German-occupied Europe in the Second World War

Raffael Scheck, Fabien Théofilakis, Julia Torrie, Raffael Scheck, Fabien Théofilakis, Julia Torrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138501492
• eBook ISBN: 9781351385886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Inspired by recent works on Nazi empire, this book provides a framework to guide occupation research with a broad comparative angle focusing on human interactions. Overcoming national compartmentalization, it examines Nazi occupations with attention to relations between occupiers and local populations and differences among occupation regimes.

This is a timely book which engages in historical and current conversations on European nationalisms and the rise of right-wing populisms.

Part I

Precursors and continuities

1 Dangerous duality

Experiencing and remembering civil–military conflict during Germany’s occupation of Poland, 1914–1918

Andrew Kless

On 26 April 1915, less than a year into the First World War, Chief of the Civil Administration (Zivilverwaltung) Wolfgang von Kries warned that Germany’s occupation of Russian Poland faced an impending crisis. At a conference of civilian and military occupiers, Kries lamented the previous nine months of “unending difficulties and arduousness, which permeated the administration in the war and in enemy territory [Feindesland].”¹ Pre-war aims and wartime objectives were lacking. When the army initially occupied small areas of Russian Poland in August 1914, occupation and its staffing requirements were an afterthought. Overwhelmed by the requirements of occupation in the war’s first month, the army called in German bureaucrats and officials to aid them in the administration of enemy territory. The resulting establishment of a Civil Administration in September 1914 created separate spheres in which the army would focus on fighting at the front, and the Civil Administration’s bureaucrats would maintain order in areas behind the front lines. Thus from the second month of the war until the last, a duality of both civilian and military authority existed in the governance of German-occupied Russian Poland, limiting German unity of effort at critical moments.

Civil–military overlap was most palpable during the war’s first year from 1914–1915, as an occupation structure was built hastily. Walls of delineation between these authorities were soon breached, as the German army commandeered resources under the guise of military necessity from rear areas already transferred to the bureaucrats. Civil–military conflict arose over soldiers’ confiscation of local food supplies that had been earmarked by the German officials for other purposes. Army seizures of incoming Civil Administration personnel, such as policemen and translators, led the civilian administrators to rely on self-governing Polish Citizens’ Committees to carry out local governance. Their mere existence infuriated many in the army, who perceived the committees as bastions of criminality. Massive territorial gains and the resulting creation of the Generalgouvernement Warschau (General Government of Warsaw or GGW) in the summer of 1915 momentarily reduced German factionalism. Yet recriminations abounded during the last moments of the war in 1918, as the occupation collapsed dramatically. Published narratives by two former officials written during and after the war portrayed the competencies of their bureaucratic brethren, while pointing out the faults and failures of their army co-occupiers, especially during initial and final moments of instability. Still, hostile memories were on both sides, as evidenced by one officer’s post-war account of the occupation. These narratives corroborate the existence of infighting between those on the same side, even though the occupation as a whole was portrayed as successful. Their warnings, often subtle, sometimes explicit, ultimately went unheeded. The published experiences of these First World War civilian and army occupiers did not prevent Germany from falling into similar antagonisms between civilian administrators, the Wehrmacht, or the SS during the Second World War. After 1939, German civilians and military occupiers in Eastern Europe were once again in competition for food, personnel, and other resources.

The first history of the occupation was published in 1916 by Administrative Chief von Kries as a series of reports describing the first year of occupation as generally orderly, except in such areas where the army interfered. In 1919, Army Captain von Wussow listed the German contributions to Poland during the war, but emphasized the army’s role within the GGW administration over their civilian counterparts. Clemens von Delbrück, German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s deputy and absolute authority over the Civil Administration, began writing his observations of the occupation as early as 1917, continuing until his death in 1921, where he lamented the occupation’s civil–military duality, which poisoned Germany’s control over the East. During the 1930s, an aged Kries wrote several histories of the occupation, which described Civil Administration bureaucrats, but not their soldierly counterparts, as above reproach. Kries’ final work was never published, as the literary freedoms of Weimar were slowly eroded under National Socialism. A pillar of National Socialist historical consciousness was the myth that Germany had been unassailable on the Eastern Front during the World War.² The reality of the German occupation of Russian Poland between 1914 and 1918 did not line up with Nazi understandings of the war and threatened German confidence before the invasion of Poland in 1939.³

