Forster — Kashubians and Kociewiacy

Albert Forster, thirty-seven, has been Gauleiter of Danzig since 1930 — leader of the NSDAP in the Free City, where he had orchestrated political nazification during the 1930s. On 1 September 1939, within the hour of the invasion, the Danzig Senate proclaims the attachment of the Free City to the Reich, and Forster becomes Reichsstatthalter, its governor. On 8 October, Hitler creates by annexation the Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen, which unites Danzig, the former Polish Pomerania — the "Corridor" — and part of East Prussia: 26,000 square kilometres and 2.2 million inhabitants.

Forster and Greiser, master of the Wartheland, are rivals and embody two competing schools of occupation policy: germanisation through mass expulsion on one side, assimilation through administrative and cultural constraint on the other — a divergence that is the object of regular arbitration at the Reich Chancellery.

From October 1939, Forster institutes the German Nationality List (Deutsche Volksliste, DVL), which divides the population into four categories: Volksdeutsche, Eindeutschungsfähige — the "germanisable" —, Schutzangehörige, and Poles. Polish is banned from public space, the property of Poles in categories III and IV confiscated, the Pomeranian elites physically liquidated: the mass executions at Piasnica, from October 1939 to February 1940, take 12,000 to 14,000 victims; those at Mniszek and Szpegawsk 10,000 dead; the Stutthof concentration camp has opened as early as 2 September 1939. One difficult question remains: what to do with the Kashubians and the Kociewiacy, Pomeranian Slavic groups distinct from ethnic Poles?