Ostkrieg (92 page)

Although Generalplan Ost had been a brainchild of Himmler's and important primarily for showing the direction of the Nazi colonial vision, another aspect of the same impulse that had far more murderous consequences was the hunger policy, the genesis of which lay not in the SS but in Goering's Four-Year Plan, the Reich Ministry for Food, the quartermaster-general's office in the Wehrmacht, and the military economic-armament office. Behind this lay Hitler's imprint, influenced as always by the experience of World War I and revolution. The key to Germany's defeat in the earlier war, the Führer was convinced, was the British
blockade, which exposed the key German weakness—lack of economic self-sufficiency, especially in foodstuffs. This problem was accentuated with the upheavals and revolutionary movements of the postwar period, especially in the new Soviet Union, which moved from being primarily a grain-exporting region to being an industrialized society that consumed all its agricultural production. This meant that a reliable food supply for Germany was even more imperiled. In an “age of economic empires,” Hitler had argued as far back as November 1937, “the primitive urge to colonization” had to manifest itself. Bolshevism, the “Guidelines of Economic Policy for the Economic Organization East” asserted in May 1941, echoing the Führer, had caused significant economic disturbances and destroyed the natural balance between food-producing and food-consuming areas. The only solution, reintegrating Russia into this balance, “will necessarily lead to both the industry and a large part of the people in the hitherto food-importing areas [of the Soviet Union] dying off.” The full ramifications of the scheme would have resulted in murder on a breathtaking scale: Nazi bureaucrats estimated that anywhere from 30 to 45 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would have perished, with some believing those figures too low by half.
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In the event, pragmatism (the need for labor) and the practical realities on the ground (lack of available manpower) limited the eventual impact of the hunger policy. If not the tens of millions of useless eaters envisioned by its originators, a few million Soviet citizens nonetheless perished as a direct result of deliberate starvation. Among them were urban populations such as Kiev, Kharkov, and Leningrad as well as roughly 2 million Soviet prisoners of war. Although Hitler's endless verbal ramblings to his intimates during the euphoric days of midsummer 1941 betrayed a clear sense of the apparent colonial nature of the project, the key point, as Donald Bloxham has stressed, lies outside this historical precedent and in another. In his emphasis on food supply and reversing the racial fragmentation of Eastern Europe, Hitler revealed the influences of a very specific historical, spatial, and economic context. As an Austrian German, Hitler had been influenced by the sense of threatened ethnicity so prevalent among the German population of the Dual Monarchy. He was also acutely aware, as illustrated in
Mein Kampf
, of the flux and openness for exploitation of the borderland areas of the former Habsburg and Romanov Empires. Moreover, as other statements of the 1930s attest, he recognized that various policies of ethnic cleansing, murderous to a greater or lesser extent, had been carried out before, during, and after World War I—and some with the connivance and encouragement of the victorious Western powers. Finally, the constant allusions to
grain supply fit neatly with his fears of a reoccurrence of the food shortages that he believed had crippled and destroyed the imperial German war effort. The earlier war experience confirmed his Darwinistic vision: food resources were both vital and scarce and had to be obtained so that its enemies could not again starve Germany into submission. If Germany was to win, then others had to lose; for the Führer, it was a zero-sum game. His vision for the east, then, was less a classic colonial one of naked economic exploitation and more an attempt to restructure and unify the area racially, then organize it as part of the broader European struggle against the American challenge.
