By a Führer decree of 8 October 1939, the annexation of the ‘Posen Military District’ – established in Poland under German occupation – to the German Reich as the ‘Reichs- and Parteigau Posen’ was proclaimed with effect from 1 November.

Although the name ‘Reichsgau Posen’ was initially chosen as the official designation, another name very quickly came into use: ‘Wartheland’, which refers to the River Warthe (Polish: Warta) that flows through the area. In Nazi publications, this name appears to have been used for the first time in the certificate of appointment drawn up by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) for Arthur Greiser (1897–1946) as Gauleiter. From the beginning of November, Greiser began to use the name ‘Wartheland’ with increasing frequency. As early as 9 December 1939, the Official Gazette of the Reich Governor in the Reichsgau Wartheland was being published in Posen/Poznań. After both names had been used in parallel during the first few months, the designation ‘Wartheland’ eventually prevailed. The official renaming of the ‘Reichsgau Posen’ to ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’ took place on 29 January 1940. At the same time as the Reichsgau was established, the short form ‘Warthegau’ also came into use. The name was used to designate the party district (‘Gau Warthegau’) and was renamed ‘Gau Wartheland’ in January 1940 (in line with the Reichsgau). Since then, the term ‘Warthegau’ has been used as a synonym for the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’.

The Warthegau, together with the Reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia, with which it bordered to the north, as well as ‘Eastern Upper Silesia’, which was annexed to the Province of Silesia, and ‘South-East Prussia’, which was annexed to the Province of East Prussia, the so-called ‘incorporated territories’. It lay between the General Government to the east and the so-called ‘Altreich’: to the west it bordered the Mark of Brandenburg, to the north-west Pomerania, and to the south-west and south Silesia.

The region’s main rivers were theWarta and theNoteć; its highest point was the Heideberg (Kobyla Góra) at 284 m. Geologically, two main areas can be distinguished: the South Greater Poland Lowlands (Nizina Południowielkopolska) and the Greater Poland Lake District (Pojezierze Wielkopolskie).

The Warthegau, together with Danzig-West Prussia, became part of the German Reich following its annexation in October 1939. Although these annexed territories were part of the German Reich’s currency area, they occupied a special position. Consequently, they were not integrated into the police district of the ‘Altreich’, and travel was severely restricted by a decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior dated 20 July 1940; special permission was required to enter or leave the area. With the exception of the Reichsbahn, the Reichspost, the Reich justice system and the Reich finances, all Reich authorities operating in the Reichsgau were subordinate to the Reich Governor. The basis for this special form of state affiliation was the so-called Sudeten Gau Laws of 14 April 1939, on the basis of which the Warthegau was also administered (Führer Decree of 8 October 1939). Madajczyk refers to this situation as an ‘administrative state of emergency’.^[1]

The district boundaries did not correspond to the boundaries of the Polish voivodeships, which no longer existed. Thus, the Reichsgau of Posen comprised the entire Poznań Voivodeship (Województwo Poznańskie) as well as parts of the Łódź (Województwo Łódzkie), Pomeranian (Województwo Pomorskie) and Warsaw (Województwo Warszawskie) voivodeships. Whilst the failure to draw on the previous Polish provincial boundaries seems hardly surprising, it is surprising that, with the exception of the southern border, none of the boundary lines were identical to those of the former Prussian Province of Posen: Thus, the territory of the former border district of Posen-West Prussia (dissolved as a province in 1938) was not incorporated into the new Gau; its districts remained part of the Prussian provinces of Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia, to which they had belonged since 1938. Whilst the districts of Wirsitz/Wyrzysk and Bromberg/Bydgoszcz, as well as the city of Bromberg, had belonged to the Province of Posen until 1919, in 1939 they were assigned to the Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen, rather than the Reichsgau Posen/Wartheland.

The Reichsgau Posen/Wartheland, led by Arthur Greiser, covered an area of 43,945 km².

