The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  How far did business profit from the employment of forced and prisoner labour? Certainly it was indeed cheap. A Soviet prisoner of war, for instance, cost less than half to employ than a German worker did. Up to 1943 German business most probably gained financially from using foreign workers. But their productivity was low, particularly if they were prisoners of war. In 1943/4, for example, the productivity of prisoners of war in the coalmines was only half that of Flemish workers.135 But foreign labour was increasingly used on construction projects that did not yield significant profits before the war came to an end. The giant chemicals plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz, for example, was never completed, and never managed to produce any buna, though a facility to manufacture methanol, used in aircraft fuel and explosives, began operating in October 1943; by late 1944, it was producing 15 per cent of Germany’s total output of the chemical. In the longer term, the Monowitz factory did become a major producer of artificial rubber, but only well after the war was over, and then under Soviet occupation.136 A similar enterprise built using the labour of concentration camp inmates, among others, at Gleiwitz, cost the chemical firm Degussa 21 million Reichsmarks by the end of 1944, while sales from the products it was beginning to turn out netted no more than 7 million, and the facilities constructed by the prisoners were dismantled for their own use by the Soviet forces, after which what was left was nationalized by the Polish government. The eagerness of business to use the concentration camp system as a source of cheap labour, especially in the last two years of the war, reflected longer-term goals than the gaining of instant profits . By 1943, most business leaders realized that the war was going to be lost. They began to look ahead and position their enterprises for the postwar years. The safest way of investing was to acquire real estate and plant, and for this their factories had to expand to gobble up more land and get more armaments orders from the government. This in turn required the recruitment of more workers, and business leaders did not mind too much where they got them from. Once they acquired the workers, businesses often made their own decisions as to how they were to be exploited, regardless of the instructions of central planning bodies. The provision of forced labour, and still more the murderous conditions under which it was used, was the responsibility of the SS and the Nazi state. But a large part of the responsibility for its rapid expansion and exploitation lay with the businesses who demanded it.137 Altogether in the course of the war, some 8,435,000 foreign workers were drafted into industry; only 7,945,000 of them were still alive in mid-1945. Prisoners of war fared even worse: of the 4,585,000 who found themselves engaged in forced labour during the war, only 3,425,000 were still alive when the war ended.138 The survivors had to wait nearly half a century until they were able to claim compensation.

  Speer never achieved total domination over the economy. Although his influence was enormous, much of it depended on smooth cooperation with other interested parties, involving not only Göring and the Four-Year Plan but also the armed forces and their procurement officers such as Milch and Thomas, Sauckel and his labour mobilization operation, the Reich Ministry of Economics and the SS. In his memoirs, Speer drew a sharp contrast between the years when he was in charge and what he portrayed as the administrative chaos that preceded them; the contrast was overdrawn.139 On the one hand, Fritz Todt had already achieved a degree of centralization before his death; on the other hand, the administrative ‘polycracy’ that many historians have identified in the arms economy before Speer continued right up to the end of the war.140 Speer did his best to master it, but he never quite succeeded. Just as importantly, Speer was able to benefit from Nazi conquests. When taken together with the looting and forced requisitioning of vast amounts of foodstuffs, raw materials, arms and equipment, and industrial produce from occupied countries, with the expropriation of Europe’s Jews, with the unequal tax, tariff and exchange relations between the Reich and the nations under its sway, and with the continual purchase by ordinary German soldiers of goods of all kinds at an advantageous rate, the mobilization of foreign labour made an enormous contribution to the German war economy. Probably as much as a quarter of the revenues of the Reich was generated by conquest in one way or another.141

  Yet even this was insufficient to boost the German war economy enough to enable it to compete with the overwhelming economic strength of the USA, the Soviet Union and the British Empire combined. No amount of rationalization, efficiency drives and labour mobilization would have worked in the long run. The German military successes of the first two years of the war depended to a large extent on the element of surprise, on speed and swiftness and the use of unfamiliar tactics against an unprepared enemy. Once this element was lost, so too were the chances of victory. By the end of 1941 the war had become a war of attrition, just like the First World War. Germany was simply being out-produced by its enemies, and in the end there was nothing Speer could do to rescue the situation, however hard he tried. This had been clear to many economic managers even before Speer took over in 1942.

