Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Even as the Germans struggled to maintain output under the onslaught of Allied bombers, a shortage of the other key resource necessary to step up production—labor—loomed as a major obstacle. Although German industrialists had long been pressing for an increased use of women, Hitler had consistently rejected their conscription into war industries, whether from ideological objections (the birth rate would fall, undermining the nation’s racial essence) or fears of domestic unrest such as occurred in 1918. When the war began, Germany actually experienced a fall in female employment as consumer goods production was cut back. Over the next few years, the number working in war production gradually rose, but generous government allowances to wives and widows of soldiers offset any inducements to work. By early 1943, however, the worsening labor situation compelled Hitler to concede that a greater use of female workers could no longer be avoided. The problem, however, was that any dramatic increase in female employment in industry was unlikely. Despite claims to the contrary, German women participated in the labor force to a much higher degree than in either Great Britain or the United States, with the great majority engaged in agriculture. In 1943, millions of women labored on the small farms so characteristic of much of Germany, an obstacle both to efficient production and to the employment of women in industry. Most experts conceded that even the most vigorous measures to mobilize women would result in little more than a million new workers, a fraction of the number needed if output was to be increased significantly.48

  A brutal logic now emerged: if larger numbers of German women could not be brought into the workforce, Sauckel’s legions would simply have to procure more workers from the east. After all, foreign workers could be forced to do tough physical labor for longer hours at low pay, could not take holidays, and were docile and compliant. Despite the fact that Sauckel’s roundups continued to foment unrest and contributed to a surge in partisan resistance, the needs of the Reich came first. The urgency, after Stalingrad, of securing foreign labor was reflected in the numbers: almost half the nearly 8.5 million forced laborers in Germany at the end of the war had arrived since 1943. Although the living and working conditions for foreign workers continued to be atrocious, noticeable improvements were made after the declaration of total war, when Nazi officials recognized the necessity of increasing the output of Ostarbeiter. From mid-1943, almost all sectors reported a rise in productivity and output, and, by mid-1944, foreign labor had become the backbone of the German war economy. Any improvement in the working conditions of the eastern workers, however, was more than offset by the harsh racial attitudes with which they were confronted. The racial inferiority of the Ostarbeiter was constantly emphasized to both German civilians and the workers themselves through leaflets and posters, with pointed reminders to Germans to act as racial masters. Reich authorities worried incessantly about sexual contact between the eastern workers and German women and, thus, imposed draconian punishments for any sort of fraternization of a sexual nature. Moreover, Ostarbeiter were frequently warned that they risked being sent to a concentration camp if they slacked off at work or upset production. They were paid minimal wages, worked long hours, kept under strict control, subjected to harsh discipline, and regarded with utter contempt. When Allied bombers rumbled overhead, foreign workers were kept out of the municipal air raid shelters, with the result that disproportionate numbers died in the bombing attacks. Little wonder, then, that most felt they were “no better off than pigs.”49

  The same economic requirements that led to the brutal Menschenjagd also contributed to an intensification of the partisan war in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Although Hitler had initially welcomed Stalin’s call to action in July 1941 as a cover for the deadly operations of the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht had from the outset struggled to control the vast regions it had conquered. The harsh measures directed at the local population, the often contemptuous behavior of German troops, the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and the mass shootings of the murder squads all contributed to a growing embitterment that aided the spread of the partisan movement. German security divisions, with their overage, badly trained, ill-equipped, and overstretched troops, struggled against a ruthless foe who used a mix of inducements and terror to tighten his hold over ever-larger areas. By early summer 1942, economic exploitation, harsh pacification policies, and increasing impoverishment of the rural population had created a cruel dynamic that fed the growth of the partisan forces. As they became increasingly bold and began to assume operational importance in some rear areas, German forces responded with large-scale search-and-destroy operations that resulted in very high civilian body counts but little diminution of partisan activities.50

