Cruel World (60 page)

The children surely did not know it, but by the time of their pageants nearly three-quarters of a million men had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner in the campaign to take Stalingrad, and thousands more, trapped in the besieged city, in no way able to “decide” their fate and in awful cold and squalor, were celebrating, with the pathetic supplies available to them, their last Christmas. The Hegewald children’s young Nazi mentors, earnest and dutiful though they might be, were undoubtedly ecstatic to be on duty there and not in Stalingrad.

Alas, things never did go quite right in Settlement Hegewald. Even
during the preparation stages other agencies, clearly dubious about Hegewald’s importance, kept stealing craftsmen working on the project. Food was an eternal problem. Two days after the last Christmas party a delegation of
Volksdeutsche
ladies from one of the more remote settlements arrived at SS headquarters to complain that they had not received promised livestock or been given any bread for two months. The
Volksdeutsche
, they said, were constantly being cheated by the remaining Ukrainians and also could not keep up with the work required to produce their milk quotas and care for big families, many of which were run by single mothers.

It also appeared that the shipments of clothes promised from Auschwitz-East had not arrived. There was a big demand for them: the Hitler Youth, for example, wanted tons of articles for the KLV children evacuated from the Reich.
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Hegewald chief Henschel and Himmler, who both had demanded further shipments in time for Christmas, complained. A reply from Oswald Pohl, head of the SS concentration camp system, informed Himmler that the demand for clothing “from the Jewish resettlement” could not be satisfied to the full because “the delivery of rags is very high.” In addition, although some 570 carloads had gone to the Ministry of Economics, “the transportation holdup to the Ukraine” had been “especially noticeable … and prevented the delivery of old clothing intended for the racial Germans there.” Things would be sent once the transportation situation improved, but, meanwhile, some 211 carloads were in storage in Lodz. A careful categorized list, innocent unless one knows the fate of the former owners of the stored items, was appended. The last category reads as follows:

There were more difficult problems. The SS projects were constantly undermined by the urgent needs of other agencies. The population of the entire region bordering the war zones was in constant flux, making arrangements difficult. In the spring of 1943 it became clear that many of the Ukrainians who had been evicted were filtering back to Hegewald and hiding with unevicted relatives. The “Sunny South” to which they had been sent had not been idyllic. What houses there were had to be shared with two or three other families, and there was neither food nor furnishings. Threats that the infiltrators would be arrested and sent as forced labor to the Reich had little effect, according to one Ukrainian official, as things in the south were so bad that “it was all the same to them.”
¹¹⁹
Since February, more
Volksdeutsche
had also been brought in from areas about to be retaken by the Red Army and were living in the usual squalid camps while they awaited housing. One desperate camp official even applied for two “bath cars” known to be on a siding in far-off Posen.

Despite all, during a lull in the Red Army’s relentless advance in the spring and summer of 1943, the SS bureaucrats, keeping up a nondefeatist front, continued their planning fantasies. In July, a hundred HJ and BDM boys and girls were scheduled to be sent to Russia for youth theater projects.
¹²⁰
Arrangements were made for student interns from the Reich to work in the area as far ahead as the spring of 1944 in order to save the
Volksdeutsche
population, which had been “biologically weakened” by twenty-four years of Bolshevik influence and marriage with foreigners.
¹²¹
The nervous young SS leaders in some villages, who continued to report in regional meetings the “terrible unhappiness” and need of the
Volksdeutsche
, reduced in some places by July 1943 to picking greens in the fields to eat, were sent back to their posts with renewed exhortations to continue precise implementation of Himmler’s utopian plans. But now their work was dangerous: teenaged BDM maidens heading out to their welfare posts had to be escorted by soldiers in “full battle kit” who were reminded “not to forget their gas masks.”
¹²²
By late August 1943, major partisan violence had reached well into Himmler’s little paradise, and by November, the inhabitants of the Hegewald utopia, such as it was, were in flight before the vanguards of the Red Army.

Late 1943 saw the burgeoning of partisan violence in the East, which was supported by the Soviets and various competing interest groups such as the Ukrainian nationalists and encouraged by the clear perception that the Germans were losing. There were many causes. Contemptuous
and cruel treatment, unrestrained murder, and hunger were major among them, but nothing was more likely to generate resistance than the brutal programs to “recruit” labor for German industry.

The idea of bringing
Untermenschen
from the USSR to work in the Fatherland was, at first, anathema for hard-core Nazis and, indeed, for most Germans, who had heard nothing but propaganda on the bestiality of the Slavs for years. It was this attitude that at first limited the use of Soviet POWs to the most menial labor and such projects as testing the efficacy of Zyklon B in the gas chambers being readied for the Jews at Auschwitz. There, on September 3, 1941, the gas was used on the Russians for the first time for the purpose of exterminating human beings instead of lice. It did not work very well. The following morning some of the 600 prisoners used for the experiment were still alive. The amount of gas used was then doubled, this time with satisfactory results. After this initial experiment, hundreds more Soviet POWs were executed in this way. Once the gassing system was working, more than 10,000 Russians were brought in during October 1941 to speed up construction of Birkenau, the extension of Auschwitz, and its crematoria. Most of these also perished. Some were not very old. Records at Auschwitz show that Soviet children as young as eleven were classified as prisoners of war.
¹²³

Soviet civilians, though employed by the Germans in low-grade jobs all over the occupied USSR, were not supposed to be sent anywhere near the pure-blooded citizens of the Reich. As we have seen, in the early stages of planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union it had been assumed that the millions of German soldiers involved would be home in a few months and that they would resume their old jobs. They would bring with them huge amounts of food for the homeland and massive amounts of raw materials for German industry. Meanwhile, the carefully controlled Polish forced labor, French POWs, and volunteer Western workers would fill in at home, and bringing labor from the USSR was not contemplated.

