Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  At the end of May, just as victories in the Crimea and Kharkov once again set Hitler’s optimism rising that a victory could yet be obtained, Professor Konrad Meyer put the final version of his Generalplan Ost on Himmler’s desk. By that time, too, the gassing of Jews at Chelmno, Belzec, and Sobibor was proceeding smoothly, with operations just beginning at Auschwitz, soon to be joined by Treblinka. Along with these “industrial” killings, the murder squads had swung back into action in occupied eastern Poland, Belorussia, and Ukraine. The Nazi regime had clearly embarked on something more than mere exploitation of conquered territory. Hitler had long emphasized that the war in the east was a matter of triumph or destruction; it was, in fact, nothing less than an opportunity to remake the racial map of Europe. Through huge population transfers, colonial resettlement schemes, and wholesale murder, the Nazis would not just reclaim territory Germany had lost following the First World War, but create a vast racial empire that would dominate Europe, eliminating for all time the alleged threat to the German Volk from Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks. That, to Hitler, was the meaning of the war—the enormous sacrifice of German blood could be justified only if a new society would be created out of the victory. Deeply committed to racial science—not for nothing had Rudolf Hess once termed National Socialism applied biology—the Nazi regime had already begun the process of “filtering” the domestic German population. With its spectacular military victories, it could now set about transforming the east, applying its characteristic mix of racial mysticism, science, modern planning techniques, and brutality. Generalplan Ost envisioned nothing less than a transformation of the vast resource-rich east through superior expertise and planning. The result would be a solution to the German economic dilemma highlighted by World War I and the Weimar years and an elevation of the nation’s standard of living. Then, Hitler boasted, “Europe, and not America, would be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Germany would also, he promised, become the most self-sufficient state in the world.23

  As we have seen, the process of Germanization had already begun in the areas of western Poland to be incorporated in the Reich, where ruthless methods had been used not merely to expel Poles from their homes and farms to make way for the repatriation of Volksdeutsche, but to “denationalize” the Poles as well. Through a process of selective murder of the Polish national intelligentsia, rigorous repression, and the “reclaiming” of young people who looked German, Nazi agencies, led by the newly formed RKFDV, had set out to make the land German. Initially, however, this project was limited not only in its scope but also in its murderous intentions. As Himmler indicated in a famous May 1940 memorandum, Jews were not yet to be murdered, but deported to Africa. “Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be,” he concluded, “this method is still the mildest and best one if . . . one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.” Although large numbers of people still would have died in such a project, in the spring of 1940 the Nazis had not yet crossed the threshold to mass murder.24

  As with the onset of the Final Solution, which was still more than a year away, Nazi plans for the east also evolved, with the catalyst for radicalization in both cases being the invasion of the Soviet Union. Preliminary planning by Meyer had resulted in rough drafts of a general plan for the east being submitted to Himmler just before and after the start of Operation Barbarossa. As Nazi victories grew during the summer and fall of 1941, so did the ambitions of those involved in the project. Working under Meyer’s direction, a small group of bright young SS-affiliated academic researchers expert in agriculture, racial science, urban planning, and economic geography had by the spring of 1942 altered the plan from one to secure food and other vital economic resources from the conquered areas of the east into a scheme that envisioned nothing less than the region’s complete transformation into an area of German settlement, complete with model towns, villages, and farmsteads, all linked by a system of superhighways. The key to this new conception was the creation of three major zones of German colonization, from “Ingermanland” (Leningrad region) in the north through the Baltic region to “Gothengau” in the Crimea and southern Ukraine. These settlement areas would be connected by a series of strongpoints, German towns and villages at key rail and road junctions strung across Galicia and Ukraine. The land in the envisioned settlement area, a territory larger than the Reich in 1938, would be owned by the state and farmed out on long-term leases to Volksdeutsche, settlers from the old Reich, and SS/Wehrmacht veterans. Eventually, the Germanic peoples would be gathered in an empire that would stretch all the way to the Urals, where a Wehrgrenze (defense wall) would stand as a barrier protecting Europe from Asia’s hordes. Germany would, thus, be freed from one of Hitler’s most persistent racial nightmares: being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers of alien peoples.25

