Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  The end of March witnessed another important event, one that also had an impact on the pace of the developing Final Solution: on the twenty-first, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, as Plenipotentiary for Labor Development. An old-line Nazi from the “socialist” wing of the party, Sauckel was given the task of solving the crippling manpower problem. Nothing exposed the gulf between ideology and economic reality more than the question of labor. Bringing foreign workers into Germany, especially from Eastern Europe, challenged the very goal of a racially pure state, but the dictates of the war economy were forcing a radical revision of Nazi ideas since it was now clear that the war could not be won without foreign labor. German losses on the eastern front had been staggering in the first nine months of the war, while there remained in Germany virtually no young men who had not already been conscripted or sent into the labor force. At the height of the winter crisis, the Wehrmacht had taken at least 200,000 men from the armaments factories, a short-term expedient that could not last since Germany desperately needed to expand its war production and, thus, needed more workers. In addition, men had to be found to fill out the depleted ranks of the Ostheer. By March, the Wehrmacht was short some 700,000 men, while the armaments industry lacked a million workers. In addition, even at the start of the war, foreigners made up almost half the agricultural workforce, a figure that had risen to 60 percent by 1940. Ironically, given Hitler’s obsession with food security, the Reich depended more and more on primarily Polish labor to feed itself.39

  A greater use of women could take up some of the slack, but even a rigorous mobilization would not have produced much more than 700,000 additional workers. In 1939, German women were already more heavily engaged in the labor force than British women would be at the end of the war, while Germany’s level of female mobilization during the war was considerably higher than that of Britain or the United States. By late 1944, women made up two-thirds of the native workforce in agriculture and over 51 percent of the native civilian workforce. Even if Nazi authorities had used, as one put it, Stalinist methods to force all available women into the workforce, there still would have remained a shortage of several million workers. The only way to satisfy the insatiable demand for labor was ruthlessly to exploit the occupied areas. From a racial standpoint, the war had produced an absurd situation. “We no sooner get rid of 500 Jews from the area of the Reich,” complained an analyst in the winter of 1941–1942, “than we immediately bring in ten times the number of racially undesired foreign races.”40

  Charged by Hitler with solving this urgent problem, Sauckel responded with a staggering ruthlessness. The invasion of the Soviet Union had touched off multiple programs of mass murder, of which the forced recruitment of foreign labor was to be one. In the spring of 1941, Germany already employed over 1.2 million prisoners of war (mainly from France) and 1.3 million civilian laborers, mainly Poles, and, during the course of the year, this number swelled by a further million foreign workers, again primarily from Poland. These workers, however, were employed mainly in agricultural occupations; not until the end of the year and the debacle at Moscow did the needs of industry begin driving the importation of foreign workers. Over the next year and a half, Sauckel mobilized millions of workers from all over occupied Europe, although the great majority came from Poland and the conquered Soviet territories. Through wild and ruthless manhunts in which people were seized off the streets, in churches and theaters, and from villages that were then burned to the ground, Sauckel’s men engaged in a brutal hunt for slave labor. These so-called Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), overwhelmingly young men and women, often just teenagers (their average age was twenty), were put to work, normally in deplorable conditions, in the Reich’s factories, mines, and fields. By the end of July, over 5 million foreign workers were employed in Germany, while, by the summer of 1943, the total foreign workforce had risen to 6.5 million, a figure that would increase by the end of 1944 to 7.9 million. By that time, foreign workers accounted for over 20 percent of the total German workforce, although, in the armaments sector, the figure topped 33 percent. In some specific factories and production lines, foreign workers routinely exceeded 40 percent of the total; indeed, by the summer of 1943, the Stuka dive bomber was, as Erhard Milch boasted, being “80% manufactured by Russians.”41

  Given its existential dilemma, then, the Reich had responded in the winter crisis of 1941–1942 with a brutal logic: if Germany suffered from a shortage of workers, replacements would simply be brought, often through coercion, to Germany. Once in the Reich, however, the Nazis faced a basic contradiction between their genocidal racial policy and the pragmatic need to use this labor wisely to raise production. This contradiction had first surfaced in the fall of 1941 when the employment of Soviet prisoners as workers failed to achieve adequate results. Not only had the great majority already been killed, but even those shipped to Germany continued to be so ill-treated that they died in large numbers. Even before Sauckel’s appointment, military officials had pointed to the absurdity of importing these men only to starve them to death before they could do any work. Although efforts were belatedly made to raise the food rations of forced laborers, in the summer of 1942 the thousands of civilians arriving daily in the Reich’s cities from the east still faced horrendous living and working conditions, with long hours, starvation rations, and the most primitive accommodations. As a result, by the autumn, thousands of half-dead Ostarbeiter, emaciated, starving, many suffering from tuberculosis, were shipped back eastward under nightmarish conditions. Adam Tooze has calculated that, during the course of the war, some 2.4 million foreign workers, overwhelmingly Ostarbeiter, died as a result of their treatment by the Nazi regime, a figure that could be increased by several million if Soviet prisoners of war were included. At a time when a crucial impediment to the German war effort was a lack of labor, then, the Nazi inability to resolve the contradiction between ideology and practicality resulted in an enormous wastage of labor power.42

