The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (132 page)

It was an unusually severe winter, that of 1939–40, as this writer remembers, with heavy snows, and the “resettlement,” carried out in zero weather and often during blizzards, actually cost more Jewish and Polish lives than had been lost to Nazi firing squads and gallows. Himmler himself may be cited as authority. Addressing the S.S. Leibstandarte the following summer after the fall of France, he drew a comparison between the deportations which his men were beginning to carry out in the West with what had been accomplished in the East.

Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cracow, had informed Himmler that he had found a “suitable site” for a new “quarantine camp” at
Auschwitz
, a somewhat forlorn and marshy town of twelve thousand inhabitants in which was situated, besides some factories, a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness. It was soon to become a much more sinister place. In the meantime the directors of
I. G. Farben
, the great German chemical trust, had discovered Auschwitz as a “suitable” site for a new synthetic coal-oil and rubber plant. There not only the construction of new buildings but the operation of the new plant would have the benefit of cheap slave labor.

To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice ruffians in the S.S., among them
Josef Kramer
, who would later become known to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” and
Rudolf Franz Hoess
, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half million who had been allowed to “succumb to starvation.”

For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of the
extermination
camps—
Vernichtungslager
—which must be distinguished
from the
concentration
camps, where a few did survive. It is not without significance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.

The
Rome–Berlin Axis
became squeaky that first fall of the war.

Sharp exchanges at various levels took place over several differences: the failure of the Germans to carry out the evacuation of the
Volksdeutsche
from Italian South Tyrol, which had been agreed upon the previous June; failure of the Germans to supply Italy with a million tons of coal a month; failure of the Italians to ignore the British blockade and supply Germany with raw materials brought through it; Italy’s thriving trade with Britain and France, including the sale to them of war materials; Ciano’s increasingly anti-German sentiments.

Mussolini, as usual, blew hot and cold, and Ciano recorded his waverings in his diary. On November 9, the Duce had trouble composing a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on his escape from assassination.

The day after Christmas the Duce was expressing a “desire for a German defeat” and instructing Ciano to secretly inform Belgium and Holland that they were about to be attacked.
*
But by New Year’s Eve he was talking again of jumping into the war on Hitler’s side.

The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany’s pro-Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army had attacked Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating position. Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially condone Russia’s unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union
largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918.
*
It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he swallowed it. Strict instructions were given to German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and radio to support Russia’s aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy with the Finns.

This may have been the last straw with Mussolini, who had to cope with anti-German demonstrations throughout Italy. At any rate, shortly after the New Year, 1940, on January 3, he unburdened himself in a long letter to the Fuehrer. Never before, and certainly never afterward, was the Duce so frank with Hitler or so ready to give such sharp and unpleasant advice.

He was “profoundly convinced,” he said, that Germany, even if assisted by Italy, could never bring Britain and France “to their knees or even divide them. To believe that is to delude oneself. The United States would not permit a total defeat of the democracies.” Therefore, now that Hitler had secured his eastern frontier, was it necessary “to risk all—including the regime—and sacrifice the flower of German generations” in order to try to defeat them? Peace could be had, Mussolini suggested, if Germany would allow the existence of “a modest, disarmed Poland, which is exclusively Polish. Unless you are irrevocably resolved to prosecute the war to a finish,” he added, “I believe that the creation of a Polish state … would be an element that would resolve the war and constitute a condition sufficient for the peace.”

But it was Germany’s deal with Russia which chiefly concerned the Italian dictator.

Mussolini’s letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degeneration of Italo–German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer’s honeymoon with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nerves of both parties. It had enabled him to launch his war and destroy Poland. It had even given him other benefits. The captured German papers reveal, for instance, one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the Soviet Union’s help in providing ports on the Arctic, the
Black Sea
and the Pacific
through which Germany could import badly needed raw materials otherwise shut off by the British blockade.

