German People's List

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The German People's List (DVL) divided the population in the parts of Poland annexed by the German Reich in World War II into population groups with different rights. Those who were included in the German People's List were given German citizenship or a later right to it , depending on their classification in one of four groups . In often discriminatory proceedings, applications for entry in the German People's List were checked primarily for political behavior prior to the German attack on Poland in 1939 and for ethnic origin . The procedure was soon extended in a similar form to the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and northern France .

prehistory

Through the division of Poland late 18th century between Russia , Prussia and Austria were ethnic Poles citizens of these countries. The western and southern parts of the former Poland were populated with different proportions of ethnic Germans . In 1918 Poland regained its state sovereignty . German citizens (in regions that previously belonged to the German Reich , such as the provinces of West Prussia and Posen ) on the territory of the re-established Polish state could choose between German or Polish citizenship. Choosing German citizenship usually meant moving out of Poland.

Naturalization procedure and selection criteria

The DVL was born on October 28, 1939, first in the set up by the German occupying forces on Polish territory " Reichsgau poses", later Wartheland , by a decree of the local Reich Governor Arthur Greiser founded. On the basis of the order of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum on September 12, 1940, the " Ordinance on the German People's List and German Citizenship in the Integrated Eastern Regions of March 4, 1941 " was published in Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 118 It was administered by the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem under Albert Brackmann and presented in detail in connection with the preparation of the General Plan East .

DVL founding document

The “Germans usable” of the population were divided into the following four departments by the DVL:

  • Volksliste 1: So-called “confessional Germans ” who campaigned for “German nationality ” before the war , i.e. were organized in organizations of the German minorities - regardless of whether they could prove “German ancestry”.
  • Volksliste 2: People who were not members of the organizations of the German minorities, but who stuck to the German language and culture. While members of Department 1 were able to join the NSDAP immediately and actually formed the core of the party in the annexed areas, the members of Department 2 were initially only able to register as candidates for party membership.
  • People's list 3: either so-called “tribal Germans”, i.e. people who were allegedly of 'German descent' although they usually no longer spoke German, or members of the so-called intermediate class, i.e. Kashubians , Masurians , Schlonsaken , if they were not members were in Polish political organizations. They got the " German citizenship on revocation".
  • People's list 4: so-called renegades , d. H. People who, in the opinion of the German civil administration, were of “German descent”, but who “had slipped into Poland”, d. H. considered themselves Poles. They received the "entitlement to German citizenship upon revocation" and were exempt from military service.

German law applied to all of them, but each department received graduated rights and privileges, recognizable by ID cards in different colors (department 1 and 2: blue, department 3 green, department 4 red). On March 4, 1941, the DVL was extended to all annexed western Polish areas (i.e. Danzig-West Prussia , East Upper Silesia and parts of East Prussia ). At about the same time, in mid-March 1941, the expulsion of Poles from these areas to the Generalgouvernement in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union was temporarily and eventually stopped entirely. In the Wartheland, the selection criteria were handled relatively restrictively until the German defeat. Only a relatively small proportion of around 10% of the local population should be included in the German People's List. The DVL of the Wartheland of 1939 did not have the function of winning non-Germans for the "German nationality" despite assertions to the contrary. On the contrary, it was supposed to exclude ethnic Poles and ethnic Germans who did not want to acknowledge the National Socialist interpretation of “Germanness”. The situation was completely different, especially in the provinces of Danzig-West Prussia and Upper Silesia. Around 60% of the local population was registered there, the vast majority in Department 3. Due to the war there was a great need for workers, and it was now in these areas a much larger part of the population was included in the privileged sections of the list and made Germans.

From 1941 onwards, the people's list also served to force soldiers to be recruited for the Wehrmacht from the population of Poland, in violation of international law . Many Poles tried to escape German conscription with the Polish Home Army or went over to the Allies. Of the 89,000 Polish armed forces captured by the Allies in Western Europe, 50,000 joined the Polish armed forces fighting on the British side in the west .

The division into the various "departments" of the DVL had extensive consequences in all areas of life, from food rations to health care and education . The more unfavorable the classification, the more difficult the u. a. War-related (survival) living situation. Anyone who was not registered in one of the four departments had the status of unlawful and stateless "Protective Members of the German Reich" and had to expect brutal reprisals. He was in danger of being deported to the General Government . Without any rights, those affected vegetated with hunger rations.

As a rule, the applicants were not subjected to a “racial screening”. Himmler pushed for such a racist selection, but was unable to prevail against the respective Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter. In the Wartheland alone, the Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Arthur Greiser agreed to a racist selection of the majority of the people in Departments 3 and 4 of the DVL, so that around 60,000 people were "examined" by the so-called suitability testers of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS . In contrast, in Upper Silesia, the upper president and Gauleiter Fritz Bracht only allowed the selection of around 50,000 people in Department 4, while the Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Albert Forster in Gdansk-West Prussia prohibited the selections entirely. However, since the deportations to the Generalgouvernement had been discontinued due to the war, probably only very few of the persons for whom the Race and Settlement Main Office had recognized rating group IV or IVf were removed from the German People's List or suffered other disadvantages resulting from this.

