Ostkrieg (51 page)

Victory, moreover, had demanded deployment of virtually the entire Luftwaffe on a limited area of the front, while the supply and logistic system was as dismal as ever. The panzer units on which the success of the summer campaign depended had suffered significant losses in men and materiel, while time was slipping away as schedules were constantly revised. Finally, the Germans were fortunate that the Soviets had attacked first and in an area where they had built up forces for the summer campaign: the enemy could not always be expected to be so cooperative in his own destruction. Indeed, the defeat at Kharkov convinced many Soviet leaders that it might, after all, be better to stay on the strategic defensive for the time being and as much as possible avoid encirclement battles. All these were sobering thoughts considering the main German operation was still to come.

Such gloomy assessments seemed not to trouble Hitler. The failed Kharkov offensive had seriously weakened the Soviets precisely at the Schwerpunkt for Fall Blau, and the Führer intended to exploit German successes by annihilating as many enemy units as possible as quickly as possible. As early as 27 May, he ordered that the remaining Soviet penetrations near Volchansk and Izyum be cleared up. The Volchansk bulge, to the north, was to be tackled first since Blau was to unfold from north to south. The operation, code-named Wilhelm, was set to begin on 7 June, but heavy rain postponed the attack for three days. Once again, the Germans caught the Soviets by surprise and finished the operation by 15 June; although Wilhelm was successful in gaining territory, the
hoped-for bag of prisoners never materialized as the Soviets, in a significant new trend, managed to pull out the bulk of their forces in time.
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The quick success at Volchansk raised the issue of whether the Izyum operation should be undertaken at all since the Wehrmacht now had a good launching pad for Blau and any action at Izyum would simply delay the main campaign even more. Bock argued that every day Blau was postponed meant a loss, but, on 14 June, Hitler nonetheless decided in favor of Fredericus II, a pincer operation whose goal was to seize the key transportation junction of Izyum as well as destroy enemy forces. After repeated delays caused by continuous thunderstorms, Kleist finally attacked on 22 June, the first anniversary of Barbarossa. As with Wilhelm, the German advance was swift but not entirely successful owing to continued rain that hampered mobility and the evasive maneuvers of the enemy. Although completed by the twenty-sixth and resulting in a more favorable jumping-off position for Blau, the operation had signally failed to annihilate the enemy. Bock, moreover, worried that the Soviet reaction showed that “he intends to avoid any major defeats now in order to gain time for the Americans to intervene.” Foreign Armies East also shared this assessment, predicting that the Red Army would turn away from an extravagant wastage of its forces and would seek instead to “withdraw most of its forces from German surprise thrusts and attempts at encirclement.” Now, more than ever, the Germans needed deep thrusts into the enemy rear, but fuel and supply limitations as well as Hitler's insistence on short encirclements raised the very real possibility that the summer campaign would simply punch into air. Even worse, Foreign Armies East now forecast that the expected material and manpower losses to be inflicted on the enemy would not appreciably affect his ability to continue the war, a grim conclusion that called into question basic German assumptions for the summer campaign. Halder might have shared these doubts but seemed not to have passed them on to Hitler. After all, the Führer was at the height of his self-assurance and once again basking in the glow of German triumphs. The warning from Foreign Armies East was accurate but too late—and, in any case, Hitler believed that he had no other option but to attack. “The crisis,” Bock had already realized in late January, “was to be solved by offensive means.”
