ABSTRACT
A second category of Nazi occupation policy involved incorporation into the German state, to form Greater Germany (Fig. 6.12). Austria was the first of these incorporated territories. Subsequently, they extended to include the Czech Sudetenland, Memel, Danzig, Eupen-Malmedy, extensive parts of Western Poland, Luxemburg, Alsace-Lorraine, Slovenia and Bialystok. Some of these lands were formally incorporated under Reich law; others were incorporated on a de facto basis. Alsace and Lorraine, for instance, were administered by the Gauleiters of adjacent Gaue. Incorporation into Germany naturally carried with it certain penalties for the peoples and cultures involved. The consequences were greatest in the Polish areas, where native
Poles were forcibly uprooted to make way for ethnic Germans from the Baltic states and south-east Europe. Wholesale Germanisation became the pattern, often with scant regard for humanitarian considerations. From the dismantled Polish state, Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland became formally constituted Reichsgaue, administrative units in which state and Party jurisdictions were coincident (Fig. G.13). Change was least in those territories which already had extensive German popUlations; here persecution and terror were little different from that already found within Germany itself.
