"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (64 page)

The consequences were far more catastrophic than in the Eastern Territories, because tens of thousands of deportees from the Eastern Territories were thronging into the densely populated General Government. Among the material consequences of the nonsensical administrative policies of the General Government authorities were the general undernourishment and exhaustion of the population, in particular of the “idle” persons unfit for work, whose rations were reduced
below
the subsistence level.
²⁰
Jews received
no rations whatsoever
in any case and were totally dependent on the Jewish welfare organizations financed by the Jews themselves. A massive black market developed, which not only was tolerated by the German authorities but evolved into an indispensable feature of life, as food supplies could not have been maintained without it.

Faced with the growing importance of the General Government as an economic factor of the Reich, the growing impoverishment of the population, and the rise of the Polish resistance movement, the administrative leadership attempted to initiate a change in its Polish policy after 1943.
²¹
Numerous initiatives by the governor general to treat the Poles less harshly and grant greater administrative autonomy attempted to implement a change in Berlin’s Polish policy.
²²

As was to be expected, these attempts met with no success because of the total lack of serious political will at the center. Berlin was not fundamentally opposed to a change of tactics,
²³
and even the SS and police leadership had come to accept the need for a more lenient treatment of the Poles and seriously believed that it could still cooperate with the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa).
²⁴
But only Hitler could make such a decision; and since he never made it, everything remained as it was. The central administration also tended to become bogged down in details; it was not prepared to abandon the “ultimate aim” of the future German settlement of the General Government; it insisted on retaining the segregation of Poles and Ukrainians because of a fear of the kindling of national passion, and it blocked the authorization of Polish priests who were “not acceptable.”
²⁵
Finally, the Reich Ministry of the Interior did not believe that the “time was ripe” for arrangements regarding Polish cooperation in the administration as a result of the Warsaw uprising and the poor military situation,
²⁶
until it was too late for any changes.

Apart from this, both the timing and the substance of the planned change of policy demonstrated very markedly the “unstable enthusiasm”
²⁷
of the governor general and the naive attitude of the authorities, who totally misjudged the impact of their propaganda and practice and were unable to comprehend that after a policy of total harshness and enslavement, it was impossible to put the clock back; the Poles could not be enlisted as allies overnight. Any credibility that could have made such attempts successful had already been gambled away, all the more because the tide would have been turned if the course of the war had run differently. Even if such attempts had not been steamrollered by the changing face of the war or had not incorporated tactical reservations, there had to be doubts about their seriousness because no genuine efforts were made to realize them; in fact the continuation of the same drastic measures as before merely gave the lie to them, with the governor general limiting himself to statements of good-will and nonbinding declarations.
²⁸
Right until the end, therefore, the treatment of the Poles was determined exclusively by considerations of economic usefulness and not by political considerations, because the leadership had been blind to the realities of the situation from the outset and believed that it could continue its absurd policy of total exploitation ad infinitum.

V. Principles of Administrative Organization: The Principle of Unified Administration

With regard to the administrative organization of the new model of domination and administration of the “non-Germans” in the General Government, different tendencies are evident in theory and practice. The classical theory of administration based on the principles of the military administration of occupied territories was rejected,
¹
and experiments were made with new forms of rule, as seen in countless reflections by the
Grossraum
experts on the nature of the future administration of the
Grossraum.
²

Whereas a continuation of the previous administrative practice under German suzerainty was planned and practiced in the occupied territories of Western Europe,
³
the principles of the administrative organization in the colonial East consisted of taking over the local administrative machinery, restructuring it to conform with Greater German colonial principles, and subjecting it to German control.
⁴
New terms (
Grossraum order, Grossraum administration, Grossraum territory, Grossraum Volk, Führervolk,
⁵
subject peoples)
⁶
and a new typology of administrative forms appeared: administration in terms of “pacts” between the
Führervolk
and the
Grossraum Volk
(retaining the local administration and government); administration in the form of a “supervisory administration” (retention of the local administration under German supervision); “government administration” (occupation of the most important positions by the
Führervolk,
with other administrative tasks performed by the local self-administration);
⁷
and the “colonial administration” (occupation of all positions by the
Führervolk
and total supervision of the life of the local population).
⁸

In administrative practice, however, these new forms of administration were never implemented. The efforts of the experts to systematize the new forms of rule, the development of abstract concepts, and their demarcation from one another show how strongly the new National Socialist
Grossraum
theory was tied to the organizational concept of the traditional administration as well as the extent to which it misjudged the revolutionary force of the National Socialist leadership in the occupied territories, averse as it was to any rigid legal structures. This shows particularly clearly the low importance, even irrelevance, of legal systems in the organization of National Socialist rule. The primacy of the policy, that is, of National Socialist radicalism, took no notice of the unity or expediency of a system but followed its own, self-driven gravity of political aims and the actual situation. The administrative forms in occupied Central and Eastern Europe were therefore mixtures of old and new elements that could not be harmonized with the aforementioned systems. The administration in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, for instance, lay somewhere between the “supervisory administration” and “government administration” types, and the administration in the General Government between the “government administration” and “colonial administration” types; in the Annexed Eastern Territories, an administrative structure was developed that was closest to the “colonial administration.”
⁹

