All language subtitles for BBC The Nazis A Warning from History S01 E04_track3_[und]

This programme contains some scenes
which some viewers may find
upsetting

One country suffered more
than any other under the Nazis -

Poland.

Nearly one in five Poles
died during World War II.

This is the place where the Nazis
conducted one of the most brutal
acts of ethnic cleansing in history.

One of the chief architects
of this policy lived here,

on a 70-acre estate
in the western part of Poland.

His name was Arthur Greiser.

IN POLISH:

In 1946, Arthur Greiser
was put on trial for war crimes.

He cut a pathetic figure.

He claimed he, too, had been
a victim of Hitler's policies,

and that he was merely a scapegoat
for the crimes of his masters.

Arthur Greiser, like other leading
Nazis, claimed he'd simply been
acting under orders.

But he lied.

For when Arthur Greiser sat in the
drawing room of his 60-room palace,

he possessed the independence
and power of a mighty feudal baron.

This is the story of the first
20 months of the Nazi occupation,

when men like Greiser tried to turn
Poland into the model Nazi state.

The Germans invaded Poland
on first of September, 1939.

Within five weeks,
the Polish Army had been crushed.

MEN SING ROUSING MILITARY SONG

Hitler's popularity soared.

To German soldiers,
HE was the military genius

who had allowed them to regain all
the German territory in the east

they had lost after World War I.

CROWD CHANT "SIEG HEIL!"

Germany was a world superpower
and Hitler was the man to thank.

Now Hitler revealed
his vision for Poland -

a fundamental reordering of the
country based on Nazi racial theory.

In August 1939,

Hitler and Stalin had agreed
to share Poland between them.

The Nazis created three new
districts in their part of Poland.

Hitler wanted two of them -
the Warthegau under Arthur Greiser

and West Prussia
under Albert Forster -

to be ethnically cleansed
and incorporated into Germany.

In a typically vague order,
Hitler told Forster and Greiser
to Germanise their districts,

but he would ask no questions
about their methods.

A crucial part of Germanisation
was the grading of the population,
according to how German they were

in terms of looks,
language and attitude.

One group were Germanised instantly
- ethnic Germans from the parts of
Poland that were German before WWI.

They welcomed the German Army
as their saviours.

IN GERMAN:

Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat
lived with the rest of his family

on a 1,500-acre estate in Greiser's
province of the Warthegau.

The Nazi's renamed the area
around his house Bleekersdorf
after his family.

The Nazis believed that the Germans
were racially superior to the Poles.

Poles who were not thought German
risked deportation to another
district or arbitrary arrest.

Poles allowed to stay in Germanised
areas were treated as slaves.

Nazis encouraged the ethnic Germans
to settle old scores
with their former neighbours.

IN GERMAN:

IN POLISH:

And in the Nazi kingdom of Poland,
the SS could do anything it liked...

as one German soldier witnessed.

IN GERMAN:

IN GERMAN:

Some senior German Army officers
were appalled at these atrocities.

One general's complaint reached
Hitler. The Fuhrer's military
agitant recorded his reaction.

"Hitler criticises the childish
attitudes within the Army
leadership.

"One can't fight a war
with Salvation Army methods."

Hitler may have had a vision
for what he wanted in Poland,

but he believed men like Greiser
should run their domains
as they saw fit.

They all ran them differently.

Arthur Greiser's rival
and neighbour, Albert Forster,
who ran Danzig, West Prussia,

conducted the ethnic cleansing
in his district
in a completely different way.

Albert Forster,

though himself a committed Nazi
later found guilty of war crimes,

did not believe rigidly
in Nazi racial theory.

If Poland was to be Germanised,
the quicker it was done the better.

He declared whole groups of Poles

were now Germans, without checking

their ethnic origins.

IN POLISH:

But Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle
lived in Posen, within the area
run by Arthur Greiser.

There, he and his family
suffered a different fate.

So Romuald Pilaczynski's uncle was,
according to Greiser, a Pole,

whilst he, according to Forster,
was a German.

He and his family weren't deported

and he could still receive

an education,

but he still didn't feel German.

Albert Forster believed
he was only acting within
the discretion given him by Hitler.

