The German War (48 page)

The German ‘east’ was condemned to a spiral of economic decline, whose pace was quickened by the unregulated brutality of colonial rule. By the autumn of 1942, German demands on the new harvest were becoming impossible to meet. Postal censors and the SD picked up the impact on the countryside. ‘It’s harvest time, and yet we have no bread,’ a Ukrainian woman wrote to relatives working in Germany. ‘The guys gather stalks, and we mill this on the hand mill, to make some bread. This is how we’ve been living up to now, and we don’t know what will be next.’ In almost every household private stills were set up, and alcohol consumption soared. At least the grain they turned into alcohol could not be seized. ‘They drink “for an occasion”,’ reported a Volhynian newspaper, ‘and “without any reason”. There used to be one inn for the entire village; now there is an inn in every third hut.’
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As villages in poorer agricultural areas, like Polissia, failed to meet their quotas, a new and terrible war against the civilian population began. On 2 September 1942 German and Ukrainian police entered the village of Kaminka east of Brest Litovsk, massacred the entire population and burned all the houses as a warning to the surrounding district of the fate that awaited those who did not meet their delivery quotas or were suspected of supporting the partisans. Exactly three weeks later, it was the turn of the village of Kortelisy, near Ratne. The District Commissioner of Kovel told the peasants that as they were known to harbour partisans he had orders to burn them alive in their homes; however, he was commuting their sentence to shooting. None of the 2,900 people executed was suspected of actually being a partisan: their deaths served as a deterrent. As this strategy of pacification through terror spread across eastern and southern Europe, the number of villages burned would grow exponentially over the next two years. With different local starting points, parts of Belorussia, Greece, eastern Poland, Serbia and, later, Italy were all engulfed by German ‘anti-partisan’ actions, with their massive collective reprisals. In western Europe, such actions remained the exception, and the destroyed villages of Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Lidice in Bohemia and Moravia became memorials because they remained unique examples of German brutality. When it was liberated, Belorussia could count over 600 villages destroyed and their populations massacred: 2.2 million of its total population of 10.6 million died under occupation.
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It would take time before peasants would see the partisans as liberators, rather than as just another threat to their precarious lives. In 1942, partisan groups were still too weak and scattered to pose a serious threat to the Germans. Rather, the rival Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and Soviet partisan groups in the forests were battling each other for control of their base areas and the food supplies of the surrounding villages. The economic, political and social collapse of Ukraine into a vortex of inter-ethnic violence followed from the untrammelled German demands. In other parts of eastern and southern Europe, the balance of causes – military, political and economic – varied, but these regions all shared a common feature: the collapse of state authority. In Belorussia, Poland, Serbia and Ukraine, no autonomous national or local government was tolerated and, reduced to mere auxiliaries, the local Order Police would eventually fracture, with many members deserting to join partisan units in the final months of German rule.
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In contrast to the direct colonial rule in the east, in France the state survived. Here the whole process of extracting food from farmers was carried out by French intermediaries, even in regions like Brittany and the Loire which came under direct German military administration from the start of the occupation. It involved constant negotiation between German and French officials at each level of the hierarchy, from the centralised Vichy structures manned by the director-generals of the provisioning administration all the way down to the mayors of individual rural communes. One of the great problems for the supply system was the illegal slaughter of livestock. From early on in the German occupation, new regulations were issued banning both butter-making and slaughter on French farms, in order to promote large abattoirs and dairies as instruments of control. Farmers did everything they could to avoid conforming to these rules, and in the autumn of 1941 promptly elected an ordinary farmer rather than a Vichy official to lead the new Peasant Corporation of Maine-et-Loire, which the Vichy government had instituted in order to increase its control over the countryside. Self-confident conservative Catholic aristocrats like Comte Henri de Champagny, well entrenched in the Vichy elite, had no compunction in unilaterally slashing the butter quota for his commune of Somloire in Anjou from 375 to 50 kilos. Less well connected mayors retreated to the age-old defence of the countryside – stubborn silence. Even the collective fines levied by the Germans for non-fulfilment of quotas often went unpaid for years – with relative impunity. Even though the French head of state, Marshal Pétain, remained personally very popular, his vision of conservative ‘solidarity and mutual aid on a national scale’ was challenged by the countryside’s refusal to co-operate.
