sons, Hitler had been prepared to work with the
Poles, and his view of them was quite favourable.
The authoritarian Polish state, the Polish brand
of anti-Semitism and official Poland’s anti-
Bolshevism made them, in Hitler’s eyes, suitable
junior partners. But Poland’s courageous resis-
tance in 1939 changed all that. With the exception
of the Jews, who were all seen as destroyers of the
Aryan race, Hitler’s views of what to do with other
‘races’ such as Slavs was opportunistic. He cared
nothing for their lives. In destroying the Polish
intelligentsia he was not so much following a racial
policy as taking what he regarded as the most effi-
cacious practical steps to root out the strong sense
of Polish nationalism. The same ‘racial’ inconsis-
tency is noticeable in the treatment of the
Ukrainian population. Vengeance for the slightest
resistance to his will was a dominant element of
Hitler’s character. Parts of western Poland were
annexed by Germany and settled with ‘German’
farmers, mainly the so-called Volksdeutsche, ethnic
Germans who for generations had lived in Eastern
Europe.
The greater part of the rest of Poland was
organised as a colony called the General
Government of the Occupied Polish Territories
headed by Hans Frank, a fanatical, brutal Nazi
since the earliest days of the party. In this colony
the Poles were to rise to positions no higher than
workers. Frank described his fief in November
1940 as ‘a gigantic labour camp in which every-
thing that signifies power and independence rests
in the hands of the Germans’. Frank, himself, typ-
ically for the strife-torn Nazi German administra-
tion, engaged in much infighting with the SS,
who obeyed no one except Heinrich Himmler.
The Ukraine, with Frank’s General Government,
was selected by the SS for the majority of the sites
of the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.
Frank approved of the murder of the Jews,
objecting to their settlement in the General
Government. In December 1941 he declared:
‘Gentlemen, I must ask you to arm yourselves
against all feelings of pity. We must destroy the
Jews wherever we meet them wherever possible.’
The majority of the Polish people would
survive so long as they served their German
masters and lost all national consciousness. What
the Nazis had in store for the Jews was so incred-
ible that, even when the facts leaked out, most of
the Jews still surviving in German-occupied
Europe could not believe it, nor was the horror
fully grasped abroad. Indeed, the hell the Nazis
created in the death camps of the east, like hell
itself, is so far removed from human experience
as to be scarcely real and credible. The Holocaust
forms one of the most difficult aspects of modern
history to explain and understand.
Hitler, in conditions of peace, that is before the
outbreak of war in 1939, could not order the
mass murder of German, Austrian and Czech
Jews within Germany. If the German sphere was
to be made judenrein, free of Jews, their forced
emigration was the only option. For Hitler, the
Jews had another possible value; they could be
used to blackmail the West. He believed National
Socialist propaganda that behind the scenes the
Jews were influential in pulling the strings of
policy in Washington, London and Paris. His aim
was to conquer continental Europe piecemeal.
The next target was Poland. In January 1939 he
therefore threatened in his well-known Reichstag
speech that the Jews would perish if Britain,
France and the US resisted his aggression on the
continent by unleashing a general war.
Until Germany attacked the Soviet Union in
June 1941, there seemed to be a small chance of
a Western peace. Jews in Germany and conquered
Europe were still allowed to live. Hitler liked to
keep options open: alternative solutions to isolate
the Jews and drive them out of Europe altogether
were considered, such as the plan to banish them
to Madagascar. That from the start he had no
moral inhibition against mass murder, if that
should prove the best course, cannot be doubted.
During the summer and autumn of 1941, mil-
lions of ‘Bolshevik’ Jews, the mortal enemy in his
eyes, were added to the millions of European
Jews already under German control, and mass
emigration or expulsion overseas was no longer a
possibility. Nor, with so much non-Jewish slave
labour falling into German hands, Hitler calcu-
lated, would Jewish slave labour be needed. The
option of mass murder as the final solution now
became the most desired and practical course.
1
THE ORDEAL OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR 265
