Dangerous Outsiders to the Volksgemeinschaft? Adjudicating Accusations against German Citizens of Polish Descent in the WWII-Era Ruhr

Abstract

This article examines the negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in wartime Nazi Germany by analyzing Gestapo investigations into accusations of “friendliness to Poland” against German citizens of Polish descent in the industrial Ruhr conurbation. By relying heavily on denunciations and informing, the Gestapo incentivized ordinary Germans in the Ruhr to identify perceived “dangerous outsiders” to the Volksgemeinschaft. Some therefore relied on longstanding anti-Polish tropes to frame accusations in the racial categories of the Nazi state. But while many such accusations alerted the Gestapo’s attention, they frequently masked a pursuit of personal issues and presented officers with significant investigatory difficulties. Unlike the generally brutal treatment of ethnolinguistic minorities in Nazi Germany, Gestapo officers often did not simply employ blanket repression in these cases. They frequently considered accused individuals’ socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany, characteristics that defendants stressed, thus highlighting the often contingent, unstable process of ethnic boundary formation in Nazi Germany.

On April 26, 1941, Lorenz Nowaczyk, a fifty-one-year-old disabled coal miner living in the city of Duisburg in western Germany’s Ruhr region, found himself in a terrible predicament.¹ The day before, the Schutzpolizei (state protection police) had arrested him after receiving a denunciation from his neighbor and alerted the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany. Nowaczyk stood suspected of violating the Heimtückegesetz (Treachery Act), a 1934 law that, among other things, punished speech which the Nazi state deemed threatening to social order.² Nowaczyk was a lifelong German citizen who had settled in the Duisburg area in 1909, received a 1939 award from the coal mine where he worked for twenty-five consecutive years of employment, and had three sons serving in the Wehrmacht.³ So how exactly had he gone astray?

Nowaczyk’s neighbor alleged that he had hurled anti-German invective at her during an altercation, supposedly shouting, “We Poles are not afraid; we will do away with you and will not put up with everything anymore. Damn German pack of idiots.”⁴ The neighbor also claimed that Nowaczyk, his stepson Paul, and his father-in-law Johann Kunsztowicz, also arrested in this case, often spoke Polish with each other and had similarly disparaged the German nation before.⁵

Born in the former Prussian province of Posen, Lorenz Nowaczyk had, like tens-of-thousands of other Polish-speaking citizens of Imperial Germany in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, migrated westward to the Ruhr.⁶ In that period, the Ruhr developed into Europe’s largest coal mining and industrial conurbation and attracted many residents of the German Empire’s poorer, largely agricultural eastern regions.⁷ While tens-of-thousands of these so-called “Ruhrpolen” left Germany in the interwar period for reconstituted Poland or northern France and Belgium, Nowaczyk, like an estimated 150,000 others, remained in the Ruhr.⁸ He had never, he averred, “professed loyalty to the Polish nation.”⁹ While he occasionally spoke Polish with certain family members, his sons, enlisted in the Wehrmacht, spoke only German.¹⁰

Nowaczyk denied the accusations against him during his Gestapo interrogation and suggested that his neighbors’ own anti-social behavior had provoked this allegation. Nowaczyk and Kunsztowicz had apparently spotted their neighbors throwing “old shoes, tin cans, and cardboard boxes” without proper sorting into a communal trashcan.¹¹ Upon noticing Nowaczyk and Kunsztowicz at the trash cans, their female neighbor had yelled “Polacks have no place on my property.” When Nowaczyk responded that he “was not a Polack and she should take back her words,” she had retorted with an even harsher barb: “you blood suckers, Polacks, murderers of Germans.”¹² After Nowaczyk’s stepson allegedly retorted, “if I am a Polack, then you are a Gipskopf (blockhead),” and his neighbor yelled “you idiot, you Polack,” the two groups parted.¹³

The Kriminaloberassistent (Gestapo officer) adjudicating this case called witnesses, including family members of both parties, before reaching a decisive conclusion.¹⁴ No clear proof of the defendants’ alleged “pro-Polish” orientation existed, so they were released with a warning after having spent a night in custody.¹⁵ This incident, the officer contended, was but one in a series of petty disputes between these neighbors.¹⁶

While this particular case ended in dismissal, the Gestapo frequently employed harsh violence and long-term detention against accused individuals, especially those suspected of being “anti-German” outsiders to the Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic people’s community). Indeed, other Ruhrpolen accused of “pro-Polish” behavior sometimes faced far more severe punishments. For instance, Stanislaus Lodyga, a resident of Rheinhausen, was arrested shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 by the Gestapo due to his prior involvement in Polish cultural organizations, imprisoned in the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and beaten so severely there that he lost several teeth.¹⁷ Wladislaus Josefowicz, an Essen resident involved in Polish associations, was also imprisoned in 1939 in Sachsenhausen, where he perished in 1940. A supportive letter to the Gestapo from a local lawyer, Josefowicz’s almost forty-year residence and strong standing in Essen-Schonnebeck, and one of his sons’ ongoing service in the Wehrmacht were rejected as justifications for his release.¹⁸

Centering around accusations like these of “pro-Polish” behavior against German citizens of Polish descent that appear in the surviving records of the Gestapoleitstelle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Gestapo Command Center) in the Rhineland branch of the Landesarchiv Nordrhein Westfalen (LAV NRW) in Duisburg, this article investigates the construction and negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in the western part of the Ruhr conurbation in wartime Nazi Germany. Certain residents of the Ruhr, it underscores, wielded wartime accusations of pro-Polishness against German citizens of Polish descent because they believed this charge to matter as an effective negative identifier and a marker of exclusion from the Volksgemeinschaft. The Gestapo and other state persecutory apparatuses sometimes reacted harshly against these individuals accused of pro-Polishness, but many defendants did not face particularly severe penalties relative to the brutal underlying norms in Nazi Germany.¹⁹ The Gestapo often approached such accusations guardedly, frequently considered accusers’ and defendants’ social standing, and took the work prowess and avowed loyalty to Germany of accused Ruhrpolen into account when adjudicating cases. By invoking other notions of community and commitment in Nazi Germany—among them, the idea of a Leistungsgemeinschaft (performance community)—defendants could sometimes rely on less obviously “ascriptive” categories of belonging in the Nazi racial state to justify clemency.²⁰

Allegations of pro-Polishness against German citizens of Polish descent, often designed to tarnish defendants as “racial outsiders,” thus did not inevitably trigger harsh punishments from the Nazi security apparatus. While popular notions of the Volksgemeinschaft often excluded individuals of Polish descent, these case files highlight the unstable, contingent negotiation of limited inclusion for persons of Polish descent in the Third Reich, much like the shifting racial classification practices in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.²¹ That the available evidence does not suggest a serious radicalization in the treatment of accused Ruhrpolen during the war also points to the influence which pragmatic regional labor demands and targeted policing priorities exercised on the Gestapo’s decision-making. While the Gestapo’s treatment of social outsiders—political opponents to the regime, foreign forced laborers, and especially Europe’s Jewish population—undoubtedly harshened during wartime, many Ruhrpolen accused of “pro-Polishness” still received relatively lenient treatment.²²

