Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Above all, the Nazi leadership would not be faced with a rebellious population, as the Kaiser – diligently feeding his own prisoners of war – had been back in November 1918, when starvation and defeat had brought the people on to the streets and cost him his throne. The nightmare of a new uprising by hungry Germans was something that haunted the Nazis throughout the conflict. In the Second World War, unlike the First, the German people never went hungry, in any meaningful sense, until almost the end – although millions, even tens of millions, in the occupied countries did, in order that Germans might eat.

  The leadership’s calculation paid off. Although, as the news from the front got worse, millions of Germans became increasingly disillusioned with Hitler, only a tiny minority turned to active resistance. Along with the regime’s brutally efficient internal surveillance apparatus, and its draconian policing of the black market, its success in organising food supplies on a reasonably fair basis shored up support among the general public in the Reich. Despite the worsening military situation during 1943–4, the constant bombing of the cities, and catastrophic levels of casualties, particularly on the Eastern Front, the only serious uprising against the Nazi government was that of 20 July 1944, an elite affair that had little to do with the masses.

  It was not until February 1945 that mothers in bombed-out Berlin started complaining that, for the first time, they ‘could not get whole milk on a regular basis’.15 Whether their ignorance of why they had remained well provisioned for so long was based on lack of information or self-deception, women such as these were not prepared for what the end of the war would bring. ‘We were not hungry during the war,’ they would insist accusingly. ‘Everything worked! It was only afterwards that things got bad.’

  These hitherto privileged civilians would soon be faced not just with the end of imports and confiscations from conquered lands that had so long bolstered the German population’s standard of living, but with victorious powers who were determined that these citizens would pay for those years of plenty at other nations’ expense, and who now had the people of Germany at their mercy.

  While the letter of the Morgenthau Plan, as originally conceived in the autumn of 1944, was never wholly adhered to, it would be a long time before its spirit was banished from post-war food policy in Allied-occupied Germany.

  As for Roosevelt himself, his health was steadily declining even as he began his fourth presidential term in January 1945. Harold L. Ickes, the veteran Secretary of the Interior, told the President’s daughter, Anna Boettiger, that Roosevelt ‘did not seem to understand at times what people are saying to him’ and that he seemed ‘to forget quickly’.16

  The President was certainly liable to concede to the War/State Department axis one moment, then make fairly outrageous ‘Morgenthau’ comments the next. On 20 March, over lunch with Morgenthau (and John and Anna Boettiger, who appear to have been contemplating some kind of ‘regency’ on the ailing President’s behalf), Roosevelt seemed confused. Boettiger remarked that the army in Germany was irked by the latest version of JCS 1067, with its clear punitive provisions, which would make it harder to run the country. It wasn’t ‘workable’, and surely Germany couldn’t be allowed to stew in its own juice as Morgenthau proposed?

  ‘Let them have soup kitchens!’ Roosevelt responded. ‘Let their economy sink!’ When asked if he wanted the Germans to starve, he retorted: ‘Why not?’17

  A few days later, the President set off for a rest at his holiday cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia. On the early afternoon of 12 April 1945, having awoken with a headache and a stiff neck, he later seemed to be feeling better. The artist who was painting his portrait at the time, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, thought his colour more natural than it had been for some time. He started reading through papers while his secretary and lover, Lucy Rutherfurd, and Roosevelt’s old friend, Margaret Suckley, sat nearby. Then, without warning, he bowed forward and said, ‘I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.’ Within minutes the thirty-second President of the United States was dead. The rush of colour that had been thought to show an improvement in his condition had been a warning sign of the cerebral haemorrhage that killed him.18

  In February 1945, Hitler had told his private secretary, Martin Bormann: ‘An unfortunate historical accident fated it that my seizure of power should coincide with the moment at which the chosen one of world Jewry, Roosevelt, should have taken the White House . . .’19

  Now, in mid-April, the President’s death caused a great sensation in the Berlin bunker where Hitler and his cohorts waited, working and praying feverishly for a miracle that would save the Third Reich.

  Hitler’s fascination with the life and career of the Prussian King, Frederick the Great (reigned 1740–86) – to the end, he kept a portrait of ‘Old Fritz’ in his study – caused him, encouraged by Goebbels, to leap at the possibility that Roosevelt’s death was his ‘Tsarina Elizabeth’ moment. In January 1762, facing defeat in the Seven Years War at the hands of a coalition made up of Russia, France and Austria, with Russian troops occupying Berlin, Frederick had been plunged in gloom – only to hear, just days later, of the Russian Tsarina’s death. The new Tsar, her nephew, Peter III, was an eccentric young man who hero-worshipped all things Prussian, and swiftly – luckily for Prussia, because he was deposed and murdered later that same year – made a favourable peace with Frederick the Great. If something similar happened for Hitler after Roosevelt’s death, this would equal that intervention by the goddesses of fate.

