ABSTRACT
During the winter of 1939-40, Heinrich Himmler’s secretary, Hanns Johst, traveled with the Reichsführer of the SS through Poland and made the following observation:
The Poles are not a state-building nation. They lack even the most elementary preconditions for it. I drove alongside the Reichsführer-SS up and down that country. A country which has so little feeling for systematic settlement, that is not even up to dealing with the style of a village, has no claim to any sort of independent political status within the European area. It is a colonial country!1
