The German War (52 page)

During the working day, it was the foremen and master craftsmen who exercised arbitrary control over them, forcing the pace of work in the foundry, even though the young women were not strong enough and had not been issued with safety goggles or the right protective clothing. Some were decent sorts, like Ekaterina Berezhnova’s master craftsman who had learned enough Russian as a prisoner in the First World War to talk to them. He also gave them bread. The firm followed the normal practice of monitoring the productivity of the foreign workers, rewarding the more productive ones by allowing them to wear the ‘Ost’ badge on the upper arm instead of the chest, but this subtle difference was lost on most of the women. In any case, the badge barred them from most of the small town and its chief recreational facility, the cinema. It was informal relationships which mattered more. Many of the forced labourers received food and clothing in return for helping out on the farms which surrounded the small town. Some of the girls made bathing costumes and swam in the canal in summer and even took photographs of their moments of recreation in the fields around the factory. They fashioned ‘folk’ costumes for their dances and sang Russian songs, accompanied by one of the Croatian men on a mandolin. At least eight weddings took place in the camp, benevolently presided over by the commandant.
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Employed often to perform semi-skilled tasks in the armaments industry, young women workers seemed unthreatening to the older, skilled German craftsmen charged with supervising and training them. One retired Krupp worker in Essen described the kind of collusive mutual aid that arose:

So there’s this guy at his milling machine and they give him a woman to train. OK, she’s supposed to be his replacement when he becomes a soldier. Well, you think he’ll be so quick to do that? Like he says, ‘Look, don’t go digging my grave,’ and the women had no interest in doing that either.

The SD also reported instances of ‘German employees asking Russian workers to hold back on their output’.
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In the neighbouring coal mines of the Ruhr, much of the work was performed by Soviet prisoners of war – exhausted, emaciated men plucked from the huge, typhus-ridden Stalag holding pens. Whereas the Ukrainian miners brought in from the Krivoy Rog were hardworking, disciplined and strong, the Red Army prisoners were in no condition to withstand the task of digging coal out with pikes and picks. Mines were famous for their unrestricted brutality, and by March 1942 two-thirds of the workers sent to the Ruhr pits from Belgium and northern France had left. The German miner who controlled the bread ration and logged the output of the four or five Soviets under him enjoyed absolute power. Here, the status of Germany’s coal miners, already the profession most protected from military conscription, dovetailed with interests of pit managers and the Nazi hierarchy. As the boss of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, put it at a meeting of mine managers in October 1942, it was up to the German worker ‘when a Russian pig has to be beaten’. Paul Pleiger, the head of the Reich coal organisation, remarked more smoothly, ‘Below ground it is dark and Berlin is a long way away.’
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The German home front too became a site of mass death. At least 170,000 Soviet and 130,000 Polish civilian workers died while deployed in Germany, and the authorities did not even count those who perished on their way to and from the Reich, or were sent back home to die there; hundreds of thousands remained unaccounted for. By June 1942, typhus was spreading amongst the Soviet civilian workers. The following month, the AEG cable plant in Berlin reported that the ‘Russian women employed are sometimes so weak that they collapse from hunger’. That summer, factories in Frankfurt sent back up to half the workers assigned to them ‘due to illness and physical exhaustion’. By September, another official report detailed how a train bringing Eastern workers into Berlin met one taking the ‘unfit’ back home. This ‘could have had catastrophic consequences’, the report continued,

because there were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on the train gave birth to children who were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick with tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was ultimately thrown on to the embankment. Other return transports were probably in a similar sorry state.

Further down the hierarchy, the statistics were still more terrible. Almost two million Red Army prisoners were put to work in Germany. A million of them died there.

