The Scourge of the Swastika
Page 16
The extension of this principle to the occupied territories in 1941 despite its prohibition by International Law can, therefore, occasion no surprise. It was one of the elementary components of the policy of Nazi domination and proceeded directly from the theory of the ‘Master Race’ and the conception of total war.
If there was a shortage of labour in Germany which imperilled the war effort, slaves would be brought in from the occupied territories. They would work for a German vietory—so long as they were able. When they became too feeble or too ill to work, let them die. If they did not die quickly enough, they would be given assistance; put to death in the gas chambers of the concentration camps and their remains cremated in the camp ovens. But let there be no waste; their by-products must be utilized; their blood and ashes as fertilizer, their hair to make cloth, and the gold in their teeth to swell the coffers of the Reichsbank.
Such was the Nazi view. And as they thought, so they acted.
The International Law regarding forced labour by the inhabitants of occupied territories is set out in Article 52 of the Hague Convention which was binding on the Germans in 1939.
Requisition in kind and services shall not be demanded from municipalities or inhabitants except for the needs of the army of occupation. They shall be in proportion to the resources of the country, and of such a nature as not to involve the inhabitants in the obligation of taking part in military operations against their own country.
Nor has an Occupying Power any right to deport the inhabitants to its own country and compel them to work there. This was done during the First World War on a comparatively minor scale and large numbers of French and Belgians were sent to Germany to work, but the practice was universally condemned by other nations. In the Second World War, however, the deportation of the inhabitants of occupied territories was carried out on such a vast scale and in circumstances of such brutality and degradation that the practice in the 1914/18 war fades into insignificance.
The Nazi slave labour policy had two objects; one was to use foreign labour to maintain the impetus of the German war machine; the other, a logical outcome of the Nazis’ racial doctrine, was to weaken by extermination ‘inferior’ peoples. It was never the intention that the majority of these deportees should ever survive their ordeal and return home. They died or were killed in hundreds of thousands, and many thousands more are still displaced persons.
An integral part of the general Nazi plan of total war, the slave labour programme was formulated and directed by Sauckel and Speer. Both these men were convicted by the Nuremberg International Tribunal; Sauckel was sentenced to be hanged and Speer to twenty years’ imprisonment. In dealing with Sauckel’s responsibility, the Tribunal in their judgment said that his attitude to the slave labour programme was expressed in one of the regulations which he issued: ‘All the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.’ And so they were.
They were transported from their homes and their country in conditions usually considered quite unsuitable for cattle; they were crowded together in filthy quarters; they were overworked and underfed, and when they were no longer fit to work but refused to die, they were sent to a concentration camp where they were gassed and their bodies cremated in the camp ovens. According to Sauckel the aim of this labour policy was to use all the resources of what he called conquered countries, including all raw materials and human labour power, completely and conscientiously to the profit of Germany and her allies.
Wherever the German armies went the inhabitants were rounded up and sent to the Reich to work. Some attempt was at first made to obtain volunteers, but when this was conspicuously unsuccessful all pretence of voluntary recruitment was abandoned, and the workers were obtained by a combination of fraud, force, and terror.
The first victim, of course, was Poland. Frank, Hitler’s Gauleiter in that country, set a target of a million workers and ordered his police to surround Polish villages and use press-gang methods.
‘The supply and transportation of at least a million male and female agricultural and industrial workers to the Reich—among them 750,000 agricultural workers of which at least fifty per cent must be women—in order to guarantee agricultural production and as a replacement for industrial workers lacking in the Reich.’ These were his demands.
As early as May 1940 compulsion began to be used as there were insufficient volunteers to satisfy the Reich’s requirements. ‘The arrest of young Poles when leaving church services or the cinema,’ wrote Frank in his diary, ‘would bring about an ever-increasing nervousness of the Poles. I have no objection at all to such rubbish, capable of work yet often loitering about, being snatched from the streets. The best method for this would be the organization of a raid.’
Such raids became frequent as more workers were required. A need for more reinforcements of Polish labour had arisen by 1942. Those Jews who were still in employment in Germany were to be evacuated and replaced by Poles. The fate of such Jews will be shown in a later chapter, but an instruction from the Plenipotentiary General for manpower stated that the Poles who were deported to the Reich to replace them would be put into concentration camps and put to work ‘in so far as they are criminal or asocial elements’. The remaining Poles, would be transported to Germany without family and put at the disposal of labour exchanges to work in armament factories. This was in direct contravention of International Law.
As so often happened during the war these arbitrary methods did not always have the effect their authors intended or expected. In the same way as the shooting of hostages later on in France only increased resistance to the German occupation, so this ‘wild and ruthless manhunt’ for workers in Poland produced a violent reaction. One of Sauckel’s deputies at a meeting of Hitler’s central planning board reported in the following terms:
The situation in Poland at the moment is extremely serious. The resistance against the administration by us is very strong … for example, fourteen days ago the head of our Labour Office in Warsaw was shot dead. Recruiting [for labour] even if done with the best will, remains extremely difficult unless police reinforcements are at hand.
In the Eastern Occupied Territories, which included Russia, the enforcement of labour was on a much larger scale. In 1942 Sauckel gave orders for two million workers to be drafted from the Ukraine. In forwarding these requirements to Rosenberg, who was then Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, Sauckel wrote: T do not ignore the difficulties which exist for the execution of this new order but I am convinced that with the ruthless use of all resources and the full co-operation of all concerned the execution of the new demand can be accomplished by the date fixed.’ All resources were, indeed, ruthlessly used and there was full co-operation, not least from the Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine to whom these orders were passed on by Rosenberg.
His reaction to these demands was not uncharacteristic.
We are the master race…. I will draw the very last out of this country. The inhabitants must work, work, and work again. Some people are getting excited that the population may not get enough to eat. They cannot demand that. We definitely did not come here to give them manna. We are a master race which must remember that ihe lowest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.
Nor was Reichsführer Himmler more considerate. He wrote:
What happens to the Russians does not interest me in the slightest. Whether other nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture. If 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank trench interests me not at all so long as the trench is finished for Germany.
As the forced recruitment of workers for Germany mounted to a crescendo, so partisan resistance increased. Many Russians, to escape deportation, left their homes and withdrew to the forests where they joined guerrilla bands. Preci
sely as Hitler’s Commissar Order merely drove the Russian armies to resist with greater determination and to stay and fight it out rather than retreat; so the renewed drive for slave labour led to a shortage of potential slaves and simultaneously to increased resistance by the civilian population.
Still more ruthless steps were, therefore, taken to obtain Russian workers and an intensive manhunt was begun.
Amongst the papers found in Rosenberg’s files after his capture were cuttings taken by the Nazi censors from letters written by Russians during this period. One of them wrote:
At our place new things have happened. People are being taken to Germany. On October 5th some people from the Kowkaski district were scheduled to go, but they did not want to and the village was set on fire. As not all who were due to leave Borowytski could be found, three truck loads of Germans arrived and set fire to their houses.
Another wrrote:
On October 1st a new conscription of labour forces took place. Of what happened, I will describe the most important to you. You cannot imagine the bestiality. You probably remember what we were told about the Soviets during the rule of the Poles. At that time we did not believe it and even now it seems incredible. The order came to supply twenty-five workers, but no one reported. All had fled. Then the German police came and set fire to the houses of those who had fled. The fire burned furiously, as it had not rained for two months. In addition, the grain stacks were in the farm yards. You can imagine what took place. The people who had hurried to the scene were forbidden to put out the flames and were beaten and arrested. Meanwhile the police set fire to more houses. The people fell on their knees and kissed the policemen’s hands but they were beaten down with rubber truncheons and the police threatened to burn down the whole village. I do not know how this would have ended had not Sapurkany intervened. He promised there would be more labourers by the next morning.
Describing the hunt in another district a third wrote:
They have already been hunting here for a week and have not got enough. The imprisoned workers are locked in the school-house. They cannot even perform their natural functions, but have to do it like pigs in the same room. People from many villages went the other day on a pilgrimage to the Poczajow monastery. They were all arrested, locked up, and will be sent to work. Amongst them are the cripples, the blind, and the aged.
A district commissioner near Kiev in reporting his activities in 1942 to Minister Rosenberg wrote:
In August 1942 measures had to be taken against two families each of which was to supply one labour recruit. Both had been requested but did not come. They had to be brought in by force but succeeded twice in escaping from the collecting camp in Kiev. Before the second arrest, the fathers of both workers were taken into custody as hostages, to be released only when their sons appeared. I then decided at last to take steps to show the increasingly rebellious Ukrainian youth that our orders must be obeyed. I ordered the burning of the houses of the two refugees.
And then there follows with sickening hypocrisy this sentence:
This harsh punishment was acceptable to the local population because previously both families had treated with contempt and scorn those conscientious people who had voluntarily sent their children to join the labour drafts.
But it was the Plenipotentiary General for Labour himself1 who said that of the five million foreign workers brought into Germany from the occupied territories not even two hundred thousand came voluntarily.
However, these harsh and brutal methods had no success. The burning of entire villages produced no more recruits; but though unsuccessful they were, nevertheless, continued and SS troops were ordered to take part in the raids on villages, to burn them down and impress the entire population for slave labour in Germany.
Nor was this all. In the collecting and transit camps through which these wretched people passed they were subjected to every form of indignity, ill-treatment, and brutality and the conditions in which they were transported to Germany were truly appalling.
They were generally dragged away from their homes in such haste that they had no time to pack any of their belongings; sometimes they were taken away half-dressed; sometimes in their night attire. They were lodged in cellars, beaten, and kept without food, water, heat, or toilet facilities, and during medical inspection the women were frequently subjected to indecent treatment.
The following account is taken from a captured German document.
In the women’s and girls’ shower rooms services were partly performed by men who would even help with the soaping. Men also took photographs in the women’s shower rooms. Since most of these women were Ukrainian peasants they were of a high moral standard and used to strict modesty, and they must have considered such treatment as degrading.
The document from which the above passage has been taken stated that these incidents were ‘altogether unworthy of the dignity and prestige of the Greater German Reich’, but the Greater German Reich appears to have done little or nothing to remove this stain from its reputation.
On their journey, from Russia to Germany, the sick and the infirm were bundled with the others into cattle trucks, fifty to sixty in each truck. No arrangements were made to feed them en route. They had no water, and had to perform their natural functions where they stood or lay. Many, when they arrived in Germany, were already unfit for work and trainloads of these were then sent back to Russia in similar conditions.
The circumstances in which these returning deportees were conveyed were well known to Plenipotentiary Sauckel’s Ministry, as the following report prepared in Rosenberg’s office proves.
In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey, people with tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car; dying people lay in freight cars without straw; and one of the dead was thrown on to the railway embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports.
It was not only from Poland and Russia that slave labour was deported. From France, Holland, Belgium, and later Italy many thousands went to Germany.
In France from 1940 to the end of 1942 the policy was put into force with some discretion. This was in line with the general Nazi approach towards the French whom, with a surprising naïveté, for they should have known better, they first tried to appease with blandishments and moderation, instructing their armies to behave ‘correctly’.
But the true heart of France was never in Vichy, and as soon as she had regained full consciousness after her stunning defeat in what General de Gaulle called ‘the first battle’ of the war, it was evident that the Gallic Maid could neither be wooed nor seduced. She would have to be ravished.
During the months which followed, Sauckel’s powers were greatly increased by decrees of Hitler and Goring and he was given complete administrative control and even legislative competence in the performance of the task which his Führer had set him, and from his suite in the Ritz Hotel in Paris he sent many a Frenchman to slavery and death.
In his official pronouncements he justified the policy on the basis of National Socialist philosophy with customary rodomontade. The remarkable violence of the war, he said, forced him to mobilize in the name of the Führer, many millions of foreigners to labour for the German war economy. This was necessary for the preservation of the life and liberty of the German people and their Western culture for those who ‘in contrast to the parasitical Jews and plutocrats’, possessed the honest will and strength to live by their own efforts. He said that there was a vast difference between the work formerly exacted through the Treaty of Versailles and the Dawes and Young Plans—which took the form of slavery for the might and supremacy of Jewry—and the use of labour which he, as Hitler’s Plenipotentiary General, had the honour to carry out as a contribution to the fight for the liberty of Germany and her allies.
But the object of the plan was not only to help the German war effort. Extermination by work was a basic element of the policy itself and not merely one of its
consequences. For this reason, foreign labour was employed in the German war industry to the utmost limit of each worker’s health and strength.
In 1942 Sauckel was given further powers over the civil and military authorities of the territories in the occupation of the German Armed Forces. This enabled him to have his own representatives on the headquarters of military commands, and to give them direct orders over the heads of the military commanders.
Charred bodies found in the church at Oradour
The slaughter at Autun
The village of Lidice
After the massacre at Lidice
This photograph of a mass execution was found on a German prisoner
At Birkenau before the crematorium was built bodies were burnt in pits
Patriots hanged at Tulle
The main gateway of Auschwitz Concentration Camp
One of the crematorium ovens at Buchenwald
Polish women’s legs disfigured by human guinea-pig operations
AUSCHWITZ
Artificial limbs taken from victims of the gas chambers
Ilse Koch, wife of the Commandant of Buchenwald
Shrunken heads found at Buchenwald
Josef Kramer’s driving licence
Thumbscrew used by the Gestapo in Belgium
A mass grave at Belsen
Sights similar to this were to be seen in all parts of the camp