  At no point in the war was the ratio of the GDP of the Allies to that of the Axis countries, including Japan, less than 2:1, and by 1944 it was more than 3: 1.142 By the beginning of 1944, even Speer was starting to realize that the odds were hopeless. All his efforts simply postponed the inevitable. They were directed not at managing the arms supply crisis, but at disguising it. The mass recruitment of foreign labour, the rationalization, the desperate efforts at co-ordinating armaments production, all were fundamentally irrational undertakings that ignored the basic impossibility of Germany’s out-producing its enemies.143 On 18 January 1944, worn out by the strain of trying to achieve the impossible, Albert Speer fell seriously ill and was taken to hospital. It was nearly four months before he recovered sufficiently to be able to return to work. In the intervening period, his rivals, from Himmler to Sauckel, gathered like vultures around what they thought was his political corpse, hoping to pick off parts of his empire for themselves.144

  UNDER THE NAZI HEEL

  I

  In some versions, the New Order in Europe was not merely an economic idea but also encompassed political restructuring as well.145 Faced with the problem of administering the areas of Europe it dominated, the Third Reich came up with a characteristic hodge-podge of different arrangements. 146 While some areas like western Poland and small chunks of eastern France and Belgium were incorporated directly into the Reich, others, intended for later absorption, like Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg or Bialystok, were placed under the authority of the nearest German Regional Leader. A third category, with a somewhat indeterminate status, included the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Reich Commissariats of the Ukraine and the ‘Eastern Land’ (the Baltic states and Belarus), was run by a specially created German administration, although in the Protectorate there was also a large Czech element in the bureaucracy. In other countries under German occupation, there was a military administration if they were considered strategically important like Belgium, occupied France or Greece; countries considered ‘Germanic’, like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, were run by a civilian Reich Commissioner, using the native administration as far as possible. Only in Norway was a native fascist leader placed in power, although in another nominally independent state, Vichy France, a regime emerged which bore distinctly fascist traits. A fifth category consisted of client states such as Croatia or Slovakia, where there was a limited German military presence but German agents of one kind or another wielded huge power. Finally there were Germany’s allies, notably Hungary, Italy and Romania, where there was German influence but no German domination. The situation was fluid, however, changing partly with the military situation and partly with local conditions, so that countries sometimes moved from one category into another.147

  Economic exploitation was not the only priority for the occupying authorities. The ‘New Order’ demanded the racial restructuring of Europe as well as its economic rearrangement for Germany’s benefit. A major purpose of the German administr
ation of occupied countries as well as of German representatives in client states and allied nations was to implement there as well as at home ‘the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. Everywhere that they could, German administrators, civilian, military and SS, moved quickly to secure the passing of anti-Jewish laws, the Aryanization of Jewish property and finally the round-up of the Jewish population and its deportation to the killing centres of the east. Reactions to these policies varied widely from country to country, depending on the zeal of the Germans, the strength of antisemitic feeling in the local authorities, the degree of national pride in the population and the government and a variety of other factors. Almost everywhere, Jewish refugees from other countries were the first victims. They were generally offered little or no protection by the administration of the country in which they had sought safety from persecution in Germany or elsewhere; even native Jewish organizations were reluctant to do anything to help them. When the Germans moved against the native Jewish population of these countries, however, reactions turned out to be more complex, and more divided.

  Such moves generally began in 1941- 2 and so came before the emergence of any widespread resistance movements in occupied Western Europe. The speed and scale of the German military victories in 1940 had left most Western Europeans in a state of shock and despondency. Millions of refugees had to find their way home; the physical damage caused by military action had to be repaired; normal life had to be restored. Hardly anyone thought in 1940 or 1941 that Britain would survive the onslaught that Hitler would sooner or later undoubtedly unleash. Most people in the occupied countries of Western Europe decided to wait and see what would happen, and in the meantime get on with their lives as best they could. Those who undertook any form of resistance were very few. Before June 1941 the continued existence of the German - Soviet Pact also made it difficult for Communists to take action. Small groups of independent leftists and right-wing nationalists did engage in various kinds of resistance, but these did not include violent action, and overall they had little effect. For the great majority, Germany’s victories made it a country to be admired, or at least respected. They had demonstrated the effectiveness of dictatorship and the weakness of democracy. The prewar political order was discredited. Working with the occupying authorities seemed unavoidable.148 And for some, at least, defeat provided the spur to national regeneration.

