Wartheland: Mennonite Resettlers and Deportation of Poles

This post begins with an apologies and shame towards Polish readers.

Many Canadian and South American Mennonites have a family connection to the “Great Trek” story. 35,000 Mennonites were removed from Ukraine behind the retreating German military in the Fall of 1943 and early 1944. Nazi Germany’s goal: at war’s end Wartheland (annexed Poland) would have a majority racially-German population and remain part of greater Germany. Its Poles were disposed and tens of thousands deported; Jews were destroyed.

Reichsführer SS Himmler boasted to one resettler group: Poles know that “if you bother just one hair of a German family, you and all your Polish men in your village will lose your lives” (note 1). Catholic clergy had been largely executed or banished. Polish parish churches were repurposed--in some cases for Nazi Party offices (note 2). The official representative of Soviet Mennonites, Benjamin H. Unruh—who had met Heinrich Himmler for multiple meetings a year earlier—had requested some of these spaces be made available for Mennonites (note 3). The resettlement of Mennonites in close proximity to each other in Warthegau was also made possible by Unruh.

The use of public telephones by Poles was illegal, letters and postcards written in Polish were not processed, evening curfews for Poles were imposed, and travel even by bicycle from one village to another was forbidden without a special permit (note 4). The District of Dietfurt (where most of the Gnadenfeld Trek group was resettled, including my 6-year-old mother) published an interdiction against selling fruit and certain kinds of vegetables to Poles (note 5).

Poles were punished with two days in prison for not saluting a uniformed German (note 6). Elementary schooling for Polish children continued; but German was to be taught “only to the extent that it is necessary for the next generation of Polish workers, whom we need to fulfill the war and reconstruction tasks, to be able to make themselves understood in German; i.e., German vocabulary will be learned, but the language may not be spoken with grammatical correctness” (i.e., so as not to pass as a German; note 7).

One Mennonite resettler recalled:

"[T]he German authorities required us to wear swastikas …; the Polish residents had to wear a large 'P.' One day, as a seventeen year old, I went to the butcher shop. When I saw the long line-up, naturally I got behind the last person. … When the clerk at the counter noticed the swastika on my jacket, she motioned for me to come forward and be served. The local residents had to wait, just because they were Polish." (Note 8)

Food, clothing, medicine and schooling were provided for the resettlers at no cost by German authorities. Their identification papers stated clearly: “All administrative offices of the Party and State are requested to provide all necessary assistance to the holder of this document.”

By force German troops “ordered [Polish] residents and owners of the houses to move out and settle in barns. In our particular situation, the Poles were still moving their belongings out as we arrived to move in. None of us could do anything about that,” wrote one Mennonite afterwards (note 9). The dispossessed families were permitted to live with relatives on the edge of the village if they were useful for agricultural production. “The way the Poles were being treated was so foreign and incomprehensible to us ... This is of great embarrassment to us, because years ago we too were chased from our own homes and farms (note 10).

The involuntary resettlement of the majority Poles happened at a different pace in each Warthegau district. Eichenbrück—where some Mennonite women from the Gnadenfeld group were given employment—saw 6,946 new German arrivals in the first six months of 1944 with only four deportations, but with larger deportations planned for July (note 11); by August 1, 1,061 Poles had been deported (note 12).

In the District of Hohensalza, the chief medical officer reported that in April “2,817 Russian-Germans were settled in the district ... and were accommodated on the estates or in apartments that were partly vacated by Poles. Evacuation from Poland did not take place” (note 13). The Nazi Party’s Racial Political Office advised Himmler that approximately one million Poles had sufficient German blood to become assimilated for the Germanization of the extended living space (Lebensraum) (note 14). However the majority of Poles were to be relocated to reservations on the eastern edges of Poland.

Once in their new home, each "Black Sea German" household received a small amount of cash from the Party—60 RM plus 10 to 30 RM per child. The NSV Party organization distributed textile articles, footwear, woolen blankets, straw sacks, bed linen, beds, tables, chairs, armoires, and other basic household necessities required for a successful start (note 15). Some of these goods were expropriated from Poles or Jews.

Many of the Great Trek refugees arrived with lice, rickets and scabies, but also tuberculosis and trachoma. Provisional hospital rooms were set up in each refugee camp to isolate the sick, under the personal care of local doctors with multiple visits per week. Pharmaceuticals were available; very ill children were brought to city hospitals. Wards for Poles were cleared and cleaned for this purpose. Only two hospitals in Warthegau were open to Poles by 1943 (note 16).

It was an offence for Volksdeutsche to return items to Poles whose homes they now possessed and with whom they “often had more in common than they did with Germans from the Reich” (note 17).

Susanna Toews gratefully recalled that “[i]nspite of the fact that we occupied their homes, the Polish people were kind to us. However, we were forbidden to talk to them” (note 18). But from the perspective of Poles it was seen differently, Łuczak argues. The “machinery of occupation set in motion to fight against any sign of Polish life would not have operated so efficiently had it not enjoyed the everyday help of the great majority of Germans inhabiting the Warta Land. … Their attitude towards the discriminatory actions of the authorities against Poles was completely passive” (note 19).

