Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (16 page)

The French nicknamed the tens of thousands of German soldiers like Boas and Böll “potato beetles”
(doryphores)
. Of them, historian Henri Michel has written: “Loaded down with heavy packages, German soldiers departed from the Gare de l’Est for home leave. Their luggage was crammed with lingerie, specialties from Paris, and luxury goods of every description. They had been acquired in countless petty transactions, but they did significant damage to the French national economy, playing a significant role in the development of the black market and inflation. They were the reason it was increasingly difficult for everyday French people to procure the basic necessities.”
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Liselotte S., whose father worked as a medical orderly in France, recalled in 2003:

I know that my mother sent my father money every month. He used it to buy things we lacked at home: coffee, cocoa, cheese, chocolate in various forms, shoes for my mother, for me, and our apprentices, fur-spe and plain leather gloves, once even a pair of motorcycle gloves. . . . Every day packages from France arrived in the mail. My mother also sent money to my father’s buddies whose wives didn’t have access to the maximum amounts allowed. One time two fur coats arrived—I was only twelve and had to grow into mine. My father used to get around the limits on the amounts he could send by taking packages to other Wehrmacht units stationed nearby. As a driver for the chief medical officer, he had plenty of opportunities, and once the mail delivered ten packages tied together. Whatever we couldn’t use in our two-person household, we would swap for other good and services. Workmen who repaired the house and kept up the garden profited from them.