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At the end of May, just as victories in the Crimea and Kharkov once again set Hitler's optimism rising that a victory could yet be obtained, Professor Konrad Meyer put the final version of his Generalplan Ost on Himmler's desk. By that time, too, the gassing of Jews at Chelmno, Belzec, and Sobibor was proceeding smoothly, with operations just beginning
at Auschwitz, soon to be joined by Treblinka. Along with these “industrial” killings, the murder squads had swung back into action in occupied eastern Poland, Belorussia, and Ukraine. The Nazi regime had clearly embarked on something more than mere exploitation of conquered territory. Hitler had long emphasized that the war in the east was a matter of triumph or destruction; it was, in fact, nothing less than an opportunity to remake the racial map of Europe. Through huge population transfers, colonial resettlement schemes, and wholesale murder, the Nazis would not just reclaim territory Germany had lost following the First World War, but create a vast racial empire that would dominate Europe, eliminating for all time the alleged threat to the German Volk from Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks. That, to Hitler, was the meaning of the war—the enormous sacrifice of German blood could be justified only if a new society would be created out of the victory. Deeply committed to racial science—not for nothing had Rudolf Hess once termed National Socialism
applied biology
—the Nazi regime had already begun the process of “filtering” the domestic German population. With its spectacular military victories, it could now set about transforming the east, applying its characteristic mix of racial mysticism, science, modern planning techniques, and brutality. Generalplan Ost envisioned nothing less than a transformation of the vast resource-rich east through superior expertise and planning. The result would be a solution to the German economic dilemma highlighted by World War I and the Weimar years and an elevation of the nation's standard of living. Then, Hitler boasted, “Europe, and not America, would be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Germany would also, he promised, become the most self-sufficient state in the world.
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As we have seen, the process of Germanization had already begun in the areas of western Poland to be incorporated in the Reich, where ruthless methods had been used not merely to expel Poles from their homes and farms to make way for the repatriation of Volksdeutsche, but to “denationalize” the Poles as well. Through a process of selective murder of the Polish national intelligentsia, rigorous repression, and the “reclaiming” of young people who looked German, Nazi agencies, led by the newly formed RKFDV, had set out to make the land German. Initially, however, this project was limited not only in its scope but also in its murderous intentions. As Himmler indicated in a famous May 1940 memorandum, Jews were not yet to be murdered, but deported to Africa. “Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be,” he concluded, “this method is still the mildest and best one if . . . one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a
people.” Although large numbers of people still would have died in such a project, in the spring of 1940 the Nazis had not yet crossed the threshold to mass murder.
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As with the onset of the Final Solution, which was still more than a year away, Nazi plans for the east also evolved, with the catalyst for radicalization in both cases being the invasion of the Soviet Union. Preliminary planning by Meyer had resulted in rough drafts of a general plan for the east being submitted to Himmler just before and after the start of Operation Barbarossa. As Nazi victories grew during the summer and fall of 1941, so did the ambitions of those involved in the project. Working under Meyer's direction, a small group of bright young SS-affiliated academic researchers expert in agriculture, racial science, urban planning, and economic geography had by the spring of 1942 altered the plan from one to secure food and other vital economic resources from the conquered areas of the east into a scheme that envisioned nothing less than the region's complete transformation into an area of German settlement, complete with model towns, villages, and farmsteads, all linked by a system of superhighways. The key to this new conception was the creation of three major zones of German colonization, from “Ingermanland” (Leningrad region) in the north through the Baltic region to “Gothengau” in the Crimea and southern Ukraine. These settlement areas would be connected by a series of strongpoints, German towns and villages at key rail and road junctions strung across Galicia and Ukraine. The land in the envisioned settlement area, a territory larger than the Reich in 1938, would be owned by the state and farmed out on long-term leases to Volksdeutsche, settlers from the old Reich, and SS/Wehrmacht veterans. Eventually, the Germanic peoples would be gathered in an empire that would stretch all the way to the Urals, where a
Wehrgrenze
(defense wall) would stand as a barrier protecting Europe from Asia's hordes. Germany would, thus, be freed from one of Hitler's most persistent racial nightmares: being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers of alien peoples.