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In Ukraine, German demands on the countryside gradually destroyed local government, leading to an anarchic civil war; in France, power drained away from the central state in a less dramatic but still highly significant fashion. It was the local landlords and clerics who had met the invaders in 1940 and guaranteed the safety of citizens by offering themselves as hostages; now they tried to protect them from extreme economic demands. As a similar process of official exhortation and communal recalcitrance was played out across occupied western Europe, local notables re-emerged as key actors, a victory of
pays
over
patrie
.
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Across Europe, the countryside prospered at the expense of the cities. Urban workers in the Loire benefited from the German demand for armaments, producing ships’ radios, tents, blackout material and camouflage netting, torpedo boats and destroyers, railway trucks and Heinkel 111 bombers, not to mention the huge projects constructing U-boat pens and Atlantic coastal fortification. But high employment, good wages and nominally better rations did not protect them from chronic food shortages and hunger. Worst off were the great cities. In Paris, a food riot broke out at the market at the rue de Buci on 31 May 1942, leaving two policemen dead. In the clampdown that followed, male communists who had helped to co-ordinate the protest were executed and female suspects were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Such protests were isolated incidents, however. The numbing reality remained the queue for official allocations which increasingly ran short as supplies were diverted to the black market.
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Middle-class Parisians returned to areas, like Chinon, where they had been evacuated in 1940, while the bourgeois cycle-tourist with double panniers became a familiar sight in the countryside. In the absence of motorised transport, the bicycle entered a golden age. Almost every town had at least one cycling club. Most cyclists were increasingly concerned with mundane problems like how to replace worn-out tyres now the British naval blockade had closed off imports of rubber. A common, though slow and extremely bumpy, solution was to wire together lengths of garden hose.
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The process of economic fragmentation and regionalisation overlaid a deeper and more basic divide: that between areas of food surplus and areas of food deficit, sometimes in the same geographical region. On the European level, the Netherlands and Denmark enjoyed a surplus, whilst Belgium, Norway and Greece all suffered from deficits. Left in charge of their own affairs, Danish government administrators had adopted a pricing and rationing policy which encouraged farmers to increase the supply of pork, beef and milk and raise exports to Germany, without imposing harsh restrictions on domestic consumption or stimulating a black market. The outcome of this system of direct economic incentives was spectacular: with a population of 4 million, Denmark became an ever more important exporter to the German Reich, contributing some 10–12 per cent of its beef, pork and butter. By 1944, German cities may have drawn as much as a fifth of their meat supplies from Denmark, as other sources went into steep decline. The Netherlands, with its technologically modern agricultural sector, remained important too, though having to adapt to the constraints of the British blockade left it short of animal feed. Dutch farmers were forced to switch increasingly to arable and greenhouse crops. By 1941, they had culled their herds to the point where farmers were able to export fodder themselves, as well as large quantities of fruit, vegetables, sugar and potatoes to Germany.
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Norway, Belgium and Greece, on the other hand, depended on large food imports. Nazi policy-makers, their reasoning based on a mix of racial policy and economic utility, regarded Norway as more ‘Aryan’ than the Reich and – by German standards – the country underwent a ‘model’ occupation. Yet even here child mortality rates began to rise, and by the summer of 1942 German reports were noting that Norwegians were ‘to a considerable extent undernourished’. In Belgium, imports from Germany were never sufficient and only reached 17 per cent of the pre-war level. As black-market prices for food soared and wage rates remained fixed, there was a wave of labour unrest.
