All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes, 1,700 men and 240 women have been executed. This is the ‘punishment’ for an attack on three German soldiers. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. The village was burnt down, women and children were left there to weep for their husbands and fathers and homes. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. All this is child’s play compared with what is happening in Poland and Russia. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty too? What shall I say when I am asked: ‘And what did you do during that time?’ Since Saturday, the Berlin Jews are being rounded up.

  The Holocaust is today often discussed in isolation. In one sense, this is logical, because the Jews were singled out for genocide, but the records of Auschwitz-Birkenau, most notorious of the death camp complexes, emphasise the numbers from other racial groups who shared the fate of Jewish deportees. The best available statistics show that a total of 1.1 million Jews arrived at the camp, of whom 100,000 survived; among 140,000 non-Jewish Poles, half survived; of 23,000 gypsies, all but 2,000 perished; all of 15,000 Soviet PoWs died; about half of 25,000 others – mostly political prisoners – were killed. In addition to almost six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, over three million Russians died in German captivity, while huge numbers of non-Jewish civilians were massacred in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries.

  It thus seems important to assess the Holocaust against the background of Hitler’s governance of his empire. One of the most moving and enlightened advocates of pursuing such context was Ruth Maier. As a twenty-two-year-old refugee in Oslo, barely a month before her own deportation and murder in Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary: ‘If you shut yourself away and look at this persecution and torture of Jews only from the viewpoint of a Jew, then you’ll develop some sort of complex which is bound to lead to a slow but certain psychological collapse. The only solution is to see the Jewish question from a broader perspective … within the framework of the oppressed Czechs and Norwegians, the oppressed workers … We’ll only be rich when we understand that it’s not just we who are a race of martyrs. That beside us there are countless others suffering, who will suffer like us until the end of time … if we don’t … if we don’t fight for a better …’ She broke off to express exasperation about the persistence of her own instinct to see the Jewish tragedy as unique, but her mental confusion does not diminish the nobility and unselfishness of this very young woman’s words from the threshold of the grave.

  One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes, from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology, while still fighting the war. Almost all comparisons between Hitler and Churchill are otiose, but one seems significant: Britain’s leader provoked the exasperation of his ministers, as well as that of humbler fellow countrymen, by his refusal seriously to address domestic social reform until victory was achieved. Germany’s leader, in contrast, launched a drastic reordering of conquered societies in the east within weeks of their occupation. He conducted wholesale expulsions of indigenous populations to make way for German colonists, and slaughtered large numbers of people, notably Jews and social and political activists, heedless of whether they offered resistance to his hegemony. Ignoring the human horror – as of course did the Nazis – these policies imposed enormous economic and agricultural disruption on Hitler’s war machine. Some members of designated lesser races enlisted in Nazi service to secure food or pay, or because they hated Jews, or because they merely relished opportunities for exercising dominion and indulging cruelty; but oppression embittered millions of Stalin’s former subjects who might have become willing German acolytes.

  In occupied western Europe in 1940–41, the Nazis encountered many active or potential collaborators. The leaders of Vichy France were eager to pursue a partnership with the Reich, which could have gained the support of many people in France, and conceivably led to French belligerence against Britain. But Hitler’s economic exploitation of Pétain’s nation, notably by imposing an artificially high exchange rate for the mark against the franc, progressively alienated the French, even before the 1943 introduction of forced labour in Germany, the detested Service de Travail Obligatoire.

  The Nazis’ mass deportations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine gravely damaged agricultural production. Many of the ethnic German colonists intended to replace the native inhabitants proved reluctant, as well as technically unqualified, to fulfil their appointed destinies. All history’s successful empires have rested partly on force majeure, but partly also upon offering conquered peoples compensations for subjection: stability, prosperity and a rule of law. The Nazis, by contrast, offered only brutality, corruption and administrative incompetence. They themselves would have argued that their cruelties were successful in suppressing strategically significant resistance to occupation everywhere save in Yugoslavia and Russia. This was true, but is only part of the story.

  Many of the occupied countries, and especially France, made useful contributions to the German war economy under compulsion: in all, they supplied some 9.3 per cent of the Reich’s armaments, and Danish agriculture provided 10 per cent of Germany’s food needs. But Hitler might have fared better had he offered conquered peoples incentives as well as threats, rewards as well as draconian confiscations of property and commodities. The Nazis’ view of economics was grotesquely primitive. They regarded wealth creation as a zero-sum game, in which for Germany to gain, someone else must lose. The consequence was that, from 1940 onwards, Hitler’s empire was progressively pillaged to fund his war, a process that could end only in its bankruptcy.

  The Nazi hierarchy was slow to comprehend the folly of slaughtering prospective slaves amid the national manpower crisis created by mobilisation of most of Germany’s population of military age. Adam Tooze has calculated that, in all, seven million men of working age – notably Jews, Poles and Russian PoWs – were killed or allowed to die by the Germans, most between 1941 and 1943. He describes the Holocaust as ‘a catastrophic destruction of labour power’. The Nazis in 1941–42 reasoned that their difficulties in feeding the German people were best assuaged by eliminating every unwanted mouth within their reach. At a Berlin meeting attended by Goering on 16 September 1941, food shortages were highlighted. The Reichsmarschal declared it to be unthinkable to reduce rations for Germany’s civilian population, ‘given the mood at home’: Hitler’s people required material as well as moral reassurance that the war was worth fighting.