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Even as the scheme expanded in scope, however, officials within the SS and from other ministries voiced critical objections. On 3 September 1941, for example, Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner, the head of the Central Resettlement Office in Posen (West Prussia), a man experienced in the practical difficulties of translating grand visions into reality, sent a memo to Adolf Eichmann that raised a crucial question that needed to be resolved. “Is the goal,” he asked, “to permanently secure [the non-German peoples] some sort of existence, or should they be totally eradicated?” He might have been the first to raise the issue, but Hoeppner was hardly the
only bureaucrat vexed by the demographic complexity of the proposal. Dr. Erhard Wetzel, a race expert in Rosenberg's employ and, thus, a rival to Himmler's SS, pointedly criticized Generalplan Ost in April 1942 for its faulty population calculations. Not only had Meyer's experts engaged in highly wishful thinking in projecting the German birthrate, but they had also grossly underestimated the size of the Slavic populations to be dealt with. If more than 80 percent of the population of Poland, 64 percent of the population of Belorussia, and 75 percent of the population of Ukraine were to be expelled from the proposed colonization area as racially undesirable, the total number of people involved would be, not the 31–45 million estimated by Meyer, but closer to 60–65 million, of whom at least 46–51 million would have to be deported. Resettling them in western Siberia—especially the Poles, whom Wetzel considered particularly troublesome—would be dangerous since they would create “a source of continual unrest against German rule.” The alternative, however, was both problematic and revealing. “It should be obvious,” he stressed, “that one cannot solve the Polish problem by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews.” Wetzel, it should be stressed, fully shared the goal of the Germanization of Eastern Europe; he was simply confounded by its implementation. Finally, Helmut Schubert, an economist in Himmler's own RKFDV, raised practical objections. The entire plan, he noted, depended on reversing the historic German trend toward urbanization and industrialization and, thus, posed a basic dilemma: industrialization and prosperity or racial homogeneity and stagnation?
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None of these objections troubled Himmler, however. Amazingly, despite the sweeping scope and murderous implications of Meyer's proposal, he ordered its architects to be even more ambitious: the Baltic states and the General Government should all be included in the Germanization project, while the time frame should be shortened from thirty years to twenty. In fact, Himmler stressed, Meyer and his team should think of expanding their proposal for the east into a general settlement plan that would link the eastern project with plans for Alsace-Lorraine, the Czech lands, and Slovenia. As to any difficulties in implementation, Himmler simply reminded his subordinates of what he had insisted since the
Kampfzeit
(struggle for power) of the 1920s: “that the so-called social question can only be solved by killing the other in order to get his land.” Himmler's murderous dreams received a decisive boost on 16 July when he presented Hitler with the final version of the Generalplan, complete with architectural drawings and maps of the proposed German settlements. Again convinced that the war in the east would be won, the Führer, according to Himmler, “not only listened to me, he even
refrained from constant interruptions, as is his usual habit. . . . Today he went so far as to approve of my proposals.” It was, the Reichsführer confessed, “the happiest day of my life. Everything I have been considering and planning . . . can now be realized. I shall set to it at once.”
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Not surprisingly, his first decision concerned the Jews, for in mid-July there was yet another of those convergences of factors that spelled their doom under Nazi rule. Hitler's optimism about the military situation and Sauckel's success in resolving the labor shortages in Germany through his brutal “recruitment drives” meant that Jewish labor was no longer regarded as necessary even for war-related projects. The domestic food crisis, meanwhile, added to the murderous “logic” that they be eliminated as useless eaters. Moreover, in all discussions surrounding Generalplan Ost, one thing had been assumed by all: the Jews would have no place. The day after Hitler's approval of Generalplan Ost, Himmler visited the newly expanded camp at Auschwitz, where he and his entourage viewed a “selection” and murder of Dutch Jews at nearby Birkenau. On 18–19 July, he issued three key orders to Globocnik and his boss in Lublin, Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Krueger, that illustrated the pattern in his thinking. The first explicitly instructed them to complete “the resettlement [i.e., murder] of the entire Jewish population of the General Government” unfit for work by the end of the year, while the second aimed at beginning the settlement program of Generalplan Ost. The third, finally, ordered draconian measures used to ensure the success of the fall harvest; the hunt for grain was to be pursued with complete ruthlessness. Three days later, on 22 July, deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka commenced; by the end of the year, only 300,000 Jews, by German reckoning, remained alive in the General Government. In all, prewar Poland's Jewish population of 3.25 million had been reduced to barely half a million. If the Nazis were intent on a New Order in the east, the first step in creating it would be the Final Solution of the Jewish problem.
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