With the mass deployment of foreign labour came an exponential rise in the numbers sent to concentration camps, which became a principal means of disciplining foreign workers. The original core of German political prisoners – usually old-time Communist functionaries – alongside, and in fierce competition with, German criminals now rose above this sea of non-German inmates and vied with each other to provide the elite of prisoner functionaries, the
Kapos
and ‘
Prominenten
’. They wielded authority over ‘eastern’ and Polish workers who had tried to escape or been reported to the Gestapo for offences such as insolence or insubordination. There were two groups of Germans whose life expectancy in the camps was particularly poor – male homosexuals and petty criminals. From 1942 onwards, this greatly expanded workforce was drafted into war production as well. The Auschwitz and Monowitz camps supplied labour throughout Upper Silesia as well as to the huge IG Farben chemical works, while the Oranienburg camp in Berlin’s northern suburbs serviced the Heinkel aircraft factory, Dachau BMW, Ravensbrück Siemens, Mauthausen Steyr-Daimler-Puch, and Sachsenhausen Daimler-Benz. In 1942 and 1943, the Luftwaffe industries led the way in employing camp labour, with BMW, Heinkel and Messerschmitt setting the pace.

Of the 1.65 million concentration camp prisoners deployed in Germany, at least 800,000 died; a further 300,000 prisoners were worked to death deliberately because they were Jews slated for ‘destruction through labour’. Including Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet and Polish civilian workers, even the official – and therefore also inherently conservative – figures show that at least 2.4 million people were worked to death in Germany itself following the military crisis of 1941–42.
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One economic historian has described German use of concentration camp labour, subjected to continuous ‘selections’ and physical effort while provided with starvation rations, as ‘not a stock but a flow’. During the rationing crisis which unfolded through most of 1942, this applied to all categories of forced labour from the east, whether military captives or civilian ‘volunteers’. In an attempt to rationalise the attrition rates and select which workers would survive in a more economical fashion, the chairman of the coal organisation of Upper Silesia, Günther Falkenhahn, pioneered a system of ‘performance feeding’ for the ‘easterners’ working in his Plesschen Werke pit, taking away food from those who underperformed and redistributing it to those who exceeded their norms. He did not reduce the demand for new transports to replace the workers who died. As this cannibalistic version of Social Darwinism spread within the Silesian coal industry, it attracted Albert Speer’s enthusiastic endorsement and gradually became standard practice in the German armaments industry.
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With starvation rations taking their toll, even managers with well-established Nazi credentials demanded better food for ‘unsentimental’ reasons such as labour productivity. In February 1942, Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office, which generally stood for the harshest and most ideological enforcement of racial principles, conceded that ‘All German offices share the view that, given the current food rations, even those Russian workers who arrived in good condition will soon be exhausted, and no longer fully deployable.’ There were early warnings throughout March, endorsed by other agencies, up to and including Hitler himself, that the ‘Russians’ needed to be fed enough to be able to work. But when German rations were cut on 6 April, envious gossip immediately circulated amongst ‘national comrades’ about the ‘exceptionally good’ food being allotted to the foreign workers – even after their rations had been reduced too: nothing could be allowed to erode the racial differential. Whatever economic efficiency demanded, the ethos of the ‘national community’ dictated that there would be no substantive rise for foreign workers until the cuts to German rations were reversed.
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*

