Ostkrieg (33 page)

Even if Russian labor had been readily available, the second key problem facing the German armaments industry, a critical shortage of raw materials, could not easily be remedied. With the desperately needed materiel from the Soviet Union unavailable, German industry was unable to meet the requirements of even the most important production programs. Even though the severe shortage of fuel and rubber had forced the OKW in mid-September to curtail considerably the use of motor vehicles, not until the beginning of November did the implications of the military failure in Russia affect German industry as a whole. The lack of skilled workers and the scarcity of key raw materials and machine tools prevented any immediate, substantial increase in production. An acute shortage of aluminum, for example, meant that, from November, Luftwaffe losses in the east could no longer be replaced. A lack of steel and vital alloys made it impossible for industry to reach production goals for key army weapons programs such as panzers and antitank guns, although ammunition levels would just about suffice to meet needs. The OKH estimated in early November that the output of tanks and antitank guns would reach only 68–73 percent of the production targets and that the situation would not improve in 1942. That same month, however, a drastic shortfall in coal production led to power reductions and the closure of some factories, further burdening armaments production.
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Moreover, the length of the eastern campaign resulted in such a shortage of oil that it was impossible to provide the required quantities of fuel to the Wehrmacht and industry. Even before the invasion, German officials understood that, if the war persisted beyond early September, there would be severe repercussions. At the end of October, therefore, the civilian and nonarmament sectors of the economy experienced sharp reductions in allocations of oil. Despite this, the quartermaster-general, Eduard Wagner, warned that, by January 1942, supplies would be exhausted and new oil fields would need to be captured. Confronted with the “unexpected urgency” of the oil situation, Goering sought, to no avail, to persuade the Rumanians to increase their oil production, even insisting that their wells should be pumped dry. The only alternative was a severe restriction on the operational mobility of the troops. Nor could Goering's demand on 8 November that “the eastern territories . . . be exploited economically as colonies and using colonial methods” rectify the situation in the short term, owing to widespread destruction by the Russians. Even in the absence of such sabotage, the
German transportation system still could not have coped: the Reichsbahn lacked sufficient locomotives and, in any case, could provide only 142,000 of a daily requirement of 240,000 freight cars. By late autumn, the bitter fighting, difficult terrain, appalling weather, and worn-out engines had combined to cause the Germans to use three times the quantity of fuel originally supplied.
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Little wonder, then, that Hitler kept insisting on distant economic objectives or that Bock and Rundstedt had been driven to despair, given the utopian objectives set for them by the OKH.

Notions of racial struggle constituted an unalterable part of Nazi ideology; from the beginning of the war in the east, as we have seen, a war of annihilation had been waged against certain segments of the population. German actions thus reinforced Nazi ideological tenets. On a daily basis, Landsers witnessed the evident worthlessness of Soviet lives as the awful brutality of the war strengthened Nazi propaganda concepts of the Slavic “subhuman.” Apart from the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, nothing demonstrated their contempt for the peoples of the Soviet Union as well as their moves to implement the hunger policy, which took a devastating toll on Soviet prisoners of war and the civilian population. Nazi authorities had intended from the beginning to strip the eastern lands of foodstuffs, but the unexpected prolongation of the war now intensified the food problems facing the German government. Determined to avoid placing any burdens on the German population, however, they chose instead to exploit the newly conquered eastern territories even more ruthlessly. The certain consequence of this radical starvation policy, Goebbels noted with a homicidal coldness tinged with the dire memories of the World War I experience, “would be the outbreak of a famine in Russia in the coming winter that would leave all previous ones in history far in its shadow. But that is not our concern. . . . If Europe should go hungry, then we Germans will be the last to starve.” To the authorities in Berlin, feeding the native population in the east was merely an incidental concern. As Goering noted in mid-September, after listing the priorities in food distribution, with the troops first and the occupied peoples a distant third, “Even if one wished to feed all the rest of the inhabitants, one could not do so in the newly occupied eastern territory. As for issuing food to Bolshevik prisoners, we are . . . not bound by any international obligations.”
