Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (30 page)

Popular opinion inside occupied Europe is also difficult to gauge. Anti-Semitism was a continent-wide phenomenon with a long history, of course, and in some areas explains an attitude of detachment and even enthusiasm for the Jews’ plight. Nor should it be forgotten that genocide always offers spectacular opportunities for enrichment—abandoned
factories, shops and properties, furniture and clothes—with which popular satisfaction may be purchased by the occupying power. After 1940, Eichmann extended the “Vienna model” of “Aryanization” of Jewish property to Amsterdam, Paris, Salonika and Europe’s other major cities, while Rosenberg’s agents alone plundered the equivalent of 674 trainloads of household goods in western Europe. Seventy-two trainloads of gold from the teeth of Auschwitz victims were sent to Berlin. If most of this went into German homes or Swiss bank vaults, a considerable sum lined the pockets of unscrupulous collaborators, informers and agents of every nationality. Yet it must be said that approval of the Final Solution was not a common phenomenon. In response to the horrors of occupation, most people living under Nazi control had retreated into a private world and tried to ignore everything that did not directly concern them. With traditional moral norms apparently thrown to the wind, the unusual cruelty of the Germans towards the Jews created a more general alarm among non-Jews.

What cannot escape our attention are German reactions—or the lack of them. There was no public protest inside the Reich to match the furore over the euthanasia campaign. Most Germans appear to have accepted that the Jews were no longer part of their community. Ordinary middle-aged policemen took part in mass executions; university professors, lawyers and doctors commanded the
Einsatzgruppen
. They did not do so out of fear: there is no recorded instance of a refusal to shoot innocent civilians being punished by death. Rather, the letters of concentration camp guards and death-squad killers reveal what ordinary individuals living in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century were capable of doing under the influence of a murderous ideology. Even in the midst of killing, private concerns about girlfriends, wives or children continued to worry them.

When SS-Untersturmführer Max Täubner was tried by the SS and Police Supreme Court in Munich in May 1943 for the unauthorized shooting of Jews in the Ukraine, the court offered a revealing insight into the moral values of the Third Reich. Its judgment stressed that killing Jews was not in itself a crime: “The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss.” In the court’s eyes, Täubner’s offence lay rather in killing them cruelly and
allowing “his men to act with such vicious brutality that they conducted themselves under his command like a savage horde.” Even though he had acted out of “a true hatred for the Jews” rather than “sadism,” he had revealed an “inferior” character, and a “high degree of mental brutalization.” “The conduct of the accused,” ran the verdict, “is unworthy of an honourable and decent German man.”
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A similar acceptance of racially motivated killing was evident inside the Reich. The segregation of forced labourers and POW workers, enforced by the Gestapo, became accepted as a normal state of affairs. Denunciations of foreign workers were commonplace. The public hanging or flogging of workers who formed sexual relationships with German citizens seem to have occasioned little protest, as did the restrictions imposed by the police on their movements and activities: Polish workers were, for example, forbidden to use bicycles or to attend church. Nazi views on the inferiority of “East workers” seem to have been commonly accepted. The inhabitants of Mauthausen grew used to seeing camp inmates shuffling through their streets and the casual brutality of their SS guards. When several hundred Russian POWs managed to escape from the camp, on 2 February 1945, only two local families are recorded as having offered a hiding-place and shelter. Most of the escapees were quickly rounded up or shot like “rabbits” by local farmers, excited Hitler Youth teenagers and townspeople eager to participate in a terrifying bloodletting.
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The death camps formed part of a larger “concentration camp universe” in which the SS ruled over hundreds of thousands of inmates in a vast network of camps stretching right across Europe. The boundaries of this “universe” stretched as far north as Norway, as far south as Crete. By the end of the war, some 1.6 million people had been incarcerated, of whom over one million had died (in addition to those deliberately targeted for extermination). In Europe as a whole there were more than 10,000 camps, including—in addition to the eight extermination camps and the twenty-two main concentration camps with their 1,200 offshoots—over four hundred ghetto camps, some twenty-nine psychiatric homes and thirty children’s homes where patients were murdered, twenty-six camps in the occupied eastern
territories where mass murder was institutionalized, as well as numerous others housing POWs, civilian workers, juveniles or “Germanizable” east Europeans.
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Some thirty-three nationalities were to be found among the inmates at Dachau, over fourteen in Ravensbruck. The conditions of work were so oppressive that even many so-called labour camps were regarded by the inmates as centres of extermination. Describing the granite quarry at Gross-Rosen, near Breslau, a French doctor who arrived there from Auschwitz noted: “Nowhere did I see individual murders carried out with such dexterity as at Grossrosen; murder was practised without qualms, by the kapos, by the Camp police, by the SS and their dogs. With consummate skill they could kill a man with two or three blows.”
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The inmates of these camps provided the basis for the main economic activity of the SS, which by 1944 extended from mining to heavy industry, from land reclamation to scientific “research.” Four hundred and eighty thousand of the 600,000 prisoners in the camps in late 1944 were termed fit for work. Their tasks included sorting the possessions of dead prisoners for distribution to the Waffen-SS or other departments, building, quarrying and mining, as well as manufacturing in the Buna works and other industrial operations. Like the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the wartime Reich became a slave labour economy.

