The Second World War (45 page)

There were no devolved arrangements in eastern or southern Europe except in Slovakia, which had been detached as a puppet state. The troubled Serbian province of Yugoslavia was under military government, as was Greece (though parts of Greece and Yugoslavia were Italian-occupied until September 1943, while certain Yugoslav border provinces were annexed to their neighbours). Eastern Poland, White Russia and the Baltic states were designated ‘Ostland’ and, with the Ukraine, run by Reich commissioners effectively as colonies. The Czech parts of Czechoslovakia had been denominated a Reich protectorate, as Bohemia-Moravia, and were directly ruled by Germany, as was the rump of Poland, known as the ‘General Government’. Areas of Russia immediately behind the battlefront were held under military government.

Special economic arrangements prevailed, as they had done during the First World War, in Belgium and the French northern departments, whose coal and iron industries were run as a single unit, its output co-ordinated with that of the Ruhr and occupied Lorraine (the success of this military ‘iron, steel and coal community’ was to plant the seed of the European Economic Community of the post-war period). However, in a wider sense, the whole of Hitler’s European empire was administered for economic return. In the industrialised West, delegates of the Economic and Armaments Ministries established working arrangements with the existing managements of individual factories and larger enterprises to agree output quotas and purchasing arrangements. Similar agreements were made with agricultural marketing agencies and ministries. Western Europe’s intensive agriculture was a magnet to economic planners in Germany, where 26 per cent of the population in 1939 had been employed on the land without managing to meet the country’s foodstuff needs. Underpopulated France, a major pre-war exporting country, was expected to provide an important part of the shortfall, particularly after mobilisation had removed one in three of Germany’s male population. Danish farming, famously efficient, was also considered a prime source of agricultural imports, particularly of pork and dairy products. Denmark, partly because it was ruled on a light rein, responded well to German demands; the 4 million Danes provided rations for 8.2 million Germans for most of the war. France, though it fed the sixty occupying German divisions and found surpluses for export, did so only at the expense of reducing its own intake; French agricultural productivity actually declined during the war, largely through a shortage of artificial fertiliser which affected farming throughout the Nazi empire.

Purchases of all commodities from France were financed throughout the war largely through credits levied by the so-called ‘occupation costs’, an arbitrary annual levy on the French revenue whose amount was dictated by Germany at an artificially low exchange rate between the franc and the mark which favoured Germany by as much as 63 per cent. Similar arrangements were imposed upon other occupied countries; but it was in France, the largest and most industrialised of the occupied countries, that they bit hardest and produced the largest returns – from 1940 to 1944 no less than 16 per cent of the Reich treasury’s income. To a certain extent ‘occupation costs’ were offset by direct German investment in French war industry, often by private enterprises such as Krupp and IG Farben; but such investment was entirely self-serving, a mere priming of the pump to enable French industrialists to maintain or increase their supply of goods to a single market for sale at a price ultimately fixed by the German buyers.

German purchase of French, Dutch and Belgian industrial products – which included items for military use such as aero-engines and radio equipment, as well as finished steel and unprocessed raw materials – were acquired in a rigged market; it was a market none the less, and the German purchasing authorities, such as the officials of the Franco-German Armistice Commission, were careful to preserve the autonomy of their opposite numbers. Such was not the case with German intrusions into the western European labour market. During the war German industry and agriculture developed an insatiable appetite for foreign labour. Since military requirements reduced the size of the domestic labour force by one-third, and Nazi policy precluded the large-scale employment of German women, the shortfall had to be made good from outside the borders of the Reich. Prisoners of war supplied some of the numbers, over a million Frenchmen being employed on German farms and in German mines and factories between 1940 and 1945; but even military captivity failed as a source of labour supply. As early as mid-1940 economic inducement was offered to tempt skilled workers from home and by December 220,000 Western workers were employed in Germany. However, as local economies recovered after the catastrophe of 1940, others resisted the lure; by October 1941 the Western foreign labour force in Germany had not risen above 300,000, of whom 272,000 were from allied Italy.

