The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Meanwhile, running counter to all the grandiose plans for German colonization of foreign living space, the insatiable demand for labour of the Third Reich’s military-industrial complex and the conscription of a rising share of able-bodied Germans into the armed forces meant that Germany itself began to be ‘colonized’ by foreign workers. The number in the Reich rose from 301,000 in 1939 (less than 1 per cent of all employees) to around two million in the autumn of 1940, to more than seven million by 1944 – nearly a fifth of the workforce. They came from all over Europe, some voluntarily, others under duress: from Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland and Italy; from Hungary and Yugoslavia too. At first, it was skilled workers from Western Europe who were attracted by the rapidly growing German economy; the men who built the road to the Eagle’s Nest were in fact Italian stonemasons, willing beneficiaries of Hitler’s boom. As the war wore on, however, it was Poles who came to predominate. Few of them came of their own volition. Already in September 1941 there were more than a million Poles working in the Reich, accounting for just under half the total foreign workforce. By July 1943 around 1.3 million workers, not including prisoners of war, had been sent to the Reich from the Government-General. There were soon more Poles in Germany than Germans in Poland. After 1941 they were joined by comparable numbers of Ukrainians and other former Soviet citizens. Many of these were women; in the autumn of 1943, there were 1.7 million female foreign workers employed in the Reich, most of them from occupied Polish or Soviet territory. Here was a headache for a regime that aspired to Germanizing Europe – an ethnographic Europeanization of Germany, a process in conflict at once with their own racial theory and with the sentiments of ordinary Germans.

  THE DEFILED EMPIRE

  One unintended consequence of all this was that, even as Nazi racial experts engaged in the laborious racial classification of Poles and Czechs, the very tendency they wished to eradicate – miscegenation – was continuing. Indeed, the chaos caused by war and forced resettlement positively increased the sexual contact between Germans and non-Germans. On March 8, 1940, new police regulations had to be issued for Polish workers in Germany, the seventh of which specified bluntly that ‘anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner’ would be liable to the death penalty (later specified as death by hanging). If a Polish woman became pregnant by a German, the pregnancy would be compulsorily terminated. The only qualification was that, as in the annexed territories, RuSHA assessors had the option of recommending a convicted Pole for Germanization if he or she fulfilled the requisite racial criteria. Beginning in late 1940, ‘prohibited contact with foreigners and prisoners of war’ became a criminal offence; this applied not just to sexual relations but to almost any kind of intimacy, including giving foreigners food, drink or tobacco. A special Reich Law of May 1943, ‘concerning Protected Membership of the German Reich’, imposed further limits on Polish workers’ sexual freedom: in addition to facing execution if they had sexual relations with German women, they were not to marry until they were aged twenty-eight in the case of men or twenty-five in the case of women, and their choice of spouse was confined to Poles not eligible for Germanization. As with the ‘racial defilement’ legislation, these measures were implemented. As early as August 1940 a seventeen-year-old Polish farm worker was publicly hanged for having sex with a German woman who was actually a prostitute. In the first half of 1942 a total of 530 out of 1,146 death sentences handed out by regular courts were passed against Poles, including ten for sex with German women and forty-seven for ‘moral offences’. Under an RSHA decree of August 1940, British and French prisoners of war caught in flagrante with German women were also supposed to be sentenced to death, though in practice they were generally given up to three years’ imprisonment. German men convicted of sleeping with Polish women faced up to three months in a concentration camp. Steps were also taken against German women who had relations with ‘foreign workers’. A Krupp factory girl was sentenced to fifteen months in jail for an illicit liaison with a French PoW. In some cases, transgressors were publicly humiliated (by having their hair shaved off) or even sent to concentration camps like Ravensbrück (where they were known as ‘bed politicals’).

  Such measures evidently enjoyed at least some popular support. Nevertheless, an SD report from January 1942 make sit clear that, in the eyes of the more radical Nazis, they were ineffective as a deterrent:

  Reports from every part of the Reich [specific complaints were appended from Potsdam, Bielefeld, Bayreuth, Chemnitz, Halle and Leipzig] reveal that the deployment of millions of foreign workers has resulted in a steady increase in sexual relations with German women. This fact has had a not inconsiderable effect upon the mood of the people. Today influential circles estimate the number of illegitimate children German women have had by foreigners as being at least 20,000. The threat of infiltration of German blood becomes ever greater due to the conscription for military service of many millions of German men, the absence of a general prohibition on sexual intercourse for foreigners, and the increasing number of foreign workers… In the case of women of German blood, one is often dealing with the less valuable part of the German population. These are often women with pronounced sexuality, who find foreigners interesting and therefore make it easy for the latter to approach them.

