All Hell Let Loose (82 page)

German and Japanese carpetbaggers who had achieved little status or respect in their own societies became proconsuls in their nations’ new possessions; Takase Toru, from 1942 to 1945 a powerful figure in Japanese-ruled Singapore, taunted Chinese business leaders: ‘I have been to Malaya three times before, and seen many of you at dinner table … but you had not paid any notice to me then.’ The Japanese extorted a ‘gift’ of fifty million Straits dollars from the Chinese community, renamed many streets, and advanced clocks two hours to Tokyo time. During the brief 1942 honeymoon between the Burmese and their ‘liberators’, a Japanese classical theatre troupe performed in Rangoon, singing:

But Japanese arrogance and brutality soon destroyed the goodwill of the Burmese people. Malays likewise recoiled from their new masters’ conduct, exemplified by their ubiquitous habit of urinating in public. The local population was outraged by the Japanese custom of administering a rebuke by a slap in the face. The occupiers grudgingly modified this practice in 1943, decreeing that only senior officers, colonels and above, could physically abuse natives; but scant heed was paid to the restriction. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, vivid chroniclers of the Asian experience, have written: ‘The Japanese seemed hardly more culturally sensitive than the British and were certainly more brutal.’

Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of Poland, wrote in his 1942 diary: ‘Humanity is a word that one dares not use … The power and the certainty of being able to use force without any resistance are the sweetest and most noxious poison that can be introduced into any government.’ This is an important statement, for it captures the exhilaration experienced by many Germans and Japanese on finding themselves, together with their local acolytes, occupying posts which conferred absolute powers of life and death. In ordinary peacetime life, men’s and women’s actions are constrained not only by law, but by social convention; even those who might feel no moral inhibitions about pillaging, injuring or killing others are subject to machinery which prevents them from doing so. But the men who exercised authority under the totalitarian regimes, emphatically including that of the Soviet Union, knew themselves liberated from all constraints and safeguards upon the sanctity of human life, provided only that killings advanced the purposes of the system they served. This huge, terrible freedom thrilled its beneficiaries: the few Nazi office-holders who afterwards gave honest testimony described their exercise of power in lyrical terms.

It was hard for victims, accustomed to lives in ordered communities, to grasp the implications of their absolute impotence. The chasm between a bourgeois society going about its lawful business and the
Arbeit Macht Frei
entrance arch to Auschwitz was initially too wide for comprehension. Occupation and subjection seemed bad enough; only progressively did it become apparent that there could be higher gradations of suffering. Ruth Maier, a young Austrian Jewish refugee living in Oslo, wrote on 25 April 1941 about her quest for a US visa: ‘I’ve been to the American Consulate about it. I’m sure to get a visa after the war. But not before then … So we need to be patient.’ The hapless girl did not yet understand that her inability to secure a visa was no mere inconvenience, but a matter of life and death – her own: five months afterwards, she was deported and murdered. As late as 1944 Edith Gabor, eighteen-year-old daughter of a Budapest diamond merchant, heard reports of the fate of Europe’s Jewish communities, ‘but we thought: “Oh, this is something that happens to other people, in other countries.”’ She herself was frightened, but not frightened enough. Later that year she was transported to the first of a succession of concentration camps where she narrowly survived unspeakable horrors. All the rest of her family save one brother were gassed.

Many people met death far from any battlefield. The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians – Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians – were extinguished by wilful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation. Their deaths were no less terrible because they took place in circumstances of obscurity, in some ruined village rather than at Auschwitz or Majdanek, and unaccompanied by any redemptive opportunity to offer resistance or win medals. Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr was appalled to learn of mass hostage shootings in occupied territories, writing to his wife on 21 October 1941:

The Holocaust is today often discussed in isolation. In one sense, this is logical, because the Jews were singled out for genocide, but the records of Auschwitz-Birkenau, most notorious of the death camp complexes, emphasise the numbers from other racial groups who shared the fate of Jewish deportees. The best available statistics show that a total of 1.1 million Jews arrived at the camp, of whom 100,000 survived; among 140,000 non-Jewish Poles, half survived; of 23,000 gypsies, all but 2,000 perished; all of 15,000 Soviet PoWs died; about half of 25,000 others – mostly political prisoners – were killed. In addition to almost six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, over three million Russians died in German captivity, while huge numbers of non-Jewish civilians were massacred in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries.

It thus seems important to assess the Holocaust against the background of Hitler’s governance of his empire. One of the most moving and enlightened advocates of pursuing such context was Ruth Maier. As a twenty-two-year-old refugee in Oslo, barely a month before her own deportation and murder in Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary: ‘If you shut yourself away and look at this persecution and torture of Jews only from the viewpoint of a Jew, then you’ll develop some sort of complex which is bound to lead to a slow but certain psychological collapse. The only solution is to see the Jewish question from a broader perspective … within the framework of the oppressed Czechs and Norwegians, the oppressed workers … We’ll only be rich when we understand that it’s not just we who are a race of martyrs. That beside us there are countless others suffering, who will suffer like us until the end of time … if we don’t … if we don’t fight for a better …’ She broke off to express exasperation about the persistence of her own instinct to see the Jewish tragedy as unique, but her mental confusion does not diminish the nobility and unselfishness of this very young woman’s words from the threshold of the grave.

