A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (72 page)

Nazi policy in Western and much of Eastern Europe was motivated by two main considerations—to keep control of the occupied countries with as few troops as possible, and to transport the maximum amount of food and war materials to Germany. The easiest way to achieve these aims was through collaborationist local regimes prepared to work under German direction, and using local police to root out opposition and oversee the dispatch of food and goods. It was not difficult to achieve, since much of the ruling class across Europe saw German occupation as a lesser evil compared with revolution or the destruction of property from continued war. Even those sections which opposed Germany in principle saw the practical advantages in making profits by working for them.

Looting the occupied countries enabled German capitalism to exploit the workforce of most of Europe and maintain both its war expenditures and its profits. This also enabled it to avoid hitting too hard the workers it feared most—the German working class which had threatened a revolution in 1918-23 (although German workers could hardly be described as ‘privileged’, since their living standards fell during the war and they could be conscripted to the Russian front, where the death toll was horrendous). German capitalism could rely on the collaborationist politicians and businessmen of the occupied lands to keep their own workers in order without the need for expensive German policing—even if their argument had to be, ‘Do this to placate the Germans, or they will come in and things will be much worse.’ It was a perfect strategy of divide and rule.

But problems developed over time. The burden of delivering goods to Germany fell disproportionately on the workers of the occupied countries. Eventually they could only obtain enough food to provide about half the daily calories they needed. They grew increasingly resentful, especially since they also risked being conscripted to work as slave labour in Germany, while their rulers lived it up with the occupying forces. By the third year of occupation there were strikes, the flight of workers to remote areas to avoid conscription, and growing organised resistance. The German response was to supplement the military occupation authorities, which were not necessarily made up of committed Nazis, with Nazi organisations such as the Gestapo which showed no restraint in their use of terror. In countries like France, Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary, Hitler increasingly relied on local fascist and Nazi groups, which pursued policies such as deporting Jews with fervour. By playing on local anti-Semitic traditions the Nazis could divert some people’s bitterness at their suffering on to scapegoats, and offer Jewish homes and goods as bribes to local collaborators.

The occupation of Poland followed a different and even nastier pattern. The Nazi aim was to obliterate the country, integrating the western region of Silesia into Germany and driving out its non-Germanic population, while keeping central Poland under military control as a ‘labour reserve’ (eastern Poland was under Russian rule from 1939-41). This meant liquidating the traditional leaders of the old Polish state. There were many thousands of Polish collaborators, but they worked as functionaries under German superiors. The Nazi police had the power of life and death, and used it. As Kolko puts it, ‘The Nazi terror in Poland was from its inception overwhelming and capricious’, with ‘total lack of predictability and imminent dangers in the cities’.
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Some 5.7 million people (16 percent of the population) lost their lives. Half of these were Jews, who were herded into overcrowded, starving ghettos in 1939 and then, from 1942, dispatched to death camps. The ghetto fitted the capitalist goal of ruling Poland in order to loot it—while Poles (and later Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians) suffered to ensure that Germany was provisioned with food and labour, pre-war prejudices were used to divert some of their bitterness onto a Jewish minority which was suffering even more than them. It followed the old logic of divide and rule. But it also fitted the murderous racist mythology of the Nazi Party. The German occupying forces were told they were the Aryan elect, the Poles were
Untermenschen
, and the Jews were the lowest of the low, an alien group which had to be expunged from Europe.

The German attack on Russia—codenamed Barbarossa—in the summer of 1941 raised the horror to a higher degree. The advancing German forces set out to destroy the structure of the enemy state as they had in Poland, but on a much greater scale and over a much greater area. This was to be accomplished by SS units operating behind the front, killing all Communist commissars and ‘Jewish-Bolshevik elements’. For the first time mass murder became an integral part of the war effort. But it was still mass murder with an allegedly military function—to stop pro-Russian forces regrouping to engage in guerrilla warfare and sabotage. So at first the Jews who were killed were males of fighting age.

The German army did not succeed in reaching Moscow and conquering Russia in the way Hitler had expected. It became stranded on the icy wastes of the central European plain, and thereafter faced the biggest and bloodiest battles in world history at Stalingrad and Kursk. The original Barbarossa army numbered three million. By 1945 German casualties on the Eastern Front totalled six million, and the total number of Russian dead reached 13 million soldiers and seven million civilians.
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German troops faced conditions which their commanders had never planned for. The war involved unbelievable brutality, and the brutalised soldiers were prepared to tolerate, if not join in, the mass murder of Russian and Jewish civilians, with the excuse that they might provide support for resistance activities. Capitalist war had created the context in which such events could occur, and they remained rational by its monstrous standards. It enabled the Nazi leadership to implement a policy which was not rational even in these terms—the attempt to exterminate all of Europe’s Jewish and Roma Gypsy population in secret. Special SS
Einsatzgruppen
detachments began to kill Jewish women and chidren as well as men—notably at the Babi Yar gorge near Kiev, where they massacred 43,000 in September 1941, while German generals still expected a quick victory. The project was formalised at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, which brought together 14 key figures from the hierarchies of the Nazi Party and the state. They set in motion elaborate mechanisms for identifying every single person of Jewish descent in German-controlled Europe—some five or six million—detaining them in batches, transporting them hundreds of miles to special camps under the guise of ‘resettlement’, persuading them to enter special buildings where they were gassed, and then disposing of their bodies as if this were all part of an industrial assembly line.