  Despite attempts to confine foreign workers to specially created brothels, staffed by strictly non-German prostitutes, the problem persisted. In September 1943 the Propaganda Ministry found it necessary to remind German citizens: ‘Every act of sexual intercourse [with a foreigner] is a defilement of the German people and an act of treason against them, and will be harshly punished by law.’ The RuSHA was reduced to vetting the hundreds of illegitimate children of Polish and Soviet workers for signs that their fathers were of ‘good racial stock’; those who did not make the grade were packed off to special ‘nursing’ homes, where mortality rates were predictably high. There was grave anxiety that the growing number of ‘foreign children’ in Germany ‘would ultimately lead to a total blurring of the absolutely necessary distinction that must be maintained between Germans and Fremdvölkische [racial aliens]’.

  The problem was predictably even more serious in the occupied territories of what had once been Poland. As early as October 27, 1939, the German police chief of Thorn (Torun) in West Prussia had to issue special orders ‘to curb the insolent behaviour of a section of the Polish population’ which included the following:

  7. Anyone molesting or accosting a German woman or girl will receive exemplary punishment…

  8. Polish women who accost or molest Germans will be confined to brothels.

  The idea that the initiative for such ‘insolence’ came from the Polish side was, of course, a fiction. As one Dr Krieg lamented in the ethnic German journal Volksdeutsche Heimkehr:

  We must elevate the German people to be a master race… You can see that time and time again in the Protectorate the Germans either ‘crack the whip’ or ‘ingratiate themselves with the Czech women’. Let this be changed. Let the German people be taught to keep a certain distance from the Pole. Polish PoWs who are working for German farmers are not to be treated as one of the family and German women are not to fraternize with Poles. Every time German nationals mix with Poles our standards sink.

  In the Warthegau, too, Greiser felt obliged to issue orders decreeing that:

  Any individuals belonging to the German community who maintain relations with Poles which go beyond those deriving from the performance of services or economic considerations will be placed in protective custody. In serious cases, especially when an individual belonging to the German community has seriously injured the ethnic interests of the Reich through relations with Poles, he will be transferred to a concentration camp… Members of the German community who enter into physical relations with Poles will be placed in protective custody.

  Such initiatives had Himmler’s backing; as he put it, ‘there was no more of a connection [b
etween Germans and Poles] than between us and the negroes’; Polish men who had sexual relations with German women were to be hanged. But here the Nazis were fighting a losing battle. Indeed, Greiser’s own suggestion that ‘Poles of the female sex who permit physical relations with members of the German community may be sent to a brothel’ amounted to an admission that racially illicit sex could not be prevented. Typical of the way social reality forced the ideologues to adapt was the decision by the Chief of the Race Office of the RuSHA in February 1942 to issue SS racial assessors and RuSHA branch officials with specimen forms for determining whether or not any Pole found guilty of ‘racial defilement’ could be considered ‘eligible for Germanization’. Further east, in the occupied Soviet Union, no serious attempt was made to prevent German military personnel from forming sexual relations with racially unsuitable partners. Oskar Dirlewanger, commander of an SS brigade entirely composed of convicted criminals like himself, was one of many transgressors in Lublin, murdering Jews by day and sleeping with one by night. Stories were legion of the debauchery that prevailed there and in Lwów.

  The concentration camps were, of course, intended to provide definitive solutions to the problem of racial pollution. Before the ‘final solution’ was decided on, Himmler encouraged Nazi doctors to look for ‘a cheap and rapid method of sterilization which could be used on enemies of the German Reich such as Russians, Poles and Jews’. As his personal secretary Rudolf Brandt later explained: ‘The hope was that in this way one could not only conquer the enemy but also destroy him. The labour power of those who were sterilized could be utilized by Germany, while their procreative capabilities would be destroyed.’ Professor Carl Clauberg conducted experiments involving blocking the uteruses of Auschwitz prisoners with injections of irritant fluid. Dr Horst Schumann attempted to achieve the same results with large doses of X-rays on both men and women. Yet even in the camps, members of the supposed master race were unable to resist the temptations of interracial sexual relationships. There was a camp brothel at Buchenwald where SS officers sexually exploited female prisoners. Rudolf Höss kept a Jewish mistress while he was commander at Auschwitz, as did Amon Goeth at Płaszów.

  Hitler’s Empire was thus inherently incapable of becoming the racially hierarchical utopia envisaged in the Generalplan Ost. The more the Nazis sought to appeal to Pan-European or anti-Soviet sentiment among the peoples they had conquered, the more they relied on collaborators to help them with the bloody business of genocide and the more they had to wage total war in pursuit of their monstrous Aryan paradise, the more ethnic mingling went on. Nor was this phenomenon unique to Nazi imperialism. Remarkably, given the superficial differences between the Germans and their Far Eastern allies, the Japanese Empire in Asia evinced precisely the same contradictory tendencies. There too the empire-builders conceived of conquering living space and settling it with thoroughbred settlers who would preserve their racial purity as they went forth and multiplied. There too it was possible to exploit local disenchantment with existing – and, as it turned out, much weaker – imperial regimes. Yet there too the need for collaborators and slave workers militated against the original vision of a racially ordered empire. Like the Nazi Grossraumwirt-schaft, the Japanese ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ began as racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abattoir, a plantation and a brothel.

