The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  With the situation in Iran brought forcefully under control, steps were also taken against French installations in Syria following the fall of France due to fears that they could be used against Britain and its allies in the Middle East. A hastily deployed Hurricane squadron was sent from RAF Habbaniyah, one of the airfields the British retained in Iraq after the end of the First World War, to strafe the bases of the Vichy French. Among those flying in the raids in the second half of 1941 was a young fighter pilot who later recalled coming in low to catch a Sunday-morning cocktail party of French airmen and ‘a bunch of girls in brightly coloured dresses’ in full swing. Glasses, bottles and high heels flew everywhere as the British fighters attacked and all took cover. It was ‘wonderfully comical’, wrote the pilot of one of the Hurricanes – a certain Roald Dahl.45

  The news coming into Berlin around this time seemed unremittingly good. With the Soviet Union in dire straits, and breakthroughs seemingly imminent in Persia, Iraq and Syria, there was every reason to think that Germany was on the brink of a series of conquests to compare with those of the great armies of Islam in the seventh century or the Mongol forces of Genghis Khan and his heirs. Success was within touching distance.

  The reality, however, was rather different. Dramatic as the German advances appeared, both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, they were beset by problems. For one thing, battlefield losses during the advance east greatly exceeded the number of reserves being sent out to replace them. Although spectacular victories led to huge numbers of prisoners being taken, these were often achieved at great cost. According to General Halder’s own estimates, the Wehrmacht lost over 10 per cent of its men in the first two months of fighting after the start of the invasion – or more than 400,000 soldiers. By the middle of September, this had risen to more than 500,000 men, dead or wounded.46

  The galloping surge forward also put an almost unbearable strain on supply lines. Lack of clean water was an issue almost from the outset, which in turn led to outbreaks of cholera and dysentery. Even before the end of August, it was becoming clear to the more astute that the picture was not as rosy as it seemed: shortages of basic materials like razor blades, toothpaste, toothbrushes, writing paper, needles and thread were notable from the first days of the invasion.47 Endless rain in the late summer soaked men and equipment alike. ‘There is no chance at all to dry the blankets, boots and clothes properly,’ wrote one soldier home.48 News of conditions reached Goebbels, who remarked in his diary that nerves of steel were needed to overcome the difficulties. In due course, he wrote, the current hardships ‘will seem like fond memories’.49

  Prospects in the Near East and in Central Asia likewise flattered to deceive. For all the optimism earlier in the year, Germany had little to show for the popular enthusiasm that supposedly promised to link North Africa to Syria, Iraq to Afghanistan. The prospect of establishing a meaningful presence, let alone taking control, seemed to be an illusion rather than something of substance.

  And so, in spite of extraordinary territorial gains, the German High Command set about trying to shore up morale just as Moscow was teetering. At the start of October 1941 Field Marshal von Reichenau, commander of the part of Army Group South that had advanced into the ‘surplus’ zone, issued an order to try to inject some grit back into his soldiers. Each man, he stated solemnly, was a ‘standard-bearer of a national ideal, and the avenger of all the bestialities perpetrated on the German peoples’.50 This was all well and good; but as men stuffed newspapers into their boots to fight off the cold, it was hard to see what effect strong words could have on a force whose members froze to death if wounded and whose skin stuck to the icy butts of their rifles.51 As biting winter took hold, such that bread had to be chopped with axes, Hitler told the Danish Foreign Minister with disdain: ‘If the German people are no longer strong enough and ready to sacrifice their own blood . . . they should perish.’52 Chemical stimulants – like Pervitin, a metamphetamine that was distributed in large quantities to troops serving on the bitterly cold eastern front – were more helpful than pep talks in giving succour.53