This article draws on a base of 166 cases involving WWII-era accusations of loyalty to Poland (Polenfreundlichkeit) against German citizens of Polish descent from the western parts of the Ruhr belonging historically to the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf administrative district). Individual case files from Gestapo branches in the northern and eastern sections of the Ruhr were almost entirely lost during WWII, but some of the surviving records of Sondergerichte (special courts) and Nazi-era newspapers suggest that similar accusations occurred there.²³

I located these particular files by combing through every case among the more than 70,000 in the LAV NRW in Duisburg with a defendant bearing a Polish surname, selecting those cases in which explicit references to an individual’s Polish heritage, their real or suspected participation in Polish associations, or their ability to speak Polish well occur.²⁴ Crucially, there are many case files involving German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr in which such accusations do not feature, and another form of “improper” behavior, such as Communist activity or Arbeitsbummelei (work truancy), is specified as an individual’s sole transgression.

This article’s aim, however, is to analyze how, in a significant number of cases, denouncers and police officers rendered salient, or particularly stressed, the Polish family descent of German citizens accused of crimes under Nazi law. People with leadership positions in Polish cultural associations; persons who supposedly displayed sympathy for Polish forced laborers; or individuals accused of speech acts against the regime, are represented most heavily.²⁵ Importantly, multiple people were sometimes implicated in alleged wrongdoing in individual case files. For instance, the file of Stanislawa Cwiklinski, accused of painting “Hitler is a bastard for wrecking our homeland” in a company bathroom in Duisburg in 1939, also includes investigations of eight other women, most of whom had been born in the Ruhr to parents with Polish surnames from the former Prussian province of Posen.²⁶ Moreover, the Gestapo often interviewed family members, acquaintances, colleagues, or neighbors of accused persons, so these case files frequently contain statements from a range of people. These files thus constitute “socially produced ‘texts’” that provide important windows into norms of engagement between ordinary citizens—accusers, defendants, and witnesses—and officials in Nazi Germany.²⁷

WWII-era accusations of pro-Polishness in the western Ruhr arose under a regime whose leadership accorded paramount importance to propagating heavily racialized notions of Polish “asociality” and underdevelopment and compelled millions of Polish citizens to work as forced laborers. While the wartime Nazi regime clearly did not beget a wholly new vocabulary of anti-Polishness, it attached unprecedently harsh punishments to actions deemed supportive of Poland and introduced a sharper racial edge to older notions of difference in the Ruhr.²⁸ Wartime accusations of pro-Polishness thereby placed affected Ruhrpolen within the broader category of Gemeinschaftsfremde (enemies of the community), a charge that would theoretically override all the protections of German citizenship and held the potential to trigger harsh punishments.

The Nazi dictatorship’s massive intervention in the lives of ordinary Germans paradoxically empowered many working-class inhabitants of the Ruhr to pursue their own personal goals by bringing everyday social issues to the state in terms that could draw the attention of authorities, such as accusations of “friendliness to Poland.” Contradictorily, however, the Nazi state thereby exposed itself to a flood of information, much of it not especially relevant for its hegemonic project because it concerned parochial social tensions.

Many Gestapo officers therefore evinced a rather circumspect approach to such accusations, especially upon closer investigation. Jan Gross contends that “the real power of a totalitarian state results from its being at the disposal of every inhabitant, available at a moment’s notice.”²⁹ Gross’ broader point about the unforeseen opportunities that repressive states receptive to denunciation and informing present to their residents is an apt one. Yet his corollary argument that “everybody can use the political police against everybody else—quickly, without delay or undue formalities,” is not really born out in the many cases in which such forms of contact with authorities in the Ruhr did not result in punishments expected by the populace.³⁰

Importantly, defendants also held the opportunity to elaborate on their own stances during questioning. Many accused individuals depicted themselves as productive members of German society, frequently accentuating their professional diligence and often underscoring their commitment to Germany, such as their service in the German military, participation in civic organizations, and the nationalist activities of their children. Many defendants invoked notions of “German work,” a cultural code that, as Sebastian Conrad has articulated, infused nationalist discourse from the nineteenth century onward, ostensibly promised to “elevate” ethnic Poles into the higher order of “Germandom,” and could resonate with secret police officers.³¹

The Gestapo was often relatively discerning when interrogating German citizens accused of “pro-Polish” behavior in the Ruhr and indeed accorded a substantial degree of importance to their perceived economic productivity, standing in their local community, concrete “commitment” to Germany, and even generational differences in “Germanization” in reaching verdicts. The Gestapo meted out shocking brutality and arbitrary detention in the Ruhr, perpetrating genocidal violence against German Jews and assaulting or executing Polish forced laborers for even the most trivial alleged offenses.³² Rooting out “nationally disloyal Poles” among the German population of the Ruhr may have served in principle as an aspiration for the Gestapo. This article argues, however, that given other perceived policing exigencies facing the Nazi state and desperate manpower shortages in the Ruhr, this goal was simply not given high priority.

Policing the Boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft

This article builds on the pioneering works of scholars such as Detlev Peukert, Reinhard Mann, Gerhard Paul, Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Robert Gellately, and Eric Johnson, who problematized an earlier perception that the German population was largely “subjected” to the all-powerful control of the Gestapo.³³ Instead, these scholars underscored that the secret police’s surveillance project depended on the active participation of ordinary German citizens in networks of informing and denunciation.³⁴ Life in the Ruhr during the Nazi period, as Peukert elucidated, was certainly marked by everyday acts of resistance against the Nazi state but also by a significant degree of active engagement with the secret police among ordinary Germans.³⁵

Still, only a smaller number of works have analyzed the rhetorical quality of accusations, the insights that they afford into older regional social dynamics, and the manner in which Gestapo officials responded to their construction of ethnic difference.³⁶ Eric Johnson has highlighted that many “ordinary Germans”—individuals who did not belong to especially targeted racial, political, or religious groups—often did not face severe penalties when accused of wrongdoing, especially for speech acts against the regime.³⁷ Furthermore, Robert Gellately has underscored the establishment of a brutal “apartheid system” for Polish foreign workers conscripted as forced laborers into Nazi Germany.³⁸ Yet, examining the cases of Ruhrpolen accused of disloyalty to Germany raises several important corollary questions that are not probed as deeply in existing works on policing. How negotiable were conceptions of Polishness in the WWII-era Ruhr and how did members of a liminal group like the Ruhrpolen—“ordinary German” citizens with Polish family roots—cope with accusations of disloyalty to Germany?

