Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  What became the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Bill was drawn up by Groener, whose Supreme War Office would control and allocate the nation’s captive manpower. Groener was a reasonable man. Unlike Hindenburg and Ludendorff he had worked on the home front and knew the dire conditions there. He was prepared to compromise with the proletariat’s representatives, recognizing that ‘we can never win this war by fighting against the workers’.19 His draft took account of civilian criticism. The extension of military service for fifteen to sixty year olds had mutated into a new obligation, Patriotic Auxiliary Service, which comprised war work of all sorts, in government offices and agriculture as well as in war industry. Only men were subject to this new duty; Hindenburg’s demand for women too to be obligated was abandoned. In keeping with the Third OHL’s wishes, the draft bill was short and general, but implicit in its statement that ‘at the command of the War Minister’ males of fifteen to sixty could ‘be called upon to perform Patriotic Auxiliary Service’ was the radical new power to transfer labour and restrict its free movement. Although Ludendorff pushed for immediate implementation, passing such a change through the Reichstag required extensive consultation. The civil authorities were not prepared to relinquish all control and added clauses granting the Bundesrat, the house representing the federal states of Germany, oversight of the decrees issued by the Supreme War Office in implementing the law and the right to revoke it. Ministers also rejected a provision for compulsory military training for adolescents over fifteen and they raised the lower boundary of obligation for Patriotic Auxiliary Service to seventeen years old. After meetings with industrialists and trade union representatives, guidelines were also added detailing how the bill should be implemented. To reassure the left, these included provision for arbitration committees with worker representation, which would mediate when an employee wished to leave his job but his employer would not grant a ‘leaving certificate’. The intention was to pass the bill through the Bundesrat, and then take it to the Reichstag Steering Committee, where party representatives would haggle with Groener and Helfferich over its contents behind closed doors. Once agreement was reached, it was hoped the bill would in short order receive thunderous acceptance in the Reichstag, sending a powerful message of unity and will to continue the struggle and placing Germany’s war effort on a new, more efficient and controlled basis.20

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff were in for a rude shock. Social Democratic, Centre and Progressive deputies in the Reichstag and its Steering Committee did not share the Third OHL’s vision of a suborned command economy and were unwilling to place unconditional trust in the hands of the military or government. The heavily revised bill accepted by the parliament on 2 December and signed into law by the Kaiser three days later was very different from the generals’ intentions. In contrast to Groener’s concise and general early draft, the long text was filled with concessions to the workers and their institutions; Ludendorff later denounced ‘the form in which the Bill was passed’ as ‘equivalent to a failure’. The disgruntled Helfferich complained similarly that ‘one could almost say the Social Democrats, Poles, Alsatians and the trade union secretaries made the law.’21 For the conservative soldiers and statesmen, it was deeply worrying that the Reichstag had forced through a demand to set up a special committee of fifteen of its members to supervise the implementation of the Auxiliary Service Law, and even more so that general regulations would need their consent. Many industrialists, looking forward to having a captive workforce at their disposal, making planning easier and undermining employees’ ability to bargain for higher wages, were dismayed to find workers’ committees and conciliation agencies foisted on any factory with over fifty personnel. The trade unions had come closer to achieving a long-standing aim of forcing employers to recognize and parley with them. Perhaps worst of all, the primary objective of reducing worker mobility, a precondition for the central management of manpower resources, had to a large degree been thwarted. The left had spotted the potential for huge profits for industrialists, and had insisted that workers too should have the opportunity to better their lot. In consequence, although theoretically war workers were fixed to their employment, the prospect of ‘a suitable improvement of working conditions’ was explicitly acknowledged to be a valid justification to switch jobs.22

  The Third OHL’s attempt to remobilize Germany on a new basis of compulsion and control was thus a resounding failure. Ludendorff showed great naivety in imagining that a law limiting labour’s freedoms would be accepted without demand for compensation. He disowned the final Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law as ‘not merely insufficient, but positively harmful’; it was, he self-servingly argued, a manifestation of the weakness of civil authorities and avarice of the political left that ultimately cost the Reich victory.23 Yet the real issue for Ludendorff was that he had been thwarted and the forces of democracy and Socialism had received a boost. The Reichstag committee’s oversight of the law, the cooperation between the SPD and centrist bourgeois parties and the imposition of arbitration committees in which workers sat in judgement alongside employers were deeply disturbing for conservatives. Their claims, backed by some historians, that the Auxiliary Service Law undermined the war effort generally lack a firm basis in evidence. The increase in strikes in 1917 was a response to deteriorating social circumstances rather than the altered employment conditions under the new law, and the complaint that the law increased labour turnover appears doubtful. By contrast, the law was extremely successful in freeing up military manpower by substituting fit workers with men liable for auxiliary service. Crucially, the concessions made also kept the trade unions invested in the imperial regime and assured their cooperation; an invaluable achievement, especially given the tumultuousness of 1917. Attempting to militarize the workforce regardless of all other interests would inevitably have led to disaster. In a war that could only be fought with the consent of the people, the compromise and concessions of the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law were Germany’s best hope of holding out.24

