Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
The wild and ruthless man hunt [he wrote to Governor Frank], as exercised everywhere in towns and country, in streets, squares, stations, even in churches, at night in homes, has badly shaken the feeling of security of the inhabitants. Everybody is exposed to the danger of being seized anywhere and at any time
by the police, suddenly and unexpectedly, and of being sent to an assembly camp. None of his relatives knows what has happened to him.
23
But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step.
*
The condition of their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certain Dr. Gutkelch described one instance in a report to Rosenberg’s ministry on September 30, 1942. Recounting how a train packed with returning worked-out Eastern laborers met a train at a siding near
Brest Litovsk
full of “newly recruited” Russian workers bound for Germany, he wrote:
Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophe might have occurred … In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey. Persons having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car. Dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports.
25
This was not a very promising introduction to the Third Reich for the
Ostarbeiter
, but at least it prepared them somewhat for the ordeal that lay ahead. Hunger lay ahead and beatings and disease and exposure to the cold, in unheated quarters and in their thin rags. Long hours of labor lay ahead that were limited only by their ability to stand on their feet.
The great
Krupp works
, makers of Germany’s guns and tanks and ammunition, was a typical place of employment. Krupp employed a large number of slave laborers, including Russian
prisoners of war
. At one point during the war, six hundred Jewish women from the
Buchenwald
concentration camp were brought in to work at Krupp’s, being “housed” in a bombed-out work camp from which the previous inmates, Italian POWs, had been removed.
Dr. Wilhelm Jaeger
, the “senior doctor” for Krupp’s slaves, described in an affidavit at Nuremberg what he found there when he took over.
Upon my first visit I found these females suffering from open festering wounds and other diseases. I was the first doctor they had seen for at least a fortnight … There were no medical supplies … They had no shoes
and went about in their bare feet. The sole clothing of each consisted of a sack with holes for their arms and head. Their hair was shorn. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and closely guarded by S.S. guards.
The amount of food in the camp was extremely meager and of very poor quality. One could not enter the barracks without being attacked by fleas … I got large boils on my arms and the rest of my body from them …
Dr. Jaeger reported the situation to the directors of Krupp and even to the personal physician of
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach
, the owner—but in vain. Nor did his reports on other Krupp slave labor camps bring any alleviation. He recalled in his affidavit some of these reports of conditions in eight camps inhabited by Russian and Polish workers: overcrowding that bred disease, lack of enough food to keep a man alive, lack of water, lack of toilets.
The clothing of the Eastern workers was likewise completely inadequate. They worked and slept in the same clothing in which they had arrived from the East. Virtually all of them had no overcoats and were compelled to use their blankets as coats in cold and rainy weather. In view of the shortage of shoes many workers were forced to go to work in their bare feet, even in winter …
Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children’s toilets were available for 1,200 inhabitants … Excretion contaminated the entire floors of these lavatories … The Tartars and Kirghiz suffered most; they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing, the poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficient rest.
These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, the carrier of the disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin tortured the inhabitants of these camps … At times the water supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days …
On the whole, Western slave workers fared better than those from the East—the latter being considered by the Germans as mere scum. But the difference was only relative, as Dr. Jaeger found at one of Krupp’s work camps occupied by French
prisoners of war
in Nogerratstrasse at Essen.
Its inhabitants were kept for nearly half a year in dog kennels, urinals and in old baking houses. The dog kennels were three feet high, nine feet long, six feet wide. Five men slept in each of them. The prisoners had to crawl into these kennels on all fours … There was no water in the camp.
*
26
Some two and a half million slave laborers—mostly
Slavs
and Italians—were assigned to farm work in Germany and though their life from the very force of circumstances was better than that of those in the city factories it was far from ideal—or even humane. A captured directive on the “Treatment of Foreign Farm Workers of Polish Nationality” gives an inkling of their treatment. And though applied to Poles—it is dated March 6, 1941, before Russians became available—it was later used as guidance for those of other nationalities.
Farm workers of Polish nationality no longer have the right to complain, and thus no complaints will be accepted by any official agency … The visit of churches is strictly prohibited … Visits to theaters, motion pictures or other cultural entertainment are strictly prohibited …
Sexual intercourse with women and girls is strictly prohibited.
If it was with German females, it was, according to an edict of Himmler in 1942, punishable by death.
*
The use of “railroads, buses or other public conveyances” was prohibited for slave farm workers. This apparently was ordained so that they would not escape from the farms to which they were bound.
Arbitrary change of employment [the directive stated] is strictly prohibited. The farm workers have to labor as long as is demanded by the employer. There are no time limits to the working time.
Every employer has the right to give corporal punishment to his farm workers … They should, if possible, be removed from the community of the home and they can be quartered in stables, etc. No remorse whatever should restrict such action.
28
Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Sauckel to procure a half million of them “in order to relieve the German housewife.” The slave labor commissar laid down the conditions of work in the German households.