The other precept for national solidarity in war was harder to enforce – equal burdens amongst Germans. On the eve of the April ration cut, Goebbels had proclaimed in
Das Reich
that the sacrifices the war imposed had to be equally shared. Otherwise, he continued, not just would ‘our provisioning’ be endangered but decent national comrades’ ‘sense of justice and their belief in the integrity and purity of public life’ would be shattered. Vowing that a regime which did not proceed ruthlessly against anyone who infringed these principles ‘would not deserve to be called a Government of the People any more’, he proffered a yardstick by which the government could be measured. Hitler and Goebbels might remain above suspicion, with their modest meals – Goebbels’s butler collected guests’ ration stamps on a silver platter before dinner – but popular humour had an answer in one of the better-known replies to the famous question, ‘When will the war end?’ ‘When Göring fits into Goebbels’s trousers.’ Tales of the special privileges enjoyed by the Nazi elite were also spread by British radio propaganda and its fake German station Gustav Siegfried Eins. Faced by a rash of rumours, Bormann reminded the Gauleiter to set a personal example of modest living within the norms of the ‘people’s community’, especially when it came to ‘food rationing’.
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The spectre of a major scandal began to stalk the elite. It began with August Nöthling, a grocer in the comfortable Berlin suburb of Steglitz, who was unable to provide ration coupons from his customers to cover a considerable amount of his foodstuffs. On 23 July 1942 he was fined 5,000 marks, the maximum that the Main Provisioning Office in the city could impose. Nöthling petitioned to have the administrative ruling tested in court, on the grounds that publicising the verdict would harm not only him but also his clientele, which included ‘important men from the Party, state, Wehrmacht and Diplomatic Corps’. In fact, Nöthling’s clients included virtually the entire political and military elite, whom he provided with venison, hams, sausages, fine wines, sweets, honey, cognac and sugar without demanding coupons. The list included the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick; the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop; the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust; the Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darré; the Reich Labour Leader, Konstantin Hierl; Hans Lammers, Hitler’s chief of staff at the Reich Chancellery; the Economics Minister, Walther Funk; the director of German radio, Eugen Hadamovsky; as well as the police chiefs of Leipzig and Berlin, and a number of state secretaries and ministerial directors. Another customer, the President of the Berlin administrative court, Gardiewski, helpfully drafted Nöthling’s original petition to his own court. The Wehrmacht was well represented in the persons of Field Marshals Brauchitsch and Keitel for the army, High Admiral Raeder and Admiral Kurt Fricke for the navy, and for the Luftwaffe there were Hans Jeschonnek and Wilhelm Haehnelt.
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Goebbels, whose sexual adventures were a long-standing source of popular amusement, was genuinely shocked at this kind of venality and brought the matter directly to Hitler, who was sufficiently appalled to demand that those involved should be forced to explain themselves and promise to change their ways. He nominated the rather lowly figure of Otto Thierack, the Minister of Justice, to conduct an investigation. As so often, the excuses revealed more about the regime’s moral compass than the scandal itself, as the Nazi elite squirmed under its betrayal of the ideal of the ‘national community’. The Minister for Agriculture, Walther Darré, who had once personally intervened to make sure that his wife received her ‘normal’ level of service from Nöthling, denied everything, claiming to have followed the regulations – which his own ministry officials had drafted – to the letter. Others, like Ribbentrop, blustered and protested their innocence. Hans Lammers hid behind his wife’s ignorance: she had not realised that the wildfowl she had accepted from the grocer was rationed. Most were forced to admit the facts but strove to minimise their responsibility. They had not known what the regulations were, or, if they had, then their wives or housekeepers had not. Viktor Lutze, head of the SA, claimed that the food had been used to make up parcels for SA men recuperating from their wounds in military hospitals. Only High Admiral Raeder accepted ‘complete responsibility’, but then immediately denied any direct knowledge of what his wife had purchased: nor was she responsible either, because she too had distributed the food to the wounded on her visits to naval hospitals and in parcels to men at the front. Goebbels was struck by the way they had ‘mainly given only flimsy excuses’, as they tried to shed responsibility for breaking the regime’s own moral code. To prevent a scandal, Hitler ruled that no further action should be taken. Abandoned by his protectors, Nöthling committed suicide in prison.
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Meanwhile, in autumn 1942, the forced deliveries of grain from the European harvest plugged the gaping hole in German food stocks. On Sunday, 4 October 1942, Hermann Göring announced the full restoration of German rations, reversing the April cuts. The scale of rations for the lengthy hierarchy of foreign labourers below the ‘national comrades’ was duly increased too, securing a more viable workforce. Only the rations for the few remaining Jews in Germany were – largely symbolically – cut once more. In a major speech appropriately billed to celebrate ‘Harvest Thanksgiving’ and broadcast live, Göring assured the German people that ‘we are feeding all of our troops from the occupied territories’ – a ‘small faux pas’ which Goebbels instructed the media not to mention in their foreign coverage. No doubt German audiences knew what Göring meant. He then dwelt, at length, on the fact that this was above all a war against the Jews. Hammering home what would happen in the event of defeat, Göring spoke like a concerned father: