None of these popular German myths had any basis in fact. There is no indication in available intelligence records that the Allies avoided bombing Jews in German cities, nor did the treatment of Jews in any German locality play a role in Allied targeting decisions.59 In fact, Allied bombing may have taken a disproportionately high toll of Jewish lives, because the air raids often targeted factories and docks where the Reich had concentrated thousands of forced laborers. British raids in March 1943, for example, wiped out 100 prisoners at one Krupp works in Essen, killed 820 and wounded 643 at another Krupp plant, then killed 230 prisoners at the Heinkel aircraft works north of Berlin. A Krupp management report filed late in the war indicated that three company prison camps had been “partially destroyed,” thirty-two camps had been “destroyed,” and twenty-two had been “twice destroyed” by Allied bombing. All of the Krupp camps in Essen had been damaged, compounding the existing health and shelter problems.60
Allied bombing spurred German industry’s demands for concentration camp labor and often encouraged public acceptance of mass slave labor as a legitimate war measure. For example, Hamburg was the center of German submarine production and a likely target for Allied bombers. The city prepared for the worst and undertook extensive civil defense measures, requiring millions of tons of cement, bricks, and other construction material.61 The SS established a major concentration camp, brickworks, and stone quarry at Neuengamme, in Hamburg’s suburbs, in part to meet this demand. In time, the Neuengamme forced-labor center became the flagship of the SS’s commercial subsidiary, the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke AG (German Earth- and Stoneworks Company, or DESAG), which provided considerable income to the police agency. When the air raids came to Hamburg in 1943, the SS marched their tattered wretches out of the camp for new tasks in the center of town. There, tens of thousands of Germans saw forced laborers at work, excavating unexploded bombs, clearing rubble, and pouring new cement at docks and factories throughout the city.62
By the end of that year, the Hamburg city government and a score of private German military contractors acquired squads of prison laborers from the SS for use in heavy construction, clearing bomb damage, and similar tasks. Within a year, hundreds of large companies in northern Germany had their own forced laborers, and several factories maintained full-scale, company-owned concentration camps for these workers. By the end of the war, the Neuengamme camp alone had distributed more than 100,000 inmates to factories throughout northern Germany.63
City governments and private enterprises throughout Germany and the German-occupied territories followed roughly the same pattern of exploitation of concentration camp inmates for civil defense and bomb-clearing duties established by Hamburg. The Sachsenhausen camp fed much of Berlin’s demand for forced labor, Dachau provided for Munich, and Buchenwald sent thousands of inmates to toil in central Germany.64
German subsidiaries of U.S. companies, including General Motors, Ford, and several oil companies, made extensive use of forced labor as well. Buchenwald concentration camp supplied labor to GM’s giant Russelsheim plant (which the Germans converted to aircraft engine production for Junkers during the war) and to the Ford truck plant at Cologne.65 International Red Cross records suggest that Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück provided prisoners for the Ford and GM plants at Berlin and Brandenburg, but the evidence on that point remains fragmentary owing to the complexity of the German system for allocating forced laborers. It is clear, however, that camp inmates were used for bomb-clearing, cleanup, reconstruction, and other services essential to these factories, particularly during the later war years. Ford’s German management also extensively exploited Russian POWs for war production work, which is generally considered a war crime under the Geneva conventions.*66
The prisoners’ civil defense work became an important pillar of the system of mass forced labor in Germany. By bringing the violence of war home to German cities, the Allied bombings contributed substantially to the atmosphere where mass slave labor could be accepted as an “ordinary” fact of life by Germany’s civilian population, at least for the duration of the war. If participation in genocide is in fact a learned behavior, as psychologist Staub contends, it was German industry’s Aryanizations, forced labor, and and response to Allied bombing that helped infect ordinary Germans with this disorder. A somewhat similar pattern of “learning by doing” emerged among SS men and German soldiers on the Eastern Front, reports historian Christian Streit.67
Importantly, the framework of international law constructed by Robert Lansing, John Foster Dulles, and others in the wake of World War I obstructed efforts to confront Nazi crimes. Much of the expertise in international law in both the United States and the United Kingdom was centered in their foreign ministries, which dealt with international legal affairs daily. By the beginning of the Holocaust, these offices played a dominant and at times exclusive role in formulating international legal precepts and in defending the Lansing-Dulles status quo. The principal U.S. government experts on international law were usually staunch advocates of a cramped conception of legality that supported the Hitler government’s claims that it could treat its civilians as it wished.
The international law experts at the U.S. Department of State considered German forced labor to be legal—or, perhaps more precisely, not illegal—under international law and custom as it then stood. They regarded it as inappropriate for outside governments to meddle in almost any form of exploitation that had been authorized by the German state, as long as it took place within the Reich itself. Further, Jewish (and other) activists in the West who sought to extend international legal authority to protect rights of slave laborers inside Germany were considered indirect threats to U.S. interests, because their proposals would require official U.S. recognition of the rights of laborers far beyond what the State Department regarded as prudent. Observers such as George Kennan, Joseph Grew, and other stalwarts of the “Riga” faction within the Foreign Service regarded almost any German depravity against the USSR to be legal, because they regarded the Soviet government to be an illegitimate regime that had refused to commit itself fully to civilized conventions.68
Most of these Western experts had difficulty coming to grips with the growing evidence of Nazi criminality. “It cannot be said that German policy is motivated by any sadistic desire to see other people suffer under German rule,” wrote George Kennan in April 1941, when he was chief administrative officer of the U.S. consulate in Berlin. (He wrote this after almost two years of well-publicized pogroms in Poland and mass deportations of German, French, and Dutch Jews to concentration camps.) “Germans are most anxious that their new subjects should be happy in their care; they are willing to make what seems to them important compromises to achieve this result, and they are unable to understand why these measures should not be successful.”69 Kennan was out of step with President Franklin Roosevelt’s hard-line policies toward the Nazis, but he was not alone.
The public pattern of Nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal. For them, Germany’s forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to problems that were common to U.S. and German elites. They ignored the reports of the Holocaust that had begun to come out of Nazi-occupied Europe, and some even went out of their way to discredit accurate information about what the Nazis were up to.
* Schulte’s information concerning mass executions of Jews through the use of prussic acid—Zyklon-B gas—was the capstone of a mountain of evidence concerning the Nazis’ intentions that had been building over the previous twelve months. The Czech and Polish governments-in-exile in London had repeatedly brought forth detailed news of the “cold pogroms” and related terror. On July 2, 1942, BBC broadcasts featured Polish-Jewish spokesman Szmul Zygielbojm, who stated bluntly that the Nazis’ strategy in Poland consisted of the “planned extermination of a whole nation by means of shot, shell, starvation and poison gas. It will really be a shame to live on, a shame to belong to the human race,” he continued, “if
means are not found at once to put an end to the greatest crime in human history.” Zygielbojm and the Polish National Council simultaneously presented a detailed report on Nazi atrocities in Poland to all members of both houses of the British Parliament. Even before the arrival of Schulte’s news concerning poison gas, the British government was prepared to concede on the basis of the Polish evidence that some 700,000 Jews “had been murdered or starved to death [in Poland alone] since the outbreak of the war.”
It was in this context that Schulte’s message became a political rallying symbol, at least among those who had been paying attention to events in Europe. Here at last was “proof,” said to be direct from the Führer’s headquarters, that in a few taut sentences summarized the thousands of earlier fragmentary reports. The Schulte telegram was not new information: It was a conclusion, and a symbol that was capable of crystallizing substantial new action in defense of Hitler’s victims.
* The true number of these workers will probably never be known, because postwar German industry has had a strong incentive to destroy all evidence of this aspect of its history. The estimate of the number of forced laborers most often cited is drawn from a 1944 end-of-year report to Hitler from Labor Minister Fritz Sauckel, where the minister proudly claims to have “recruited” 5.3 million foreign laborers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates for the Reich since his appointment as minister in 1942. The overwhelming majority of these “recruits” were in fact brought to Germany at gunpoint, as even Sauckel admitted. The 5.3 million figure was accepted by the prosecution at Nuremberg, in part because Sauckel could not deny having made it, and the enormous scale of the forced labor program eventually became an important factor in the court’s decision to convict and hang Sauckel for crimes against humanity.
But 5.3 million forced laborers is clearly an underestimate. The Ministry for Armaments and War Production (the Speer ministry), for example, calculated at about the same time that 8.1 million foreign laborers had been compelled to work in German industry between 1942 and 1944. Sauckel’s figures, as it turned out, concerned only the total number of work “slots” for forced laborers at the time of his report. He did not record statistics on those who had been worked to death or otherwise murdered, those who had escaped, or those who had been replaced for other reasons. Further, Nazi Germany had conscripted another five million laborers, most of them Poles and Jews, before 1942. These persons did not appear as statistics in either Sauckel’s or Speer’s report.
“This meant that a total of at least ten million foreigners were recruited” for labor, according to Edward Homze, a specialist in modern German labor history. “The [ten million] figure, however, must be considered a conservative estimate.… by the end of 1944, at the peak of employment of foreign workers, one out of every five workers employed in the Reich was a foreigner.”
* The Nazis’ forced labor program actually contributed significantly to the growth of anti-Nazi resistance in the occupied areas, contrary to the Germans’ intentions. That at least was the opinion of a committee of Wehrmacht generals, who petitioned Berlin during the war for a suspension of the labor program because it was sparking powerful opposition almost everywhere it was attempted. Similarly, the U.S. Army guerrilla warfare specialist Edgar Howell, who studied Nazi counterinsurgency tactics in the Ukraine during the development of the United States’ own counterinsurgency doctrine, concluded after the war that “the German labor program … probably contributed more to the ultimate frustration of the German war effort in the rear areas than any one other policy.”
* These subsidiary companies were not run from Detroit during the war, as has sometimes been alleged, nor did the German subsidiaries repatriate profits to the U.S. or report their activities to the parent companies. It is nonetheless true that the German directors and trustees who did manage those factories during the war—who competed for political influence, war-production contracts, and supplies of forced laborers—were to a large degree the same German bankers, lawyers, and corporate leaders who had been appointed by the parent companies in the U.S. to run these facilities prior to the war, and who often continued in their posts after the conflict ended. In Ford’s case, the ambitious Berlin attorney Heinrich Albert served as company director, tireless promoter of military production, and leader of Ford’s effort to “de-judify” the company before and during the war.
7
No Action Required
Both before and during World War II, the U.S. State Department’s European Division and legal advisor’s office were dominated by specialists in U.S.-German and U.S.-Soviet relations who contended that American interests would be best served by staying out of the deepening European conflict. Until late 1941, they favored retaining cool but proper diplomatic relations with the Axis states. Like George F. Kennan, State’s specialists discounted reports of Nazi atrocities, attributing those massacres that could not be ignored to the random violence of war. The “special measures” that the Nazis had publicly initiated against Jews were regrettable, they said, but were not a matter in which the U.S. government wished to interfere. The leaders of this informal grouping at the State Department included the chief administrative officer, Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long;1 the chief advisor on political affairs, James Clement Dunn;2 wartime ambassador and political advisor Robert Murphy;3 Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew;4 legal affairs chief, Green Hackworth;5 the chief for Soviet and Eastern European affairs, Loy Henderson;6 European expert H. Freeman Matthews;7 European Division assistant chief John Hickerson;8 Jewish affairs specialist R. Borden Reams;9 and other senior staffers such as Elbridge Durbrow.10 Each made his own interpretation of wartime events, of course, but taken together, these men became the core of a faction within the U.S. government whose conception of national security led them to deny the Holocaust, obstruct efforts to rescue Hitler’s victims, and, later, to oppose trials of Nazi Germany’s leaders.
The situation in the British Foreign Office was disturbingly similar. There the tone was set by Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, who was once described by his personal secretary Oliver Harvey as “hopelessly prejudiced” against Jews. “This is largely due to the blind pro-Arabism of the FO [Foreign Office] which A.E. [Eden] has never resisted,” Harvey noted in his diary. “Indeed, he is a blind pro-Arab himself.”11 Harvey’s comments were not entirely accurate: Eden’s central concern was the maintenance of the increasingly rickety British Empire, and he was pro-Arab only to the extent that it served that end. Even so, there was an undertone of anti-Semitism in the British Foreign Office that frequently played a part in wartime policy concerning investigation of Nazi criminals and the rescue of Jewish refugees.
By the fall of 1941, reports of German atrocities were becoming harder to dismiss, on the one hand, and more useful as a theme in Allied propaganda, on the other. On October 25, 1941, just prior to the U.S. entry into the war, the Nazis’ mass execution of prisoners in France led President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to make an unusual joint public condemnation of German atrocities.12 Within three months, nine European governments-in-exile in London established the Inter-Allied Conference on the Punishment of War Crimes and issued the first policy statement on the prosecution of Nazi criminals of the war. This Declaration of St. James, as it became known, accused Germany of creating in the occupied countries a regime of terror that was characterized by “imprisonments, mass expulsions, the execution of hostages and murder.” Henceforth, they declared, one of the principal aims of the war should be “the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of … these crimes.” The Nazis should be “sought out, handed over to justice and judged.”13
Despite the tough language, the declaration was silent concerning those who were the central target of Nazi persecution: Jews. The earlier protests from Roosevelt and Churchill had also sidestepped mention of Nazi anti-Semitism, as had similar declarations from the Poles, Czechs, and the USSR. This “very delicate matter,” as it was termed in a later officia
l history of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, was temporarily finessed in the St. James Declaration by a claim by the signatory governments that “if no particular mention had been made of the suffering of the Jews, it was because it had been considered that such a mention would have been a recognition of German racial theories.”14
The British Foreign Office meanwhile saw the Declaration of St. James—and, indeed, any public promise to punish war criminals—as a disturbing development. “This is getting pretty near the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ thing,” a Foreign Office aide, Orme Sargent, told Eden. The declaration “throws the net very wide” in its definition of war crimes, commented another aide, Roger Makin, “and takes us into paths where we are very reluctant to tread.”15
What Makin was getting at behind his garbled metaphor was a series of interlocking concerns over the implications for British foreign policy of Hitler’s war crimes. First of all, Makin reasoned, too much attention to this issue by the Allies would surely increase pressure on Britain to loosen its immigration policies for Jews in Palestine—in fact, the pressure was already building from Jewish organizations at home and abroad. The Foreign Office had traditionally pursued a hard line against Jewish immigration to Palestine and was “terrifically worried,” as Franklin Roosevelt put it,16 about an Arab uprising against the British if it were permitted to increase. This concern was heightened by the situation in North Africa, where British troops were seeking a breakthrough against Rommel’s forces and the Germans were trying to coax Arab leaders over to their side.
Second, and equally important, there was the controversial matter of how to go about ending the war. There was no doubt at the British Foreign Office that Germany must be defeated. But it was considerably less clear in 1942 exactly what the terms of an armistice might be. Foreign Office and War Office documents of this period reflect the assumption that there probably would not be an unconditional German surrender, but rather that Germany would likely retain control of a substantial portion of its occupied territories at the time of any negotiated peace agreement. That assumption, in turn, was tied up with what was probably the single most explosive strategic issue of the war: the possibility of a separate peace agreement between any one of the major Allies and Nazi Germany, perhaps on terms that would permit the Germans to continue their war against the USSR. A hard line on war crimes, particularly one that insisted on international trials for senior members of the German government, would inevitably undermine any British efforts to negotiate an armistice, the Foreign Office reasoned from its experience in World War I.17
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