Greiser — the Priority of the Wartheland

Arthur Greiser, forty-two, is a Nazi of the first hour, native of Sroda Wielkopolska (Polish Pomerania) — one of the leaders of the old Danzig Volkspartei from the time of the Free City. On 8 October 1939, Hitler names him Gauleiter of a new territory, the Reichsgau Wartheland (after the Warta river), formed by the direct annexation to the Reich of the Polish voivodeships of Poznan, Lodz, and part of western Mazovia — 92,000 square kilometres and 4.9 million inhabitants.

The assigned doctrine is the total germanisation of the territory in ten years. To this end Greiser has a vast arsenal: confiscation of Polish and Jewish property, settlement of Volksdeutsche — those ethnic Germans drawn from the Baltic states and south-eastern Europe, from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Volhynia — under the framework of the Umsiedlung, the "transplantation." He can also expel populations to the Generalgouvernement, close Polish schools except for the elementary primary, raze cultural buildings — synagogues, Catholic churches, monuments — and persecute the Catholic Church. There remain to be fixed the pace and the order of priority of the first months.

Greiser intends to make the Wartheland the experimental model of Nazism, more radical than Frank's in the Generalgouvernement, and presses Berlin to grant him derogations from ordinary law.