German industry’s unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust. But it is often overlooked in the popular imagination and in media portrayals of Nazi crimes, which tend to stress the role of the political police or the grotesque and horrifying extermination camps.
Forced labor in Germany can be divided into three overlapping categories: press-ganged foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates. Each group is frequently described as slaves or even, as Ben Ferencz has eloquently described Jewish forced laborers, as less than slaves.33 Still, there were important differences among these categories as far as the laborers themselves were concerned.
The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, though virtually every European nationality was represented. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agricultural labor. “All of the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way that they produce to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure,” Labor Minister Sauckel ordered.34 (Sauckel refers here only to men, but in fact about 25 percent of these workers were female.) As ominous as Sauckel’s phrase was, it nevertheless suggested that industry and the German state would make some minimal effort to keep most of these workers alive, if only to use them a bit longer. The workers were often euphemistically referred to as “foreign workers” or even as gastarbeiters—“guest workers.”
In contrast, Jewish concentration camp inmates and many Soviet POWs were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them. This procedure typically required between one and six months.35 The SS, which ran the concentration camps, teetered uneasily between contradictory policies of deriving valuable labor from camp inmates or of simply murdering Jews and other targeted groups as quickly as possible, regardless of the economic consequences. In practice, the police agency pursued both ends simultaneously, selecting some inmates for death-through-labor while immediately killing others wholesale.36 The prisoners worked to death were primarily Jews, though they were in time joined by groups of Polish and Russian POWs, homosexuals, “guest workers” who had attempted to escape from corporate work gangs, and others.
The Germans created a hierarchy among those they declared to be subhuman, and this structure—combined with heavy doses of police terror—contributed to keeping the system of forced labor and mass murder viable for several years. Typically, the Germans sent those at the bottom of the pyramid to be gassed: Jews who were old, weak, or very young; handicapped persons; and injured prisoners. They murdered millions of healthy Jews as well, as part of their Final Solution.
On the next step up, the SS in some cases preserved the stronger or more economically useful Jews, at least for a time. They worked these men and women to death in vast construction or mining projects; some were even used in less deadly skilled production tasks. On this same step could also be found many unskilled workers from the East, Soviet and French POWs, and others destined to be worked to death. Then came another group, which included laborers from Vichy France, Italy, Belgium, and Western Europe, who were ostensibly “volunteers” but who were in reality often captives of the German companies they served. There were still further variations of status and treatment among the foreign workers, depending upon the nationality and gender of the worker and the industry to which he or she was assigned.37
This system employed both coercion and reward within its cramped boundaries. Foreign laborers could gain improved rations or other benefits as a reward for increased production, for example. On the other hand, corporate managers could and often did push slackers and troublemakers down among the Jews and those marked for death.
As the war turned against Germany, the Labor Ministry turned to simple press-ganging of foreign workers. Sauckel told Albert Speer in early 1944 that “out of five million foreign workers who [recently] arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily.”38 Sauckel’s ministry began manhunts and roundups in the Nazi-occupied areas that hit consumer-goods factories, workers’ homes, theaters, and churches. In many instances, captives were shipped to Germany before they could bid good-bye to families or gather boots and winter clothes. Sauckel’s men treated Ukrainian and Russian women with special cruelty; females surprised in their beds were in some cases loaded into boxcars and shipped across Europe wearing only their underwear or a nightdress, much to the amusement of the guards.
In Ukraine, the violence accompanying labor recruitment grew so severe that even the Nazis’ own quislings complained to Berlin. One protest in 1943 from a German-sponsored local administration lists sixteen instances of violence during the supposedly voluntary labor enlistment campaigns; in one Ukrainian village that failed to meet its labor quota, the Germans murdered forty-five people, eighteen of them children between the ages of three and fifteen.*39
Industrial barracks for foreign laborers became de facto concentration camps, complete with barbed wire, searchlights, and armed guards hired by the companies. Corporate managers from Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler Benz, and similar companies enforced regulations under which laborers who “sabotaged production” or left their posts without permission were punished by beatings, hangings, or deportation to death camps. As the war ground down to its desperate conclusion, the rations for workers in some factories fell to fewer than 800 calories a day, guaranteeing epidemics, physical collapse, and a lingering death.
