Action Zamość

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Expulsion of Poles by the SS in the region (December 1942)

The Zamość campaign was Heinrich Himmler's attempt during World War II to forcibly " Germanize " parts of the Lublin district in the Generalgouvernement (GG) . The action was one of two attempts by Germany to implement the settlement measures specified in the General Plan East outside the imperial borders in the east. At the same time , after the expulsion of 15,000 Ukrainians, 10,000 ethnic Germans were resettled in their place in Hegewald near Zhytomyr around Himmler's headquarters between autumn 1942 and the end of 1943 .

On November 12, 1942, in his function as Reich Commissioner for the consolidation of German nationality , Himmler declared the Zamość district "the first German settlement area". The town and district of Zamość were to be "populated by Germans", and the population living there were to be partly resettled and partly murdered. The action began at the end of November 1942 after the German Wehrmacht's summer offensive had shifted the front on Soviet territory further east. 60,000 settlers - Polish "people of German origin" and above all " ethnic Germans " - were to be accommodated. Around 110,000 Poles were deported from 300 villages for this purpose. But only 9,000 German settlers could be settled in 126 villages. The action led to a strong growth in the resistance movement in the Polish population, which could not be broken even by the anti-partisan actions of the German occupiers. After police troops were withdrawn from the area of ​​Zamość to suppress the ghetto uprising in Białystok , the German settlement could no longer be continued. It ended in August 1943. The German settlers fled the advancing Red Army in 1944 .

background

As in the Reinhardt campaign , Odilo Globocnik, as “ Himmler's outpost in the east ” (Peter Black), was at the center of the event. Both “actions” ran roughly parallel in time and show what the objective of the “ Operation Barbarossa ”, namely to create the “ living space in the East that is indispensable for the future of our people ” (Hitler, 1945), meant in its execution: about the “ final solution of the Jewish question "in addition to mass expulsions in the sense of a" re- population "and for many foreign nationals annihilation; for a few who could be identified as “German-born” and meanwhile assimilated settlers and who had to profess “ Germanness ” again , a right to stay. For Himmler, as Reich Commissioner for the consolidation of German nationality, these processes meant “colonization”, supposedly in the continuation of medieval colonization in the east in the footsteps of Henry I (919–936), to whom the “ German urge to the east ” is attributed in Slavic historiography . Odilo Globocnik was responsible for the settlement of ethnic Germans in the Zamość area.

Zamość's choice

According to the Baedeker travel guide to the “Generalgouvernement” from 1943, Zamość was “built by German and Italian master builders” because of its earlier connection with the Hanseatic League as a “stronghold of German culture” in the east. It lay on a west-east line in the extension of the Hellweg , at the beginning of which the Duisburg National Socialists had given their city center the current name "König-Heinrich-Platz" on August 1, 1936. The Hellweg leads as today's Bundesstraße 1 past the Wewelsburg near Paderborn, which Himmler had seized in 1934 while keeping its purpose for the SS secret. In a legend valued by the National Socialists, the castle was considered the starting point of a final battle between East and West. In Zamość, the west-east traffic arteries between the Greater German Reich and the three “Reichsmarks” provided for in the “ General Plan East ” for “Germanization” were to be bundled on Soviet territory. Zamość, which was to be called “Himmlerstadt” in the future, was part of Globocnik's area of ​​command with the cities of Tomaszów and Hrubieszów. Globocnik came across traces of early German settlements there. During his first visit to Lublin on July 20, 1941, after the first version of the “General Plan East” had been completed (July 15, 1941), Himmler ordered the creation of “ a large settlement area in the German colonies near Zamość ”.

On April 11, 1942, 3,000 Jews from Zamość were deported to the Belzec extermination camp ; 250 people were shot on the spot. On November 12, 1942, the " Zamość Action " began. According to the “general plan”, the “first settlement area” was to emerge in the “general government”, which was subject to a special colonial administration, i.e. In other words, the people living there had no rights in principle (cf. Volkstumsppolitik ).

course

On the night of November 27-28, 1942, police units began to evacuate the villages. The population was rounded up and transported to the Zamość assembly camp with hand luggage and 20 złoty per person. At these forced resettlements took part under the leadership of the central transfer the order police , the SD , the SS Landwacht Zamosc and local garrisons of the Air Force and the Army . Many people who resisted or fled were killed or shot while being evicted and transported to the camp.

Immediately after the evacuation, “ ethnic German ” resettlers , Bessarabian and Bukowina Germans who had waited in camps were shown to the courtyards. This affected about 300 villages.

The displaced population was selected according to the specifications of the “ German People's List ” according to four so-called racial evaluation groups: two groups capable of working were intended for “re-Germanization”, the third group for forced labor in Germany, provided the people were not over 60 or under 14 years old were. These people were sent to so-called “pension villages”. The Jewish settlements whose inhabitants had been transported to the extermination camps were called pension villages. Thousands of displaced children and elderly people froze to death there and starved to death. The fourth group, people classified as criminals or asocial - because they resisted - came straight to Auschwitz .

110,000 Poles were expelled from 300 villages by SS, police and Wehrmacht units by August 1943. The majority were able to flee, 51,000 were deported . The population resisted massively and went over to the partisans. The armed groups of the resistance movement fought the police commandos and attacked the settlers. A division of the Polish Home Army and the 3rd company "Grzmot" of the peasant battalions , together around 400 men, fought against the approximately 1,900 strong German security troops. 7,000 people were killed in German reprisals for the resistance. On June 30, 1943, Himmler declared the entire General Government a gang fighting area .

Failure of the settlement plans

In February 1943 an attempt was made to protect the areas populated by ethnic Germans by a belt of villages populated by Ukrainians. 14,739 of the Polish farmers resident there were evicted. The hope was to be able to take advantage of national differences with this “Ukrainian action”.

The expulsion of the Polish population and the resettlement led not only to the growth of the resistance movement, but also to lower production of food and thus to lower deliveries to the occupation authorities. The Eastern Army of the Wehrmacht was supplied from the General Government. Hans Frank and the governor of Lublin, Ernst Emil Zörner , criticized the settlements, but could not prevail against Himmler and Globocnik.

On August 15, 1943, Globocnik broke off the settlement campaign that had begun and the fight against the resistance in the military anti-partisan campaigns “ Aktion Werwolf I / II” due to the lack of suitable further forces.

The 9,000 "ethnic German" new settlers were able to make a short livelihood until the advance of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation of Zamość in July 1944. Against all reality, Himmler declared to the Gauleiters in Posen on August 3, 1944 , "We have our political, economic, human and military tasks in the glorious East". It must be possible "generation after generation to equip our peasant trails and always provide a few hundred kilometers of the area that we initially have behind the military border with bases and then gradually populate them in terms of area and force the others out."

See also

Remarks

  1. ↑ Peter Longerich , Heinrich Himmler. Biography, Siedler: München 2008, p. 605.
  2. ^ Zdeněk Váňa: The world of the ancient Slavs. Prague 1983, p. 211.
  3. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (collection of sources) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941-1945 , Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530- 9 , p. 22 with note 34.
  4. ^ Richard Breitman: Heinrich Himmler. The architect of the "final solution". Zurich-Munich 2000, p. 264. Quoted in Baedeker in: Das Generalgouvernement. Travel guide . Karl Baedeker, Leipzig 1943, pp. 135f., With reference to a nearby Palatinate settlement area from around 1800, “the z. Is currently being strengthened by new settlements ”.
  5. ↑ "King Heinrich" means Heinrich I (919–936), of whom several stays in Duisburg are attested.
  6. ↑ E. Unger-Winkelried: The battle on the birch tree. in: Special service for the front contemporaries. Voice of home. Edited by the Reich press office of the NSDAP in Zsarb. with d. High Command of the Wehrmacht, episode 246 BC March 7, 1943 (Berlin), pp. 16-17.
  7. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The order under the skull. The history of the SS, Augsburg 1995. p. 291.
  8. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (collection of sources), Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941-1945 . Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 253 with note 13.
  9. ^ Israel Gutman et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Vol. III, p. 1621.
  10. ^ Federal Archives (ed.): Europe under the swastika, The occupation policy of German fascism (1938–1945); Hüthig Verlagsgemeinschaft, Volume 8, Analyzes, Sources, Register, ISBN 3-7785-2338-4 , p. 206.
  11. ↑ Cf. Werner Röhr: “Reorganization of Europe” - 60 years ago. The "Action Zamosc" and the "General Plan East". in: Junge Welt, November 28, 2002.
  12. ^ Bradley Smith / Agnes Peterson (eds.): Heinrich Himmler. Secret speeches from 1933 to 1945 and other speeches. With an introduction by Joachim C. Fest, Berlin 1974, p. 246.

literature

  • Götz Aly , Susanne Heim : thought leaders of annihilation. Auschwitz and the German plans for a new European order. Revised edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 432-440: The Zamosc project. ( Fischer pocket books - story 11268).
  • Wolfgang Bleyer, Elisabeth Brachmann-Teubner, Gerhart Hass , Helma Kaden, Manfred Kuhnt, Norbert Müller, Ludwig Nestler, Fritz Petrick , Werner Röhr , Wolfgang Schumann (historian) , Martin Seckendorf (editor's college under the direction of Wolfgang Schumann): Night across Europe. The occupation policy of German fascism (1938–1945) . Eight-volume document edition. Volume 2: Werner Röhr (ed.): The fascist occupation policy in Poland. (1939-1945). License issue. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7609-1260-5 .
  • Klaus Dönecke and Hermann Spix: The Reserve Police Battalion 67 and the 'Aktion Zamość'. A research report . In: Medaon 13/2013 ( online ).
  • Bruno Gebhardt : Handbook of German History. Volume 21: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): 20th Century (1918–2000). Rolf-Dieter Müller : The Second World War 1939-1945. Tenth, completely revised edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-608-60021-3 .
  • Zygmunt Klukowski : Diary from the years of the occupation: 1939–1944 . Editors Christine Glauning, Ewelina Wanke; Introduction Ingrid Loose; Translation from the Polish Karsten Wanke. Metropol, Berlin 2017.
  • Czesław Madajczyk: From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Documents. KG Saur, Munich a. a. 1994, ISBN 3-598-23224-1 ( individual publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin 80).
  • Czesław Madajczyk (ed.): Zamojszczyzna - Special Laboratory SS. Zbiór dokumentów polskich i niemieckich z okresu okupacji hitlerowskiej. 2 volumes. Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnictwo, Warsaw 1977, Over 400 documents on “Aktion Zamosc” in German and Polish.
  • Rolf-Dieter Müller : Hitler's Eastern War and German Settlement Policy. The cooperation between the Wehrmacht, the economy and the SS. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10573-0 ( Fischer 10573 history ).
  • Werner Röhr: “Reorganization of Europe” - 60 years ago. The "Action Zamosc" and the "General Plan East". In: Junge Welt. November 28, 2002.
  • Mechthild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher (ed.): The "General Plan East". Main lines of the National Socialist planning and extermination policy. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-002445-3 ( Writings of the Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century ).
  • Bruno Wasser: The redesign of the East. Eastern colonization and spatial planning of the National Socialists in Poland during the German occupation 1939–1944 with special consideration of the Zamojszczyzna in the Lublin district. Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss. 1992.

Web links