Bombing, particularly the Americans’ daylight raids, consumed the most attention of German defense planners. Despite the crushing defeat at Stalingrad and the growing superiority of the Red Air Force, Hitler kept moving planes west to counter the bombers, and Joseph Goebbels admitted in his diary that the bombing kept him from ever sleeping.47 The RAF estimated that of 2,750 fighters in the Luftwaffe, 1,900 were deployed on the Western Front, almost four times what was sent to Russia! One assessment of the pivotal battle of Kursk, while the Germans still had a chance to slow the Red Army, concluded that a 30 percent increase in German tactical air forces, which comprised the Nazis’ entire antibombing effort in the West, would have swung the fight.48
In fact, General Carl Spaatz wanted the Luftwaffe in front of him, where he could destroy it. During the “Big Week” in February 1944, 1,000 U.S. bombers and 900 fighter escorts with long-range drop tanks (a seemingly simple idea that proved dauntingly complex, requiring 150 separate valves and pressure pumps) headed for Germany. This time, Spaatz had issued new directives to his fighter jockeys. “Seek and destroy” the German pilots, he told them, freeing the fighters from bomber escort to achieve “nothing less than annihilation of the Luftwaffe. The strategy [was] to bait them…. Send in the bombers—the bait—to destroy the aircraft factories and then massacre the planes and pilots that came up to defend them.”49 The bombers, of course, were far more than merely “bait,” smashing the Ju-88 and Me 109 factories, destroying the Reich’s ability to put up new aircraft. The raids exceeded Spaatz’s expectations. On the first day, Germany lost 150 fighters, and over the next five days, and from then on, between 40 and 50 fighters per raid. Brunswick’s air production, Daimler-Benz’s engine and vehicle manufacturing in Stuttgart, and Regensburg’s Messerschmitt factories were all flattened, and the British joined in, pounding Leipzig, Berlin, Aachen, Munich, and a half dozen other cities. Augsburg was nearly eradicated. Attempting to defend Berlin, the Luftwaffe lined up its fighters 50 abreast and flew head-on into the bombers as P-51s shot down between 70 and 170 planes—they fell so fast no accurate count could be made.
Speer recorded later that February–March of 1944 marked the virtual end of German air power, as approximately 60 percent of German aircraft in the West were shot down in a two-month period. By May, new attacks on oil-producing facilities meant “the end of German war production,” and by July, the attack on the synthetic oil plant at Merseburg left it entirely unusable.50 Whereas in May, the Reich still had 180,000 tons of aviation fuel available, a month later it had only 10,000 tons, leading Speer to inform Hitler that the loss of aviation petrol neared 90 percent. The economic miracle had come crashing down, and the steady increase in Nazi production since 1942 abruptly sputtered. A collapsing economy dovetailed with an increasing level of pessimism and defeatism among the civilian sector, to which the Reich courts responded by issuing death sentences for negative talk and sabotage to the tune of one hundred per week by 1943. Two Deutsche Bank managers were arrested and executed in the fall of 1943 for “defeatist” comments, as was a board member of the electricity company RWE.
Even though Nazi industry continued to produce, turning out 2,900 fighters alone in the months from February to September 1944, such industrial productivity was irrelevant when the Luftwaffe’s entire complement of fighter pilots was either killed or seriously wounded over a five-month span in 1944.51 Throwing inexperienced pilots up in more advanced planes amounted to sending children onto the Los Angeles freeways in Ferraris. Ironically, the success of bombing on several levels intersected with the Nazi acceleration of the Holocaust, most notably in forcing the Reich to rely ever more heavily on slave labor.
Between the bombing campaign and the millions of new subjects in the conquered lands who consumed resources, Germany was caught in a vise. At first the subjugated lands had provided a windfall of food and ores. Goebbels called German extraction “digesting” the occupied territories. After 1942, in fact, food rations were increased thanks to the doubling of deliveries from conquered territories—not only wheat, but potatoes and meat.52 Much of the food never got into Germany at all, however: the Wehrmacht consumed over half of the rye and potato imports and two thirds of the oats. Matters were made worse by the RAF’s attacks on the Dortmund-Ems canal, the bomber offensive’s attack on the Hamm marshaling yards, and the blockage of the Rhine in October when the Cologne-Mülheim bridge was destroyed. Without coal or iron ore, steel production shriveled. Coal shortages plagued the Reich after late 1944; by that time, the arms industry had ground to a halt. Late in 1944 while Americans were churning out a Sherman tank every forty-five minutes, Germany could put a total of only one hundred Tiger I tanks in operation on the entire Eastern Front. All “King Tigers” (Tiger IIs) were being reserved for the Battle of the Bulge.