  Even as the scheme expanded in scope, however, officials within the SS and from other ministries voiced critical objections. On 3 September 1941, for example, Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner, the head of the Central Resettlement Office in Posen (West Prussia), a man experienced in the practical difficulties of translating grand visions into reality, sent a memo to Adolf Eichmann that raised a crucial question that needed to be resolved. “Is the goal,” he asked, “to permanently secure [the non-German peoples] some sort of existence, or should they be totally eradicated?” He might have been the first to raise the issue, but Hoeppner was hardly the only bureaucrat vexed by the demographic complexity of the proposal. Dr. Erhard Wetzel, a race expert in Rosenberg’s employ and, thus, a rival to Himmler’s SS, pointedly criticized Generalplan Ost in April 1942 for its faulty population calculations. Not only had Meyer’s experts engaged in highly wishful thinking in projecting the German birthrate, but they had also grossly underestimated the size of the Slavic populations to be dealt with. If more than 80 percent of the population of Poland, 64 percent of the population of Belorussia, and 75 percent of the population of Ukraine were to be expelled from the proposed colonization area as racially undesirable, the total number of people involved would be, not the 31–45 million estimated by Meyer, but closer to 60–65 million, of whom at least 46–51 million would have to be deported. Resettling them in western Siberia—especially the Poles, whom Wetzel considered particularly troublesome—would be dangerous since they would create “a source of continual unrest against German rule.” The alternative, however, was both problematic and revealing. “It should be obvious,” he stressed, “that one cannot solve the Polish problem by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews.” Wetzel, it should be stressed, fully shared the goal of the Germanization of Eastern Europe; he was simply confounded by its implementation. Finally, Helmut Schubert, an economist in Himmler’s own RKFDV, raised practical objections. The entire plan, he noted, depended on reversing the historic German trend toward urbanization and industrialization and, thus, posed a basic dilemma: industrialization and prosperity or racial homogeneity and stagnation?26

  None of these objections troubled Himmler, however. Amazingly, despite the sweeping scope and murderous implications of Meyer’s proposal, he ordered its architects to be even more ambitious: the Baltic states and the General Government should all be included in the Germanization project, while the time frame should be shortened from thirty years to twenty. In fact, Himmler stressed, Meyer and his team should think of expanding their proposal for the east into a general settlement plan that would link the eastern project with plans for Alsace-Lorraine, the Czech lands, and Slovenia. As to any difficulties in implementation, Himmler simply reminded his subordinates of what he had insisted since the Kampfzeit (struggle for power) of the 1920s: “that the so-called social question can only be solved by killing the other in order to get his land.” Himmler’s murderous dreams received a decisive boost on 16 July when he presented Hitler with the final version of the Generalplan, complete with architectural drawings and maps of the proposed German settlements. Again convinced that the war in the east would be won, the F
ührer, according to Himmler, “not only listened to me, he even refrained from constant interruptions, as is his usual habit. . . . Today he went so far as to approve of my proposals.” It was, the Reichsführer confessed, “the happiest day of my life. Everything I have been considering and planning . . . can now be realized. I shall set to it at once.”27

  Not surprisingly, his first decision concerned the Jews, for in mid-July there was yet another of those convergences of factors that spelled their doom under Nazi rule. Hitler’s optimism about the military situation and Sauckel’s success in resolving the labor shortages in Germany through his brutal “recruitment drives” meant that Jewish labor was no longer regarded as necessary even for war-related projects. The domestic food crisis, meanwhile, added to the murderous “logic” that they be eliminated as useless eaters. Moreover, in all discussions surrounding Generalplan Ost, one thing had been assumed by all: the Jews would have no place. The day after Hitler’s approval of Generalplan Ost, Himmler visited the newly expanded camp at Auschwitz, where he and his entourage viewed a “selection” and murder of Dutch Jews at nearby Birkenau. On 18–19 July, he issued three key orders to Globocnik and his boss in Lublin, Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Krueger, that illustrated the pattern in his thinking. The first explicitly instructed them to complete “the resettlement [i.e., murder] of the entire Jewish population of the General Government” unfit for work by the end of the year, while the second aimed at beginning the settlement program of Generalplan Ost. The third, finally, ordered draconian measures used to ensure the success of the fall harvest; the hunt for grain was to be pursued with complete ruthlessness. Three days later, on 22 July, deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka commenced; by the end of the year, only 300,000 Jews, by German reckoning, remained alive in the General Government. In all, prewar Poland’s Jewish population of 3.25 million had been reduced to barely half a million. If the Nazis were intent on a New Order in the east, the first step in creating it would be the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.28