This article thus also engages with the rich scholarly literature on popular understandings of the Volksgemeinschaft in Nazi Germany.³⁹ As Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt have stressed, “the vision of a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ possessed enormous mobilizational force” in Nazi Germany and was as much a product of “top-down” efforts as it was “defined in social practice ‘from below.’”⁴⁰ This article highlights that everyday citizens of Nazi Germany could variously invoke notions of the Volksgemeinschaft to justify persecuting German citizens of Polish descent or stress the redemptive capacity of work and nationalist sacrifice for Germany in calls for leniency. Volksgemeinschaft, as Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto have stressed, “was not a static condition.”⁴¹ Although fundamentally racialized, the links which this concept often bore to an “ethic of achievement” preserved some room for defendants, witnesses, and Gestapo officers to justify clemency on pragmatic, productivity-related grounds.⁴²

Drawing inspiration from Natalie Zemon Davis’s Fiction in the Archives, this article foregrounds accusers’, defendants’, and Gestapo officers’ “crafting of a narrative” vis-à-vis conceptions of multiethnicity, “Germanization,” and Polishness in the Ruhr.⁴³ Yet the people at the center of this project contended with a highly interventionist modern state grasping, however futilely, toward total social control. Stephen Kotkin has contended that ordinary Soviet citizens in the industrial planned city of Magnitogorsk wrestled with how to “speak Bolshevik;” that is, how to interpret overarching Soviet sociopolitical norms and to couch their engagement with the state in the terms most useful to their own special interests.⁴⁴ While avoiding any specious comparisons between the Nazi and Soviet states, this article applies Kotkin’s emphasis on political communication to investigate notions of “Polishness” constructed in the WWII-era Ruhr, another industrialized, working-class area located in a highly repressive dictatorship.

A group of scholars has recently urged researchers studying Nazi Germany to move “beyond the racial state”; that is, to investigate the discrepancies in Nazi racial policy and to consider the way that other conceptions of difference marked sociopolitical practice in the Third Reich and Nazi-occupied Europe.⁴⁵ Adopting an approach pioneered by proponents of Alltagsgeschichte such as Alf Lüdtke and foregrounding the behavior of accusers, defendants, and Gestapo officers, this article studies how notions of Polish ethnic difference were constructed and adjudicated in the WWII-era Ruhr.⁴⁶ Highlighting the contested nature of ethnic politics in the wartime Ruhr, it thus contends that boundaries of Germanness and Polishness were often negotiated via state-society interactions in this region of Nazi Germany.

Polishness as a Sticky Category of Difference: Framing Accusations of Disloyalty

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, word reached the Gestapo in Essen that Marianne Kaniewski, a German citizen born in Dembniza in the former Prussian province of Posen (now Dębnica in Poland) but a resident of the Ruhr since the Imperial Period, had questioned newspaper reports about atrocities supposedly committed against Poland’s German-speaking minority to her neighbors. Kaniewski’s neighbors, several of whom were called into a local office for questioning, attributed this behavior to fundamentally dispositional qualities. “As far as I can tell,” one neighbor said, “ist sie polnisch gesinnt” (she has a Polish ethos), highlighting that she frequently spoke Polish with her family.⁴⁷ Kaniewski was more generally, this same neighbor claimed, “eine schwatzsüchtige and unverträgliche Frau” (a gossipy and unbearable woman).⁴⁸ Later investigative work by a Nazi Ortsgruppenleiter (local group leader) in this neighborhood also determined that Kaniewski and her husband were suspected of having nurtured “tight contacts” with invading French forces during the 1923–1925 Franco-Belgian Ruhr occupation and could likely be classified as “Nationalpolen” (Polish nationalists).⁴⁹ But the Gestapo in Essen chose not to pursue the case any further after it was dismissed by a special court with only a threatening warning and no formal punishment in line with an amnesty order.⁵⁰ Likely also influencing this dismissal was the fact that Kaniewski’s son had been a member of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, since April 2, 1933.⁵¹

In wartime Nazi Germany, an era that began with the invasion of Poland, denouncers likely felt that accusations of pro-Polish behavior, such as the one leveled against Kaniewski, carried special weight. Indeed, on September 11, 1939, the Gestapo undertook mass arrests of individuals in the Ruhr whom informants had identified as leading figures in Polish cultural and church associations.⁵² Hundreds of prominent figures in Polish organizations in the Ruhr, theretofore warily permitted due to the 1934 German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, were thus swept up in this brutal wave of arrests.⁵³ The political loyalties of these Polish associational heads, who were subsequently imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen or Ravensbrück concentration camps near Berlin, were viewed as particularly suspect. Denunciations from ordinary Germans were not the triggers for arrests in these particular cases. Instead, these individuals’ long-monitored participation in Polish organizations was understood as a sign of disloyalty.⁵⁴

Yet over thirty other cases in the LAV NRW in Duisburg revolve around denunciations from ordinary Germans of “pro-Polish” behavior in 1939, ranging from listening to Varsovian radio broadcasts during the German invasion of Poland to violating the Heimtückegesetz by sympathizing openly with Poland’s plight. While especially prominent in 1939, between the beginning of WWII and 1944, when the Gestapo increasingly turned away from the use of written records, cases in which German citizens of Polish descent were accused of harboring sympathies for Poland were not uncommon in the Ruhr.⁵⁵ Anti-Polish racism certainly hardened throughout the war years in Germany, but extant records do not suggest a concomitant racializing shift in the rhetorical content of accusations faced by defendants in these cases.⁵⁶

This article contends that allegations of “pro-Polish” behavior were understood as an effective basis for engagement with Gestapo officers in the Ruhr, a region that had once been home to nearly 350,000 Catholic Polish-speaking residents and in which the perceived “otherness” of Polish culture had often undergirded the construction of German nationalist ideologies.⁵⁷ Sharpened by fears of disorder during nineteenth-century industrialization, Franco-Belgian occupation of the region in the 1920s, and Nazi Germany’s tense relationship with the Polish Second Republic, the “threatening Pole” functioned for years here as a powerful symbol of ethno-social alterity, purportedly doomed to developmental backwardness, violent boorishness, and proletarian status.⁵⁸ If, in many cases in these files, both the accuser and accused were miners or factory workers, it is striking that they often linked broader prejudices toward the working class with “Polishness.”

