Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Above all, time and again our forces in the east had proved their superiority over Stalin’s hordes. The losses, in terms of both personnel and materiel, of the Red Army had been staggering. Ours were not light either but were still more or less tolerable. Most of European Russia, which before the war had provided the enemy with practically all of his agricultural and industrial products, was in our hands. We had every right to expect that, once summer returned, we would be able to finish off that opponent once and for all.

  24. My New Order

  For me, power has never been simply an end in itself. To be sure, having hundreds of thousands cheer me until they were blue in the face, as at the annual Party Day in Nuremberg, was not ungratifying. Even here in Hell, where all sounds are muted and nothing ever happens, the memory makes me shudder a little. But let me put it on record as clearly as I can: my objective, the only thing that really mattered, was to build a new order. In Germany, in Europe, perhaps—who knows?—in the world. In this respect the war had a double impact. It interrupted some of my attempts in this direction, but it also opened all sorts of new possibilities.

  When one occupies a country, the first thing to do is to secure it and to make it secure. In the West, doing so was easy. Much easier than one would think by reading the vast literature about the “Resistance,” its heroic deeds, and the terrible damage it supposedly inflicted on us Germans. We were, after all, dealing with more or less civilized people. “Civilized” in the sense that they were racially close to us. “Civilized” in the sense that they had been living under orderly forms of government for centuries on end. “Civilized” in the sense that most of them were town dwellers rather than semi-literate clodhoppers. As such, they neither had weapons at home nor would have known what to do with them if they did.

  In all these countries without exception, we were able to rely on the existing civil services, police forces, and so on. Had that not been the case, things would have looked very different from the way they did. That was true in Denmark and in Norway. It was also true in the Benelux countries, the occupied part of France, and the Channel Islands. Essentially, all we had to do was make sure that the people at the top would follow our orders. In some of these countries we appointed military governors and in others, civilian ones. In Denmark, the country that did the best of all under our rule, we left the entire government, complete with the king and parliament, in place. One of the advantages of the various arrangements was that they were not uniform. In this way we were able to adapt to local conditions while at the same time making it harder for people in the various countries to cooperate with one another. Divide and rule was how the Romans ran their empire. In many ways I simply followed their example.

  We did station some of our troops in the west, especially during the second half of the war. But we did that more in order to defeat a possible invasion than to hold down the local population. For that, all we needed were some HSSPFs (Hohere SS und Polizei Führer, Higher SS and Police Leaders), whom Himmler appointed and provided with the appropriate staffs. Plus one battalion of second-rate troops here and another there. Some were still undergoing their basic training, which meant that we got two soldiers for the price of one. Others were recuperating from their experiences on the eastern front, whereas others still consisted of overage personnel.

  I received regular reports from Kaltenbrunner and others. They showed that, everything considered, the arrangements we made were a great success. To be sure, hardly a day passed without some act of sabotage taking place. But most were very minor: a few illegal leaflets and newspapers surreptitiously distributed in one place; a telegraph wire cut or a train derailed in a second; a couple of our men killed or injured when a shooting occurred, or a mine exploded, in a third. People in post-1945 “advanced” countries tend to take such incidents very seriously. They do that partly because they are being stimulated by sensationalist journalists who make their living by always magnifying them out of all proportion to the point where quite a few terrorist acts are staged specifically with the media in mind! And partly because the “long peace,” as it is called, has made them weak in body and mind. But we, and I personally, had a world war to fight and win. Not a day passed that did not bring new problems demanding all my strength, mental, and, in a certain sense, physical as well. Hence it was only on exceptional occasions that such trivia was even brought to my attention.

  When that happened, invariably, my role was to put some backbone into the Wehrmacht commanders and their ubiquitous legal advisers. This included those at my headquarters and those on the spot. Steeped in their old-fashioned “code of honor,” quite a few of them were too soft to implement the barbaric retaliatory measures the situation required and I demanded and which, I should add, international law often permitted to be implemented against an occupied population that did not know its proper place. As, for example, when civilians who were not wearing uniforms or other identifying signs and not carrying weapons openly fired at our troops, when they were not under a proper chain of command, and so on.

  We could not afford to treat terrorists with kid gloves. That is why I always insisted that nothing less than the death penalty, liberally used, would have any effect. A notable example of what could be done (though it took place in the east, not the west) followed the assassination of Heydrich, Neurath’s successor in Prague. Heydrich was a strange character. Handsome and athletic—he was a champion fencer, ice skater, and horse rider—but with a face marked by a cruel streak, he was an insatiable womanizer. Specializing in discovering people’s weaknesses and capitalizing on them by blackmail if necessary, he was an excellent bureaucrat. But he was also a Draufgänger (daredevil) and inclined to take greater personal risks than I thought were appropriate for someone of his rank. Perhaps this had something to do with persistent rumors about his Jewish ancestry. Though repeatedly disproved, they may have made him feel insecure. In any case he took flying lessons and flew a fighter plane both in Norway and in France. Once, during the Russian campaign, he was forced to make an emergency landing. Touching the ground, he had to be rescued by some of our troops. When he told them he was the head of the Reich Security Service and demanded to be treated accordingly, they understandably thought he was out of his mind! Thereupon I prohibited him from flying, but I could not prevent him from driving his convertible sports car to work every day.

