Cruel World (58 page)

The children’s clothes were desperately needed. In September 1943, Amcross reported that there were 350,000 war orphans in Soviet-controlled areas who needed “sets” of clothing: “Two suits warm underwear, two pair wool mixed stockings, two flannel pajamas, one pair shoes, skirt or trousers, heavy sweater, overcoat, overshoes, woolen cap, scarf, mittens, also two each blankets sheets cases towels.”
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Red Cross workers were never quite sure where everything went; it is certain, however, that the Red Army and party officials got priority. But children seem to have been high on the list. One Moscow family, living happily but hungrily in exile in Siberia, vividly remembers eating Spam and a “big fat omelet” made with powdered eggs “from the USA.”
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The beneficial effects of the aid were described with emotion, tangible even in his staccato cable, by an Amcross worker named Hubbell, who, in December 1943, almost a year after its liberation, was, exceptionally, allowed to visit Stalingrad.

Here virtually all hospitals, nurseries, and clinics for children had been destroyed. Forty-five thousand children had been orphaned in the city
alone, and almost double that number in the surrounding area. In the suburb of Beketovka, the 80,000 remaining inhabitants were almost entirely women and children. Child health facilities had been constructed in basements, the remnants of apartment buildings, mud huts, and tents. There was still no electricity or running water; Hubbell observed “women and children, every one seemingly carrying yoke 2 pails including small tots.” The water, taken from the Volga, was boiled and chlorinated. Old tin cans served as cups and dishes. There were no ambulances, practically no surgical equipment, and only one X-ray machine for the entire province. Nor were there sufficient supplies of soap, towels, or sterilizers.

In this chaos, the local Red Cross chairman, Zenia Kozintseva, who was “badly crippled all her life” and who had “lost everything,” had wrought miracles “beyond belief.” Thirty war orphans’ homes had been set up in peasant huts, which also served as schools. Three thousand pairs of shoes and 65,000 articles of clothing had been distributed, allowing children “to leave their abodes” and attend classes. Red Cross nurse’s aides had been sent to the train station to pick up “all unattached children on trains”: so far they had reunited 3,500 mothers and children separated during the siege. Hubbell saw a seventy-eight-bed nursery facility for “tots under four” that had been set up in the basement of a destroyed hospital, “where reconstruction plastering building stoves all done by nurses themselves clean warm meager equipment but all comfortable equipped with Amcross layettes whose baby blue flannel blankets each bed contrast white walls impressive heartening sight.” In another “restored” three-by-ten-foot basement that lodged a mother, a two-month-old, a five-year-old, and their grandmother, Hubbell was touched by the enormous gratitude he found for shoes and other warm clothing donated by “the Sheridan, Wyoming County Chapter of the American Red Cross,” a world away both literally and figuratively.
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In mid-February 1942, the British relented on the issue of food for Greece. They were encouraged not a little in their decision by confidential reports from Italian diplomats who said that over a million people were endangered. The Axis powers were only too happy to let the Allies feed the Greeks, who were not on the racial extermination list, and promised that the incoming supplies, to be distributed by an International Red Cross commission, would go to the population. Meanwhile, the Germans, who had been using the British blockade as a “chief propaganda argument in Greece,”
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did not cut down on their requisitioning. The British had also been correct in thinking that the Greek shipments would give other occupied countries ideas. In the hothouse atmosphere of London, where
the various governments in exile jockeyed for attention on many issues, the plan to aid Greece could not be kept secret for long. On January 22, 1942, the Belgians also appealed for relief for their children and young mothers. By now the British, feeling that “the entry of the United States into the war had removed the danger of any really large scale food relief to enemy Europe being forced upon us,” were more amenable to such a request. In February, trying not to show favoritism, the British Ministry of Economic Warfare approved the idea of exploring “an Anglo-American scheme of providing milk concentrates (but not vitamins) for children in the worst affected areas of Europe,” their concern that the program would help the Nazis having been assuaged by evidence that the supply of milk products in the United States and the shipping available to move them was not very great.
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But providing clothing, also desperately needed in this region, was not allowed, on grounds that “quite small quantities of good quality wool are very useful for stretching supplies of synthetic material,” and that it would be hard to prevent people from “selling or exchanging clothes for other goods or for money, especially in a country where the purchasing power is all in the power of the occupying forces.”
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Finalizing the details of the shipments to Greece, which necessitated negotiations with Germany, Italy, and Sweden, took until June 1942. An attempt by the Axis Red Cross organizations to get control of distribution was defeated, and in early August three ships supplied by neutral Sweden, with the wonderfully unwarlike names of
Camellia, Eros
, and
Formosa
, finally left Canada for Greece. By 1944 there would be fourteen vessels, paid for in large part by the United States Lend-Lease program, steaming back and forth with all sorts of vital items.
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Getting to the ports was the easy part. It was far more difficult to transport things within Greece and to make sure they went to those who were neediest. Internal documents of the central International Red Cross Commission reveal much agonizing, familiar to all welfare organizations, as to just who should be eligible for the food distributions. Refugees, war victims, children, and “the poor” would be included, while the very rich and farmers would be excluded. It was, however, no longer easy to say who was rich and who was poor. Money was often not accepted in exchange for food, if there was any; this pitched many salaried families into the “poor” category. As the British had feared, there were more serious problems: the Axis promise not to requisition the food was not always observed. Local Red Cross distribution subcommissions and roving representatives reported constant threats and interference from occupation authorities and collaborators. Lack of transportation controlled by the Red Cross made
it extremely difficult to get food to the remote mountain areas and to many of the islands. In one town, commission functions were completely taken over by the mayor and officers of the occupation force. The Italian commandant of Coropi, in Attica, demanded that a shipment of hazelnuts meant for the children of the town be given to him instead, which, after protest, was done. And in Piraeus, flour earmarked for the Greek islands was taken by the Germans and “distributed by other entities.”
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Despite all, as had occurred in Leningrad, the incoming food, limited and misdirected though it was, raised the rations for many from nearly zero to about a quarter of the normal minimum, which might be just enough to sustain life, especially for children, until more help could be procured.

