Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (26 page)

Nor indeed was neutrality any more acceptable. As one commentator stated:

What small state is there which is sufficiently independent to be neutral towards the Great Powers? The crisis of neutrality is in reality the crisis of the structure of our continent, of the collapse of old orders and empires, and of the birth of new dynasties. The small states have become the prey of an inexorable course of history, and the only question is whether they will give in without hope or full of hope.
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Luciolli, then, was surely right to characterize the regime’s basic conception of politics as hierarchical. Europe was called to rule the world but only on the condition that it was itself ruled by the Reich. For Hitler no devolution of power to racial inferiors was permissible; it could only be a sign of weakness, not strength. German superiority had to be jealously safeguarded in every sphere, with sometimes ludicrous results. After the Czech national ice-hockey team beat the Germans 5–1 in Prague, Goebbels alluded to “the mistaken practice of matching oneself with colonial peoples in a field in which we are inferior. Herr Gutterer is to arrange … that a repetition of such incidents is made impossible.” Even the Italians, supposedly Germany’s partners in the making of the New Order, got the same treatment; directives issued in connection with the treatment of foreign workers ordered that “relationships with Italians are not welcomed.”
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At the political level, such attitudes were replicated to the detriment of Germany’s would-be collaborators. As Luciolli remarked, given the pervasive sense of disaffection from the Versailles order in Europe by 1939, there was little reason to suppose that collaboration as a political project would not be successful. It is hard now to remember that the very concept had a positive ring to those who coined it in France. Laval and Pétain saw collaboration as a partnership of two imperial powers, and thus a way of salvaging French sovereignty. Hitler stood in the way of such ideas.

He was especially wary of
soi-disant
National Socialists. If unpopular they were likely to be ineffective administrators; if popular, a threat. Quisling scrambled into power during the invasion of Norway
but was kicked out after a week. Degrelle in Belgium and Mussert in Holland were put on ice. They might be allowed to recruit gullible or desperate young men to fight on the Eastern Front, but power resided in the hands of professional civil servants. The disillusioned young French collaborator Robert Brasillach concluded despondently in August 1943: “There is no longer a fascist Europe.”
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What made the Degrelles and Musserts unsuitable partners was precisely, of course, their nationalism. “For Norway to become germanophile it must become national,” declared Quisling. Mussert drew up a scheme for a League of Germanic Peoples in which Hitler would be head but whose members (Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the Greater Netherlands) would have independent National Socialist governments and their own military forces. It is difficult to imagine anything less likely to have appealed to Hitler. On 30 June 1941 young Ukrainian nationalists pre-empted Berlin by their “Proclamation of the Ukrainian State” in Lvov; two weeks later, most of them had been arrested and the movement was broken. Hitler’s imperialism was thus of a very different kind from that of Wilhelm II, who had supported Paul Skoropadsky during the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918: both favoured authoritarian regimes, but Wilhelm was prepared to allow a local proxy to govern in his name. Hitler refused even that, insisting: “I cannot set any goals which will some day produce independent … autonomous states.”
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The essential feature of the “new European Order” is that it was a German Order. Although numerous Nazi visionaries played with the ideology of Europeanism, for Hitler himself it was only Germany, or more precisely
Deutschtum
, that mattered. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin propaganda publicized the idea that this was a “crusade for Europe”: a new “Song for Europe” was broadcast, stamps with the slogan “European United Front against Bolshevism” were issued and the press even claimed in late November 1941 that “born out of discord, struggle and misery the United States of Europe has at last become a reality.” Nevertheless, such slogans clashed with the reality of occupation rule experienced by ordinary people and there was no sign that this Europeanism was taken any more seriously outside Germany than it was by the Führer.
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After Stalingrad, when the Germans started to seek out friends and allies more seriously, it
was too late. No one was convinced by the U-turn in Nazi jurisprudence which led to declarations of “anti-imperialism,” especially as these had no discernible effect upon policy. In eastern Europe, where the Red Army’s advance made anti-communism a potentially fruitful form of political warfare, Nazi racialism had alienated the population beyond Goebbels’s reach. In the West, beyond any plausible Soviet sphere of influence, anti-communism offered little. Only in Greece, and to a lesser extent Serbia and Northern Italy, was it possible to poison the domestic scene to the point of civil war. As the German forces withdrew, they left behind them an inheritance of bitter internecine bloodletting. By 1944, the Cold War was already casting a shadow over Europe, but not sufficiently to save Hitler’s empire.

