Cruel World (68 page)

The forced recruiting in Holland was only a small part of Sauckel’s Western manpower hunt. Even in perfectly Nordic Norway universal labor conscription was ordered in 1943 for boys and girls twelve and over. The younger ones were supposed to help in civil defense. Those over fifteen would be put to work. After Oslo University students protested against this measure, their main auditorium burned down under suspicious circumstances; the fire was blamed on Communist agitation in the student body. Roundups followed, and eventually 12,000 students were sent to a camp in the far north of the country and from there, in December 1943, to Germany. Here too a loyalty oath was the ticket to release, but
few signed. Six hundred fifty of the students were sent to a special camp where an unsuccessful effort was made to train them for the SS, after which they too went to the factories.
¹⁰

A much more tempting source of labor for the Nazis was the youth of France, which not only was much more numerous, but also was racially less desirable and therefore more exploitable. But restraint had to be shown toward the French, who must be kept pacified as long as the war in the East continued. In September 1941, there were already well over a million French POWs and some 50,000 volunteer workers in Germany.
¹¹
Many more were employed by the German occupation agencies in France. But by 1942 the number of new French volunteers had fallen off just as much as that of the Poles, and few of those recruited early on, who found working in Germany very unpleasant indeed, were willing to renew their contracts.

In May, therefore, Sauckel demanded that France supply 350,000 workers by June 30. Pierre Laval, as he had done in the case of the deportation of Jews, wanted to keep control of recruiting in French hands while satisfying the German request. By early June he had succeeded in making a deal that would allow the repatriation of one French POW for each three skilled French workers, an arrangement known as the
Relève
. To promote enrollment for work in Germany, Vichy launched a huge propaganda campaign. This program had little effect; by the end of August the response was so inadequate that Sauckel ordered forced conscription. Laval again preempted the Nazi action by passing a French law requiring all men eighteen to fifty and single women twenty-one to thirty-five to register. This effort was, if anything, even less successful. Laval’s own Cabinet objected to the “Polonization” of France.
¹²
Young men disappeared in droves, and some local officials openly advised others not to register. The police, already overextended and unhappy enforcing the anti-Jewish measures, were often reluctant to engage in the pursuit of French young people. There were strikes and demonstrations and murmurings against “mobilization for slavery.” Upon the German occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, this would all change. Roundups at gunpoint became common in Paris, and there were tough reprisals: the ailing seventy-year-old father and seventeen-year-old brother of one boy who refused to register were sent to Dachau.
¹³
These measures were quite effective: by the end of December 240,000 workers had gone to Germany.

But Sauckel and his Führer, who reportedly had suggested that one to
two million Frenchmen should be conscripted for service in the rear areas of the Eastern Front, wanted more.
¹⁴
In January 1943, Sauckel demanded another 250,000 by March. Laval, desperate to fill the quota, on February 16 ordered the creation of the Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO), which basically revived the French draft, but this time to provide manpower for the enemy. Service was for two years and exemptions were given only to essential agricultural workers and those holding jobs “useful to the needs of the country.” Needless to say, the exemptions did not include full-time students or the young people who had so far been protected by participation in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse and the Compagnons de France.

Not everyone thought this drastic order was bad. The Vichy press touted the “healthy European experiences” in store for the young, who, they gushed, might even be allowed to take their bicycles with them. General de la Porte du Theil of the Chantiers, in a speech considered scandalous by most, told his boys that they should obey because “it is necessary above all to avoid falling under the yoke of Bolshevism.” Some zealous officials felt that a little forced labor would do wonders for France’s “decadent” youth; the
préfet
of Rouen was especially pleased to be able to send all of the long-haired, hip
zazous
of the city to Germany. Others were not so eager, and even Laval is said to have encouraged some of his underlings to “drown” the process in “administrative magma.”
¹⁵

