The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  ‘NO BETTER OFF THAN PIGS’

  I

  Speer’s achievement in galvanizing the war economy into increased production, futile though it was to prove in the end, rested not least on the effective use of the labour force. The proportion of the industrial workforce engaged in arms manufacture had grown by 159 per cent from 1939 to 1941 and by the time Speer took up office, there was little room left for any further growth in this area. Speer encouraged the more efficient use of labour, not only through increasing the amount of shift-work but also through his general rationalization of production, halving the number of man-hours needed to make a Panzer III tank, for example. The number of combat aircraft made in German factories quadrupled between 1941 and 1944, and even if the choice of terminal dates for the statistics maximized the increase, the growth in production was still real enough. Yet this was achieved with an aircraft factory workforce that in 1944 was not much larger than it had been three years previously, at 390,000 instead of 360,000.67

  At the same time, fresh labour was poured into the armaments industries, increasing the size of the workforce dramatically in a few key areas. In 1942 the number of workers engaged in producing tanks grew by nearly 60 per cent. A 90 per cent increase in the number of employees in railway locomotive factories in the same year helped boost production from under 2,000 in 1941 to more than 5,000 two years later. The crucial growth came in ammunition production, where 4 50,000 workers were employed by the autumn of 1943, compared to 160,000 in tank factories and 210,000 in the manufacture of weapons. Here too there were major increases, although they had been inaugurated not by Speer, but by a programme announced on 10 January 1942 under Todt.68 The task of recruiting these new workers was allotted to the man whom Hitler appointed as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization on the creation of this new post on 21 March 1942: Fritz Sauckel. Sauckel was a very different character from a smooth, cultivated bourgeois professional like Speer. Born on 27 October 1894, the son of a post office worker, Sauckel grew up in poor circumstances in Franconia, left school at the age of fifteen, became a cabin boy on a freighter and spent the First World War in a prison camp when his ship was sunk by a French warship as soon as hostilities broke out. Back in Germany in 1919, he worked as a lathe operator in a ball-bearing factory before studying engineering. Here, therefore, was a real plebeian, in both his origins and his lifestyle. Unlike some of the other leading Nazis, Sauckel appears to have had a happy marriage, during which he fathered no fewer than ten children. In 1923 he heard Hitler speak and was converted by his message of the need for national unity. Sauckel remained loyal to Hitler after the failed beer-hall putsch of the same year, and Hitler rewarded him by appointing him Regional Leader of Thuringia in 1927. Elected to the Thuringian legislative assembly in 1929, Sauckel became Minister-President of Thuringia when the Nazis came out of the 1932 state elections as the strongest party.69

  In the 1930s, he not only led the Aryanization of one of the biggest arms manufacturers in Thuringia but also ensured that it was taken over by his own holding company, the Wilhelm Gustloff Foundation. Despite his origins, therefore, Sauckel was no stranger to the world of business and industry. His experience was to stand him in good stead in 1942. Sauchel’s plebeian populism found dramatic expression on the outbreak of war, when, after Hitler had turned down his request to be allowed to serve in the armed forces, he smuggled himself on to a U-boat as a stowaway, only being discovered after the submarine had put to sea. Given his prominence, the head of the U-boat fleet, Admiral Karl Dönitz, recalled the vessel to port, but the episode did Sauckel’s reputation no harm. A close ally of Martin Bormann, he seemed both to Bormann and, indeed, to Hitler to possess the qualities of energy and ruthlessness needed to solve the labour problem in 1942. His record as a hardline Nazi would reassure the Party that he was not going to be soft on ‘subhuman’ Slavs even if their labour was vital to the German war effort.

  The new post was directly subordinate to Hitler, which gave Sauckel, like Speer, enormous clout. He used it, at least to begin with, to work closely with Speer in organizing the recruitment above all of foreign workers, though the tensions between the two men were palpable, later turning into a real power-struggle. Other institutions that had previously played a role in labour mobilization, including the Reich Labour Ministry, the Four-Year Plan and the German Labour Front, were effectively sidelined. On the other hand, the element of coercion needed to put the mobilization into effect necessarily involved the Reich Security Head Office, whose head, Heinrich Himmler, thus became a third major player in this field alongside Sauckel and Speer.70

  There were already large numbers of foreign workers in Germany - over a million of them Polish - when Sauckel took up his newly created post. As Himmler and G̈ring considered Poles inferior racially and in every other way as well, they were thought only capable of working in simple, unskilled jobs in agriculture, where indeed they were badly needed because of the drafting of German labourers into the army and the longer-term migration of rural workers into the towns.71 Of the 1.2 million prisoners of war and foreign civilians working in Germany in May 1940, 60 per cent were employed in agriculture. The 700,000 Poles amongst them worked almost exclusively as farm labourers, though a few were employed in road construction. Attempts to draft them into the mines had met with little success; the Polish workers were inexperienced, many were in poor health, malnourished or unfit for the heavy physical labour required of coalminers, and their productivity was low.72 While Polish labourers had overwhelmingly been drafted into agriculture, however, the need by mid-1940 was for more workers in the arms industry - the deficit according to some armaments inspectors was as high as a million. The large numbers of French and British prisoners of war taken during the western campaign of May- June 1940 seemed eminently suitable. By early July 1940, some 200,000 of these had already been sent to work in Germany; the number increased to 600,000 by August 1940 and 1,200,000 by October 1940.73