German people's list, as of 1942
area DVL (together) DVL 1 DVL 2 DVL 3 DVL 4
East Prussia 45,000 8,500 21,500 13,500 1,500
Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia 1,153,000 150,000 125,000 870,000 8,000
Warthegau 476,000 209,000 191,000 56,000 20,000
Upper Silesia 1,450,000 120,000 250,000 1,020,000 60,000
Together 3,124,000 487,500 587,500 1,959,500 89,500
area Total population German population 1939 registered in the DVL Polish guardians
East Upper Silesia 2,450 100 1,477 973
Wartheland 4,400 325 512.5 3,887.5
Gdansk West Prussia 1,650 243 976 674
Zichenau / Sudauen 1,000 46.5 920
As of 1944, numbers in 1000 each, people's list of all departments from Dept. I to Dept. IV

The table shows that a large number of people who were Polish citizens up to 1939 have been “Germanized”. This sometimes happened voluntarily, but more often under duress and under threat of imprisonment in a concentration camp or the removal of the children. In one of the Nuremberg trials , the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settlement Main Office) of the SS , which was conducted by an American military tribunal in 1947-48, this system of staggered naturalization of foreign citizens via the German People's List was punished as a crime.

Consequences after the end of the Second World War

After the war, the People's Republic of Poland initially rated people who were registered in the “DVL” as “fascist-Hitlerist” collaborators. This often resulted in reprisals (such as detention in camps or even displacement). It is true that among the "Germanized" there were actually collaborators and people who had represented the politics of the National Socialists with conviction. From the second half of 1945, however, the opinion prevailed in the ranks of Polish politicians that numerous DVL members of Groups III and IV, especially in Upper Silesia, had not been voluntarily but compulsorily enrolled. The same was true for Danzig-West Prussia.

As part of a “rehabilitation process”, the nationality of those affected was checked and, if necessary, Polish citizenship was granted, the others were classified as German and expelled. According to the results of the Polish census of 1950, 1,104,100 DVL members who had been “rehabilitated” in this way and former German citizens lived on the territory of the People's Republic of Poland.

After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, those who were registered on the DVL and their descendants received the right to be accepted as repatriates in the Federal Republic of Germany. Federal German courts used the classification of the National Socialists as a basis for disputes over the question of whether someone should be considered a “German national” within the meaning of Article 116 of the Basic Law . In 1990 media reported that this practice would be replaced by a case-by-case review.

See also

literature

  • German People's List (DVL) . In: Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1998, p. 146 ff.
  • Wolfgang Bleyer, Elisabeth Brachmann-Teubner, Gerhart Hass , Helma Kaden, Manfred Kuhnt, Norbert Müller, Ludwig Nestler, Fritz Petrick, Werner Röhr , Wolfgang Schumann , Martin Seckendorf (Ed. College): Night over Europe. The occupation policy of German fascism 1938–1945. Eight-volume document edition, volume 2: The fascist occupation policy in Poland 1939–1945 , Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-89144-292-0 , ibid. 1992, ISBN 3-7609-1260-5 . License from Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1989 (here under the series title Europe under the swastika !) ISBN 3-326-00294-7 .
  • Manfred Raether: Poland's German Past. Schöneck 2004, ISBN 3-00-012451-9 (updated new edition available as an e-book).
  • without author., Sigel hb., that is Heinz Brandt: Full citizenship rights. In: Kreuzburger Heimatnachrichten, field post newspaper of the NSDAP Kreisleitung Kreuzburg OS , February 1944, p. 15.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ HH Schubert: People's political requirements of the German people's list . In: New peasantry . tape 33 , 1941, ZDB -ID 500244-8 , p. 404 f . ( x-berg.de - article).
  2. ↑ on the practice of Germanization and the criteria, whether one is in Upper Silesia in Gr. 3 Become German or not after some time, is instructive Heinz Brandt 1944, see lit.- Brandt was also the author of a Nazi propaganda book: Upper Silesia, Greater Germany's youngest Gau. Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1942. Brandt officially called himself "Gaupresseamtsleiter".
  3. ↑ Norbert Haase: From “Ons Jongen”, “Malgré-nous” and others - The fate of foreign forced recruits in World War II (PDF) Lecture at the University of Strasbourg, August 27, 2011
  4. ^ Ryszard Kaczmarek: Polacy w Wehrmachcie . Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2010, ISBN 978-83-08-04488-9 , p. 412.
  5. ^ Sylwia Bykowska: The Rehabilitation and Ethnic Vetting of the Polish Population in the Voivodship of Gdańsk after World War II . Peter Lang Publishing Group , 2020, ISBN 978-3-631-67940-1 , p. 239 (English).
  6. ↑ Unsuitable as an SS bride . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1989 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel, March 2, 1990, quoted from Nora Räthzel, Gegenbilder : National Identities through Construction of Others , Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-10130-7 , p. 163 .