  Serious supply problems also characterised the invasion. It had been estimated that the battle group closing in on Moscow would need twenty-seven deliveries of fuel by train each day; in November, it received three – in the course of the whole month.54 American economists monitoring the war focused on precisely this issue in reports entitled ‘The German Military and Economic Position’ and ‘The German Supply Problem on the Eastern Front’. They calculated that each 200 miles of advance would require an additional 35,000 freight cars, or a reduction of 10,000 tons in daily deliveries to the front line. The speed of the advance was proving to be a major problem.55

  Keeping the front line supplied from the rear was bad enough. But there was a more pressing issue. The guiding principle behind the invasion had been the amputation of the rich lands of Ukraine and of southern Russia – the so-called ‘surplus’ zone. Even when grain shipments were being delivered from the Soviet Union before the invasion started, the effects of the war on food supplies and diets were far more marked in Germany than they had been, for example, in Great Britain. Rather than being boosted by gains in the east, daily calorie consumption, already reduced by the end of 1940, began to plummet further.56 In fact, the amounts of grain shipped back to Germany after Operation Barbarossa got under way were much lower than had been imported from the Soviet Union in 1939–41.57

  German radio broadcasts attempted to boost morale – and provide assurances. Germany used to have plentiful reserves of grain, one news report stated in November 1941; ‘now in wartime, we have to do without this kind of luxury’. But there was good news, the bulletin went on. There was no need to fear the shortages and problems of the First World War. Unlike the period between 1914 and 1918, ‘the German people can rely on their food control authorities’.58

  This was fighting talk, for in fact it was becoming clear that the idea of taking control of an apparently bottomless pool of resources in the east had been an illusion. The army that had been instructed to feed itself from the land was unable to do so, barely surviving and resorting to rustling livestock. Far from boosting the agricultural situation at home, meanwhile, the promised lands on which Hitler and those around him had set their hopes turned out to be a drain. The Soviets’ scorched-earth policies robbed the land of much of its wealth. Meanwhile within the Wehrmacht confused and contradictory military priorities – there was constant tension over whether men, tanks, resources and fuel should be diverted to the centre, to the north or to the south – sowed seeds that would prove deadly. American estimates made in the spring of 1942 about likely crop yields in the conquered territories of the Soviet Union’s south painted a pessimistic picture of the likely harvest in Ukraine and southern Russia. At most, the report suggested, two-thirds of pre-invasion yields were possible. Even that would be doing well.59

  For all the territorial gains achieved, therefore, the campaign in the east had failed to deliver not only what had been promised but what was needed. Just two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Backe had presented his projections regarding wheat requirements as part of a four-year economic plan. Germany was facing a deficit of 2.5 million tons per year. The Wehrmacht needed to resolve this – and to secure millions of tons of oil-bearing seeds, and millions of head of cattle and pigs – for Germany to eat.60 This was one reason why Hitler instructed his generals to ‘raze Moscow and Leningrad to the ground’: he wanted to ‘prevent people remaining there whom we would then have to feed in the winter’.61

  Having predicted that millions would die from food shortages and famine, the Germans now began to identify those who should suffer. First in line were Russian prisoners. There is no need to feed them, wrote Göring dismissively; it is not as though we are bound by any international obligations.62 On 16 September 1941, he gave the order to withdraw food supplies from ‘non-working’ prisoners of war – that is, those who were too weak or too injured to act as slave labour.
A month later, after rations for ‘working’ captives had already been reduced, they were lowered once again.63 The effect was devastating: by February 1942, some 2 million (of a total of 3.3 million) Soviet prisoners were dead, mostly as a result of starvation.64

  To quicken the process further still, new techniques were devised to eliminate the number of mouths that needed feeding. Prisoners of war were gathered by the hundred so that the effects of pesticides that had been used to fumigate Polish army barracks could be tested on them. Experiments were also carried out on the impact of carbon monoxide poisoning, using vans that had pipes connected to their own exhausts. These tests – which took place in the autumn of 1941 – were conducted in locations that were soon to gain notoriety for using the same techniques on a massive scale: Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen.65

  The mass murders that began just weeks after the start of the invasion were a sickening response to the failure of the German attack and the abject inadequacies of the economic and strategic plans. The great granaries of Ukraine and southern Russia had not generated what had been expected of them. And there was an immediate price to pay: not the deportation or emigration of the local population, as Hitler had mentioned in conversation. With too many people and not enough food, there were two obvious targets who had been demonised in all walks of German life, in the media and in popular consciousness: Russians and Jews.