In terms of the economic or war needs of German capitalism, none of it made sense. Many of those murdered were skilled workers or members of professions who could have contributed to profit-making or the war economy. Instead, when their labour was used before they were killed, it was as slave labourers performing tasks ill-suited to their skills. The movement of millions of people from one end of Europe to another clogged up railway lines and used rolling stock that was desperately needed for troops, weapons and industrial components. Bureaucratic personnel who could have been much more fruitfully employed were involved in planning the operation. Yet it continued, day after day, week after week, right up to the end of the war.

It did not even make sense in crude ideological terms, as a way of diverting the bitterness of the mass of German people towards scapegoats. For the mass of German people were not told about it. It was a secret operation. Thousands of people must have known some details of the Holocaust. Many more suspected something unpleasant was happening and deliberately turned their thoughts away from it.
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But that did not make it a means for winning mass support for the regime.

This is hardly surprising. The Nazi leaders had discovered over the years that although they could take advantage of the widespread anti-Semitism which existed in German society, there were also limits to this. For example, when they unleashed SA Stormtrooper violence against Jewish shops and businesses on
Kristallnacht
in November 1938 they found it provoked popular hostility. Many people who were prepared to blame Jews in general for the world’s problems were not happy to see individuals they knew suffer. Diffuse anti-Semitism existed alongside, and in competition with, a range of other ideas which challenged it. That was why Social Democrat and Communist leaders from a Jewish background (from Karl Marx to Rosa Luxemburg) had been able to gain the allegiance of very large numbers of German workers—although some of these workers would have been influenced by anti-Semitic traditions and propaganda. It is also why an examination of Nazi propaganda in the last years of the Weimar Republic shows that Hitler could not rely on anti-Semitism alone, and on occasions had to tone it down in order to gain support. Even after the Nazis had taken power and suppressed the expression of views which openly challenged anti-Semitism, they found they got a better reception by focusing on falling unemployment, revoking the Treaty of Versailles and building Hitler’s image as an international figure.

Where anti-Semitism was crucially important was in holding together and motivating the inner core of the Nazi Party, the SA and the SS, and stopping them relapsing into passivity, conservatism and inertia. It was this irrational ideology that motivated them to risk confronting the forces of the left in the Weimar period, and to implement Hitler’s orders once the Third Reich was established. For them, Jews were the ultimate enemy behind every mishap Germany had suffered. Elimination of the Jews was seen as the only way to safeguard conquered territory as the German army advanced eastward. And even when defeat was close at hand, in late 1944 and in early 1945, killing off the Jews could seem like a victory.

The German ruling class had needed people with such deranged views to deal with the crisis in the early 1930s. Their derangement provided it with a force which could conquer working class organisations and then sustain its drive towards European supremacy. In return, the Nazis were allowed to act out their deranged fantasies by exterminating over six million Jews, Gypsies and disabled people. Major firms—Krupps, I G Farben and others—were happy to help in the organisation of the death camps, using slave labour from them, even if the extermination programme made no sense in economic terms. Nazism was the grisly fulfilment of Rosa Luxemburg’s prophesy—that the alternative to socialism is barbarism.

Hope reborn

A young captain in the British army, Denis Healey, could tell the 1945 Labour Party conference that he had just returned from parts of Europe where ‘socialist revolution’ was under way:

The war had not simply led to horror and despair. It had produced a reaction among those who had been defeated and demoralised in the inter-war years. Resistance movements had emerged which seemed to be a foretaste of revolutionary change in much of Europe.

Greece had suffered more than any other country in the war apart from Poland and Russia. Italian and then German occupation had led to the deaths of one in ten people—half of them from starvation.
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Resistance groups emerged spontaneously at first but were pulled together into a loose national organisation, EAM-ELAS, which exercised increasingly effective control over rural areas, threatened the German army’s lines of communication and tied down thousands of German troops. When the German army prepared to withdraw north in late 1944 the liberation movement seemed destined to take control of the country. A right wing dictatorship sustained by the monarchy had followed a pro-Nazi policy until the Italian invasion in 1940. The major forces of the resistance wanted an end to the monarchy and the old ruling class, and were happy to see the Greek Communist Party play a central role within EAM-ELAS.

In Italy the industrialists and landowners had helped put Mussolini in power in the 1920s and were happy with his regime until the summer of 1943, when the Italian army suffered serious defeats and they lost their overseas empire. For almost two decades the only underground opposition had come from scattered groups of Communists, and to a lesser extent Socialist Party supporters, who had attempted to maintain some sort of national organisation. Ignazio Silone’s novel
Bread and Wine
, about the desperate attempts of an underground socialist to establish a network of contacts, gives a sense of the harshness of those years. The first overt resistance came in March 1943 when a wave of strikes began in Turin and spread, despite arrests, across northern Italy, involving 100,000 workers. The immediate cause was the immense hardship from soaring prices and the effects of bombing. But a small number of Communist militants with memories of the struggles of 1918-20 were in the forefront of the agitation. Mussolini told fascist leaders that the strike had set his movement back 20 years, and Hitler asked how such disobedience could be permitted.
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In fact the strikes showed that the war was creating such a social crisis, as it impoverished great swathes of the lower and middle classes, that repression alone could not sustain the regime for long.

By the time US and British troops landed in Sicily early in July and began, very slowly, to push north, most of the upper class were worried that the crisis of the regime might engulf them as well. The only way to keep their power, they thought, was to ditch Mussolini and come to terms with Britain and the US. Their attitude was shared by Mussolini’s closest collaborators in the Fascist Grand Council. At a special meeting a fortnight after the landings it voted for Mussolini to surrender power. The next day the same king who had handed power to Mussolini in 1922 replaced him with General Badoglio, the commander of the Italian troops in the rape of Ethiopia in 1935, and put Mussolini under house arrest.