  In the first year of the war, German security troops killed some 80,000 alleged partisans, at a loss of a little over a thousand of their own men, only to find that their brutality had simply fueled an increase in guerrilla numbers. In Belorussia alone, German figures indicated a kill ratio of seventy-three to one, and, during the entire war, German casualties in the central sector of roughly 34,000 were dwarfed by some 300,000 partisan deaths, yet partisan numbers tripled during 1942. Although many German officers on the ground understood the necessity of better treatment of the rural population as a prerequisite for regaining their support, Hitler responded by entrusting the SS with sole authority for combating the partisans. Thus empowered, Himmler in August 1942 appointed the ruthless SS police leader and Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to lead the fight against “bandits,” charging him with the pacification of central Russia. If von dem Bach was not already aware of what pacification meant, an addendum by Hitler to his own October directive that all partisans were to be killed spelled it out with brutal clarity: the partisan war in the east, he stressed, was “a struggle for the total extirpation of one side or the other.”51

  Although the partisans enjoyed some sporadic success in disrupting rail traffic and supply movements, the partisan war itself was hardly, in 1942, the great “people’s struggle” of later Soviet myth. Despite often brutal measures directed against the peasantry, the partisans largely failed to break their wait-and-see attitude—that resulted primarily from the military setbacks of 1942–1943, which made a German victory less likely, and the Reich’s escalating economic demands, which inherently contradicted any attempt at real pacification. Faced with the pitiless logic of total war, German officials combined economic considerations with existing ideological predispositions and security concerns to unleash devastation on great swaths of occupied territory. The large-scale combing sweeps, the Großunternehmen, now aimed not so much at rooting out guerrillas as at plundering anything of value in the so-called bandit areas. German economic officials directed the seizure of crops and livestock, the destruction of villages, the wholesale evacuation of the inhabitants for forced labor, and the liquidation of those deemed unfit for work. The sheer ruthlessness and brutality of this policy have led the historian Christian Gerlach to speak of the emergence of a Tote Zonen (dead zones) policy that envisioned the cultivation of select parts of the rear area and the complete evacuation and utter destruction of others. By the end of the year, the explosion of brutality associated with the Tote Zonen policy had resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths as well as the emergence of a full-blown partisan movement capable of extensive disruption of rear-area operations. This counted for little with Nazi officials, however, obsessed as they were with avoiding a repetition of 1918.52

  By mid-1943, growing coercion on the home front, the need to mobilize all resources for war, and the increasing demand for labor had created a logic of escalating terror. Determined to root out defeatism and mobilize fully for war, Speer now moved into an ever-closer alliance with Himmler as both made use of the full repressive apparatus of the Nazi state. Forced by military reverses on the eastern front to abandon Generalplan Ost, for which the SS had begun creating slave labor camps under the catchphrase Vernichtung durch Arbeit, Himmler from spring 1943 sought to gain advantage f
rom the crisis by emphasizing the economic utility of turning concentration camps into work facilities for arms production. Speer was also eager to use these labor resources to aid the war effort, as was German industry, which, in its search for cheap and docile labor, looked eagerly at concentration camp inmates. As a wide range of businesses made use of prisoner labor, a vast network of sub-camps sprang up throughout Germany, with the result that by late 1943, as Richard Evans has noted, “there was scarcely a town in the Reich that did not have concentration camp prisoners working in or near it.”53

