CHAPTER 12

Exploitation

THE pattern of German power in Europe was a patchwork. Very little territory was formally annexed to the Reich: Danzig, large slices of Poland and smaller ones of Belgium. Other areas were intended and prepared for annexation although not formally annexed and even formally assured of their continuing integrity and independence: Alsace and Lorraine, Luxembourg, parts of Slovenia. In these areas compulsory military service was introduced and the Reich Ministry of the Interior set about imposing German law and the German legal system, integrating postal, railway and customs services, changing place names and even personal names, adjusting citizenship rights and constraining the population to speak German. Formal annexation was only a matter of time. These were, from the practical point of view, districts which were contiguous with the Reich and had special strategic or economic value; from another point of view they were districts which had once been part of a medieval Germanic empire or were peopled by kinsmen of the German race.

Three other territories which were distinct from the Reich were nevertheless completely subordinated to it through a Governor General, a Protector and a Reich Minister. These territories, all of which lay to the east of Germany, were brought within the German customs area; their separate existence in international law was barely conceded; and various overlords within the Reich such as Goering as Commissioner for the Five Year Plan and Sauckel as Plenipotentiary for Labour were entitled to direct demands to their rulers. They were the Government General of Poland, ruled by Hans Frank with the status of a head of government but not a head of state; the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, in which parts of the administration (justice, for example) were placed under Reich Ministries in Berlin but which had also a nominally autonomous administration in pseudo-diplomatic relations with Berlin and a Protector (first Neurath, then Heydrich and ultimately Frick) who advised this administration what to do and saw that it did it; and the Baltic and Russian territories which came under Rosenberg, who had theoretically the same executive and legislative powers as Hans Frank in Poland and exercised them through his Ministry for the East and its Reich Commissioners in Riga and Rovno for the Ostland and the Ukraine respectively.

The rest of occupied Europe was governed by military or civilian governors according to its continuing strategic importance. Greece, Yugoslavia, Belgium and occupied France were under military government. These areas were subject to decrees promulgated by the military authorities of the Reich and applied by the local military governor, who was in addition usually helped by civilian advisers posted to his staff to guide him in all but purely military affairs. The government of Belgium and north-eastern France, which formed a single administrative zone, was transferred to a civilian Reich Commissioner in July 1944 for the better supervision and regimentation of the local population. Greece and Yugoslavia both saw Italian and Bulgarian occupiers as well as German. The native government of Greece was put in the hands of a puppet government in Athens, that of Yugoslavia was divided between a puppet government in Belgrade and the separatist Croat state established under Ante Pavelič. This state comprised not only Croatia but also Bosnia and Herzegovina and part of the Dalmatian coast and was roughly coterminous with the eleventh-century kingdom of the same name. Pavelič was a rabidly anti-Serb Croat who had curried favour with the Italians before the war as an enemy of the Yugoslav state and was then pressed on an unenthusiastic Hitler by Mussolini. After May 1941 Pavelič, who had had to cede most of the Adriatic islands and Dalmatian coast to Italy and accept a prince of the Italian royal house as king in Croatia, turned against the Italians. The king never visited his kingdom.

Norway and the Netherlands were placed under civilian Reich Commissioners – Josef Terboven and Artur Seyss-Inquart – who were directly responsible to Hitler and were empowered to legislate by decree and review all existing laws. The powers of crown and government were transferred to them, and each appointed deputies to overlord sections of the central administration and its regional offshoots. Obnoxious or potentially subversive elements in public life, such as parliaments and other elective bodies, the press and broadcasting, were abolished or brought under control, and the national police was subordinated to the German police and SS. Denmark was exceptional in that its head of state, the king, remained in the country throughout the war and in the exercise of his functions for most of it; the Danish cabinet continued to look to the sovereign and the Danish army remained in being in designated zones. There was no formal agreement but the military capitulation was made and accepted in return for recognition of Denmark’s continuing independence and neutrality. Until 1943 relations between Germany and Denmark were conducted through diplomatic channels, although German officials had to be reminded from time to time that they must not treat Denmark as just another occupied country. In 1943 the Germans took over the country, the king was closely confined, the army was disbanded, the navy scuttled itself, and the government and parliament were dissolved. Thereafter Denmark was run by the SS.

If Germany had won the war Denmark and the Netherlands would probably have been annexed despite explicit assurances to the contrary. In both countries, although earlier in the Netherlands than in Denmark, political forms and economic activities were adjusted to German patterns and needs. Political parties – other than the local Nazi variant – were extinguished, Nazi laws introduced, production and labour treated as segments of the German economy. In the Netherlands trade-union leaders began by cooperating with the Germans in the hope of preserving their various auxiliary institutions and activities, but membership of unions dropped sharply and the creation of a labour front in 1942 caused union officials to resign too. Some unions were dissolved by decree when their officials resigned in protest against the appointment of pro-German overseers; one Roman Catholic union was dissolved when the Roman Catholic hierarchy ordered members to leave it on pain of being denied the sacraments. Dutch SS were formed as early as the autumn of 1940 (from candidates with untarnished ancestry back to 1800), took a personal oath to Hitler as the Greater German Führer and provided fighting units for the eastern front. Himmler planned to plant Nordic settlers from these countries in various parts of the USSR, whether they wanted to go there or not.