  The only answer, the Nazis concluded, was to reduce provision for native inhabitants of the occupied territories and Russian PoWs. On 13 November, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told his heads of department that ‘prisoners of war who are not working will have to starve’. Thus Russian prisoners began to die in vast numbers, some of hunger and others at the hands of guards granted unlimited licence to kill in order to control the herds of desperate humanity for which they were responsible. By 1 February 1942, almost 60 per cent of 3.35 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had perished; by 1945, 3.3 million were dead out of 5.7 million taken captive.

  Only in 1943 did the Nazis acknowledge that hungry mouths also had useful hands: they belatedly accepted the value, indeed indispensability, of keeping prisoners alive to bolster Germany’s shrinking industrial labour force. When this new policy was implemented, Goering observed with complacency that Russians performed 80 per cent of the construction work on his Ju87 Stukas. By the autumn of 1944, almost eight million foreign labourers and PoWs were engaged in the German economy, 20 per cent of its workforce. BMW employed 16,600 prisoners at its Munich plant alone; though still treated with institutionalised cruelty, their rations were increased just sufficiently to sustain life. Industrial employers asked that punishments should b
e administered behind the wire of workers’ quarters, rather than in open view on factory premises, to avoid distressing German staff. A vast complex of guarded quarters was established in and around every major German city, to house foreigners of all kinds. The Munich area harboured 120 PoW facilities, 286 barracks and hostels for civilians and a brothel to service them, together with seven concentration camp outstations including a branch of Dachau – 80,000 bedspaces.

  It was impossible for most German civilians credibly to deny knowledge of the concentration camps or the slave-labour system: little girls living near Ravensbrück were seen playing a game of ‘camp guards’; prisoners were widely used for firefighting, rescue work and clearing rubble in the wake of air raids. They were also dispatched to deal with unexploded bombs, a task so often fatal that SS men convicted of crimes were preferred as guards for such squads. To ensure that slaves were readily available, local satellite camps were established in urban areas. Prisoners from Sachsenhausen, for instance, were drafted into nearby Berlin, where their striped clothing caused civilians to refer to them as ‘zebras’. In Osnabrück, mothers complained to the SS that children in the schoolyard were obliged to witness slaves being beaten by their guards. The SS responded that ‘If the children aren’t tough enough yet, they have to be hardened.’

  Local authorities were generally appreciative of such cheap labour, which the Mayor of Duisburg described as ‘highly satisfactory’. But some civilians deplored alleged coddling: a road contractor wrote in March 1944, ‘We are still much too soft on PoWs and other labour squads in our streets. I say, better throw one man overboard than let us drown.’ The SS frequently used prisoners to collect loot from wrecked buildings for their own profit – in Düsseldorf two men were shot lest they reveal their jailers’ racketeering. Civilian doctors frequently signed false death certificates for prisoners shot or beaten to death; in this as in much else, the German medical profession displayed its readiness to oblige the Nazi regime. Slave labourers continued to die even after being enlisted in the service of Reich industries, partly because a tension persisted between the need for their services, and Nazi reluctance to feed them. By one calculation, 170,000 of 2.77 million Russian civilian workers perished, along with 130,000 Poles and 32,000 Italian PoWs.

  From 1943 onwards, however, prisoner mortality declined sharply. Even some Jews were kept alive, notably as workers at the huge IG Farben complex beside Auschwitz-Birkenau. The major Holocaust killings, save those of Hungary’s Jews, were already completed. Foreign workers and slaves never provided a wholly satisfactory substitute labour force – they were thought to underperform their German counterparts by at least 15 per cent, perhaps as much as 30 per cent. It was a folly, as well as a barbarity, to suppose that starved and brutalised slave labourers could achieve as much useful productivity as those treated with minimal humanity. The concentration camp system, which the SS sought to make a profit centre, was inefficient even on its own terms, but slave labour alone made it possible for Germany to continue the war until 1945.

  2 KILLING JEWS

  The edifice of Holocaust literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance. The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology, but to Germany’s policies throughout the global conflict. The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfil objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime. Goering asserted at a key party meeting on 12 November 1938, following Kristallnacht: ‘If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.’

  At that time, Nazi policy still promoted the emigration of Reich Jews, but a November 1939 article in the SS journal Schwartze Korps asserted the commitment to ‘the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total extermination’. Many such remarks were made openly and publicly by leading Nazis: Hitler made his notorious ‘prophecy’ in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, asserting that war would result in ‘the annihilation of European Jewry’. He sought to make it plain that every Jew within his reach was a hostage for the ‘good behaviour’ of the Western Powers. If the British and French declined to acquiesce in his ambitions – above all if they chose to oppose these with force – the consequences would be their responsibility.

