In the early hours of October 28, 1938, Berlin resident Mendel Max Karp was still sleeping when police officers burst into his apartment to order him to leave the territory of the German Reich. He was then arrested and deported to the German-Polish border on a special train. Mr. Karp was one of the many Jews of Polish nationality forcibly expelled by the Nazi regime between October 27 and 29, 1938. As the Polish government refused them entry into their home country, the Polish Jews lived for months in hastily built refugee camps. The campaign, known as Polenaktion (Polish Action), was the first mass deportation of Jewish people from the Reich.
The Ideological Background of the Polenaktion
Anti-Semitism was a vital component of the Nazi regime’s Weltanschauung (worldview). Influenced by a blend of pseudoscientific racial theories, racial hygiene, eugenics, and Social Darwinism, the Nazi party officials claimed that “international Jewry” was the most dangerous enemy for Germany’s racial purity and national survival.
In one of his earliest statements on the “Jewish question,” written in September 1919, Adolf Hitler already advocated for “the systematic legal combating and removal of the rights of the Jew.” The final goal of what he dubbed “anti-Semitism of reason,” however, was “the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.”
In 1920, as he took over the leadership of the NSDAP, Hitler renewed his call for the exclusion of the citizens professing Jewish faith from the national community. “None but those of German blood, regardless of their creed, may be members of the nation,” declared the future Führer in the fourth point of the party’s program, “no Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.” In the 1920s and early 1930s, Jewish people were regular targets of Nazi violence, as members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the NSDAP’s paramilitary division, roamed the streets of several German cities.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, anti-Semitism became an integral component of the regime’s official policy. On April 1, 1933, Joseph Goebbels publicly called for a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. In the following years, Nazi authorities implemented increasingly harsh discriminatory measures aimed at the systematic exclusion of Jewish people from German society and culture. In Bavaria, a law even forbade local Jews from donning the traditional regional costumes.
The marginalization of the Jewish minority culminated in the Nuremberg Laws. Announced at the Rally Party held on September 15, 1935, these regulations stripped all German Jews of their citizenship and revoked their civil and political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans.”
Propaganda campaigns accompanied the gradual expulsion of the Jews from the national community. In 1934, the party created a special office, the Rassenpolitische Amt (Office of Racial Policy), to enforce its racial ideology. Every month, the new party division indoctrinated Germans on racial and eugenetic theories from the pages of its publication, Neues Volk.
The process of bureaucratic isolation also set in motion regular waves of anti-Semitic brutality. The first series of assaults took place in March 1933, during the Nazi party-sponsored political violence following the Reichstag Fire and the approval of the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. Five years later, in 1938, an upsurge of anti-Semitic violence shook the Austrian Jewish community after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. In the same year, the Sudeten Crisis resulted in attacks and riots against Jews throughout the territories of the Reich.
“We will make Berlin free of Jews,” pledged Goebbels in his diary. “Our path is the right one,” the Minister of Propaganda added. In 1938, many NSDAP members shared Goebbels’ hatred towards Jewish people. Indeed, the Security Service listed their belief that “the moment of the final resolution of the Jewish question had arrived” among the motivating factors of the nationwide anti-Semitic violence.
The Geopolitical Origins of the Polenaktion
“We demand the union of all Germans to form a Greater Germany based on the right of national autonomy,” declared the first point of the Nazi party’s program. During the postwar years, Adolf Hitler was one of the loudest opponents of the European order established by the Allies during the Paris Peace Conference. After his rise to power, the leader of the NSDAP sought to redraw the continent’s geopolitical map through the creation of “Greater Germany,” a project aimed to bring together all European Germans in a single political entity.
The first step in the foreign policy of territorial aggrandizement was the 1938 Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. After the unification of the two neighboring countries, Hitler turned his attention to the Sudetenland, a geographical area with a minority of about three million ethnic Germans. In 1919, the Treaty of Saint-Germain had assigned the region to Czechoslovakia. In 1938, however, invoking the principle of national self-determination, Hitler claimed the right to annex the Sudetenland to Germany. In September 1938, the Munich Agreement allowed the Führer to achieve his territorial aim.
While the Munich Conference temporarily prevented the outbreak of a new war, the disruption of the postwar borders led to the displacement of thousands of Jewish people from the newly annexed regions. In the face of the growing number of Jewish refugees, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened an international conference in Evian, a French town, in the summer of 1938. While the leaders gathered in Evian voiced their sympathy for the Jews’ plight, they did not increase their countries’ strict quotas for immigration.
The First Nazi Mass Deportation
As more European areas fell under the control of the Nazi regime, thousands of Jewish people faced discrimination and marginalization. Many lost their homes and livelihoods during increasingly recurring episodes of anti-Semitic violence. In the face of growing oppression, foreign Jews residing in the regions annexed to the German Reich sought refuge in their countries of origin.
According to a 1933 census, around 58 percent of the foreign Jewish population residing in Germany possessed Polish nationality. Pejoratively dubbed Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), the Eastern European Jews immigrated to Germany and Austria to escape from poverty, pogroms, and state-sponsored discrimination. By 1938, around 50,000 Polish Jews lived in the territories of the Reich. Many of them were born in Germany.