  As with the Ostarbeiter, living and working conditions were deplorable, even though the need for labor somewhat reduced the ideological pressure for annihilation. Mortality rates were appallingly high, particularly when the supply of such prisoners seemed unending. Although conditions improved somewhat through 1943, Himmler conceding that “the food issued should be like that provided . . . to Egyptian slaves, which contained all the vitamins and was simple and cheap,” the hope of survival of most individual inmates depended on special skills or training that could not be easily replaced. By August 1943, SS-run labor camps held 224,000 prisoners, a number that would double and then triple over the next year and a half; in January 1945, nearly 715,000 inmates toiled in the system. The Nazi attitude toward this slave labor was, perhaps, best epitomized by the August 1943 decision to use thousands of prisoners to blast tunnels out of the Harz Mountains for the production of V-2 rockets. Urged on by the head of the SS Building Directorate, Hans Kammler, a “cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic . . . [and] unscrupulous,” the men toiled in inhuman conditions. Determined to finish the project as quickly as possible, and, thus, unwilling to waste time and money to build barracks off site, Kammler instead forced the workers to sleep in wooden bunks four levels high within the cold, damp confines of the tunnels, with no proper sanitary facilities or adequate water supplies. They were allowed outside only once a week during weekly roll call. Each morning, SS guards punched workers in the face: those who did not fall were considered fit for work. “Pay no attention to the human cost,” Kammler declared in response to the rising death toll from dysentery and sheer exhaustion. “The work must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time.” Eventually, one in every three of the men forced to work on the V-2 production facility would die of disease, starvation, or maltreatment, some 20,000 in all. Speer, however, was ecstatic, in mid-December congratulating Kammler on his success in setting up the production center in only two months, an accomplishment “that far exceeds anything ever done in Europe, and is unsurpassed even by American standards.”54

  Speer’s cooperation with Himmler was sealed in early October at a joint appearance at the annual gathering of Gauleiter in Posen. In his address to the regional party leaders, Speer bluntly accented the critical military situation, noting the damage done to armaments production by Allied bombing and the stark fact that the enemy now dictated what Germany had to do. Only the “sharpest measures,” he stressed, could improve the state of affairs. As if to stiffen the resolve of the Gauleiter for the “necessary brutality” in mobilizing all Germany’s resources, Himmler then made them openly complicit in the ongoing Judeocide: “You all accept happily the obvious fact that there are no more Jews in your province. All Germans, with very few exceptions, realize perfectly well that we could not have lasted through the bombs and stresses of the . . . war, if this destructive pestilence were still present within our body politic. . . . The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth. . . . About the matter of the Jews . . . you are now informed.” Aside from revealing his belief in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy and reminding his audience that they had no choice but to fight on since, with the murder of the Jews, the Nazi bridges were burned behind them, Himmler’s speech was notable for one other aspect: he pointedly threatened the Gauleiter that methods similar to those used against the Jews would now be employed against Germans who refused to accept the sacrifices necessary for radical mobilization of the economy and society.55

  Despite these exertions and the deaths of tens of thousands of slave laborers, Speer was never able to boost German war production sufficiently to challenge that of Germany’s enemies. In the end, no amount of rationalization, labor mobilization, threats, or intimidation would have worked once the war became one of attrition. Given Hitler’s unwillingness to squeeze civilian living standards as harshly as Stalin had done, Speer and Himmler responded with a brutal exploitation of foreign labor. The crisis unleashed by the stunning defeat at Stalingrad thus fed a process of intensifying violence and radicalism that allowed the Reich to continue the war beyond 1943, but with no hope of actually winning. When, in January 1944, the realization finally sank in that all his efforts would, ultimately, be fruitless, Speer suffered a physical breakdown that incapacitated him for nearly four months. The forces that he had helped set in motion, however harsh and irrational, nonetheless ensured that the regime would not crumble—a collapse of war production in 1943 had been averted. Although the British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee expressed the hope that autumn that “the German people [would] no longer be willing to endure useless bloodshed and destruction” and, consequently, that “some sudden change of regime to prepare the way for . . . an armistice” might result, these experts were to be terribly disappointed. November 1943 also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the armistice of 1918, a humiliation that Hitler had repeatedly vowed would never happen again. In this, he was true to his word, but the struggle over the next year and a half would cost the Wehrmacht more than twice as many soldiers as the first four years of war combined.56

  As 1942 gave way to 1943, an air of unreality hung over German military planning. The reflections of the OKW, set down in a memorandum of 10 December, revealed not so much a sense of strategic helplessness as a complete absence of realistic thinking. Not only must North Africa be held and the Balkans secured against a possible Allied invasion, but the Ostheer was also to launch another summer offensive in the east. Even more bizarre was the operational goal: the OKW staff not only proposed taking Leningrad but also envisioned a large offensive that would “finally separate the Soviets from their economic sources of strength in the Caucasus,” with the ultimate goal of advancing into the Middle East. In view of the relation of forces between Germany and its enemies in early 1943, this was not merely utopian but delusional.57

