The German War (51 page)

Along with deporting the Jews, Heinrich Himmler was busy elaborating his ideas for creating agricultural colonies settled by farmer-soldiers in successive drafts of his ‘General Plan for the East’, providing an intellectual focus for an ambitious and talented generation of demographers, economists and historians. Germans’ manifest destiny to rule over the east had been readily embraced at home when it came to Poland. Many young women, from kindergarten teachers to students, volunteered to go out and do their bit to help re-Germanise the Wartheland or, in 1942–44, the Zamo
region. They had to make do with what they could find. One BDM activist in the Lublin district looking for a suitable site for a kindergarten for the children of German settlers had a Jewess ejected from her house. It was too small and so she arranged for a Jewish house in Plaszow to be dismantled and re-erected in the village.
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In June 1942, Erna Petri arrived with her 3-year-old son in Lwów. They had left their farm in order to join her SS husband, and they took over the former manor house of a Polish noble outside the city. With its white-pillared portico and wide meadows, it looked more like the dwelling of a plantation owner than the modest family farm she had left in Thuringia. True to the precept that the Germans should assert themselves physically over the natives, within two days of her arrival she witnessed her husband flogging his farm labourers. Soon, Erna too was beating the workers. As she served coffee and cake to her husband’s SS and police colleagues on the villa’s balcony overlooking the gardens, talk inevitably turned to the mass shootings of Jews. In the summer of 1943, she was returning from shopping in Lwów when she saw a group of nearly naked children crouching by the side of the road. She stopped the carriage, calmed the six frightened children and took them home, where she gave them some food and waited for her husband to return. When he did not turn up, she took matters into her own hands. Pocketing an old service revolver which her father had given her as a parting gift, Erna Petri led the children through the woods to a pit where she knew other Jews had been shot and buried. There she lined them up in front of the ditch and went along the line firing into the back of each child’s neck. She remembered that after the first two, the others ‘began to cry’, but ‘not loudly, they whimpered’.
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In the Soviet territories, enthusiastic colonists like the Petris were a minority: Germans did not flock to the Crimea and Ukraine, despite the rich agriculture. If deep-seated cultural fear had served as the strongest justification for waging ‘preventive’ war against the Soviet Union, it also made it hard to convince Germans to go and settle there. In the first two years of war, the Nazis had successfully propagated the idea that German society needed to become a
Volksgemeinschaft,
a national community. This concept meant different things to different people, but it now clashed with talk of a wider destiny to rule a non-German ‘Greater Area’. This new mission was routinely dismissed as ‘imperialism’, a term whose pejorative associations summoned up images of Boer women and children in British concentration camps in the 1941 film
Ohm Krüger,
and the mass starvation enforced by the Royal Navy on German children which extended after the armistice into 1919. True, there was nostalgia for Germany’s former African colonies, but the tough world to be conquered and colonised in the east was another matter. Soon Himmler’s SS resettlement commissions were scouring the orphanages of Poland, Ukraine and Belorussia to pick out suitably ‘Aryan’-looking children they could ‘Germanise’ themselves. With too much ‘living space’ now available to Germans, Himmler told the guardians of racial purity to dilute their criteria and to ‘distil’ every ‘drop of good blood’ out of the racial ‘mish-mash’ of the eastern nations.
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There were other reasons why the Nazi empire was not a popular idea. Germany was now awash with foreigners. With much of the Nazi propaganda on racial ‘purity’ pandering to a narrow sense of national, or even local, identity, the influx of foreign workers could at best be tolerated as a wartime expedient, a rational but unpleasant necessity. At the same time, many domestic ills were blamed on the disruption caused by foreigners, who, it was conveniently forgotten, had been press-ganged. In a special report surveying their black-marketeering activities, the SD claimed that the French and Italians brought watches and jewellery, not to mention food and wine, into the country, or sold on the macaroni and Mediterranean fruits they received in parcels from home. As a result some of the Italian civilian workers were said to have built up large balances in their Deutsche Bank accounts. Their principal crime, in other words, had been to behave like Germans. Reversing the real bargaining power of Germans and foreign workers, the French and Italians were turned into the seducers, drawing innocent ‘national comrades’ into the web of their nefarious trades. This inversion of reality also accorded with the more widely shared ‘doublethink’ in which foreigners were blamed for sexual contacts often initiated by Germans.
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Many French prisoners of war had obtained German civilian suits or work clothes, and were flooding into cafés, cinemas and pubs. Outside Innsbruck, they were seen sunning themselves in the deckchairs on the terrace of the Berg Hotel. Propagandists might exhort their national comrades to keep their distance from the foreigners in their midst but they were soon developing ever more complex ties to them, by turns opportunistic, exploitative and intimate.