  FORCED LABOUR

  The Third OHL failed in 1916 to shift the basis of Germany’s war effort from consent to control, but coercion nonetheless remained an important tool in economic mobilization. German workers might be intimidated into compliance by police, employers or the generals in charge of the country’s home districts. However, the harshest and most blatant compulsion on Reich soil targeted enemy subjects. It is rarely remembered today just how dependent Germany was on foreign labour during the First World War. By 1918, around a seventh of its labour force, 2.5 million people in total, came from abroad. Most were, in some sense, forced labourers. Some 1.5 million military prisoners of war made up the majority and could legally be put to non-war-related tasks. However, there were also very many civilians: hundreds of thousands of Russian-subject Polish seasonal labourers were detained on large agricultural estates; tens of thousands of Belgian civilians were forcibly brought to Germany to labour in its industry; and even among the many foreigners who did sign an employment contract, compulsion had often played some part in their decision. Yet strikingly and perhaps counter-intuitively given the Nazis’ extensive use of slave labour in the Second World War, the primary lesson of the 1914–18 conflict was that forced labour did not work terribly well. The more violent the compulsion, the more miserable and recalcitrant workers became, and the less was achieved.25

  Before the war, the booming German economy had attracted much immigrant labour. There had been half a million foreigners working in agriculture and a further 700,000 in industry. When hostilities broke out, 350,000 Russian-subject Polish seasonal workers were caught on the wrong side of the border. At first, the priority was to keep those of military age from joining the Tsar’s army. All others were to be retained only for the root-crop harvest and then expelled. However, by October 1914, it had dawned on the Prussian Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture that these people would be crucial to the Reich’s farming and food supply in a long war, and they were consequently forbidde
n from returning home or leaving their jobs. Russian-subject Poles working in German industry were soon placed under similar restrictions. The home district generals accepted responsibility for enforcing discipline among these Poles. They were banned from striking or acting insubordinately and travel beyond their assigned locality was forbidden without prior permission from the general. To provide a semblance of legality for detaining people ineligible for military service, intense pressure was placed upon them to sign employment contracts ‘voluntarily’.26 Two points should be noted. First, in detaining these people, the German state demonstrated right from the start of hostilities that it was prepared to act ruthlessly and against the spirit of international law to benefit its war effort. Second, its treatment of what were regarded as uncultured easterners was different from citizens of ‘civilized’ western states. British women, for example, were permitted to return home at the start of the war, while their 4,000 military-aged men were first forbidden exit and in November interned in a relatively comfortable camp, Ruhleben, just outside Berlin. In contrast to the Russian Poles, they were never made to work for Germany’s war effort. French and Belgian male civilians were mostly forced to labour only from 1916.27

  The Third OHL thus did not pioneer forced labour in Germany, but its urgent need for workers for the Hindenburg Programme prompted it to extend the practice in a new and harsher direction. With German manpower nearly at full stretch, the High Command cast covetous eyes towards occupied Belgium, an industrialized land with a skilled but largely unemployed workforce. The idea of recruiting these workers had been in circulation for a while. Big manufacturers in the Reich had already approached the Prussian War Ministry before Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s rise, and it in turn had urged General Moritz von Bissing, the head of the administration in the General Government Belgium (GGB), first in March 1916 and then again in the summer, to mobilize Belgian manpower for the German war effort. Voluntary recruitment had little success: fewer than 30,000 workers had come forward, and as the War Ministry needed at least ten times that number for its armaments programme, forced labour had been proposed. The Governor General blocked the suggestion. Even under pressure, he would compromise no further than a decree, issued in mid-May 1916, permitting workers who were unemployed or had refused to labour for German interests in Belgium to be deported over the border. Bissing’s objections were in part motivated by pragmatism. He rightly doubted the economic effectiveness of forced labour and feared it would cause unrest in Belgium and provoke a negative international reaction. Bissing was also thinking strategically: he hoped Belgium would ultimately be attached to the Reich, and therefore wished to treat its population ‘reasonably’. Finally, something of the paternalism inherent in the old Prussian officer corps played into his actions. He understood his role as ‘administrator of the land’, and felt a responsibility to oppose the more rapacious forms of exploitation. ‘I am of the opinion that a pressed lemon has no value, and that a dead cow gives no more milk,’ he had observed a year earlier, in June 1915. ‘For this reason, it is so important and necessary that a land which economically and also in other respects has such significance for Germany is kept viable and that the wounds of war are, as far as possible, again healed.’28

  In the end, Bissing’s resistance was broken by Ludendorff and Hindenburg, who regarded the introduction of forced labour as a greater priority. Just a week and a half after their appointment to head the German army, they met the Governor General to discuss Belgian resources. Five days later, on 13 September, they ordered him to provide labour for German needs, regardless of social or legal scruples. Bissing resisted. He consulted with the Chancellor and then travelled to Pleß, more than 1,000 kilometres from his seat in Brussels, to reason with the High Command. On 19 September he personally refused Ludendorff’s demand for any general use of Belgian forced labour in Germany. It was only on 6 October, after a conference in which the GGB’s representatives were isolated among both military and civil representatives in their categorical rejection of forced labour, and after an unsuccessful appeal to the Chancellor, that Bissing reluctantly agreed to organize deportations of Belgian industrial workers for Germany.29

  It would have been difficult to make a worse decision, for on every level the deportations were a fiasco. Once Bissing had relented, the first group of unemployed and so-called ‘work-shy’, 729 all told, were rounded up and transported on 26 October 1916. A total of 115 such actions would take place before the deportations were halted on 10 February 1917. Initially, the OHL hoped for 20,000 workers to be transported weekly, but in the face of considerable problems, above all an overstrained rail system and lack of suitable accommodation in Germany, this figure was revised downwards, first to 12,000–13,000 and then 8,000. By 10 December the army intended to deport 2,000 Belgian workers weekly, but in practice, although 10,000 or even 12,000 had been transported during some weeks in November, even this number proved impossible to reach by the year’s end. In total, 60,847 Belgians were deported. The army’s crude strategy was to bring them to camps in Germany, where through deliberately harsh treatment, inadequate nutrition and poor sanitation they were to be coerced into bettering their lot by signing employment contracts in German war industry, thereby becoming ‘voluntary’ workers. A measure of how bad these holding camps were is the mortality in them: in a matter of months, 1,316 inmates died. Regardless, only 13,376 Belgian deportees, less than a quarter of the total, succumbed and signed a contract. Callous treatment encouraged bitterness and hatred, not submissiveness.30

  The deportation of a few thousand wretched workers had no bearing on Hindenburg’s armaments drive but it did unleash an international public relations disaster rivalled only by the massacres and destruction of the franc-tireur delusion of August 1914. The Belgian Catholic clergy and government in exile issued protests. So too did the Entente. The Germans’ reputation for barbarity was cemented. In neutral lands there was public outrage. The Pope condemned the practice of mass deportation. Most damaging was the reaction in the United States. There was a flurry of condemnation by intellectuals, in the press and at mass rallies in the country’s major cities. The popular outrage, stoked by America’s pro-war faction, undermined President Wilson’s efforts to engineer an American-made negotiated peace. In the winter of 1916–17, as a consequence of the deportations, Germany finally conclusively lost what its ambassador in Washington termed ‘the struggle for the American soul’.31

  The Germans, along with their Habsburg allies, had more success in the use of military prisoners for labour. As Ludendorff later observed, these were ‘of the utmost importance’ to the Reich’s war economy.32 Their numbers far exceeded the civilians who were forced to work. By the end of 1914, the Germans had captured 219,364 French, 19,316 British and around 300,000 Russian soldiers. Their captives swelled to 1.5 million in 1915 and to 2,415,043 by war’s end. The Austro-Hungarians held around two million enemy soldiers.33 At first, these men’s labour was not called upon. They languished in overcrowded prison camps, where in the first half of 1915 a typhus epidemic raged, necessitating strict isolation from the civilian populations.34 Nonetheless, plans were soon formulated to exploit prisoners’ labour and from the middle of the year in Austria and Germany they were sent out en masse in work details. There was nothing illegal about this deployment. International law proscribed only activities connected ‘with the operations of the war’ for military captives.35 Initially, the Austrians proposed to employ the prisoners on ambitious state land reclamation and railway projects. In Germany, they were first put to similar work but soon after began to be allocated to the iron industry or mines, where they quickly became a large section of the labour force. By August 1916, the month of Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s rise, they accounted for around 14 per cent of workers in the Ruhr coal industry.36

  It was in agriculture that military prisoners were most numerous and proved invaluable. Around two-thirds of Germany’s prisoners were set to agricultural tasks. In Austria too, their deployment to
farms was ruled ‘a state necessity of the first rank’.37 At first they worked only on large estates, because the Central Powers’ armies, preoccupied with security concerns, insisted that private enterprises wishing to use the labour of captives take a minimum of thirty. It was uneconomical to guard any fewer. However, as economic priorities became more pressing, the military adopted a more flexible attitude and from October 1915 permitted individual POWs to be accommodated permanently on farms. Thereafter it was quite common for prisoners to be distributed singly or in pairs. At war’s end, 1.5 million prisoners were spread across 750,000 German farms and firms.38 The men allocated to peasant farmers could count themselves fortunate. Captives sent to work in industrial areas were poorly paid, badly fed and at risk of epidemic disease. An even worse fate befell those, 16 per cent of all Germany’s and over 20 per cent of Austria-Hungary’s prisoners, who were retained by the armies for labour directly behind the lines. Criminally inadequate rations, beatings and overwork stamped life in their prisoner labour companies. They accounted for many of the perhaps 140,000 and 230,000 men who died respectively in German and Austro-Hungarian captivity.39 By contrast, prisoners allocated to small farmers in the countryside were often treated well. The female proprietors valued the scarce labour, food was available and, as the prisoners often lived in the farmhouse, barriers of language and national enmity broke down and many came to be treated as part of the family. This form of forced labour, a model far removed from the brutal servitude usually associated with the term, was the great foreign labour success of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the war. The men, mostly Russians with farming backgrounds, knew they were lucky and, in contrast to prisoners in industry or the front prisoner companies, they offered a high level of productivity.40