The Wild East Nazis: A Warning from History

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This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

One country suffered more than any other under the Nazis -

Poland.

Nearly one in five Poles died during World War II.

This is the place where the Nazis conducted one of the most brutal acts of ethnic cleansing in history.

One of the chief architects of this policy lived here,

on a 70-acre estate in the western part of Poland.

His name was Arthur Greiser.

IN POLISH:

In 1946, Arthur Greiser was put on trial for war crimes.

He cut a pathetic figure.

He claimed he, too, had been a victim of Hitler's policies,

and that he was merely a scapegoat for the crimes of his masters.

Arthur Greiser, like other leading Nazis, claimed he'd simply been acting under orders.

But he lied.

For when Arthur Greiser sat in the drawing room of his 60-room palace,

he possessed the independence and power of a mighty feudal baron.

This is the story of the first 20 months of the Nazi occupation,

when men like Greiser tried to turn Poland into the model Nazi state.

The Germans invaded Poland on 1st September 1939.

Within five weeks, the Polish Army had been crushed.

MEN SING ROUSING MILITARY SONG

Hitler's popularity soared.

To German soldiers, HE was the military genius

who had allowed them to regain all the German territory in the east

they had lost after World War I.

CROWD CHANT "SIEG HEIL!"

Germany was a world superpower and Hitler was the man to thank.

Now Hitler revealed his vision for Poland -

a fundamental reordering of the country based on Nazi racial theory.

In August 1939,

Hitler and Stalin had agreed to share Poland between them.

The Nazis created three new districts in their part of Poland.

Hitler wanted two of them - the Warthegau under Arthur Greiser

and West Prussia under Albert Forster -

to be ethnically cleansed and incorporated into Germany.

In a typically vague order, Hitler told Forster and Greiser to Germanise their districts,

but he would ask no questions about their methods.

A crucial part of Germanisation was the grading of the population, according to how German they were

in terms of looks, language and attitude.

One group were Germanised instantly - ethnic Germans from the parts of Poland that were German before WWI.

They welcomed the German Army as their saviours.

IN GERMAN:

Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat lived with the rest of his family

on a 1,500-acre estate in Greiser's province of the Warthegau.

The Nazi's renamed the area around his house Bleekersdorf after his family.

The Nazis believed that the Germans were racially superior to the Poles.

Poles who were not thought German risked deportation to another district or arbitrary arrest.

Poles allowed to stay in Germanised areas were treated as slaves.

Nazis encouraged the ethnic Germans to settle old scores with their former neighbours.

IN GERMAN:

IN POLISH:

And in the Nazi kingdom of Poland, the SS could do anything it liked...

as one German soldier witnessed.

IN GERMAN:

IN GERMAN:

Some senior German Army officers were appalled at these atrocities.

One general's complaint reached Hitler. The Fuhrer's military agitant recorded his reaction.

"Hitler criticises the childish attitudes within the Army leadership.

"One can't fight a war with Salvation Army methods."

Hitler may have had a vision for what he wanted in Poland,

but he believed men like Greiser should run their domains as they saw fit.

They all ran them differently.

Arthur Greiser's rival and neighbour, Albert Forster, who ran Danzig, West Prussia,

conducted the ethnic cleansing in his district in a completely different way.

Albert Forster,

though himself a committed Nazi later found guilty of war crimes,

did not believe rigidly in Nazi racial theory.

If Poland was to be Germanised, the quicker it was done the better.

He declared whole groups of Poles were now Germans, without checking their ethnic origins.

IN POLISH:

But Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle lived in Posen, within the area run by Arthur Greiser.

There, he and his family suffered a different fate.

So Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle was, according to Greiser, a Pole,

whilst he, according to Forster, was a German.

He and his family weren't deported and he could still receive an education,

but he still didn't feel German.

Albert Forster believed he was only acting within the discretion given him by Hitler.

His neighbour, the fanatical racist Arthur Greiser, was furious.