  The portrayal of the Slavs as racially inferior, erratic, with a capacity for suffering and violence had been consistently developed before the war. Although the vitriol had been toned down after the Molotov–Ribbentrop agreement was signed in 1939, it started up again after the invasion. As has been forcefully argued, this played directly into the genocide of Russians that started in the late summer of 1941.66

  Anti-Semitism was even more heavily ingrained in Germany before the war. According to the deposed Kaiser, the Weimar Republic had been ‘prepared by the Jews, made by the Jews and maintained by Jewish pay’. Jews were like mosquitoes, he wrote in 1925, ‘a nuisance that humankind must get rid of some way or other . . . I believe the best thing would be gas!’67 Such attitudes were not unusual. Events like the Kristallnacht, which saw co-ordinated violence against Jews on the night of 9–10 November 1938, were culminations of poisonous rhetoric that routinely dismissed the Jewish population as ‘a parasite [that] feeds on the flesh and productivity and work of other nations’.68

  Rising fears of what such talk – and action – would bring had already prompted some to consider making new alliances. In the mid-1930s, David Ben-Gurion, later the first Prime Minister of Israel, tried to reach an agreement with leading Arabs in Palestine to enable greater levels of Jewish emigration. This came to nothing, with a mission led by a supposed Arab moderate being sent to Berlin to agree terms on how the Nazi regime would instead support Arab plans to undermine British interests in the Middle East.69

  Before the end of the first month of the war, in September 1939, a plan had been agreed to resettle all Jews in Poland. To start with, at least, the plan seems to have been to gather the population en masse to facilitate their removal from German territory by forcible emigration. Indeed, elaborate plans were developed in the late 1930s to deport German Jews to Madagascar, a hare-brained scheme seemingly based on the popular (but misguided) conviction of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geographers and anthropologists that the native Malagasy population of this island in the south-west Indian Ocean traced their origins to the Jews.70

  There had been discussions in Nazi Germany about deporting Jews elsewhere too. In fact, and perversely, Hitler had been championing the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine for the best part of two decades. In the spring of 1938, he spoke in support of a policy of emigration of German Jews to the Middle East and the formation of a new state to be their home.71 Indeed, in the late 1930s, a high-level mission, led by Adolf Eichmann, had even been sent to meet with Zionist agents in Palestine to discuss how an accommodation could be reached that would solve what was often called ‘the Jewish question’ once and for all. With considerable irony, Eichmann – who was later executed in Israel for crimes against humanity – found himself discussing how to boost emigration of Jews from Germany to Palestine, something which seemed in the interests both of the anti-Semitic Nazi leadership and of the leadership of the Jewish community in and around Jerusalem.72

  Although the discussions did not result in agreement, the Germans continued to be seen as potentially useful partners – even after the start of the war. In the autumn of 1940, Avraham Stern, the creator of a movement called the Lehi, which became known to the authorities in Palestine as the Stern Gang and whose members included the future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as well other founding fathers of modern Israel, sent a message to a senior German diplomat in Beirut with a radical proposal. ‘Common interests could exist,’ it began, between Germany and the ‘true national aspirations of the Jewish people’, whom Stern (and others) purported to represent. If ‘aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised’, it went on, Stern offered to ‘actively take part in the war on the German side’. If the Jews could be liberated through the creation of a state, Hitler would surely benefit: apart from ‘strengthen[ing the] future German position of power in the Middle East’, it would also ‘extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis’ of the Third Reich ‘in the eyes of all humanity’.73