One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes, from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology, while still fighting the war. Almost all comparisons between Hitler and Churchill are otiose, but one seems significant: Britain’s leader provoked the exasperation of his ministers, as well as that of humbler fellow countrymen, by his refusal seriously to address domestic social reform until victory was achieved. Germany’s leader, in contrast, launched a drastic reordering of conquered societies in the east within weeks of their occupation. He conducted wholesale expulsions of indigenous populations to make way for German colonists, and slaughtered large numbers of people, notably Jews and social and political activists, heedless of whether they offered resistance to his hegemony. Ignoring the human horror – as of course did the Nazis – these policies imposed enormous economic and agricultural disruption on Hitler’s war machine. Some members of designated lesser races enlisted in Nazi service to secure food or pay, or because they hated Jews, or because they merely relished opportunities for exercising dominion and indulging cruelty; but oppression embittered millions of Stalin’s former subjects who might have become willing German acolytes.

In occupied western Europe in 1940–41, the Nazis encountered many active or potential collaborators. The leaders of Vichy France were eager to pursue a partnership with the Reich, which could have gained the support of many people in France, and conceivably led to French belligerence against Britain. But Hitler’s economic exploitation of Pétain’s nation, notably by imposing an artificially high exchange rate for the mark against the franc, progressively alienated the French, even before the 1943 introduction of forced labour in Germany, the detested
Service de Travail Obligatoire
.

The Nazis’ mass deportations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine gravely damaged agricultural production. Many of the ethnic German colonists intended to replace the native inhabitants proved reluctant, as well as technically unqualified, to fulfil their appointed destinies. All history’s successful empires have rested partly on
force majeure
, but partly also upon offering conquered peoples compensations for subjection: stability, prosperity and a rule of law. The Nazis, by contrast, offered only brutality, corruption and administrative incompetence. They themselves would have argued that their cruelties were successful in suppressing strategically significant resistance to occupation everywhere save in Yugoslavia and Russia. This was true, but is only part of the story.

Many of the occupied countries, and especially France, made useful contributions to the German war economy under compulsion: in all, they supplied some 9.3 per cent of the Reich’s armaments, and Danish agriculture provided 10 per cent of Germany’s food needs. But Hitler might have fared better had he offered conquered peoples incentives as well as threats, rewards as well as draconian confiscations of property and commodities. The Nazis’ view of economics was grotesquely primitive. They regarded wealth creation as a zero-sum game, in which for Germany to gain, someone else must lose. The consequence was that, from 1940 onwards, Hitler’s empire was progressively pillaged to fund his war, a process that could end only in its bankruptcy.

The Nazi hierarchy was slow to comprehend the folly of slaughtering prospective slaves amid the national manpower crisis created by mobilisation of most of Germany’s population of military age. Adam Tooze has calculated that, in all, seven million men of working age – notably Jews, Poles and Russian PoWs – were killed or allowed to die by the Germans, most between 1941 and 1943. He describes the Holocaust as ‘a catastrophic destruction of labour power’. The Nazis in 1941–42 reasoned that their difficulties in feeding the German people were best assuaged by eliminating every unwanted mouth within their reach. At a Berlin meeting attended by Goering on 16 September 1941, food shortages were highlighted. The Reichsmarschal declared it to be unthinkable to reduce rations for Germany’s civilian population, ‘given the mood at home’: Hitler’s people required material as well as moral reassurance that the war was worth fighting.

The only answer, the Nazis concluded, was to reduce provision for native inhabitants of the occupied territories and Russian PoWs. On 13 November, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told his heads of department that ‘prisoners of war who are not working will have to starve’. Thus Russian prisoners began to die in vast numbers, some of hunger and others at the hands of guards granted unlimited licence to kill in order to control the herds of desperate humanity for which they were responsible. By 1 February 1942, almost 60 per cent of 3.35 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had perished; by 1945, 3.3 million were dead out of 5.7 million taken captive.

Only in 1943 did the Nazis acknowledge that hungry mouths also had useful hands: they belatedly accepted the value, indeed indispensability, of keeping prisoners alive to bolster Germany’s shrinking industrial labour force. When this new policy was implemented, Goering observed with complacency that Russians performed 80 per cent of the construction work on his Ju87 Stukas. By the autumn of 1944, almost eight million foreign labourers and PoWs were engaged in the German economy, 20 per cent of its workforce. BMW employed 16,600 prisoners at its Munich plant alone; though still treated with institutionalised cruelty, their rations were increased just sufficiently to sustain life. Industrial employers asked that punishments should be administered behind the wire of workers’ quarters, rather than in open view on factory premises, to avoid distressing German staff. A vast complex of guarded quarters was established in and around every major German city, to house foreigners of all kinds. The Munich area harboured 120 PoW facilities, 286 barracks and hostels for civilians and a brothel to service them, together with seven concentration camp outstations including a branch of Dachau – 80,000 bedspaces.

It was impossible for most German civilians credibly to deny knowledge of the concentration camps or the slave-labour system: little girls living near Ravensbrück were seen playing a game of ‘camp guards’; prisoners were widely used for firefighting, rescue work and clearing rubble in the wake of air raids. They were also dispatched to deal with unexploded bombs, a task so often fatal that SS men convicted of crimes were preferred as guards for such squads. To ensure that slaves were readily available, local satellite camps were established in urban areas. Prisoners from Sachsenhausen, for instance, were drafted into nearby Berlin, where their striped clothing caused civilians to refer to them as ‘zebras’. In Osnabrück, mothers complained to the SS that children in the schoolyard were obliged to witness slaves being beaten by their guards. The SS responded that ‘If the children aren’t tough enough yet, they have to be hardened.’