Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (17 page)

At the same meeting, Göring issued even more drastic statements. Angered by occupation authorities who were trying to stabilize France’s currency to facilitate its long-term exploitation, Göring thundered: “It has been said that we need to restrict soldiers’ access to their pay, or it will cause inflation in France. But inflation is what I want to see more than anything else. . . . The franc should be worth nothing more than a sheet of a certain type of paper used for a specific purpose. That will hit France exactly the way we want to hit France.”
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In her autobiography, a librarian who worked in Hamburg during the Third Reich described the consequences of this attitude: “We didn’t suffer any privations. . . . Our food, clothing, and shoe vouchers were honored. Our men were still bringing back meat, wine, textiles, and tobacco from the occupied territories.” When the same eyewitness traveled to Cologne in the summer of 1943, after her parents’ home was hit by an Allied bomb, she found the train station crammed with soldiers on leave from the Eastern Front whose homes had also been destroyed: “There they stood, having traveled day and night, laden down with knapsacks and packages.” Even as late as Christmas 1944, the author’s brother, who had been given last-minute leave, was able to produce “a whole goose, half a suckling pig, and a large slab of bacon from his luggage.” He also brought home, apparently from his Wehrmacht rations, “coffee, tea, schnapps, and cigarettes.”
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The effects of Hitler’s order, as transmitted by Keitel, to suspend all customs checks are described in an urgent communication from customs officials in the city of Kiel, near the German-Danish border: “There is no doubt that the majority of goods imported by members of the Wehrmacht into German territory under the guise of ‘comrades’ luggage’ are to be sold at dramatically inflated prices. It is equally beyond doubt that members of the Wehrmacht, especially of the navy and the Luftwaffe, are engaged to a considerable extent in such black market activities—for the purpose of personal profit.”
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Deputy Finance Minister Reinhardt intervened to end the quarrels and complaints on Germany’s northern and eastern borders by invoking Hitler’s decree: “It is the Führer’s will that as many foodstuffs as possible be brought back home from the occupied eastern territories and that customs authorities take a hands-off approach.”
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By sweeping aside restrictions maintained by Wehrmacht intendants, Hitler and Göring encouraged Germans in their spirited, organized, and extremely popular drive to loot the shelves of occupied Europe. At the beginning of the war, the Wehrmacht had decreed that products scarce in Germany could be imported duty-free into the Reich in “amounts of up to 5 kilos in weight”—a relatively modest allotment.
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The limit was initially maintained despite constant reports from various authorities that it was being exceeded. But by summer 1940, political pressure had forced the Wehrmacht High Command to double the amount.
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Göring’s Schlep Decree, which legalized the near-unlimited transport of goods from occupied Europe to Germany, was politically motivated. Measured against figures from September 1940, the number of packages sent via military post from France to Germany immediately quintupled and settled at an average of 3.1 million a month.
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On November 1, 1940, soldiers’ pay was increased by 50 percent in Poland, Norway, and Holland, by 20 percent in France and Denmark, and by 25 percent in Belgium. The pay raises were intended to “enable members of the Wehrmacht to satisfy their consumer needs to a greater extent.”
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On behalf of the Wehrmacht leadership, Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and Lieutenant General Hermann Rei-necke endorsed the decree.