France, unlike every other defeated country, was run from two different capitals, Paris and Vichy. From Vichy Marshal Pétain’s government exercised authority over the whole country except Alsace-Lorraine, virtually annexed to the Reich, and the zone in the south-east ceded to Italy by the armistice. From Paris Hitler’s plenipotentiary, Otto Abetz, also exercised functions which covered occupied and unoccupied France: he was a career diplomat whose tasks were to advise the military commander in the occupied zone on political matters, to maintain permanent contact with the French government in Vichy and its representatives in the occupied zone, and generally to influence French politicians, the press and broadcasting. He straddled France, advising the German rulers in the north and bringing pressure to bear on Pétain and his ministers in the south. But in practice France was partitioned. As a defeated country waiting for a peace settlement it was subject to the interim arrangements accepted with the armistice. The Germans exacted the right to occupy the north with military and police forces, detached the north-east which, in terms of military government but not of civil administration, was controlled with Belgium from Brussels, and created a prohibited zone running along the north and west coasts under strict military control. Abetz ruled indirectly in the unoccupied zone by addressing representations to Vichy, and Vichy’s subservience to German power was never in doubt; although there was no outward German presence in the unoccupied zone until it too was occupied in November 1942, the SD operated there on a restricted scale from the beginning (for example, in tracking down wireless transmitters and operators).

In all these countries the pattern of German control at the top was invisible to most people who never had or were never given any clear picture of what role the Germans had assumed. What people saw was not a new pattern imposed by the conqueror but a series of random consequences of the impact of German rule on local administration. At the centre the Germans kept and even enlarged the powers of civil servants whom they converted from administrators into ministers-to-the-Germans with power to issue decrees, a form of indirect rule in which the Germans directed the civil service and the civil service directed everybody else. Local government bodies also remained in being, often with familiar faces in the same offices, but this reassuring continuity was contradicted by uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of mayors and other office-holders. Disturbingly these no longer did what they were expected to do. Nor did one mayor behave like the next one, for each reacted differently, the one more obediently, the other more defiantly or more slyly, to the directions of his superiors. Mayors whom the Germans regarded as satisfactory remained in office and were given enhanced authority, but since unsatisfactory mayors were replaced, those who survived became in effect appointees holding office during good behaviour. German observers were inserted into the machinery of government at the centre and also to some extent lower down – for example, on the governing boards of French lycées; Labour Offices were put under undisguised German control, so that an unemployed worker coming in to register even in a comparatively small town would find himself face to face with a German official who might direct him to work in Germany or in some occupied country other than his own. But for the most part the general public continued to deal with local authorities whom it knew, and was unaware of the extent to which or the methods by which they were subjected to German regulation. In fact German control, even where it was not obtrusive, was thorough and pervasive. Courts, like the administration, continued to function outwardly much as before, but the German police kept a watch on the sentences given in criminal courts and might override them, with the result that criminal justice became something of a lottery in which sentences differed widely from court to court and the accused did not know whether his sentence would stand. He even had reason to fear a light sentence since the Germans were more likely to step in and increase it.

In all occupied countries, whether under military or civilian rule, a great deal went on which did not meet the eye and was not meant to, and in particular Himmler’s Higher SS and Police Führers were a law unto themselves. They normally held SS rank equivalent to that of the military governor or local troop commander and, de Jure or de facto, circumvented the German military and civil power in implementing policies determined by Himmler. In the inevitable quarrels with local governors the SS had the advantage of knowing exactly where they stood, since the SS and police authorities in conquered areas were replicas by extension of the system familiar in the Reich. Most other offices were ad hoc creations in which a good deal of confusion prevailed.

The Germans turned out to be much less fond of local Nazis and pro-German parties than vice versa. They used such parties but felt no call to support them. In Belgium, for example, they made use of various collaborationist groups until these cancelled each other out by their competitive jealousies. In the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart paid very little attention to Adrian Mussert and the Dutch Nazis although some individuals were given minor administrative office. The Danish Nazi Party also proved valueless. In Norway a rather different situation arose because the German Commissioner Terboven was determined to retain power in his own hands, governing through a council in Oslo and regional deputies appointed by himself until ordered by Hitler to acknowledge Quisling and make him Prime Minister; Quisling’s original role had been to subvert Norway in the German interest but this plan had been abandoned in favour of the military conquest of the country with the result that it was not clear to the new rulers sent by Hitler whether Quisling still counted or not. Only in France, under the aegis of Vichy, did native fascists flourish for a while. For day-to-day administration the Germans relied, where they could, on the existing machinery of government and its existing staff, supplemented by an injection of German officials at key points with the title but more than the status of observers. In the east, where the machinery was less good, the reliance impracticable and Slav sub-men by definition unemployable, they had to take over themselves except at levels or in matters which did not interest them.