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In late 1944, the Gestapo arrested a French worker named André after intercepting a letter he had written to his German lover. He was full of eager plans for their reunion at Christmas and promised her, ‘I kiss your breasts a thousand times, we will do 69.’ André was in Germany as a civilian worker and there was no actual ban on such relationships, although the fact that his lover was a married woman gave the police an excuse to intervene. The investigation revealed a clandestine love story which had begun nearly two years earlier, at the beginning of 1943, with Sunday trysts. André, it transpired, had in fact been a French prisoner of war, one of the million sent to work in Germany after the armistice of 1940. Under lax guard, it had not been difficult for him to escape, especially since his lover gave him civilian clothes. This was not so very unusual in itself – perhaps as many as 200,000 other French prisoners did the same. But André was so smitten that no sooner had he arrived in France than he decided to return to Germany. André belonged to the relatively small minority who genuinely volunteered to work in the Reich – and he must have been one of the very few to do so not from economic motives but out of love.
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Although relationships between Germans and French civilian workers were permitted by the complex web of police and military regulations, those between German women and French prisoners of war were prohibited. Soon after the capitulation of France, the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich had ordered ‘that in accordance with the Führer’s order, French, English and Belgian prisoners should, like the Polish prisoners of war, receive the death sentence, in cases of sexual intercourse with German women and girls’. The Wehrmacht ignored Heydrich and, instead, followed the Geneva Convention, according to which representatives of the French military were entitled to take part in the proceedings of the German military courts and, more importantly, had to be informed of the verdict. Applying Article 92 of the military penal code, which covered cases of insubordination, the judges generally handed down prison terms of three years. Punishment might be lighter if it was believed that the woman had ‘seduced’ the man; conversely, if the woman was married to a soldier, as in this case, then the sentence imposed by the military courts was usually heavier and involved sending the prisoner to the harsh Stalag at Graudenz. An estimated 7,000–9,000 internees were sent to this fortress, where heavy labour, poor diet, exposure to the cold of winter and deficient hygiene took their toll. Despite the incriminating love letter, André tried to deny that he had had a sexual relationship: he was sentenced to three years in a fortress. We do not know how the German police treated his lover; as in other cases of this kind, much would have depended on the view of her husband.
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Intent on chasing down and punishing sexual misconduct, Gestapo officials launched detailed investigations, interviewing local residents in time-consuming cases which often began and sometimes ended in malicious neighbourhood gossip. In one such inquiry, a French team of glaziers had been repairing the flats in a building in Essen one after another, and, as the Gestapo officer wearily concluded after a lengthy investigation, ‘It would appear that the present case is an instance of neighbours gossiping because all the apartments were not repaired simultaneously.’ As RAF bombing became more frequent in 1942, such teams of glaziers were sent from town to town to replace windows and mend roofs. Many of the neighbourhood denunciations reaching the Gestapo involved minor gifts, buns, tea and sauerkraut, sometimes articles of clothing, occasionally no more than hot water to make coffee. In cases like this, the French glaziers were simply cashing in on a German wartime convention whereby handymen preferred to be paid partly in kind.
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In towns and cities, female French and Belgian civilian workers also began to attract the attention of the authorities. In Stuttgart the state prosecutor complained that they were rude and insulting to members of the League of German Girls, and spent a lot of time in cafés, bars and cinemas. In Ulm, there was ‘lively traffic’, and in Renttingen a local official was appalled by the way that German soldiers from the local barracks ‘smooch and kiss French women in broad daylight’. The local Party leader appealed openly to German men to uphold their ‘racial consciousness’ and honour. Police who discovered that four teenage boys had been regularly dating several French women at a ski hut outside Stuttgart could only charge the three who were under 18 with breaking the curfew regulations for juveniles. The oldest could not be charged with anything, because he was over 18 and because, as the state prosecutor complained bitterly, ‘sexual intercourse with female foreign workers, even when they are citizens of an enemy state and a significant affront to the public is apparent, cannot be prosecuted’.
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It was different for women from the east. Soon after the Germans took over Novocherkassk in June 1942, a local official visited Antonina Mikhailovna’s home to register her family. He soon returned, collected the 17-year-old – she had only minutes to pack a few things and say goodbye to her parents – and added her to the column of those walking to Rostov-on-Don in the heat of high summer, accompanied by the local elders, Germans with rifles and guard dogs. In Rostov they were loaded into a filthy goods wagon, used for transporting pigs, which took them as far as Poland. During the ‘disinfection’ halt there, Antonina and the other girls were made to strip and shower, ‘while men went to and fro and laughed’. Another girl, Maria Kuznetsova, told a similar story about the arrival of her transport in Munich. After being forced to shower, they were sat on a table and shaved. ‘We were young and, you know, innocent and everywhere the men walked around us, though we cried and wailed. But it didn’t help.’
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Both girls were sent to work for one of the metalworking firms supplying the armaments industry, in the Styrian town of Kalsdorf. Lapp-Finze AG was a medium-sized firm, employing a workforce of 820, including 89 ‘Eastern workers’ and British prisoners of war, 80 Croats, and 15 French civilians. Each national group was housed separately, some in town, others in barracks on the industrial estate. There, only the three barracks for the Eastern workers were fenced off with the barbed wire which the firm produced. In summer, when they arrived, the blocks appeared spartan but clean, the wooden bunk beds covered with mattresses and pillows filled with straw. But the onset of winter was altogether different. The small wood-burning stove in each block gave off far too little heat, especially at night when they lay down to sleep. Their enclosure was right in front of the house of the camp commandant, making it easy for him to check their comings and goings.