A World at Arms (102 page)

Throughout occupied Western and Northern Europe, the Germans did what they could to exploit the economy. First it was simply looting, either by confiscation or by nominal payments with money extorted as occupation costs. As the war continued longer than expected, they shifted more and more in two new directions. In the first place, they recruited more and more labor, first voluntarily, then by force. In the second place, they turned increasingly to war production on the spot. This policy, pushed by Albert Speer, harnessed the economies of the occupied countries more effectively and efficiently to the German war effort. It also, in return, provided the workers with exemption from being
shipped to forced labor inside Germany. In the process, they could contribute to the maintenance of German rule over them. In every country, German firms tried hard to take over local plants and businesses, preferably at little cost, or to gain the securities which would allow them control. It was a system of exploitation which enormously aided the German war effort; it left behind exhausted workers and run–down industries.

From Southeast Europe, the Germans expected to draw important food stuffs, minerals, and other raw materials. They hoped to keep down the standard of living in the area so that it could continue to export to Germany, rather than consume at home, and also provide a source of cheap labor.
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The area was covered by a net of diplomats and special agents as well as hordes of German industrialists and financiers trying to take over factories, banks, and mines. All feuded with each other; and the complaint of the German Minister to Bulgaria about Franz von Papen, the ambassador to Turkey, that he was getting into everything when he was “ambassador only in Turkey and not in all of the Balkans,”
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may serve as a sample of endemic competition for influence. In all these countries, Germany ran up huge clearing debts for deliveries provided to Germany but not repaid by the Reich. After Germany had won the war, the countries of Southeast Europe could either write off these debts or buy whatever Germany offered in repayment.
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In the old core area of Czechoslovakia, called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, German rule was indirect but looked to a future in which the Czechs would be partly Germanized, partly expelled or exterminated. In the meantime, they could work for German victory.
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Not all of them shared the puppet President Emil Hácha’s joy at the German victory over France in 1940;
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some in the country did begin to organize resistance. But this was on a very small scale. The Czech administrators appear to have believed that the Germans needed them–and while the war lasted, the Germans did. That would not have saved them had Germany won the war, and it did not save those, including some high officials, who were in contact with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile; but it did preserve the people from some of the more ruthless measures during the war. The sending of a special team by air from the government-in-exile in London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, who had replaced Constantin von Neurath as head of the
German administration, led to savage reprisals but no general resistance.
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Though restive, the Czechs remained under firm German control to the end of the war.

The Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London had some contacts with the occupied area. It tried to secure the recognition of the Allies for its eventual return to Prague and was successful in this regard. It also wanted the Munich agreement nullified and a return to its pre-Munich borders. Furthermore, though for some time negotiating with Wenzel Jaksch, the leader of the Social Democrats among the Sudeten Germans,
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they eventually decided to expel the Germans from the country after the war.
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By the end of the war, the Allies had come to agree to this project. Since the Germans had themselves torn up the agreement under which these 3.5 million people had been transferred to Germany with the land on which they lived, they were now to be transferred without it. Their demand to go “Home into the Reich” was fulfilled in a manner none of them had anticipated.

Slovakia was allowed a temporary respite as a puppet state whose treatment might serve to encourage other governments in Southeast Europe to cooperate with Germany. The special treatment for the Germans living there, however, pointed to a future in which the Slavic element would be expected to vanish.
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The fact that in the summer of 1939 Hitler for a while thought of sending Arthur Seyss-Inquart there
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suggests that incorporation into Germany lay in store for this puppet state. During the war, Slovakia could help Germany by its small industrial and agricultural production and some fighting in the East; it might be played off against the occasionally obstreperous Hungarians;
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but it would be closely watched. The uprising of the Slovak army in 1944 was put down with savage fury. The Jews, like those of Bohemia and Moravia, were for the most part deported and murdered. Until Germany had won its war, Hitler was willing to allow Monsignor Tiso to act as a puppet ruler of a client state. In 1945, that entity would disappear as the Czechoslovak government returned in the wake of the Red Army.

In Hungary, the governments operating under the Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, tried to combine participation in the war on a limited basis with independence from Germany. The limits to participation were governed not only by a lack of enthusiasm for fighting Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or the United States.
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The Hungarians wanted to take back even more of the territory they had lost to Romania after World War I than they had received at the hands of Hitler and Mussolini in 1940; they feared that a greater contribution by Romania to the Axis
war effort would prejudice their standing with Berlin when they turned to the war they really wanted to fight, the one with Romania. In view of this set of priorities, they kept as much of their army at home as possible, sent to the Eastern Front only what seemed essential to remain in Germany’s good graces, and were enormously upset when those forces were crushed by the Red Army in the fighting of early 1943.
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There were additional causes of friction between Budapest and Berlin which grew out of the domestic situation in Hungary. The Germans tried to protect their minority in Hungary and to recruit soldiers from it, both policies which the proud Hungarians resented. On the economic front, German efforts to dominate Hungary’s small but significant oil industry aroused resentment. The soundings which the Budapest government began to make in 1943 as the anti-German Miklós Kallay replaced the pro-German László Bardossy as Prime Minister annoyed the Germans, who tried unsuccessfully to have him dismissed and to influence his Cabinet appointments.
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The major source of friction between the Germans and Hungarians, however, was the refusal of the Budapest government to turn over the approximately 800,000 Jews in the country. A whole series of anti-Semitic laws was enacted, but the Regent and Prime Minister balked at murder. Hitler had himself predicted in July 1941 that the Hungarians would be the last to surrender their Jewish population; repeated pressure on the Budapest government and personal bullying by Hitler of the Regent failed in their purpose; and some Jews from other portions of Europe took refuge in Hungary. All this would change only after German troops occupied the country in March 1944. A new government under the former ambassador to Berlin, Döme Sztojay, proved more accommodating. His government assisted in the deportation to their deaths of about half a million Jews, with the rest saved by a combination of international pressure and Horthy’s own reluctance, which produced a halt in the deportations in July, 1944.
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The SS utilized its own role in murdering Hungarian Jews to obtain a major foothold in the economy of the country, exchanging control of the nation’s largest industrial concern, the Manfred Weiss company, for the lives of some of its owners and their families.
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This dramatic intervention into Hungarian economic life did nothing to endear the Germans to the nationalistic Hungarians. The advancing Red Army made it ever more evident that the Western Allies had been correct in advising their Hungarian contacts that the country should surrender to all the Allies; and Horthy attempted to do so in October 1944. The Germans prevented this by a second coup in the capital and now established a puppet regime under the Hungarian Fascists, the Arrow-Cross
movement of Ferenc Szálasi.
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The change inaugurated further slaughter of Jews but hardly helped the Germans greatly.
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Administrative chaos was Szeilási’s main contribution to Hungary’s remaining role in the war on Germany’s side. During the winter of 1944–45 the Germans and the few Hungarians still fighting with them were driven out of the country by the Red Army. A new system would be installed in Hungary to last for more than forty years.