His neighbour, the fanatical racist
Arthur Greiser, was furious.

Grieser wrote letters of complaint
to his mentor Heinrich Himmler...

head of the SS.

"From the beginning, I avoided
trying to win cheap successes

"by Germanising people who could
not prove their German origin.

"As I have discussed with you,
MY ethnic policies are threatened
by those in Danzig, West Prussia.

"Their policy seems to a superficial
observer to be more successful."

Like Greiser,
Himmler was fanatically committed
to racial theory.

He believed a Germanic race could
be distinguished scientifically.

But Forster had joked
that if HE looked like Himmler,

he wouldn't go on
about the idea of race so much.

When Himmler heard that Forster
was Germanising en masse,

he wrote a letter of complaint
to him,

telling him to Germanise each Pole
only after ethnic examination,

and reminding Forster...

"You, as an old National Socialist,

"know that one drop of false blood
that comes into an individual's
veins can never be removed."

But Albert Forster wasn't worried
by Himmler's threatening letter.

As a Gauleiter, or district leader,
he had direct contact with Hitler.

He believed Hitler would let him
govern his own area as he liked.

He was right.

Hitler didn't intervene and
Forster never changed his policy.

Arthur Greiser had another problem.

In the autumn of 1939, hundreds
of thousands of ethnic Germans

began to arrive
in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Hitler and Stalin allowed them
to leave neighbouring countries
and come home to the Reich.

Greiser had to find homes
for these ethnic Germans.

German propaganda film
shows the incoming ethnic Germans

being welcomed with open arms by

the indigenous German population

of Poland.

The reality could be very different.

IN GERMAN:

But if the local Germans weren't
impressed with the new arrivals,

then many of the new arrivals
were equally disappointed.

They were told they were being
resettled in Germany.

According to the Nazis, they were,
but that depended, of course,
on how you defined Germany.

IN GERMAN:

The new arrivals needed somewhere
permanent to live.

In Greiser's district
that problem was easily solved.

Families like the Jeziorkowskas
received a late-night visit
from the German security forces.

IN POLISH:

The Nazis distributed
the property they'd stolen
to the incoming ethnic Germans.

Each head of a family
was given a key, a map

and told to go and find their new
flat somewhere in the city.

Propaganda shows the pristine glory
of the fresh accommodation.

For the Eigis,
it wasn't like that at all.

IN GERMAN:

The incoming ethnic Germans
now had homes to live in,

but they didn't have jobs.

That difficulty, too,
was swiftly overcome.

Before coming to Greiser's
Warthegau, Irma Eigi's father
had run a hotel and restaurant.

Irma Eigi's father
eventually found a restaurant
that was still in Polish hands.

He informed the Nazis. They stole
it from the Polish owner for him.

In the depths
of the Polish countryside,

the forced evictions could
be even worse.

Whole villages could be uprooted.

One night in the summer of 1940,
the Nazis arrived at Odrowaz,

an isolated village in the heart
of Greiser's fiefdom of Warthegau.

They planned to remove every
inhabitant of the village at 3am.

Franz Jagemann was an interpreter

assigned to the German forces
who carried out the action.

IN GERMAN:

IN POLISH:

Appalled at this barbarism,

Franz Jagemann warned other Polish
villages in advance of their fate,

but he still participated
as an interpreter in the evictions.

In Greiser's Warthegau,
in little over a year,

700,000 Poles were evicted
from their homes.

Greiser deported many south-east,

to the part of Poland he saw
as the Nazi's racial dustbin -

the General Government
run by Nazi Hans Frank.

IN POLISH:

The Jeziorkowskas
were thrown off the train
once it reached its destination.

In spring 1940, Greiser
was sending 15,000 Poles a month
to the General Government.

IN GERMAN:

These massive and unannounced
deportations from Greiser's
district enraged Hans Frank -

the man who ruled
the General Government.

The country house
of this Italian opera-loving Nazi

was outside Krakow, in a palace
he had seized from a Polish prince.

TENOR SINGS ARIA

Hans Frank was proud of his long
relationship with Hitler,

a relationship characterised
by Frank's sycophancy.

Frank was confident such abasement
to the Nazi cause could help him
win the argument over deportations.