Given these conventions of anti-Polishness in the Ruhr, framing a particular individual as “polenfreundlich” (friendly to Poland), “polnisch gesinnt” (having a Polish ethos), or “polnisch eingestellt” (oriented toward Poland) during WWII held special resonance. Certain nationalist slogans allegedly uttered by defendants also recur prominently in accusations in these Gestapo case files, such as “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” or its German translation “Noch ist Polen nicht verloren,” the opening line of the Polish national anthem and a long-time rallying cry among individuals of Polish descent living “na obczyźnie” (in the diaspora).⁵⁹ While such stock phrases may indeed have been pronounced frequently by individuals suspected of “Polenfreundlichkeit,” one could plausibly surmise that accusers invoked them precisely because of their familiarity to many long-time residents of the Ruhr as emblematic expressions of Polish nationalism.

Scholars of ethnic politics speak of “stickiness” as a quality undergirding certain descent-based notions of difference.⁶⁰ In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, tens-of-thousands of the Ruhr’s residents had publicly spoken Polish and belonged to a rich array of Polish associations in the Ruhr.⁶¹ Yet, by 1939, many residents of the Ruhr with Polish family roots had only tenuous connections with Polish culture and had, in thousands of cases, even “Germanized” their surnames.⁶² Indeed, as even Nazi-loyal researchers such as Eberhard Franke highlighted, many thousands of descendants of the initial group of Polish-speaking migrants to the Ruhr were involved in Nazi organizations and would serve in the German armed forces during WWII, including during the invasion of Poland.⁶³ Yet, many Ruhrpolen did continue to nurture more private familial and cultural ties with Poland and still bore the surnames of their Polish-speaking ancestors, so Polishness persisted as a sticky category of difference.

Patterns of, and motivations for, denunciation or informing in a “participatory dictatorship” like the Third Reich varied widely—a desire to prove commitment to the Nazi cause, fear of one’s own complicity in a “borderline” case of wrongdoing, thirst for revenge against a co-worker, or a vendetta against a neighbor were some of the many reasons for which denouncers initiated contact, however indirect or anonymous, with the country’s policing apparatus.⁶⁴ It also bears underscoring, as Robert Gellately has stressed, that information frequently came to the Gestapo via circuitous paths and was often forwarded initially to local, lower-level Nazi Party officials.⁶⁵ While such dynamics raise questions about the truthfulness and representativeness of these accusations, this article focuses on these cases on their own terms, foregrounding the insights they reveal into norms of engagement with the Nazi state.

Denouncers and informers and the witnesses they cited needed to perform acts of translation to convey their personal testimony in terms convincing to officials in Nazi Germany. Moreover, for officials to take their concerns seriously, testimony had to tread a fine line, offering sufficiently expressive detail but avoiding the suspicion that the case was motivated by narrowly personal concerns.⁶⁶ Many accusers understood the potentially violent implications of their actions, with some calling for imprisonment and even death sentences in their statements to the Gestapo. For instance, the denouncer alleging via handwritten letter that Bernhard Zakrzewsky, a native son of Moers in the Ruhr, had defamed the German state and signaled support for Poland proposed that this “deutschfeindlicher Lump” (anti-German scoundrel) and “frecher Polak” (insolent Polack)” “should have his head lopped off or receive fifteen years in prison.”⁶⁷ Accusers apparently perceived the Gestapo as an effective, violent tool for conflict arbitration, provided that they spoke the language of the Nazi state and emphasized the honorable and public-spirited nature of their testimonies to the Volksgemeinschaft.

Fundamentally, accusers and witnesses aimed to pursue small, frequently personal, affairs via broader accusations of national disloyalty designed to attract the attention of the regional Gestapo. Many of the alleged violations of the “Heimtückegesetz” documented in these Gestapo cases, for instance, arose during petty fights at work, drunken exchanges in bars, and small disagreements during neighborhood encounters. For instance, Stefan Adamczewski was beaten and delivered to a local police station by two fellow residents of Duisburg, one of whom also bore a Polish surname, when they supposedly grew annoyed with his drunken proclamations of Polish phrases in the street.⁶⁸ Geoff Eley has stressed the “importance of everydayness in enabling us to engage certain aspects of power under fascism”; it was precisely the conception of these mundane encounters as threats to the Volksgemeinschaft which characterized many denunciations.⁶⁹

At a very basic level, denouncers raising allegations of “Polenfreundlichkeit” or “Deutschfeindlichkeit,” whatever their actual motivations, were stressing their own commitment to the Nazi project and asserting an essential conformity between the “self” and the broader “Volksgemeinschaft.”⁷⁰ Indeed, many accusations drew direct rhetorical links between personal and national honor and often underscored the denouncer’s own moral obligations vis-à-vis other Germans, emphasizing that they wanted to “nip” threats to the country in the bud before they posed an even greater danger. “As a truly German woman, I would ask that you lend me a bit of your attention” reads the first sentence of a handwritten 1941 denunciation in Duisburg against Johann Ciolkowiak, which centered around the accusation that “here in the neighborhood lives an incorrigible Polack (ein Stockpolak) who poses as a German.”⁷¹ The “(self)-energizing” thrust of the Volksgemeinschaft construct thus positioned such denouncers as active participants in a broader, constant process of community formation.⁷²

Testimonies often established the denouncer as a sort of “authority” figure who could discern threats from “Polish-friendly” individuals to the community. Some denouncers simply cited their intuitions or hearsay as evidence for their claims. Franz Jenek, who was eventually executed in August of 1940 for supposedly conducting espionage in the Krupp Works in Essen on behalf of the Polish secret service, was said by one co-worker to be “polnisch eingestellt” (oriented toward Poland); “Beweise hierfür habe ich indessen nicht” (I do not really have any proof for this), the man added, but the fact that Jenek was from the former Prussian province of Posen and word of his pro-Polish sentiments had spread in their workplace led him to make this assertion.⁷³ This policing served as a form of community control that relied on “untrained” members of the public tasked with ascertaining, and, in theory, accurately reporting threats.

National and social threats were, in the formulations of many accusers, intertwined. Accusations often sought to link allegations of “pro-Polish behavior” with other correspondingly negative social qualities, such as drunkenness, cantankerousness, and laziness. Thomas Musilak’s drunkenness was highlighted in his 1940 case, in which he was accused of having yelled “Poland is not yet lost” and making other pro-Polish statements while staggering through the district of Beeck in Duisburg.⁷⁴ The separate cases of Marceline Niesporek from Duisburg in 1940, Leokadia Posin in Essen in 1940, and Maria Piontek from Rheinhausen in 1942 all involved corresponding assertions that the accused were not simply pro-Polish but also quarrelsome and spiteful.⁷⁵ That many such allegations were directed against women highlights an overlap between policing of gender norms and the instrumentalized use of ethnic prejudice. Enhanced state penetration into the private sphere thus facilitated these discursive prejudicial linkages and the active involvement of women, both as denouncers and defendants, in community boundary-policing.⁷⁶

