A World at Arms (94 page)

From the practical and the propagandistic side, this was one of the major features of life and death in wartime Germany and German-controlled Europe. As a German reporter wrote at the end of a three week–long trip into the occupied Ukraine in 1943: “We heard entirely clear and explicit announcements about the Jewish question. Among the 16 million inhabitants of the area controlled by the civilian administration in the Ukraine, there used to be 1.1 million Jews. They have all been liquidated... One of the higher officials of the administration explained the executions with the words, ‘the Jews are exterminated like roaches’.”
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This was not only a central objective of the regime but one of which it was inordinately proud. In 1944, even as Germany was everywhere on the defensive, it planned a big international anti-Jewish congress to be held in Cracow in German-occupied Poland to explain and commemorate the wonderful character of such activities.
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The congress was eventually cancelled, but the mass killing went on. By the last years of the war, there was not only the pressure from the leadership. Thousands involved in the process had acquired a vested interest in it: here was their source of promotion and rewards; and by 1944, to say nothing of 1945, killing defenseless civilians seemed to them vastly preferable to the far more dangerous alternative of serving at the front where those they faced also carried arms.

The killing of the infirm among the Germans and any and all Jews they could get into their hands were not the only components of National Socialist racial policy during the war. There was a somewhat similar program for the mass murder of gypsies, the Roma and Sinti, which
involved the deaths of thousands but is only beginning to be investigated.
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Furthermore, the government was very worried that Germans might marry Poles, Hungarians, and others whom Hitler and all in charge of racial policies considered undesirable.
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As the government brought more and more prisoners of war and slave laborers into pre-1939 Germany, there was endless concern about German women sleeping with men of Slavic and other backgrounds whom the regime held to be racially inferior. Illegitimate children were just fine as long as both parents met the racial criteria of the Nazis, but what was considered interracial sex was severely punished. The problems posed by the increasing casualties among the male population as a result of combat were to be met in the post-war years by a whole series of schemes discussed during the war. These ranged from Martin Bormann’s argument for multiple wives bearing children to one man in what one historian has called the National Socialist principle of crop rotation
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to a plan worked out by a high SS official for recruiting for the SS from among the Germans in North and South America and in Australia.
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A more immediate form of population “recruitment” was a large-scale program of kidnapping of “Germanic-looking” children and the classification as German of those Poles and Czechs whom the authorities thought plausible candidates for reclassification.

Finally, it was assumed that extensive German settlement in agricultural areas of the U.S.S.R. and Poland would lead to farm families with large numbers of children who would take the place of those lost in the fight to seize these territories. As a starter, even during the war the regime began to allocate estates to its most faithful servants. General Guderian, for example, between commanding an army on the Eastern Front and becoming inspector general of armored forces, spent months travelling around occupied Eastern Europe looking for an estate which the government could steal for him.
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The new racial order in Europe was to have been established in the decades after Germany had won the war, but a big start was made during hostilities.

Reference has been made to the prisoners of war and other foreign workers brought into Germany during World War II. This eventually massive program began with Polish prisoners captured in the campaign of fall 1939 and came to include over one million French prisoners and about one million Soviet prisoners of war. The latter, together with another million who agreed to serve as auxiliaries with the German army, constituted the survivors of over five million captured Red Army soldiers; the over three million others having been murdered or allowed to starve to death. To these must be added approximately four to five million
additional forced laborers, most of them impressed or kidnapped in the Soviet Union, with smaller contingents from Poland, France, and other portions of German-occupied Europe. Furthermore, several hundred thousand Italian workers who had been recruited more or less voluntarily were joined by additional hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers captured by the Germans after the Italian surrender of 1943 and converted into slave laborers soon after.

These seven to eight million forced or enslaved workers came to play a critical role in the German war economy in several ways.
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In the first years of the war, they enabled the regime to refrain from mobilizing German women for factory work and to replace the men who left farms for better paying industrial jobs. From 1942 on, the massive increases in forced labor by the surviving Soviet prisoners of war and enslaved Russian and Polish civilians made it possible for the German government to draft very large additional numbers of German men into the armed services, primarily to replace casualties of the fighting on the Eastern Front.

Wretchedly housed and fed, constantly harassed and mistreated, brutally punished for real or imaginary offenses, the slave workers were omni–present in wartime Germany. Every town had its slave labor camps, every factory its proportion of slave-laborers, ranging from 20 to 80 percent of the work force. The degrees of mistreatment were carefully calculated on so–called racial lines with the French and other “Western” workers discriminated against least and those from the Soviet Union most of all. The greatest concern of the regime was always about sexual relations between foreign workers and German women, a practice met by public hangings on the one hand and a national system of brothels on the other.
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The slave laborers suffered even more than German civilians as the Allied bombing offensive destroyed many of their barracks and interrupted the flow of their already miserable food rations. During the war years, many died of mistreatment, others were killed as “useless mouths” when unable to work, and the women who constituted more than half the forced laborers from the East were often subjected to forced sterilizations and abortions. In the last days of the war thousands were shot on the slightest pretext.
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During their years among the Germans, they had played a key role in the war economy. Simultaneously, their terrible treatment, graded according to alleged racial categories, accustomed the Germans to the racialist new order in which all would be expected to live and die in a German-controlled Europe. In the months before final defeat, most Germans were concerned primarily with immediate questions of their
own and their families’ survival; but in the earlier heady days of anticipated victory, they could already experience the “benefits” of being a “master race” by living on the upper rung of a racial hierarchy as they watched columns of ill–fed and poorly clothed workers in the streets of their cities, and working alongside them in factory and farm. Industrial magnates, at the same time, could reap large profits from underpaying workers who would be replaced by ever more slaves as those who were too weak or old were killed off–and therefore needed no pensions.