Grieser wrote letters of complaint to his mentor Heinrich Himmler...

head of the SS.

"From the beginning, I avoided trying to win cheap successes

"by Germanising people who could not prove their German origin.

"As I have discussed with you, MY ethnic policies are threatened by those in Danzig, West Prussia.

"Their policy seems to a superficial observer to be more successful."

Like Greiser, Himmler was fanatically committed to racial theory.

He believed a Germanic race could be distinguished scientifically.

But Forster had joked that if HE looked like Himmler,

he wouldn't go on about the idea of race so much.

When Himmler heard that Forster was Germanising en masse,

he wrote a letter of complaint to him,

telling him to Germanise each Pole only after ethnic examination,

and reminding Forster...

"You, as an old National Socialist,

"know that one drop of false blood that comes into an individual's veins can never be removed."

But Albert Forster wasn't worried by Himmler's threatening letter.

As a Gauleiter, or district leader, he had direct contact with Hitler.

He believed Hitler would let him govern his own area as he liked.

He was right. Hitler didn't intervene and Forster never changed his policy.

Arthur Greiser had another problem.

In the autumn of 1939, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans

began to arrive in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Hitler and Stalin allowed them to leave neighbouring countries and come home to the Reich.

Greiser had to find homes for these ethnic Germans.

German propaganda film shows the incoming ethnic Germans

being welcomed with open arms by the indigenous German population of Poland.

The reality could be very different.

IN GERMAN:

But if the local Germans weren't impressed with the new arrivals,

then many of the new arrivals were equally disappointed.

They were told they were being resettled in Germany.

According to the Nazis, they were, but that depended, of course, on how you defined Germany.

IN GERMAN:

The new arrivals needed somewhere permanent to live.

In Greiser's district that problem was easily solved.

Families like the Jeziorkowskas received a late-night visit from the German security forces.

IN POLISH:

The Nazis distributed the property they'd stolen to the incoming ethnic Germans.

Each head of a family was given a key, a map

and told to go and find their new flat somewhere in the city.

Propaganda shows the pristine glory of the fresh accommodation.

For the Eigis, it wasn't like that at all.

IN GERMAN:

The incoming ethnic Germans now had homes to live in,

but they didn't have jobs.

That difficulty, too, was swiftly overcome.

Before coming to Greiser's Warthegau, Irma Eigi's father had run a hotel and restaurant.

Irma Eigi's father eventually found a restaurant that was still in Polish hands.

He informed the Nazis. They stole it from the Polish owner for him.

In the depths of the Polish countryside,

the forced evictions could be even worse. Whole villages could be uprooted.

One night in the summer of 1940, the Nazis arrived at Odrowaz,

an isolated village in the heart of Greiser's fiefdom of Warthegau.

They planned to remove every inhabitant of the village at 3am.

Franz Jagemann was an interpreter

assigned to the German forces who carried out the action.

IN GERMAN:

IN POLISH:

Appalled at this barbarism,

Franz Jagemann warned other Polish villages in advance of their fate,

but he still participated as an interpreter in the evictions.

In Greiser's Warthegau, in little over a year,

700,000 Poles were evicted from their homes.

Greiser deported many south-east, to the part of Poland he saw as the Nazi's racial dustbin -

the General Government run by Nazi Hans Frank.

IN POLISH:

The Jeziorkowskas were thrown off the train once it reached its destination.

In spring 1940, Greiser was sending 15,000 Poles a month to the General Government.

IN GERMAN:

These massive and unannounced deportations from Greiser's district enraged Hans Frank -

the man who ruled the General Government.

The country house of this Italian opera-loving Nazi

was outside Krakow, in a palace he had seized from a Polish prince.

TENOR SINGS ARIA

Hans Frank was proud of his long relationship with Hitler,

a relationship characterised by Frank's sycophancy.

Frank was confident such abasement to the Nazi cause could help him win the argument over deportations.

But Himmler showed that he knew best how to deal with Hitler and that timing could be everything.