Perhaps most pressing to many in the Ruhr, and therefore most biting, were allegations that an accused individual was inhibiting productivity in this region of coal mining and heavy industry so central to Nazi Germany’s expansionist ambitions. A 1939 report in the case file of Franz Rogala titled “Hetzer auf der August-Thyssen-Hütte in Duisburg-Hamborn” (Agitators at the August-Thyssen-Coke Smelting Works in Duisburg-Hamborn), listed Rogalla and another colleague with Polish family roots at this coke smelting compound, Franz Cigalsky, as individuals disrupting work discipline with their pro-Polish comments.⁷⁷ W. K, a twenty-three-year-old Duisburg-born coal miner, was denounced in his 1942 file as an “Quertreiber … der besonders gegen Anordnungen der Vorgesetzten immer anstänkerte” (obstructionist who always made a stink about orders from his superiors); his accuser, a co-worker, said that he surmised “seinem ganzen Wesen nach, nehme ich an, dass er innerlich zum Polentum neigt” (in his entire character he was inwardly inclined toward Polishness).⁷⁸ Michael Perz, a guard at a camp in Essen with Polish forced laborers, was denounced in 1943 because he had allegedly told foreign workers in Polish that Germany would soon lose the war, which presumably undermined their work drive.⁷⁹ The “biologization of society” in Nazi Germany, one which hardened older notions of alterity, thus enabled this semantic linkage between “innate” racial characteristics and “asociality.”⁸⁰

Mobilizing this discourse that cast people of Polish descent not just as persons who had verbalized loyalty to Poland but also as individuals whose behavior impeded economic production conjured up old anti-Polish stereotypes. These accusations likely functioned as instrumentalized invocations of “polnische Wirtschaft” (Polish economy)—an old German ethnic slur for disorder and the antithesis to the supposed “German work ethic” essential to win a total war.⁸¹ Yet while the core substance of many of these accusations perpetuated older developments, the threat of harsh punishment in Nazi Germany made them especially dangerous. An accusation of “Polenfreundlichkeit” may have engendered police harassment in earlier decades, but, short of behavior deemed clearly treasonous, was unlikely to result in much more. In the Nazi period, however, even a small comment at work could land someone in front of the Gestapo, an institution whose officers regularly assaulted and even murdered accused persons under the slightest of pretexts. How did defendants respond in such traumatic circumstances?

Forging the Fatherland: The Idiom of Commitment in Defendant Responses

In 1941, Stanislaus Malecki, a factory worker in Duisburg, stood accused of violating the Heimtückegesetz, having allegedly moaned about conditions at his workplace and expressed pro-Polish sympathies.⁸² But the reason for which Malecki had snapped and underscored his love for Poland, he himself contended, arose from his very experience of sacrifice for Germany. Malecki was, it turned out, a WWI veteran and had suffered a grievous head wound in combat. “I am very nervous and get riled up over small trifles due to the head shot I suffered,” Malecki professed.⁸³ Acknowledging that he may have erred while gripped by an uncontrollable bout of rage, Malecki averred that he was “possessed neither of an anti-state orientation nor a sympathy for Poland.”⁸⁴ “I have not had any connection to the latter for years,” Malecki claimed in closing.⁸⁵ Although subjected to tough questioning, Malecki was released from detainment with a warning.

Malecki, like many others placed in the dangerous position of having to defend themselves against accusations of national disloyalty, could not conceal his Polish family heritage. He stressed, however, a demonstrated loyalty to the German body politic, which, in his case, had meant sacrificing his body and psyche. The range of allegations that German citizens of Polish descent accused of “pro-Polishness” might encounter could vary. But just as particular patterns emerged in the construction of these accusations, so too were certain defense strategies evident among those on the other side. A discourse of productivity, social transformation, and national commitment permeated many of the responses of defendants to accusations that they had revealed themselves to be “Poles,” strategies that could invoke concepts such as Leistung (performance) and broader notions of commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft that were shorn of more explicitly racialized elements.⁸⁶

Finding themselves in an especially precarious position were imprisoned or detained defendants who had belonged to Polish cultural or religious associations in the Ruhr, which in the early twentieth century had numbered well over 1,000 and claimed tens-of-thousands of members.⁸⁷ Many men, like the Duisburg-based coal miner Josef Matuszak, had belonged in earlier decades to the Zjednoczenie Zawodowe Polskie (Polish Labor Union) in the Ruhr.⁸⁸ So too, many, such as Andreas Matuczak of Rheinhausen, were members of Polish religious associations.⁸⁹ The leaders of these organizations, such as Stefanie Sredzinska, had worked hard to maintain their vibrancy and ties to Poland in the interwar period, efforts that resulted in these same leaders facing imprisonment in the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps in September 1939.⁹⁰

Many of the leaders of these organizations, who had been arrested after the Nazi invasion of Poland when the Gestapo consulted with informants, disputed that their participation in these associations necessarily conflicted with their loyalty to Germany. James Bjork has posited that the concept of “imperial patriotism,” often applied by researchers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to describe the coexistent loyalties of that state’s multiethnic citizenry to different nationalist groupings and an overarching imperial framework, is an apt descriptor for the complex allegiances of many Polish-speaking citizens of Imperial Germany.⁹¹ The durability of this framework even into the Nazi period and its occasional resonance with the Gestapo reveals itself in numerous case files.

For instance, the wife of Adam Szymkowiak, a man active in the Union of Poles in Germany in Essen and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen in 1939, declared in a handwritten letter to the Gestapo that “although [her] husband was involved in the union of the Polish minority … he never supported or took any action against the Führer.”⁹² He had always “fulfilled his duties to the Volksgemeinschaft,” she averred, highlighting that he had been wounded twice in WWI and received the Iron Cross for his bravery.⁹³ The mother of the Duisburg-born Max Fidrysiak, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen due to his leadership role in Polish associations in the Ruhr, emphasized in a clemency request to the Gestapo in 1940 that her son’s grandfather had fought in the German wars of unification, his father had fallen at Verdun in 1916, and his brother had served during the German invasion of Poland in 1939.⁹⁴ Leo Sobocinski, a member of the Union of Poles in Germany in Essen imprisoned for violating the Heimtückegesetz in 1939, claimed to be “a friend of both Poland and Germany.”⁹⁵ In 1934, he had even written to both Adolf Hitler and Józef Piłsudski to congratulate them on signing the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact.⁹⁶ “I would like to describe myself as a German-Pole” and “wish to support amicable relations between the two peoples,” Sobocinski contended, illustrating the hybrid identities of many persons of Polish descent in the Ruhr.⁹⁷ Per these defendants’ strategies, “German nationalism was less about blood than a devotion to the Volksgemeinschaft” in cultural or process-driven terms and did not necessarily conflict with other loyalties.⁹⁸