The Wartheland was inhabited by around 4.3 million people. Of these, 85 per cent were ethnic Poles.^[2] In the pre-war period, the German population accounted for around seven per cent; this was increased to 12 per cent through the creation of the so-called ‘German People’s List ’.^[3] In their population policy, the National Socialists distanced themselves from the classic imperialist policy of territorial revision: in their view, it was not possible to Germanise the Polish population. The annexed territories were therefore to be ‘Germanised’ within the next decade, and the Poles – regarded by the Nazis as belonging to ‘foreign peoples’ – were to be ‘murdered, deported [or] enslaved’,^[4] whilst the intelligentsia, the nobility and the Jews were to be liquidated, in the opinion of the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command.^[5] Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) often referred to the territories conquered in the East as the ‘nursery of Germanic blood’, in which there would be no place for Poles and other Slavic peoples in the long term. To implement this policy, approximately 630,000 Poles were expelled from the Wartheland to the General Government.^[6] Almost 200,000 Germans from the ‘Altreich’ resettled in the Wartheland. In addition, there were 232,000 settlers from Eastern Europe who had been expelled from their home regions (including Baltic Germans, people of German descent from the Soviet Union and from South-Eastern Europe).^[7] The German settlers were required to settle in a so-called settlement zone. This zone extended in a 10–20 km wide belt in a west-east direction from Neutomischel/Nowy Tomyśl to Lentschütz/Łęczyca, and in a north-south direction from Plotzk/Płock to Welun/Wieluń.

As it was not possible to deport the Jews from the Warthegau at the start of the war, the Nazis considered ghettoisation a more promising option. Ghettos were established in a number of towns in the Warthegau (including Kalisch/Kalisz, Pabianitz/Pabianice, Kutno, Koło [‘Warthbrücken’], and Gostynin [‘Gasten’, ‘Waldrode’]). At the end of 1939, a ghetto was established in Łódź, in which 157,000 people were crammed into an area of 4 km². From 1942 onwards, it functioned almost exclusively as a labour ghetto, where Jews were exploited as forced labourers in the textile industry. The ghetto existed until 1944, making it the longest-lasting in the whole of Poland.

In the village of Chełmno (“Kulmhof”), situated in the Warthegau, the first extermination camp was established in the summer of 1941, where at least 152,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered. The victims initially came from the rural communities of the Warthegau; from early 1942, deportations then took place from the Litzmannstadt ghetto to Kulmhof.^[8]

The aim of the National Socialist occupiers was not merely to create a region inhabited by Germans, but to ‘Germanise’ the entire area: In half a dozen decrees, the Reich Minister of the Interior, in collaboration with the administrative authorities of the Reichsgau, ordered the renaming of towns and districts, of which the change of name from‘Lodz’to ‘Litzmannstadt’ is certainly the best known. At the same time, Nazi town planners in the Warthegau attempted to create planned villages and ‘ideal towns’ designed entirely to serve National Socialism. The National Socialists ’ ideas regarding landscape conservation are summed up by the following quote from Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann (1891–1973), the Special Commissioner for the Landscape Development of the New Settlement Areas: “In the East, we need not only German people, but also trees, forests, clouds and rain […]. […] We must therefore bring the East together as an indestructible unity of folk culture and landscape, of homeland and race, which forms a foundation of culture, beginning with the soil as its origin.”^[9]

From the National Socialists’ perspective, the Warthegau was not an occupation but a reconquest of ‘ancient Germanic cultural territory’. On the one hand, the Warthegau served as a model for territories that might later be annexed to the Reich: it provided a testing ground for determining how to deal with the local population and how to carry out resettlements, deportations or liquidations. Furthermore, it was hoped that the settlement of colonists in the Gau would benefit future colonisation projects (as envisaged by the General Plan East). On the other hand, the Warthegau also served as a model for the ‘Altreich’: the integration of the Party and the state within the administration was tested, as were spatial planning concepts that might later have been applied in the ‘Altreich’. Overall, Arthur Greiser’s remark, in which he described the Warthegau as a ‘training ground for practical National Socialism’,^[10] aptly characterises the National Socialists ’ functionalisation of the Reichsgau.

Academic research into the Warthegau has taken very different forms in Germany and Poland, where it began immediately after the war – primarily through publications by the Poznań-based West Institute (Instytut Zachodni). Fundamental works on the subject are to be found primarily in Polish historical scholarship (e.g. Janowicz 1951, Łuczak 1972, and Marczewski 1979); these focus mainly on issues of administration, the economy and also the Nazis’ population and settlement policies. German research has primarily dealt with the occupation of Poland as a whole, with the emphasis often on the Holocaust. To date, individual regions have scarcely been addressed as research topics, and there is as yet no German-language monograph providing a comprehensive historiographical overview of the Warthegau. There are, however, publications on individual aspects of the Warthegau, for example on education policy (Hansen 1995) or on regional planning (Hartenstein 1998). There is hardly any discussion of the topic of the flight and expulsion of Germans from the Warthegau.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, research has so far focused on the figure of Arthur Greiser (e.g. Epstein 2010).