Solutions, Final and Otherwise
Shortages in the Reich always posed a conundrum for Nazi leadership, for Germany badly needed laborers—every Jew killed was one who could not work. “The hard truth,” Heinrich Himmler said, was that “this people must disappear from the face of the earth.”53 But a harder truth was that every German man in a factory was one less in the field. The first group to benefit from this problem was the Soviet prisoners captured early in the war; the initial policy was to starve them, but by November 1941, Hitler reversed himself and decided to use them in Germany as workers, even though a malnutrition policy continued. The Reich had been consuming fuel and wasting manpower to move hundreds of thousands of Russians to Germany, but then left them to die, serving no useful purpose. Even as workers, allowing them to die was counterproductive: industrial workers needed training, also an investment of time and expertise—a loss of capital with every death.
Throughout 1942 slaves continued to arrive—an astonishing reverse Lebensraum. Prisoners were concentrated in labor and prison camps throughout virtually every industrial city in Germany, most of them without housing, often utterly disorganized, presenting, according to one hard-bitten Nazi, “a picture of desolation and immiseration.”54 Nor was this new: forced labor had built the Nazi military machine sent to Russia after the invasion of France. By 1941 alone, Germany had more than a million foreign prisoner-workers (mostly French) and a million more “civilian” workers from Poland and other occupied countries, all of whom made up over 8 percent of the workforce. A million more soon arrived from Poland after Russia was invaded, including large proportions of teenagers, followed by almost two million more throughout 1942. Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, who headed the labor mobilization agency (GBA), delivered 34,000 new workers per week for seventy-eight consecutive weeks.55 At its peak, the foreign labor force constituted one fifth of Germany’s labor: Munich alone had more than 16,000 slave laborers for its BMW plant, and some labor populations actually grew in size as the Wehrmacht was chased out of Russia, evacuating some 400,000 people back to work camps. Until that time, German factories littered conquered lands—prior to the withdrawal, Ju-87 Stukas were 80 percent constructed in Russia.
Even with the Russians and Poles, however, the manpower crisis continued as Hitler’s Holocaust exterminated Jewish workers. Millions were gone by 1942 alone, eliminating almost 2.4 million potential workers, and another 1.1 million died in “work” camps, along with 175,000 Soviets. Auschwitz was only one of many concentration camps to farm out its inmates for industrial work with I. G. Farben; Sachsenhausen provided labor for Daimler-Benz; and so on, to the tune of 500,000 workers. Many of them were driven by “performance feeding,” whereby underperforming workers had their rations deducted and the difference given to better workers. Friction resurfaced between the SS and administrators of industrial programs, with the former interested in decreasing the inmate population and the latter seeking to stabilize it. After the winter of 1942, steps were taken to increase food rations and provide basic medical care. The primacy of food for slave labor—Jews especially—produced something of an irony, as Hitler had begun his “Second Book” with an extensive discussion of food, calling
“the struggle for daily bread…the top of all vital necessities.”56
Productivity statistics from slave workers remain murky, but even after allowing for the additional costs of guards and an overall productivity level only 40 percent that of a free German laborer, prisoner labor still constituted a net gain for the Nazis. Not all forced laborers were equally productive, and French prisoners seemed less efficient than German Jews or other German prisoners, while Poles and Soviets badly underperformed western Europeans. In short, Nazi Germany’s experience with slave labor scarcely differed from that of the American Confederacy—and these were generally industrial workers already capable of performing mechanized tasks. And, as always, better-fed workers tended to be more efficient.
Here was the internal contradiction of the “Hunger Plan”—the program of systematic starvation of Jews and other foreign prisoners: performance at even low levels demanded a certain caloric intake. Food set aside for workers was food not going to the Wehrmacht, yet without workers, the army had no guns, tanks, or ammunition. Ultimately, the Nazis reverted back to the racial genocide decided upon earlier, creating a “perverse functional connection between the extermination of the Jewish population…and the improvement in food rations that was necessary to sustain the labor force working in the mines and factories of the Reich.”57 The Jews would be excluded from food supplies, regardless of the industrial cost. In the short run, the mass murder of Jews freed up substantial food stores for the military. Exclusion of Poles from rations soon followed in March 1943 when they lost their bread allotments. After that (with a few exceptions), it was only a matter of time before even the most productive Jews and Poles became useless.
