Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (49 page)

This had direct political consequences for Rosenberg and his supporters. Powerless even to determine senior appointments within his vast and largely notional fiefdom, Rosenberg had to suffer the appointment as Reichskommissar in the Ukraine of Erich Koch, who rivalled Hitler in his contempt for Slavic helots, and Hinrich Lohse as Reichskommissar of Ostland, who not surprisingly resisted all attempts by Rosenberg to grant the three Baltic states some measure of severely limited autonomy. In practice, separatism - or more accurately the redrawing of political geography - took place strictly under German auspices and did not permit any element of self-determination.
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The febrile desire of sundry fascist, nationalist or religious émigrés to turn the German invasion to their own advantage mostly came to nothing. They were cultivated, dropped and in some cases imprisoned and murdered - the same fate that many of them would subsequently meet at the hands of a vengeful NKVD (in Stefan Bandera’s case, in 1950s Munich where he was working for Radio Free Europe).
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It was not only Hitler who opposed Rosenberg’s policy, however. Both he and Lohse found their local powers contested by the economic agencies of the Reich which operated independently of Rosenberg’s ministry in Berlin and, more importantly, by Himmler’s Higher SS and Police Leaders.
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Economic and military necessity stalled any attempts to reform the Bolshevik socio-economic order in ways appealing to the local population. As we saw above, Hitler’s conception of future Germano-Russian economic relations was based upon crude exploitation. Practical concerns also ensured that there was no more than cosmetic tinkering with the institution of collective farming. Decollectivisation, with all its attendant dislocation, would have vastly complicated the military’s capacity to secure food supplies. It was much easier for the SS to convert
kolkhoz
into landed estates than to mess around later ‘rationalising’ small farms recently returned to their owners. As Backe, the responsible State Secretary for agriculture, remarked, if the Bolsheviks had not established collective farms, the Germans would have had to invent them. German propaganda posters announced ’The end of the
kolkhoz
! The free peasant on his own land!‘, and depicted German soldiers using rifle-butts to shove the burden of vodkaswilling bureaucrats from the shoulders of Russian peasants. The reality was otherwise. Rosenberg’s Agrarian Decree of 15 February 1942 may have set up ‘communal economies’ based upon individual farms, but the semi-feudal ‘work-days’ and tithe-like delivery obligations were not dissimilar to the hated Soviet system.
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In the industrial economy, the struggle for ownership was an all-German affair involving various agencies and the private sector, with firms such as Flick, Krupp and Mannesmann acting as ‘foster-parents’ to Soviet firms in their sector.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if such economic exploitation had been remotely as successful as German policy in Western Europe (especially France). Yet the fact remains that it was not. This was primarily due to the fact that policy in the occupied territories was increasingly determined by that most sinister of the Nazi Diadochi: the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, whose priorities were racial rather than economic. Indeed, it may be that Himmler’s plans for Eastern Europe give us the most reliable picture of how the Germans would have ruled if they had won the war.

Himmler believed that the East ‘belonged to’ the SS, which would assume control of the deportation, repatriation and extermination of entire populations.
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This ascendancy began long before Barbarossa, in the context of occupied Poland. Already on 24 October 1939, shortly after he had secured the title of Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germandom (RKFDV), Himmler addressed SS leaders in Posen on the subject of German settlement in Poland.
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Each settlement was to consist of a leading nucleus of soldier-farmers (drawn from the ranks of the SS), surrounded by the farms of settlers from the ‘old Reich’, and then an outer ring of ethnic Germans. The Poles would be their farmhands and labourers. With characteristic pedantry, the Reichsführer specified the thickness of the brick farmhouse walls; insisted on the installation of baths and showers in the cellars ‘for the farmer who returns sweatily from the fields’; and the prohibition of ‘kitsch and urban clutter’ in the farmhouse interiors, which were to be ‘neither luxurious nor primitive’.
