For those following the reports coming out of the Warthegau, or the Reichgau Wartheland as it was officially known here’s a little background on it’s head of the civil administration.
Arther Greiser was actually a native of the Posen area and readily related to Hitler in that he too felt the effect of defeat and loss of his home province as a result of World War I. Greiser was a member of the Freikorps and eventually moved on into the Nazi Party itself. He moved his way up politically in the Free City of Danzig where he worked his way up to become second in command to Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Forster. Despite his benevolent statements in the newspaper article he was somewhat less caring of the “happy” people in the Warthegau as he worked hard to deport many of the non-German citizens to the General Gouvernment controlled by Hans Frank.
Ian Kershaw quotes him as having told his officers on the issue of Germanization of the Warthegau, “The Pole is for us an enemy and I expect from every officer...that he acts accordingly. The Poles must feel that they do not have the right to put themselves on the same level as a people of culture.” (Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945, p.251).
In the spirit of “what comes around goes around” the German inhabitants of the Warthegau, which for centuries had been mixed German-Polish ethnicity, will be forcibly deported. As will the Germans from Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia.
Deportation of entire ethnic populations was a common Stalinist tactic. The Germans got no worse than many other peoples in the USSR. But as an outcome of WW2 in 1945, it was an effective way of insuring that political borders matched ethnic ones, depriving nation-states of a reason to fight each other.