James T. Nicholson of the Red Cross, first American to make an extensive tour of German-occupied Poland, declared in an interview today that a mass movement of populations unprecedented in world history was going on in Poland.
It is the announced policy of the German Government to remove from the Reich-annexed area of Poland every Jew, Pole, Ukrainian–everyone except “pure Germans”–and dump them in the Polish “Government-General,” said Nicholson, who returned last week after spending six months in Europe conducting relief operations for the American Red Cross.
Nazi Governor-General Hans Frank has been notified that he may expect between two and three million more people in the Government-General, which comprises the area around Warsaw, as the Germans proceed with their forced mass migrations, Nicholson declared.
He quoted Frank, who is responsible only to Hitler, as saying that the reconstruction of the Government-General, so that it would become economically self-sustaining–upon which Hitler insists–cannot be accomplished without the aid of the Jews.
“The Jews,” Frank told Nicholson, “comprised the commercial people of Poland. The Poles aren’t able to engage in commerce, so we can’t accomplish our task without the Jews. If they behave, will leave them alone.”
Asked about mass executions in Poland, Nicholson said: “That’s not in my parish.” He explained that the Red Cross still had “to do business” in Poland, that Red Cross representatives were still in the Nazi-occupied area and that the Allies had just given permission for $250,000 more in relief supplies to go through the blockade.
The Red Cross representative, who was the only American to visit the Lublin Jewish “reservation,” said that the so-called reservation was “a myth.” The Germans, he said, may have contemplated such a reservation, but have never carried it out to the point of concentrating all Jews there.
“I saw them everywhere,” he said, “but none behind stockades. In the streets they could be easily identified because they were forced to wear white armbands with the blue Star of David on them.” In Cracow, he said, Jews were forced to ride in “Jim Crow” sections on street cars and buses.
But the Red Cross, he said, has insisted that all its relief be distributed impartially and the Germans, he declared, have not interfered. “In every town there is a local committee to distribute relief and there is one Jew on every committee That’s something, if you know Poland.”
Nicholson said that 1,500,000 persons out of between 12,000,000 and 14,000,000 persons in the Government-General face starvation. He said 500,000 in Warsaw were in need of soup daily and that of these 150,000 were being given soup, many by the Joint Distribution Committee.
“The trouble in Lublin,” he said, “is not that there is not enough food. It is that people don’t have the money to pay for it any more.” He told of wandering bands of people, trekking from place to place over a war-scorched land, thousands of them seeking jobs where there were none to be had.
The Germans, he said, dream of shipping 1,000,000 Poles into Germany proper for the Spring planting and the next harvest. He said he did not think this itinerant labor could be successfully transported and predicted that there would be no immediate relief of Polish unemployment.
Nicholson, who was a machine-gun lieutenant in the last war and who joined the Red Cross staff in 1919, said he had never seen anything like the mass migrations now in progress in Poland. There were hundreds of white collar workers in the Cracow area who had been shipped from Stettin with only the clothes on their backs. The problem of those expelled from Germany is more acute than that of the people who have stayed in their homes, he said.
The first time he interviewed Governor-General Frank, Nicholson reported, the Nazi official passed off the Jewish problem with the remark: “Why I have a Jew who is a shoemaker here in the castle.”
“But he saw I wasn’t satisfied,” Nicholson continued, “and then he began to tell me that there had always been a Jewish problem in Poland, but he admitted that if he expected to make the Government-General self-supporting he would have to depend on the Jews.”
From the Russian-occupied section of Poland, Nicholson said, “We’ve heard terrible stories, but they haven’t been authenticated.” He said the German and Russian Red Cross organizations had finally entered into communication with each other.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