When Austria became a German province, numerous Jews of Polish origins applied for a return visa. Fearing a mass exodus of Polish Jews from the newly occupied regions, Poland announced a plan to revoke all passports issued to citizens who had been residing abroad for more than five years. The measure came as unwelcome news to Nazi authorities, who intended to expel all Jews from the Reich. On October 9, 1938, the Polish government introduced another regulation, declaring that by the end of the month, passport holders living outside Poland were required to obtain a control stamp to enter Polish territory.
In the following weeks, Poland’s unexpected measures led to a diplomatic tug-of-war. On October 27, as negotiations over the faith of the thousands of Polish Jews reached a stalemate, the office of the Reichsführer SS issued a circular, ordering all police departments of the the Reich to “immediately round up all Polish Jews in possession of valid passports…into protective custody and to transport them en masse without delay to the Polish border.” As a result, in the next two days, the German police, acting on data meticulously gathered by the Gestapo, arrested thousands of Polish Jews.
The roundups did not follow the same pattern in all German states. In Baden, the police arrested only men. In Nuremberg and Munich, entire families were victims of the Polenaktion. In Berlin, schoolchildren were deported without their parents. Many Jews left their homes without their possessions.
“I was forced to leave Germany meagerly clothed and with just a few Reichsmarks,” wrote Max Karp to his nephew Gerhard. Others had the time to pack their bags hastily. While the nationwide expulsion order was a complete surprise to almost all Polish Jews, few of them managed to elude deportation.
Stuck in No-Man’s Land
After their arrest, the Jews were transported to the German-Polish border, where armed police forced them to enter Poland. “We were being driven like hunted animals! Anyone who couldn’t keep up was goaded forward with painful strikes and blows to the ribs,” later recalled Max Karp.
Joseph Cysner, a Polish Jew residing in Hamburg, used similar words to describe his experience: “Children could hardly walk anymore—old people collapsed on the way—but on went the column of Polish Jews, driven by the Nazi beasts and beaten and threatened with the bayonet if they refused to move on!”
The Polish guards, stunned by the unexpected presence of large groups of people amassing at the border, did not know how to react. “Suddenly the Poles raise their guns and we are all told to lie down – then to stand up and confusion made the people more afraid and frightened,” remarked Joseph Cysner in his retrospective account.
The Polish government refused to grant the refugees entry into Polish territory, threatening to retaliate to the Polenaktion by expelling German citizens living in Poland. By the time bilateral negotiations between Reich officials and Polish representatives began, Germany had “succeeded in pushing some 12,000 Jews into Poland, partly by way of the frontier stations, partly surreptitiously,” as Dr. Werner Best declared in his October 29 memo.
After Germany agreed to end the deportations, thousands of victims of the Polenaktion struggled for months to find shelter and provision in no man’s land or improvised refugee camps. Most of the Jews were interned in the border town of Zbąszyń, where they lived in stables and horse stalls as they sought to secure visas to find refuge overseas.
While Jewish communities and organizations provided some relief to the deportees, conditions at the border camps remained abysmal. “Due to the hardships and the enormous emotional trauma, there were are many deaths here, also suicides, people who have fainted or have gone insane and others who are very ill,” wrote Marx Karp.
Thea Feliks Endel, a child at the time of the Polenaktion, remembered witnessing “people kneeling over, people getting very sick.” Thea eventually left the camp with the Kindertransports, a British rescue program aimed to save Jewish children from Nazi persecution. Max Karp also secured a visa to leave Europe. As he was about to leave for Shanghai, however, the Nazi regime invaded Poland. He died in 1940 at the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.
In May 1939, more than 3,000 Jews were still living in the camp in Zbąszyń. Others were allowed to momentarily travel back to their previous homes to organize their final immigration from the territories of the Reich.
The Aftermath of the Polenaktion
Among the Polish Jews affected by the Polenaktion were Sendel and Rifka Grynszpan. On November 3, 1938, their son Hershel, who had been living in Paris since 1936, received an alarming postcard from his sister, detained with the rest of their family in Zbąszyń. A few days after learning of his loved ones’ plight, Herschel went to the German Embassy in Paris, where he shot junior diplomat Ernst vom Rath.
“It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish,” declared the young Polish Jew when questioned by the police, “I am not a dog. … My people have a right to exist on this earth.”
The assassination led to numerous episodes of anti-Semitic violence. On November 9, upon receiving the news of vom Rath’s death, the Nazi leadership responded by launching a nationwide wave of pogroms. Commonly known as Kristallnacht (The Night of the Broken Glass), the state-sponsored brutality damaged thousands of Jewish-owned shops, synagogues, and homes. During the rampage, the SA and SS men arrested around 30,000 Jewish men.
The Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the systematic persecution of all Jews residing in the territories of the Third Reich. The 1938 pogrom also impacted the victims of the Polenaktion, erasing any lingering hope to return to their homes and resume their normal lives. In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the Polish Jews expelled during the first mass deportation ordered by the Nazi regime were confined in ghettos. Many were later executed by the SS or died in concentration camps.
When family members who were already overseas managed to secure travel visas for those left behind, it was often too late. “I believe the papers allowing them to come to England never reached them,” recalled Isidor Kirshrot, a Jewish farmer deported with his family to Zbąszyń. “I don’t know when and where they perished,” he added.
After World War II, Thea Feliks Eden also discovered that her mother and youngest brother were killed in Poland. “They had rounded up everybody else who was Jewish and just… shot them. That was the end of the line for them,” she said in an interview. The fate of many victims of the Polenaktion, however, remains unknown.