  Hitler himself was under no such illusions, recognizing clearly in March 1943 that the “question of personnel is our greatest worry and by far the most serious problem,” one for which no ready solution was at hand. Although Foreign Armies East calculated total Red Army losses to the end of 1942 at between 11.7 and 11.9 million men, a figure that was, if anything, low, and despite the fact that the Soviets had in 1942 lost another 1.5 million as prisoners (or over ten times the number of Germans taken at Stalingrad), its conclusion was sobering. Through ruthless mobilization measures, Gehlen’s office stressed, the Soviets would have in 1943 an available reserve of 3.4 million men as opposed to a Wehrmacht total of only 500,000. Moreover, this seven-to-one inferiority would be even greater in practice since the Red Army could concentrate all its forces against the Ostheer, while German reserves had to be stretched across all possible fronts. Nor did materiel production offer any hope of relief, for, despite the fact that German output soared—at least until the Battle of the Ruhr commenced—Soviet production was higher still and, once again, could be used entirely against the Germans. In addition, American and British production had to be weighed in the balance, as did the possibility of the opening of a second front in Europe.58

  For the second key problem facing Hitler, and one no less urgent than that of personnel and production, was the growing interconnectedness of the various fighting fronts. The question of the defense of Fortress Europe not only demanded more attention from the German leadership but also eroded the dominant role of the eastern front as the great bulk of German resources could no longer be concentrated in one a
rea. Prevention of a second front in the west was now the command of the hour: “no front,” Hitler declared in mid-May, could be allowed “to come into being on the borders of the Reich.” Just the threat of a second front, in fact, compelled the Germans, over a year before the Normandy invasion, to transfer forces from the east to other threatened areas, from Norway to France to Italy and the Balkans, while the Soviets could mass virtually all their strength against the Germans. The consequence of this was alarming; if in 1917 and 1918 a German division on the western front defended a sector of roughly two and a half miles, in the summer of 1943 on the eastern front that same division, likely with fewer men, would be covering four times the area. Sectors that in the First World War were held by a division were now being defended by a battalion. This inferiority in numbers and the German need to prepare for a possible defense against Allied attack somewhere in the west meant not only that the Soviets would be in a position to launch several offensives simultaneously in the summer of 1943, but also that any German response would of necessity be limited. Little wonder, then, that so many in the German leadership put their faith in “the higher leadership abilities and the greater worth of the individual German soldier.”59

  Although Hitler was clearly aware of the difficulties facing Germany, remarking on 18 February 1943 that he could “undertake no great operations in this year . . . but only small strikes,” he nonetheless refused, largely for economic reasons, to countenance a large-scale withdrawal in order to free up manpower. Giving up the Donets Basin, with its steel production and vital raw materials, Hitler emphasized, would not only strengthen the Soviet opponent but also cripple German production. He raised similar objections to Manstein’s proposal for a flexible defense based on the “backhand blow,” which would invite the enemy, much as at Kharkov, to advance beyond his limits, only to be dealt a devastating defeat by a timely counterstrike. Although he certainly understood the merits of this strategy, he could not accept its prerequisite: giving up the Donets Basin. Nor, given the precarious situation facing Germany over the entirety of the eastern front, could he allow a concentration of forces in the south, which would imperil the other sectors, on the chance that the Soviets would attack precisely where the Germans wished. The counterstrike at Kharkov had worked because of a failure of intelligence, a mistake the Soviets were not likely to repeat given the exact information they possessed in the spring of 1943 about German intentions. Moreover, the Soviets themselves were preparing a backhand stroke against the Germans in the areas around Orel and Kharkov. Hitler, in fact, far from being an incompetent strategist, recognized that Germany no longer had freedom of action. The vast power differential between the two sides, the absolute importance of armaments production, and the looming threat of a second front all demanded his attention and seemed more pressing than a disagreement over an active or passive defense in the east.60