  The Western Powers treated such remarks as hyperbolic. Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemispheric conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly educated and long-civilised European society could fulfil their leaders’ extravagant rhetoric and implement genocide. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945, and even for a time afterwards.

  The Nazi T4 euthanasia programme, which began in July 1939, killed German and Polish inmates of psychiatric units, categorised as ‘unfit for further existence’, at a rate of some 5,000 a month in 1940. Most were gassed, though some were shot, under Gestapo and SS supervision with assistance from doctors; between four and five thousand of the 70,000 victims were Jewish. The T4 programme was historically important, because at an early stage it demonstrated the German government’s willingness to undertake an annihilatory process, minutely bureaucratised from Berlin, to eliminate a sub-group surplus to the Third Reich’s requirements. Once one minority had been slaughtered wholesale, no further moral barrier stood in the path of the Holocaust: the dilemmas facing the Nazi leadership related only to timing and logistical feasibility.

  For more than two years after war came, the priority of securing victory was held to require postponement of an absolute elimination of European Jewry. Between August 1939 and the summer of 1942, when the death camp programme achieved full capacity, the Nazis contented themselves with killing large numbers of people in many countries on an arbitrary and opportunistic basis. During the first months after German troops entered Poland, some 10,000 Poles were murdered – a mixture of Jews and non-Jews deemed inimical to German interests. Five designated SS Einsatzgruppen – death squads – followed the armoured spearheads. Their commanders were granted generous discretion about selecting victims, which some exploited to eliminate prostitutes, gypsies and the mentally ill. Around 60,000 Polish Jewish soldiers were segregated from their fellow PoWs and earmarked for later disposal; all Poland’s 1.7 million Jews were designated for resettlement in ghettos. Early in 1940, the Nazis embarked on the enforced removal of 600,000 Jews from areas of the country now incorporated in the Greater Reich; the deportees were transferred to the ‘General Government’ rump, administered separately. Large numbers, displaced without provision for their shelter or feeding, perished within months.

  At this stage, Nazi policy was still incoherent. There was much discussion about deportation: in May 1940 Himmler presented a memorandum to Hitler about the possibility of shipping Europe’s Jews to Africa or Madagascar. The Reichsführer SS mentioned the radical alternative of the ‘Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people’, but rejected this as ‘un-Germanic and impossible’. It was agreed that as many Jews as possible should perish in the course of the normal business of administering occupation; but there was no commitment to their systematic slaughter.

  During the next two years, and especially after the invasion of Russia, Germans killed Jews at whim, on a scale largely determined by availability of manpower and resources. A German ordnance sergeant from a bakery company recalled: ‘I saw these people being rounded up and then just had to look away, as they were clubbed to death right before our eyes … A great many German soldiers, as well as Lithuanians, stood there watching. They did not express either assent or disapproval – they just stood, totally indifferent.’
A handful of German officers displayed the courage to protest. Col. Walter Bruns, an engineer who chanced upon a massacre of Jews while out riding near the Rumbuli forest in Latvia on 30 November 1941, submitted a formal report to Army Group North. He also made a personal visit to army headquarters at Angerburg to deliver a further copy. No formal response was forthcoming, save that the chief of staff urged that in future such killing ‘must be done with greater caution’.

  The Einsatzgruppen were relatively few and small; they achieved some impressive massacres, notably in Ukraine, but their victims were still numbered only in tens of thousands. Energetic efforts by the SS Mounted Brigade in the Pripet marshes during early August 1941 accounted for 6,504 Jewish victims. The unit’s final report for the month cited 15,878 killings, though the real total was probably over 25,000. The logistical difficulties of wholesale murder proved immense, even when labour-saving expedients were adopted, such as herding victims into mass graves before shooting them. At such a sluggish pace, the process of ‘solving Europe’s Jewish problem’ would require decades, and in the late summer of 1941 SS commanders began to demand a much more radical and comprehensive approach. In September, Einsatzgruppe C proposed working the Jews to death: ‘If we entirely dispense with the Jewish labour force, then the economic rebuilding of Ukrainian industry … is virtually impossible. There is only one possibility … the solution of the Jewish problem via the full-scale deployment of the Jewish labour force. That would bring with it the gradual liquidation of Jewry.’

  Late in July 1941, a new policy was adopted: confinement of east European Jews to ghettos, where they became easier to control and deploy for labour service, while freeing up outside accommodation. The Wehrmacht strongly supported this measure, because it resolved administrative difficulties in its rear areas. The SS extended the range of Jewish murder victims to include many more women and children, but after experiencing the practical difficulties of industrial killing, few SS officers yet felt able to accept a challenge as ambitious as exterminating the entire race. Through the winter of 1941–42 they focused upon packing the ghettos, then completing regional cleansing processes by killing all those Jews found outside them, most in rural areas. Ghetto living conditions were unspeakable: from August 1941 onwards, 5,500 Jews died each month from starvation and disease out of Warsaw’s total ghetto population of 338,000, and mortality was comparable elsewhere.