  14

  The Gates of Hell

  To view those who are in essence unequal as if they were equal is in itself inequitable. To treat those who are unequal unequally is to realize equality.

  ‘An Investigation of Global Policy with

  the Yamato Race as Nucleus’ (1943)

  Over the town the planes broke formation and dive bombed the centre of the town. The din was terrific especially the rat tat tat of machine gun fire. About 10 a.m. casualties began to arrive and were put on to the floor outside the receiving room. Soon casualties began to pour in – literally hundreds of them. Scene was like something particularly gruesome out of one of Well[s]’s novels rather than real life.

  Dr Oscar Elliot Fisher, Malaya, December 11, 1941

  A RACIAL WORLD ORDER

  Hitler visualized some aspects of his new world order more clearly than others. He was intentionally vague about how precisely he wished the Jews to disappear from his European empire. Few things, by contrast, were more precisely delineated in his imagination than the future architecture of the imperial capital, Berlin:

  One will arrive there along wide avenues containing the Triumphal Arch, the Pantheon of the Army, the Square of the People – things to take your breath away! It’s only thus that we shall succeed in eclipsing our sole rival in the world, Rome. Let it be built on such a scale that St Peter’s and its Square will seem like toys in comparison…

  Those who enter the Reich Chancellery should feel that they stand before the lords of the world…

  Granite will ensure that our monuments will last forever. In ten thousand years they’ll be standing, just as they are…

  Albert Speer drew up detailed plans designed to realize his Führer’s grandiose schemes. Berlin was to become ‘Germania’, a permanent exhibition of classical hypertrophy. At the centre would be a vast new Reich Chancellery. To the north they envisaged a giant rectangular lake and, next to the Reichstag, a vast meeting hall, with a dome 825 feet in diameter – so large that clouds would have formed on the inside of it. From there, visitors would be able to promenade down a breathtaking boulevard, 130 yards wide and three miles long, towards the biggest triumphal arch in history, standing 400 feet high, on which would be engraved the names of all the Germans who had fallen in the First World War. From this megalopolis, so Hitler had prophesied in Mein Kampf, a new empire of living space for the Aryan race would radiate eastwards to the Ukraine and beyond. Elevated highways would stretch from Berlin to Warsaw and on to Kiev. Along these, hardy German settlers and their buxom wives would drive in their Volkswagens – ‘people’s cars’ – bound for one or other of the fortified settlements studded between the Baltic and the Crimea. Once established there, they and their broods of bouncing blond babies would rule over a rump, semi-educated populace, purified of all racially dangerous elements by a systematic policy of expulsion and extermination.

  Since he had never visited the Soviet Union, Hitler’s visions of Lebensraum were a strange mélange of Lives of a Bengal Lancer and the cowboy yarns of Karl May – part North-West Frontier, part Wild West. Curiously, in view of his commitment to the idea of an empire of colonial settlement in Eastern Europe, he seems to have found the former rather more attractive as a model for his own empire. In Mein Kampf, he made much of the ruthlessness of British rule in India, which he contrasted with German naivety on colonial questions. Since the British appeared able to rule India with a tiny elite of expatriate administrators and soldiers, he reasoned, Germany ought to be able to do the same in Eastern Europe. The crucial lesson to be drawn from the British experience was to maintain subject peoples in a state of poverty and illiteracy. ‘The vast spaces over which [the English] spread their rule’, he asserted in August 1941, a time when the challenge of ruling vast spaces was much on his mind, ‘obliged them to govern millions of people – and they kept these multitudes in order by granting [themselves] unlimited power… What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.’ A crucial point for Hitler, to which he often returned during his rambling dinner-table monologues, was the hypocrisy of British imperialism; the fact that, for all their pious talk of a civilizing mission, the British in reality did little to alter the living standards or the cultures of the peoples they governed:

  They [the English] are an admirably trained people. They worked for three hundred years to assure themselves the domination of the world for two centuries. The reason why they’ve kept it so long is that they were not interested in washing the dirty linen of their subject peoples.

  It was a theme he reverted to in January 1942:

  The wealth of Great Britain is the result less of a
perfect commercial organization than of the capitalist exploitation of the three hundred and fifty million Indian slaves. The British are commended for their worldly wisdom in respecting the customs of the countries subject to them. In reality this attitude has no other explanation than the determination not to raise the natives’ standard of living… The climax of this cynical behaviour of the English is that it gives them the prestige of liberalism and tolerance. [But] the prohibition of ‘suttee’ [ritual suicide] for widows and the suppression of starvation-dungeons were dictated to the English by the desire not to reduce the labour-force, and perhaps also by the desire to economize [on] wood! They so cleverly set about presenting these measures to the world that they provoked a wave of admiration. That’s the strength of the English: to allow the natives to live whilst they exploit them to the uttermost.

  Here, then, was a model for Nazi rule in Eastern Europe – a model of malign neglect. It was a model Hitler adhered to throughout the fleeting existence of his East European empire. He objected, for example, when measures were proposed to improve public health in the occupied territories. The British, he insisted, knew better than