Recent histories of the Eastern Front have added much to how historians understand German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian imperial experiences during the First World War. Once the problematic periphery of their empires, ethnically Polish territory became key to conceptions of a post-war central-eastern Europe. However, historians have yet to reach consensus about the conduct of the war in Poland, the political nature of post-war plans, and the continuities between the First World War and the Second. Vejas Liulevicius’ War Land on the Eastern Front, a study of the German military’s Ober Ost regime, has shaped the way historians understood German occupation policy for more than a decade. Ober Ost was a “monolithic military state” carved out of Russian territory north and east of East Prussia, both territorially and organizationally distinct from the civil–military duality of the Generalgouvernements in Belgium and Poland. Liulevicius finds, “This military utopia’s ambitions went far beyond traditional conservatism or monarchism, instead showcasing a modern kind of rule, bureaucratic, technocratic, rationalized, and ideological,” and thus set a precedent for Nazi occupations two decades later.⁴ However, Ober Ost was not entirely representative of Germany’s conduct as an occupier in Poland. Christian Westerhoff has noted important differences in occupied civilian labor policy between the Generalgouvernement Warschau and Ober Ost. His study demonstrates that occupation in Eastern Europe was not monolithic, especially regarding civilian labor. Forced labor and excesses against the population were common in Ober Ost, while in the GGW, administrators generally maintained a free labor market.⁵ Jesse Kauffman’s examination of the GGW shows that the leadership of the organization in Poland, politicians in Berlin, and Poles themselves each envisioned and worked towards different futures for post-war Poland. However, German support of Polish national institutions during the occupation, even if dually motivated, demonstrated that Germany’s actions in Poland were not entirely malevolent.⁶ Yet, central to nearly all occupation regimes is the need to make an occupation contribute to a war effort, through exploitation and often the fulfillment of a political goal, as Stephan Lehnstaedt contends. His comparison of the three Germanic occupation regimes of the World Wars fills a fundamental gap in understanding Germany’s early twentieth century trajectory. He argues the German GGW, and Austro-Hungarian K.u.K Militär-Generalgouvernement (Lublin) were not simply precursors to the Nazi General Gouvernement, but these occupations were part of an epoch, and those of 1914–1918 resulted in a natural evolution, or continuity, to that of 1939–1945.⁷

Chaos of 1914 and 1915

German bureaucrats were sent to the war-torn East in August 1914 because the army urgently requested them. However, the army’s overriding concern for fighting at the front line soon led to conflict with these newly arrived civilian administrators over the priorities and management of rear-area occupation, which intensified over the coming year. In the first week of the war the German army occupied slivers of Russian Poland. This gain was overshadowed when Russian troops invaded German East Prussia on 17 August, posing an existential threat. The army’s focus on fighting the Russian army at the front took nearly all attention away from the requirements of occupation. The military situation in Russia precluded anything but decentralized military occupation, administered by several army corps-level headquarters in very limited areas of operation opposite the Prussian border. Focused only on the small sector of enemy territory they were assigned, army headquarters formulated policies independent of the next unit, creating contradictions and chaos. Several German military commands on the Eastern Front reached out to Reich and Prussian bureaucracies for help administering these newly occupied areas; the army hoped once and for all to extricate itself from a task it had neither desired nor anticipated in the course of a short war.⁸ On 22 August 1914, Prussian Minister of the Interior Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell dispatched eastward several Prussian bureaucrats, led by Felix von Merveldt, and including Wolfgang von Kries.⁹

Immediate consensus formed among the Prussian bureaucrats and lower-level army commanders that the army’s existing occupation was inadequate and uneven. Their best solution would be the creation of a formal Civil Administration, taking over for the army in rear area governance, freeing the army to focus entirely on combat. Still, the administration would take directives from a nearby corps-level headquarters. A formal Civil Administration was established on 23 September 1914 in three districts along the Prussian border. It was cursed from the start by a civil–military duality, intersected by a Reich and Prussian contention. As an organization, the Civil Administration fell under the Reich Office of the Interior (RAdI) under Deputy Reich Chancellor Clemens von Delbrück, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s direct subordinate. The subordination of Prussian bureaucrats to the Rei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction by the Editors
• PART I Precursors and Continuities
• PART II Conceptions of Occupation
• PART III Economic Matters
• PART IV Race, Gender, and the Interactions of Occupiers and Occupied People
• Afterword by Shelley Baranowski
• Bibliography
• Index