  Yet attempts to identify skilled workers for deployment into the arms industry were less than wholly successful. By December 1940 over half of the prisoners were employed, like the Poles, in agriculture. The deficit had to be made up by civilian volunteers. They were recruited from the occupied western countries and from countries allied to Germany, and they were supposed in theory at least to have the same wages and conditions as German workers. By October 1941, there were 300,000 civilian workers in Germany from the western countries, 270,000 from Italy, 80,000 from Slovakia and 35,000 from Hungary. The Italians quickly made themselves unpopular with complaints about German food and with rowdy behaviour in the evenings, while the privileges they were accorded aroused resentment amongst native Germans. Nor did the foreign workers live up to their employers’ expectations. Most of them, as the Security Service of the SS complained, put little effort into their work. The reason was obvious: their wages were kept lower than those of their German counterparts, and were not tied to performance.74

  The invasion of the Soviet Union, however, introduced a whole new dimension to the deployment of foreign labour. Hitler, G̈ring and the economic managers of the Reich began, as we have seen, by regarding the people of the territories conquered in Operation Barbarossa as dispensable. Victory would be swift, so their labour would not be needed. By October 1941, however, it was clear that victory would not come that year, and industrialists in Germany were beginning to put pressure on the regime to supply Red Army prisoners of war, for example in the mines, where manpower shortages had caused a fall in production. On 31 October 1941, Hitler ordered that Russian prisoners of war should be drafted into work for the war economy. Using them as unskilled labourers would enable skilled German workers to be redeployed where they were most needed.75 So many Soviet prisoners of war had died by this time, however, and the condition of the rest was so poor, that only 5 per cent of the 3,350,000 Red Army troops captured by the end of March 1942 were actually used as workers.76 Thus the recruitment of civilians became even more urgent.

>   Using a mixture of advertising and inducements on the one hand, and coercion and terror on the other, the German civil and military authorities in the occupied eastern territories launched a massive campaign to recruit civilian workers even before Sauckel came into office. Armed recruitment commissions roamed the countryside arresting and imprisoning young, able-bodied men and women, or, if they had gone into hiding, maltreating their parents and families until they surrendered. By the end of November 1942 Sauckel himself claimed to have recruited over a million and a half extra foreign workers since his appointment, bringing the total up to nearly 5.75 million. Many of these, notably from the west, were on six-month contracts, and a proportion had been released as unfit, so that the actual number of foreign workers (including prisoners of war) employed in Germany in November 1942 was in fact no more than 4,665,000. This was a substantial achievement by Sauckel’s own lights.77 But it was still not enough. By 1942 the war in the east had turned into precisely the kind of war of attrition that Hitler had tried to avoid. From June 1941 to May 1944 the German armed forces were losing on average 60,000 men killed on the Eastern Front each month. In addition, hundreds of thousands more were put out of action by capture, wounds or disease.78 Replacing them was far from easy. Nearly a million more recruits were gained in 1942 by lowering the age of conscription; 200,000 more men were drafted in from jobs in the arms industry previously ruled exempt; raising the age of conscription to include the middle-aged had also been necessary to bring many of them in. But these measures in turn exacerbated the existing shortages of labour in the arms industry and in agriculture.79

  The more German soldiers died on the Eastern Front, the more the army drafted in fresh groups of previously protected German workers from the arms industries, and the more those industries needed to replace the departing employees with new cohorts of foreign workers. Unwilling to offend popular opinion in Germany by improving wages and conditions for foreign workers, the regime went over increasingly to compulsion even in the west. On 6 June 1942 Hitler agreed with Pierre Laval, the Vichy French Prime Minister, that he would release 50,000 French prisoners of war in return for the despatching of 150,000 civilian workers to Germany, in a scheme that was subsequently considerably expanded still further. Early in 1942 Sauckel demanded that a third of all French metalworkers, amounting to some 150,000 skilled labourers, be relocated to Germany, along with another quarter of a million workers of all kinds. By December 1943 there were over 666,000 French workers employed in Germany, along with 223,000 Belgians and 274,000 Dutch. The more determinedly Sauckel’s roving commissions seized workers from French factories, the more difficult it became to keep those factories producing munitions and equipment for the German war effort. Increasing compulsion led to growing resistance, just as had previously happened in Poland.80