  This was most obvious in France, where the armistice had been followed by a division of the country into an occupied zone in the north and along the western coast, and an autonomous area in the south and east, run by the government of Marshal P’tain from the spa town of Vichy. Technically this was the last government of the defeated and discredited Third Republic, but the parliament quickly voted P’tain full powers to draft a new constitution. The aged Marshal abolished the Third Republic but he did not create any formal replacement. Everything centred on himself. ‘Ministers are only responsible to me,’ he said on 10 November 1940. ‘History will judge me alone.’149 He developed a leadership cult. His portrait was everywhere, and he required all public servants to take a personal oath of loyalty to him. In Vichy France, mayors and other officials were appointed rather than elected, and it was P’tain who controlled the appointments process. Public opinion regarded him as the saviour of France. His regime took on a fascist tinge, proclaiming a ‘national revolution’ that would regenerate French society and culture. A new youth movement was to mobilize and discipline young people in the service of their country. Vichy proclaimed the virtues of the traditional family, with women in their proper place as wives and mothers. Catholic values were intended to replace the Godlessness of the Third Republic, and the clergy, high and low, duly lent their support to the regime. But Vichy never had the time or the coherence to develop into fully fledged fascism. Moreover, many of its policies soon began to alienate popular opinion. Vichy’s moral repressiveness was not popular among young people, and labour requisitioning by the Germans began to turn people against the idea of collaboration. The Deputy Premier, Pierre Laval, who liked to think of himself as a realist and therefore regarded the ‘national revolution’ with a healthy degree of scepticism, did not get on with P’tain and was dismissed in December 1940, but on 18 April 1942 P’tain recalled him to office as Prime Minister, and he remained there, increasingly taking over the reins of government from the aged Marshal, until the end of the war.150

  The triumph of Marshal P’tain and the far-right nationalists in France brought to power in the unoccupied zone a regime that was shot through to its core with antisemitism. This tradition derived partly from the military opposition to the campaign to exonerate the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been accused of spying for the Germans in the 1890s, partly from the antisemitic fallout of a series of notorious financial scandals in the 1930s, partly from the broader influence of the rise of European antisemitism under the impact of Hitler.151 The polarization of French politics during the Communist-supported Popular Front in 1936-7 under the Premiership of L’on Blum, who happened to be Jewish, added further fuel to the flames of antisemitic feeling on the right. And the immigration into France of some 55,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe, bringing the total Jewish population of the country to 330,000 by 1940, ironically stoked fears among the military of a ‘fifth column’ of agents working secretly for the German cause, along the lines they still believed had been followed by Dreyfus.152 More than half the Jews living in France were not French citizens, and a high proportion of those who were had acquired their citizenship after the First World War. These now became the first target of state discrimination. Already on 18 November 1939, well before the defeat, a new law provided for the internment of anyone who was considered to be a danger to the French Fatherland, and some 20,000 foreigners resident in France, including many Jewish immigrants from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, were put into prison camps; many were released after a short time, but as soon as the German invasion began, all German citizens, most of them Jewish, were arrested once more and taken again to the camps. Jews from Alsace-Lorraine, France and the Benelux countries were among the millions who took to the road in terror, fleeing to the south. At the same time, antisemitic campaigners like Charles Maurras and Jacques Doriot plumbed new depths in their rhetorical attacks on the Jews, whom they now blamed for the French defeat, a view shared by many senior figures on the political right as well as large parts of the French population in general and, not least, by the Catholic Church hierarchy in France.153 In the following wartime years, other antisemitic writers, such as Louis-Ferdinand C’line, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle or Lucien Rebatet in his bestseller Les D’combres, were to echo such views and, in Rebatet’s case at least, to describe French Jews as weeds that had to be destroyed root and branch.154

