Ostkrieg (42 page)

Even at the height of the danger on the eastern front, then, when it appeared as if Army Group Center, if not the entire Ostheer, might
collapse, Nazi killers on the ground kept at their murderous task while top officials continued to refine procedures for a more efficient destruction of the Jews. In the east, the men of Einsatzgruppe B spent the winter in the vicinity of Smolensk, Mogilev, and Bryansk, but, even as they recoiled from the Russian counteroffensive, their advanced commandos systematically killed the surviving Jews in the rear area of Army Group Center. To the south, during the early months of 1942, Einsatzgruppen C and D engaged in more extensive operations, murdering perhaps 75,000 people in all between the beginning of the Soviet attack and the end of March. In one particularly gruesome incident, 4,000–5,000 Jews were placed in stables that were then doused with the gasoline in such scarce supply to the army and set afire. In Transnistria, 43,000 Jews, in groups of 300–400, were shot while kneeling naked in the icy weather on the rim of a precipice; the shootings continued for days, interrupted only by the celebration of Christmas. Almost 30,000 Jews were deported to the makeshift camp of Berezovka, some sixty miles northeast of Odessa, where most perished from the abysmal conditions or being shot. The shootings had been conducted so haphazardly that some of the corpses had been left on the main road or thrown into a local lake, raising fears of epidemics in the spring. To the north, in the Baltic, Einsatzgruppe A also continued its operations, with the murderously reliable Karl Jäger and his Einsatzkommando 3 alone accounting for over 138,000 victims between the start of operations and early February 1942.
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Even as the Einsatzgruppen worked nonstop during the winter months to kill as many Jews as possible, officials in Berlin discussed ways in which to extend the reach of the Final Solution. In the wake of the Wannsee Conference, a number of smaller meetings, involving lower-ranking officials, were held to work out the details of the complicated process. News about the decisions made at Wannsee spread quickly throughout the bureaucracy, where there was no lack of willingness to participate. In Heydrich's original scheme, Europe was to be “combed from west to east,” but, in practice, because transportation problems were less acute in Poland, the systematic extermination of the Jews at death camps began in the General Government. Already on 26 January 1942, Albert Speer had informed Rosenberg that, owing to the rail crisis, any additional Jewish transports from the west would have to be postponed until April. Even the deportations of Reich Jews to concentration camps approved by Himmler on the same day had to be delayed for a time.
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These difficulties, however, merely caused Nazi officials to shift their focus, rather than postpone their plans. In early December 1941, the Germans had begun killing Jews in gas vans at the extermination camp
at Chelmno. As the killers gained experience in and skill at their deadly craft, the pace and scope of their operations expanded accordingly, and increasing numbers of Jews from the Warthegau and the Lodz ghetto, deemed unsuitable for work and, therefore, useless eaters, were sent to their fate. Beginning in early February 1942, selections also began to be made in Riga: Jews deemed incapable of work were shot or murdered in gas vans. In Minsk, too, executions became a regular feature. That same February, 150 Jews were killed in the first test of the gas chambers at the newly constructed camp of Belzec, near Lublin. Similarly, construction of a new camp to accommodate large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war had begun at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1941. But, by early 1942, with it increasingly evident that large numbers of Soviet prisoners would never reach the camp, the site's mission began to change: Birkenau would now assume the same role, killing nonworking Jews, as Chelmno and Belzec. Systematic mass murder was clearly in the air as winter gave way to early spring, but the process initially used to kill euthanasia victims in Germany had to be shown to be feasible on a large scale in the east. The first transports of Jews from Galicia and Lublin arrived in mid-March at Belzec, where they were successfully gassed to death in one large operation. The technical hurdle to assembly-line murder had been overcome. In April, when the Reichsbahn again supplied special trains for Jewish deportations, so had the transportation obstacle. The will was never in doubt. Late that month, in a detailed discussion of the Jewish question, Goebbels found that Hitler's attitude remained “unrelenting”: the Jews had to disappear from Europe.