  Tooze has noted that this seemingly irrational squandering of a vital war resource also extended to Jewish labor, another 2.4 million potential workers, by his estimate, falling victim to the Nazi racial madness. Here, however, as he emphasizes, the picture is, perhaps, less illogical than it seems. Sauckel’s very success in recruiting foreign workers had, as one further murderous consequence, the result that the labor crisis could largely be solved without resorting to the full-scale mobilization of Jewish labor. In the most brutal sense, the Jews had now become, to the Nazis, useless eaters. Thus, even though some Jewish workers continued to be kept alive for war production in the dwindling ghettos of Poland and the factories built near Auschwitz, Sauckel’s successful mobilization of non-Jewish labor allowed the racial ideologues to gain the upper hand: the genocidal imperative triumphed over that of the more pragmatic, although still deadly, idea of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (destruction through labor). Although some Jews arriving at Auschwitz received a temporary stay of execution through the Selektion process, the great majority, perhaps 90 percent, were killed immediately. Thus, the apparent paradox that the destruction of the Jews—set in motion in June 1941, accelerated in 1942, and largely completed, except for Hungarian Jews, in 1943—took place against the backdrop of a desperate German need for labor can be resolved in large part by the simultaneous successful Nazi effort to import large numbers of Ostarbeiter. By the end of 1943, with three-quarters of the eventual Jewish victims of the Holocaust dead, the most counterproductive mistreatment of the foreign workers had also ended. In the instance of foreign workers, the contradictions in Nazi racial policy had been resolved in favor of the priority of the war effort; for Jews, there would be no such respite.43

  The military reverses of the winter of 1941–1942 also meant a setback for the policy of immediate economic exploitation of the conquered eastern territories in order to sustain the war effort. Not only would German industry be unable to obtain and utilize important Soviet raw materials, but also, and just as crucially,
it left Germany facing once again the nightmare of 1914–1918: a severe food crisis. Frustrated in their attempt to obtain sufficient quantities of foodstuffs from the Soviet Union, Nazi officials now faced the bleak prospect of an expansion of the war into the indefinite future. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the Nazi regime had imposed strict rationing on the population, but this Spartan regimen had been tempered by the promise of a secure, if monotonous, diet. The German and European grain harvest in both 1940 and 1941 had been disappointing, however, which meant that Nazi officials had been unable to import enough food to cover domestic deficits. Meat rations had already been cut in June 1941, and the bread ration had been sustained only by drawing on reserve stocks of grain. By the end of the year, these had largely been exhausted, and now food officials faced the task of feeding the additional hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to be sent into Germany. When Herbert Backe protested to Goering, the latter suggested cynically that the Ostarbeiter could be fed on cats and horse meat. Backe, however, checked the statistics and reported back to Goering that there were not enough cats to provide a ration and that horse meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population.44

  Although German authorities initially attempted to stretch scarce food resources simply by providing the Ostarbeiter with starvation rations, this was clearly a counterproductive strategy. It served no purpose to import workers into the country only to starve them so that they could perform little useful labor. Nor, given the “crushing impact” and “deterioration in morale” among Germans at the regime’s ration cuts in the spring of 1942, could Nazi officials seriously countenance further deep reductions in consumption. As early as mid-February, on learning of the need for ration cuts, Goebbels worried that the situation was resembling that of World War I. Given Hitler’s near-pathological anxieties about a food crisis triggering domestic unrest, the propaganda minister had little difficulty persuading his Führer to act in a radical manner against privilege so that the hardships of war would be seen to fall equally on all. Indeed, as early as April, the Nazi state proclaimed the death sentence for anyone engaged in black market activity. That same month, Hitler was granted special new powers by the Reichstag to take action against anyone harming the Volksgemeinschaft, which, given the powers he already possessed, had to be seen as a populist warning.45

  Nazi officials also drew the logical, if radical, conclusion from the brewing food crisis: if not enough food was available to sustain everyone, the optimal solution would be to concentrate rations on those who did productive labor while reducing the population of those who did not. The Führer, after all, had long made it clear that it was unacceptable for anyone to starve in Germany while the Wehrmacht controlled Ukraine; German authorities would simply have to find better ways to utilize the meat and grain of the occupied areas. Although the hunger policy had not produced the desired results in 1941, Backe, put in charge of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in April, in essence returned to its basic principles in 1942: food had to be distributed from east to west on a massive scale; the Wehrmacht would have to feed itself completely from the eastern territories as all food shipments from the Reich would cease; and entire groups, most notably the Jews, were to be excluded completely from the food supply. Backe, who combined in his person the ice-cold technocrat and the ideologue with close ties to Himmler and Heydrich, recognized the intersection of ideology and opportunism. The hunger policy was now to be directly coupled to the strategy of racial genocide; if the decision to accelerate the killing of the Jews had been taken for other reasons, the food crisis now supplied a powerful additional incentive. The German food supply would be secured at any price.46