ORGANIZING EUROPE

In so far as there was a Nazi vision for Europe, it belonged to the sphere of economics, not politics. Associated with the idea of a German Monroe Doctrine was the notion of a
Grossraumwirtschaft
—a regional economy with Germany at its heart. In certain forms, this bore a more than passing resemblance to the post-war Common Market. The “New Order” beloved of the youthful technocrats at the Reich Ministry of Economics involved the economic integration of western Europe and the creation of a tariff-free zone: Minister Walther Funk went so far as to propose such a scheme in the early summer of 1940. Goering, who carried far more weight in the Nazi establishment, also discussed the need for cross-national investment in Europe under German auspices. Others looked to the Balkans, where German economic penetration had intensified during the 1930s. Trade agreements were negotiated in 1939 and 1940 with Romania and Hungary that brought vital raw materials under the control of the Third Reich.

Late in 1940, Hermann Neubacher—later Hitler’s Balkan supremo—confided to an American journalist the bright future which awaited Europe after the war: “Germany’s economic organization of the Balkans is the first step in a plan to set up the entire European continent as a single
Grossraum
, which instead of individual countries would form the economic unit of the future. A common plan would
regulate production across the European
Grossraum
.”
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From this continental bloc both the United States and Great Britain were to be excluded; Europe was to become self-sufficient. The gold standard and laissez-faire of the post-Versailles order were to be replaced by barter trade and planning of production on a continental scale in an extension of German trade policy of the 1930s.

The idea of “organizing” Europe into a vast continental economy was discussed before and after 1939 far more openly than was the continent’s political future. Nevertheless, particularly during the first three years of the war, such grand schemes had little practical impact upon policy. The
Blitzkrieg
strategy for waging war dictated rather different methods of exploiting the economic resources of the conquered territories; only with the turn to “total war” did the idea of some form of economic integration appear attractive in the context of the war effort itself.

But Nazi thinking about international economics provided no analogue to the liberal doctrine of the mutual benefits offered by the market. The regime sometimes claimed that Germany’s partners would benefit from associating with her: this had after all been the case to some extent in the 1930s and was not entirely implausible, especially after the hardships associated with international capitalism in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it was increasingly clear that Europe’s prime economic function was to support Germany. Only in so far as that function was best served by securing the economic prosperity of the rest of the continent did it seem at all likely that the economic benefits would be shared more widely. Countries like Greece and Romania soon suspected they had exchanged the tyranny of the City of London for the stranglehold of Berlin.

Such a narrow vision of the European economy was particularly pronounced during the war itself. To the despair of those like Goering and later Speer, who were responsible for increasing armaments production, Hitler was extremely reluctant to see living standards inside the Reich fall. He wished at all costs to avoid a repetition of the debacle of 1918, when, he believed, the collapse of the home front had led to military defeat. The regime kept food consumption as close as possible to pre-war levels and was unenthusiastic about encouraging women into the factories. Hitler knew that there was little public
enthusiasm for an extended conflict and remained sensitive to Party reports of dissatisfaction. He was reluctant to test his popularity by making sharp cuts in consumer goods production. The economic resources of Europe would enable him to avoid this.
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With the Wehrmacht as it invaded one country after another came a variety of economic experts, private businessmen and special agents who took over existing firms, expropriated Jewish-owned businesses, and established contacts with prominent local industrialists. The Wehrmacht, and other authorities, levied “occupation costs” and requisitioned existing stocks of strategic goods from jute to bicycles. The bulk of these were consumed by army units, or sent back to the Reich in soldiers’ parcels. In the First World War, German troops in the Balkans had received food from home; this time, they sent food back.

