The German War (47 page)

The sole grounds for strategic optimism in Germany in early 1942 lay with their Japanese ally. The day after bombing the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched an attack on Hong Kong. The island colony surrendered on Christmas Day 1941, by which time Japanese armies were sweeping through South East Asia, their string of successes culminating in the fall of Singapore on 14 February 1942. As the German leadership learned of these victories, it realised that the United States and Britain would be in no position to launch an invasion of western Europe until the autumn at the earliest, and probably not until 1943. Whatever the long-term risks of widening the war to include Japan and the United States, in the short term it bought Germany vital time in a moment of crisis. From Hitler’s perspective, the United States had already covertly entered the war in September when Roosevelt committed the US Navy to securing the convoys carrying Lend-Lease military aid to Britain against German U-boats in the Atlantic. In November, the American President extended Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought enormous benefit to Germany by ensuring that American resources would be sucked into the Pacific theatre before they could be deployed in Europe.
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Why Hitler felt it was necessary for Germany to declare war on the United States on 11 December is less clear. Given that 75 per cent of Americans were still opposed to entering the European war, Hitler certainly made Roosevelt’s domestic political task easier. Japan made no matching declaration of hostilities against the Soviet Union, and, had it done so in December 1941, Stalin might have hesitated to move the Siberian divisions westwards to defend Moscow. Hitler admitted to Goebbels that he derived huge satisfaction from this act of sovereign decision-making, taking the initiative which had been denied him on 3 September 1939, when it had been the British and French leaders who had declared war on Germany. It was a strangely emotional admission, given how well the French and British declaration of war had accorded with the Nazi leadership’s claims to be acting purely defensively. Declaring war on America was an unnecessary act – a provocation which threw all prior caution to the winds: it was no accident that, instead of threatening to take action against the Jews in Europe in order to curb their warmongering in America, Hitler authorised the first deportations of German Jews at this time. There would be no de-escalation, no negotiated settlement. Once again the United States, Britain and Russia were ranged against Germany, just as in 1917. If Hitler’s political career had been dedicated to re-fighting and this time winning the First World War, now he had his ‘world war’.

The German leadership desperately needed to rethink its military strategy. The seeming invincibility enjoyed by its often qualitatively and quantitatively inferior forces in the summer campaigns of 1940 and 1941 had derived from strategic surprise. That would be virtually impossible to recreate. By early 1942, German military intelligence and the Army General Staff knew that they had grossly underestimated Soviet military-industrial capacity, and that they could only wage a second campaign in the east if they were able to mobilise their own economic and military resources fully, on a scale usually associated with a war of attrition. In this pause for strategic stocktaking, the navy also pushed for a different strategy, one which would turn the war on the eastern front into a holding operation and devote the lion’s share of resources to a new global air and sea campaign to link up with Japan in challenging British and American control of the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean. While Hitler concentrated on making his strategic choices, others in the German leadership were trying to find the labour, food, coal and steel to make any new offensive possible.
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By conquering the highly industrialised lands of western Europe, Germany had the real prospect of escaping from its inferior pre-war position and becoming a military-industrial superpower. Apart from the United States, all the belligerent powers were constrained by limited resources. In the German case, stocks had been run down and resources were shuffled back and forth because of short-term bottlenecks. Skilled workers moved between the army and the factory: most of the weapons deployed in the Barbarossa campaign had been produced by men released from the Wehrmacht after the 1940 victory and then called back to the colours a year later. By the end of 1941, they were meant to have returned to their factories to produce weapons for the campaign against Britain in 1942. Instead, they were combating frostbite on the eastern front. War production could be increased dramatically at home only with a massive influx of labour.
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It was a similar tale with material resources. In the summer campaigns of 1940 and 1941, virtually all the petrol supplies had been consumed to fuel the advancing tank columns, as reserves were staked against the chance of a decisive victory. The Royal Naval blockade continued to ensure that Europe remained chronically short of vital military supplies, like oil and rubber, as well as critically short of food. The Germans could produce synthetic rubber and biofuel, but these were costly substitutes and, heavily dependent on its limited Romanian supplies, the Wehrmacht’s tanks, personnel carriers, trucks and planes all remained desperately short of petrol. Only the conquest of the Caucasian oilfields could alter this situation – and in 1942 that again became a key military goal.
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Coal remained the prime source of energy in wartime Europe. Nominally self-sufficient, from the outset Germany’s shortage of railway rolling stock had created distribution problems. Just as in the first winter of war, there was not enough rolling stock to move military supplies in the winter and spring of 1942; even the deportation of the Jews had to wait. The general shortage of coal and steel – the basis of industrial, including weapons, production – was aggravated by the fact that firms engaged in hoarding and stockpiling in order to minimise disruption to their own production. This rational local response only exacerbated the general problem. At the same time productivity in the French and Belgian pits kept falling, limiting how much coal could be extracted and so throttling the pace of industrial expansion. The main reason was hunger. On 9–10 May 1941, there were strikes in the Belgian coal mines and steel mills, symbolically commemorating the first anniversary of the occupation. Keen to ward off any increase in communist influence, Belgian employers preferred to negotiate with the trade unions, agreeing to an 8 per cent wage rise; they also refused to hand over the lists of militants to the German military authorities.
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But in the French and Belgian coalfields, hunger remained the dominant fear, to the point where the French factory social committees and the Belgian factory councils spent so much of their efforts setting up works canteens and allocating allotments that they were dubbed ‘potato committees’.
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In each occupied West European country, the local German military and civil administrations jostled with each other and competed with the demands of the local Gestapo and SD, not to mention with the overarching jurisdictions of central Reich agencies, such as Göring’s Four Year Planning Office, Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry, Fritz Sauckel’s recruitment of foreign labour, and the Ministry of Agriculture, nominally headed by the old Nazi ideologue Walter Darré but increasingly run by his State Secretary, Herbert Backe. Moreover, the attempt to create a pan-European economy in 1942 was marked by conflict over whether to suck labour and capital into Germany or build new plants in occupied Europe, for example in the French Atlantic ports, or in the formerly Polish parts of Upper Silesia. Overshadowing all decisions loomed the issue of food.
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The politics of food distribution was never rationally subordinated to economic or military aims. If it had been, then French and Belgian coal miners might have been fed enough to increase their output. Instead, Germans automatically came first, their rations creating the most fundamental and enduring of their racial rights in the war. Food remained the prerogative of the Ministry of Agriculture and Herbert Backe made his career by insisting on a tough interpretation of the regime’s racial-nationalist priorities. During the planning for Barbarossa, he had estimated that 20–30 million ‘Slavs’ would have to be starved to death in order to feed the German armies. In early 1942, German administrators were surprised that the number of deaths of Soviet civilians had not been even higher in the previous autumn and winter. The other shock was that food stocks on the home front had run dangerously low, due to the confident expectation of a short war. Backe immediately set about preparing a second ‘hunger plan’ for the east and imposed food delivery quotas across occupied Europe, levying them on the west as well as the east.
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On 6 August 1942, Hermann Göring chaired a meeting of officials from the occupied territories charged with putting Backe’s food requisitioning plan into effect. Taking personal responsibility, Göring laid out the argument with brutal clarity:

I have here before me reports on what you are expected to deliver . . . it makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German collapses from hunger. If you had been present when the Gauleiter spoke here [yesterday], you would understand my boundless anger over the fact that we conquered such enormous territories through the valour of our troops, and yet our people have almost been forced down to the miserable rations of the First World War . . . I am interested only in those people in the occupied regions who work in armaments and food production. They must receive just enough to enable them to continue working.

For added rhetorical effect, he also reminded officials, worried about the social consequences of imposing famine on a majority of the population under their control, that the extermination of the Jews would free up some food supplies in their territories. By 1942–43, Germany was drawing more than 20 per cent of its grain, 25 per cent of its fats and nearly 30 per cent of its meat from occupied Europe. The total deliveries of grain, meat and fats from France and the occupied Soviet territories more than doubled, from 3.5 million tonnes to 8.78 million tonnes over the same period. In the Kiev district of Ukraine, the greatest round of requisitioning during the whole occupation occurred ahead of the 1942 harvest itself: 38,470 tonnes of grain were collected in June, 26,570 tonnes the following month, tailing off finally to a mere 7,960 tonnes in early August. The representative for Food and Agriculture in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine returned from a tour of inspection content that the peasants of the district had no more grain, not even for seed. This had been a military-style requisitioning operation, with detachments of the mainly Ukrainian Order Police descending on houses, mills, markets, gardens and barns to search for hidden stockpiles. Much of the French and Ukrainian supplies went directly to the Wehrmacht on the spot; the General Government, whose rule had been extended from central into eastern Poland and western Ukraine, supplied more than half of the rye and potatoes and two-thirds of the oats imported into the Reich.
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At exactly the same time, labour recruitment increased dramatically. On 21 March 1942, Hitler appointed his old comrade Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, to be plenipotentiary for labour mobilisation. In the eighteen months from the start of 1942 to June 1943, Sauckel’s agents brought 34,000 foreign workers to the Reich every week, adding 2.8 million to the 3.5 million that were already in Germany. The number would continue to rise until there were just under 8 million foreign workers in the summer of 1944. The forced recruitment from occupied western Europe prompted raucous scenes and wildcat strikes. As the trains pulled out to take the forced drafts of French workers to Germany, crowds broke the wartime ban on national symbols and sang the ‘Marseillaise’. In Belgium, the trade unions and the Catholic workers’ youth movement helped hide the
réfractaires
who refused to return to Germany when they came home on leave. The numbers of those in France, Belgium and the Netherlands who did not go back rose to nearly a third. Most of them were forced to find illegal work and lodgings, often on outlying farms where their dependence made them ideal, docile labourers. With German power at its height, relatively few chose to go further and join the small resistance groups.
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The great majority of forced workers came from eastern Europe, however. The Polish General Government and Ukraine were particularly heavily trawled. According to Sauckel’s figures, between April and November 1942, 1,375,567 civilian workers were sent to the Reich from the occupied Soviet territories, a further 291,756 from the Polish General Government and 38,369 from the Wartheland, compared to 357,940 from the Netherlands, Belgium and all but northern France. Threatened with execution if they failed to fulfil the German quotas, in the east village leaders preferred to choose outsiders. In the predominantly Ukrainian villages of western Volhynia, as the major surviving ethnic minority it was Poles who were often targeted. Elders faced simultaneous pressures to deliver grain and labour to the Germans, and therefore opted to send those who did not work in agriculture, drafting disproportionate numbers of teenagers who were not yet in registered employment. Over half the 1942 draft to Germany were girls and young women aged 12–22.
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For the German colonial masters this was an unsustainable strategy. Over any longer period of time, the Reich could not have sucked both food and labour from its eastern colonies, which were rapidly pushed into starvation and increasing mortality. There were parallels here with Stalin’s forced collectivisation and first Five Year Plan, which had caused a huge famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s: to Soviet planners, it had not mattered if Ukrainian peasants starved or if agricultural output nosedived, just as long as they delivered their quotas. But even Stalin had discovered that such a policy was unworkable and had to reinvest and start mechanising agriculture, to mitigate some of the losses. Despite considerable internal discussion between the different agencies involved, the Germans made no such adjustments.
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