The Second World War

by John Keegan

  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 exploitation of the East

  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.

  Massacre is endemic to campaigns of conquest; it had been the hallmark of the Mongols and had been practised in their time by the Romans in Gaul and the Spaniards in South America. It was an index, however, of the degree to which Western civilisation had advanced that massacre had effectively been outlawed from warfare in Europe since the seventeenth century; it was a consonant index of Nazi Germany’s return to barbarism that it made massacre a principle of its imperialism in its conquered lands. The chief victims of its revival of massacre as an instrument of oppression, however, were not those who opposed German power by offering resistance – resistance was what had chiefly invoked the cruel excesses of conquerors in the past – but a people, the Jews, whose very existence Nazi ideology deemed to be a challenge, threat and obstacle to its triumph.

  The fate of the Jews

  Jews had been legally disadvantaged in Germany immediately after the Nazi seizure of power; after 15 September 1935, under the so-called Nuremberg Laws, Jews were deprived of full German citizenship. By November 1938 some 150,000 of Germany’s half-million Jews had managed to emigrate; but many did not reach countries which lay outside the Wehrmacht’s impending reach, while the great concentration of Europe’s Jews, as yet unmotivated to flight, lived within it. That included the Jews of the historic area of settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia, some 9 million in number, as well as the great Jewish populations of Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Salonica and Lithuanian Vilna, the centre of Jewish religious scholarship. The diplomatic and military victories of 1938-9 put many of these East European Jews under Nazi control; Barbarossa engulfed the rest of them. Himmler, though he persisted in trying to establish his legal right to do so, began to massacre them at once. Four ‘task groups’ (Einsatzgruppen), divided into ‘special commands’ (Sonderkommandos) composed of German SS and securitymen and locally enlisted militias, had already killed one million Jews in the new area of conquest between June and November 1941. Most, however, had been killed by mass shooting, a method Himmler regarded as inefficient. In January 1942, at a meeting held at the headquarters of Interpol, of which Himmler was president, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, his deputy Heydrich proposed and received authority to institutionalise the massacre of the Jews, a measure to be known as the ‘Final Solution’ (Endlösung). Jews had been obliged to live in defined ghettos in Poland since the moment of occupation, and the order had subsequently been extended to other occupied areas. It was therefore not difficult to round up and ‘transport’ Jews for ‘resettlement’ in the east. Those sent to camps associated with an industrial plant run by the SS economic branch were usually worked to a state of enfeeblement before being sent to the gas chambers, though the old, the weak and the young might be gassed immediately; Auschwitz, the large camp in southern Poland, served both purposes. Those sent to the extermination camps, like Treblinka and Sobibor, were gassed on arrival. In this way, by the end of 1943, about 40 per cent of the world’s Jewish population, some 6 million people, had been put to death; of the last large European Jewish community to survive, the 800,000 in Hungary, 450,000 were delivered to the SS between March and June 1944 and gassed at Auschwitz.

  By that time, the head of the SS economic branch reported to Himmler on 5 April, there were twenty concentration camps and 165 subsidiary labour camps; in August 1944 the population was 524,286, of whom 145,119 were women. In January 1945 the total had risen to 714,211, of whom 202,674 were women. There were few Jews among them, for the simple and ghastly reason that the Final Solution was effectively complete. It seems possible, however, that Jews never formed a majority of the camp populations, since it was normally their fate to die on or soon after arrival; non-Jewish forced labourers, who were kept alive as long as they could work, may always have outnumbered them. In that irony lay a chilling dimension of Nazi racial policy. For the removal and transportation of Europe’s Jews was a fact known to every inhabitant of the continent between 1942 and 1945. Their disappearance defined the barbaric ruthlessness of Nazi rule, offered an unspoken menace to every individual who defied or transgressed Nazi authority and warned that what had been done to one people might be done to another. In a profound sense, the machinery of the Final Solution and of the Nazi empire were one and the same: because systematic massacre underlay the exercise of Nazi authority at every turn, Hitler needed to rule his conquered subjects scarcely at all. The knowledge of the concentration camp system was in itself enough to hold all but a handful of heroic resisters abject during five years of terror.