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Large parts of the Soviet population had, thus, been deliberately condemned to death by starvation. Since feeding much of the Soviet population could come only at the expense of ensuring adequate foodstuffs
for German consumers, this was never an option, especially given Hitler's constant association of hunger with revolutionary domestic unrest during World War I. Backe's hunger policy intended the murder of millions of people simply by denying food to certain segments of the civilian population, most notably urban dwellers and those in the agriculturally deficient areas. This attitude was clearly genocidal and not coincidentally linked to the murder of Jews, considered, as they were, to be useless eaters. In areas swept over by the Einsatzgruppen, those Jews not killed immediately were to be denied access to food markets or the opportunity to buy directly from farmers, thus condemning them to a slow death by starvation. Jewish inhabitants of many cities, for example, received no more than 420 calories per day. A mid-July memorandum to Eichmann from the head of the SD in Posen specifically made the connection with ethnic cleansing. “There is the danger this winter,” the official noted, “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 labor by some sort of fast-working preparation.”
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This vision of mass death through malign neglect turned out to be extremely naive. With the failure to achieve a quick victory, the Germans lacked the security forces to seal off the targeted areas effectively. As a result, the Soviet urban population managed stubbornly to hang on by returning to the countryside or using the black market. Landsers, it appeared, also showed more humanity than their superiors and, contrary to regulations, fed civilians from their own field kitchens. German soldiers, the quartermaster-general complained to Halder, were often “very considerate” toward the population. From late 1941, as well, some military administrators attempted to ensure at least minimal levels of foodstuffs for Soviet civilians, not for humane reasons but as a matter of practical self-interest. “If the Russian campaign had been a Blitzkrieg, then we would not have had to take the civil population into consideration,” attested one army official. “But an end is not in sight. . . . Under these circumstances it is irrational to follow a course that turns the civilian population 100% against us.” Observed another, in a harsh criticism of the illogic of Nazi policy: “If we shoot the Jews, let the prisoners of war die, deliver a large part of the urban population to death by hunger, in the coming year lose a part of the rural population to hunger, the question remains unanswered: Who then will actually produce anything of economic value?” By the autumn, civilians doing “useful work,” whether as laborers, agricultural workers, or security forces, received 1,200 calories a day, a starvation diet to be sure, but better than the 850
calories accorded those not working for the Germans or the 420 for children under the age of fourteen and Jews.
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The Wehrmacht nonetheless did its best to feed itself from the land, with the inevitable consequences for the civilian population. Within weeks of the invasion, not insignificant parts of the invading force were redirected to the requisitioning of food. At the same time, given the inadequacies of the supply system, German troops plundered huge quantities of livestock, grain, and dairy produce for their own use. The army, however, failed to seize large quantities of grain reserves as the Soviets succeeded in destroying much of the existing stocks. In reprisal, Hitler ordered mass starvation. “The Führer is for a somewhat more radical course in the occupied areas,” Goebbels noted laconically on 19 August. In Belorussia, where supplies were already inadequate, Army Group Center adopted a ruthless policy of “eating the country bare.” In the Baltic and Ukraine, enough food was seized to feed the army tolerably well and to create a substantial Reich reserve, but, because of transportation difficulties, it proved impossible to send much of it back to Germany. Much of the reserve stockpiled in the east, in fact, spoiled during the winter of 1941–1942. As a result, virtually nothing was left to feed the Soviet population, which, in Goering's words, faced “the greatest mortality since the Thirty Years War.”