Romania was treated with special care by the Germans because of its important oil resources. The fact that production was steadily falling made the Romanian government both unable and unwilling to increase deliveries to the Axis as much as the latter desired–any dramatic increase in exploitation would exhaust the country’s most valuable resource all the more quickly. A major concern of the government of Marshal Ion Antonescu was, therefore, to obtain real payment for what was sent and to keep from pumping too much. He was more successful with the latter than the former, and ironically assisted by the efforts of the Americans in 1943 and 1944 to disrupt the oil industry by bombing. Romania was, however, Germany’s largest and Italy’s only source of natural, as distinct from synthetic, oil from June 1941 on.

Inside the country, the Romanian administration carried on as before. The areas lost to the Soviet Union in 1940 were temporarily recovered, and Romania also administered an additional portion of the Ukraine known as Transnistria. The Germans hoped that such expansion eastward at the expense of the Soviet Union would divert Romanian aspirations from the recovery of the portions of Transylvania lost to Hungary and the northern Dobruja ceded to Bulgaria, also in 1940, but this was a lost cause. The Antonescu government was looking toward the recovery of those areas and anticipated a war with Hungary at the earliest opportunity. In fact, to a large extent the Romanian effort on the Eastern Front was designed to impress the Germans with the merits of Romania’s cause.

When the tide turned in the East, the very large commitment of Romanian forces there meant that the disaster was all the greater for the country. As they began to look for a way out of the war, the Romanians, who had hitherto enthusiastically participated in the program to murder the Jews in newly occupied Russian territory, balked at turning over to the Germans the Jews of pre-June 1941 Romania. A last-minute coup in August 1944 came far too late to keep the whole country from being occupied by the Red Army. The government-in-exile created by the Germans under the Iron Guard leader Horia Sima had
no resonance in the country, but the fact that the new government in Bukarest declared war on Germany and participated actively in the fighting on the Allied side led to the restoration of Transylvania to Romania at the end of the war. The new government installed in August 1944 would, however, soon be displaced by a Communist regime; in this regard, Romania shared the fate of both its Hungarian and Bulgarian rivals. In all three, the remnants of the pre-war regime and elites were displaced by new masters.
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Bulgaria had joined Germany in the hope of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of its Romanian, Yugoslav, and Greek neighbors and had been rewarded by substantial grants of land from each. What the Germans expected in return had been delivered by Sofia: cooperation in the German campaign of spring 1941 against Greece and Yugoslavia. Thereafter, the major interests of Berlin had been in the position of Bulgaria as a possible spring–board against Turkey, contributions toward their problem of pacifying insurgencies in occupied Yugoslavia, and the turning over of Bulgaria’s Jews. On the first two of these the Bulgarians were willing to cooperate, and while the German thrust through Bulgaria and Turkey into the Middle East never materialized, that was due to factors outside Sofia’s control. On the third issue, that of the Jews, the results were mixed. The Bulgarians allowed the Germans to have most of the Jews in the occupied portions of Greece and Yugoslavia assigned to her, but refused to sanction the deportation of pre-war Bulgaria’s Jews. These were, as a result, saved from being killed, a result due not only to Bulgarian resistance but also to the reluctance of the Germans to push that country too far.

German diffidence in this case–as compared with others–was part of a general policy which recalled that Bulgaria’s cracking under the strain of war in 1918 had set off the avalanche of defeat at the end of World War I. Bulgaria, it was believed, could be expected to contribute only so much to the Axis cause. Hitler had some respect for King Boris the only reigning monarch the Fuhrer evaluated positively–and accepted that ruler’s protestations of loyalty and affection at face value.
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The Germans, therefore, contented themselves with minimal economic deliveries and accepted Bulgaria’s refraining from going to war with Russia.

The Bulgarian government, however, added to its seizure of Greek and Yugoslav territory by the fatal step of declaring war on Britain and the United States in December 1941. Once at war with the Western Allies, they would and could not extricate themselves from the self–imposed hostilities in time by an early surrender and switching of sides.
The result was that after the collapse of Romania in August 1944 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria and occupied that country. Under a new Communist-led government Bulgaria re–entered the war on the Allied side, and large forces fought alongside the Red Army in Southeast Europe even as her society was reshaped at home.
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