  As one would expect from him, his rule was as harsh as harsh can be. In the first two months alone several hundred Czechs were executed. But he also improved some people’s lives, such as by making sure Czech armaments workers got better rations than those of the Reich and introducing some welfare provisions, such as paid holidays, for the first time. His success in pacifying Bohemia and Moravia made him a thorn in the eye of the Czech government in exile as well as its English puppet masters. That was why, one fine morning in May 1942, two Czechs working for the English secret service threw a bomb at him, inflicting injuries from which he died eight days later. In response, I ordered my people to do what had to be done. The details do not matter. For me, what did matter was that, from that point on, Bohemia and Moravia gave us very little trouble indeed. The more time passed, the more we moved our war industries into those districts. Not only were they among the few still beyond the reach of enemy bombers, but they remained in our hands right down to the end. As a result, alone in Europe the Czechs actually ended the war with more capital stock and higher real wages than they had when it started. Briefly, so weak was the “resistance” that it was not even remotely capable of preventing us from exploiting the countries in question to the hilt, let alone of putting our rule over them in danger.

  Meeting terror with terror, we put hundreds of thousands into concentration camps. The next step was to open the way to economic exploitation. There were no half measures and no false sentimentality here. The only thing that counted was our own interests and needs. The most important milch-cow in our shed was France. At peak we were able to divert as much as 30-40 percent of its output t
o our service. Jewish property apart, by and large that did not happen because we resorted to confiscation. In any case there were not enough Jews around for such measures to make a difference, macroeconomically speaking. At best it was only German individuals and companies who profited. Good for them, I say.

  Instead, we did four things. First, in most of the countries we occupied we captured substantial stores of raw materials which helped sustain our industry. Second, we required that the authorities in Vichy pay the cost of our occupation at a level we ourselves determined. Third, we fixed the exchange rate in favor of the mark (marks, of course, were one of the few things we could produce in unlimited quantities and at practically no cost). Fourth, we made many leading industrialists cooperate with us. Seeing their opportunity, they did their best to produce what we needed. To provide employment and to ensure the existence of their factories until the end of the war, they said. The best example was in France, where the Renault Corporation worked hand in hand with us. For that it was nationalized after the war. But other companies, especially in the Netherlands and Belgium, were not far behind.

  One reason why industrialists in all the occupied Western countries put their factories at our disposal was precisely because we told them that, if they did not do so, we would take their labor force away from them. Speer in particular was always in favor of having as many workers as possible work for us in their native countries. Partly because doing so saved us from having to hunt them and look after them; and partly because he wanted to reduce his dependence on Sauckel, a man from a much lower background with whom he was never able to get along. The figures speak for themselves. In 1940 the contribution of the occupied countries stood at a mere 3 percent of our German steel production. Four years later, it reached 27 percent, a nine-fold increase. Especially in 1942-44, a large part of our consumption of grain, fat, and meat was covered by the occupied territories, primarily Poland and France.

  Still, our need for labor and more labor was insatiable. In the summer of 1944 the total number of foreign workers, including Polish, French, and Russian prisoners as well as civilians, stood at eight million. A handful, especially Westerners, were influenced by our propaganda and came of their own free will. Many others, especially during the last years of the war, were rounded up in Razzias, or raids. They were taken to specially constructed camps, packed into trains, and sent to Germany whether they wanted to go or not. Once they arrived, strict discipline and the shadow cast by our concentration camps did the rest. Foreigners of both sexes were employed in factories and on the land working in agriculture, where they helped families whose male members had been called up. The figures speak for themselves. At peak, the proportion of foreign workers in the Reich reached 19 percent. I am told that, in some of our more industrialized cities, German almost turned into a minority language. It was just the opposite of what I had intended, but as long as the war lasted, there was nothing I could do about it.

  In July 1942 a major scandal unfolded in Berlin when a greengrocer, one August Nöthling, was fined for selling foodstuffs without asking for coupons. The list of his clients reads like a Who’s Who of cabinet ministers, senior party officials, and high Wehrmacht officers. I ordered an investigation; in the end, though, for fear of hurting national morale I had to let the matter drop. In any case we succeeded in keeping our people, and incidentally those of the occupied countries in the West as well, tolerably healthy. There were no major outbreaks of plague and other infectious diseases. There was no repetition of World War I, when hundreds of thousands of our people died of diseases brought about by malnutrition and the Spanish Flu. And there was nothing like the Thirty Years’ War, when as much as one-third of the population of Central Europe perished. To the contrary, the population continued to grow. In the Netherlands it reached nine million for the first time. The same happened in Denmark, though on a smaller scale.