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Lest Landsers take pity on Soviet civilians and offer them food from their own resources, the OKH issued a directive on 1 November: “In the fight against Bolshevism we are concerned with the survival or destruction of our people. . . . German soldiers will be tempted to share their provisions with the people. They must, however, say to themselves: ‘Every gram of bread or other food that I may give out of generosity to the population in the occupied territories I am withholding from the German people and thus my own family. . . .' In the face of starving women and children German soldiers must remain steadfast. If they refuse to do so they are endangering the nutrition of our own people.” Although the Germans failed to implement the hunger policy in its full horror, in many cities famine still raged during the winter of 1941–1942, most notably in Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkov. In the areas most seriously affected, the starving inhabitants could not be dissuaded by even the most draconian threats from roaming the front lines in search of food. Even horses that had died and been buried were dug up and eaten. If fewer Soviet citizens starved to death in the first year of German occupation than expected or desired, a situation that clearly mystified German officials, it was certainly not for a lack of effort.
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This reprieve, if such it could be called, did not extend to the Jews. By mid-August, as we have seen, the question had turned from why the Jews in the Soviet Union should be killed to why they should not be killed. As any perceived economic value they might have as laborers was trumped by ideological or security concerns, their status as useless eaters or the “bearers of Bolshevism” marked them for annihilation. Two months of continual killings had created a reliable body of executioners, while the steady drumbeat of Nazi propaganda had convinced many of the necessity of eliminating “this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war.” Both local authorities and officials at the center in Berlin now began to perceive the possibility for a large-scale solution of the Jewish question. If in mid-August the onslaught against Soviet Jews and a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe were still separate entities, time, space, and opportunity intersected in the autumn of 1941 to transform regional murder into European-wide genocide. “The occupied Soviet areas,” Alfred Rosenberg announced in a mid-November speech, “should become the scene of the biological elimination of all European Jews.” Thus, although in mid-August Hitler had rejected proposals for the deportation of German Jews during the war, by December a training journal of the Order Police could proclaim openly,

The word of the Führer [in his January 1939 speech] that a new war, instigated by Jewry, will not bring about the destruction of . . . Germany but rather the end of Jewry, is now being carried out. The gigantic spaces of the east, which Germany and Europe have now at their disposition for colonization, also facilitate the definitive solution of the Jewish problem in the near future. This means not only removing the race from power, but its elimination. . . . What seemed impossible only two years ago, now step-by-step is becoming a reality: the end of the war will see a Europe free of Jews.
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Clearly, then, the autumn of 1941 marked a watershed at which the threshold to mass murder, not just of Soviet Jews but of all the Jews of Europe, was crossed. In this complex process of decisionmaking and evolving policy formulation, pressures from the periphery, events at the center, and seemingly decisive military triumphs resulted in key decisions being made in mid-September, when it looked as if the war in the east would soon be over and Germany left as the master of the Continent. Preparations and plans for implementation of mass murder, set in motion before the drive on Moscow lagged in late October, continued apace despite the increasing military difficulties—and, in some cases,
such as transportation, deportations took place that even aggravated shortages at the front.

As with the earlier decision to expand the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union, perceptions of the ongoing war effort proved pivotal. With the slowing of the Germans' advance in the face of stout Russian resistance and growing doubts about their ability to win the war in 1941, Hitler's mid-August decision reflected the recognition that it was impractical at that juncture to deport Jews from the Reich into the Soviet Union. Perhaps, too, in the wake of the recent meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, the old notion of using Jews as hostages to warn America against entering the war played a role in Hitler's thinking. His decision, however, did not stifle mounting pressures from local and regional officials in Germany and the occupied east for a clearer definition of Jewish policy. As pressure for deportation and other anti-Jewish measures mounted in Germany, in the east ambitious administrators pressed for approval from Berlin of more comprehensively radical measures. Military officials, too, voiced concerns over the partisan war and the deteriorating security situation. At the same time, given the severe food shortages, local administrators stressed the untenable conditions within the Polish ghettos. If the ghettos were to support themselves financially, productive jobs had to be created. That, however, would require significant investment that would likely pay off only in the long term. By the autumn, however, Nazi authorities had begun to see the solution to their labor problem in the exploitation of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. Murdering the Jews thus appeared to many the most utilitarian solution to a burdensome problem. Amid growing frustration and impatience, then, those at the periphery clamored for some basic policy direction.
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