Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Hitler, as has long been known, was obsessed with the alleged Jewish world conspiracy and its threat to Germany. The trauma of the war experience, the revolutionary upheavals and destruction that shook Central and Eastern Europe (especially the triumph of Jewish-Bolshevism in Russia), and the sense of threat and opportunity created by the collapse of empires all left an indelible impression on him. His toxic sense of conspiratorial anti-Semitism reinforced his belief that the Jews had somehow fomented and uniquely profited from the upheavals all around. Further, the threatened German nationalism he had imbibed as a youth in Vienna was further exacerbated by the outcome of the war, when not just the Habsburg Empire but Germany itself seemed on the verge of destruction. Lost territory represented more than just a province or two changing colors on the map; for Hitler and other racial nationalists, it meant not only a truncation of the German racial body but also an opportunity, in the tangle of ethnic groups and lack of clear boundaries in Central Europe, for other nationalities to profit at Germany’s expense. Nor was Hitler in any doubt as to who was responsible for this destruction. In February 1945, in one of his last conversations with Martin Bormann, he remarked, “An unfortunate historical accident fated it that my seizure of power should coincide with the moment at which the chosen one of world Jewry, Roosevelt, should have taken the helm in the [United States]. . . . Everything is ruined by the Jew, who has settled upon the United States as his most powerful bastion.” At the very end of a lost war, in which his plans for a great continental empire had been foiled in large part by the relentless resistance of the Soviet Union, it was the pivotal role of Roosevelt and the Jews to which Hitler assigned blame for the German defeat.1

  Hitler’s obsession with the power and strategic potential of the United States had, we now know, emerged as long ago as the late 1920s in his unpublished Second Book. The perceived threat from the United States to a large extent also determined, from his point of view, the purpose of the war. America, to Hitler, represented more than just an economic or strategic challenge; its liberal, capitalistic, democratic, pluralist vision, behind which lurked the malevolent Jew, posed an existential threat to his own vision of a homogenous racial community unified in a common vision and led by a strong Führer. Germany, after all, had not lost the Great War but been undermined by jealous enemies. Unable to shed his wartime mind-set, Hitler fully subscribed to the Dolchstoss (stab in the back) myth, not least because it neatly encapsulated two key ideas: solidarity and betrayal. In this view, the trench experience had forged a unique “community of the front,” itself a microcosm of a new, unified society, while the huge popular investment in the war domestically had been undermined by the “internal enemy.” The “real Germany,” then, had not lost the war but been betrayed by Jewish war profiteers. Although the myth initially obscured the reality of total war, that Germany had lost a drawn-out war of attrition because it lacked manpower, raw materials, and industrial and financial resources, by the late 1920s Hitler had come to appreciate the importance of these material factors. The only logical response to this situation, as sketched first in Mein Kampf and then in the Second Book, was to create a new unified society within Germany, then carve out a Lebensraum for the German Volk sufficient to allow it to compete with the United States in the struggle for global preeminence. The only such vast spaces available in Europe lay in the east and could be taken only by force. The mission of conquest, for economic and racial reasons, thus formed the central core of Hitler’s ambition. For him, after all, the purpose of a state was nothing less than to secure the existence of the Volk. It also fit well with his fundamentalist social Darwinism: either the German Volk struggled for Lebensraum and assured its existence, or its racial enemies would deny it the means to life and, thus, assure its extinction.2

  By the summer of 1939, however, Germany’s ability to conduct that existential struggle seemed in doubt. Rapid rearmament had, indeed, provoked an economic crisis, although this was not in itself the key reason for war. More importantly, Hitler’s actions had prompted accelerated rearmament efforts by Great Britain, France, and the United States as well as a hardening of the global diplomatic constellation against Germany. Not coincidentally, Hitler’s famous threat on 30 January 1939 to annihilate the Jews, to which he returned with such obsessiveness in subsequent years, was intended as a precise warning to Roosevelt to stay out of Germany’s “legitimate” affairs in Europe. As before 1914, Hitler saw the hand of the Jewish conspiracy in the effort once again to isolate and encircle Germany. Ironically, Stalin’s gamble on provoking an intracapitalist war offered Hitler a way out of his dilemma. Faced with an enemy coalition allegedly orchestrated by world Jewry, he needed to strike hard and fast, an opportunity now available because of the pact with Stalin. In the interim, he could fight a war in the west with no threat of a second front and protected against the worst effects of the much-feared British blockade.3