Furthermore, just as an idiom of social productivity infused the accusations made against many German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr, many of them countered with rebuttals couched in similar terms. Stanislaus Lodyga, a signalman in a coal mine in Rheinhausen first imprisoned in Sachsenhausen from September 1939 until May 1940 for his involvement in Polish cultural organizations and later denounced by a co-worker in an anonymous 1944 letter as “ein Polak im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes” (a Polack in the truest sense of the word), countered that it was precisely his desire to strictly follow the rules in the mine that angered his colleague.⁹⁹ Individuals vouching for defendants also mustered similar rhetoric. Jakob Przybylski, a high-ranking member of the Union of Poles in Germany in Essen imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, received support from his employer, the T. Goldschmidt A. G., whose representative claimed in 1939 that he “had always distinguished himself through exceptional diligence, dutifulness, and reliability.”¹⁰⁰ When Przybylski’s daughter wrote a letter in 1940 from Essen in an attempt to free her father she employed similar language; her father had carried out his work with the “Fleiß deutscher Wertarbeit” (diligence of quintessentially high-quality German workmanship), was “loyal and honest,” and had passively resisted occupying French forces in the Ruhr in 1923.¹⁰¹ The discourse of “German work,” often understood in the war years as a biological marker of racial Germanness, emerges in these testimonies as a characteristic capable of embodiment by German citizens of Polish descent.¹⁰²

A corresponding strategy entailed presenting accusations of pro-Polishness as socially unproductive outbursts from individuals hell-bent on pursuing personal vendettas. For instance, Johann Banaszak, accused in 1941 in Duisburg of calling himself a “Pollack” and proclaiming that “Poland was not yet lost,” cast the allegations leveled against him as a petty “Racheakt” (act of revenge) from a disgruntled neighbor.¹⁰³ Similarly, Franz Miskiewicz, a porter in Duisburg, contended that he had been denounced in 1943 for lamenting Poland’s wartime fate by a vengeful co-worker, whom he had recently caught sleeping on the job during an air raid alarm.¹⁰⁴ Defendants often invoked their own experiences of anti-Polish discrimination in making arguments about their accusers’ pettiness. For instance, Konstanze Nowak, denounced in 1940 in Essen by a fellow female churchgoer for praising Poland, alleged that this woman had told her “You Polacks are at fault for the war, you dirty, stinking Polacks.”¹⁰⁵ Hedwig Rychczynski, accused of violating the Heimtückegesetz by some of her tenants, recalled having been labeled a “dreckiges Polackenweib” (a filthy Polack hag) during a 1939 confrontation in Essen.¹⁰⁶ Often, these defense strategies conflated accusers’ baseless allegations with classist notions of proletarian vulgarity and sordidness.

Productivity and commitment to Germany could also be transmitted intergenerationally, so many defendants suggested. A remaining prominent strategy of defendants centered around highlighting the “German” upbringing of their children and their progeny’s sacrifice for the Volksgemeinschaft. “I think far too much like a German to have made those comments,” claimed Leonhard Teodorczak in 1939 in Kamp-Lintfort after having been accused of downplaying atrocities allegedly committed by Polish troops; two out of his four children, Teodorczak pointed out, were in the Hitler Youth.¹⁰⁷ Stefan Bolewski, who was arrested in 1943 in Duisburg per the Nazi policy of Sippenhaft (family liability punishment) after several of his relatives were found to be involved in resistance movements in German-occupied Poland, argued that he had always “felt [him]self to be a German man” and had three children in the Wehrmacht, one of whom, Stanislaus, had been seriously wounded and received numerous decorations.¹⁰⁸ Thus, even individuals accused under racialized wartime policies of collective wrongdoing solely by virtue of familial ties to regime opponents invoked an active commitment to the Volksgemeinschaft. ¹⁰⁹

In sum, many defendants countered the accusations leveled against them by accentuating their sacrifices to the German nation. This was a defense strategy that did not cleanly mesh with the primacy that the Nazi regime accorded to descent- and race-based theories of human behavior. In other words, the tactics that many defendants employed highlighted alternative aspects of social belonging in Germany, such as proven commitment to the German nation in the form of military service, productive labor, the rearing of children socialized into German-language milieus in the Ruhr. These were people who presented themselves as effectively balancing German and Polish identities, even in a heavily racialized dictatorship like the Third Reich, or as having somehow shed their acknowledged Polish family roots and “Germanized.” Were these tactics, however, at all effective with Gestapo officers?

Priorities in Policing Polishness: The Gestapo’s Circumspect Approach toward Accused Ruhrpolen

In 1941, Franziska Szalek was hauled into a hearing before a Gestapo officer in Essen who had received a denunciation from Szalek’s neighbor concerning illegal contact with a Polish forced laborer. Szalek had allegedly tried to buy a new shirt for a Polish-speaking forced laborer “aus Mitleid” (out of sympathy) for his difficult plight.¹¹⁰ “We seem, in the widow Szalek’s case, to have a person who feels herself drawn more to the Polish nation,” wrote a Gestapo officer, who also argued that Szalek needed to be taught “how to handle herself as a German toward the Poles.”¹¹¹ Although the officer considered handing out an “exemplary punishment” to Szalek, he ultimately appears to have dismissed her with a stern warning not to reoffend.¹¹²

The Gestapo was an extremely harsh policing force that relied on arbitrary detention, physical violence, and psychological terror to carry out enforcement of its objectives. Yet the Gestapo in the parts of the Ruhr belonging to the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf does not appear to have viewed uncovering “nationally disloyal” Ruhrpolen as a particularly pressing issue and was relatively reserved in the penalties it handed out to accused individuals. One of the hallmarks of Gestapo terror, as Eric Johnson has stressed, was its “selective nature.”¹¹³ While allegations of “pro-Polish” behavior leveled against Ruhrpolen positioned the accused beyond the boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft, many defendants were ultimately not treated like members of an especially targeted racial, political, or religious outsider caste. Relatively lenient treatment could still entail significant abuse by the Gestapo. The individual case files in the LAV NRW in Duisburg do not provide insights into extrajudicial beatings, verbal abuse, or the perceived threat of violence that persons hauled into questioning might have faced. Merely the terrifying possibility of questioning would have cowed many people into submission.¹¹⁴

Given the severe underlying conditions in Nazi Germany, however, it is noteworthy that most accusations of “pro-Polish” behavior in the Ruhr did not result in harsher punishments. About 75 percent of the persons solely accused of violating the Heimtückegesetz whose cases I located were simply given warnings or held in custody for a few days. Penalties were stricter for those accused of mixing with Polish forced laborers, but around 50 percent of the individuals accused of illegal contact with Polish citizens were dismissed with only warnings. It is often difficult to tie specific allegations to corresponding punishments because this information is sometimes not available in surviving records or individuals were accused of multiple crimes and ascertaining how officials weighted each transgression is near impossible. Broadly speaking, however, these figures correspond to analyses of punishments in Nazi Germany undertaken by researchers such as Jan Ruckenbiel, Bernward Dörner, and Eric Johnson.¹¹⁵ Moreover, these trends (see Appendix) mostly hold true throughout the war years.