The story was much the same in all the other countries Germany occupied, although the desired goods were often more difficult to come by than in France. A German customs investigation, for instance, cited the following passages from a letter written home to his wife by a soldier stationed in Poland: “The packages for you, my father, and Frieda went out the day before yesterday. Be on the lookout for them when they arrive. . . . The shoes are on their way. . . . I got some material for a couple of pairs of pants for Otto.” Anticipating his home leave, he announced: “Use won’t have to worry about a lack of Easter surprises. I’m well supplied, and I’ll be bringing everything home for Easter. Nice things that you probably can’t get anymore in Germany. I try to think of everything and get everything I can for you, and you show your gratitude by not writing. Do you think that’s fair? You don’t need to save the coffee I sent—I’ll bring more at Easter. You can give Ida some of the cocoa you’ve got at home. I’ve got enough of that as well for you.”
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In the Baltic States, Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse determined that substantial amounts of money were being imported from Germany and exchanged. He reported that soldiers were buying up whatever was available and “then shipping the purchased wares out of the territory.”
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These purchases for export were made possible by extremely high exchange rates, which quadrupled the value of the mark against the ruble. The rate had been set to the advantage of German soldiers with the aim of facilitating plunder. Unlike in the conquered nations of Western Europe, cash could be imported into, then exchanged and spent in, the occupied parts of the Soviet Union with a minimum of “bureaucratic nonsense.” Soldiers were allowed to take 1,100 marks worth of RKK certificates, rubles, and German currency with them, as well as 600 zlotys (around 300 reichsmarks) for travel expenses through the General Government of Poland. The only objection raised at the Economics Ministry meeting during which those limits were set came from senior government counsel Hoffmann of the Eastern Economics Staff, who pointed out that they would cause “what amounts to a total clearance sale in the East.”
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The introduction of German currency was only restricted much later—after an urgent request by occupation authorities.
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In a letter published in 1954, Otto Bräutigam, a former department head at the Nazi ministry in charge of occupied territories in the East, recalled: “Because of the low prices, the Baltic States were a true El Dorado for German soldiers and the civilians who followed them. There was a gigantic shopping spree.” Bräutigam knew whereof he spoke. On August 6, 1941, the first day ar his arrival in Riga, he wrote of “buying some things in the ‘Wehrmacht department store.’” “There wasn’t a lot available,” he complained, but then added: “My driver has gotten hold of 25 kilos of butter, which we split in the spirit of fairness.”
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A soldier’s daughter who was born in 1934 reported: “Among the bright spots were the packages my father sent us from the East: tin cans with excellent butter and delicious black tea from his company’s stopover in Riga. I can particularly remember the clunky and at first far too large blue shoes and boots, which served me well and kept my feet dry until after the war. I was proud of the satchel of Russian leather I used as a school knapsack. My father ‘organized,’ as people used to say back then, various leather articles for me. A thick green woolen blanket always accompanied us whenever we children were evacuated to the countryside, as well as a dark-blue knitted sweater with a blue-and-white collar.”
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In October 1943, when Heinrich Böll was transferred from France to the Crimea, he made one last shipment of butter home, “as a tribute from ‘douce France.’” In the heavy fighting of early December, he suffered a minor head wound that probably saved his life. He landed in a military hospital in Odessa, where he wrote: “You can buy anything you want at the bazaar here.” He was then sent to convalesce in Stanisławów, Poland, in what is now Ukraine, where he immediately sent one package of chocolate and one bar of soap back home. Shortly before returning to Germany on leave, he wrote: “I’m constantly asking myself if there’s anything nice here I can bring you. I’ve given up on my dream of getting you a pair of these lovely, warm Polish booties. The price is simply too high.”
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Even in the depths of winter in 1943, while the Wehrmacht was suffering catastrophic defeats on the battlefield, the soldiers of the Eighteenth Army near Leningrad managed, according to statistics from the military post office, to send more than 3 million packages home. They were filled with items that had been plundered, bought at bargain prices, or left over from food rations. To the disappointment of the soldiers, probably because of state restrictions the packages traveling in the other direction were markedly fewer. By then the government was seeking to conceal the extent to which Germans were enriching themselves at the cost of others. According to accounts by the military postmaster general, Karl Ziegler, his department was required “to burn all records of total statistics compiled for the military postal service.”
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In Norway, occupying German soldiers also did their level best to empty the country’s shelves, even though the Norwegians depended on imported food for their survival. While the number of packages shipped from Norway was restricted, occupation authority staff members were allowed to send 2.5 kilos of goods home per month.
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The packages mainly contained fish, and there was a lively trade in fox fur.
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For Christmas 1942, the Wehrmacht High Command relaxed the restrictions and even set up a “herring transfer station” to transport “barrels of herring privately purchased by vacationers” via sealed express freight trains to the northern German city of Güstrow. From there, the herring was distributed throughout the Reich.
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Only in 1944, when military defeat seemed probable and dissatisfaction among the Norwegian population had reached a critical level, did Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven try to limit the plundering of Norwegian herring to between 7 and 8 kilos annually per soldier. In April 1944, the chief intendant reported that he was doing his best to get the limit raised to between 10 and 12 kilos, although he added that his efforts had “regrettably not yet yielded a final result.”
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Considering that normal weekly meat and fish rations in Germany at this point were 350 grams (less than a pound), the herring imports represented a nutritional increase of around 50 percent for German housewives. Moreover, that figure includes only officially permitted imports—it doesn’t take into account vacationers’ prohibited but tolerated practice of bringing fish back with them on passenger trains. In summer 1944, officers finally began disciplining a handful of German soldiers for “illegal herring exports.”
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A few months earlier, in December 1943, the Wehrmacht chief intendant in Norway had noted dryly, “Request rejected,” after learning of the Reich commissioner’s plans to stop the illegal smuggling.
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Meanwhile authorities in charge of the German occupation troops had noted as early as summer 1942 that Norwegians were “considerably undernourished.”
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Even in areas where the military situation was hopeless, officers responsible for troop welfare continued to pander to what had quickly become the habitual greed of German soldiers. In April 1943, encircled army divisions in the Kuban region along the Black Sea ordered one million small-package stamps with the inscription “one small package/front-homeland.”
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In the winter of 1944-45, the commander of 6,000 soldiers trapped by British troops on the island of Rhodes distributed some 25,000 such stamps.
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In October 1944, the Wehrmacht High Command approved a measure allowing Germans entering occupied Italy to exchange 100 reichsmarks in RKK certificates for lire and to spend the money there. The Finance Ministry protested that the practice would further destabilize the currency and endanger the supply of basic necessities in Italy, and the decision was reversed six weeks later.
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Private purchases in the month of August 1943 in occupied France totaled 125 million reichsmarks. Even allowing for the devaluation of the franc, the equivalent would be hundreds of millions of dollars today.
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Private purchases drove up inflation, disrupted occupation authorities’ attempts to control the market, and undermined all forms of economic stability. Stability, however, was precisely what was required to ensure the long-term exploitation of the resources of an occupied country. The functionaries responsible for running occupied economies repeatedly tried to restrict the number of packages sent through the military postal service and to subject German soldiers to customs and currency checks. But customs officials described such checks as “truly precarious” situations that often led to “unfortunate confrontations” and “rebellion and insults.”
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The few occasions when customs officials actually did confiscate goods or currency inevitably “called forth a general mood of bitterness among the troops.”