  The scope Sauckel felt he had for forced recruitment in the east was considerably greater than in the west. As the military situation on the Eastern Front became more difficult, the army, the occupation authorities and the SS all began to abandon any remaining scruples in the recruitment of local inhabitants for labour. Speaking in Posen in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.’81 The SS burned down whole villages if the young men evaded labour conscription, picked up potential workers off the streets, and took hostages until sufficient candidates for conscription came forward - all measures that further fuelled recruitment for the partisans. Meanwhile, the military authorities in the east devised a plan (‘Operation Hay’) to seize up to 50,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen for employment in construction work for the German air force, or for deportation to Germany to work in arms factories. By such methods, the number of foreign workers from the occupied areas of the Soviet Union employed in Germany was boosted to more than 2.8 million by the autumn of 1944, including over 600,000 prisoners of war. By this time, there were nearly 8 million foreign workers in the Reich as a whole. 46 per cent of workers in agriculture were foreign citizens, 33 per cent of workers in mining, 30 per cent in the metal industries, 32 per cent in construction, 28 per cent in the chemical industry, and 26 per cent in transport. More than a quarter of the workforce in Germany consisted of citizens of other countries in the final year of the war.82

  II

  This massive influx of foreign labour changed the face of Germany’s towns and cities from the spring of 1942 onwards. Camps and hostels were set up all over Germany to house these workers. In Munich alone, for example, there were 120 prisoner-of-war camps and 286 camps and hostels for civilian foreign workers. In this way, 80,000 beds were made available for foreign workers. Some firms employed very large numbers: towards the end of 1944 the motor vehicle manufacturer BMW was housing 16,600 foreign workers in eleven special centres.83 The Daimler-Benz factory at Unterẗrkheim, near Stuttgart, which made aircraft engines and other war products, had a workforce of up to 15,000 during the war. Excluding the company’s research and development section, the proportion of foreign workers increased from roughly nil in 1939 to more than half by 1943. They were housed in seventy different facilities, including improvised barracks set up in an old music hall and a former school.84 In the Krupp steelworks in Essen, which had lost more than half its male German workers to the armed forces by September 1942, while at the same time having to cope with a doubling of turnover since 1937 in response to huge increases in military orders, nearly 40 per cent of the workforce consisted of foreigners by the beginning of 1943. They were there because the firm had put in repeated requests to the relevant government authorities (latterly Sauckel’s office), and because the company itself had gone on a recruiting drive for skilled workers in Western Europe. Top Krupp officials pulled strings in the German occupation administration in France to secure an allocation of nearly 8,000 workers, many of them highly skilled, in the autumn of 1942. Sauckel’s office even began to suspect that the company preferred skilled foreign workers to less well-trained and experienced German ones. In the Krupp company town of Essen, the foreign workers lived in private lodgings, or - if they were prisoners of war, or drafted from the east - in specially constructed and heavily guarded camps. The camps for Soviet workers were particularly badly built, with inadequate sanitation and a lack of bed-linen and other equipment. A large number of the civilians were under the age of eighteen. The diet they were allocated was markedly worse than that provided for other nationalities. One foreman at the Krupp vehicle manufacturing plant, who was also a sergeant in the SS and thus not likely to be sympathetic to Soviet workers, complained that he was supposed to get a decent day’s work out of men whose daily ration was ‘nothing but water with a couple of turnips floating in it, just like dish-water’. Another Krupp manager pointed out: ‘These people are starving and in no position to do the heavy labour in boiler construction for which they were assigned to us.’85

  Corruption was rife in the foreign workers’ camps, with commandants and officers siphoning off supplies and selling them on the black market, or hiring out skilled workers to local tradesmen in return for schnapps or food for themselves. There was a lively trade in leave permits, often forged by educated inmates working in the camp administration. At one camp, a German-Polish interpreter established a widespread prostitution ring, using young female inmates and bribing the German guards to turn a blind eye with food stolen from the camp kitchens. Sexual liaisons were common between German camp officials and female inmates; they were often coerced, and rape was not uncommon. For the sexual needs of the foreign workers, sixty brothels had been specially established by the end of 1943, with 600 prostitutes, all (at least according to the Security Service of the SS) volunteers from Paris, Poland or the Czech Protectorate and all earning a tidy sum of money by providing sexual services for the workers. Whether their work was quite as lucrative as the SS supposed was questionable. At one camp brothel in Oldenburg, for example, s
ome six to eight women clocked up 14,161 visits by clients in the course of 1943, earning 200 Reichsmarks a week, with 110 deducted for living costs.86 If these measures were intended to prevent liaisons between foreign workers and German citizens, they failed. Social contact between Germans and western foreign labourers was not banned if the latter were not prisoners of war, and there were inevitably many sexual encounters, so many, indeed, that the Security Service of the SS estimated that at least 20,000 illegitimate children were born to German women as a result, so that the ‘danger of foreign contamination of the blood of the German people was constantly increasing’.87