The overall effect of these policies differed rather sharply from one area to another. In the industrial economies of the Protectorate and north-western Europe, the short-term policy of physical expropriation soon gave way to one of allowing existing installations to continue production before taking over the finished products. The Aryanization of Jewish-owned firms offered an avenue to direct control, particularly of Czech and Austrian holdings. Firms, however, owned by non-Jews or by the state were also brought under German control. In this way, much of the most important heavy industry and mining production of central Europe was incorporated into the
Reichswerke AG “Hermann Göring”
by a process of what has been termed “legalized theft.” Three quarters of France’s iron-ore supply went to Germany, half of total Belgian production was for German purposes. Czech armaments production was crucial to the war effort. From these countries, there was a clear net economic gain to Germany.
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Ironically, Nazi economic policy worked much better there than in the territories in the East, whose economic importance had loomed so large in National Socialist thinking. Whereas Goering—the economic overlord of the Reich until 1942—accepted the need to exploit local resources in western Europe
in situ
, in the East he pushed for straightforward “pillage” until confronted with the resistance of local Party and military rulers in Poland and the Ukraine, who had to cope with the consequences.
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In the primarily agrarian economies of Russia and the Balkans, German policies of expropriation led swiftly to the most terrible conditions. The peasants’ response was to stop producing for the market, the surplus vanished, and city dwellers in these regions faced starvation. Only a month after the German invasion of Greece in April 1941, observers there predicted famine. They were right: around 100,000 Greeks may have died of hunger that first winter. In the East, the Nazi regime was prepared for worse yet. “Many tens of millions of people will be superfluous in this area and will die or have to emigrate to Siberia,” concluded one report a month before the invasion. “Attempts to rescue the population there from famine by drawing upon surpluses from the black earth region can only be at the expense of provisioning Europe.” With the first outbreaks of guerrilla resistance to German rule, and the ruthless German response, life in the countryside became precarious, and all chances of efficiently exploiting the “black earth” of the Ukraine vanished for the duration of the war.
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Whereas Goering and the Nazi Party favoured direct exploitation of the local population, Alfred Rosenberg, who was nominally in charge of policy in the East, favoured encouraging pro-German and anti-Russian nationalist groups. As political warfare this might have worked, except that it was opposed by Rosenberg’s own deputies. Reichskommissar Kube promised the Belorussians “no parliamentary nonsense and no democratic hypocrisy.” In the Ukraine there was Erich Koch, a devoted follower of Hitler. “I will pump every last thing out of this country,” Koch said. “I did not come here to spread bliss but to help the Führer.” The Ukrainians were “niggers” and their attempts at political assertion met with Koch’s contempt.

The results were obvious to many of his subordinates. “If we shoot the Jews,” protested one administrator, “liquidate the prisoners of war, starve considerable portions of the population, and also lose part of the farmers through famine … who in the world is then supposed to be economically productive here?” At the start of the occupation, the farmers in the Ukraine had hailed the Germans as liberators. Had Hitler agreed to privatize the collective farms as Rosenberg and his advisers urged, agricultural output might well have risen instead of
dropping. But he did not, and the great granary of Europe never fulfilled its promise. Famine spread across the Ukraine and eastern Galicia in the winter of 1941. A revival of industrial activity took place in the East following a change of heart by Goering, but too late to win back the sympathies of a by now totally disillusioned population. By 1943, many peasants were turning their thoughts back to Moscow, arguing that “a bad mother is still better than a step-mother who makes many promises.” Rosenberg believed his underling Koch had “ruined a great political opportunity.” Only the more moderate policy the Wehrmacht pursued with the Muslim mountaineers in the Caucasus indicated one of the great might-have-beens of the war.
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