As early as October 1940, to maintain troop morale, Göring had completely abolished the already liberal limits on what soldiers could purchase, dismissing “worries raised from various quarters that stores in the occupied territories would soon be stripped bare” as “negligible.”
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In the same breath he condemned “the measures instituted to enforce restrictions on purchases and shipments” as “psychologically intolerable.” Instead he ordered that German soldiers in hostile countries be allowed to buy everything they could afford, with no greater restrictions than applied to native citizens. Existing “prohibitions on the purchases of furs, jewelry, carpets, silks, and luxury items” were to be “immediately” lifted. Also to be abolished were restrictions on the numbers of packages soldiers were allowed to send back home through the military postal service. (Limits on packages in the other direction were retained.)

Göring used the occasion to formulate what became known as the “Schlep Decree”
(Schlepperlass):
“The basic restrictions on the transport of purchased items by soldiers on leave, etc., are to be lifted. Soldiers should be allowed to take with them whatever they can carry so long as it is intended for their own personal use or that of their dependents.”
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Göring also ordered the free shipment through the military postal service of packages weighing up to 1,000 grams (with 200-gram leeway) “in unlimited numbers.” On July 14, 1942, customs officials quietly lifted the regulations governing packages whose weight exceeded that limit.
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Taking the same view as most of his soldiers, Hitler praised the Wehrmacht as “the most natural middleman available to a soldier who wants to send something to his wife or children.” In the summer of 1942, he admonished Admiral Erich Raeder: “When soldiers bring something home from the Eastern Front,” it is “a bonus that benefits the homeland.”
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On occasions in which individual officers and customs officials tried to put a stop to uninhibited plundering, the Führer vented his rage on behalf of the troops: “To put it bluntly: What can I take with me from the East? Treasures of art? They don’t exist. All that’s left is food to stuff your mouth. Nothing better can happen to it than that it be given to a soldier’s family here at home.”
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Around the same time, Hitler remarked that a soldier on home leave “should be considered the ideal and simplest means of transport and should be given as much food as he can physically carry.”
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The chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, quickly translated these statements into a personal decree of the Führer’s. The edict read: “Food, intoxicants, and tobacco brought back from occupied territories to the Reich by members of the Wehrmacht on home leave or official business, insofar as they are carried by hand, are to be made immediately exempt from all forms of control and confiscation.”
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In early August 1942, at a high-level meeting devoted to the topic of food supplies, Göring returned to the issue. According to the minutes of the meeting, Göring interjected: “Is the finance minister in attendance?” The deputy minister replied: “Yes, sir! Reinhardt here!” Göring then continued: “Mr. Reinhardt, desist with your customs checks. I’m no longer interested in them. . . . I’d rather have unlimited amounts of goods smuggled in than have custom duties paid on nothing at all.”