I thought in starting this section it would be interesting to reflect on the events affecting the jews before the final solution. How did the Jews end up in Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka and so on? A well organised plan it was not, Himmler never really seemed sure of what he was doing himself. After invading Poland there were a number of factors to be considered, the Jews, The Poles and the Germans, all three were at that time firmly rooted in Poland. Himmler never really gave much thought to the Jews remaining in Poland, his early plans were to ship them all out to Africa, but this never really gained much ground. Germans in Poland were being encouraged to return to the homeland but where were they to go? There was not enough room for them, instead Himmler was to create a plan that would split Poland in three, one area for each of the Poles, Jews and Germans. Of course the Germans taking the lions share. However Himmler never consider the logistics of that action, Germans living in areas to be occupied by the poles, and poles living in areas to be occupied by the Germans. One Polish family moves out to allow a German family in and then nowhere to put the Polish family. It was all a mess. So the solution as Himmler saw it was to free up more land, create more homes and so on, the solution although not the final one was to push the Jews further North in a much smaller area thus creating more space. That still did not work, so the idea came about that Ghettos would be created for the Jews in certain areas. Lódz, Kraków, Lublin were to become the main holding area for the Jews but contain so many people that living was not really a term you could use. From the Ghettos you then moved on to the camps, but the journey for the Jews was not a nice one, Himmler's incompetence is displayed not only in his management of the Jews but in many other ways not for this site.
That was a total mess. The idea was to move the "Volksdeutche" Germans from places like Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, even from America, to farms, cities, and towns, expropriated from their original Polish and Russian owners. It pretty much disintegrated into Nazi bigshots hauling off loot. Before the Germans could get rolling with soldier-peasants holding down farms in the Ukraine, the Ukrainian partisans were shooting up the train lines, and the Soviets were crashing back into Kiev. Himmler was a bizarre character, a born filing clerk, happiest going through personal dossiers. The resettlement program was one of his loonier schemes.
