0:00:02 > 0:00:07*
0:00:03 > 0:00:07This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
0:00:41 > 0:00:46One country suffered more than any other under the Nazis -
0:00:46 > 0:00:48Poland.
0:00:48 > 0:00:53Nearly one in five Poles died during World War II.
0:00:55 > 0:01:02This is the place where the Nazis conducted one of the most brutal acts of ethnic cleansing in history.
0:01:17 > 0:01:22One of the chief architects of this policy lived here,
0:01:22 > 0:01:26on a 70-acre estate in the western part of Poland.
0:01:26 > 0:01:30His name was Arthur Greiser.
0:01:32 > 0:01:37IN POLISH:
0:02:05 > 0:02:09In 1946, Arthur Greiser was put on trial for war crimes.
0:02:09 > 0:02:12He cut a pathetic figure.
0:02:15 > 0:02:20He claimed he, too, had been a victim of Hitler's policies,
0:02:20 > 0:02:25and that he was merely a scapegoat for the crimes of his masters.
0:02:29 > 0:02:36Arthur Greiser, like other leading Nazis, claimed he'd simply been acting under orders.
0:02:39 > 0:02:42But he lied.
0:02:44 > 0:02:50For when Arthur Greiser sat in the drawing room of his 60-room palace,
0:02:50 > 0:02:55he possessed the independence and power of a mighty feudal baron.
0:02:55 > 0:03:00This is the story of the first 20 months of the Nazi occupation,
0:03:00 > 0:03:05when men like Greiser tried to turn Poland into the model Nazi state.
0:03:30 > 0:03:35The Germans invaded Poland on 1st September 1939.
0:03:47 > 0:03:52Within five weeks, the Polish Army had been crushed.
0:03:54 > 0:03:59MEN SING ROUSING MILITARY SONG
0:04:17 > 0:04:20Hitler's popularity soared.
0:04:20 > 0:04:24To German soldiers, HE was the military genius
0:04:24 > 0:04:30who had allowed them to regain all the German territory in the east
0:04:30 > 0:04:33they had lost after World War I.
0:04:36 > 0:04:40CROWD CHANT "SIEG HEIL!"
0:04:46 > 0:04:52Germany was a world superpower and Hitler was the man to thank.
0:04:52 > 0:04:56Now Hitler revealed his vision for Poland -
0:04:56 > 0:05:01a fundamental reordering of the country based on Nazi racial theory.
0:05:03 > 0:05:06In August 1939,
0:05:06 > 0:05:11Hitler and Stalin had agreed to share Poland between them.
0:05:11 > 0:05:16The Nazis created three new districts in their part of Poland.
0:05:16 > 0:05:20Hitler wanted two of them - the Warthegau under Arthur Greiser
0:05:20 > 0:05:25and West Prussia under Albert Forster -
0:05:25 > 0:05:29to be ethnically cleansed and incorporated into Germany.
0:05:29 > 0:05:36In a typically vague order, Hitler told Forster and Greiser to Germanise their districts,
0:05:36 > 0:05:41but he would ask no questions about their methods.
0:05:43 > 0:05:50A crucial part of Germanisation was the grading of the population, according to how German they were
0:05:50 > 0:05:55in terms of looks, language and attitude.
0:06:00 > 0:06:09One group were Germanised instantly - ethnic Germans from the parts of Poland that were German before WWI.
0:06:09 > 0:06:14They welcomed the German Army as their saviours.
0:06:18 > 0:06:22IN GERMAN:
0:07:13 > 0:07:18Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat lived with the rest of his family
0:07:18 > 0:07:23on a 1,500-acre estate in Greiser's province of the Warthegau.
0:07:23 > 0:07:29The Nazi's renamed the area around his house Bleekersdorf after his family.
0:07:48 > 0:07:54The Nazis believed that the Germans were racially superior to the Poles.
0:07:54 > 0:08:02Poles who were not thought German risked deportation to another district or arbitrary arrest.
