The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (73 page)

demographic collapse resulting from contagious Old World diseases

and exploitive western imperial rule. By comparison, the Nazis conspired to murder the entire Jewish population of eastern Europe and

condemned subject Christian communities to homicidal levels of

forced labor and slow starvation.

These policies were both indefensibly barbaric and stupidly counterproductive. In the early months of the eastern campaign, the

Ukrainians and other subject communities that had suffered under

Soviet imperial rule were ready to welcome the advancing German

armies as liberators. Instead, the Nazis executed Ukraine nationalist leaders and forced the entire community back into an unhappy

alliance with Stalin through inhumanly brutal extractive policies.

Captives of their own racist ideology, the Nazis abandoned the triedand-true tactic of divide and rule. It was only in 1944 that Rosenberg found the backbone to complain publicly that the Germans had

missed a golden opportunity to exploit the Ukrainians’ deep hatred of

the Soviets. This would prove shortsighted later in the war, but unalloyed ruthlessness made the Nazis’ systems of imperial extraction

exceptionally lucrative in the near term. Freed from the constraints

of long-term planning and humanitarian sentiment, they set out to

strip-mine their conquered territories.

France under the Nazis 375

In the west, Nazi empire builders manipulated the terms of

the Hague Conventions, which allowed victorious powers to make

defeated nations assume the costs of their occupation. The Netherlands’ bill came to one hundred million guilders per month between

1940 and 1942, which increased the Dutch national budget by more

than sixfold. Similarly, the Germans charged eighteen million francs

to the Belgium government and seized its gold reserves.

The Nazis’ greatest extractive innovation was turning modern

fi nancial mechanisms into instruments of imperial exploitation. They

used the international clearing system, which European central banks

used to balance imports and exports, to force conquered nations to

fund the Reich’s food and raw material imports. Normally, importers

would pay for foreign goods by depositing the purchase price in clearing accounts in their own national bank. This bank would then transfer the sum to their trading partners’ national bank, which would in

turn credit the exporters’ accounts in their own currency. The Nazis,

however, never fulfi lled their side of the bargain. This meant that state

banks in the conquered territories had to reimburse their exporters

by printing more money, which made them pay for the Third Reich’s

imports. This system was so effi cient that Germany owed its “trading

partners” twenty-nine billion reichsmarks by the summer of 1944.23

While high-ranking Nazis followed Napoleon’s example in plundering Europe of its great works of art and moveable treasures, they

found that currency manipulation was a much simpler alternative to

the messy business of day-to-day looting. Instead of seizing food and

materials from western Europeans, the conquering German forces

“paid” for them with Reich Credit Bank certifi cates. These certifi cates,

which were denominated in paper notes ranging from fi fty pfennigs

to fi fty marks, looked like money, but they were not legal tender in

Germany. The central banks of defeated nations had to redeem them,

which forced them to cover the cost of German military requisitions. As

with the clearing system, these banks had to make up the shortfall by

issuing more money. This highly infl ationary form of imperial extraction had the double virtue of appearing to be legal under the Hague

Conventions because the Germans seemingly paid for their plunder.

The Nazis usually withdrew the certifi cates at the end of a successful

campaign to ensure that local economies did not collapse entirely, but

they kept them in circulation in France until December 1943 to wring

as much wealth as possible out of the Reich’s rich historical enemy.

376 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The Nazis also garnered popular support at home by giving common German soldiers and civilians a healthy share of the imperial

spoils. They infl ated the offi cial exchange rate between the reichsmark

and the currencies of defeated nations to increase German purchasing

power. Families in Germany sent money and extensive shopping lists

to their men in uniform. In return, they received packages of Greek

tobacco, Norwegian herring, North African shoes, Russian bacon, and

French velvet, silk, liqueurs, and coffee. Under what became known as

the “schlep decree,” Göring mandated that soldiers returning home

on leave could bring back as much of this purchased booty as they

could personally carry. The French bore the greatest weight of these

policies by virtue of their shared border with Germany and because

they had some of the most tempting goods. Even mayors and other

civic offi cials in Germany took part in this form of modern looting by

buying artifi cially inexpensive raw materials in France by the freight

train load. All told, nonmilitary purchases of French goods came to

125 million marks by mid-1943.24

By comparison, most eastern economies were not suffi ciently

developed to sustain these more advanced extractive methods. The

Nazis also had no inclination to be as gentle with their “subhuman”

Slavic subjects as they were with “civilized” western nations. Dispensing with the niceties of bank certifi cates and clearing accounts,

German forces stripped Poland and the occupied Soviet Union of

food and other raw materials with the full knowledge that millions

of people would starve. Western Europeans made similar forced contributions to the Reich’s breadbasket, but their exports to Germany

brought only severe malnutrition, not famine.

In addition to stealing their food, the Nazis also turned millions of

eastern Europeans into slave laborers. This strategy refl ected the reality that, as in the premodern empires, the Nazi empire’s wealth was

still in subject labor. Desperate for manpower to free German men

for military service and spare German women from factory work,

the Reich plenipotentiary for labor allocation, Fritz Sauckel, scoured

occupied Europe for workers. While coerced Frenchmen, Belgians,

Dutchmen, Danes, and Norwegians helped meet the Reich’s labor

needs, they were spared the worst of the Nazi forced labor policies.