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It was also within this larger context that the fate of the Jews was determined. The original goal, to remove them from the German area of influence and control, largely remained intact in 1939–1940, even as the Jewish problem intensified. Forced emigration had not been effective, efforts to shove Polish Jews across the demarcation line with Russia had failed, the reservation scheme came to naught, and the Madagascar Plan collapsed as a result of British persistence in the war. Although a territorial solution remained official policy, by the time of Barbarossa a new dynamic was emerging. Security concerns, the identification of Jews as Communists and potential partisan fighters, and the fear of the internal enemy undermining the war effort all led to the preinvasion decision to murder the male Jews of the Soviet Union. In its implementation, the decision also demonstrated the intersection between policy and ambition. In the early summer of 1941, local initiatives often drove policy forward as ambitious and ruthless SS and SD men used the autonomy given them to drive forward a murderous solution to a problem they knew had high priority with the Führer. The decision in the summer of 1941 to expand the murder to include all Soviet Jews and then the further resolution that same autumn to kill all Jews under German control both illustrated the importance of the military situation: unexpectedly tough Soviet resistance, high German losses, the traditional fear of partisan war and internal upheavals fomented by Jews, and the apparently sudden prospect of complete success combined to create an explosive atmosphere. Inspired, perhaps, by the expectation and euphoria of imminent victory after such a tough struggle, Hitler now definitively decided that the Jews had no place in the new Nazi imperium. The territorial solution, which itself had assumed high levels of mortality through “natural causes,” gave way to an “exterminationist solution,” which envisioned a much more immediate death, especially for the Jews in those areas designated for German colonization.

The timing, implementation, and attainment of Hitler's far-reaching
goals, of course, depended on military triumphs. The success of the Wehrmacht formed the prerequisite for the realization of Hitler's vision. Military victories and setbacks set the ultimate parameters for the extent to which this imperial policy could be pursued: how much of policy was to be put into effect, the extent and success of this implementation, and the compromises that undermined the full impact of Nazi plans. Solving the Jewish problem and creating the racial-utopian Germanic Lebensraum in the east were both central to the Nazi worldview, and, for both, the war-fighting ability of the German armed forces was the essential component. The realization of this fact also raises the question of the extent to which the Wehrmacht knowingly participated in and supported Nazi criminal activities in the Soviet Union. Despite postwar attempts to depict the Wehrmacht leadership as primarily apolitical and technocratic, from the end of World War I it had been a bastion of aggressive nationalism and revisionism, conservative, strongly anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic. Deeply affected by the war experience and the defeat in 1918, the great majority of its members accepted the Dolchstoss myth and, with Hitler, were determined that Jewish-Bolshevism would not again destroy Germany.
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Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the army leadership raised no objections to the flood of criminal orders emanating from the Führer and the OKW. From Hitler's injunctions to conduct a brutal and merciless war of extermination to cooperating with the RSHA in delineating spheres of responsibilities behind the front to specific measures such as the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree, the army leadership could be under no illusions as to the purpose and methods of the coming war in the Soviet Union, but it failed to mount any protest. Indeed, during the summer and autumn of 1941, army leaders, both at the front and in the OKH, often explicitly urged their troops, in ideologically charged, anti-Semitic proclamations, to wage war on National Socialist lines and discard notions of humane treatment of the enemy. Further, the army fully cooperated with the murderous Einsatzgruppen units as they carried out their bloody task, offering logistic, intelligence, and communications support, as well as occasionally furnishing manpower for executions. It also willingly handed over commissars and Jews to the Einsatzgruppen for murder. Moreover, millions of Soviet prisoners of war died in camps under its control as part of a deliberate plan of murder and starvation. Army security units used ruthless methods to suppress the partisan war as well as embracing the use of SS and police units in order to pacify and safeguard rear areas. It remorselessly plundered and stripped the areas under its control of foodstuffs
in order to feed itself off the land, regardless of the consequences for local civilians. It also exploited native inhabitants for labor and cooperated with the forced roundups, the infamous Menschenjagd conducted by Sauckel's organization that sent people as forced laborers back to Germany. The nexus between economic, colonial, racial, and military imperatives was, perhaps, best illustrated in Polish eastern Galicia, where local authorities began constructing Durchgangstrasse 4, a key transportation corridor into Ukraine that neatly combined immediate military utility with an eventual use, as part of Generalplan Ost, as an axis of settlement for Volksdeutsche. In the meantime, the Autobahn would be constructed by Jewish laborers, some twenty thousand of whom would be worked to death in a process of extermination through labor.