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In May 1940, Himmler outlined the fate of the indigenous Polish population in a key memorandum entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East’. Poland was to be dissolved into its real, or imagined, constituent ethnic parts. Those deemed unfit for regermanisation - that is, those ‘fished out’ of ‘this mishmash’ - were to be relegated to the status of helots, provided, he ominously and sententiously mused, ‘one rejects the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally unGerman and impossible’. The helots were to receive a rudimentary education, namely ‘simple arithmetic up to 500 at the most, how to write one’s name, and to teach that it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans and to be honest, hard-working and well behaved. I consider it unnecessary to teach reading.’ This ‘inferior remnant’ would exist in the General Government as a leaderless labouring class supplying Germany with the manpower for major capital projects such as quarries, public buildings and roads.
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On 24 June 1940, Himmler addressed himself to the problem of Polish rural labour. The Poles would be used to create towns, villages and infrastructural improvements, after which ’7/8ths’ of them would be deported to the General Government. There they would constitute a seasonal reserve army of labour brought in to work in quarries or at harvest time. There was to be no fraternisation between Germans and Poles, between whom ‘there was no more of a connection than between us and the negroes’. Poles who had sexual relations with German women would ‘suffer the noose’; German men and women who consorted with Poles would be sent to concentration camps.
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Himmler’s RKFDV planning staff, notably Professor Konrad Meyer, an ambitious thirty-nine-year-old agronomist and SS-Oberführer, converted these random thoughts into coldly technocratic schemes such as his February 1940 ‘Planning Fundamentals for the Reconstruction of the Eastern Territories‘, which envisaged deporting ’Zug um Zug’ (without delay) 3.4 million Poles and all Jews.
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Meyer was merely the most prominent participant in what amounted to a Gadarene stampede by more or less cranky academics to provide the SS with their expertise in everything from ethnic relations, race biology or types of plants suited to cold climates.
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Apparently, Himmler regarded talking to such people as a form of late-night relaxation after his taxing daytime duties.
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Speaking in Madrid on 22 October 1940, Himmler announced that in Poland resettlement was taking place ‘on the basis of the latest findings of research and will bring revolutionary results’. A ‘Generalplan’ existed for the total refashioning of 200,000 square kilometres of territory which would be implemented in the first half of 1941.
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Actually, a ‘general plan’ probably did not exist at this stage, but the concept was a useful one to tout around if one’s intention was to steal a march on rivals in the business of moving entire populations. And moved they were. By the end of 1940, some 261,517 Poles had been expelled from the Warthegau, 17,413 from Upper Silesia, 31,000 from Danzig-West Prussia, and 15,000 from Zichenau, in sum nearly 325,000 people. Only the transport priority accorded Barbarossa prevented further massive deportations in 1941. As it was, a further 400,000 Poles were shuffled around in the incorporated territories to make room for ethnic German repatriates before 1945. Over the demarcation line, the Russians did likewise.

The invasion of the Soviet Union provided Himmler with a vastly expanded potential field of activity. To this end, within two days of the invasion he gave Professor Meyer three weeks to supply him with a sketch of the broad outlines of future German settlement policy in the augmented occupied territories. Even within the SS, planning was a congested field. Thus in his inaugural address on 2 October 1941 to senior members of the occupation regime in Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, the new Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia, outlined his plans for the settlement of the East. These were based upon two separate moral universes. In the first, Germans would treat cognate peoples such as the Dutch, Flemings and Scandinavians with relative decency. Beyond in the East, a German military elite would preside over ‘helots’ - ‘if I may put it drastically’ - who would be the workforce for major projects. A form of human polderisation would ensue. An outer wall of soldier-farmers would keep out the human ‘storm flood of Asia for all time’. Behind this primary line of defence, an expanding ring of subsidiary ‘dams’, commencing in Danzig-West Prussia and the Warthegau, would ensure German settlement of one ‘space’ after another.