In the end, German industry worked several million of these men and women to death, and permanently injured millions more. One indication of the scale of the carnage can be gleaned from the difference between the number of job slots filled by foreign laborers and the number of workers actually shipped to fill those slots. If the German government reports are correct, German industry destroyed at least three million foreign workers between 1942 and 1944 alone. That, moreover, was before the winter of 1944–45, when mass starvation set in.40
The conditions in the SS concentration camps were still worse. In some, the starvation-killings began at least as early as 1939 and continued without respite for the rest of the war. There was no medical care to speak of, little clean water, no toilets, and no rest. Inmates who collapsed or failed to turn out for the morning roll call faced beatings or execution. There was no Red Cross, no correspondence with families, no redress for grievances, no holidays, no pay.
By the end of the war, the SS had created a network of twenty-three main concentration camps that served as the hubs of a submerged nation of prison laborers.41 These camps included Buchenwald in central Germany, Dachau near Munich, Mauthausen in Austria, Sachsenhausen just north of Berlin, and Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. These labor camps were usually separate from the extermination centers such as Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. The sprawling complex at Auschwitz, however, combined slave labor and mass extermination, and the inmate population there was at times larger than that of a small city—at least until the gas chambers could catch up.
The main SS labor camps were surrounded by at least 1,000 nebelgänger, “side camps,” established by German companies or by the SS.42 These facilities came under the administrative umbrella of the main SS camps, but as a practical matter they were maintained and run by the corporation or SS unit sponsoring the side camp. The Krupp steelworks, for example, controlled fifty-five of these camps in the Essen area alone. The guards at each were Krupp company employees, not SS.43 At some Krupp camps, inmates slept in barracks; at others, they slept in tents, in bombed-out buildings, or in piles of construction materials. The company kept 1,100 French prisoners of war in dog kennels at Noeggerathstrasse in Essen, where each six-foot-wide, three-foot-high enclosure provided sleeping space for five inmates. There was no water at the Noeggerathstrasse center.44
Health conditions were appalling. Many Krupp inmates had spotted fever, company doctor Wilhelm Jaeger reported to Krupp headquarters in 1942. “Lice, the carrier of this dis
ease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin, tortured the inhabitants of these camps.” Nearly all of the inmates became infected with skin diseases as a result of the filthy conditions, Jaeger said. The shortages of food also caused many cases of hunger edema (the starvation affliction first seen in World War I camps), nephritis (kidney disease), and Shiga-Kruse disease (dysentery).45 Most Krupp doctors refused even to enter the prisoners’ camps, fearing that they, too, might become infected by the typhus and other plagues prevalent there.
Despite this widespread and often public brutality, industrial exploitation of concentration camp labor paradoxically provided an important element in the SS’s cover story for the mass murders that it had begun at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other killing centers. The relatively visible forced labor of camp inmates provided some answer, however unsatisfactory, to the nagging questions concerning what had become of the hundreds of thousands of German Jews who had been quite publicly deported to the East.
Meanwhile, the Allies’ carpet bombing of Berlin and other cities accelerated German exploitation of forced labor. The Allied bombing—itself a war crime, some observers contend—tended to reinforce Nazi efforts to mobilize German society to carry out anti-Semitic measures, particularly the deportation of German Jews during the first years of the war. Clearly, Allied bombings did not cause the Holocaust. For Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other committed Nazis, the elimination of Jews was desirable in itself, requiring no justification. But for millions of ordinary Germans—for the “bystanders,” to use psychologist Ervin Staub’s term—whose active and tacit cooperation was necessary to implement Hitler’s genocidal designs, Allied bombing seemed to be a war crime against Germans that justified harsh retaliation against the supposed enemies in their midst, the Jews.46
The British bombing strategy was calculated to kill or maim as many German civilians as possible, to spread terror and demoralization, and to disrupt industrial production by burning the working-class quarters of cities to the ground. This was not pinpoint bombing of military-industrial targets, as Allied spokesmen frequently claimed at the time, but rather “a new offensive of which the primary target would now be the homes of the German people,” according to strategic analyst George Quester. “No longer would a city in Germany be spared because of its remoteness from clearly military targets, [and] no longer would specific targets in large cities be aimed at, rather than the city as a whole.… The ferocity of the area assault was really now to be restrained only by technical or meteorological obstacles.”47 The U.S. in time adopted many aspects of the British air strategy, as demonstrated in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and, later, in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the opening years of the war, when the U.S. was still officially neutral, President Franklin Roosevelt had forcefully condemned as a war crime any airborne bombing of undefended cities and towns. Great Britain and the U.S. were signatories to the 1907 Hague convention, Roosevelt said, which had banned “attack or bombardment by any means whatever of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended.” The phrase “by any means whatever” had been inserted specifically to deal with bombardments of undefended civilian targets from airplanes or—as had seemed more likely in 1907—from balloons.48
