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The SS began expelling Poles immediately after the German invasion (October 1939). They at first concentrated on Poles and Jews in the Wartheland and the Danzig corridor. Himmler was very anxious to get on with the process of Germanization as quickly as possible. Almost all of the Jews were quickly and ruthlessly deported. We note varying estimates of the number of other Poles deported. One source suggests that the SS deported 1.5 million Poles to the General Government and an additional 0.2 million to the Reich for slave labor in 1939. Another source gives a much lower estimate of 325,000 people (end of 1940). The pace of the expulsions began to slow in 1941 as the Wehrmacht began to gear up for the upcoming Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union. The deportations proved disruptive for the war effort and preparations for Barbarossa. For one thing, the Germans did not have sufficient ethnic Germans to replace the deported Poles. Many of the ethnic Germans who had followed Hitler's orders and came home to the Reich were not farmers and the German authorities were conducting lengthy screening programs to make sure the people involved were not only racially acceptable ethnic Germans, but also reliable National Socialists. Relatively few Reich Germans volunteered to move east into these new territories. Thus farm productivity declined. As a result, German authorities slowed the expulsions, but they did not cease. Some were conducted in the dreadful winter of 1939-40 with dreadful consequences for the people expelled from their homes. The Germans who did settle in these territories would meet a terrible fate when the Red Army reentered Poland (1944).
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