  By early summer, Backe made the connection between food policy and genocide specific. There were, he indicated in response to protests from administrators in Poland about the reduction in rations, “in the General Government . . . still 3.5 million Jews. Poland is to be sanitized within the coming year.” In mid-July, Himmler communicated orders that all Jews in Poland not needed for work were to be killed by the end of the year; the food crisis had helped accelerate the Final Solution. Indeed, the hunt for grain was to be pursued with utter ruthlessness whether the victims were Jews or Slavs. After a tense meeting on 5 August with the Gauleiter, who gave vent to the growing resentment of the German population at the uncertain food situation, Goering the next day, in a meeting of the Reichskommissars and military commanders of the occupied areas, gave full scope to Backe’s plan, authorizing a fundamental rearrangement of the food supply in Europe. To Goering, it was inconceivable that the Third Reich controlled “regions . . . such as we never had during the last world war, and yet I have to give a bread ration to the German people. . . . The Führer repeatedly said . . . if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans, but other peoples.” It was time, Goering emphasized, to reassert basic priorities:

  God knows, you are not sent out there [to the east] to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them so that the German people can live. . . . It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German faints from hunger. . . . We conquered such enormous territories through the valor of our troops, and yet our people have almost been forced down to the miserable rations of the First World War. . . . I am interested only in those people in the occupied regions who work in armaments and food production.

  In former times, Goering noted, the matter had been simpler: “Then one called it plundering.” Perhaps unnecessarily, Gauleiter Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine, assured Goering that the grain from his area would be obtained at any price.47

  The radical demands formulated by Backe and Goering meant that anyone not working for the German war effort would be cut off from the food supply. The first group to disappear, as always, was the Jews. By the autumn of 1942, the gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, and Auschwitz were operating full bore, and a palpable sense of relief descended on Berlin. Not only had the food crisis been averted, but rations for both Germans and foreign workers had also been increased substantially. Total European deliveries of grain more than doubled, while there was a huge increase in deliveries of potatoes, meats, and fats, especially from France, Poland, and the occupied Soviet territories. Nor, despite expectations, had the food ration been completely cut in the General Government, where there had been an unexpectedly good harvest. By year’s end, however, virtually all the 3 million Jews residing there had been killed; if the harvest had not been so good, millions of Poles would have joined them. The desperate German effort to improve the dismal food situation had created a functional connection between the accelerated extermination of the Jews and the improvement in the food rations that would sustain the Nazi labor force. Sauckel’s mobilizations had provided Germany vital labor, while the synthesis of racial and food policies had resolved the food crisis; in both cases, those left on the outside were the Jews of Europe.48

  As labor and food problems were being resolved in the most inhumane ways, another obstacle loomed. If the slim thread of German hopes rested on completing the defeat of the Red Army in 1942 and seizing the oil, food, and raw materials of European Russia vital to the confrontation with the Anglo-American powers, the offensive capacity of the Ostheer, or at least Army Group South, had to be rebuilt as quickly as possible. This, in turn, required a drastic increase in weapons production from the armaments industry, a sector of the economy that was sputtering badly as a result of a variety of overlapping problems. Just six months after his mid-July decision to reorganize the armaments industry in favor of the Luftwaffe and the navy, Hitler now had to reverse course and give priority to the army, but production lines could not simply be switched overnight. This constant shifting in weapons priorities also made the rational allocation of scarce resources difficult, especially in the absence of any clear central direction of the war economy. The welter of agencies clamoring for dominance over the war econo
my made things worse as it led to a confusion of responsibility and stifling bureaucratic interference. In addition, the catastrophic state of the transport system slowed the delivery of vital raw materials, especially coal, which resulted in crippling power shortages and the shutdown of numerous factories. The shortage of labor and lack of key raw materials further hampered production, especially given the reluctance to make severe cuts in the civilian sector. Even the celebrated Nazi effort of the 1930s to win the support of workers through appeals to quality German craftsmanship backfired, as antiquated modes of production resulted in the waste of scarce materials and left many firms resistant to rationalization and mass production methods. Despite having access to the resources of much of Europe, the German war economy was badly underperforming. As Fritz Todt noted in January 1942, with obvious understatement, Germany “should have been more prepared to fight a total war.”49