  In anticipation of imminent victory, and eager to realize his utopian blueprint, Himmler hurriedly pushed ahead with his pilot schemes. Thus, even though Nazi authorities had already begun work in the spring of 1942 on a limited plan for building a “Germanic bridge” between Lithuania and the Czech lands by resettling Volksdeutsche, Himmler promoted a much more ambitious project. The focal point for the immediate implementation of his plans was to be the provincial town of Zamosc, southeast of Lublin. In the Generalplan, Lublin lay in a key region, situated at the junction of two main axes of settlement, so the project at Zamosc was seen as a key test of the entire colonization policy. The SS experts responsible for carrying out the scheme planned to “bottle up” the Polish population living in the region and “suppress their economic and biological development.” In blunter terms, Himmler meant to tear down the entire town, deport the Poles living in the region, and replace them with German settlers. The Nazi governor-general, Hans Frank, worried about opposition by the Poles and the possible disruption of their contribution to the war economy, wanted to wait until the end of the war for implementation of the project, but Himmler saw no reason for delay.29

  Put under the direction of the thuggish and odious Odilo Globocnik, this trial run to sort out the problems involved in the implementation of population policy proved disastrous, as Globocnik’s violent and harsh methods provoked exactly the sort of backlash that Frank had feared. In order to make room for German colonists, in November 1942 Globocnik’s men began uprooting over 100,000 people from some three hundred villages in the Zamosc region who were then sent for “selection” to camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz. There, they were racially screened: some of the adults and children were to be Germanized and “won back to the German nation”; the remaining children and the elderly were sent to “retirement villages,” where they would starve to death; other adults were to replace Jewish forced laborers, who would then be killed; the rest would be sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.30

  From mid-December on, transports with the first Zamosc deportees began arriving at Auschwitz, while other trains arrived in Berlin with Poles bound for work in the armaments industry. There, they were exchanged with the so-called arms factory Jews, who had stayed alive working in the armaments industry but were now superfluous. Trains from Berlin would then carry the Jews to Auschwitz; after unloading their “cargo,” they would then transport Volksdeutsche, primarily from Southeastern Europe, to the Zamosc region. Here, the incoming German colonists would be met by SS resettlement agents, relocated in the surrounding area, and given land that had been seized from the Poles. From Zamosc, the trains would return to Auschwitz with those Poles deemed “undesirable.” This “population exchange” was, thus, part of a pilot demographic project in which highly productive German agricultural settlements would be created in the east, with the Poles displaced either Germanized, put in forced labor, or killed and the Jews murdered immediately.31

  In the Zamosc area, things did not go as smoothly as in Berlin or Auschwitz. Within weeks of the first “evacuation” drive, the region was in revolt: the new settlers were attacked and some killed; farmers fled to join partisan bands; and partisan warfare flared in an area that up to that point had been quiet. Himmler ordered vicious reprisals against the Poles, but this failed to quell the unrest, which continued into the spring of the following year. Frank was furious; because of Himmler’s impatience and Globocnik’s brutality, the Poles in the General Government were in an uproar, fearful that, as an SS leader put it, “after the Jews are annihilated [the Germans] will try to use the same methods to drive the Poles out of this area and liquidate them just like the Jews.” In May 1943, Frank complained that “a state of open rebellion” existed in the Zamosc area, with SS actions having caused an “indescribable panic.” Entire districts were being depopulated, both by the resettlement action and by Poles fleeing the land, with resulting disruption of both the economic and the security situation.32