In regard to the particulars of the administrative machinery established in the General Government, the plans for a German administration based on the Reich administration, drawn up in October 1939 by the central authorities in Berlin, had been rejected for political reasons (too complicated) during the era of the military administration.
¹⁰
These reasons certainly did not correspond to the ideas of the political leadership and the governor general, ideas of administrative leadership based on a colonial model. Officially, all top posts were to be staffed by Germans (because only in this way could Germany “become a global empire” and the “Polish danger” be eliminated),
¹¹
with Poles being used merely as ancillary labor. Former Polish civil servants were therefore kept only as employees in subordinate positions;
¹²
the Polish intelligentsia was to be denied any activity wherever possible; it was feared as a standard-bearer of Polish national sentiment and rejected from the outset;
¹³
the potential for other forms of cooperation, especially at the local level and in rural areas, was not exploited and subsequently was gambled away recklessly.
¹⁴

The policy of a small German administrative nucleus supervising an administration staffed with Polish ancillary workers never left the theoretical stage. In reality, starting in 1940, a German “model administration” was developed in the General Government contrary to Hitler’s intentions;
¹⁵
the “
Grossraum
” administration was replaced by a closely woven network of authorities and regulations, in which the administration’s tendency toward perfectionism
¹⁶
could unfold free from dependency on the Reich administration and totally unaffected by the course of the war.
¹⁷
There was no more talk of leaving the locals as far as possible to their own devices, as expounded in the colonial principle; of all the occupied territories, the local administration of the General Government was the one most comprehensively under German control. Only in matters of no interest to the German administration or in which financial burdens could be passed on was the Polish administration retained (e.g., in the area of welfare benefits).

The structure and lines of authority of the civil administration of the General Government were therefore somewhat inadequate from the beginning for any constructive Polish policy. In its expansion, its comprehensive jurisdiction, its quest for order and clarity, it was essentially no more than a mirror of the Reich administration, however strongly the top administrators in the general governor’s office emphasized the unique features of their system compared to that of the Reich and the special authorities (e.g., the economic administration or the police).
¹⁸
The administration was headed by career civil servants with administrative experience from the Reich or the Austrian administration.
¹⁹
The administrative structure borrowed heavily from Reich law; in the words of the governor general, it represented “the last offshoot of an administration directly conducted using Reich methods.”
²⁰

Compared with the increasing jurisdictional chaos in the Reich
²¹
or the legal vacuum and secret guidelines practiced in the Annexed Eastern Territories, the administration of the General Government still represented a certain degree of order. The judicial system was clearly structured, the administration organization had been developed along clear lines, at least at the beginning, and the administrative jurisdiction was not infested by Party authorities. The reason for this clarity was that the administrative structure of the General Government was based on a relatively simple basic pattern, described by the concept of the “Unified Administration.” This pattern (which can be categorized as lying between the aforementioned “government administration” and “colonial administration” as coined by W. Best) was regarded as the ideal administrative from for colonial or semicolonial territories. Further, the Unified Administration was to create a strong centralized administration, compared with the cumbersome departmental administration of the Reich, and was to be the new administrative form of the future.
²²
In a grotesque overestimation of his own limits, Governor General Frank, the most eager champion of the principle of the Unified Administration, regarded himself as a preceptor of the Reich administration, which his own administration must “educate.”

The two characteristic features of the principle of the Unified Administration, which can only be outlined briefly, were revolutionary. They involved nothing less than the
elimination
of the departmental principle and of special administration and their consolidation under a single leadership.
²³

All levels of the administration in its entirety were headed by a chief administrator, who combined all responsibilities. The channels of decision of the specialist departments were placed under the control of the chief administrators of the various levels, and the entire administrative process was to be routed through these individuals. Initial attempts to implement this principle were already in place in the Reich—such as in the status of the Reich minister and head of the Reich Chancellery
²⁴
—and had found strong advocates, especially in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which assumed that the new central authority was the Reich
internal
administration and anticipated that implementation of the Unified Administration would result in the standardization and strengthening of the responsibilities it had lost to the Reich special administrations and the political special authorities.
²⁵
However, the strong status of the departments prevented this principle from being implemented in the Reich. In contrast, the General Government was virgin territory where the Unified Administration could be tested without interference from the Reich administration.
²⁶
Three administrative levels were developed: the office (later government) of the governor general as the central authority; the medium-level authority, roughly comparable to administrative districts, in the from of four (from 1941 five) districts (Kraków, Warsaw, Radom, Lublin, and Lemberg [L’vov]) as well as forty (from 1941 fifty-five) rural
Kreise
and seven urban
Kreise.
Below
Kreis
level, the Polish administration of the towns and municipalities remained under German supervision. The chief administrators with comprehensive powers as mentioned above were the governor general for the central administration, the district chief (
Gouverneur
) in the districts, the
Kreishauptmann
in the rural
Kreise,
and the
Stadthauptmann
in the urban
Kreise.
²⁷
The specialist authorities were incorporated into the administrations of the
Kreishauptmann
and the district chief and of the governor general
²⁸
and were directly responsible
not
to the internal administration but to the respective chief administrator. They lost their status as autonomous decision-making bodies and were reduced to the status of “executive and advisory bodies of the organ of sovereign power.” For the administrative leadership of the General Government, Unified Administration was—as expressed in the bombastic language of the day—“not the supervision or dictatorship of the internal administration or any other branch of the administration over all others, but … the administrative policy direction of all branches of the administration as well as the elimination of all negative features in order to achieve the task placed upon us in a non-German settlement region in war and in peace.”
²⁹