The Nazis, after their own fashion, had also begun an aid program in the Soviet Union. Despite the military setbacks that had foiled Hitler’s plan to defeat the Red Army within weeks, by the fall of 1941, the Nazis did control large sections of the USSR, which were well enough secured that they could be placed under civilian occupation. A Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Areas, or Ostministerium, under longtime Nazi Party leader Alfred Rosenberg, had been set up to coordinate policy for these regions, which were subdivided into Reichskommissariats ruled by Nazi appointees of varying degrees of fanaticism and independence.
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Within these territories, both the Wehrmacht and the SS carried on their respective duties and projects, as did other mainstream Nazi organizations such as the Nazi Welfare Agency, the Labor Front, and the Hitler Youth. Competition for scarce resources, which included labor and food, was ferocious among these agencies, and the opportunities for corruption were endless.

Opinion was also sharply divided on how to treat those elements of the Soviet population who were useful and sometimes sympathetic to the German war effort. Many high officials had found the
Untermenschen
attractive, and despite the strong prohibitions on fraternization, some German soldiers had even found romance. One recruit fell in love with a Ukrainian girl and soon became part of the family scene:

Even Himmler was so impressed at the sight of bouncing blond Ukrainian children that he ordered an experimental integrated kindergarten set up for those who were said to be orphans to see if they could be Germanized.
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Hitler was even more taken with the bouncing blond young ladies of the region, who were soon included in the nanny recruitment program that had been launched in Poland.

Despite this enthusiasm, Hitler, as well as the Reichskommissar of the Ukraine, Erich Koch, basically opined that the populace should be treated “like Negroes,” a policy not always shared by Minister for the East Rosenberg and the governors of the various other subdivisions of the territory. To add to the confusion, in the war zones the military would soon be employing over a million Russians, known as “Hiwis,” or
Hilfswillige
(willing helpers), in the very bosom of their armies, much of the Hiwis’ willingness being generated by a desire for food. What once again became clear was that it would be absolutely necessary to make use of the locals, no matter how bad their “blood,” for every kind of activity from agriculture to fighting, because there simply were not enough Germans to keep things going in these vast regions, a reality that would lead to the same ever-mutating policies already being seen in Poland.

It was in the midst of this confusingly fluid situation that Himmler decided to activate the first of his thirty-six long-planned utopian areas of Germanic colonization in the USSR. The SS-controlled areas of the
Lebensraum
, after being cleansed of undesirable elements, were to be settled by networks of pure German villages arranged around support bases, or
Stützpunkte
, reminiscent of American Wild West forts. Preference for land grants would go to SS veterans and other carefully chosen racially pure ethnic Germans.

So popular was this program that, by the fall of 1943, Himmler himself had to curb unseemly land grabbing by the SS.
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But in 1942 the SS troops, still busy fighting and exterminating, were not much use on their new farms. Colonists would therefore have to be drawn from the
Volksdeutsche
population of the USSR and elsewhere. Himmler also had high hopes that settlers from the arch-Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, and Holland could be tempted to emigrate to the new territories. An
agency was even set up in the Netherlands that hoped to recruit some five million Dutch citizens, not only to help populate the
Lebensraum
but to “relieve overpopulation at home.”
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This program was not a success, and Himmler was thrown back on the “colonists” available locally, who, in the Soviet areas, having been thinned out by the Russian deportations, were not an impressive group, and ran heavily to women and children. Nevertheless, in the late summer of 1942, the SS chief ordered the first project on Soviet soil to proceed. The settlement area, centered on a village to be called Hegewald, was to be established some eighty miles west of Kiev along the main rail line running from Zhitomir to Vinnitsa, where Himmler’s eastern headquarters were located. A special task force, or
Sonderstab
, commanded by SS Standartenführer Henschel, a protégé of Himmler, went right to work.

The times were hardly propitious. An attempt to set up an SS
Volkschule
just to the north of Hegewald had been delayed indefinitely due to “increased activities of partisans.” The officer in charge, requesting more arms for his men, reported in late July that all traffic had to move in armed convoys, which were frequently fired upon, and that the roads, often mined, were closed between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.
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Food was also in desperately short supply across the area, but news of this sort did not dampen the colonizing spirit. Back home, 500 students were being recruited to come help out in the fall.
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A complex staff of carpenters, nurses, social workers, and administrators was set up. Elaborate guidelines were issued for the preparation of the villages for some 43,000 settlers. These would be made up of both indigenous
Volksdeutsche
, who would be suitably rearranged, and new arrivals. All would be given farms of 35 to 40 hectares (90 to 100 acres). Windmills were to be repaired, houses made ready for winter; floors, windowpanes, and stoves were to be installed or repaired. “Beautification,” however, would have to wait. The dwellings, as usual, would be those of evicted and liquidated Ukrainians, whose abandoned furniture, food, and livestock would be distributed to the
Volksdeutsche
. The new arrivals would have to get right to work on their new farms; to facilitate this, kindergartens for children aged two to six were required. The settlers moving in were to bring their teachers with them, and entire schools for the older children would be moved intact to the new locations.
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