AS BÖLL’S letters home make clear, soldiers were quickly corrupted by their new and improved abilities to acquire goods. Prior to the Schlep Decree he noted with a modicum of criticism: “The store shelves will of course now be emptied by soldiers. . . . I have reservations about joining in the stockpiling; although everything is paid for, it reminds me of robbing a corpse. The only thing in particular that I have my eyes on is coffee.” In the end, he also bought a polo shirt for 2 marks and a bath towel for 80 pfennigs, but he kept his desires in check, remarking that his comrades’ search for bargains “was gradually degenerating into plain and simple hoarding.” On another occasion he reflected on his own indomitable desire to buy things: “The devil of temptation is truly a devil. He’s everywhere!” Böll was not long in succumbing. Before returning to Cologne on leave he announced to his family: “I’ve got half a suckling pig for you.” Later he looked back with a heavy heart on such happy times: “Alas, I would like so much to bring back a suckling pig or something like that.”
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In his “Letter to a Young Catholic,” composed in 1958, Böll offered a number of recollections from his time in France. He described, for instance, the schoolmaster’s wife who had allowed herself to be photographed on a porch in order to show the officers’ wives the lovely blouse she had had made from French silk. Böll also described, in tones of disgust, how members of his unit stole sheets, blankets, and toys from deserted houses, packing them up in bundles and shipping them home. He spent
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time, in his retrospective account, visiting cathedrals and debating ways to practice Catholicism. All he acquired was a book, bought in Paris, by a Germanophobe whose tirades he juxtaposed with his family’s nightly fear in their bomb shelter in Cologne.
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In the wake of the Schlep Decree, a debate arose within the bureaucracy over how to define “anything a soldier can carry.” According to the Wehrmacht High Command’s official interpretation, soldiers were allowed to take with them only “as much baggage as they can carry in both hands without the help of straps or other means of assistance.”
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Soldiers were also required to salute while carrying their baggage. These restrictions raised objections from customs officials in the Finance Ministry, who argued that “limits on the amount of permissible goods should not be set according to the physical strength of entering persons.” The officials called for a “generally applicable standard independent of how much a given individual can carry.” When the debate found its way into the official customs trade publication, the political leadership ran out of patience.
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In August 1942, Göring condemned as “nonsense” the military rule that soldiers were allowed to carry only as much as would not hinder them from delivering mandatory military salutes. That regulation, Göring raged, ran contrary to his “repeatedly” expressed will: “Soldiers can buy as much as they want, whatever they want, and whatever they can carry.” Göring’s position was summed up by his associate Fritz Klare, who oversaw German food supplies under the Four-Year Plan. Every Wehrmacht soldier, Klare decreed, should be “allowed to import as much food and as many basic commodities as he as an individual can afford and carry. Potential inflationary consequences in the occupied territories need not be taken into consideration.” Furthermore, “encumbering” customs regulations were to be lifted.
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A short time later, Berlin customs officials raided the home of a Luftwaffe colonel and discovered substantial amounts of fine cognac and spirits on which no alcohol duties had been paid. The raid also drew Göring’s ire: “The acquisition of limited quantities of wine, cognac, and similar commodities—even those subject to requisition certificates—is not only allowed but encouraged by my express wish. It does not amount to smuggling.”
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It would take another two months and a further explosion of rage by Hitler for Deputy Finance Minister Reinhardt to issue the following edict—in direct contravention of existing regulations—to the Reich customs authorities: “Members of the Wehrmacht are indeed allowed to use straps and other means of assistance to carry belongings. They are not required to assume ‘a military posture’ when crossing the border.” Soldiers and baggage belonging to them should be treated “as liberally as possible,” and customs officials were to “refrain from all confiscations of packages of food that soldiers carry with them.” “Heads of finance departments,” Reinhardt added threateningly “will run the risk of being held personally accountable by the Führer, if any of their subordinates transgress this prohibition.” Reinhardt justified the edict with reference to paragraph 1 of the Tax Revision Law of 1934, which directed taxation economists in the Finance Ministry to “take into account changing circumstances and popular sentiment.” It also bound them to “interpret” every article of law “according to the National Socialist worldview.”
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At the end of 1943, the Nazi leadership allowed the occupation authorities in France—in the face of the acute danger of inflation—to stop the technically illegal but tacitly encouraged import of hundreds of millions of marks in RKK certificates. But Göring quickly issued a qualification: “I ask you to ensure that the measures to be taken do not lessen the existing legal purchasing capacity of troops transferred west, especially from the Eastern Front.”
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Only when the war began to turn against Germany did Göring feel compelled to stop encouraging private plunder. On May 15, 1944, he gave in to pressure from the Finance and Food Ministries and prohibited “the import of flour, shortening, and meat from the occupied territories.” But the edict was never carried out for fear of popular disapproval. In October, the Finance Ministry noted that because of the worsening military situation “the implementation measures for the prohibition edict were not yet in force.”
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Reading between the lines of Böll’s letters home from the field, one senses a tension between his desire to behave with reasonable restraint and the urge, encouraged by Hitler and Göring, to fall upon the defeated enemy like a plague of locusts. Böll, too, exploited the possibilities offered by RKK certificates, writing to his family: “It would nice be if you could smuggle a few credit certificates in a letter so that I can pay my debts.” On another occasion, he instructed his wife: “Tell them at home to collect credit certificates. I’ve got a lot of money to exchange from comrades and for me as well.” Occasionally, although not often, the attempts to smuggle money or procure bargains went awry. “That was really bad luck with the credit certificates,” Böll wrote once, without elaborating further. “I could have sent a sizeable amount of chocolate or soap.” In general, though, soldiers like Böll enjoyed the benevolent protection of Göring and Hitler and could go about their shopping purposefully and happily, sending home whatever they acquired. On one occasion, immediately after returning from home leave, Böll wrote: “Please just send me money in your letters so that I can bring back something of the treasures of this country. So that we, too, can have a small party. Every day will be a celebration.”

The zeal of whole divisions of bargain hunters, family providers, and insatiable opportunists considerably alleviated the hardships of war. It fostered a sense of material connection between the battlefield and the home front. The calculated policy of allowing soldiers to personally enrich themselves at the expense of foreign peoples gave rise to the feeling that their interests were being watched over from above and that small oases of pleasure were possible within the larger war. “Do you know,” Böll wrote to his wife, “how happy it makes me to be able to send you something?” On another occasion, he rhapsodized: “It was the source of truly indescribable joy for me to supply you with butter.”
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This was one reason for the pervasive—though in Böll’s case passive—loyalty felt by Germans toward the Nazis. And it was all the dictatorship required to keep functioning politically. The Bölls—a Catholic family disinclined to sympathize with Nazism—were basically satisfied with their lot. Their money wasn’t sitting around uselessly. It was being transformed in France, albeit at ever increasing prices, into practical necessities and luxury items.

Individual acts of plunder by buying up goods in foreign countries soon gave rise to more organized forms of criminality. Smuggling and black marketeering were occasionally pursued in the sheer spirit of adventure, but more often than not they were directly motivated by the desire for profit. Between 1940 and 1941, trains in the Alsatian city of Metz were requisitioned by civil servants who then drove on to Paris, where they used tens of thousands of RKK certificates to buy “scarce commodities such as coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate, cognac, champagne, wine, liqueurs, clothing, nylons, etc.” These goods were then brought back by train to Metz, “where postal workers from Nuremberg took possession of them, smuggled them back home, and sold them—mostly, according to one customs document, to other postal workers.”
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On a small scale, soldiers “misused the military mail” to send home packages containing as many as eight hundred cigaretteers m Romania, Bulgaria, or Greece. On a grander scale, they stuffed whole wagonloads of contraband onto Wehrmacht trains returning to the Reich. In one instance, soldiers packed more than fourteen tons of oranges onto a military freight train bound for the southern German city of Rosenheim, where they were delivered to family members as “tokens of affection.” A dentist who worked at Auschwitz was apprehended in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia with a heavy lump of gold. Citing a vow of secrecy he had sworn, he refused to provide authorities with any information about where the gold came from.

The head of the Cologne Finance Department resigned himself to the fact that rampant corruption was a consequence of war, one that could not be effectively combated. “With people under considerable physical and mental stress,” he wrote, “it is understandable that they should develop a strong desire for intoxicants that, except for tobacco, cannot be satisfied in modest proportions. . . . Our ethnic comrades from humble circumstances are especially willing to pay any price for the wares they want.” The Frankfurt customs bureau recorded the case of a Luftwaffe soldier who sold French spirits in Frankfurt to a barkeeper in Kassel; another sent 170 kilos of food from Ukraine, along with carpets and oil paintings, to his wife. Upon being caught, he was sentenced to three weeks’ house arrest. In Baden-Baden, “large quantities” of French perfume were traded at inflated prices. Unscrupulous companies mislabeled goods destined for private consumption as “vital wartime supplies”; soldiers passed them off as “Wehrmacht freight.” Within the Reich, a Luftwaffe inspector was found with 16,000 marks’ worth of RKK certificates intended for a shopping spree in France, while across the border a soldier was caught trying to smuggle jewelry valued at 155,800 marks into Germany.
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