Nisko Plan Was a Major Escalation for the Nazis

After the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 – and especially after Britain and France started World War II by declaring war on Germany – Jewish emigration was out of the question… but the Nazi commitment to make Germany Judenrein was stronger than ever.

With the easiest (and the most humane) way to achieve this objective now totally impossible, the escalation and radicalization of methods were now inevitable. Predictably, the next step was escalation (graduation) from forced emigration to deportation (internment) to some kind of a giant concentration camp (reservation).

Poland was a natural choice as more than 85% of Jews under German control were living in Poland. Specific location for such reservation (conceptually similar to Indian reservations in the USA) was chosen by Adolf Hitler himself in the beginning of September 1939.

The chosen area was a remote corner of the Generalgouvernement territory (occupied territory of Poland not annexed into the Reich), bordering the cities of Lublin and Nisko. In reality, it was the death sentence for all Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland as they would have inevitably died from murderous “living” condition… or from “extermination through labor”.

Hence, it was for the better (for the Jews) that the “Nisko Plan” as it was called was abandoned in spring of 1940. Much for the better because death from the bullet or poison gas was far more merciful than from starvation, disease or being worked literally (and deliberately) to death. Much more merciful genocide, in short.

During the early implementation of the plan, the Nazis set up a system of Jewish ghettos to use them as forced labor for the German war effort. The first forced labor camps were established for the Burggraben project intended to fortify the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line and to supply the local SS units at Lublin.

Interestingly, the Lublin are was chosen for the Nisko plan (as well as for SS killing centers) for ideological and even mystical reasons. In fact, Lublin had been the focus of Nazi planners since the early 1930s, as Nazis believed it to be the center of Jewish worldwide power (!) and source of their genetic potential (!!).

By April of 1940, when the Nisko Plan was abandoned, 95,000 Jews had been deported to Lublin from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The plan was abandoned because there was simply no way to fit almost four million Jews under German control into that reservation… or into any reservation for that matter.

Hence, the failure of Nisko Plan became one more step on the Road to Holocaust.