In this context Mennonite leader Benjamin H. Unruh had a clear and new vision for church, and by June 1944 authorities were prepared to approve his articles of incorporation for the “Mennonite Congregational Church of German Nationality. ” With the assistance of legal counsel Gustav Reimer of the Heubuden, its constitution limited membership to those of “German nationality.” On principle Christians of Jewish or Slavic ethnic background would be excluded from this church. Unruh was full of optimism: “Today we are facing a new Reformation,” he wrote, and a united Mennonite Congregational Church had a role to play. It can “exemplify” to the larger Protestant “sister churches” what it means to be both “a true community of faith and a pioneer and shock troop (Stoßgruppe) for the whole … united in prayer, witness and work in the service of our dear German Volk!" (note 20). This image of a shock troop--language used for Hitler's paramilitary--was as close as Unruh and colleagues could come to see the church as a culturally critical embodiment of the Gospel.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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Map of Reichsgau Wartheland from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreis_Dietfurt_(Wartheland)#/media/Datei:Wartheland.png. For a detailed map of Altburgund, cf. https://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra/publication/167966/edition/170631/content; and Rolf Jehke, Territoriale Veränderungen in Deutschland und deutsch verwalteten Gebieten 1874 – 1945 (online), http://territorial.de/wart/wart.htm.

Note 1: In Valdis O. Lumans, Hitler’s Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 197.

Note 2: Cf. the discussion around a baroque church in Protection of Monuments, March 22, 1941, NAC 53/299/0, series 7.2, file 2970, 1, no. 5, https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/en/jednostka/-/jednostka/1049629. Cf. also “Trial of Gauleiter Artur Greiser, Case No. 74, June 21–July 7, 1946,” Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vol. 13 at 70. Supreme National Tribunal of Poland, July 7, 1946, http://www.worldcourts.com/imt/eng/decisions/1946.07.07_Poland_v_Greiser.pdf. The closure of Catholic churches was noted by contemporary Jacob A. Neufeld without comment (Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, edited by H. L. Dyck, translated by H. L. Dyck and S. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 300.

Note 3: Unruh reflects on the Himmler visit at various points to denominational colleagues. See also “Notizen,” Box 2, file 7, 1919-1957, Unruh Collection, Weierhof. On Unruh's proposal for the new Mennonite church/conference of congregations in Warthegau, cf. Benjamin Unruh to Peter Bergmann, Letter, June 6, 1944, 2. From Mennonitische Forschungsstelle Weierhof, Benjamin Unruh Collection, folder “Correspondence with Abraham Braun, 1930, 1940, 1944–45.” Also Horst Gerlach, “Mennonites, the Molotschna, and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle in the Second World War,” translated by John D. Thiesen, Mennonite Life 41, no. 3 (1986), 4–9; 8, https://mla.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/pre2000/1986sep.pdf. On Unruh see my published essay, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/bitstream/handle/20.500.12730/1571/Neufeldt-Fast_Arnold_2022a.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 

Note 4: Doc. 4, 15, 16 & 17, in Czesław Łuczak, “Chronicle: Records on the Situation of Poles in the Warte Land,” Instytut Zachodni (Poznań), Western Affairs 8, no. 1 (1967), 172, 180–182.

Note 5: Doc. 18, in Łuczak, “Chronicle,” 182.

Note 6: Doc. 3 & Doc. 22, in Łuczak, “Chronicle,” 172; 189.

Note 7: Greiser, Circular on the use of the Polish language by Poles, February 23, 1943, February 23, 1943, p. 2. From: Instytut Zachodni Poznań, https://www.iz.poznan.pl/archiwum/zasob/.

Note 8: Jacob Braun, The Long Road to Freedom (Winnipeg, MB: Word Alive, 2011), 82.

Note 9: J. Braun, The Long Road to Freedom, 80; cf. also A. A. Töws, ed., Mennonitische Märtyrer der jüngsten Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart, vol. 2: Der große Leidensweg (North Clearbrook, BC: Self-published, 1954), 381.

Note 10: Jacob A. Neufeld, Tiefenwege. Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse von Russland-Mennoniten in zwei Jahrzehnten bis 1949 (Virgil, ON: Niagara, 1958), 179f.

Note 11: July 4, 1944, State Health Office Eichenbrück Report, Transport Niemców znad Morza Czarnego na teren Kraju Warty (Transport of Germans from the Black Sea to the Wartheland; from NAC, 53/299/0, series 2.2, file 1979, 224, no. 232, https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/en/jednostka/-/jednostka/1049368. Cf. J. Neufeld, Path of Thorns, 299; 325.

Note 12: August 4, 1944, State Health Office Eichenbrück Report, Transport 318, no. 327.

Note 13: May 5, 1944, State Health Office Hohensalza Report, Transport 15, no. 19.

Note 14: Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 185.

Note 15: January 25, 1944, Governor for Reich Gau Wartheland, Unterbringung, 12–15, no. 16–19; also March 13, 1944, Reich Governor for the Reich Gau Wartheland, Unterbringung, 161, no. 180. From: Unterbringung der Schwarzmeerdeutsche. Der Reichsstatthalter im Reichsgau Wartheland Posen (GK 62) / Namiestnik Rzeszy w Okręgu Kraju Warty. From NAC, 53/299/0, series 2.2, file 1978, https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/en/zespol/-/zespol/13390.

Note 16: Transport, no. 136. Also Tuberkulosenschutz, September 16, 1943, NAC 53/299/0, series 2.5, file 2215: 301, no. 293, https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/en/jednostka/-/jednostka/1049717. 

Note 17: Doris Bergen, “The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe and the Collapse of the Nazi Empire, 1944–1945,” in The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy, edited by Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers, 101–128 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 112.

Note 18: Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 31. Cf. also Łuczak, “Chronicle."

Note 19: Łuczak, “Chronicle,” 170.

Note 20:  Benjamin H. Unruh to Vereinigung Executive (“Zur Einigungsfrage”), January 26, 1944, 10, from Benjamin Unruh Collection, "Abraham Braun Correspondence," Mennonitische Forschungsstelle Weierhof.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Wartheland: Mennonite Resettlers and Deportation of Poles,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), July 14, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/07/wartheland-mennonite-resettlers-and.html.