0:08:02 > 0:08:07Poles allowed to stay in Germanised areas were treated as slaves.
0:08:11 > 0:08:17Nazis encouraged the ethnic Germans to settle old scores with their former neighbours.
0:08:19 > 0:08:23IN GERMAN:
0:08:51 > 0:08:55IN POLISH:
0:09:31 > 0:09:37And in the Nazi kingdom of Poland, the SS could do anything it liked...
0:09:37 > 0:09:39as one German soldier witnessed.
0:09:39 > 0:09:48IN GERMAN:
0:11:01 > 0:11:04IN GERMAN:
0:11:18 > 0:11:23Some senior German Army officers were appalled at these atrocities.
0:11:23 > 0:11:30One general's complaint reached Hitler. The Fuhrer's military agitant recorded his reaction.
0:11:30 > 0:11:36"Hitler criticises the childish attitudes within the Army leadership.
0:11:36 > 0:11:41"One can't fight a war with Salvation Army methods."
0:11:42 > 0:11:47Hitler may have had a vision for what he wanted in Poland,
0:11:47 > 0:11:54but he believed men like Greiser should run their domains as they saw fit.
0:11:54 > 0:11:56They all ran them differently.
0:11:56 > 0:12:03Arthur Greiser's rival and neighbour, Albert Forster, who ran Danzig, West Prussia,
0:12:03 > 0:12:09conducted the ethnic cleansing in his district in a completely different way.
0:12:13 > 0:12:15Albert Forster,
0:12:15 > 0:12:21though himself a committed Nazi later found guilty of war crimes,
0:12:21 > 0:12:24did not believe rigidly in Nazi racial theory.
0:12:24 > 0:12:29If Poland was to be Germanised, the quicker it was done the better.
0:12:29 > 0:12:36He declared whole groups of Poles were now Germans, without checking their ethnic origins.
0:12:38 > 0:12:40IN POLISH:
0:13:06 > 0:13:14But Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle lived in Posen, within the area run by Arthur Greiser.
0:13:14 > 0:13:18There, he and his family suffered a different fate.
0:13:33 > 0:13:38So Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle was, according to Greiser, a Pole,
0:13:38 > 0:13:43whilst he, according to Forster, was a German.
0:13:43 > 0:13:49He and his family weren't deported and he could still receive an education,
0:13:49 > 0:13:51but he still didn't feel German.
0:14:19 > 0:14:26Albert Forster believed he was only acting within the discretion given him by Hitler.
0:14:26 > 0:14:31His neighbour, the fanatical racist Arthur Greiser, was furious.
0:14:31 > 0:14:36Grieser wrote letters of complaint to his mentor Heinrich Himmler...
0:14:36 > 0:14:39head of the SS.
0:14:39 > 0:14:44"From the beginning, I avoided trying to win cheap successes
0:14:44 > 0:14:49"by Germanising people who could not prove their German origin.
0:14:49 > 0:14:56"As I have discussed with you, MY ethnic policies are threatened by those in Danzig, West Prussia.
0:14:56 > 0:15:02"Their policy seems to a superficial observer to be more successful."
0:15:02 > 0:15:08Like Greiser, Himmler was fanatically committed to racial theory.
0:15:08 > 0:15:13He believed a Germanic race could be distinguished scientifically.
0:15:15 > 0:15:20But Forster had joked that if HE looked like Himmler,
0:15:20 > 0:15:25he wouldn't go on about the idea of race so much.
0:15:27 > 0:15:33When Himmler heard that Forster was Germanising en masse,
0:15:33 > 0:15:37he wrote a letter of complaint to him,
0:15:37 > 0:15:42telling him to Germanise each Pole only after ethnic examination,
0:15:42 > 0:15:45and reminding Forster...
0:15:45 > 0:15:47"You, as an old National Socialist,
0:15:47 > 0:15:55"know that one drop of false blood that comes into an individual's veins can never be removed."