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Before the war Greece had imported a third of its grain from Canada, the USA and Australia. In 1940–41, grain supplies plummeted to 40 per cent of their pre-war level, and within five months of the German occupation the first famine broke out in occupied Europe. In Athens the daily calorie intake dropped to 930, and over the next year 40,000 died in the Athens-Piraeus area. Unlike Backe’s successive ‘Hunger Plans’ for the Soviet Union, the Greek famine was unintended, triggered by a fatal combination of military purchasing and requisitioning, alongside food hoarding by wholesale distributors. The famine was greatly exacerbated by the division of the country into three separate occupation zones – Italian, German and Bulgarian – which inhibited internal trade, in particular from the grain-rich regions of Thrace and eastern Macedonia. There was one train a day from Athens to the north, and foraging city-dwellers could bring back no more than 300–350 tonnes of food per day by rail. As post and telecommunications broke down too, the integration of the national economy went into rapid reversal. None of the three military administrations was moved to provide much assistance; nor were Backe’s officials in the Reich Food Ministry in Berlin. The famine was finally relieved only when Britain agreed to lift its blockade and permit Swedish vessels to bring Canadian grain to Greece under the supervision of the International Red Cross. Whereas Belgium and Norway were of real economic and strategic importance and counted as ‘Germanic’ and ‘Aryan’ nations, the philo-Hellenism of the German officers who established their headquarters in Athens in the spring of 1941 did not extend beyond the classical period. By the spring of 1942, German-language newspapers in Greece began to speak of ‘urban parasites’ and ‘useless eaters’ – language which had so far been reserved in German parlance for the Jews.
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On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police conducted their first great roundup of Jews, arresting 13,152 foreign nationals in Paris and its suburbs. Families with children were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the famous cycling track. There, without adequate sanitation, water or food, 8,160 were held for up to six days in the sweltering heat of midsummer, before being deported.
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While the Jews were still being held in the Vél d’Hiv, much of the French public was gripped by the spectacle of professional cycling. Ten days earlier, on the weekend of 5 and 6 July 1942, Parisian crowds had flocked out to the municipal stadium at Vincennes, where, overlooked by a giant portrait of Pétain urging them to ‘Remain disciplined. The Marshal asks you’, they watched the Dutch champion van Vliet triumph in the final. On 16 July, the first day of the round-up, a Frenchman was winning the fourteenth stage of the Tour of Spain. In the autumn of 1942, in place of the Tour de France, a smaller, six-stage version was held, billed as the Circuit de France, involving sixty-nine riders and covering 1,650 kilometres. Emile Idée and Marcel Kint slogged it out in the Paris–Roubais and Paris–Tours classics, and French riders continued to ride in the tours of Italy, Switzerland and Spain. In September, the vast Vél d’Hiv reopened to the public, for a boxing match, as if nothing had happened there.
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The round-ups of Jews continued until March 1943 in France: trains took Jews to transit camps at Drancy, Compiègne and Pithiviers and from there to the death camps in Poland. They departed amidst an eerie silence, quite different from the spontaneous demonstrations that had accompanied the forced drafts of French workers to Germany. Only in the Netherlands and Denmark were there public and courageous acts of support. In February 1941, hundreds of Jewish men were arrested in Amsterdam’s streets in reprisal for a minor attack on a German police unit in a Jewish-owned ice-cream parlour. The Dutch Communists had called a general strike on 25 February 1941, which the Germans crushed with live ammunition and hand grenades. There was no repetition, but when the deportation of Jews began in the Netherlands, the Catholic Church protested publicly: on 26 July 1942, a letter from Archbishop de Jong of Utrecht to the Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart about the deportation of Jewish converts was read out in all Catholic churches. The swift German response was to arrest most of the Catholic converts: there was no recurrence, and the deportation of the Jews ran smoothly, with boisterous protest songs and shouts of ‘
Oranje boven
!’ reserved for the trains taking Dutch workers to Germany. In Denmark, anti-Semitism was so unpopular that the Germans did not attempt to deport the Jews until the summer of 1943, because they knew that it would spell the end of collaboration with the Danish constitutional monarchy. When the Reich Plenipotentiary finally took this step in September 1943, the date of the planned action was leaked and all but 485 of the country’s 7,000 Jews were smuggled across the Baltic narrows to the safety of neutral Sweden.
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