  The result, although spectacular, also reinforced the economic and racial logic of Hitler’s ideological vision. Great Britain, influenced and supplied by the United States, chose to continue the war rather than settle with Germany, while Roosevelt launched a truly enormous rearmament effort in America that would, in a few years, produce a military force that would swamp the Wehrmacht. Moreover, although Germany’s conquests in the west contained valuable industrial and human resources, they lacked precisely the things that Germany most needed and the British proceeded to blockade: raw materials, food resources, and, most importantly, coal and oil. Once more, the logic of the situation forced Hitler to turn his eye to the east—only the raw materials, food supplies, and oil of the Soviet Union would allow Germany to organize an integrated continental economy that could compete with America. Nor would further trade agreements with Stalin suffice. Behind Stalin, Hitler believed, lurked another tentacle of the Jewish conspiracy. Economic dependence on the Soviet Union would result in the same fate for Germany as reliance on the Anglo-American global market: extinction. Propelled by a peculiar combination of racial arrogance (the notion of Slavic inferiority), the sense that the borderlands of the former Russian Empire were up for grabs (Germany, after all, had seized them in World War I), and urgency (a belief that time was against Germany), Hitler saw the only solution to the German dilemma in securing the necessary resources by conquest. If Germany acted immediately, a short window of opportunity existed since the American rearmament program would not bear fruit until 1942, while the spectacular victory over France offered the means: a short blitzkrieg campaign. Barbarossa was, thus, planned as a swift operation that would allow Germany access to the vital resources of the Soviet Union even as it continued preparations for the ultimate struggle against America.

  Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to concentrate all its resources on Barbarossa, as early as Smolensk in July–August 1941, and certainly no later than Moscow that autumn, Germany found that blitzkrieg had run aground. Not only did it face the prospect of two wars, but Hitler also initiated actions for a third war as well, that against the Jews of the Soviet Union. If the enormous extent of the Nazi project is to be comprehended, it must be understood in its interrelated political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and military contexts, as a grand mission of colonization, economic exploitation, and racial recivilization. Hitler prided himself on being a Raumpolitiker, a geopolitician who thought in imperial terms, rather than merely a Grenzpolitiker, one concerned only with border revisions. Expansion was, thus, intended not just to rectify the injustices of Versailles but also, as he put it to the Reichstag after the conquest of Poland, to create “a new order of ethnographic conditions . . . , a resettlement of nationalities.” This untangling of ethnic groups, predicated on the establishment of a racially cleansed German community at the heart of a larger European empire, formed the context in which his racial ideas should be understood. The first test case for this racial restructuring was Poland, where efforts began almost immediately to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union to the Warthe
land, the part of western Poland to be annexed to Germany. At the same time, room had to be made for the new arrivals, so ethnic Poles and Jews had to be removed. The Poles could simply be dumped in the General Government, but the Jews, as a perceived racial menace, had to be watched and, thus, were concentrated in a few urban ghettos or, as part of another experiment, sent to the Nisko reservation, an inhospitable border area southeast of Lublin. In all these actions, the Nazis learned a number of things: war legitimized harsh measures against enemies; disentangling populations was a messy, often brutal, business; territorial expansion and ethnic untangling offered vast opportunities for ambitious, ruthless underlings; and Jews had no place in the anticipated New Order.4

  As Nazi planners confronted the prospect of further expansion to the east, they recognized another problem, one that defied easy solution: greater success in territorial conquest would bring with it more racial inferiors and Jews, thus intensifying the demographic dilemma. The solution lay not merely in shoving people around on a limited scale but in a truly ambitious and revolutionary socioeconomic and demographic project. This formed the context for Generalplan Ost, which was nothing less than a utopian vision of transplanting ethnic Germans and related Aryan peoples into the vast expanse of European Russia. While Western Europe’s industrial capacity would be integrated into the German economy, Eastern Europe would be the scene of a complete agricultural and demographic restructuring. Urban areas would be greatly reduced, while a neofeudal system of Germanic farms and villages would be established along key transportation routes. The logic of this “settler colonialism” also involved, as it had in North America and Australia, the large-scale removal of the native population from the land: those who could not be incorporated, above all the Jews, but also large parts of the Polish population, were to be expelled across the Ural Mountains into Asia, left to starve, or both. Although efforts were made to implement some pilot schemes, Generalplan Ost largely fell victim to changing developments in the war. In any case, the most grandiose schemes were always intended to take place after a successful conclusion to the war, when Generalplan Ost would be merged within a broad consolidation of all conquered areas in a general settlement plan.5