But Himmler showed that he knew
best how to deal with Hitler and
that timing could be everything.

He wrote Hitler a memo emphasising
that the General Government should
remain a racial dumping ground.

He gave Hitler it when the Fuhrer
was in a euphoric mood in May 1940,

as a result of German successes
against France.

They discussed the memo, then
Himmler wrote that Hitler found the
memo to be "very good and correct".

In a typical example

of how key decisions could be taken

in the Third Reich,

Hitler never put his own views
down on paper.

Himmler had won the battle.

Armed only with a nod from Hitler,

he told his disciple, Greiser,

to carry on deporting Poles

to Hans Frank.

Hans Frank dealt with his

disappointment in his customary way.

He led his subordinates to believe
he supported Hitler's decision

and that he hadn't really
been defeated at all.

Himmler's victory meant Poland
continued to be full of upheaval.

Even the ethnic Germans
did not escape cruel treatment.

Later in the Nazi occupation, some
ethnic German farmers refused to be
relocated as they were homesick.

Dr Fritz Arlt
helped deal with the problem.

In our interview,
Dr Arlt emphasised that he tried
to help the occupied population.

But this letter
about these ethnic German farmers

shows a very different side
to his character.

It bears the dictation mark
"Dr A" for Dr Arlt.

We reminded him of its existence.

The letter asks for the ringleaders
of the ethnic German farmers to be
sent to a KZ, or concentration camp.

INTERVIEWER IN GERMAN:

Dr Arlt joined the Nazi Party
in 1932.

Is he now ashamed he did?

But it was another group
which was to suffer most

at the hands of Nazis in Poland -

the three million Polish Jews.

In the early months
of the German occupation of Poland,

the Nazis
gathered together Polish Jews

and then transported them into
ghettos within the major towns.

The Nazis had not yet decided what
the final fate of the Jews would be.

The biggest ghetto in Arthur
Greiser's district was in Lodz.

Here, in the spring of 1940,

160,000 Polish Jews were ordered
to congregate in a ghetto area
of less than two square miles.

IN GERMAN:

Within weeks
of the ghetto being opened,

the Nazis sealed it, imprisoning
the Jews behind barbed wire.

To escape starvation, the Jews
had to buy food at inflated prices,

either from Nazis or, unofficially,
from the locals outside the wire.

IN GERMAN:

Eugen Zielke was an ethnic German
living in Lodz.

His family owned a food shop.

Some of his relatives were involved
in extorting money from the Jews -

a crime from which he benefited
as well.

INTERVIEWER:

The Jews trapped behind
the barbed wire began by using
their money to buy food.

As that ran out, they sold jewels,
ornaments, even their clothes.

When they had nothing left they
could sell, they began to starve.

INTERVIEWER:

This was the office
of the ambitious Nazi
who ran the Lodz ghetto,

a former coffee importer
from Bremen called Hans Biebow.

He quickly discovered in the ghetto
he could do anything he liked...

even attempt rape and murder.

Biebow began to do well for himself

as a result of extorting money

from the Jews.

But as spring turned to summer
in 1940,

the death rate in the ghetto
began to rise,

the victims buried here in the
Jewish cemetery within the ghetto.

A debate raged among the local
Nazis as to what they should do.

Biebow's deputy said the Germans
should let all the Jews die.

But Biebow knew if the Jews did die,
he couldn't exploit them any more,

so he came up with the solution
which prevailed.

The Jews became slave workers,

making goods which could then be
exchanged for more food.

Biebow made even more money,

but he realised he had to share
the profits, particularly
with his boss...Arthur Greiser.

At the end of this road
constructed by slave labour,

Arthur Greiser sat in luxury,
in a palace also built
on the suffering of the Poles.

Far from being a victim
of Hitler's policies,

Greiser
was their greatest beneficiary.

Far from acting under orders,

he had interpreted Hitler's vague
instructions in a way that brought
greatest profit to himself.

Far from being a scapegoat, he
CHOSE to be a thief and a murderer.

In the first 20 months
of their occupation of Poland,

the Nazis showed they were
amongst the cruellest conquerors
the world had seen...

but even worse was to come.