  After the French defeat and the creation of the Vichy regime in the unoccupied zone, P’tain’s government first repealed legislation banning incitement to racial or religious hatred, then on 3 October 1940 passed its first formal measure against the Jews, whom it defined as people with three or four Jewish grandparents, or two if they were married to a Jew. Jews were banned in particular from owning or managing media concerns. Jewish professors were with a few exceptions dismissed from their posts. These measures had validity for the whole of France, including the occupied zone; in addition, when the German authorities in the occupied zone took steps against the Jews, the Vichy regime frequently followed suit under the pretext of preserving the administrative unity of France. On 4 October 1940 another law created special internment camps for all foreign Jews in the Vichy zone. 40,000 Jews were interned in them by the end of 1940.155 Native French Jews and their leading representatives assured the Vichy regime that the fate of the foreign Jews was not their concern.156 For the moment, they remained relatively unaffected. But this would not last. As early as August 1940 the German Embassy in Paris had begun urging the military authorities to remove all Jews from the occupied area.157 Action soon followed.

  In the occupied
zone of France, the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz, urged immediate measures against the Jews. With Hitler’s explicit approval, Jewish immigration to the occupied zone was banned, and preparations were made for the expulsion of all Jews who were still there. On 27 September 1940, with the agreement of the army Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch, Jews who had fled to the unoccupied zone were banned from returning, and all Jewish persons and property were to be registered in preparation for expulsion and expropriation. From 21 October 1940 all Jewish shops had to be marked as such. By this time the registration of around 1 50,000 Jews in the occupied zone was essentially complete.158 The Aryanization of Jewish businesses was now driven rapidly forwards, while the economic foundation of the Jews’ existence was increasingly undermined by a series of ordinances that banned them from a whole variety of occupations. Jews were forbidden to enter bars where members of the German armed forces were customers. And the SS began to take an increasingly active role, led by Theodor Dannecker, the officer responsible for the ‘Jewish question’ in the Security Service of the SS in France. Dannecker ordered the arrest and internment in camps of 3,733 Jewish immigrants on 14 May 1941. The Vichy regime also began carrying out Aryanization measures along the same lines, confiscating Jewish assets and businesses. By early 1942 some 140,000 Jews had been officially registered, enabling the authorities to pick them up whenever they wanted to.159 Preparations to deport them began in October and November 1941, following a series of meetings between Himmler and senior figures in the French occupation administration, including Abetz, in September 1941.160

  Many of these refugees had been opponents of the Nazi regime, and a good number were hunted down ruthlessly by the Gestapo. A special fate was reserved for one Jewish refugee in particular. In June 1940, a Gestapo unit arrived in Paris to secure the young Pole Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a German diplomat there had been the pretext for the launching of the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938. Grynszpan had in fact been moved by the French prison authorities to Toulouse. En route he had actually escaped, perhaps with the connivance of his captors, or perhaps he had simply got lost, but, amazingly, he turned up at a police station not long afterwards to present himself to the authorities. The Gestapo were quickly on the scene. After interrogating him in their notorious cellars in the Prinz Albrecht Street in Berlin, no doubt about his supposed but in fact purely imaginary Jewish backers, they took him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was admitted on 18 January 1941 and seems to have received relatively privileged treatment. In March 1941 he was transferred to Flossenbürg, and in October to the Moabit prison in Berlin to await trial by the People’s Court under Otto-Georg Thierack. Meanwhile a legal team had been sent to Paris to try to find evidence for the claim, put forward in 1938 as justification for the pogrom, that he had been acting as part of a Jewish conspiracy. It failed to find any. Worse still, it now became clear that the man he had shot, vom Rath, was homosexual, and rumours were circulating that the two had been involved in a sexual relationship. There was no truth in the allegations, but the danger of embarrassment was still considerable, so Goebbels decided to abandon the idea of a trial. Grynszpan was transferred to the penitentiary at Magdeburg in September 1942, where he seems to have died early in 1945, whether or not from natural causes is uncertain.161