Concomitant to the extermination program, Nazi doctors struggled with the dual challenges of keeping their own soldiers protected from typhus and other easily transmitted diseases (which required protection for all populations, including Jews and Russians) while at the same time advancing the mission of murder.58 One solution was to combine “disinfecting” with the extermination process, and to burn bodies after killing them. Already the terminology of Jews as “lice” was in vogue; hence it was a short step to move from disinfecting in the literal sense to the Nazi application of racial purification through gas and fire. Again, however, battles within Nazi ideology had to be fought over even something as inhumane and twisted as the cremation of bodies killed for racial cleansing. In 1932, the Nazi Party condemned cremation as left-wing and materialist, but a concerted effort to embed the process into Nazi policy succeeded, and within a year, cremation was not only acceptable, but also (like everything in a totalitarian society) written into law. Inside the Nazi health establishment (itself an oxymoron), the new German mythos portrayed cremation as “a heroic Nordic rite for the master race,” certainly not a fitting end to “lice,” although it did become the preferred method for ridding camps of their Jewish prisoners.59
Following the Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads) program of exterminating Soviet Bolsheviks, Nazi leadership had to finally come to grips with the herculean task of murdering entire populations. Large-scale executions began in Poland in October 1939, but were still oriented toward eliminating Polish leadership, not exterminating Jews.60 Bullets and fire were too time-consuming and costly, and early experiments with mobile gas vans likewise proved ineffective. Heinrich Himmler, the “architect of genocide,” insisted on “a more clinical approach from his SS general(s) and troops.”61 With the Holocaust’s institutional underpinnings already in place under the delousing programs necessary for evacuated peoples in the East and for forced labor sent to Germany, it was then only a small step to apply the delousing infrastructure—which already included both chemical “showers” and cremation facilities for bodies—to Judeocide. As Himmler put it,
Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology: it is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, anti-Semitism for us had not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused.62
The concentration of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, justified as a sanitary precaution, in fact magnified the spread of disease. Warsaw alone had twenty delousing stations capable of servicing seven thousand prisoners a day, which were later easily converted into gassing centers. Nazi propaganda increasingly linked Jews and disease, portraying Jews as inherent typhus carriers—a point that worked in the inmates’ favor at Auschwitz, where indications of typhus tended to ward off SS guards, providing precious extra days or weeks of life.63 Within ghettos and most camps, however, preventing typhus became a symbol of resistance, an act in defiance of the program of mass murder. At any rate, mass delousing became a near impossibility as the Wehrmacht absorbed millions of Russian prisoners and still more civilians from captured lands.
Chelmno became the first fixed killing installation, commencing operations on the same day Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. There and at Belzec by August 1942, the killing chambers were first disguised as disinfectant showers, invoking antityphus measures. Sobibor and Treblinka had already installed their own gas chambers, complete with signs saying “FOR DISINFECTION.” Auschwitz soon followed the others, gassing Poles and Russians for several months before being converted to a Jewish extermination center. Crematoria technology had been modified to mass-process bodies, with new designs such as that at Birkenau consisting of a two-floor arrangement: gas chambers underground and crematoria above, with bodies carried up via elevators. Rudolf Hess boasted, “Now we had the gas and we had the procedure.”64 Not quite: what Hess still lacked was complete authority from Hitler over Jews, which was given to Himmler in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. There, in a posh, elegant villa, “in a cultivated suburb, in one of Europe’s most sophisticated capitals,” fifteen well-educated and supposedly civilized bureaucrats decorously and methodically (and certainly enthusiastically) agreed to the systematic execution of nine million people.65 That the originators of this carnage had such high levels of education typified the entire German extermination experience—a point that should concern politicians espousing education as a means of producing civil and tolerant bureaucrats. Of twenty-five Einsatzgruppen leaders, fifteen possessed the equivalents of Ph.D.s in jurisprudence or philosophy. And most of the Wannsee conferees were young—half were under forty—giving the lie to the premise that the youth are necessarily pure and gentle.66
Wannsee marked the last step in the Nazi murder march that had begun in many ways two decades earlier through the systematic destruction of Jewish civil rights. Hitler and his henchmen briefly dabbled in an expulsion policy, discussing relocation of Jews to Madagascar. This transitioned to a policy of relocation inside the German empire with the opening of Polish lands, then Russia (where Hitler intended to create a “Garden of Eden”), then, following setbacks in Russia, vanished in a sea of impracticality and irrelevance. A temporary measure fell to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s subordinate, following the conquest of Poland in 1939. Heydrich established enclosed ghettos in which Jews were to be confined in Polish cities. Lodz, the first ghetto within the German empire, set the standard by which others would be created and governed.67 Heydrich preferred concentrating Jews in major cities alongside rail routes so “future measures can be accomplished more easily,” a phrase that indicated ghettoization was not, in fact, the end point.68 Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, at his interrogation in 1961, said the expression for removal of the Jews commonly used—Die Endlösung (“the final solution”)—during 1941 referred to “physical extermination,” meaning the principle of mass executions was on the table much earlier than Wannsee. In July 1941, in fact, Hitler had already decided to permanently eradicate the Jews, leaving the details to Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann to perfect methods of killing.69 By that point, concentration camps already existed for prisoners and condemned workers, and the practice of allocating half rations to the ghettos meant that slowly the death rate was producing the intend
ed result through starvation.
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