In February 1944 armaments czar Speer enlisted Himmler’s help in “deploying concentration camp inmates in functions that I regard as especially urgent.” This request inaugurated a rapid expansion of slave labour in munitions, in aircraft construction and particularly in building the underground missile works at “Dora” and Peenemünde. Death rates here were horrendous: 2,882 of 17,000 workers died on the “Dora” project within a few months: Speer regarded the project as a “sensational success.” Overall, some 140,000 prisoners were used by Speer while 230,000 were utilized as slave labour by industrial firms in the private sector. By this point the armaments crisis had reached such a point that for the first time anti-Semitic ideology was overridden and Hungarian Jews were moved from Auschwitz as additional labourers.
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Barbarossa also extended the range of SS responsibilities in other directions. Terror replaced the rule of law in the East, and Himmler
was authorized to deal with civilians directly without reference to the courts. The Waffen-SS became Himmler’s army, growing from around 75,000 men in 1939–40 to nearly 500,000 by late 1944, part-threat part-partner to the Wehrmacht and as such a key instrument for Hitler in his gradual Nazification of the Army. The SS was given responsibility for policing the occupied territories in the East, while SS-Gruppenführer Bach-Zelewski was placed in charge of coordinating anti-partisan operations.

Needless to say, such operations resulted in enormous destruction and loss of life. The basic strategy was “to answer terror with terror.” Reprisal ratios were set for attacks on German life or property. As a result thousands of villages were burned down and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the course of “cleansing operations.” Their impact upon partisan activity was almost certainly counterproductive, driving young men into clandestine activity. Efforts at a more sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy would have to wait several decades: after 1945 European colonial powers, and the Americans, studied and learned much from the failures of Nazi retaliatory anti-guerrilla policies.

While the partisans never really posed a significant military threat to German rule, they did obstruct the process of Germanization. Here, too, Barbarossa made Nazi thinking more extreme and more ambitious. Following the conquest of the Ukraine and Belorussia, SS town planners lost no time in drawing up proposals for new small German towns dotted across the Ukraine. “General Plan East” envisaged a massive settlement programme stretching from Lithuania to the Crimea over twenty-five years. At Auschwitz, inmates dug fish ponds and built barns for model farms where Nazi colonists could be trained before heading east.

In the real world, however, certain difficulties with the entire Germanization idea were becoming apparent. One was corruption, for among the Germans from the Old Reich was a high proportion of “gold-diggers” (or “golden pheasants,” as they were known) and carpet-baggers, attracted by the prospects of quick riches and easy plunder. By contrast, few farmers wanted to make the move. Settlers felt exposed in rural areas where their life and property were endangered by the embittered local population.

Ironically—given the regime’s obsession with “living-space”—there did not seem to be enough settlers for the enormous amount of territory which Himmler dreamed of colonizing. “Well, Kamerad, how are you getting on?” asked the local peasant leader in a Nazi paper of the time. “Too much land,” is the response, as the unwilling farmer “looks helplessly into the distance.” “The proportions between space and people have been reversed,” commented another critic in 1942. “The problem of how to feed a great people in a narrow space has changed into that of the best way of exploiting the conquered spaces with the limited numbers of people available.”
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As the regime cast around for volunteers, the screening of potential colonists threw up some knotty problems for the racial theorists: some Party hardliners were willing to take any suitable-looking candidates, even if their ties with Germany were tenuous; others insisted that knowledge of language and culture was more important than physical attributes. Some even speculated that if the SS brought home too many racially superior specimens from Russia, the inhabitants of the Reich might develop an inferiority complex and start a race war! On the other hand, of the 35,000 unwilling Slovenes who were forcibly brought to Germany, only some 16,000 were finally reckoned suitable for Germanization; as most were the relatives of Slovene partisans, it is surprising that the number was so high. The rest, together with others from Luxembourg and Alsace, had to be kept in detention camps for the duration of the war.

The limits imposed by wartime reality on Himmler’s demographic engineering were sharply revealed in the case of Zamość, a town south of Lublin where a special effort was made to create a planned settlement of
Volksdeutsche
. In this, the only case where the SS brought its colonization schemes anywhere near completion, over 10,000 Poles were removed from their homes to make way for German settlers. Half the Poles fled into the forests, where they joined the Underground and raided farms and villages; the rest were screened for racial purity and deported. Twenty-five thousand Germans were brought into an area still inhabited by 26,000 Ukrainians and 170,000 Poles. They were, a propagandist boasted, “the first German cell of the modern eastern colonization, reawakened by this search to a pulsating German colonial life.” But by early 1944, the local authorities
were already trying to persuade Himmler to abandon the colony and evacuate the settlers westwards: assaults on their farms were a regular occurrence and their menfolk were sleeping in fields to avoid being killed by the Underground.
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Yet Himmler and Hitler stuck doggedly to their vision of a German empire in the East and left the evacuation of their hardy colonists as late as possible. This lack of contingency planning for withdrawal was but one aspect of the basic unreality in their plans. Their racist colonialism was doomed to failure; it was an imitation of Habsburg frontier policy without Habsburg political flexibility. They had created such hatred among the local population that in the absence of “an overpowering police machine” the numbers of colonists required to hold vast areas of the former Soviet Union for Germany were beyond the grasp of Berlin. Hitler’s long-term policy had been to see “100 million Germans settled in these territories.” But such numbers simply did not exist. The Nazis wanted to turn Germans into peasants, but most Germans refused. Whether, as Himmler believed, the returning war heroes from the front would have welcomed a farmstead in Poland or the Ukraine as their reward must be open to doubt.
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As the Red Army advanced, the resettlement scheme disintegrated of its own accord. Between August 1943 and July 1944, some 350,000 Crimean Germans were evacuated to western Poland; others followed from the Ukraine and Belorussia. The German scorched-earth policy meant that it became impossible for many colonists to remain even had they wanted to. By early 1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were trekking westwards towards the Reich in a vast spontaneous exodus.

At the same time an even grimmer series of forced marches betrayed the dark side of the racial dream. In the last phase of the Final Solution, the extermination camps and concentration camps were closed down and, in some cases, destroyed, and the surviving inmates were driven through the snow on long marches in the general direction of the Reich. Of the 714,211 prisoners still in the camps in January 1945 around 250,000 died on these death marches.