There is no claim to free time. Female domestic workers from the East may leave the household only to take care of domestic tasks … It is prohibited for them to enter restaurants, movies, theaters and similar establishments. Attending church is also prohibited …
29
Women, it is obvious, were almost as necessary as men in the Nazi slave labor program. Of some three million Russian civilians pressed into service by the Germans, more than one half were women. Most of them were assigned to do heavy farm work and to labor in the factories.
The enslavement of millions of men and women of the conquered lands as lowly toilers for the Third Reich was not just a wartime measure. From the statements of Hitler, Goering, Himmler and the others already cited—and they are only a tiny sampling—it is clear that if Nazi Germany had endured, the New Order would have meant the rule of the German master race over a vast slave empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural mountains. To be sure, the
Slavs
in the East would have fared the worst.
As Hitler emphasized in July 1941, scarcely a month after he had attacked the Soviet Union, his plans for its occupation constituted “a final settlement.” A year later, at the high tide of his Russian conquests, he admonished his aides:
As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mold the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilizing him, goes straight off to a concentration camp!
30
Though it was a flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions to use prisoners of war in armament factories or in any labor connected with the fighting at the front such employment, massive as it was, constituted the least of worries for the millions of soldiers captured by the Third Reich.
Their overwhelming concern was to survive the war. If they were Russian
the odds were greatly against them. There were more Soviet war prisoners than all others put together—some five and three-quarter million of them. Of these barely one million were found alive when Allied troops liberated the inmates of the POW camps in 1945. About a million had either been released during the war or allowed to serve in the collaborator units set up by the German Army. Two million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity—from starvation, exposure and disease. The remaining million have never been accounted for and at Nuremberg a good case was made that most of them either had died from the above causes or had been exterminated by the S.D. (S.S. Security Service). According to the German records 67,000 were executed, but this is most certainly a partial figure.
31
The bulk of the Russian war prisoners—some 3,800,000 of them—were taken by the Germans in the first phase of the Russian campaign, in the great battles of encirclement which were fought from June 21 to December 6, 1941. Admittedly it was difficult for an army in the midst of combat and rapid advance to care adequately for such a large number of captives. But the Germans made no effort to. Indeed the Nazi records show, as we have seen, that the Soviet prisoners were deliberately starved and left out in the open without shelter to die in the terrible subzero snowbound winter of 1941–42.
“The more of these prisoners who die, the better it is for us,” was the attitude of many Nazi officials according to no less an authority than Rosenberg.
The clumsy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories was not a humane Nazi, particularly in regard to the Russians, with whom, as we have seen, he had grown up. But even he was moved to protest the treatment of Russian prisoners in a long letter to General Keitel, the Chief of OKW, dated February 28, 1942. This was the moment when the Soviet counteroffensive which had hurled the Germans back before Moscow and
Rostov
had reached its farthest penetrations that winter and when the Germans had realized at last that their gamble of destroying Russia in one short campaign—or perhaps ever—had failed and that just possibly, now that the U.S.A. had been added to Russia and Britain as their enemies, they might not win the war, in which case they would be held accountable for their war crimes.
The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany [Rosenberg wrote Keitel] is a tragedy of the greatest extent. Of the 3,600,000 of them, only several hundred thousand are still able to work fully. A large part of them have starved, or died because of the hazards of the weather.
This could have been avoided, Rosenberg continued. There was food enough in Russia to provide them.
However, in the majority of cases the camp commanders have forbidden food to be put at the disposal of the prisoners; they have rather let them
starve to death. Even on the march to the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give the prisoners food. In many cases when the prisoners could no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion, they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population and the corpses were left. In numerous camps no shelter for the prisoners was provided at all. They lay under the open sky during rain or snow …
Finally, the shooting of prisoners of war must be mentioned. These … ignore all political understanding. For instance, in various camps all the “Asiatics” were shot…
32
Not only Asiatics. Shortly after the beginning of the Russian campaign an agreement was reached between OKW and the S.S. Security Service for the latter to “screen” Russian prisoners. The objective was disclosed in an affidavit by Otto Ohlendorf, one of the S.D.s great killers and like so many of the men around Himmler a displaced intellectual, for he had university degrees both in the law and in economics and had been a professor at the Institute for Applied Economic Science.
All Jews and Communist functionaries [Ohlendorf testified] were to be removed from the prisoner-of-war camps and were to be executed. To my knowledge this action was carried out throughout the entire Russian campaign.
33
But not without difficulties. Sometimes the Russian captives were so exhausted that they could not even walk to their execution. This brought a protest from Heinrich Mueller, the chief of the Gestapo, a dapper-looking fellow but also a cold, dispassionate killer.
*
The commanders of the
concentration camps
are complaining that 5 to 10 per cent of the Soviet Russians destined for execution are arriving in the camps dead or half dead … It was particularly noted that when marching, for example, from the railroad station to the camp, a rather large number of prisoners collapsed on the way from exhaustion, either dead or half dead, and had to be picked up by a truck following the convoy. It cannot be prevented that the German people take notice of these occurrences.
The Gestapo didn’t care a rap about the Russian captives falling dead from starvation and exhaustion, except that it robbed the executioners of their prey. But they didn’t want the German people to see the spectacle. “Gestapo Mueller,” as he was known in Germany, therefore ordered that