0:15:57 > 0:16:02But Albert Forster wasn't worried by Himmler's threatening letter.
0:16:02 > 0:16:07As a Gauleiter, or district leader, he had direct contact with Hitler.
0:16:07 > 0:16:13He believed Hitler would let him govern his own area as he liked.
0:16:13 > 0:16:19He was right. Hitler didn't intervene and Forster never changed his policy.
0:16:24 > 0:16:28Arthur Greiser had another problem.
0:16:28 > 0:16:34In the autumn of 1939, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans
0:16:34 > 0:16:38began to arrive in Nazi-occupied Poland.
0:16:38 > 0:16:44Hitler and Stalin allowed them to leave neighbouring countries and come home to the Reich.
0:16:44 > 0:16:49Greiser had to find homes for these ethnic Germans.
0:17:17 > 0:17:21German propaganda film shows the incoming ethnic Germans
0:17:21 > 0:17:27being welcomed with open arms by the indigenous German population of Poland.
0:17:27 > 0:17:30The reality could be very different.
0:17:32 > 0:17:37IN GERMAN:
0:18:20 > 0:18:25But if the local Germans weren't impressed with the new arrivals,
0:18:25 > 0:18:29then many of the new arrivals were equally disappointed.
0:18:29 > 0:18:33They were told they were being resettled in Germany.
0:18:33 > 0:18:41According to the Nazis, they were, but that depended, of course, on how you defined Germany.
0:18:41 > 0:18:47IN GERMAN:
0:19:51 > 0:19:56The new arrivals needed somewhere permanent to live.
0:19:56 > 0:20:00In Greiser's district that problem was easily solved.
0:20:00 > 0:20:07Families like the Jeziorkowskas received a late-night visit from the German security forces.
0:20:10 > 0:20:14IN POLISH:
0:22:19 > 0:22:26The Nazis distributed the property they'd stolen to the incoming ethnic Germans.
0:22:31 > 0:22:35Each head of a family was given a key, a map
0:22:35 > 0:22:40and told to go and find their new flat somewhere in the city.
0:22:42 > 0:22:47Propaganda shows the pristine glory of the fresh accommodation.
0:22:47 > 0:22:51For the Eigis, it wasn't like that at all.
0:22:51 > 0:22:54IN GERMAN:
0:23:45 > 0:23:50The incoming ethnic Germans now had homes to live in,
0:23:50 > 0:23:52but they didn't have jobs.
0:23:52 > 0:23:56That difficulty, too, was swiftly overcome.
0:23:56 > 0:24:04Before coming to Greiser's Warthegau, Irma Eigi's father had run a hotel and restaurant.
0:24:34 > 0:24:41Irma Eigi's father eventually found a restaurant that was still in Polish hands.
0:24:41 > 0:24:47He informed the Nazis. They stole it from the Polish owner for him.
0:25:27 > 0:25:31In the depths of the Polish countryside,
0:25:31 > 0:25:37the forced evictions could be even worse. Whole villages could be uprooted.
0:25:37 > 0:25:42One night in the summer of 1940, the Nazis arrived at Odrowaz,
0:25:42 > 0:25:47an isolated village in the heart of Greiser's fiefdom of Warthegau.
0:25:47 > 0:25:52They planned to remove every inhabitant of the village at 3am.
0:25:57 > 0:26:00Franz Jagemann was an interpreter
0:26:00 > 0:26:04assigned to the German forces who carried out the action.
0:26:04 > 0:26:08IN GERMAN:
0:26:52 > 0:26:57IN POLISH:
0:27:25 > 0:27:28Appalled at this barbarism,
0:27:28 > 0:27:34Franz Jagemann warned other Polish villages in advance of their fate,
0:27:34 > 0:27:40but he still participated as an interpreter in the evictions.
0:29:16 > 0:29:21In Greiser's Warthegau, in little over a year,
0:29:21 > 0:29:26700,000 Poles were evicted from their homes.
