He judged the effectiveness of his occupation policy not least in terms of the considerable economic contribution that the countries he controlled made to his conduct of the war. Between 1941 and 1943, more than half the German supplies of iron ore came from annexed and occupied territories (above all from Lorraine, Luxemburg, and Norway). Through the annexations that had occurred by summer 1940, German steel producers increased their capacity from 23 million to 39 million tons per annum, in fact an amount too big to be utilized. From summer 1941 onwards, the largest manganese deposits in Europe in Nikopol in the Ukraine were able largely to supply the requirements of German industry for this rare non-ferrous metal. From 1941 onwards, chromium was provided by mines in Yugoslavia and Greece,13 while supplies of bauxite and copper came largely from France.14 The occupied territories in the Soviet Union, Poland, France, and Denmark played the most important role in supplying Germany with food during the war. During 1942/43, they provided more than 30 per cent of the grain and around a third of Germany’s meat consumption.15 By the end of 1943, the number of foreign civilian workers had reached over 5.4 million; a third were Soviet ‘eastern workers’, and more than a million came from the General Government.16 Moreover, by the end of 1943, there were more than 1.8 million POWs involved in the ‘labour mobilization’ programme, including over 564,000 from the Soviet Union and more than 664,000 from France.17 Germany also demanded heavy occupation payments from the occupied territories, which greatly outweighed the costs of their occupation forces. In fact, these payments, along with the German clearing debts that had not been paid, covered a substantial part of Germany’s war costs.18
Thus the Nazi regime’s wartime economic policy in Europe was basically a gigantic programme of plunder and exploitation. The massive intervention in the economies of the occupied countries, which were also cut off from foreign trade relations with states outside the German ‘bloc’, resulted in inflation and reduced production. Significantly, Germany only partially succeeded in utilizing the industrial capacity of the occupied countries through the distribution of orders to produce armaments for the Wehrmacht.19 In addition, the removal of food stocks worsened the supply situation, even causing famines, particularly as agricultural production in almost all the occupied countries declined during the war.20
Meanwhile, resistance was growing, particularly after the attack on the Soviet Union, and was dealt with by the German occupation authorities and police agencies with extreme brutality. In combatting partisan movements, underground organizations, strikes, or cases of civil disobedience, German forces had no compunction about involving wide sections of the population. The ruthless combatting of ‘bands’ and their alleged supporters, the so-called ‘reprisals’, in other words the shooting of hostages and the destruction of villages and urban districts, was characteristic of this approach. It also involved the large-scale deportation of local people to concentration camps, draconian sentences imposed by special courts, and, in the second half of the war, ‘counter-terror’, in other words the assassination of well-known personalities considered hostile to the German occupation.21 At the same time, local collaborators with the German occupation and its allied regimes in south-east Europe became complicit through their involvement in the criminal policies of the regime, namely the persecution and deportation of Jews. As a result, they felt compelled to remain completely and utterly loyal to Germany.
German occupation policy and its treatment of its allies, which clearly bore Hitler’s signature, had one overriding aim: to secure the Nazi regime’s total control over the whole of Europe and the racial ‘reordering’ of the continent. It was not interested in mobilizing the resources of the occupied and allied countries through incentives, rewards or binding pledges. Instead, it ruthlessly took what was required for the war: raw materials, food supplies, people. Hitler’s rule over the continent was based on military superiority vis-à-vis its foreign opponents and unlimited force against its internal ones.
The regime at home
The heterogeneity of the German occupation administrations and the lack of clarity about the organization and constitution of the future empire were basically a reflection of the internal workings of Hitler’s regime during the war.
After 1937 Hitler had effectively abolished the government as a collective body, and his attempt, on the outbreak of war, to create a kind of war cabinet in the shape of the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich had also come to nothing.22 In January 1942 Lammers failed to persuade Hitler to issue a Führer edict instituting regular ministerial meetings under the former’s chairmanship; the ‘Führer’ considered that such an arrangement was ‘unnecessary’.23 Thus, the individual ministries continued to have to legislate through the ‘circulation procedure’, leading to long-winded written consultations. As a result, legislation inevitably continued to lack coherence. In any case, Hitler took the view that legislation should primarily take the form of framework laws, with the detail being filled in through decrees dealing with particular issues,24 and, in June 1940, he banned all new laws not considered important for the war effort.25 In consequence, the main emphasis shifted from governmental legislation towards a proliferation of decrees issued by the individual ministries.26
Under this system, Hitler possessed unlimited authority to create law by issuing a Führer edict. However, there were problems. This was particularly the case when edicts were not submitted to the Reich Chancellery for comments by the government departments affected prior to their being signed off by Hitler, but instead were secured through personal audiences with the ‘Führer’ arranged by powerful individuals in what Lammers termed an ‘ambush procedure’ [as distinct from the regular ‘circulation procedure’]. Hitler banned this practice, insisting that he did not wish to be approached about an edict or a decision without the Reich Chancellery and the departments affected having been asked to comment on the matter. However, as he had to repeat the injunction it was clear that the practice was continuing.27 Also, the fact that Führer edicts were not published could give rise to considerable difficulties.28
Thus Hitler’s regime increasingly departed from the forms of traditional state practice, in other words from a governmental process marked by the distribution of functions to officially responsible departments, by adherence to the law and to bureaucratic rules, and by a fixed civil service hierarchy based on qualifications and performance criteria. Instead, his regime was increasingly becoming a Führer autocracy, in which he assigned particular tasks to individuals whom he could trust, at his discretion. The result of this personal rule, which was progressively undermining the existing governmental apparatus through ad hoc assignments, was opaque lines of responsibility leading to bitter and lengthy conflicts within the power structure. The fact that Hitler often declined to get involved in such conflicts, instead leaving their resolution to the relative assertiveness of the individual disputants, further encouraged the regime’s fragmentation.