The Germans therefore resorted to conscription. Fritz Sauckel, Reich Plenipotentiary-General for Labour, required the administrations of the occupied countries of the West to produce stated numbers of workers and thereby raised the number of foreign workers in Germany between January and October 1942 by 2.6 million. (In France the Obligatory Labour Service eventually proved a prime impetus for the defection of the young to the Maquis.) The rate of increase was sustained into 1943, largely as a result of Italy’s defection from the Axis in September which allowed the imposition of labour conscription there, yielding another million and a half young men.

Nevertheless recruitment in the West, whether by incentive or compulsion, could still not ultimately satisfy German requirements. Western workers had to be paid, fed and housed at western European standards, and the consequent charge on the German war economy grew progressively burdensome. The solution Sauckel introduced was conscription in the East. An immediate source of Eastern labour had been found in 1942 in the millions of Red Army men made prisoner in the encirclement battles at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev. Out of the eventual total of 5,160,000 Soviet soldiers captured during the war, 3,300,000 died by neglect or murder at German hands; in May 1944 only 875,000 were recorded as ‘working’. Most worked in slave conditions; so too did the 2.8 million Russian civilians, mostly Ukrainians, whom the Germans brought within the Reich between March 1942 and the Wehrmacht’s expulsion from Russia in the summer of 1944. Originally invited to ‘volunteer’, the first recruits found themselves treated so badly that news of their virtual enslavement deterred others from following, and Sauckel had to resort to labour conscription to make up the numbers. A similar policy was imposed in the Polish ‘General-Government’. The SS became the instrument of enslavement. Its leader, Heinrich Himmler, outlined the principles by which it worked in his infamous Posen address of October 1943: ‘It is a matter of total indifference to me how the Russians, how the Czechs fare. . . . Whether the other peoples live in plenty, whether they croak from hunger, interests me only to the extent that we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise it does not interest me.’

The Reich commissioners for the Ukraine and the Ostland and the Government-General of Poland adopted a similar attitude to the exploitation of the economies under their control. In Poland private enterprises were either taken over by German managers or subjected to German managerial control; in the Soviet Union, where all production had been state-owned before the invasion, the first priority was to restore war damage, contingent or more usually deliberate, which had, for example, resulted in the wrecking of three out of four of all electricity-generating stations in the conquered area. Once damage had been repaired, the operation of the whole industrial structure, including mines, oil-wells, mills and factories, was consigned to state corporations – in particular the Berg-und Hüttenwerk Company for mining, the Kontinentale Oel company for oil and the Ostfaser Company for wool fibre – which operated as extensions of Germany’s nationalised industry. Later, when state corporations proved unequal to the task of managing all the plant that had been captured, private companies, including Krupp, Flick and Mannesmann, were allocated enterprises to oversee as part of their existing empires. The one Soviet economic system with which the Germans did not tamper was the collective farm. Inefficient though it was, and despite long-term plans favoured particularly by Himmler to settle the ‘black earth’ region with German soldier-peasants, the supply of both native and ethnic German settlers for the occupied area was too small to permit a wholesale transformation to private agriculture. In western Poland and other areas on the fringes of the Greater Reich, native cultivators were expropriated and replaced with Teutons; throughout the Ostland and the Ukraine there was an effort at reprivatisation, but the collective system was generally judged too well established to unravel.

Such changes as the Germans imposed were cosmetic. The
Agrarerlass
(Agricultural Edict) of February 1942 reconstituted collectives as agricultural communes, allegedly equivalent to the village societies which had existed before the Revolution, in which cultivators were granted rights of property over private lots and the German occupiers assumed the role of landlords to whom a proportion of the crop was owed as rent. In practice, as the cultivators quickly discovered, the Germans were as exigent as the commissars in exacting tribute, and failure to deliver it entailed loss of the private holding, expropriation and exposure to recruitment for forced labour.