  The clique in the bunker waited in vain. There was, of course, no miracle, no game-changing crack in the coalition against Hitler. In the meantime, however, the Führer had seen fit to add a few extra twists to the catastrophe he had already inflicted on the country he supposedly loved. First there was the so-called ‘Nero Order’, or scorched-earth policy, by which Hitler instructed all organs of the Nazi state, political, military and economic, to work together to destroy everything – ‘all military, transport, communication and supply facilities, as well as all material assets in territory of the Reich’ – so as to deny them to the advancing enemy. Hitler made it clear that the post-war quality of life of the German people, which would obviously collapse if these demolitions were carried out, was of no interest to him:

  If the war were lost, the nation would also perish. This fate was inevitable. There was no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people would need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it would be better to destroy these things ourselves, because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. Besides, those who would remain after the battle were only the inferior ones, for the good ones had been killed.20

  In fact, so Speer claimed, he managed to persuade Hitler to place the continuation of this campaign of senseless destruction in his (Speer’s) ministry’s hands, thus enabling him to minimise further catastrophic damage in practice, changing orders to destroy into orders to immobilise, and so on.21

  Amid the sprawling chaos of the German bureaucracy during those last months of the Reich, there were those already planning for the post-war period, for the phase during which the survival of the German economy (and its managing elite) must be secured and German industry’s energetic re-entry to the world market prepared.

  The activities of these experts were directed (and protected, for such work could involve suspicion of treason) by the powerful figure of Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, head of Department III (SD Inland) of the Reich Main Security Office and Deputy State Secretary at the Economics Ministry.

  One of the expert group’s leading brains was forty-eight-year-old Dr Ludwig Erhard. Erhard was a complex figure, a Bavarian economist (his Ph.D. dealt with the theory of value), a believer in free markets and global interdependence (not a view welcomed by the Nazis) who had already begun working on ‘worst case’ economic plans as early as 1942. The study he completed was entitled ‘War Financing and Debt Consolidation’ and co
vered such topics as ‘refloating’ the currency under circumstances of defeat and restoring free-market capitalism after the crypto-socialist autarkic experiment of Nazism.22 Though a non-Nazi with suspicious contacts to members of the anti-Hitler opposition, his brilliance, and usefulness to the technocrats within the Hitlerite establishment, kept him secure and in employment to the very end – ready, in fact, to face the shining future that awaited him after 1945.

  The great flaw in the post-war plans put together by this expert group under Ohlendorf’s protection lay not just in the tainted character of many of their main proponents (Ohlendorf himself would be executed after the war for his part-time activities as a mass murderer in the Ukraine and the Crimea in 1941–2), but in their false assumption that, as in 1918, a defeated Germany would continue to govern itself, albeit under Allied supervision. The same was even more true of plans made by German experts to evercome the problem of feeding the population during the approaching post-war period.

  The Reich’s food experts knew perfectly well that Germany had never been, and was still not, self-sufficient in food. Even in peacetime, Germany had relied on imports. The country would face grave problems feeding itself from its own, reduced resources – and that was if the situation got no worse.

  Well before the full, panic-stricken exodus from the eastern provinces began in January 1945, many millions of other Germans – up to a third of the civilian population – had already uprooted themselves from their normal surroundings, whether in the bombed-out cities or the rural areas threatened by the Allied advances.23

  This was both good and bad news. Good, because it meant that many more Germans than in the pre-war period were close to the physical sources of food production, and the transport and distribution networks were, therefore, less burdened than might otherwise have been the case. But at the same time bad, because even those not too old or too young for the labour force often found it hard to find productive work in these new environments and as a consequence remained dependent on state welfare of some sort or another.

  Luckily for the immediate prospects of the nation, Germany’s last wartime grain harvest, although a mediocre one, had mostly been gathered in and stored before the spectacular Allied advances began again in January 1945, and before the Anglo-American air forces’ devastating ‘transport’ campaigns of January–February finally wrecked the rail and canal networks so crucial to the distribution of food and industrial goods alike. It would be another three years before reliable connections were re-established between the crucial Ruhr industrial area and the other urban centres of Germany.24

  There were, however, serious problems even at this stage. Potatoes, largely coming from the east, could not be transported because of shortages of rolling stock, caused by Allied bombing. And as for the supplies of meat needed to keep the beleaguered Wehrmacht’s goulash pots bubbling, these could no longer be requisitioned from foreign sources. Clearly, more of the Reich’s domestic livestock had to be slaughtered, thus leaving the national reserve substantially diminished. And this was before the breakdown of normal organised life really accelerated.

  There was, finally, another grave, and in the longer term more ominous, problem. In the regime’s desperate, heedless attempt to maintain the expansion in the production of explosives and ammunition during the last phase of the war, huge quantities of the nitrogen fertilisers essential to successful large-scale food production within Germany – but also vital to munitions production – had been diverted to the armaments sector. As a result, and despite partially successful attempts by Backe’s ministry to protect fertiliser stocks, agricultural yields fell dramatically and would not recover for some years. It was a scorched-earth policy of a kind, perhaps, but, unlike Hitler’s noisy Götterdämmerung scheme for destroying infrastructure, a silent and covert one that would further hurt average German consumers just when they stood in greatest need.