He wrote Hitler a memo emphasising that the General Government should remain a racial dumping ground.

He gave Hitler it when the Fuhrer was in a euphoric mood in May 1940,

as a result of German successes against France.

They discussed the memo, then Himmler wrote that Hitler found the memo to be "very good and correct".

In a typical example of how key decisions could be taken in the Third Reich,

Hitler never put his own views down on paper.

Himmler had won the battle. Armed only with a nod from Hitler,

he told his disciple, Greiser, to carry on deporting Poles to Hans Frank.

Hans Frank dealt with his disappointment in his customary way.

He led his subordinates to believe he supported Hitler's decision

and that he hadn't really been defeated at all.

Himmler's victory meant Poland continued to be full of upheaval.

Even the ethnic Germans did not escape cruel treatment.

Later in the Nazi occupation, some ethnic German farmers refused to be relocated as they were homesick.

Dr Fritz Arlt helped deal with the problem.

In our interview, Dr Arlt emphasised that he tried to help the occupied population.

But this letter about these ethnic German farmers

shows a very different side to his character.

It bears the dictation mark "Dr A" for Dr Arlt.

We reminded him of its existence.

The letter asks for the ringleaders of the ethnic German farmers to be sent to a KZ, or concentration camp.

INTERVIEWER IN GERMAN:

Dr Arlt joined the Nazi Party in 1932.

Is he now ashamed he did?

But it was another group which was to suffer most

at the hands of Nazis in Poland -

the three million Polish Jews.

In the early months of the German occupation of Poland,

the Nazis gathered together Polish Jews

and then transported them into ghettos within the major towns.

The Nazis had not yet decided what the final fate of the Jews would be.

The biggest ghetto in Arthur Greiser's district was in Lodz.

Here, in the spring of 1940,

160,000 Polish Jews were ordered to congregate in a ghetto area of less than two square miles.

IN GERMAN:

Within weeks of the ghetto being opened,

the Nazis sealed it, imprisoning the Jews behind barbed wire.

To escape starvation, the Jews had to buy food at inflated prices,

either from Nazis or, unofficially, from the locals outside the wire.

IN GERMAN:

Eugen Zielke was an ethnic German living in Lodz.

His family owned a food shop.

Some of his relatives were involved in extorting money from the Jews -

a crime from which he benefited as well.

INTERVIEWER:

The Jews trapped behind the barbed wire began by using their money to buy food.

As that ran out, they sold jewels, ornaments, even their clothes.

When they had nothing left they could sell, they began to starve.

INTERVIEWER:

This was the office of the ambitious Nazi who ran the Lodz ghetto,

a former coffee importer from Bremen called Hans Biebow.

He quickly discovered in the ghetto he could do anything he liked...

even attempt rape and murder.

Biebow began to do well for himself as a result of extorting money from the Jews.

But as spring turned to summer in 1940,

the death rate in the ghetto began to rise,

the victims buried here in the Jewish cemetery within the ghetto.

A debate raged among the local Nazis as to what they should do.

Biebow's deputy said the Germans should let all the Jews die.

But Biebow knew if the Jews did die, he couldn't exploit them any more,

so he came up with the solution which prevailed.

The Jews became slave workers,

making goods which could then be exchanged for more food.

Biebow made even more money,

but he realised he had to share the profits, particularly with his boss...Arthur Greiser.

At the end of this road constructed by slave labour,

Arthur Greiser sat in luxury, in a palace also built on the suffering of the Poles.

Far from being a victim of Hitler's policies,

Greiser was their greatest beneficiary.

Far from acting under orders,

he had interpreted Hitler's vague instructions in a way that brought greatest profit to himself.

Far from being a scapegoat, he CHOSE to be a thief and a murderer.

In the first 20 months of their occupation of Poland,

the Nazis showed they were amongst the cruellest conquerors the world had seen...

but even worse was to come.

Subtitles by Marie Campbell BBC Scotland, 1997