Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (27 page)

TOTAL WAR

“The
Blitzkrieg
is over,” wrote a military economics specialist in January 1942. “As for the economy, it is a matter of the first priority that it should be clearly reconstructed on the basis of a long war.” In the winter of 1941, the German leadership was forced to move the economy on to a total war footing. This meant, as Milward observes, that the original scheme for the creation of a New Europe had failed, and with it Goering’s efforts to coordinate arms production through the Four-Year Plan; saving the National Socialist revolution would require a profound transformation of economic relationships and rationalization of the gargantuan but massively wasteful rearmament effort that had been going on since 1936.
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Now even more intense exploitation of the satellites was required. The young technocrat Albert Speer, a favourite of the Führer’s, began to coordinate arms production. Party hack Fritz Sauckel was ordered to conscript millions more foreign workers into the service of the Reich. Having killed off nearly three million Russian POWs that winter, the regime now woke up to its desperate labour needs. As one official noted in February 1942: “The current difficulty besetting labour deployment would not have arisen had a decision been made in proper time for a larger-scale deployment of Russian POWs. There were 3.9 million Russians available; of these now only 1.1 million are left.”
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The Reich was already dependent on foreign labour: some 700,000
Polish workers were employed by the summer of 1940, and one year later there were some 2.1 million civilian labourers and 1.2 million POWs. Far more, however, were now needed. From 1942 Sauckel’s labour drives across the continent resulted in the forced conscription of millions of workers. The violent methods employed by his officials aroused enormous protest and spurred on the growth of resistance to German rule. One report of November 1942 gives a graphic picture of how workers were actually recruited:

Men and women, including teenagers aged 15 and above, [are being] picked up on the street, at open-air markets and village celebrations and then speeded away. The inhabitants, for that reason, are frightened, stay hidden inside and avoid going out … The application of flogging as a punishment has been supplemented since the beginning of October by the burning down of farmsteads or entire villages as a reprisal for the failure to heed the orders given to the local townships for making manpower available.
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In April 1943 Sauckel’s agency head in Warsaw was shot dead in his office; the following month, widespread protest caused forced conscription to be slowed down in western Europe.

Even so, foreign labour was vital to the German war effort. As early as 1942 Goering’s giant
Reichswerke
had drawn 80–90 per cent of its 600,000 workers from foreign workers and POWs; the rest of the economy followed suit. By 1944 there were eight million, mostly civilian, workers in the Reich, and another two million working directly under German command in third countries. These workers tilled farms and provided a cheap source of domestic servants. They constituted one third of the labour force in the armaments industry by November 1944, and more than one quarter of the workforce in the machine-building and chemical industries. Their presence cushioned the German population and saved the regime from having to establish a comprehensive domestic labour policy, particularly one that would have forced German housewives into paid work. As a Nazi labour scholar wrote: “How much more we were prepared to endure a temporary increase in the alien element in certain occupations rather than
endanger the folk-biological strength of the German people by the enhanced deployment of women in the workforce.”
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Sauckel’s continental manhunt may have aided the war effort in Germany, but it caused tremendous disruption elsewhere. Faced with the unpredictable threat of being rounded up and sent to the Reich, male workers in occupied Europe often abandoned their jobs and went into hiding. Local administrators sought ways to protect their workforce from deportation; policemen turned a blind eye. The growth of the Maquis in France and resistance in Greece was directly linked to the growing intensity of Saucke’s labour drives. Politicians and civil servants tried to persuade the Germans to change their policy. Their greatest ally was Albert Speer, the Minister for War Production.