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In late 1941, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) of the SS drew up its own version of a ‘Generalplan Ost’, whose contents can be inferred from a critical commentary dated April 1942 by Dr Erhard Wetzel, the desk officer for racial policy in Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The plan would have taken thirty years to realise from the end of the war. It dealt with Poland, the Baltic states, White Russia, parts of the Ukraine, and ‘Ingermanland’ (the region around Leningrad) and the ‘Gothengau’ (the Crimea). Its SS authors envisaged up to ten million Germans settling in the occupied East; with thirty-one million of the forty-five million indigenous inhabitants of these areas being deported to western Siberia. Here Wetzel punctiliously corrected the SS’s arithmetic. Their original figure of forty-five million indigenous people appeared to include five to six million Jews who would have been ‘got rid of’ before the evacuation. Moreover, allowing for such factors as the birthrate, the native population would in fact have been sixty to sixty-five million people, of whom forty-six to fifty-one million would be ‘resettled’. The plan envisaged deporting different percentages of the various populations who were its object. Thus ‘80 to 85 per cent’ of the Poles (or twenty to twenty-four million people) were to be ‘evacuated’. Wetzel did not like the idea of creating a Greater Poland in exile, especially since the Poles’ presence would antagonise the inhabitants of Siberia whom he wished to cultivate against the Greater Russians. Pondering what to do with the Poles - since ‘it is taken for granted that one cannot liquidate the Poles like the Jews’ - Wetzel suggested the alternative strategy of ‘encouraging’ the emigration of their intellectual classes to southern Brazil in return for the repatriation of ethnic Germans. The Polish lower classes could go to Siberia, which after other nationalities had been ‘pumped in’ would constitute a denatured, ’Americanised’ hodgepodge distinct from the neighbouring Russians. Sixty-five per cent of the Ukrainians and 75 per cent of White Ruthenians were to accompany the Poles eastwards. Censoriously, Wetzel remarked that the RSHA plan had nothing to say about the Russians. By contrast, he had a great deal to offer in the way of detailed advice about how to curb the fecundity of the Russian population, which he regarded as the potential cause of future wars. Apart from factories mass-producing prophylactics, he suggested the retraining of midwives as abortionists and deliberate under-training of paediatricians; voluntary sterilisation; and the cessation of all public health measures designed to diminish infant mortality. He concluded his commentary with some observations about how some climates in the area covered by the plan were unsuited to ‘nordic-falian’ settlers, suggesting that the planting of woods in the Ukrainian steppe would render it more suitable.
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The obvious statistical errors and logistical deficiencies in the RSHA plan ensured that Himmler (who would have to present the case to Hitler) entrusted the task to the more expert Meyer. In May 1942, Meyer delivered the memorandum ‘Generalplan Ost: Legal, Economic and Spatial Foundations for Development in the East’. The plan, which exists only in summarised form, envisaged the creation of three vast ‘marcher settlements’ (Ingermanland, Memel-Narew and Gothengau) which would consist of 50 per cent German colonists, linked to the Reich at 100 kilometre intervals by thirty-six ‘settlement strongpoints’ whose inhabitants would be 25 per cent German. The plan would take twenty-five years to implement, would involve five million German settlers and would cost 66 billion Reichsmarks. The writ of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories would not run in the ‘marcher settlements’, latter-day fiefdoms held by the SS. Himmler expressed himself pleased with the overall thrust of the plan, although he wanted the time-scale shortened to twenty years, integration of areas like Alsace and Lorraine or BohemiaMoravia into the plan, and the more rapid Germanisation of the General Government, Estonia and Latvia. Meyer was set to work on a ‘general settlement plan’ incorporating these revised features.
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These plans were dismissed by earlier historians as the musings of desk-bound academic fantasists, but many German historians now argue that they were meant in earnest. Nazi practice in the Zamosc district in the south-east of the General Government tends to support the revised view. In July 1941 Himmler ordered Odilo Globocnik, the local SS and Police Leader in Lublin, to begin the ‘Germanisation’ of this area. There were several reasons why Himmler alighted on this district, apart from the fact that in Globocnik, the organising mind behind the ‘Aktion Reinhard’ extermination camps, he had an efficient and willing tool. First, Zamosc could function both as a gateway to the Ukraine and Black Sea areas and as the first link in a chain of German settlements stretching from the Baltic to Transylvania. The soil was rich, there was a significant ethnic German presence, and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians would facilitate a policy of dividing and ruling the ‘natives’. Secondly, the town of Lublin was a vital crossroads and supply point for Waffen-SS troops
en route
to south-east Russia. Plans for the development of an SSTOWN included barracks for three Waffen-SS regiments and various SS-controlled factories which would be built and run by labour from nearby Majdanek concentration camp.
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