In short, German agricultural policy in the East rested upon the principle of coercion, as did its whole
Ostpolitik
. Nazi Germany was not interested in winning the goodwill or even the co-operation of peoples it deemed by ideological edict to be inferior –
Untermenschen
. What was true in the East, moreover, was true throughout Hitler’s empire. Coercion, repression, punishment, reprisal, terror, extermination – the chain of measures by which Nazi Germany exercised its power over occupied Europe – were inflicted with more circumspection west of the Rhine than east of the Oder. They were, nevertheless, the common instruments of control wherever the swastika flag flew, unrestrained by the writ of civil law, and pitiless in effect whenever the will of the Führer gave their agents licence.

That had been true first of all in Germany itself. Immediately after his appointment to the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933, Hitler had broadened the existing legal provision of
Schutzhaft
– protective custody of the person concerned, to protect him or her, for example, from mob violence – to embrace ‘police detention’ for political activity. To hold ‘police detainees’ detention centres were established at Dachau near Munich and Oranienburg in March 1933 and soon other such ‘concentration camps’, a term borrowed from the Spanish pacification of Cuba in the 1890s and later adopted by the British during the Boer War, had been established in other parts of Germany. Their first inmates were communists, held for terms determined by the Führer’s pleasure; later other political and conscientious opponents of the regime, active or merely suspect, were detained, and by 1937 ‘anti-socials’, including homosexuals, beggars and gypsies, were sent there. At the beginning of the war the number of concentration camp detainees was about 25,000.

No concentration camp was yet an extermination camp; all were merely places of arbitrary imprisonment. However, they were administered by a special ‘Death’s Head’ branch of the SS, whose chief, Heinrich Himmler, was since 1936 also chief of the German police. This particular stroke of
Gleichschaltung
brought under the unified control of a Nazi official the political (Gestapo) and criminal police forces of the Reich, together with the ordinary civil police, but also the security organs (
Sicherheitsdienst
or SD) of the Nazi Party. Thereafter a German citizen was liable to arrest by the Gestapo, consignment to ‘police detention’ by an official of the SD and imprisonment by SS ‘Death’s Head’ guards, without any intervention by the judicial authorities whatsoever.

The great conquests of 1939-41 brought the extension of SS/Gestapo power, now allied with that of the military police (the
Feldgendarmerie
), into the occupied territories. The effect was first felt in Poland, where acts of aggression against the leaders of society began immediately after occupation: professionals such as doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers and priests were arrested under the ‘police detention’ provisions and confined in concentration camps. Few were ever to emerge. Forced labour was a founding principle of the concentration camp system: the Nazi slogan
Arbeit macht frei
, ‘Labour wins freedom’, was the precept by which they operated. As concentration camps multiplied in occupied territory and their populations increased, rations dwindled, the pace of work accelerated, disease proliferated, and forced labour thus became a death sentence. The Poles were the first to die in large numbers, and those who did not survive
Schutzhaft
represented a significant proportion of the nation’s loss of a quarter of its population during the war; thereafter few peoples were spared. The penalty for resistance, even dissidence, for Czechs, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Belgians, Netherlanders and French was not arrest and imprisonment but deportation without trial, often ending in death. The most poignant of all the memorials on the great medieval battlefield of Agincourt is not the monument over the mass graves of the French knights who fell in 1415 but the modest
calvaire
at the gates of Agincourt château, which commemorates the squire and his two sons, ‘morts en transportation à Natzweiler en 1944’.

Natzweiler, to which the three Frenchmen were transported to death, was one of eighteen main concentration camps run by the SS in and outside Germany. Tens of thousands died in those west of the Oder, worked or starved to death, killed by diseases of privation or, in individual cases, executed by decree. The western concentration camps were not, however, extermination camps; the appalling spectacle of death on which the British army stumbled at Belsen in April 1945 was the result of a sudden epidemic among the chronically underfed inmates, not of massacre. Massacre, however, was the ultimate horror which underlay the concentration camp system, and those camps which lay east of the Oder including particularly Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek, had been built and run exclusively for that purpose.