As far as this development during the war was concerned, the following factors stand out:
First: Hitler’s continuing practice of appointing ‘special representatives’, often with the title ‘Reich Commissioner/Commissar’ or ‘General Plenipotentiary’, to deal with particular political issues in a rapid and unbureaucratic fashion. The ‘Führer’ gave these special assignments to a small and easily manageable group and this small coterie of top functionaries, most of whom performed both state and Party functions, created complex power structures, whose ‘bosses’ owed their position entirely to their personal relationship to Hitler.
Göring’s power base essentially derived from his responsibilities as Prussian Prime Minister (now a largely prestige position), commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, head of the Four-Year Plan, and, from 1939 plenipotentiary for the war economy. He extended the responsibilities of the last-named position to include the occupied territories. During the winter of 1941/42, however, it became clear that his policy of ruthlessly plundering raw materials and agrarian produ
cts, particularly from eastern Europe, could not cope with the requirements of a lengthy war, and, with the rise of Speer from 1942 onwards, Göring lost his preeminent position within the economy. In addition, Hitler largely excluded him from decision-making on foreign policy issues, and the failure of the ‘Blitz’ on Britain and, above all, the increasing British air raids during 1941/42, damaged his prestige as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. Despite his loss of power and influence, he remained Hitler’s designated successor, although from 1942 onwards he appears to have given up, increasingly withdrawing from politics to pursue his various other interests.29
During the war, the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, created an apparatus of repression encompassing the whole of Europe. He built up his own military force in the Waffen SS, as Reich Settlement Commissar pursued an elaborate settlement policy based on racial criteria, and used his various responsibilities to subject the conquered territories to a gigantic programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination resulting in millions of victims. In the process Himmler and the SS became the decisive driving force in creating the ‘New Order’. In addition, in 1943 he took over the Interior Ministry and, in 1944, was appointed commander of the Reserve Army.30
Apart from his positions as head of the Party’s propaganda department, Propaganda Minister, President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and Gauleiter of Berlin, during the war Goebbels acquired additional functions in the civilian sector, particularly involving critical issues on the home front. To begin with, in 1942, Hitler assigned him the task of coordinating aid for bombed cities, an activity that in 1943 was extended to organizing preventive measures. Finally, in July 1944, he was appointed Plenipotentiary for Total War with the authority to ‘overhaul’ the civilian sector.31
As successor to Todt, Speer took over the latter’s various functions (Minister of Munitions, General Inspector of the German Road Network, General Inspector of Water and Energy, General Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of the Construction Industry) and, in possession of Hitler’s full confidence, quickly brought the whole of the armaments sector under his control. In addition to these tasks, in autumn 1944, as General Inspector of Construction, Speer extended his responsibilities to include the rebuilding of war-damaged cities.32
Although other leading Nazi figures also accumulated responsibilities during these years, they were less successful in their attempts to build up independent power bases. In November 1940, Dr Robert Ley, the head of the Party’s national organization and of the German Labour Front, was appointed Reich Commissar for Social Housing and, in October 1942, given additional responsibilities, as ‘Reich Housing Commissar’. In February 1940, he had also secured a Führer edict authorizing him to prepare an ‘Old Age Welfare Plan’, which he aimed to turn into a comprehensive programme of social reform. However, Hitler ordered a halt to Ley’s project during wartime; his major house-building plan could not be implemented during the war; the Labour Front was declining in importance; and the office of head of the Party’s national organization lost out in its internal struggle with Bormann’s Party Chancellery. As a result, Ley proved unable to integrate his various responsibilities to form a coherent empire.33 The Party’s chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, apart from being Minister for the Eastern Territories, continued to head the Party’s Foreign Policy Office and maintained the Bureau Rosenberg to support his work as the ‘Führer’s’ ‘Representative for the Supervision of the Intellectual and Ideological Indoctrination and Education of the NSDAP’. In summer 1940, Hitler also assigned him the task of confiscating libraries, art collections, and other cultural artefacts in the occupied territories. The Rosenberg Taskforce was established to carry out this comprehensive campaign of plunder. However, as Minister of the East, Rosenberg was unable to get his way in the face of the Reich Commissars and the various Reich agencies operating in the occupied eastern territories, and he was unsuccessful in coordinating his other activities. In addition, in March 1942 Sauckel was appointed General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization; in July 1942, Karl Brandt became Plenipotentiary (from 1943 Commissar General) for Health Services; and, in May 1942, the Hamburg Gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, was appointed Reich Commissar for Shipping. All these appointments were special representatives ‘directly responsible to the Führer’.34