Speer believed, unlike Sauckel, that economic cooperation with the industrialized economies of France, Belgium and Holland was essential to the Reich war effort. Bringing labourers into Germany by force made no sense if it alienated foreign governments and businessmen, disrupted production and increased resistance to German rule. In France, Sauckel’s policy had pushed Laval to the point of desperation: “It is no longer a policy of collaboration,” complained the French premier, “but on the French side of a policy of sacrifice and on the German side of a policy of compulsion.” What Speer proposed in effect was to resuscitate the policy of collaboration—as a matter of economic rationality rather than political pride.
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Speer envisaged a rationalization of production which treated the whole of north-western Europe as a single economic unit. This was very different from the policies of expropriation which had characterized the early forms of German economic policy and which, in a sense, reached their culmination in Sauckel’s exploitation of European labour. Speer’s was a cooler, less nationalistic outlook which preferred planning to plunder and the world of business to that of National Socialist ideology. For Speer, the creation of a Europe-wide armaments industry—essential if Germany was to have a chance of winning the war—necessitated the protection of industrial economies outside the Reich, and by extension, the protection of an adequately skilled and motivated labour-force.

Speer’s efforts to build up arms production in Poland and the
Ukraine ran afoul of the economic havoc created there by earlier policies. But in France, where the ideological stakes were low, Speer’s strategy made an impact. He managed to block Sauckel’s labour drive and reached an understanding with local technocrats (like Jean Bichelonne, the Vichy Minister of Industrial Production) which allowed industrial output to be planned by committee rather than merely targeted for expropriation. “It is imbecility if I call up one million men in France,” insisted Speer in criticism of Sauckel. “I end up with two million workers less there and fifty to a hundred thousand more in Germany.” Not only war production but also consumer goods were going to the Reich. By the autumn of 1943, some 40–50 per cent of French industrial output was being used for German purposes. By this point Speer was thinking in terms of creating giant industrial cartels in coal, cars, aluminium and other goods which could be planned in a tariff-free European zone.
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Such visions made Speer look like a pioneer of the industrial arrangements that would lead to the European Coal and Steel Community and ultimately to the Common Market. There is some truth in this view, which is certainly at least as plausible as that which traces these post-war institutions back to the federalism of the anti-Nazi resistance. But the fact remains that the New Order was much more, and much less, than a proto-Common Market. In one way Speer was a realist, for he recognized the impossibility of winning a modern, highly industrialized war on the basis of Hitler’s primitive economics of conquest; in another way, though, he was deluded, for without Hitler’s politics the Third Reich was nothing. Speer’s vision, in other words, of a world where business superseded political conflict—a world strikingly akin to that which did eventually emerge after 1945—could not be realized in Hitler’s Europe. Hitler himself limited Speer’s planning and never totally withdrew his support for Sauckel: the victory of rationality over ideology was only temporary.

If Europe could not be “organized,” the fault lay largely with the “organizers” and their concept of “organization.” With his customary lucidity, the philologist Victor Klemperer had quietly noted its Nazi connotations of imposed discipline, of hierarchy and of order which in turn stemmed from its underlying racialism. Its mirror image turned out to be the “organizing” (i.e. thieving, pilfering and plundering)
carried out by the lowest of the low in the concentration camps. Rather than a principle of value-free, managerial efficiency, organization Nazi-style meant the economic subordination of the lesser races of Europe to the Nordic-Germanic
Volk
. Thus, economics could not be separated from ideology; ultimately, race was to be the genuine “organizing” principle for the continent.
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EUROPE AS A RACIAL ENTITY

“Europe is not a geographical entity,” commented Hitler in August 1941. “It is a racial entity.” The League of Nations had tried to keep minorities where they were, and ensure stability through international law; Hitler, in contrast, had no faith in law and aimed to ensure stability by uprooting peoples. In pursuit of racial goals, nations were rearranged and millions of people were forcibly driven from their homes, resettled hundreds of miles away in strange surroundings, abandoned, forced into labour camps, or deliberately put to death. It was in this respect, above all, that the Second World War differed from previous conflicts. A vast gulf lay between Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial aspirations of 1918—with their old-fashioned programme of assimilation through cultural Germanization—and the biological racism of 1939.
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This new world of state-sponsored mass murder and cultural extermination gave birth to a new term—genocide—introduced for the first time in 1944 in a study of
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
by a Polish-Jewish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin. After the war, the Nuremberg trials, the UN Genocide Convention, the Eichmann trial and new media interest in what became known as the Holocaust all made people familiar with the idea that the Second World War had been in some measure a race war. Often, however, this was seen exclusively in terms of “the war against the Jews” (to cite the title of one famous study). In fact, the Final Solution of the Jewish question emerged out of a broader interlocking set of racial issues which the Nazi regime sought to “solve” through war.