Resistance to the STO became quite creative. One intrepid bureaucrat, Jean Isméolari, a former labor inspector, set up an entirely fake “Commission of Appeal” for those seeking exemptions from the STO that issued release documents on an impressive letterhead covered with seals, stamps, and illegible signatures. This one-man agency, which was not suspected by either the Germans or Vichy, is said to have exempted thousands from forced labor.
¹⁶
The Vichy Secretary of the Navy redistributed two classes of cadets from the Naval Academy at Toulon to technical training programs whose work was “important to the nation,” and young communications “cadets” were hired by the post office.
¹⁷
In a more brazen effort, one Chantiers de la Jeunesse leader took six truckloads of boys to a transit camp to be registered. As they entered, they stood up in the trucks, singing loudly. The boys were duly processed and had their documents properly stamped. The trucks then departed, apparently empty. No one noticed that they in fact contained 240 boys, lying on top of one another and covered with old bags and blankets.
¹⁸

The universities and high schools, whose students had heretofore been exempted from labor call-ups, a fact that had led to a marked increase in enrollment, also went into action. Ironically, the only ones exempted from
the beginning were the few remaining Jewish students, who were, however, expected to register for agricultural work in France. The Vichy government managed to have the tour of duty in Germany for the 32,000 targeted students reduced to one year, after which they would have to do another year of community service in France. In addition, a complex structure of deferments was concocted by the universities, and many faculties cheated by hiring extra teaching assistants, falsifying records, and turning a blind eye to ID cards that were not quite in order. The French Resistance emulated their Dutch colleagues by stealing the registration files of the Sorbonne. The passive attitude of many students had been blown away long since by the excesses of German anti-Jewish measures. The June 1942 requirement that Jews wear stars was a major catalyst; few have forgotten the impact of the first day on which these badges were displayed. Some teachers told their students to come to school wearing similar badges. In Bordeaux, as in many other places, a whole class of girls came to school wearing stars in order to be like their one Jewish classmate. University students did likewise, and when questioned, said that the letters JUIF on their stars stood for
Jeunesse Universitaire Intellectuelle Française
.
¹⁹
The Nazis were not amused: non-Jews wearing stars could be sent off to Dachau.
²⁰

The apparent coddling of students by the Vichy government, which reduced the number eligible for induction in the STO to 15,000, plus the large number who simply did not register, was unacceptable to the Germans, and led to all sorts of harassment. Required physicals for STO service were scheduled in the middle of medical school exams in Clermont-Ferrand. In Montpellier, Germans rounded up students as they emerged from their finals, lest they escape. In the end, it is thought that only some 6,000 university students actually went to Germany. Many more would be sent to German projects within France. But the fear of arrest and deportation soon led to a 26 percent decrease in university enrollment.
²¹

All this resistance took much time and effort for small results; it was also dangerous. There was no way to compete with the combined power of the Nazis and the collaborationist police organizations, to whom human rights were meaningless, and there was no letup in the pressure. Both the Jewish deportations and the forced labor actions showed how well the Nazis had learned the efficacy of fast and ruthless activity. As the demand for bodies increased, victims were grabbed in the Métro, cafés, or even brothels. University classrooms could be a trap, and whole Chantier encampments were shipped directly to Germany with no time to say
good-bye to families or pack belongings. In one three-day period in May 1943, 5,200 young men were taken straight from a Chantier to the huge I. G. Farben plant next to the Auschwitz death camp; 16,372 would leave France by August. There was seemingly no end to it. In May and again in August, Sauckel would ask for a total of 720,000 more bodies. The age limit was lowered to seventeen, which made high school pupils eligible.
²²

By the spring of 1944 even France’s very proper
Grandes Écoles
, traditional training grounds for the nation’s government, scientific, and business elites, were resorting to distinctly illegal measures to save their endangered students. Othar Zaldastani, second in his class at the engineering school of Ponts et Chausées and the son of Georgian exiles who had fled to France in the 1920s, was doubly vulnerable because he held a Nansen passport and was therefore considered stateless. After the Allied landing in Normandy, the director of the school urged Zaldastani to leave Paris. To protect him, the director arranged for him to work at a Ponts et Chausées office in the small town of Besançon, in the east of France, until Paris should be liberated. This was definitely a “nationally essential” job, as the Germans depended on the French to keep the roads and bridges open for their armies. By August 1944, the Vichy government had fallen and there was no restraint on the Germans. Zaldastani’s colleagues advised him to flee to Switzerland. He did not make it. Picked up by a German patrol, he too would be taken to Germany and fed into the STO program with other French students.
²³

For all those considering going into hiding, even within France, the prospects were bleak. Without the proper STO stamp on one’s work card, one could not get ration coupons, pick up letters at the post office, be employed, or withdraw funds from a bank. Families were endangered and a fugitive was dependent on those willing to protect him. Refuge with French underground organizations was one option, but in 1943 these groups were still not widespread and were specific in their politics, and most young people had no safe way to contact them.

