Ordinary Clerks or Trailblazers of Destruction? – The ‘First Wave' of Chiefs of Civil Administration and Their Implementation of Nazi Policy During the German Invasion of Poland in 1939

Abstract

When the German Army invaded Poland in September 1939, it was closely followed by special police units: the Einsatzgruppen of the Sicherheitspolizei. It is well known that both formations committed horrendous crimes against the civilian population, killing tens of thousands of people during the barely two months of military administration alone. But one group of perpetrators has remained shrouded in obscurity to this day: the first chiefs of civil administration (CdZ) who entered Poland in the first half of September 1939. This article elucidates not only how this group facilitated frictionless cooperation between the army and the police, but also how they often actively induced mass violence against Poles and Jews in the occupied areas. The CdZ were no ordinary clerks, as their own postwar narratives would have it, but rather ‘willing executioners’ of the Third Reich's extermination program. Unlike their successors – Hans Frank, Arthur Greiser, Alber Forster, and Erich Koch – the first CdZ were not highly ideologized party barons; it thus follows that the opportunity to demonstrate their ‘work ethic’ in the service of the Third Reich was sufficient to make them well-functioning cogs in the wheel of mass murder and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in the new dispensation of the Cold War, none of these ‘first wave’ CdZ had to stand trial for their dark deeds at the very beginning of the war.