The Zamość Expulsions: Generalplan Ost in Action

The Zamość expulsions of 1942 to 1943 were the largest single attempt by the Nazi regime to implement Generalplan Ost, the long-term plan for the racial reorganisation of eastern Europe through the removal of the Slavic populations and their replacement by ethnic German settlers. The operation expelled around 110,000 Polish villagers from approximately 297 villages in the Zamość region of south-eastern Poland between November 1942 and August 1943. The expelled were sent to labour camps in Germany, to Auschwitz, to other concentration camps, or to substitute villages from which the previous occupants had been expelled in turn. Around 30,000 children were separated from their families. The operation was the closest the regime came to a working trial of the wider plan.

The plan and the place

Generalplan Ost was the long-term Nazi plan for the racial reorganisation of the territory east of pre-war Germany. The plan, drafted from 1941 onwards under Heinrich Himmler’s direction by the Reich Security Main Office and the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKFDV), envisaged the removal of around 30 to 50 million Slavs from the territories between the German border and the Urals over a period of twenty to thirty years. The cleared territory would be settled by approximately 8 to 10 million ethnic Germans drawn from the Reich and from the German diaspora communities of central and eastern Europe.

The plan was never implemented at the envisaged scale. The military situation on the Eastern Front from late 1942 onwards prevented it. What was implemented was a series of regional operations of which the Zamość expulsions were the largest and the best documented. The Zamość region was selected because it had a substantial pre-existing population of ethnic German settlers (descendants of earlier German migrations) who could form the nucleus of the new German colonisation, and because Himmler had a personal interest in the area, having renamed it Himmlerstadt during the operation.

The operation

The expulsions began in November 1942. The procedure was uniform across the affected villages. SS and police units arrived at a village before dawn, surrounded it, ordered the inhabitants to assemble at a central point with what they could carry, separated the men, the women, the elderly and the children into different categories, and transported the resulting groups to the holding camp at Zamość city. From the holding camp the inhabitants were sorted into four categories: those judged racially suitable for Germanisation (selected for transport to Germany for forced labour and racial assessment, with children placed for German adoption); those judged fit for slave labour (sent to factories in Germany); those judged unfit for work (sent to Auschwitz, to Majdanek or to substitute villages in central Poland); and the children specifically (separated from parents and either sent for Germanisation or sent to die).

The substantial proportion of the expelled who were children, around 30,000 of the 110,000, made the Zamość operation the largest single child-separation operation conducted by the regime against a non-Jewish population. The youngest children were placed in transit camps at Łódź and elsewhere; the racially selected were sent to Germany for adoption; the racially rejected were left in conditions designed to kill, including the documented case of the children of Lublin Castle who were murdered with phenol injections by SS doctors.

The Polish response

The Polish underground responded to the Zamość operation with substantial armed resistance, the only sustained underground response to a Nazi regional expulsion programme in occupied Europe. Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and Peasant Battalion (Bataliony Chłopskie) units conducted attacks on German troop columns, on the substitute German settlers as they arrived, and on the police and SS units conducting the operation. The Battle of Wojda on 30 December 1942 was the first major engagement; the Battle of Zaboreczno on 1 February 1943 was the largest. The resistance did not stop the operation but slowed it substantially, and forced the regime to commit substantial additional troops to the area.

What the operation showed

The Zamość expulsions were the documented working trial of Generalplan Ost. The operation showed that the plan was logistically possible at a small regional scale, that it would produce sustained armed resistance from the affected populations, and that it would require substantial military and police resources to be sustained. The plan was, in the event, abandoned as the war turned against Germany. The historians’ view, established in the work of Czesław Madajczyk and Götz Aly, is that the Zamość operation was the closest the regime came to operational implementation of its long-term racial plan for eastern Europe, and that the historiographical importance of the operation lies in what it shows about the nature of the wider plan as much as in the specific suffering of the expelled.

See also

Sources

  • Czesław Madajczyk, Generalna Gubernia w planach hitlerowskich, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1961
  • Czesław Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce, two volumes, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970
  • Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung, Hoffmann und Campe, 1991
  • Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, University of North Carolina Press, 2005
  • Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, Knopf, 2005
  • Bradley F. Smith, Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making 1900-1926, Hoover Institution Press, 1971 (background on Himmler’s personal interest in the region)
  • Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), Warsaw, archive holdings on the Zamość expulsions
  • USHMM, “The Zamosc Expulsions”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org