Little effort was made to charm the new French employees of the Reich once their journeys began. Depersonalization began right away. At their assigned transit centers, which were usually surrounded by armed French guards and barbed wire, they were given uniforms in the traditional
bleu de travail
of the French laborer unless they were already wearing the uniforms of the Chantiers or Compagnons de France. Food and bedding were previews of the turnip soup and dirty straw mattresses to come. The conscripts were given aptitude tests and “contracts,” which no one bothered to sign. Transport, luxurious compared to that of the Jews
being deported, was in decrepit and often unheated passenger cars that left from platforms cordoned off by police and off limits to families. If there had been any illusions about their real situation, these were swept away at the German frontier, where loudspeakers proclaimed that they were now in Reich territory and that protests and patriotic demonstrations, frequent during the voyage, would no longer be tolerated. In some places Hitler Youth boys threw rocks at their trains. Guards with dogs patrolled the stations, luggage was searched, and much was confiscated.

Eventually the young workers were taken to triage camps, where laborers of all nationalities, but not the Jews, were massed together in extreme and chaotic squalor. Here small children begged for cigarettes, and young girls from the East offered themselves for a piece of bread or a cupful of the soup that the French, still sufficiently well fed, would reject. Othar Zaldastani, puzzled by the strange behavior of several boys in the mess hall of the triage camp at Offenbach, later learned that they had been buried up to their necks for days as punishment for some infraction and had lost their reason.
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Most shocking to the new arrivals were “flocks of starved beings in rags” followed by screaming guards. A Nazi official organizing the French assured them that they were not the same as these “Russian dogs.”
²⁵
Indeed, before their eyes, one of the Russians was shot for accepting food from a Frenchman.

In these Dantesque enclosures the unskilled foreign workers were looked over by labor officials, chosen, and redistributed to their new workplaces, usually without any reference to their “aptitudes.” Not all the billets were civilian. To their dismay, many were sent to serve with the Nazi Todt Organization, which at this time was entirely dedicated to building military projects, and even to support units for the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht. In these units they were made to wear German uniforms and were supposed to act in a military fashion, which as a form of resistance they generally refused to do.

Lodgings in the 22,000 labor camps in Germany ranged from the back rooms of small businesses through converted hotels, tent cities, and converted passenger ships to the vast barracks cities of the Krupp organization, which held some 50,000 workers. Bed linens and heating were rare, and sanitation often appalling. One camp of 600 workers near Vienna had a single outdoor faucet, which froze in the winter; another, at Friedrichshafen, provided only six toilets for 900 men.
²⁶

The French, as members of Group C (non-Germanic allies), did have some important privileges. They did not have to wear badges, and on their days off they could go into nearby towns and attend movies, concerts, and
even the opera if they could find a ticket. One group, instead of going on home leave, even managed a ski trip. As we have seen, the French soup was thicker than that of the Poles and
Ostarbeiter
. Theoretically entitled to the same amount of food as German workers, the Western laborers were given ration coupons that they could spend on the German economy. But it soon became clear that their choice was limited to particular items, and that many shops and restaurants were closed to them. Their reception by the German public was mixed. Those working on farms generally were accepted and well treated, but the industrial workers in towns, often not very presentable due to the limited laundry and bathing facilities in their barracks, did not fare so well, and contempt for them was frequent. One German, complimented by a forced laborer on his knowledge of French, replied, “Masters, of course, must learn the language of their slaves.” There were other problems for the students: the Germans soon began to renege on their one-year service limit, and leaves became less and less possible. In addition, since they were, in theory, volunteers, they did not get any help from the Red Cross and other organizations as the POWs did, but could receive packages from home. This was nice when the packages arrived, but many families in France could not afford to send off their own rationed food, and the bundles that got through had often been looted en route. But any little thing was gold for the workers, whose relations managed to hide forbidden items such as medicine, perfume, cosmetics, and even small bottles of wine inside jars of jam or bags of beans, all of which could be bartered in the flourishing black markets of the labor camps.