  This was bluster. In fact, Stern was being pragmatic – even though the hopes he placed in allying with Germany were not shared by all within his own organisation. ‘All we want of the Germans’, he said shortly afterwards to explain his stance, is to bring Jewish recruits to Palestine. In doing so, ‘the war against the British to liberate the homeland will begin here. The Jews will attain a state, and the Germans will, incidentally, be rid of an important British base in the Middle East, and also solve the Jewish question in Europe . . .’ It seemed logical – and horrific: leading Jewish figures were actively proposing collaboration with the greatest anti-Semite of all time, negotiating with the perpetrators of the Holocaust hardly twelve months before genocide began.74

  As far as Hitler was concerned, where Jews were deported to was unimportant, such was the power of his anti-Semitism. Palestine was just one location among many that were considered, with locations deep inside Russia also discussed seriously. ‘It does not matter where one sends the Jews,’ Hitler told the Croatian military commander Slavko Kvaternik in 1941. Either Siberia or Madagascar would do.75

  Faced with chronic problems in Russia, this casual attitude now hardened into something more formal and more ruthless as it dawned on Nazi planners that the fact that Jews had been gathered in camps meant that mass murder could be accomplished with little difficulty.76 Faced with a drain on resources that were already scarce, it was a short jump for a systemically anti-Semitic regime to start to look to murder on a massive scale. Jews were already in camps in Poland; they were a ready and easy target at a time when the Nazi leadership were realising that there were millions of mouths too many to feed.

  ‘There is a danger this winter’, wrote Adolf Eichmann as early as the middle of July 1941, ‘that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of labour by some sort of fast-working preparation.’77 The elderly, the infirm, women and children and those ‘not capable of labour’ were dismissed as expendable: they were the first step in replacing the ‘x million’ whose deaths had been so carefully forecast before the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  So began a chain of events whose scale and horror were unprecedented, the shipment of human beings like livestock to holding pens where they could be divided into those who would work as slave labour and those whose lives were deemed to be the price to pay for the survival of others: southern Russia, Ukraine and the western steppe became the cause of genocide. The failure of the land to generate wheat in the anticipated quantities was a direct cause of the Holocaust.

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bsp; In Paris, where the police had been carrying out secret registrations of Jewish and non-Jewish foreigners since the late 1930s, the process of deportation was simply a question of rattling through the card index that was handed to the German occupiers and then sending guards to detain entire families for transportation to camps in the east, mainly in Poland.78 The registration of Jews in other occupied countries, such as the Netherlands, as part of the broad programme of institutionalised Nazi anti-Semitism also made the process of deporting those now identified as surplus to requirements distressingly easy.79 Having attacked the Soviet Union with thoughts of surplus zones, thoughts now revolved around surplus populations – and how to deal with them.

  As the hopes of what the invasion would bring were thwarted, the Nazi elite concluded that there was one solution for Germany’s problems. In a grotesque mirroring of the meeting that had taken place in Berlin on 2 May 1941, another meeting took place less than eight months later in Wannsee, a leafy suburb of Berlin. Once again, the question revolved around the issue of the deaths of unquantifiable millions. The name given to the conclusions reached on the frosty morning of 20 January 1942 sends shivers down the spine. In the eyes of its makers, the genocide of the Jews was simply a response to a problem. The Holocaust was the ‘Final Solution’.80

  Before long, tanks, aircraft, armaments and supplies were on their way to Moscow from London and Washington as the fightback against Germany began to gather pace. These were networks, trade routes and communication channels that had functioned since the days of antiquity through the so-called Persian Corridor, stretching inland from the Gulf ports of Ābādān, Basra, Bushihr and others, through the interior to Teheran via Arak and Qom, and eventually through the Caucasus to reach the Soviet Union. Routes were also opened up through the Russian Far East across into Central Asia.81