But even as the German forces entered the USSR, the need for more labor had become so acute in some industries in Germany that many economic leaders had begun to gaze eastward. By October 1941, Hitler, over Himmler’s vehement objections, had authorized the deployment of Russians, both POWs and civilians, in war factories within Germany.
¹²⁴
There was not much distinction between the two categories. All the regulations created for the Poles plus many worse ones were applied to the Soviet workers. They were to be kept in work gangs carefully segregated from both the German people and other forced laborers. Police supervision would be constant. They could not be used as individual workers, and
were to have the hardest and dirtiest jobs and be kept on starvation rations. As Göring put it at a meeting of labor administrators:

The “housing” would be in unheated barracks within barbed-wire enclosures, and the civilians’ clothing, such as it was, must clearly display a badge reading “OST” for
Ostarbeiter
, or Eastern worker. At this early stage the planners did not feel that there would be too many civilians, as the 1.6 million POWs available seemed sufficient. But by early December 1941, the situation of the Soviet prisoners of war was so terrible that only a few thousand were fit enough to be sent. Nazi officials reported that 2,000 a day were dying, and that ten of the fifteen POW camps were quarantined due to typhus epidemics. Of those transported, 25 to 70 percent died en route and the rest were too weak to work when they arrived. Attempts were made to remedy this situation by setting up rehabilitation camps, sending the POWs to work on farms to be fattened up, and urging industries to run their own recovery centers. But, on grounds that
Untermenschen
should not ever be treated as well as Germans, the hard-core Nazis would never relent on the matter of sufficient rations, even when it was clear that their policy was hurting production. One directive, acknowledging that cat might not be a good enough kind of meat, upgraded the allowable types to “horse meat and meat stamped by inspectors as unfit for human consumption.” Not surprisingly, 400,000 more POWs died between November 1941 and January 1942, and only slightly more than 160,000 of the 3.5 million prisoners taken by March had been sent to work in Germany, far fewer than were needed.
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Attention now necessarily was focused on Soviet civilians. This should have been fertile ground for recruiting, especially in the Ukraine, where Soviet suppression had been ferocious and many were attracted by the possibilities of a better life in the capitalist world. Once again, the German authorities put up posters and made promises to lure workers, and a certain number did respond, but from the beginning voluntary recruitment was a farce. In many towns and villages local officials, given worker quotas that had to be filled by the week or the day, resorted to brutal roundups
and raids in which anyone over the age of fifteen could be taken from bed or off the street. Often, a town that did not meet its quotas was burned to the ground in reprisal. Not that there was any reward for volunteering. The workers, the great majority of whom were women and teenagers, were treated like POWs or concentration camp inmates.

Protests from German industry and the various labor administrations had no effect on the Nazi police and racial formations responsible for gathering and transporting the workers. The gatherers were fanatically determined that the Slavs should be treated like beasts. Werner Mansfeld, appointed by Göring to coordinate the recruiting from the USSR, complained that it was “absurd to transport these workers in open or unheated freight cars, only to unload dead bodies at their final destination.” He was also aghast at what happened once they got there: well-fed and clothed laborers who were “diligent and careful, and work at a pace that some German workers find hard to maintain,” were reduced within weeks by lack of rations to states of such weakness and collapse that they could hardly stand, much less work, and were also made vulnerable to typhus and tuberculosis.
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Efforts to keep this situation secret by prohibiting letters home from the
Ostarbeiter
were not a success. Word filtered back, and was made manifest by the Nazis’ own policy of sending “unfit” workers, which included the ill and the pregnant, back in transports that were even more gruesome than those going out and were plainly visible to anyone at a railroad station:

In early April 1942, with labor shortages ever more desperate and draft calls ever higher, labor “recruitment” for the entire Nazi Reich was centralized under Fritz Sauckel, a technocrat who cared only about producing the bodies required. He was soon joined in this slave trade by Himmler, whose SS had by now set up a string of armaments factories linked to his concentration camps. More and more force would be used to procure the workers, whose minimum age was ever younger. Despite the terrible conditions, the operation was a statistical success: eventually there would be some 2.8 million
Ostarbeiter
and Soviet POW laborers working in Germany
proper. The variety of experience among those conscripted was enormous, depending greatly on the attitudes of the procurers, who ranged from benign to corrupt and whose own lives and careers often depended on achieving their quotas. It is clear that illicit profits also could be made on this human trade and that hundreds of young workers were sold outside the official work projects.