The annexation of Polish lands and the General Government

On 26 October 1939 military administration came to an end in the Polish lands occupied by the Wehrmacht, and the occupation began in the form it was to keep until 1945. That day two decrees of Adolf Hitler came into force. The first, signed on 8 October, annexed to the Reich the western and northern lands of the Republic: Pomerania, Greater Poland with part of the Łódź region, Polish Upper Silesia with the Dąbrowa Basin and western fringes of Lesser Poland, northern Mazovia with Ciechanów and Płock, and the Suwałki region. From these two new Reich districts were formed – West Prussia with Gdańsk, under Albert Forster, and Posen, under Arthur Greiser – while the rest was attached to East Prussia and the province of Silesia. The second decree, of 12 October, created out of the remainder of the German occupation zone the General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories, with Hans Frank as Governor-General. On the same day Frank took office and issued his first ordinances, among them one imposing compulsory labour on Poles and Jews.

Some chronologies state under 19 October that parts of Poland were “formally incorporated into Germany”, and describe the creation of the new districts and the General Government under 26 October. No act of annexation, however, bears the date 19 October. Hitler signed the decree on the division and administration of the eastern territories on 8 October, to take effect on 1 November. A further decree, of 20 October, brought its entry into force forward to 26 October, so that it would coincide with the creation of the General Government. Both decisions thus came into effect on the same day.

From military administration to partition

When the Wehrmacht was occupying Poland in September, chiefs of civil administration followed the armies, subordinate to the military commanders. Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, took over the administration of Pomerania in the very first days, and Greiser, until then President of the Danzig Senate, did the same in Poznań. The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, took over northern Mazovia, which in Königsberg was called “South-East Prussia”. On 25 September a decree of Hitler’s divided the occupied territory into military districts, and at the beginning of October, as most of the divisions were leaving for the west, the whole was taken over by the Commander-in-Chief East, General Gerd von Rundstedt. Under him the head of the entire civil administration was the Reich Minister without Portfolio Hans Frank, a lawyer and one of Hitler’s oldest associates, with Arthur Seyss-Inquart as his deputy in the Kraków district.

What to do with the conquered country long remained an open question. The secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact did not settle whether some rump Polish state was to survive, and for several weeks Hitler kept this option open, hoping it would serve him in his game with London and Paris. The end of September brought a decision. The Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September moved the border from the Vistula to the Bug, giving Germany the Lublin region and part of Mazovia, and both occupiers undertook to suppress Polish “agitation” jointly. On 6 October, in the Reichstag, Hitler offered the Western powers peace, mentioning the possibility of creating a small Polish state. On the day of that speech the last fighting operational group of the Polish Army capitulated at Kock. Daladier and Chamberlain rejected Hitler’s offer on 10 and 12 October, and by then the fate of the occupied country had been sealed.

The drafts of both decrees were prepared by Wilhelm Frick’s Reich Ministry of the Interior, with the details worked out by his State Secretary, Wilhelm Stuckart. The border of the new Reich was drawn far to the east of the 1914 frontier – by 150–200 kilometres on average. Hitler wanted the whole industrial hinterland of western Poland inside the Reich, and the Gauleiters of the neighbouring districts outdid one another in their demands. The army was not allowed a say in these decisions. As early as 7 October Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, which gave the head of the SS power over the resettlement of populations in the occupied territories.

The annexed territories

The decree of 8 October created two new Reich districts (Reichsgaue), each headed by a Reich Governor who was at the same time the NSDAP Gauleiter. The Reichsgau West Prussia, renamed Danzig-West Prussia on 2 November, comprised Polish Pomerania with Bydgoszcz, Toruń and Gdynia, the former Free City of Danzig, already annexed on 1 September, and the East Prussian government district of Marienwerder (Kwidzyn). It was divided into the government districts of Danzig, Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) and Marienwerder, and its capital was Gdańsk. The Reichsgau Posen, from January 1940 the Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau), consisted of the government districts of Posen, Hohensalza (Inowrocław) and Kalisz. It was the only district formed entirely from land taken from Poland. On 9 November Łódź and its surroundings, at first left outside the Reich border, were added to it. In April 1940 the city was renamed Litzmannstadt.

The remaining territories were attached to existing Prussian provinces. Polish Upper Silesia, the Dąbrowa Basin, Zaolzie and the western districts of the Kraków voivodeship, with Chrzanów, Oświęcim, Biała and Żywiec, became the government district of Kattowitz (PL) in the province of Silesia. Northern Mazovia became the government district of Zichenau (Ciechanów) in East Prussia, and the Suwałki region and the Działdowo district were also attached to East Prussia. According to the most commonly cited figures, the annexed territories covered some 92,000 square kilometres and had about 10 million inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of them Poles. Germans among them numbered, by various estimates, several hundred thousand, about 6–7 per cent. Before the war almost the whole of Polish coal mining and steelmaking and the country’s best farmland had lain in these territories.

Annexation meant that Reich law applied in these areas – but not the same law for everyone. Poles were not granted German citizenship. They were to become a population without rights, destined for labour, expulsion or, in selected cases, Germanisation. As early as October Polish schools, organisations and newspapers were closed, and the Polish language began to be removed from offices, signs and church services. Polish property was taken over by trustee offices. Later, from 1940, the inhabitants were divided according to the German People’s List into categories on which rights, food rations and the fate of whole families depended.

The General Government

The remainder of the German zone became the General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories. The name was chosen deliberately: it harked back to the Government-General of Warsaw of the First World War, while the phrase “occupied Polish territories” left the future of the area open for the time being. It was dropped in the summer of 1940, when the idea of any Polish state was finally abandoned. The General Government covered some 95,000–96,000 square kilometres with roughly 12 million inhabitants. It was divided into four districts: Kraków, Warsaw, Radom and Lublin. Its capital was Kraków, not Warsaw, which the occupier wished to reduce to the status of a provincial town.

The General Government was neither part of the Reich nor a state. German jurists called it an “adjoining land” (Nebenland) of the Reich. It was separated from the Reich by customs, police and currency borders. The Governor-General was directly subordinate to Hitler and held the whole administration in his hands, but laws could also be made by the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich and by Hermann Göring as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan. The police and the SS were formally subordinate to Frank but in fact to Himmler, whose representative was the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who at the same time directed resettlement on Himmler’s behalf. The conflict between Frank and Himmler and his men lasted throughout the occupation, but it concerned power, not aims. No Polish authorities, not even nominally collaborationist ones, were created. The Poles were left only the municipalities, courts for minor cases and an auxiliary police force, the so-called Blue Police.

Frank arrived in Kraków in the first days of November and on 7 November took up residence on Wawel, in the castle of the Polish kings. Until May 1940 his deputy was Seyss-Inquart, and the Office of the Governor-General was run by Josef Bühler. In a proclamation issued on the day he assumed power, Frank told the Poles that they would be able to work under German protection if they were obedient, and that any resistance would be crushed. The ordinances of 26 October introduced a labour obligation for Poles and forced labour for Jews, under the control of the SS and the police. On 31 October an ordinance on combating acts of violence introduced the death penalty for any act directed against Germans or the German authorities, to be tried by summary courts.

The purpose of the occupation

Hitler set out what the General Government was for on 17 October, in a conversation with the head of the OKW, General Wilhelm Keitel, which Keitel recorded. The administration was not to make Poland a model province or to put the country in order in the German manner. The Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from re-emerging as a ruling class, and the standard of living kept so low that the country would serve as a source of cheap labour. Hitler spoke of a “hard ethnic struggle” that permitted “no legal restraints”, and added that the army should be glad to be able to withdraw from questions of administration. The General Government was also to serve as a military glacis in the east and as the place into which Poles and Jews from the annexed territories would be thrown out.

The handover of power to civilians took place in haste and without consultation with the army. Some historians link it to the fact that as early as September and October complaints from military commanders about murders committed by the SS and the police were reaching Berlin. The loudest protests later came from Rundstedt’s successor as Commander-in-Chief East, General Johannes Blaskowitz, who took up the post on that very 26 October and lost it in May 1940 because of his memoranda. The army retained the right to defend the border with the USSR and to intervene in the event of unrest, but it no longer had any say in policy towards the population. For the Poles the change brought no relief. The military administration, though it tolerated crimes, had at least been formally bound by the Hague Convention. The civil administration recognised no such limits, and the Germans maintained that the war with Poland was over because the Polish state had ceased to exist.

The occupiers began by striking at the Polish elites. Operation Tannenberg, launched in September, turned in the annexed territories into the Intelligenzaktion, a campaign to murder teachers, priests, landowners, officials, activists and all those regarded as leaders of Polish national life. It was bloodiest in Forster’s district, where besides the police and the SS the local German self-defence force (Selbstschutz) also did the killing. At the end of October executions began in the forests of Piaśnica near Wejherowo, where by the spring of 1940 an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 people were killed. The victims of the autumn and winter of 1939–1940 in the annexed territories are counted in tens of thousands. In the General Government the wave of terror began not much later: on 6 November in Kraków more than 180 professors and university staff were arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen.

Its place in the war

The decrees of 8 and 12 October determined what the German occupation of Poland would look like for the next five years. The annexation was recognised neither by the Polish government-in-exile nor by Britain and France, and in the light of international law, which forbids an occupier to change the sovereignty of occupied territory, it was null and void. A great campaign of expulsions began in the annexed territories. As early as the autumn most of the Polish inhabitants were driven out of Gdynia, and in the first planned operation, from 1 to 17 December 1939, nearly 88,000 Poles and Jews were deported from the Warthegau to the General Government. Baltic Germans and Germans from the Soviet occupation zone were settled in their homes and on their farms. By 1941, according to historians’ estimates, several hundred thousand people had been driven out of the annexed territories into the General Government. Hundreds of thousands more were deported for forced labour in the Reich.

At the same time the General Government became the place to which the Germans sent Jews. In October Adolf Eichmann dispatched the first transports from Ostrava, Vienna and Katowice to the San river under the Nisko Plan. In the following years the Jews were shut up in ghettos, and from 1942, under Operation Reinhard, they were murdered in the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, on the territory of the General Government. The Poles, deprived of secondary and higher schools, of the press, museums and most of their property, were according to Nazi plans to become a nation of labourers without an intelligentsia and, in the more distant future after the war, to be removed from the General Government as well. In 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, a fifth district, Galicia with Lwów (Lviv), was added to the General Government.

Hans Frank ruled from Wawel until January 1945, when he fled before the Red Army. After the war the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland declared the government of the General Government a criminal organisation, and Frank, Forster and Greiser were sentenced to death and executed – the first by sentence of the tribunal at Nuremberg, the other two by sentence of Polish courts. The border Hitler drew in October 1939 vanished together with the Third Reich, but the memory of it, of the expulsions and of the division into “annexed” and “General Government” Poles, survived long after the war.