In the east, Sauckel’s men grabbed people off the streets or seized

them in churches and theaters. In Poland, every male between the

ages of eighteen and sixty was liable for compulsory labor. As a result,

France under the Nazis 377

there were approximately seven million foreign forced laborers in

Germany by mid-1944.25 Technically, these unfortunate people were

not slaves because the Nazis paid them. But their employers imposed

heavy payroll deductions for room and board on men and women

who were living at virtual starvation levels in labor camps. The Nazi

regime additionally transferred much of its labor costs to defeated

governments by making them responsible for the back wages and

family benefi ts of their citizens working in the Reich.

Even the Holocaust had an extractive element. Although the

Nazis’ hysterical anti-Semitism was highly irrational, their xenophobic policies paid economic returns. Initially, Hitler planned to move

against the Jews only after a quick Nazi victory, but once the initial

blitzkrieg in the east failed, he abandoned all restraint. As in the new

imperial Africa, Nazi racial doctrines reduced Jews to the level of subhumans and left them dangerously vulnerable. The difference was

that where western European empires simply sought profi t, the Nazis

plotted genocide. In preparation for their fi nal solution to the “Jewish problem,” Hitler’s men set about segregating Jews from larger

subject populations through special armbands, discriminatory laws,

forced ghettoization, and eventually deportation to concentration and

extermination camps.

These tactics made it easier for the Germans to seize the Jews’ savings and material wealth. Inmates in the network of SS concentration

camps produced fi fty million marks per year through the production of crafts, construction and agricultural work, and industrial slave

labor. The Nazis even shipped a million cubic meters of looted Jewish

furniture to the Reich for resale at reduced rates to German families

who had lost their homes to Allied bombing. Götz Aly estimated that

the mandatory aryanization of Jewish assets and the outright theft

of their personal property generated fi fteen billion to twenty billion

reichsmarks for the Reich and puppet governments in occupied

nations.26 This plundered Jewish wealth kept subject nations suffi ciently solvent to meet their fi nancial obligations to the Third Reich

and bound collaborationist regimes more closely to the German cause

by making them accomplices to genocide.

Upon refl ection, the Nazi imperial balance sheet was impressive.

Estimates vary, but it appears that the Third Reich extracted roughly

170 billion marks from its subjects, a fi gure that was approximately

three times the total German domestic revenues for the same period.

378 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Not only did this imperial windfall keep the Nazi armies in the fi eld,

it also kept the German people relatively comfortable for much of

the war. In the Reich itself, German household income remained at

approximately 78 percent of prewar levels for most of the confl ict.

The British and American rates, by comparison, were roughly half

this fi gure.27

For common Germans, the returns of empire were even more signifi cant in the occupied territories, where their status as a conquering power freed them from the conventional constraints of morality

and civil society. Nazi doctrines of racial supremacy meant that an

implicit perquisite of service in territorial administrations or military garrisons was the privilege of self-enrichment. In addition to

extraterritorial protection from local laws and taxes, German men

also acquired power over local women. As in earlier empires, their

wealth and status made them desirable companions for those who

sought to mitigate their subjecthood. These relationships ran the

gamut from formal prostitution to marriage. Either way, a German

military administrator’s humiliation of his French counterpart in the

days following France’s capitulation exposed the lie behind Operation Seduction and made it clear that sexual domination was also a

reality of occupation: “We are the victors! You have been beaten! The

women, even the children of your country, are no longer yours! Our

soldiers have the right to have fun, and if you do anything to slight

the honor of the German army you will be arrested.”28 Typically, the

subject women, particularly lower-class women, who suffered sexual

abuse at the hands of German men rarely had any legal recourse.

Although desperate Jews in the Warsaw ghetto fought back

against the Germans in 1943, the Nazi imperial regime’s denigrating

occupation policies and crushing extractive agenda produced surprisingly few incidents of open resistance in the fi rst half of the war. This

was due in part to the barbarity and utter ruthlessness of its internal

security systems. Any village or community that had the courage

to take up arms against the Nazis faced extermination. This was the

fate of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice, which the SS destroyed

entirely in 1942 as retribution for the murder of
Obergruppenführer

Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy Reich protector of the puppet state of

Bohemia and Moravia, by Czech partisans.

Freed from the constraints of conventional decency, the Nazis’ use

of brutality and terror as methods of imperial control were highly

France under the Nazis 379

effi cient. The SS and the Central Offi ce for Reich Security, which

coordinated and centralized the Reich’s various paramilitary and

secret police services, exercised direct control over domestic police

forces in subject nations. Exempt from judicial oversight and local

laws, these imperial enforcers had nearly total freedom of action

and answered only to Himmler himself. While in the east SS men

and security offi cers had the authority to punish subject populations

summarily, in western Europe the Nazis pretended to respect the rule

of law. But a special
Nacht und Nebel
(night and fog) decree empowered them to assassinate or abduct anyone who resisted openly. Those

who disappeared and survived ended up in one of twenty-three major

concentration camps, where overall survival rates were as low as

30 percent.

While this institutionalized brutality was formidable, violence and

intimidation alone can never serve as the sole foundation of imperial

rule. Even the Nazis needed local assistance to control their empire.

As the German police chief in Amsterdam explained: “The main support of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the

Dutch police. Without it, not ten percent of the German occupation

tasks would have been fulfi lled. . . . Also it would have been practically