  SIXTEEN

  The War for the Islands

  The victory of Midway transformed the climate of war in the Pacific not only objectively but subjectively. From now on, the reheartened American chiefs of staff recognised, they could go over to the offensive. The question was: along which axis? The ultimate objective was the home islands of Japan, unless Tojo and his government could be brought to concede defeat before invasion became necessary. However, the home islands lay 2000 miles from America’s remaining Pacific bases in Hawaii and Australia, between each of which a formidable chain of Japanese island fortresses interposed to block an American amphibious advance. The ground which had been lost so quickly by unprepared garrisons – or through the absence of any garrison at all – between December 1941 and May 1942 would now have to be recovered step by step at painful cost. Was it better to proceed along the pathway of the great islands of the East Indies or to leap across the stepping-stones of the tiny, isolated atolls of the north Pacific?

  Choice of route implied choice of commander and of service. On 30 March 1942 the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marshall and Admiral King, had agreed on a division of strategic responsibilities in the Pacific. The new arrangement abolished ABDA and put Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet with headquarters at Hawaii, in charge of the Pacific Ocean Area and MacArthur, commander of army forces in the region with headquarters in Australia, in charge of the South-West Pacific Area. To choose the northern route would be to make Nimitz and the navy paramount – a logical step, since the Pacific had always been the navy’s interest. However, the small Marine Corps was its only military arm, and as yet it lacked the shipping, warships and men to stride across the atolls towards Japan. The army, by contrast, had the men, who were being shipped from the training camps to Australia in growing numbers; while the South-West Pacific Area route, which began close to Australia and proceeded along large islands that yielded at least some of the resources an offensive force required, demanded proportionately smaller shipping resources. To choose it, however, was to make paramount not only the army but its commander too. Although MacArthur had become a hero to the American people for his defence of Bataan, he was not popular with the nation’s admirals. A prima donna among subordinates and a man who brooked no equals, he would, they feared, usurp the direction of strategy by subordinating naval to army operations if the South-West Pacific Area was made the primary zone of the counter-offensive.

  Through stormy inter-service negotiations a compromise was reached. The services would take the southern route; but the area would be subdivided to allot part of the theatre to Nimitz and the navy, part to MacArthur and the army, which would have strictly limited call on the navy’s transports, carriers and bombardment fleet. The compromise, agreed on 2 July 1942, consigned Task One, the capture of the island of Guadalcanal, east of New Guinea, to the navy. Task Two, an advance into New Guinea and its offshore island of New Britain, where Japan had a major base at Rabaul, would go to MacA
rthur; so eventually would Task Three, a final assault on Rabaul.

  Guadalcanal, in the Solomons, committed both the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps to a desperate struggle. Though safely approachable from New Zealand, the departure point of the operation, it was surrounded on three sides by other islands in the Solomons group, which together formed a confined channel that was to become known to the American sailors as ‘the Slot’. Once troops were ashore, the navy was committed to resupplying them through these confined waters and so to risking battle with the Japanese in circumstances where manoeuvre was difficult and surprise all too easy for the enemy to achieve.

  The 1st Marine Division, a regular formation of high quality, was landed without difficulty on 7 August and also took the offshore islands of Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo. The Japanese garrison numbered only 2200 and was swiftly overcome. However, the appearance of the Marines on Guadalcanal provoked the Japanese high command to frenzy; ‘success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal’, a document later captured read, ‘is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or us.’ Since the Japanese recognised that a breach in their defensive perimeter at Guadalcanal would put the whole of their Southern Area at risk, they resolved on extreme efforts to retake it. On the night of 8/9 August off Savo Island they surprised the American fleet supporting the Guadalcanal landings, sank four cruisers and damaged one cruiser and two destroyers. From 18 August they poured reinforcements into the island, supported by naval guns and aircraft which continuously attacked its airfield (renamed Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot killed at Midway). On 24 August a fleet carrying the largest reinforcement yet dispatched was intercepted by the American navy east of Guadalcanal and the second of five battles fought in its waters ensued. This Battle of the Eastern Solomons was an American victory; though Enterprise was damaged, the Japanese lost a carrier, a cruiser and a destroyer and about sixty aircraft to the Americans’ twenty.