Secondly: those who were merely Reich ministers, and whose position was not underpinned by a power base in the Party or by other special assignments from Hitler, generally declined in importance. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop managed to achieve a privileged position within the leadership clique vis-à-vis Hitler on account of the regime’s foreign policy ‘successes’ during the years 1938–41, because of his total subservience to the ‘Führer’, and the fact that, by 1938, he had succeeded in excluding the usual ‘special emissaries’ from foreign policy making. However, he was unable to intervene actively in occupation policy, and, with the almost complete absence of foreign policy after 1942, his influence waned.35 Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, the ‘lawyer of the lawless state’, lost all influence in the course of the war because of his attempt to maintain legal procedures within the administration and support for a reform of the Reich’s federal structure. Hitler considered him tired and worn out, finally replacing him with Himmler in August 1943, and appointing him to the largely figurehead post of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.36
In 1942, Hitler made significant changes at the top of three ministries without appointing new ministers. In May 1942 he transferred effective power in the Reich Agriculture Ministry from the minister, Walther Darré, to Darré’s state secretary, Herbert Backe. Backe was a confidant of Himmler’s and, like Darré, an agricultural ideologist, but, unlike him, also a pragmatic technocrat. He played a key role in imposing Nazi racial ideology in the agricultural sphere and, in particular, was responsible for the systematic starvation policy pursued in the occupied eastern territories.37 In May 1942, the portfolio of the long-serving transport minister, Julius Dorpmüller, was effectively taken over by Albert Ganzenmüller, a tough railway expert, who had been a keen Nazi in his youth, and now, at Speer’s instigation, was appointed state secretary.38 Backe and Ganzenmüller, experts in the critical areas of food supplies and transport, both enjoyed Hitler’s particular favour. The Ministers Walther Funk (Economics), Franz Seldte (Labour), Bernhard Rust (Education), and Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk (Finance) remained in office with much reduced authority. Hitler replaced state secretary Schlegelberger ( justice) by the biddable Thierack as part of his attempt to reform the judicial system, with the aim of removing the last vestiges of an independent judiciary.39
Thirdly: Hess’s chief of staff, Martin Bormann, who after Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941 took over the Staff of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy under the new title of Party Chancellery, rapidly established himself as the leading figure within the Party. He proved more effective at exercising the Party’s control functions vis-à-vis the state bureaucracy, in particular when it came to participating in legislation, the appointment of officials, but also in relation to all ‘fundamental political issues’.40 Above all, however, his permanent proximity to Hitler, who continued to entrust him with his personal affairs, gave him a key position. Through his responsibility for Hitler’s schedule, Bormann was able, to a considerable extent, to control access to the ‘Führer’, as the latter preferred interviews to studying documents. Thus, he was able to direct the flow of information reaching Hitler, particularly in the sphere of domestic policy. He also relayed Führer assignments and Hitler’s opinions on other matters, all given orally, to leading members of the regime. Moreover, Bormann’s intermediary role was by no means limited to Party matters, which meant that the Reich Chancellery under Lammers, hitherto the main link between Hitler and the state bureaucracy, acquired a serious competitor. Bormann’s power was by no means unlimited, however. Military matters were outside his sphere of competence, and he was not permitted to intervene in matters for which thos
e top politicians who had immediate access to Hitler, namely Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and Ribbentrop, were responsible. He was able to take the initiative in the sense of emphasizing particular opinions of Hitler only in issues involving the NSDAP and its place within the power structure, the radicalization of racial policy, and the attempt to exclude the Churches from almost all areas of life.41
During the war, the Gauleiters further increased their importance. In the two new ‘Reich Gaus’, which had been established in the annexed Polish territories on the model of the ‘Sudeten Gau’, Gauleiter Albert Forster (Danzig-West Prussia) and Gauleiter Artur Greiser (Warthegau), as Reich Governors, possessed the right to issue directives to various branches of the state administration. They took full advantage of this, establishing a virtual dictatorship in their Gaus, and invoking Hitler’s assignment to justify carrying out a ruthless ‘Germanization’ of their districts.42
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