Abstract
In an extraordinary book, a kind of ‘docu-drama,’ published in spring 1940, the popular nationalist writer Edwin Erich Dwinger fabricated a holocaust that ethnic Germans had suffered at the hands of the Poles in the days after Germany’s invasion in September 1939. Fantastically embellishing the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ on 3 September in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), Dwinger’s book, Death in Poland, opens with Polish soldiers and civilians attacking ethnic German communities in Western Poland.1 Random violence against German civilians grows increasingly systematically and eventually includes an astonishing number of elements that later appear in Germany’s war against the Jews. The prophetic nature of the work is startling: Poles round up German civilians in marketplaces against the background of burning churches; they assign Germans color-coded identity passes (red, pink, and white) which classify their political reliability (much as Germans would do with Poles they considered to be ethnically German); they force Germans on ‘hunger marches’ and confiscate their last possessions, including, Dwinger specifically notes, purses (which German authorities actually snatched from Schneidemühl’s Jews during March 1940 deportations); guards lock up helpless civilians in barns which they threaten to burn down; soldiers separate men from women and discuss the morality of murdering women — and Dwinger pointedly has one Pole decline to do so in order to establish the deliberate nature of shooting civilians by the majority; and Polish soldiers ‘liquidate’ stragglers at the end of the column who have fallen sick or become weak (Death 136).2
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Notes
E. Dwinger (1940) Der Tod in Polen (Jena: Diedrichs).
On purses, see the report by Hans Lammers, 16 March 1940 published in H. Adler (1974) Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr), pp. 144–5.
J. Herf (2006) The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p. 127. On the explicitly racial nature of Germany’s campaign against Poland, see A. Rossino (2003) Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas).
J. Horne and A. Kramer (2004) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press).
J. Matthäus (2003) ‘Die “Judenfrage” als Schulungsthema von SS und Polizei: “Inneres Erlebnis” und “Handlungslegitimation”’ in J. Matthäus et al. (eds) Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? ‘Weltanschauliche Erziehung’ von SS, Polizei, und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der ‘Endlösung’ (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer), p. 85.
Cited in P. Longerich (2006) ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945, 2nd edn (Berlin: Siedler), p. 159.
On the ‘moral’ retraining of Germans in the Third Reich, see C. Koonz (2003) The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press)
T. Kühne (2010) Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Elisabeth Gebensleben to Irmgard Brester, 6 April 1933, quoted in H. Kalshoven (1995) Ich denk so viel an Euch: Ein deutsch-holländischer Briefwechsel (Munich: Luchterhand), p. 189.
K. Dürkefälden (1985) ‘“Schreiben wie es wirklich war …” Aufzeichungen Karl Dürkefäldens aus den Jahren 1933–1945’ in H. and S. Obenaus (eds) (Hannover: Fackelträger), p. 110.
C. Browning (1992) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins), p. 58.
Entry for 11 October 1941 in W. Cohn (1984) Als Jude in Breslau 1941, J. Walk (ed.) (Gerlingen: Bleicher), p. 106.
Goebbels on 17 November 1942, quoted in B. Dörner (2007) Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin: Propyläen), p. 151.
G. Moltmann (1964) ‘Goebbels’ Rede zum Totalen Krieg am 18. February 1943’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 12, p. 22.
P. Longerich (2008) Heinrich Himmler. Biographie (München: Siedler), p. 715
F.-L. Kroll (1999) Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh), p. 255.
Entries for 7 and 27 March 1942, J. Goebbels (1994) Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente, E. Fröhlich (ed.) (Munich: Saur), part II, vol. 3, pp. 431, 561.
Quoted in C. Barth (2003) Goebbels und die Juden (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh), p. 199, 233.
Letter of 28 September 1941, quoted in S. Müller (2004) ‘Nationalismus in der deutschen Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945’, in J. Echternkamp (ed.) Die Deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945 (Munich: DVA), vol. 2, p. 84.
Fritz Jacob to Rudolf Quener, 5 May and 21 June 1942, cited and discussed in F. Bajohr (2002) ‘“… dann bitte keine Gefühlsduseleien”. Die Hamburger und die Deportationen’, in Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte (ed.) Die Deportationen der Hamburger Juden 1941–1945 (Hamburg: FZH), pp. 20–1.
W. Kempowski (2002) Das Echolot: Barbarossa ‘41 (Munich: Albrecht Knaus), pp. 88, 215–6.
Generally, H. Heer (1999) Tote Zonen: Die deutsche Wehrmacht an der Ostfront (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition), pp. 120–3.
See also J. Potthast (2000) ‘Antijüdische Massnahmen im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren und das “Jüdische Zentralmuseum” in Prag’, in I. Wojak and P. Hayes (eds) ‘Arisierung’ im Nationalsozialismus. Volksgemeinschaft, Raub, und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus), p. 178.
R. Düsterberg (2004) Hanns Johst: ‘Der Barde der SS’. Karrieren eiens deutschen Dichters (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh), p. 303.
Entry for 12 March 1942, E. Jünger (1955) Strahlungen (Tübingen: Heliopolis), p. 90.
International Military Tribunal (1947–9) Trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 14 November 1945–1 October 1946 (Nuremberg), p. 26
J. Stroop (1979) The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is No More! (New York: Pantheon). On Stroop
K. Moczarski (1981) Conversations with an Executioner, M. Fitzpatrick (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), p. 92.
S. Klarsfeld (ed.) (1980) The Auschwitz Album: Lili Jacob’s Album (New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation).
A. Wirth (1979) ‘Introduction’, in J. Stroop, The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is No More! (New York: Pantheon)
R. Raskin (2004) A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press), p. 16.
P. Celan (1971) ‘Death Fugue’, in Speech-Grille, and Selected Poems, J. Neogröschel, trans. (New York: Dutton), pp. 28–9. The translations are mine.
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Fritzsche, P. (2016). The Management of Empathy in the Third Reich. In: Assmann, A., Detmers, I. (eds) Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_7
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