  But it was not only foreign industrialists and workers who cooperated. Even before the war, every single one of the Western countries we later occupied had its own native Fascist/National Socialist parties or movements with programs more or less similar to our own. Call them Action Française, call them Rexists (in Belgium), call them NSB (the Dutch Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, National-Socialist Movement), and the like. Many of their members came from the less developed districts of the countries in question. Their motives varied. Among them were antipathy for both communism and capitalism, a visceral hatred for the Jews, whom they blamed for all their problems, and even a certain Pan-European idealism, some of whose roots went back all the way to the years before 1914.

  This last-mentioned sentiment was often directed not only against Russia but against the United States as well. With very good reason, as the post-war “Coca-colonization” of the western half of the continent was to prove. In many ways it was not too different from the kind that, starting in the 1950s, helped Europe push toward integration. At times the very same people were involved. An excellent example was Ludwig Erhard. Born in 1897, an economist by trade, in 1939-45 he worked for industry preparing plans for the reconstruction of Europe. Later, as West Germany’s Minister of Finance and Bundeskanzler, he and his colleagues made a decisive contribution to European integration. And why not? If anyone knew how to turn a bankrupt economy around so as to provide work, prosperity, and social security for millions, it was our experts. And me, of course, pointing the direction in which they should go and giving them the backing they needed. Better than the French. Better than the English. Much better than the Americans who, at a time when we were positively crying out for labor in 1937-38, were still mired in a depression.

  Other forms of cooperation were also widespread. For example, many artists in the occupied countries agreed to entertain our occupation troops or even to come to perform in Germany. For this, more than one of them subsequently paid a high price. And then there was the so-called “horizontal cooperation.” One famous French actress even claimed that, while her heart was with her country, her ass was international! In every single country where our soldiers were stationed tens of thousands of local women were found who slept with them. A comparative handful did so because they were forced. But it turns out that the Americans raped far more Frenchwomen than our well-disciplined troops ever did. Some did it for food or money and others for love. Others still had a mixture of both motives. And why not? Nature itself has decreed that women should always seek the best-looking, strongest men to mate with. For a number of years, the best-looking, strongest men were ours. As occupation troops, they had more free time than the native men did, and, in comparison with those men, they were often generously provided for and paid. Even members of the SD and Gestapo sometimes found lovers among the local female population.

  Starting in 1942, the Wehrmacht in Russia, combing the prisoner of war camps, recruited hundreds of thousands of so-called Hilfswillige, i.e. volunteers. Among them were some Muslim troops guided, I was told, by their faith in “Allah and Adolf Effendi.” We even set up kosher butcher shops for them! It was a practice I strongly disliked. However, in the end I had no choice but to tolerate it. The most important indication of our success in enlisting the willing support of many Europeans in and outside the occupied territories were the tens of thousands who enlisted in Himmler’s Waffen SS. They were very well trained, magnificently equipped, and led by superbly aggressive officers. Indeed, the Waffen SS may well have been the toughest, tightest organization that ever went into battle. Yet almost half of its divisions consisted entirely, or mainly, of foreigners. The largest contingents were supplied by the Netherlands, Hungary, and Romania. But we also had Belgians, Estonians, Italians, Russians, and White Russians. Whatever their origin, these men knew what they could expect in case we were defeated. If only for that reason, they fought like devils. In fact the very last defenders of the Reichskanzlei and me during the Battle of Berlin were the men of the Charlemagne Division. Pay attention, you hypocritical French.

  I myself consistently turned my face aga
inst Kleinstaaterei (little-state mentality). Doing so, I did as much to assist in the birth first of the European Economic Community and then of the European Union as anyone else. But there were two differences. First, I would never have been so foolish as to give up our solid D-mark and to conspire with people such as the Greeks—the Greeks!—to create the Euro instead. Second, to think that such a union can be held together solely by consent without the use, or at least the threat, of force is pure illusion. As BREXIT showed all too clearly, come the first real crisis it will be torn apart. What was needed was a single government with a single army at its disposal. German ones, needless to say. Around this government and this army other Europeans, provided only they had the proper blood in their arteries, could and would coalesce.

  In the east, things were different. Slavs with heavy infusions of Jewish and Tatar blood, the people there were subhumans, incapable of engaging in civilized behavior even if they had tried. Spaces were larger, the population sparser, towns smaller and fewer, and the forests and swamps more extensive and more primeval. To top it all off, the road network, which could have alleviated all these problems, was primitive and so practically nonexistent that, in some places, we had to use cavalry instead of motor vehicles! In Poland at any rate we had a civilian government in the form of the aforementioned Generalgouvernement. However, the quality of the personnel we were able to send there left something to be desired. Or perhaps they were infected by the usual Polish flare for corruption; as one of my subordinates put it, there is no such thing as a decent Pole. In any case we, meaning the Reich, got considerably less out of the country, considering its size and resources, than we should have.

  The Baltic countries resembled those of the west in that we could more or less rely on the local administrations. More so, in fact. Having tasted the joys of Jewish-Bolshevik rule for a year or so, the population hated and feared the Soviet Union more—much more—than it did us. When we occupied the region in 1941, we found the corpses of thousands of people whom the NKVD had murdered. When we were forced to leave it in 1944-45, many of those who did not flee were either summarily shot or deported to Siberia, never to be heard of again.