One consequence of the Nazi conquest of Europe was the extension on to a continental scale of the dialectic of the Nazi racial welfare state—a state, in other words, where police measures to repress
“racial undesirables” were the obverse of policies to safeguard the vigour of the
Volksgemeinschaft
. The New Order in Europe involved, on the one hand, measures to curb the “threat” which Jews, gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians and other
Untermenschen
presented to the Reich, and on the other hand, grand schemes on behalf of
Deutschtum
. This meant, in particular, providing for the welfare and resettlement of the ten million so-called
Volksdeutsche
—German-speakers living outside the borders of the Reich. Expulsion and colonization, extermination and social provision, were the two sides of the same imperial Nazi coin.

But the war did not merely expand the geographical reach of Nazi racial policies, it also radicalized and complicated them. War was the great catalyst. For Hitler in the late 1930s, the first resettlement of Germans from the South Tyrol was initially a matter of diplomatic necessity; in Himmler’s hands after October 1939 it became the prelude to a much more ambitious vision involving the total ethnic recasting of eastern Europe. Resettlement goals changed several times as the amount of German territory increased and the outlook changed. The same might be said for Nazi policy towards “racial undesirables.” Policy moved into uncharted waters as the war progressed.

On the “Jewish question” new vistas, and new difficulties, opened up as first Poland, then western Europe, and finally large parts of the Soviet Union came under Nazi control. Along the “twisted road to Auschwitz” were wrong turns like the Madagascar Plan of 1940 (by which Europe’s Jewish population were to be shipped to the island) and deathly improvisations like the gas-vans used in Serbia, the Ukraine and Chelmno before the Nazi leadership hit upon the idea of industrialized mass murder in the death camps.

The expansion and radicalization of the racial agenda was accompanied by the rapid growth of the SS. Consolidating the security services in the RSHA under Heydrich gave Himmler extensive influence in policing and intelligence throughout much of the occupied territories. Created in 1934, the concentration camp empire (excluding the death camps) expanded its population from 25,000 in 1939 to 714,000 in 1945 and was administered by another wartime SS office, the WVHA. The death camps themselves did not exist in 1939; in 1942
they killed over one million people. The creation of a new class of German colonists from the hapless
Volksdeutsche
became the responsibility of the RKFDV (see below), established in October 1939. It removed more than one million ethnic Germans from their homes, managed hundreds of resettlement camps, and settled at least 400,000 across eastern Europe. It was thus war that brought the SS close to rivalling the power of the state apparatus created in the Soviet Union for controlling the lives and fates of millions of people.
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The centrality of racial thinking—as well as the idea of industrializing mass murder—was what primarily differentiated Hitler’s empire from Stalin’s. Possessing the power to reshape the human composition of an entire continent, Himmler and the SS came face to face with the ambiguities, dilemmas and limitations of an imperial policy shaped by the premises of biological racism. What, in the first place, was to be the role of the Germans themselves? Were they to be concentrated in the Reich, which was more or less the view which prevailed until 1941, or should some form a frontier class manning the eastern marches as their medieval forebears had done? As a master race were they to lord it over Slavic helots, manning estates of thousands of serfs, or should they till the soil themselves in accordance with the Nazi view which saw
Blut und Boden
as the ultimate guarantor of Aryan vitality? How, too, was an ethnic German to be recognized—by language, looks or genealogy? Bitter doctrinal disputes on such issues took place among Nazi bureaucrats throughout the war. As for the
Untermenschen
, were they a necessary labour force or a biological threat to be exterminated? Such were the dilemmas of
apartheid
as practised on the vast and murderous scale of Hitler’s New Order.