Occupation administration, racial law and displacement

The occupation was sustained by forms, decrees, jurisdictions, budgets and property files as well as by police violence. Ministries in Berlin designed special legal regimes. Regional presidents and governors issued orders. Municipal administrations implemented housing transfers, expropriation, labour allocation and services for segregated districts.

Franz Schlegelberger’s Ministry of Justice helped establish a radically unequal criminal-law system for Poles and Jews in annexed territories and subordinated judicial practice to racial policy. Friedrich Uebelhoer’s order establishing the Łódź ghetto demonstrates how an administrative document could create the spatial framework for exploitation and deportation. Werner Ventzki’s municipal career shows how those policies continued in the management of an occupied city.

Military rule formed an earlier layer in 1939. Walter Braemer’s command in Bydgoszcz illustrates proclamations, hostage measures and collective punishment before the terror apparatus passed into longer-term police and civilian structures. The profiles are linked by function, but they do not erase differences between ministerial rule-making, regional decision, municipal execution and military command.