Although the Gestapo briefly detained a significant portion of these accused individuals for questioning, many were quickly released, due in large part to conflicting testimonies or lack of evidence; only a small percentage were ever officially sentenced to formal prison terms. In other words, an individual with a Polish family background might be accused of displaying national disloyalty in some form, but an accusation alone, and even corroboration from several witnesses, often did not suffice to land a conviction. Given the Nazi security apparatus’ brutal treatment of so many groups, such as German Jews and Communists, it is noteworthy that a certain commitment to upholding evidential standards emerges in these cases.

The Gestapo seemed to care less about accusations of national disloyalty among the Ruhrpolen than many accusers expected of them, so long as they did not involve espionage or a significant relationship with Polish forced laborers. Many officials employed relatively careful criteria in handling cases centered around “Polenfreundlichkeit,” often giving the accused the benefit of the doubt and calling the motives of the accuser and other witnesses into question. The interrelationship in Nazi Germany that Ernst Fraenkel identified between the Normenstaat—a normative state apparatus that managed governance under a twisted but clear set of rules—and the Maßnahmenstaat—a prerogative state framework that implemented the violent fascist program of the Nazi Party on an ad hoc basis—thus pervades many of these files.¹¹⁶ This seeming conformity with pre-Nazi judicial practices seems, however, to have been grounded far more in an official distrust of ordinary Germans than in a commitment to liberal legal norms.

An apparent frustration among Gestapo officers with the quality of information and the character of denouncers and their associated witnesses is evident in numerous files. Martin Broszat highlighted that officers in Nazi-era Bavaria became overwhelmed by an “accreting bacillus of denunciations and accusations,” a phenomenon that the Gestapo in the Ruhr also experienced.¹¹⁷ For instance, the individual who denounced the coalminer Johann Napieralla in Essen in 1941 for allegedly wishing for Poland’s rebirth was described as making “not a very believable impression.”¹¹⁸ The person who accused Franz Wisnewski in Duisburg in 1940 of having listened to Polish radio broadcasts in 1939 was noted as having deviated strongly from her earlier testimony in the subsequent hearing.¹¹⁹ The denouncer of Veronika Kazmirzak, who was herself described as a “quite diligent woman,” in Kamp-Lintfort in 1943 was deemed to have been motivated by “cattiness” by the official handling the case.¹²⁰ Similarly, the previously discussed case of Konstanze Nowak in 1940 in Essen was dismissed by the presiding officer as “Weibertratsch, der sich unter zwei, offenbar auch geistig sehr zurückgebliebenen Menschen, abgespielt hat” (feminine gossip that has played out between two seemingly mentally handicapped people).¹²¹ Evidently, the ideal of community policing frequently did not play out to the liking of Gestapo officers, who were inundated with cases that often proved of little interest. That cases brought forward by women were sometimes dismissed as mindless babble suggests that the Nazi state’s increased penetration of the private sphere and rhetoric of female participation in the Volksgemeinschaft frequently belied an enduring patriarchal disdain for women’s political activity.

The significant attention that Gestapo officers paid to individuals in these cases is conspicuous because it departs from the arbitrary, anti-liberal methods that this very same organization employed with other “outsider” groups in Nazi Germany.¹²² For instance, German Jewish WWI veterans in the Third Reich who stressed their individual commitment to Germany were still murdered during the Holocaust, their perceived “racial” threat to the Volksgemeinschaft outweighing any kind of proven national sacrifice for Germany.¹²³

“Street-level bureaucrats” in the Gestapo could be receptive to arguments in which defendants highlighted their social productivity, proven commitment to Germany, and moral standing in the Ruhr.¹²⁴ When Anton Markiewicz, a machinist in Duisburg-Hamborn, was accused in 1941 of telling Polish forced laborers in Polish to work more slowly, he was noted as having remained loyal for thirty years to the same employer where his work was “gut geführt” (well done).¹²⁵ When Kasimir Sarbinowski, the Essen-born head of a Polish association in the Ruhr sent to Sachsenhausen in 1939, was said to be “gut beleumundet” (highly regarded) by the Blockleiter (block leader) of the Nazi Party in the neighborhood of Essen-Rellinghausen, he was freed from imprisonment.¹²⁶ In some ways, a significant amount of attention to an individual’s pro-community orientation, not simply perceived ascriptive group belonging, thus persisted even in the Nazi period.

Another arena in which this more differentiated approach became clear was in the generational differences in “Germanization” that Gestapo officers perceived within families.

Clear divides in the relationship with Polish culture existed among different generations of families in the Ruhr. The Gestapo, perhaps because it viewed young German citizens of Polish descent who had grown up in the Ruhr as more-or-less “Germanizable,” sometimes accepted these differences. Tellingly, the file of J. B. from Rheinhausen in 1940 contains a letter in which his teenaged daughter active in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the female wing of the Hitler Youth) who had written to the Gestapo to free her imprisoned father, a member of a Polish church organization in the Ruhr held in Sachsenhausen, was ordered to monitor her father’s activities and help him reorient his behavior per her duties as a German woman.¹²⁷ Rather than depicting all members of families with ties to Polish culture as “unquestionably Polish,” some Gestapo officials seemed to accept such generational divides.

In many ways, this approach bore similarities with the shifting, flexible approach that characterized racial ordering schemes among Polish-speaking populations in Nazi-occupied Europe; one that, as Gerhard Wolf highlights, could differ significantly between regions.¹²⁸ Indeed, perched on, as Doris Bergen has termed it, “the edge of the Nazi knife that separated privilege from penalty” were thousands of formerly German citizens of Polish descent who had lived in the Ruhr until the early-interwar years, moved to northern France, and found themselves under German occupation from 1940 onward.¹²⁹ Via a series of racialized “sifting” procedures initiated by organs of the SS, such as its Race and Settlement Main Office, in 1943, thousands of departed Ruhrpolen received “retractable grants” of probationary re-naturalization by virtue of obtaining places on Category III of the Deutsche Volksliste, a process justified in part by the “ethnic transformation (Umvolkung)” that they had purportedly undergone in the Ruhr.¹³⁰ While other agencies, not the Gestapo, led this procedure, it is indicative of wider ideological currents pertaining to “Germanization” among the Ruhrpolen that circulated in wartime Nazi Germany and that may have influenced the Gestapo’s decision-making.

