the Armia Krajowa or AK, was the main resistance force, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. Its estimated strength ranged between 200,000 and 600,000 members. Alongside it, the communist People's Army operated with an estimated 14,000 to 60,000 fighters, organized and controlled by the Soviet Union. In April 1943 the Germans began deporting the remaining Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, provoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which lasted from the 19th of April to the 16th of May. It was the first armed uprising against the Germans in Poland. The larger Warsaw Uprising followed in 1944, launched on the 1st of August by the AK under Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski. After 63 days of fighting, surviving AK soldiers agreed to a conditional surrender. The 15,000 remaining Home Army soldiers were granted POW status, and 180,000 civilians were expelled. American troops captured Frank in May 1945. He surrendered forty volumes of his diaries to the Nuremberg Tribunal, and much of the evidence used against other defendants came from those records. He was sentenced to death by hanging on the 1st of October 1946, and the sentence was carried out on the 16th of October. His secretaries Seyss-Inquart and Bühler were also executed. Ludwig Fischer, governor of the Warsaw District, was sentenced and hanged in Warsaw. Ernst Kundt, governor of the Radom District, was sentenced and hanged in Czechoslovakia.