0:29:35 > 0:29:42Greiser deported many south-east, to the part of Poland he saw as the Nazi's racial dustbin -
0:29:42 > 0:29:46the General Government run by Nazi Hans Frank.
0:29:54 > 0:29:58IN POLISH:
0:30:34 > 0:30:40The Jeziorkowskas were thrown off the train once it reached its destination.
0:30:40 > 0:30:46In spring 1940, Greiser was sending 15,000 Poles a month to the General Government.
0:30:50 > 0:30:58IN GERMAN:
0:31:31 > 0:31:37These massive and unannounced deportations from Greiser's district enraged Hans Frank -
0:31:37 > 0:31:41the man who ruled the General Government.
0:31:43 > 0:31:48The country house of this Italian opera-loving Nazi
0:31:48 > 0:31:54was outside Krakow, in a palace he had seized from a Polish prince.
0:31:54 > 0:31:58TENOR SINGS ARIA
0:32:47 > 0:32:51Hans Frank was proud of his long relationship with Hitler,
0:32:51 > 0:32:56a relationship characterised by Frank's sycophancy.
0:33:29 > 0:33:37Frank was confident such abasement to the Nazi cause could help him win the argument over deportations.
0:33:37 > 0:33:45But Himmler showed that he knew best how to deal with Hitler and that timing could be everything.
0:33:45 > 0:33:52He wrote Hitler a memo emphasising that the General Government should remain a racial dumping ground.
0:33:52 > 0:33:57He gave Hitler it when the Fuhrer was in a euphoric mood in May 1940,
0:33:57 > 0:34:01as a result of German successes against France.
0:34:01 > 0:34:09They discussed the memo, then Himmler wrote that Hitler found the memo to be "very good and correct".
0:34:09 > 0:34:16In a typical example of how key decisions could be taken in the Third Reich,
0:34:16 > 0:34:19Hitler never put his own views down on paper.
0:34:19 > 0:34:24Himmler had won the battle. Armed only with a nod from Hitler,
0:34:24 > 0:34:30he told his disciple, Greiser, to carry on deporting Poles to Hans Frank.
0:34:34 > 0:34:40Hans Frank dealt with his disappointment in his customary way.
0:34:40 > 0:34:45He led his subordinates to believe he supported Hitler's decision
0:34:45 > 0:34:49and that he hadn't really been defeated at all.
0:34:54 > 0:34:59Himmler's victory meant Poland continued to be full of upheaval.
0:34:59 > 0:35:05Even the ethnic Germans did not escape cruel treatment.
0:35:05 > 0:35:13Later in the Nazi occupation, some ethnic German farmers refused to be relocated as they were homesick.
0:35:13 > 0:35:17Dr Fritz Arlt helped deal with the problem.
0:35:17 > 0:35:24In our interview, Dr Arlt emphasised that he tried to help the occupied population.
0:35:24 > 0:35:29But this letter about these ethnic German farmers
0:35:29 > 0:35:33shows a very different side to his character.
0:35:33 > 0:35:39It bears the dictation mark "Dr A" for Dr Arlt.
0:35:39 > 0:35:42We reminded him of its existence.
0:35:52 > 0:36:00The letter asks for the ringleaders of the ethnic German farmers to be sent to a KZ, or concentration camp.
0:36:00 > 0:36:03INTERVIEWER IN GERMAN:
0:36:51 > 0:36:56Dr Arlt joined the Nazi Party in 1932.
0:36:56 > 0:36:59Is he now ashamed he did?
0:37:19 > 0:37:24But it was another group which was to suffer most
0:37:24 > 0:37:27at the hands of Nazis in Poland -
0:37:27 > 0:37:29the three million Polish Jews.
0:37:29 > 0:37:35In the early months of the German occupation of Poland,
0:37:35 > 0:37:39the Nazis gathered together Polish Jews
0:37:39 > 0:37:44and then transported them into ghettos within the major towns.