On November 10, 1939, Molotov even agreed to the Soviet government’s paying the freight charges on all such goods carried over the Russian railways.
⁴⁶
Refueling and repair facilities were provided German ships, including submarines, at the Arctic port of
Teriberka
, east of
Murmansk
—Molotov thought the latter port “was not isolated enough,” whereas Teriberka was “more suited because it was more remote and not visited by foreign ships.”
⁴⁷

All through the autumn and early winter of 1939 Moscow and Berlin negotiated for increased trade between the two countries. By the end of October Russian deliveries of raw stuffs, especially grain and oil, to Germany were considerable, but the Germans wanted more. However, they were learning that in economics, as well as politics, the Soviets were shrewd and hard bargainers. On November 1, Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder and Colonel General
Keitel
, “independently of each other,” as Weizsaecker noted, protested to the German Foreign Office that the Russians were demanding too much German war material. A month later Keitel was again complaining to Weizsaecker that Russian requirements for German products, especially machine tools for manufacturing munitions, were “growing more and more voluminous and unreasonable.”
⁴⁸

But if Germany wanted food and oil from Russia, it would have to pay for them in the goods Moscow needed and wanted. So desperate was the blockaded Reich for these necessities from Russia that later, on March 30, 1940, at a crucial moment, Hitler ordered that delivery of war material to the Russians should have priority even over that to the German armed forces.
*
⁵⁰
At one point the Germans threw in the unfinished heavy cruiser
Luetzow
as part of current payments to Moscow. Earlier, on December 15, Admiral Raeder proposed selling the plans and drawings for the
Bismarck
, the world’s biggest battleship (45,000 tons), then building, to the Russians if they paid “a very high price.”
⁵¹

By the end of 1939 Stalin himself was personally participating in the negotiations at Moscow with the German trade delegation. The German economists found him a formidable trader. In the captured Wilhelmstrasse papers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meetings with the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail that stunned the Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheated but could be terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of the Nazi negotiators, reported to Berlin, he “became quite agitated.” The Soviet Union, Stalin reminded the Germans, had “rendered a very great service to Germany [and] had made enemies by rendering this assistance.”
In return it expected some consideration from Berlin. At one conference at the Kremlin on New Year’s Eve, 1939–40,

At a midnight meeting in the Kremlin on February 8

On February 11, 1940, an intricate trade agreement was finally signed in Moscow providing for an exchange of goods, during the ensuing eighteen months, of a minimum worth of 640 million Reichsmarks. This was in addition to the trade agreed upon during the previous August amounting to roughly 150 millions a year. Russia was to get, besides the cruiser
Luetzow
and the plans of the
Bismarck
, heavy naval guns and other gear and some thirty of Germany’s latest warplanes, including the Messerschmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88 dive bombers. In addition the Soviets were to receive machines for their oil and electric industries, locomotives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and so on.
⁵³

What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW—one million tons of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates, considerable amounts of numerous other vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons of soybeans from Manchuria.
⁵⁴

Back in Berlin, Dr. Schnurre, the Foreign Office’s economic expert, who had masterminded the trade negotiations for Germany in Moscow, drew up a long memorandum on what he had gained for the Reich. Besides the desperately needed raw materials which Russia would supply, Stalin, he said, had promised “generous help” in acting “as a buyer of metals and raw materials in third countries.”

This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia’s aggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, and accepted the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in the three Baltic countries (to be eventually used against whom but Germany?).
Stalin was helping him to surmount the British blockade. But more important than that, Stalin still afforded him the opportunity of fighting a one-front war, of concentrating all his military might in the west for a knockout blow against France and Britain and the overrunning of Belgium and Holland, after which—well, Hitler had already told his generals what he had in mind.

As early as October 17, 1939, with the Polish campaign scarcely over, he had reminded
Keitel
that Polish territory

As the momentous year of 1939 approached its end Hitler realized, as he had told his generals in his memorandum of October 9, that Soviet neutrality could not be counted on forever. In eight months or a year, he had said, things might change. And in his harangue to them on November 23 he had emphasized that “we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.” This was a thought which never left his restless mind.