  Himmler, however, doggedly pursued his utopian dreams. In mid-September 1942, he stressed to his associates that the chief task in the first two decades after the war would be to gather the Germanic peoples and finish construction of the great German empire that would stretch to the Urals. Amazingly, on 23 November, the very day that the Soviet ring closed around Stalingrad, he could assert in a speech that the east “would be colonies today, settlement area tomorrow, and German territory the day after tomorrow.” In practice, however, the turnabout in the military situation at Stalingrad largely caused his schemes to grind to a halt in the winter of 1942–1943. His pilot project at Zamosc, and similar smaller ones in Ukraine, had failed miserably and brought only turmoil and economic disruption. The Nazis had amply demonstrated their willingness and ability to uproot and destroy entire groups of people, but the very war that had made these radical measures possible now forced a halt to their utopian ventures. Generalplan Ost had envisioned a vast racial restructuring of Eastern Europe. One component was to be the extermination of the local Jewish population as well as the deportation and annihilation of perhaps 30–40 million Slavs. A second aspect was the resettlement of millions of Volksdeutsche, Germans, or others of Germanic origins in the evacuated areas, while the final component was the employment of millions of Slavs in forced labor. By the end of 1942, the destruction of the Polish Jews under German control was largely complete, while military setbacks halted the vast resettlement schemes. Those same military reverses, however, now brought the third aspect of the plan to the forefront as the Germans desperately needed foreign labor for their war economy.33

  While, as noted above, Sauckel proved adept in his Menschenjagd (slave labor hunts), Himmler, with a nose for power, sensed a way for the SS to profit as well. With the demands of the war economy paramount, and with labor a key commodity within that economy, he realized that control of the flow of workers would confer great power. Although ideological imperatives were always predominant in Himmler’s mind, the Reichsf
ührer-SS also understood that huge pools of labor would be required for the vast construction projects of Generalplan Ost. “If we do not fill our camps with slaves,” he emphasized in June 1942, “with worker slaves who will build our cities, our villages, our farms . . . , then even after years of war we will not have enough money to be able to equip the settlements in such a manner that real Germanic people can live there.” In conjunction with implementation of Generalplan Ost, then, Himmler expanded the WVHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office) of the SS to take full advantage of the forced labor potential in the concentration camp system. Under the leadership of the energetic Oswald Pohl, the population of the camp system skyrocketed, growing from roughly 20,000 in September 1939, to 75,000 in April 1942, and 224,000 in August 1943. By January 1945, the camp system held an astonishing 714,000 people, the great majority non-Jewish (political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and Ostarbeiter), and had effectively been transformed into a Soviet-style labor gulag. Although Himmler wanted to extract maximum economic benefit from these prisoners, he could not quite suspend his racial principles, so a sort of murderous compromise between ideology and pragmatism evolved: Vernichtung durch Arbeit. Thus, although Pohl urged his camp commandants to act as managers and make their enterprises economically productive, he still reminded them that the work must be “in the true meaning of the word, exhaustive.”34

  Pohl also held out the lure of cheap labor in order to attract industrial investment as a means to expand the scope of the WVHA from construction projects to armament work. The result was a dramatic expansion of its network of labor camps adjacent to the larger concentration and extermination facilities. Auschwitz, for example, not only rented out its inmates to the nearby I. G. Farben facilities at Monowitz, but also sent prisoners to industrial sites throughout Silesia. Eventually, when Himmler’s opposition to such workers within the Reich receded, the SS supplied forced labor to Heinkel (Oranienburg), Siemens (Ravensbrück), BMW (Dachau), and Daimler-Benz (Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen). Opposition from Speer to Himmler’s power grab, however, prevented a large penetration of the SS into armaments production in 1942. Not only were such enterprises grossly inefficient, but camp managers also tended to take Vernichtung durch Arbeit far too seriously. Mortality rates in 1942 soared so high that the WVHA could not meet its own targets for the slave labor population. If Himmler was going to be able to leverage the labor reservoir of the concentration camps to increase the power of his SS empire, these staggeringly high rates of attrition would have to be brought down. Only after the military debacle at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–1943, however, did the SS set about making changes, but by then it would be too late. The key period was 1942, the last opportunity the Reich had to win the war in the east before it faced the full power of the enemies stacked against it. The tension between racial impulses and economic pragmatism, as well as the use of brutal colonial methods against other European peoples, resulted in an astonishing misuse of labor. Although the Nazis modified their policies in 1943, the damage could not be undone: in the crucial phase of the war, they had not been able to convert the resources under their control into weapons as effectively as their opponents. Nazi officials had begun to realize their conundrum: they could have racial purity or an effective war economy, but not both.35