  Although Generalplan Ost had been a brainchild of Himmler’s and important primarily for showing the direction of the Nazi colonial vision, another aspect of the same impulse that had far more murderous consequences was the hunger policy, the genesis of which lay not in the SS but in Goering’s Four-Year Plan, the Reich Ministry for Food, the quartermaster-general’s office in the Wehrmacht, and the military economic-armament office. Behind this lay Hitler’s imprint, influenced as always by the experience of World War I and revolution. The key to Germany’s defeat in the earlier war, the Führer was convinced, was the British blockade, which exposed the key German weakness—lack of economic self-sufficiency, especially in foodstuffs. This problem was accentuated with the upheavals and revolutionary movements of the postwar period, especially in the new Soviet Union, which moved from being primarily a grain-exporting region to being an industrialized society that consumed all its agricultural production. This meant that a reliable food supply for Germany was even more imperiled. In an “age of economic empires,” Hitler had argued as far back as November 1937, “the primitive urge to colonization” had to manifest itself. Bolshevism, the “Guidelines of Economic Policy for the Economic Organization East” asserted in May 1941, echoing the Führer, had caused significant economic disturbances and destroyed the natural balance between food-producing and food-consuming areas. The only solution, reintegrating Russia into this balance, “will necessarily lead to both the industry and a large part of the people in the hitherto food-importing areas [of the Soviet Union] dying off.” The full ramifications of the scheme would have resulted in murder on a breathtaking scale: Nazi bureaucrats estimated that anywhere from 30 to 45 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would have perished, with some believing those figures too low by half.6

  In the event, pragmatism (the need for labor) and the practical realities on the ground (lack of available manpower) limited the eventual impact of the hunger policy. If not the tens of millions of useless eaters envisioned by its originators, a few million Soviet citizens nonetheless perished as a direct result of deliberate starvation. Among them were urban populations such as Kiev, Kharkov, and Leningrad as well as roughly 2 million Soviet prisoners of war. Although Hitler’s endless verbal ramblings to his intimates during the euphoric days of midsummer 1941 betrayed a clear sense of the apparent colonial nature of the project, the key point, as Donald Bloxham has stressed, lies outside this historical precedent and in another. In his emphasis on food supply and reversing the racial fragmentation of Eastern Europe, Hitler revealed the influences of a very specific historical, spatial, and economic context. As an Austrian German, Hitler had been influenced by the sense of threatened ethnicity so prevalent among the German population of the Dual Monarchy. He was also acutely aware, as illustrated in Mein Kampf, of the flux and openness for exploitation of the borderland areas of the former Habsburg and Romanov Empires. Moreover, as other statements of the 1930s attest, he recognized that various policies of ethnic cleansing, murderous to a greater or lesser extent, had been carried out before, during, and after World War I—and some with the connivance and encouragement of the victorious Western powers. Finally, the constant allusions to grain supply fit neatly with his fears of a reoccurrence of the food shortages that he believed had crippled and destroyed the imperial German war effort. The earlier war experience confirmed his Darwinistic vision: food resources were both vital and scarce and had to be obtained so that its enemies could not again starve Germany into submission. If Germany was to win, then others had to lose; for the Führer, it was a zero-sum game. His vision for the east, then, was less a classic colonial one of naked economic exploitation and more an attempt to restructure and unify the area racially, then organize it as part of the broader European struggle against the American challenge.7