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The end of March witnessed another important event, one that also had an impact on the pace of the developing Final Solution: on the twenty-first, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, as Plenipotentiary for Labor Development. An old-line Nazi from the “socialist” wing of the party, Sauckel was given the task of solving the crippling manpower problem. Nothing exposed the gulf between ideology and economic reality more than the question of labor. Bringing foreign workers into Germany, especially from Eastern Europe, challenged the very goal of a racially pure state, but the dictates of the war economy were forcing a radical revision of Nazi ideas since it was now clear that the war could not be won without foreign labor. German losses on the eastern front had been staggering in the first nine months of the war, while there remained in Germany virtually no young men who had not already been conscripted or sent into the labor force. At the height of the winter crisis, the Wehrmacht had taken at least 200,000 men from the armaments factories, a short-term expedient that could not last since
Germany desperately needed to expand its war production and, thus, needed more workers. In addition, men had to be found to fill out the depleted ranks of the Ostheer. By March, the Wehrmacht was short some 700,000 men, while the armaments industry lacked a million workers. In addition, even at the start of the war, foreigners made up almost half the agricultural workforce, a figure that had risen to 60 percent by 1940. Ironically, given Hitler's obsession with food security, the Reich depended more and more on primarily Polish labor to feed itself.
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A greater use of women could take up some of the slack, but even a rigorous mobilization would not have produced much more than 700,000 additional workers. In 1939, German women were already more heavily engaged in the labor force than British women would be at the end of the war, while Germany's level of female mobilization during the war was considerably higher than that of Britain or the United States. By late 1944, women made up two-thirds of the native workforce in agriculture and over 51 percent of the native civilian workforce. Even if Nazi authorities had used, as one put it, Stalinist methods to force all available women into the workforce, there still would have remained a shortage of several million workers. The only way to satisfy the insatiable demand for labor was ruthlessly to exploit the occupied areas. From a racial standpoint, the war had produced an absurd situation. “We no sooner get rid of 500 Jews from the area of the Reich,” complained an analyst in the winter of 1941–1942, “than we immediately bring in ten times the number of racially undesired foreign races.”
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Charged by Hitler with solving this urgent problem, Sauckel responded with a staggering ruthlessness. The invasion of the Soviet Union had touched off multiple programs of mass murder, of which the forced recruitment of foreign labor was to be one. In the spring of 1941, Germany already employed over 1.2 million prisoners of war (mainly from France) and 1.3 million civilian laborers, mainly Poles, and, during the course of the year, this number swelled by a further million foreign workers, again primarily from Poland. These workers, however, were employed mainly in agricultural occupations; not until the end of the year and the debacle at Moscow did the needs of industry begin driving the importation of foreign workers. Over the next year and a half, Sauckel mobilized millions of workers from all over occupied Europe, although the great majority came from Poland and the conquered Soviet territories. Through wild and ruthless manhunts in which people were seized off the streets, in churches and theaters, and from villages that were then burned to the ground, Sauckel's men engaged in a brutal hunt for slave labor. These so-called
Ostarbeiter
(eastern workers),
overwhelmingly young men and women, often just teenagers (their average age was twenty), were put to work, normally in deplorable conditions, in the Reich's factories, mines, and fields. By the end of July, over 5 million foreign workers were employed in Germany, while, by the summer of 1943, the total foreign workforce had risen to 6.5 million, a figure that would increase by the end of 1944 to 7.9 million. By that time, foreign workers accounted for over 20 percent of the total German workforce, although, in the armaments sector, the figure topped 33 percent. In some specific factories and production lines, foreign workers routinely exceeded 40 percent of the total; indeed, by the summer of 1943, the Stuka dive bomber was, as Erhard Milch boasted, being “80% manufactured by Russians.”