• Michael Alberti: The Persecution and Extermination of the Jews in the Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945. Wiesbaden 2006 (Sources and Studies, German Historical Institute, Warsaw 17).
• Catherine Epstein: Model Nazi. Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford 2010.
• Georg Hansen: Ethnic Education Policy in Occupied Poland. The Model Gau of Wartheland. Münster 1995.
• Michael Hartenstein: New Rural Landscapes. National Socialist Settlement Planning in the ‘Incorporated Eastern Territories’ 1939 to 1944. Berlin 1998 (Academic Series on History 6).
• Zbigniew Janowicz: The Administrative System of the Polish Territories Incorporated into the German Reich, 1939–1945. The so-called Wartheland and Gdańsk-West Prussia districts [The administrative system of the Polish territories annexed by the German Reich, 1939–1945. The so-called Wartheland Gau and Danzig-West Prussia]. Poznań 1951 (Studies on the German Occupation of Poland 5).
• Włodzimierz Jastrzębski: Nazi resettlements from Polish territories incorporated into the Reich in the years 1939–1945 [National Socialist resettlements from the Polish territories incorporated into the Reich in the years 1939–1945]. Poznań 1968 (Studies on the German Occupation of Poland 9).
• Alexander Kranz: Reich Governor Arthur Greiser and the Civil Administration in the Wartheland in 1939/40. Population Policy in the First Phase of German Occupation in Poland. Potsdam 2010 (Potsdam Papers on Military History 8).
• Andrea Löw: Jews in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Living Conditions, Self-Perception, Behaviour. Göttingen 2007 (Series on the Łódź Ghetto Chronicle).
• Czesław Łuczak: The Wartheland 1939–1945. A Historical and Economic Study of the Nazi Occupation [Wartheland 1939–1945. A Study of the History and Economic History of the Nazi Occupation]. Poznań 1972.
• Czesław Łuczak: Day by Day in Occupied Greater Poland and the Łódź Region (Wartheland). A Chronology of Events 1939–1945 [Day by Day in Occupied Greater Poland and the Łódź Region (Wartheland). Almanac 1939–1945]. Poznań 1993.
• Czesław Łuczak: Under the German Yoke (Wartheland 1939–1945). Poznań 1996.
• Czesław Madajczyk: Nazi Germany’s Occupation Policy in Poland 1939–1945. Berlin 1987.
• Jerzy Marczewski: Hitler’s Concept of Colonisation and Resettlement Policy and its Implementation in the Vistula District [The National Socialist Concept of Colonisation and Resettlement Policy and its Implementation in the Vistula District]. Poznań 1979 (Studies on the German Occupation of Poland 14).
• Patrick Montague: Chelmno and the Holocaust. The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp. Chapel Hill 2012.
• Werner Röhr: Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945. From the ‘training ground for practical National Socialism’ to the ‘model Gau’? In: Bulletin for Research into Fascism and the World Wars 18 (2002), pp. 28–54.

[1] Madajczyk: Occupation Policy, p. 32.

[2] Kranz: Reich Governor Arthur Greiser, p. 32.

[3] Kranz: Reich Governor, p. 56ff.

[4] Wolfgang Benz: The General Plan East. On the Nazi regime’s policy of Germanisation in the occupied eastern territories 1939–1945. In: Ibid. (ed.): The Expulsion of the Germans from the East. Causes, Events, Consequences. 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main 1995 (The Era of National Socialism. A Book Series), pp. 45–57, here p. 47.

[5] Łuczak: Dzień po dniu [Day by Day], pp. 10ff.

[6] As early as December 1939, 87,838 Poles were deported from the Reichsgau Posen to the General Government within 17 days. By the spring of 1941, the figure had risen to 365,000. See Wolfgang Jacobmeyer: ‘The Invasion of Poland and the New Character of the War’. In: Christoph Kleßmann (ed.): September 1939. War, Occupation and Resistance in Poland. Göttingen 1989 (Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe 1546), pp. 24ff.; Dieter Stüttgen: Province, Grand Duchy, Posen. Marburg/Lahn 1975 (Outline of German Administrative History, Volume 2, Series A: Prussia), p. 125.

[7] Stüttgen: Posen (note 6), p. 125.

[8] Montague: Chelmno and the Holocaust.

[9] Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann: ‘Tasks and Objectives of German Landscape Policy’. In: Gartenkunst 53 (1940). Quoted from: Hans-Christian Harten: De-Culturation and Germanisation. National Socialist Racial and Educational Policy in Poland. 1939–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 131.

[10] Arthur Greiser: ‘The Greater German Mission in the Wartheland’. In: *Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte*. Central political and cultural journal of the NSDAP 12 (1941), p. 46.

Daniel J. Lemmen: Reichsgau Wartheland. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2014. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32578 (accessed 12 January 2021).