0:37:55 > 0:38:00The Nazis had not yet decided what the final fate of the Jews would be.
0:38:12 > 0:38:16The biggest ghetto in Arthur Greiser's district was in Lodz.
0:38:16 > 0:38:19Here, in the spring of 1940,
0:38:19 > 0:38:26160,000 Polish Jews were ordered to congregate in a ghetto area of less than two square miles.
0:38:56 > 0:39:03IN GERMAN:
0:39:28 > 0:39:32Within weeks of the ghetto being opened,
0:39:32 > 0:39:36the Nazis sealed it, imprisoning the Jews behind barbed wire.
0:39:36 > 0:39:41To escape starvation, the Jews had to buy food at inflated prices,
0:39:41 > 0:39:47either from Nazis or, unofficially, from the locals outside the wire.
0:39:51 > 0:39:56IN GERMAN:
0:40:15 > 0:40:20Eugen Zielke was an ethnic German living in Lodz.
0:40:20 > 0:40:22His family owned a food shop.
0:40:22 > 0:40:28Some of his relatives were involved in extorting money from the Jews -
0:40:28 > 0:40:32a crime from which he benefited as well.
0:40:54 > 0:40:57INTERVIEWER:
0:41:48 > 0:41:54The Jews trapped behind the barbed wire began by using their money to buy food.
0:41:54 > 0:42:00As that ran out, they sold jewels, ornaments, even their clothes.
0:42:00 > 0:42:05When they had nothing left they could sell, they began to starve.
0:42:05 > 0:42:07INTERVIEWER:
0:42:43 > 0:42:49This was the office of the ambitious Nazi who ran the Lodz ghetto,
0:42:49 > 0:42:54a former coffee importer from Bremen called Hans Biebow.
0:42:54 > 0:42:59He quickly discovered in the ghetto he could do anything he liked...
0:42:59 > 0:43:02even attempt rape and murder.
0:44:00 > 0:44:07Biebow began to do well for himself as a result of extorting money from the Jews.
0:44:07 > 0:44:11But as spring turned to summer in 1940,
0:44:11 > 0:44:15the death rate in the ghetto began to rise,
0:44:15 > 0:44:20the victims buried here in the Jewish cemetery within the ghetto.
0:44:22 > 0:44:28A debate raged among the local Nazis as to what they should do.
0:44:28 > 0:44:32Biebow's deputy said the Germans should let all the Jews die.
0:44:32 > 0:44:38But Biebow knew if the Jews did die, he couldn't exploit them any more,
0:44:38 > 0:44:43so he came up with the solution which prevailed.
0:44:48 > 0:44:51The Jews became slave workers,
0:44:51 > 0:44:56making goods which could then be exchanged for more food.
0:45:01 > 0:45:04Biebow made even more money,
0:45:04 > 0:45:11but he realised he had to share the profits, particularly with his boss...Arthur Greiser.
0:45:43 > 0:45:48At the end of this road constructed by slave labour,
0:45:48 > 0:45:55Arthur Greiser sat in luxury, in a palace also built on the suffering of the Poles.
0:46:14 > 0:46:18Far from being a victim of Hitler's policies,
0:46:18 > 0:46:23Greiser was their greatest beneficiary.
0:46:23 > 0:46:25Far from acting under orders,
0:46:25 > 0:46:32he had interpreted Hitler's vague instructions in a way that brought greatest profit to himself.
0:46:32 > 0:46:37Far from being a scapegoat, he CHOSE to be a thief and a murderer.
0:47:04 > 0:47:09In the first 20 months of their occupation of Poland,
0:47:09 > 0:47:15the Nazis showed they were amongst the cruellest conquerors the world had seen...
0:47:15 > 0:47:18but even worse was to come.
0:47:54 > 0:47:59Subtitles by Marie Campbell BBC Scotland, 1997