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Complicity of the Wehrmacht and the army leadership in Nazi crimes is, of course, not the same as complicity of average soldiers. This raises the further question of how far typical Landsers participated in these criminal activities. This remains a difficult question to answer with any degree of precision or reliability. In terms of the most serious of these atrocities, the murder of the Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war, it is obvious that, without the logistic and administrative cooperation of the Wehrmacht bureaucracy, mass murder on such a large scale would hardly have been possible. Although the institutional complicity is apparent, it also seems clear that relatively few soldiers took an
active
part in the shootings of Jews. In general, average Landsers probably cooperated with SS killers more in the Baltic than in Ukraine, for example, but best estimates are that, overall, not more than twenty to thirty thousand Wehrmacht personnel, out of the millions who served on the Ostfront, were
active
in explicitly aiding the Security Police in the selection, organization, and shooting of Jews and accounted for only around 1 percent of the victims. Much the same could be said with regard to implementation of the Commissar Order or the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. Without the functional cooperation of the Wehrmacht, these murderous policies could not have been carried out, but relatively few of the active perpetrators were
front troops
.

This same formulation would apply as well to the partisan war, where, until 1943, most of the violence stemmed from rear security units. The worst of the crimes with which the Ostheer was associated—the murder of the Jews, the shooting of political officials, the systematic starvation of prisoners of war, the colonial exploitation of food and raw materials, and participation in forced labor roundups—were largely perpetrated by occupation and security units. If the typical Landser was a combat infantryman, then, his point of contact with the native inhabitants of
the Soviet Union was more likely to be in the form of the requisitioning of food items than in mass murder. Likely the greatest culpability the average Landser incurred was during the scorched-earth retreat of the autumn of 1943. Given the freedom to destroy, and often operating in areas controlled by partisans, many responded in an orgy of destruction. For the rest, however, SS, party, and Wehrmacht officials scrambled to gain control of the spoils. The Ostheer, as Christian Hartmann noted, was “supposed to conquer the Lebensraum, perhaps even secure it, but not organize it.” By and large, then, the responsibility for the greatest crimes committed by the Wehrmacht accrued to those in the rear areas and in leadership positions. Further, the number of those involved in serious crimes was very small, perhaps only 5 percent of the entire Ostheer. This relatively tiny number admittedly accounted for enormous damage, but it would be false to replace the incorrect view of the “clean” Wehrmacht with an equally erroneous one in which all were criminals.
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Although not
directly
involved in criminal activities, the bulk of Landsers were
indirectly
complicit in that the racial assumptions and norms of the regime infused all thought and activity in the Third Reich, making it relatively easy to justify violence and killing. Not only did they tacitly accept the radical racial and ideological premises of Barbarossa, but their successes on the battlefield also enabled the regime to carry out its murderous plans. As with the issue of criminal complicity, the question of why they fought is complex and multifaceted. For many, of course, it was a straightforward matter of obligation, of being conscripted into the military and sent to fight. Some fought from old-fashioned patriotism and a misguided belief in the German cause. Still others were nationalists who, motivated by a strong sense of grievance, hoped to correct what they saw as the injustices of Versailles, to recover German honor and international preeminence, or to restore the nation's lost provinces. Many, troubled by the reality of war and fighting to maintain a sense of self, struggled on out of a sense of duty, if not to their country, then to their comrades, whom they were unwilling to abandon in a difficult situation. Pride, honor, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves if necessary also played a role as the focal point became the small group of comrades surrounding oneself. In the last phase of the war, when hundreds of thousands of Germans were dying every month, hope in miracle weapons, fear of Soviet (and Allied) revenge, and harsh, terroristic measures on the part of their own regime sufficed to keep many doing their hard duty as the racial community became fully militarized in the heat of total war.