U.S. acknowledgment that bombing civilians constituted a war crime disappeared from Allied war propaganda after 1940. Great Britain and Germany began an escalating series of air strikes against one another in which each described its actions as legally sanctioned reprisals intended to deter attacks from the enemy. By the time the U.S. entered the war, the Allies had already concluded that British and U.S. air raids against German cities would remain among their most important tactics. Before World War II was over, both sides had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in this fashion, each blaming the other for initiating the carnage. As the Allies gained control of the skies over Europe, they stopped claiming that these acts of bombing were crimes, while the Germans stepped up their argument that the raids on cities were serious violations of the rules of war. The Nazis used Allied airborne “crimes against Germans” as a compelling and seemingly convincing reply for German audiences to the Allied charges of Nazi crimes in the occupied territories.49
Thus, contrary to Allied intent, bombing raids tended to mobilize the German population (at least early in the war), reduce passive resistance to Hitler’s policies among the German military and industrial elite, and facilitate a more dramatic shift toward total war mobilization than had previously been possible.50 The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, for example, found that Allied bombing had little negative impact on German war production up to the fall of 1944, and that the earlier Allied raids were actually accompanied by increases in the level and efficiency of German war production.51 (U.S. targeting of German oil and railroad centers in the last months of the war, in contrast, does seem to have had considerable military impact, though that conclusion remains in dispute among some senior bombing survey analysts.)52
Inside Nazi Germany, the Allied bombing fed directly into Hitler’s war against Jews as well as into more conventional patriotic and civil-defense activities. Propaganda Minister Goebbels repeatedly linked the Nazis’ genocide of Jews to Allied bombing in his broadcast speeches and in front-page editorials in the mass circulation weekly Das Reich. In May and June 1942, for example, shortly after the first 1,000-bomber Allied raids on Cologne and Essen, Goebbels declared that Germany would repay England “blow for blow” for the attacks on German cities. He went on to blame the purportedly “Jewish press” of London and New York for instigating Britain’s “bloodthirsty malice” against Germany. These Jews, Goebbels continued, “will pay for it [the bombings] with the extermination of their race in all Europe and perhaps even beyond Europe.”53
Goebbels was a master propagandist with a keen sense of Germany’s mood and national culture. He clearly believed that the bombings fueled German mobilization for genocide, giving ordinary Germans a justification for the deportation of Jews, or at least a further reason to remain silent as government officials and Nazi activists did the dirty work. Further, the bombings provided an opening for Goebbels to publicly endorse race murder as a partial solution to Germany’s problems—while at the same time maintaining the ability to deny that this was government policy when it was opportune to do so.
Otto Ohlendorf, a leading SS intellectual and ideologue, offered similar reflections during his postwar trial for the murder of 90,000 civilians by an Einsatzgruppe under his command. As Ohlendorf saw it, the Nazis’ mass execution of Jewish children by gas and gunfire was directly comparable to Allied killings of German children by bombing. The murder of Jewish children, he claimed, was a “security measure,” because otherwise “the children would grow up, and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of their parents.” He continued: “I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations.”54
The general public in Germany closely associated Jews with Allied bombing operations. At first, this took the form of popular hostility toward Jews as supposed foreign spies and manipulators behind Allied governments, a view that was systematically encouraged by the Nazi party and Goebbels’s ministry. Indeed, diehard Nazis and their sympathizers to this day present Auschwitz and other concentration camps as “security measures” created in response to Allied initiatives.55
Later in the war, however, the reverse idea seems to have taken hold among the German public, much to Goebbels’s distress. Beginning at least as early as the summer of 1943, confidential police reports indicate a widespread popular belief that Allied bombing was retribution for Nazi mistreatment of Jews. Many Germans believed that cities and religious bishoprics that had supposedly been less hostile to Jews would be immune to Allied air attacks.56
Similarly, many Germans throughout the war regarded Jews as useful hostages who could be employed to deter Allied bombers. In
Schweinfurt, the elite Nazi intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD) reported that “Many national comrades [i.e., Nazi party members] are of the opinion that the Jewish Question has been solved by us in the most clumsy way possible. They say quite openly that … our cities would still be intact if we had only brought the Jews together in ghettos [without deporting them]. In that way we would have today a very effective means of threat and counter-measure at our disposal.”57 These sentiments can also be found in letters sent by ordinary Germans to the Goebbels ministry, historian Ian Kershaw has reported. Such notes frequently included suggestions that Jews “should not be allowed in air-raid shelters but should [instead] be herded together in the cities threatened by bombing and the numbers of their dead published immediately after each air-raid,” or that the “Americans and the British should be told that ten Jews would be shot for each civilian killed in a bomb-attack.”58
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