  Minister Backe, the architect of the ‘Hunger Plan’, had concentrated during the winter of 1944–5 on feeding Berlin, above all other places.25 And until the dramatic Soviet advances of February–March 1945 robbed them of a large amount of Germany’s most productive agricultural land and the final crisis began, the Agriculture and Food Ministry had viewed the food situation in the Reich as ‘sufficient’. Nonetheless, a lot of secret planning had been undertaken to cope with ‘worst case’ scenarios.

  With support from Hans Kehrl, Speer’s planning chief, Backe had also secretly been setting up small local plants to process the yeasty sulphite suds that were a by-product of cellulose manufacture. These had previously been sold to breweries, but could be turned into a food rich in protein and vitamins, a substitute for meat. According to figures from April 1945, just weeks before the end of the war, fifty such plants were in existence, capable of producing 20,000 tons a year – enough to supply the basic protein needs of ten million children. Likewise, Backe managed to get Hitler to sign an order that protected at least part of German agriculture’s stock of workhorses from the frantic depredations of the Wehrmacht – which had always used a lot of draught animals but during the final months of the war, when petrol all but ran out, started to requisition farmers’ horses as well on a large scale. This threat became severe even as the planting season for the crucial first post-war harvest approached.

  So, during these final, bloody months of the Third Reich, the group of intelligent and highly competent technocrats around Speer and Backe – Backe being, so to speak, the ‘Speer’ of the food sector – knew, for all their loyalty to the Nazi state, that the war was lost. In general, they did their best, without endangering their own positions (not to mention their lives) by confronting the increasingly irrational Führer with this reality, to ensure that the inevitable end of Nazi Germany would not necessarily mean the end of the German people.

  The weakness in these managers’ plans was that they presupposed, or at least were sustained by the hope, that after the war Germans would still control their own economy and food production. Until the end, both Speer and Backe also harboured delusions that the victorious enemy would not be able to dispense with their expert services. All these things would not – most emphatically not – prove to be the case.

  To these looming operational and technical problems were added both the prospective hindrance of highly bureaucratic supervision by foreigners unacquainted with local conditions, and the threat of those same foreigners’ vengeful, punitive attitudes. This last factor alone would ensure things turned out even worse than feared for the conquered German population.

  There seems little question that Backe’s and Speer’s efforts, in maintaining Germany’s food supply and war industries respectively, had kept the Nazi war machine in operation well beyond its expected functional life. The ‘miracles’ they had so famously performed during this final phase were, however, pointless except in prolonging the war and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, probably millions more human beings – who might have stood a chance of survival had the Reich surrendered in, say, autumn 1944.

  To the end, production had relentlessly continued wherever humanly (or inhumanly) possible. Labour shortages had been apparent in Germany from the beginning of the war, and had become more and more desperate as millions of German workers, many extremely valuable to the production effort, were sent to the front, their lives and their skills sacrificed to the insatiable needs of the Wehrmacht. They were replaced by foreign labour, either prisoners of war (constant at around 1.5 million) or conscripted civilians from the occupied countries. During the early years of the war, most of the foreigners working in Germany had been POWs, many from France, working on farms. However, by the autumn of 1944, when the brutally coercive labour programme organised by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the ‘General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment’ (Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz), reached its height, 7.9 million foreign workers were employed in Germany, more than 20 per cent of the workforce.

  It was bitterly ironic that in the systematical
ly racist Nazi state, where homogeneity was close to a religion, foreigners had become a conspicuous feature of daily life to an extent that they had never before been in German history. In the armaments plants, more than a third of the workforce was of foreign origin, and in some sectors even more. Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch, responsible for aircraft production at the height of the war, quipped that the Stuka Ju 87 was ‘80 percent manufactured by Russians’.26

  With the arrival of peace, all those foreign industrial workers, concentration camp inmates, servants and POW farm labourers – at least eleven million in all throughout Germany and Austria at the beginning of 1945 – were suddenly free. Some stayed where they were, deciding there was safety in numbers or encouraged to do so by the Allies, who needed their work in the factories and services to keep basic industries going. But the rest ended up either wandering around defeated Germany or streaming home along the crowded, potholed roads and highways that had so recently been the scene of bloody battles and dramatic advances and retreats. These ‘displaced persons’ (DPs as they were universally known) had to be fed and housed by the newly installed occupation authorities until they could either be sent home or, if for some reason that was not possible or desirable, found permanent shelter and sustenance.

  Colin MacInnes described ‘Sergeant Mac’ coming up against this stream of liberated but still scarred humanity as his unit pushed on into the heart of Germany at the very end of the war: