The main camp for asocials was at Flossenbürg in northeastern Bavaria. It was founded in late April-early May 1938, when the Gestapo and Kripo picked up thousands of asocials. This place was designed for “non-politicals” like repeat offenders, pimps, tramps, beggars, and alcoholics. The camp was also supposed to help finance Himmler’s SS empire.37 Physically fit males, removed from one institution or another, or arrested on the street, were sent there and forced to work in the rock quarry.38
The population of the camp became more heterogeneous over time.39A survey of February 8, 1943, the last one before the camp was inundated with evacuees from camps to the east, indicated just over four thousand prisoners. An estimated one-third were Germans, while most of the rest were slave workers from the east. Like all other main concentration camps, Flossenbürg eventually had its own empire of sub-camps, and by 1945 ninety-two of them were linked to the main camp.40
There were small numbers of Jews in this camp in mid-1940, but most came later, between August 1944 and January 1945, when at least ten thousand arrived from Poland and Hungary. They were sent primarily to the sub-camps of Flossenbürg, where thousands perished.41 By the end of 1944 the camp population had doubled to eight thousand and in February 1945 stood at eleven thousand.42
A census of the Flossenbürg system at the end of February 1945 shows that the population had become internationalized. Poles made up the largest contingent (38.2 percent) of the twenty-two thousand prisoners, followed by Soviets (23.2 percent). Among the thirty nationalities were many Hungarians, especially Hungarian Jews (9 percent), but also many French (6.7 percent), Italians and Germans (each with 5.5 percent), and Czechs (with 4.8 percent). At that point the Flossenbürg system as a whole contained forty thousand prisoners, of whom twenty-nine thousand were male. By the time the system collapsed in 1945, the population had grown to around fifty-two thousand.43
That camp had fifteen hundred recorded executions in the year April 1944 to April 1945. At times, it killed up to ninety people per day, including Germans involved in resistance activities like Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and General Hans Oster.44 There were no gas chambers at this camp, no assembly-line killing, but in little-known Flossenbürg and its sub-camps at one time or another at least a hundred thousand were incarcerated, of whom perhaps one-third died.45 That was more people than were killed in the bloodiest period of terror in the French Revolution.46
CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM IN THE WAR
At the end of 1933 it seemed concentration camps would be closed down, but on March 20, 1936, Hitler agreed to new plans to expand them again that were put to him by Himmler. The idea was to cover Germany with five large camps.47
Himmler and Oswald Pohl, chief of SS administration, were keen to exploit cheap labor, and in 1938 they founded the first of many SS-owned companies, the German Earth and Stone Works, which set up rock quarries and brickworks. Economic considerations partly determined the locations of new camps in 1937–38, when Flossenbürg (in northeastern Bavaria), Buchenwald (near Weimar), and Mauthausen (in newly annexed Austria) were built. Two more major camps at Gross-Rosen (Lower Silesia) and Natzweiler (in Alsace) were built in 1940, all near sources of raw materials.
The number of prisoners increased from 21,400 in August 1939 to 32,120 in October, as suspect persons were picked up around the outbreak of the war.48 Pohl reported on April 30, 1942, that the six main camps had 44,700 prisoners. The purpose of the camps shifted away from merely holding certain prisoners “to the economic side. Mobilization of all prisoner labor took place, initially for war purposes (increase of arms production) and later for peacetime building work.”49
Like most of the people sentenced by the notorious People’s Court, only a minority of the prisoners in camps were German. The number in all the concentration camps grew dramatically over time. By August 1943 (despite astoundingly high death rates) the figure had gone up to 224,000. A year later the prison population stood at 524, 268, and it continued to expand.
Albert Speer met with Hitler on September 20 and 22, 1942. There was a deepening labor shortage, and the regime faced an awkward choice: either move factories to the camps (as Himmler wanted) or move prisoners to the factories. Speer and others argued for the latter and for private enterprise.50 Decentralized production facilities would have an additional advantage in the face of growing air raids.51 Hitler agreed with Speer, and the result was enormous transformation of the camp system, which spread like a cancer into nearly every corner of the country.
Germany became covered in a network of hundreds of concentration camps and many other kinds of punitive facilities. Dachau eventually had 197 sub-camps; Sachsenhausen administered 74; Buchenwald had 129 sub-camps by war’s end; Flossenbürg controlled 97; Mauthausen in Austria eventually had 62; Ravensbrück had 45; and Neuengamme had 90 outer camps. Gross-Rosen eventually had a total of 118 sub-camps, and the main camp at Mittelbau-Dora had 32.
Many of these sub-camps, it should be noted, were larger than the biggest prewar main concentration camps, some with tens of thousands of prisoners. It would have been impossible for citizens not to know about these, not only because they were widely publicized in the German press of the day, but because there were so many hundreds of them. They were located in practically all cities and on the premises of factories of any size. The national composition of the camp system was overwhelmingly non-German, with prisoners drawn from all over the vast reaches of the Third Reich, especially from Eastern Europe.
PART SEVEN
STALIN AND HITLER: INTO THE SOCIAL CATASTROPHE
22
RIVAL VISIONS OF WORLD CONQUEST
Soviet leaders were disappointed by the failed revolutions after the First World War, particularly in Germany. The Communist International (Comintern) was created in early 1919 to win support among left-wing radicals in the West for the revolution in Russia and to spread it worldwide. In 1920 Lenin tried to carry Communism westward on the bayonets of the Red Army, but the Poles stopped the invasion outside Warsaw. The Soviets reverted to political methods, but there was no doubt that the aim was to create dictatorships along the lines of the Leninist model.
At the opening session of the Comintern, Lenin and Trotsky described the epoch as “one of disintegration and collapse of the entire world capitalist system, which will involve the collapse of European civilization as a whole.” Capitalism had to be destroyed, and workers of the world should seize power and create a “new apparatus of power”—namely the dictatorship of the working class. “It should be used as an instrument for the systematic suppression of the exploiting classes and their expropriation.” The goal was decidedly not to introduce “a false or bourgeois democracy.” The latter was nothing more than a “hypocritical form of the rule of the financial oligarchy.” The bourgeoisie would have to be disarmed, and “open armed conflict with the political power” carried through to victory. The Bolsheviks had no patience even with the Socialists and branded them “social-traitor parties.” The ambition was to establish worldwide Communism. Stalin was forced to take up alternative approaches, but would relaunch the drive to bring about the millenarian dream at the earliest moment.1
COMMUNIST PLANS FOR WORLD CONQUEST
Stalin had become convinced by the early 1920s that capitalist imperialism from the West and the East automatically implied “the inevitability of armed collisions.” Sooner or later these would culminate in armed conflict on the scale of the First World War. His pragmatic approach was to do what was possible to have the “imperialist” countries war among themselves and ensure they not join in an anti-Soviet alliance.
His strategy was the ancient one of “divide and rule.” As the U.S. ambassador George F. Kennan put it, this approach “consisted in the instinctive effort—the same to which he was so addicted in personal life—to divide his opponents, to provoke them to hostile action against each other, to cause them to waste their strength in this way, while he conserved his.”2
At the plenary session of the Cen
tral Committee on January 19, 1925, Stalin said the Soviet Union would inevitably be affected by a major clash of arms: “If war comes we will not be able to sit back and relax. We will have to make a move, but we will be the last to act. We shall throw our weight onto the balance, and that might tip the scales.”3 He said repeatedly that he was not giving up on world revolution. In May 1925 he insisted it was important to focus for the time being on making the revolution a success at home, but that would be the first stage in the global struggle.4
For Stalin, spreading Communism was a crucial part of the Leninist mission to “save” the proletariat, but he also conceived of it as a defensive measure against a hostile world. In his address to the Seventeenth Party Congress on January 26, 1934, he said that the next major war would be aimed at the conquest and division of the USSR and the country had to prepare itself appropriately. He even alluded to his own terror and purges to come, which were supposedly needed to root out would-be traitors. Despite the great successes that had been achieved, he warned, they had to be wary of being overconfident.5 His view was that after the next war the Soviets might bring Communism to Europe—and perhaps beyond.
Stalin’s speech to the plenum of the Party’s Central Committee on March 3, 1937, underlined the deteriorating international situation as sufficient justification for the mass terror and the show trials. “Is it not clear,” he asked rhetorically, “that as long as there is capitalist encirclement, we will be infiltrated by wreckers, spies, diversionists, and assassins sent to us by foreign states?”6
The entrenched worry about capitalist encirclement, an unquestioned “truth” since Lenin’s time, was magnified many times over by Hitler’s successes. From the Soviet point of view, the Western democracies were complicit since none tried to stop Hitler or to join in the collective security agreements Stalin proposed.
At the Eighteenth Party Congress on March 10, 1939, he said the long anticipated imperialist war was already under way. It had not yet become universal, but pitted Germany, Italy, and Japan—the “aggressor” states—against the United States, Britain, and France. The latter still would not embrace collective security, as recommended by the Soviet Union, but tried to appease the aggressors. Stalin felt these “nonaggressor” states were much stronger than their enemies, so why did they not resist? The reason was simple: the United States, Britain, and France were conspiring to have Japan become embroiled with China, and to set up Germany and Italy for a war against the Soviet Union. These nations would be encouraged to make war and thereby would “weaken and exhaust one another, and once they had become weak enough,” the West would “arrive on the scene with new-found strength, ‘in the interests of peace’ of course, and to dictate conditions to the weakened belligerents. Cheap and easy!”7
Stalin was convinced he saw through the machinations designed “to poison the climate and provoke a conflict” between Germany and the Soviet Union from which the West would ultimately gain. His worst nightmare, one that haunted him throughout the war to come, was that Western democracies like Britain and France might join Germany in an anti-Soviet crusade.
His strategy at the end of August 1939 to deal with that worst-case scenario was to encourage (or at least not hinder) Germany’s attack on Poland, which might lead Britain and France to come to Poland’s aid. There was no reason to expect such a war would be a quick victory for Hitler, but it might well drag on and weaken all the enemies of the Communists. Ultimately the war in the West would make it possible for the Soviet Union to break out of the capitalists’ encirclement. At the very least it would allow the Soviets to reclaim lands lost at the end of the First World War.
When Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939, he was in effect reviving the internationalist side of Leninism. He told a meeting of his intimate circle on September 7: “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries… for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken.” Stalin boasted he was playing these powers off against each other.8
Historians have said Soviet foreign policy under Stalin was driven either by “revolutionary” ideological expansionism or by “traditional” great-power political considerations.9 In fact the approach varied over time, but either way, the coming of the Second World War opened expansive possibilities.
HITLER’S ANSWER TO THE COMMUNIST CHALLENGE
Hitler’s worldview was worked out in opposition to the Communism he saw stalking the streets in Germany after the First World War. He also developed plans that were much more than idle daydreams. When he spoke to German army officers about his vision of the future, they were impressed and for the most part also convinced. The assertion that Hitler’s plans were little more than “objectless” fantasies is no more convincing than the claim that he “notoriously” exhibited “inner insecurity in all fundamental questions” and should be labeled a “weak dictator.”10One of Germany’s leading military historians takes Hitler’s ideas on foreign policy and his “program” far more seriously. “It is a mistake,” Manfred Messerschmidt writes, “for anyone to suppose that these ideas of Hitler’s were not more than simple reflections of a purely abstract nature. That is to miss the direction of his thought. We should not overlook its affinity with the ‘philosophy of war’ that became widespread after 1918. Hitler’s ideology and foreign policy objectives, as his later statements show, combined to form a thoroughly effective basis of political action.”11 Hitler had no difficulty in explaining his position to leading officers when he met with them only days after his appointment as chancellor.
To say that he had a “theory” or “philosophy” is not to claim that he planned everything in advance. He also made tactical compromises, and at crucial points in the war he even broke some key principles.
The idea of struggle was integral to Hitler’s thinking, particularly in foreign policy. He said in a speech at Erlangen in 1930, “Every form of life seeks to expand, and every people strives for world domination.”12The “stage plan” to world conquest he put forward in his writing before he came to power postulated that the first step for a new Germany was to reassert itself in foreign affairs and regain its rightful place as the dominant power on the continent. The initial period would be the most dangerous because the country would be vulnerable. But Hitler would never be content merely to tear up the Treaty of Versailles, put France in its place, and return Germany to what it was in 1914. In his view, the nation would have to prepare for war with the Soviet Union, but, so his thinking ran, it would do so with Britain’s support or at least with its neutrality.
Purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s helped to reinforce Hitler’s determination, because the Red Army—most people in the West agreed—was so depleted that victory would come easily. Hitler believed that Germany would gain continental hegemony and lebensraum (living space) in the east. With that platform, Germany could then expand on a global scale and acquire a navy and colonies.13
Hitler thought it would be possible in his own lifetime to make Germany one of the “big four” powers in the world, alongside Britain, Japan, and the United States. He said little about America, but it was virtually inevitable that after wars against France and the Soviet Union, there would eventually be something akin to a “battle of the continents.” War against the United States might not happen in Hitler’s generation, and in any case it would also take time to foster the master race. He was convinced, however, of the “racial supremacy of the German people” and believed that ultimately, “like a god, the new human being would protect the world domination of the Germanic blood from all change.”14
Hitler thought of America in the 1920s as an economic giant but knew little about it. He said America’s decision to enter the war in 1917 was the result of Jewish influences. He liked U.S. immigration laws; he said they were based on ra
cism and designed to ensure the survival of “Aryan” supremacy. In the 1930s, however, he began to view the United States as weak because its leaders stemmed from the “wrong side” of the U.S. Civil War. He said there was too much interbreeding—which in his books meant degeneration and decline—so that America had become a “mongrel society.” From this point on, he also badly underestimated or ignored American economic and military potential.15
Right from the beginning of the Third Reich, Hitler started preparing for war and soon chalked up impressive foreign policy victories. By the time he met with the heads of the German armed forces on November 5, 1937, his resolution for war was firm. According to notes taken by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, Hitler said the nation was close to full military capacity, but at a certain point (1943–45) its advantages would begin to slip away. He had frequently said Germany should head east first and tackle the “Jewish-Bolshevik” Soviet Union, with Britain as either an ally or neutral. To the consternation of the military leaders present, Hitler now held he was willing to risk war, even against Britain and France, in order to further his program. Some of the military thought peaceful means could be used to gain much of what Hitler claimed the German people needed. But no one really argued with either his short-term or his long-term goals. They objected mainly to the risks.16
This Hossbach memorandum was secret, but Hitler said more than enough in public for the European powers to know what he had in mind. Goebbels later spoke about this matter to a small circle of invited press people on April 5, 1940, just before the opening of the offensive against France. With a triumphant air he boasted that they had kept their foreign policy aims vague until that moment. Goebbels said their neighbors should have gotten rid of Hitler while they had the chance. Instead, they waited until he was better armed than they were and had made it through the most dangerous period, and only then they declared war. To the propaganda minister it was ridiculous.17
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