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Given its existential dilemma, then, the Reich had responded in the winter crisis of 1941–1942 with a brutal logic: if Germany suffered from a shortage of workers, replacements would simply be brought, often through coercion, to Germany. Once in the Reich, however, the Nazis faced a basic contradiction between their genocidal racial policy and the pragmatic need to use this labor wisely to raise production. This contradiction had first surfaced in the fall of 1941 when the employment of Soviet prisoners as workers failed to achieve adequate results. Not only had the great majority already been killed, but even those shipped to Germany continued to be so ill-treated that they died in large numbers. Even before Sauckel's appointment, military officials had pointed to the absurdity of importing these men only to starve them to death before they could do any work. Although efforts were belatedly made to raise the food rations of forced laborers, in the summer of 1942 the thousands of civilians arriving daily in the Reich's cities from the east still faced horrendous living and working conditions, with long hours, starvation rations, and the most primitive accommodations. As a result, by the autumn, thousands of half-dead Ostarbeiter, emaciated, starving, many suffering from tuberculosis, were shipped back eastward under nightmarish conditions. Adam Tooze has calculated that, during the course of the war, some 2.4 million foreign workers, overwhelmingly Ostarbeiter, died as a result of their treatment by the Nazi regime, a figure that could be increased by several million if Soviet prisoners of war were included. At a time when a crucial impediment to the German war effort was a lack of labor, then, the Nazi inability to resolve the contradiction between ideology and practicality resulted in an enormous wastage of labor power.
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Tooze has noted that this seemingly irrational squandering of a vital war resource also extended to Jewish labor, another 2.4 million potential
workers, by his estimate, falling victim to the Nazi racial madness. Here, however, as he emphasizes, the picture is, perhaps, less illogical than it seems. Sauckel's very success in recruiting foreign workers had, as one further murderous consequence, the result that the labor crisis could largely be solved without resorting to the full-scale mobilization of Jewish labor. In the most brutal sense, the Jews had now become, to the Nazis, useless eaters. Thus, even though some Jewish workers continued to be kept alive for war production in the dwindling ghettos of Poland and the factories built near Auschwitz, Sauckel's successful mobilization of non-Jewish labor allowed the racial ideologues to gain the upper hand: the genocidal imperative triumphed over that of the more pragmatic, although still deadly, idea of
Vernichtung durch Arbeit
(destruction through labor). Although some Jews arriving at Auschwitz received a temporary stay of execution through the
Selektion
process, the great majority, perhaps 90 percent, were killed immediately. Thus, the apparent paradox that the destruction of the Jews—set in motion in June 1941, accelerated in 1942, and largely completed, except for Hungarian Jews, in 1943—took place against the backdrop of a desperate German need for labor can be resolved in large part by the simultaneous successful Nazi effort to import large numbers of Ostarbeiter. By the end of 1943, with three-quarters of the eventual Jewish victims of the Holocaust dead, the most counterproductive mistreatment of the foreign workers had also ended. In the instance of foreign workers, the contradictions in Nazi racial policy had been resolved in favor of the priority of the war effort; for Jews, there would be no such respite.
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The military reverses of the winter of 1941–1942 also meant a setback for the policy of immediate economic exploitation of the conquered eastern territories in order to sustain the war effort. Not only would German industry be unable to obtain and utilize important Soviet raw materials, but also, and just as crucially, it left Germany facing once again the nightmare of 1914–1918: a severe food crisis. Frustrated in their attempt to obtain sufficient quantities of foodstuffs from the Soviet Union, Nazi officials now faced the bleak prospect of an expansion of the war into the indefinite future. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the Nazi regime had imposed strict rationing on the population, but this Spartan regimen had been tempered by the promise of a secure, if monotonous, diet. The German and European grain harvest in both 1940 and 1941 had been disappointing, however, which meant that Nazi officials had been unable to import enough food to cover domestic deficits. Meat rations had already been cut in June 1941, and the bread ration had been sustained only by drawing on reserve stocks of grain. By the end of the year,
these had largely been exhausted, and now food officials faced the task of feeding the additional hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to be sent into Germany. When Herbert Backe protested to Goering, the latter suggested cynically that the Ostarbeiter could be fed on cats and horse meat. Backe, however, checked the statistics and reported back to Goering that there were not enough cats to provide a ration and that horse meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population.
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