In certain cases of clear and “costly” infractions among Ruhrpolen, however, the Gestapo relied on heavily racist, hereditary understandings of human behavior and imposed harsh punishments. Although there is not clear evidence of significant wartime radicalization in the treatment of accused Ruhrpolen, harsh understandings of racial difference frequently justified extraordinarily punitive action undertaken by the Gestapo. Most shocking was its invocation of the wartime principle of Sippenhaft, in which it attributed collective guilt to all family members if one close relative had violated their duties to the Volksgemeinschaft. One of the most infamous examples of this violent principle was the murder of seven members of the Leiss family in Moers, who had belonged to Polish organizations in the Ruhr for decades. Wenzel Leiss deserted from the German military at Stalingrad in 1942 and the Reichs Security Main Office consequently executed seven members of his family in response, pointing to their activity in Polish associations from the Kaiserreich onward as evidence of a general pattern of disloyalty in the family.¹³¹ It is also worth noting that dozens of members of Polish associations in the Ruhr who were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen died before they were freed, the suspicion that they were “irredeemable Poles” outweighing any concern for their well-being or that of their families.¹³² For instance, Peter Tomyslak, a veteran of WWI decorated with the Iron Cross, succumbed to exposure and dehydration in Sachsenhausen on March 18, 1940, his wife’s desperate attempts to free her ailing husband rebuffed.¹³³

Perhaps most characteristic of the Gestapo’s approach to adjudicating cases of national disloyalty leveled against Germans of Polish descent in the Ruhr was the sheer flexibility with which its officers operated. Economic considerations and raw raison d’état appeared to have played a crucial role in the decision-making of the Gestapo when it came to accused Ruhrpolen, residents of a region that came under heavy bombardment during the Second World War and experienced massive labor shortfalls in its mining and industrial sectors that even the forced conscription of millions of foreign workers could not fill.¹³⁴

Although left unstated, the Gestapo would very likely not have viewed it as in its interest to arrest and indefinitely detain every German citizen of Polish descent accused of pro-Polishness and employed in industrial work. Given the desperate labor shortages that gripped the Ruhr during the war, isolated individual “threats” rather than a wider insurgency—say, for instance, a massive underground Communist network—seemed more “correctable” via warnings rather than sustained punitive action. Ian Kershaw has underscored the mixed, uneven nature of police coercion vis-à-vis the Bavarian industrial working class, and a similar attention to labor needs and punishment priorities manifests in these case files.¹³⁵

A case in point is the story of the Oberhausen-born coal miner Stanislaus Florysiak, who was accused in September 1939 of drunkenly praising Poland and claiming “that he also had Polish blood in his veins” but was released after his interrogation by a Gestapo officer, who wrote that Florysiak’s “parents are good Germans and his father had actually fallen as a German soldier at Arras [in WWI]” and stressed that “he be allowed to return to his work again.”¹³⁶ So too, Anton Fabrowski was suspected of having links with associates of the Polish secret service in 1940 and even imprisoned, but he was eventually approved to work at a factory in Witten. “Since a huge dearth of truly qualified skilled workers exists in industries crucial for the war effort,” a Gestapo officer wrote, Fabrowski would be a good fit for the Ruhrstahl A.G. in Witten.¹³⁷

Clearly, an overarching program of violence and intimidation undergirded the Gestapo’s work. There were numerous instances in which the Nazi secret police meted out harsh penalties to German citizens of Polish descent who were accused of wrongdoing. But many cases were eventually dismissed, and their defendants were frequently subjected to no more than basic questioning. Although this article is based on a relatively limited series of cases, a significant cumulative radicalization in punishments over time also does not seem to have occurred. At a time when the German armed forces murdered millions of civilians in Central and Eastern Europe and conscripted many as forced laborers, the Gestapo in the Ruhr does not appear to have responded significantly more harshly to instances of “pro-Polish” behavior in the Ruhr. This approach largely stemmed from the Gestapo according a lower priority to reopening the so-called “Polenfrage” (Polish question) in the Ruhr. In a region seen as so crucial to Nazi Germany’s expansion, other perceived threats came across to state officials as more pressing.

Conclusion

Analyzing the experiences of the so-called Ruhrpolen in the wartime Third Reich raises important questions about the contours of Nazi dogma, the relationship between Nazi ideology and practical exigencies, the manner of ordinary peoples’ political engagement with this dictatorship, and links with political discourses in earlier regimes. More broadly during these years, the status of this group of German citizens of Polish descent prompted significant reflection and debate about the progress—or conversely, the limits—of “Germanization” among sociologists, government officials, and ordinary German citizens. Even individual people could display seemingly contradictory views on this question. For instance, the German sociologist Wilhelm Brepohl argued that the superiority of German culture—work discipline, social order, etc.— in the Ruhr had delivered many persons of Polish descent from total backwardness in preceding decades and led to many “Germanizing”; he also posited, however, that a disproportionately large number of Ruhrpolen belonged to a lower rung of society in the region, which he termed the “Typus Polack” (the Polack type).¹³⁸

Focused on the behavior of three different groups of actors—denouncers and informers, defendants, and Gestapo officers themselves—this article has highlighted that although the notion of Polishness as a category of alterity felt like a sticky identifier for many denouncers, accused individuals could mount defensive strategies that highlighted positive social and “national” contributions, which the Gestapo often took seriously. Although it was not uncommon for accusations of national disloyalty leveled against German citizens of Polish descent in the Ruhr to foreground their alleged Polishness, it was less customary for these cases to result in harsh punishments for the accused. Notions of the Volksgemeinschaft centered around productivity or social diligence could justify relatively lenient treatment for such accused individuals. Thus, imagined boundaries of “Polishness” and “Germanness” in the wartime Ruhr were relatively permeable and often negotiated via state-society relations at the local level.

The mobilizational Nazi dictatorship gave private individuals the chance to use its repressive instruments for their own self-interests and special purposes, including vendettas.¹³⁹ To do so, common people learned to speak the language of the regime and advance their accusations in its categories, for which “Polenfreundlichkeit” seemed apt. As a result, the Gestapo encountered a flood of accusations, including many that did not target infractions the regime was concerned about and were instrumental cover-ups of personal issues.¹⁴⁰ Consequently, the Gestapo faced the task of sorting out the veracity of these accusations. Rather than simply using blanket repression in all cases, Gestapo officers frequently took questions of socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany into account in reaching decisions.

These findings may tentatively point toward a renewed look at place-based, regionally specific analyses of Nazism and its complexities, studies that do not disregard the homogenizing impacts of “Gleichschaltung” (repressive coordination) but also retain a searching eye for local particularity. Older traditions of ethnic prejudice, longer patterns of interaction between ordinary citizens and state officials, and structural economic needs exercised a decisive impact on the form that Nazism took on the ground in specific regions. It is these complicated dynamics, the layering of a revolutionary fascist state onto long-term sociopolitical and economic dynamics and the “interpellative capacities” of the Nazi dictatorship, to which further research on the regime can turn.¹⁴¹