  It was also within this larger context that the fate of the Jews was determined. The original goal, to remove them from the German area of influence and control, largely remained intact in 1939–1940, even as the Jewish problem intensified. Forced emigration had not been effective, efforts to shove Polish Jews across the demarcation line with Russia had failed, the reservation scheme came to naught, and the Madagascar Plan collapsed as a result of British persistence in the war. Although a territorial solution remained official policy, by the time of Barbarossa a new dynamic was emerging. Security concerns, the identification of Jews as Communists and potential partisan fighters, and the fear of the internal enemy undermining the war effort all led to the preinvasion decision to murder the male Jews of the Soviet Union. In its implementation, the decision also demonstrated the intersection between policy and ambition. In the early summer of 1941, local initiatives often drove policy forward as ambitious and ruthless SS and SD men used the autonomy given them to drive forward a murderous solution to a problem they knew had high priority with the Führer. The decision in the summer of 1941 to expand the murder to include all Soviet Jews and then the further resolution that same autumn to kill all Jews under German control both illustrated the importance of the military situation: unexpectedly tough Soviet resistance, high German losses, the traditional fear of partisan war and internal upheavals fomented by Jews, and the apparently sudden prospect of complete success combined to create an explosive atmosphere. Inspired, perhaps, by the expectation and euphoria of imminent victory after such a tough struggle, Hitler now definitively decided that the Jews had no place in the new Nazi imperium. The territorial solution, which itself had assumed high levels of mortality through “natural causes,” gave way to an “exterminationist solution,” which envisioned a much more immediate death, especially for the Jews in those areas designated for German colonization.

  The timing, implementation, and attainment of Hitler’s far-reaching goals, of course, depended on military triumphs. The
success of the Wehrmacht formed the prerequisite for the realization of Hitler’s vision. Military victories and setbacks set the ultimate parameters for the extent to which this imperial policy could be pursued: how much of policy was to be put into effect, the extent and success of this implementation, and the compromises that undermined the full impact of Nazi plans. Solving the Jewish problem and creating the racial-utopian Germanic Lebensraum in the east were both central to the Nazi worldview, and, for both, the war-fighting ability of the German armed forces was the essential component. The realization of this fact also raises the question of the extent to which the Wehrmacht knowingly participated in and supported Nazi criminal activities in the Soviet Union. Despite postwar attempts to depict the Wehrmacht leadership as primarily apolitical and technocratic, from the end of World War I it had been a bastion of aggressive nationalism and revisionism, conservative, strongly anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic. Deeply affected by the war experience and the defeat in 1918, the great majority of its members accepted the Dolchstoss myth and, with Hitler, were determined that Jewish-Bolshevism would not again destroy Germany.8

  Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the army leadership raised no objections to the flood of criminal orders emanating from the Führer and the OKW. From Hitler’s injunctions to conduct a brutal and merciless war of extermination to cooperating with the RSHA in delineating spheres of responsibilities behind the front to specific measures such as the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree, the army leadership could be under no illusions as to the purpose and methods of the coming war in the Soviet Union, but it failed to mount any protest. Indeed, during the summer and autumn of 1941, army leaders, both at the front and in the OKH, often explicitly urged their troops, in ideologically charged, anti-Semitic proclamations, to wage war on National Socialist lines and discard notions of humane treatment of the enemy. Further, the army fully cooperated with the murderous Einsatzgruppen units as they carried out their bloody task, offering logistic, intelligence, and communications support, as well as occasionally furnishing manpower for executions. It also willingly handed over commissars and Jews to the Einsatzgruppen for murder. Moreover, millions of Soviet prisoners of war died in camps under its control as part of a deliberate plan of murder and starvation. Army security units used ruthless methods to suppress the partisan war as well as embracing the use of SS and police units in order to pacify and safeguard rear areas. It remorselessly plundered and stripped the areas under its control of foodstuffs in order to feed itself off the land, regardless of the consequences for local civilians. It also exploited native inhabitants for labor and cooperated with the forced roundups, the infamous Menschenjagd conducted by Sauckel’s organization that sent people as forced laborers back to Germany. The nexus between economic, colonial, racial, and military imperatives was, perhaps, best illustrated in Polish eastern Galicia, where local authorities began constructing Durchgangstrasse 4, a key transportation corridor into Ukraine that neatly combined immediate military utility with an eventual use, as part of Generalplan Ost, as an axis of settlement for Volksdeutsche. In the meantime, the Autobahn would be constructed by Jewish laborers, some twenty thousand of whom would be worked to death in a process of extermination through labor.9