The likely future appearance of a German-controlled world was foreshadowed in other ways in wartime Germany. The administrative chaos which had been developing in the years before the war was, if anything, accentuated during the conflict. Once in a great while some superfluous agency was dissolved; von Ribbentrop’s private foreign office, for example, was abolished two years after its head had become Foreign Minister of Germany.
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But for every agency ended, at least ten new ones sprang up, and all struggled for power and jurisdiction with each other. A post-war study which referred to this system as “authoritarian anarchy,”
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aptly describes the administrative chaos in which rivalry for power was stimulated by ambition and zeal to gain the favor of the Fuhrer-and Hitler himself felt most comfortable. In this mass of rivalries he always had the last word, and, as he saw it, the most ruthless and determined made their way to the top.

This confusion was characteristic not only of the military hierarchy and the civilian administration, it also extended to a project especially dear to Hitler: the transformation of Germany’s urban landscape. A whole series of cities was to be completely restructured, not only Berlin but a long list of others. Massive buildings symbolizing the capital of the world were to be erected in Berlin; smaller versions would grace other cities.
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Work on these projects began during the war; some of the contracts were being worked on for years, and the architectural offices were still busy on their design work in the spring of 1945.
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Two aspects of these projects deserve mention because of their significance for the priorities of the regime and its hopes for the future. The priorities were such that all involved in the planning could count on deferments from the draft; like those engaged in murdering Jews and participating in the endless jurisdictional quarrels which characterized the regime, those planning the future of Germany’s cities had a strong vested interest in remaining at their current tasks rather than facing the dangers of the front. Secondly, all the plans for cities and towns had one common characteristic: there would be no churches in post-war Germany’s urban areas.
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Here one can see the architectural expression
of a goal close to the hearts of the leadership of National Socialist Germany. Whatever temporary accommodations might have to be made in wartime to the objections of the churches to euthanasia, to the removal of crucifixes from the schools, and to the maintenance of a structure of chaplains in the army, once victory had been attained in the war, the existence of the Christian churches in Germany could safely be ended. And if anyone objected, the Gestapo would see to their punishment.
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Any number of other things would disappear from a German-controlled Europe, including the independence of most countries on the continent. The economic and political preparations for this were also under way during the war and thus affected German internal affairs as well as those of the occupied countries. There was considerable discussion in some government circles about the “New Order” which Germany would create. In part for propaganda purposes to counter the hopes aroused by the Atlantic Charter and the call for a new world by the United Nations, there were proposals for Germany to give some public presentation of its post-war plans.
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Until its surrender Italy and, for most of the war, Japan urged Germany to take some steps to reassure the peoples of German-occupied Europe about their future, but all such pleas fell on deaf ears.
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If there was one thing Hitler did not want, it was promises and commitments which might restrain Germany. At times he gave his immediate associates some hints of what the future of a German-dominated Europe would look like,
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but beyond the promise that there would be no Jews he would not make any of his intentions public.

All trade would be directed from Germany, and German currency, the Reichsmark, would be the central currency.
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The economy would be directed by the state with industry strictly controlled and regulated-insofar as it was not actually owned by the government or by the growing empire of the SS.
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Under the ambitious leadership of Himmler, the SS was expanding its authority. The SS and police apparatus took over more and more functions from the courts, operated independently in the occupied territories, and built up an industrial empire originally based largely on the concentration camp system.
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The internal rivalries, which characterized the S5 like all other aspects of the Third Reich, should not be allowed to obscure its cohesion in dealings with other segments of society. Its economic role was growing at the expense of private industry and of the economic structure which Albert Speer, with his sharp elbows and the personal support of Hitler, was steadily building Up.
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The military force of the SS, the Waffen SS or armed SS, as it was called, grew steadily in spite of very heavy casualties.
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Growing rather like a cancer within
Germany’s land forces, this army within an army grew ever larger, recruiting not only in Germany itself but from people of real or imagined German ancestry all over Europe.
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And those officers of the regular army, who were sought out for the higher staff positions in the corps and army headquarters created to command the ever increasing numbers of Waffen SS divisions, were expected to leave whichever Christian Church they belonged to as the price of certain and rapid promotion.
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The SS, like the cities of Germany and their people, would have no religious inhibitions.

The old rivals of the SS, the brown–shirted SA and the regular Nazi Party organization, came to play significant roles in wartime Germany in two opposite ways. On the one hand, they were utilized to assist in the mobilization of the public. In this process, the party, like the SS, grew more influential in the last year of war. Under the vigorous leadership of Martin Bormann, the central offices of the party gained vastly greater power.
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On the other hand, there is good evidence that the party organization became something of a lightning rod for whatever discontent and dissatisfaction existed in the country. Most Germans fell easily into the habit of separating their Führer from the party he led, imagined that all would be well if only he knew about whatever they objected to, and developed an increasingly negative attitude toward the party’s officials.
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