Albert Forster

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Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig.

Albert Maria Forster (July 26, 1902 – February 28, 1952) was a German politician.

Forster was born in Fürth, Germany and attended the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Fürth from 1912 to 1920. He became a member of the SA in Fürth in 1923 and observed the high treason process against Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler and the further eight accused, which took place from 26 February to 1 April 1924 in the court of Munich.

In 1930, Forster became the Nazi Party's Gauleiter of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland). In the spring of 1933, Forster spearheaded the Nazi take-over of Danzig. Between 1933-1939, Forster became embroiled in a feud with the Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, Arthur Greiser, who was to remain Forster's life-long arch-enemy. In 1939, following orders from Berlin, Forster led the agitation in Danzig to seek re-union with Germany. The Danzig issue was used as a pretext for the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Following Poland's defeat, while Greiser became gauleiter of the region of north-western Poland annexed to Germany after 1939, called by the Germans the Warthegau , Forster became the Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter (governor) of the province Danzig-West Prussia from 1939 to 1945, thereby concentrating both the State and Nazi Party power in his hands. Adolf Hitler instructed the Gauleiters, namely Forster and his rival Arthur Greiser, in the Warthegau to "Germanize" the area, promising that "There would be no questions asked" about how this "Germanization" was to be accomplished. He pursued a policy of assimilation of the Poles in his area of responsibility, in which all Poles proficient in the German language were classified as Germans. In addition, Forster was willing to accept any and all Poles who claimed to have "German blood" as Germans. In practice, the method of determining whether Poles had any German ancestry or not was to send out Nazi Party workers to interview the local Poles; all Poles who stated that they had German ancestry had their answers taken at face value with no documentation required. Those Poles who claimed not to have German ancestry were, for the most part, expelled to the Government-General. Given the alternative between claiming to have German ancestry or being expelled, the majority of the Polish population under Forster's rule chose the former option. Forster more over ordered to return to Poles, property previously confiscated from them, as a Germanization measure and even compensate them for the loss of income in the interim, once they had been listed as Germans. In pursuing his policy, Forster believed to be following National Socialist ideology to the letter. His theory was that the bulk of the "supposedly" ethnic-Polish population in his gau were Kashubians rather than true poles, and that the Kashubians were racially German. In the Adolf Hitler school he established in Danzig, racial experts were churning out a steady stream of pseudo-scholarly works proving the Germaness of the local poles. He was not alone in this view among the Nazi leadership, however Himmler appointed by Hitler as "Reich Commisioner for the Strenghening of Germandom" and, as such, the man assigned to of decide "Germanization" policy in German-occupied territories, took the opposite view. Forster, it would emerge, couldn't care less.

This policy was in direct contrast to what was happening in the Warthegau under Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. Greiser zealously pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, attempting to expel the entire Polish and Jewish population under his rule. Greiser was outraged by Forster's polices, and had complained to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler that Forster's assimilation policy was against Nazi racial theory. When Himmler approached Forster over this issue, Forster simply ignored him, realizing that Hitler allowed each Gauleiter to run his area as he saw fit. Both Greiser and Himmler complained to Hitler that Forster was allowing thousands of Poles to be classified as Germans, but Hitler merely bounced the problem back to them, telling them to go sort out their problems with Forster on their own. This was a difficult task. Himmler attempts to cajole Forster to see matters his way met wih resentment and contempt. In a discussion with Richard Hildebrandt, HSSPF Vistula, over Germanization in his gau, Forster scoffed: "if I looked like Himmler, I wouldn't talk about race".

Forster's conflict with the SS also had direct and injurious consequences for ethnic Germans. During the war, hundreds of thousands of ethnic-Germans departed Soviet annexed territories hoping to be resettled in the expanding Reich. While Greiser did all he could to accommodate them in his gau, Forster viewed them with hostility, claiming that they were unsuitable for settlement in his gau being old and urban while the gau needed young farmers. He initially refused to admit any of them into his gau. When a ship bearing several thousands of ethnic Germans from the Baltic states arrived at Danzig he initially refused them entry unless Himmler promised that they would not be settled in Danzig-West Prussia but proceed immediately elsewhere. An assurance that Himmler could not provide. It was only following a marathon of a telephone consultation with the desperate Himmler that he allowed the passengers to disembark on the understanding that their residence in the gau would be temporary, though most did not, ultimately, leave the gau. In time he had to relent and by June 1944 53,258 such refugees had settled in Danzig-West Prussia. More than a handful but a far cry from the 421,780 settled in the Warthegau. Of course Forster's Germanization policies left much less free land and housing then Greiser's mass expulsions, still it is evident that Forster's perception of the ethnic German refugees as wards of the SS played its role in determining his attitude. Before the war Forster had tried and failed to gain control over the organisation of the irredentist activities of the ethnic German population in the Polish territories adjacent to the free state of Danzig. Rather it was the SS-dominated Volkdeutche Mittelstelle that won control. With Forster and Himmler engaged in a power struggle, this rendered the ethnic Germans concerned suspicious to Forster. Upon the incorporation of these formerly Polish territories in the Danzig-West Prussia gau, Forster distrust of the local Nazi leaders led him to deny them political power and fill all significant positions with people from the pre-war free state of Danzig. The result was, inevitably, great bitterness among he local Germans, which Forster's Germanization policies, which denied them higher status then that of the hated ethnic Poles, naturally exacerbated.

Despite his relatively mild administration of occupied Polish Territory, Forster was responsible for the expulsion of several hundred thousand^{[citation needed]} Poles to the General Government and to Stutthof concentration camp. He was also one of those responsible for mass murder at Piaśnica, where approximately 12,000 Polish and Kashub inteligentsia were killed.

After the war, he was condemned to death by the Polish court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1948. According to some sources Forster was hanged on February 28, 1952 in Mokotów Prison in Warsaw. However according to S. Herbert Levine there are reports that by 1955 Forster was living under house arrest in a farmhouse near Gdańsk.

[edit] References

Rees, Laurence The Nazis : A Warning From History, foreword by Sir Ian Kershaw, New York : New Press, 1997 ISBN 1-56584-551-X
Levine, S. Herbert "Local Authority and the SS State: The Conflict Over Population Policy in Danzig-West Prussia, 1939-1945 - Central European History (1973)