One country escaped: Switzerland. In 1940 the general Swiss view was that Germany had won the war. The question was whether it would pay the Swiss better to be tough in this situation or pliant. They knew before the war that the Nazis treated Switzerland in their training manuals as part of the Reich and showed it as such in official maps, and they also knew that the German army had plans for an attack on Switzerland. These plans were never put into operation but they nearly were on more than one occasion.

Swiss planning for defence against Germany began in the mid-thirties, ostensibly within the constraints of Swiss neutrality. In fact a very small number of Swiss leaders deliberately transgressed this neutrality by entering into secret military discussions with France. They went so far as to conclude, at the military but not the political level, plans for the entry of French forces into Switzerland at the request of the Swiss government. Documents captured by the Germans in France in 1940 gave Germany grounds for invading Switzerland but they never did so.

Swiss airspace was infringed by both sides from 1940, for the most part accidentally. The Swiss defences engaged aircraft, inflicting and suffering casualties. A blackout was imposed in November 1940 in response to German pressure when British bombers used Switzerland as a navigational aid. As the air war grew fiercer but not much more accurate Switzerland suffered increasing damage, for which it received reparation after the war from the United States. It was blockaded by both sides and so forced to introduce rationing of food and fuel. It was specially vulnerable on two counts. Spies proliferated, and any undue toleration of their activities could be dangerous: about 1,400 Swiss citizens and foreigners were arrested during the war years by a Swiss police determined to give the belligerents no excuse to denounce Swiss neutrality. (But the famous Lucy ring, frequently alleged to have been a British device for conveying Ultra and other special intelligence to Moscow, was no such thing.) Secondly, geography had set Switzerland in the eye of the hurricane – to quote the phrase used by a post-war Swiss historian. Under a multi-lateral treaty of 1909 Switzerland was obliged to allow the passage in wartime of all non-military material over its Alpine railways. This right was most valuable to the Germans and Italians since the use of the Swiss route freed others for military traffic, and there was therefore a corresponding fear that the railways would either be seized by the Axis or sabotaged by their foes.

That Switzerland remained in spite of these hazards immune from direct attack was primarily the reward of determination. The Swiss constitution provides for the appointment of a military, as opposed to a civilian, commander-in-chief in times of emergency. On 30 August 1939 the Swiss parliament gave the cabinet emergency powers and on the same day General Henri Guisan was named commander-in-chief. The appointment was controversial and contested and Guisan had to be on his guard throughout the war against the intrigues of civilian and military personages who held that Switzerland’s only chance of escaping a German invasion lay in a scrupulous emphasis on the Swiss tradition of neutrality: they believed that Switzerland must aim above all at avoiding any provocation of Hitler. General Guisan argued otherwise. He said that independence was even more important than neutrality, since without independence there would be no neutrality to protect; that the only threat to independence came from Germany; and that preparations must be made to meet this threat. On his orders a thousand factories, public works and public services, and Switzerland’s numerous tunnels were prepared for demolition. In a dramatic, secret scene on the historic Rütli (where the Swiss confederation was inaugurated in 1291) 650 officers of the army took an oath to resist. A mountain redoubt was fortified where fighting would go on even if Switzerland’s borders were forced and its frontier cities taken. Justified by results, Guisan lived to receive the acclaim of even the most timorous of his fellow citizens.

Germany’s European allies complete the picture. They were Italy, Slovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. Slovakia was a puppet from the moment of its creation in 1939. In south-east Europe Hitler was prepared to let Rumania down as much and as often as it suited him, give Hungary most of what it wanted, enlarge Bulgaria to the dimensions tantalizingly glimpsed at San Stefano in 1877, and let Greece become an Italian province. If Hitler anticipated squabbles between Italians and Slavs he did so without distaste. Thus Bulgaria and Hungary were uneasy allies who made hay while the sun shone – Bulgaria at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia and Greece, and Hungary at the expense of the first two of these. When the sun stopped shining for the Germans in the middle of the war all these countries began to try to change sides. Rumania, which had tried to avoid taking sides between Germany and the western democracies, slid into alliance with Germany through fear of the Soviet Union but not without being forced by Hitler to yield territory to its neighbours and, indirectly, to evict its king. After being forced to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR King Carol sought territorial guarantees for the rest of his state from Hitler, but Hitler refused. The king, whose weak position was threatened not only by the loss of national territory but also by the hostility of the fascist Iron Guard (whose temper had not been improved by the murder in 1938 of its leader Corneliu Codreanu), tried to save himself by inviting the army leader Marshal Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard to join his government, but they were advised by Germany not to. The loss of more territory by the second Vienna Award and the Treaty of Craiova (by which Hitler allotted parts of Rumania to Hungary and Bulgaria) made Carol’s position impossible and he abdicated. Antonescu, a stupid rather than a sinister man, with a pushing wife, joined the government of the new King Michael and so too did the Iron Guard, but the mutual antipathy of the army and the Iron Guard produced a threat of civil war. The Iron Guard attempted a coup but Hitler, who wanted no trouble in Rumania and who had formed a favourable impression of Antonescu in the course of two visits by the Marshal to the Führer, decided to back the army which, with the help of German tanks, smashed the Iron Guard. Its leaders were lodged in internment camps until 1944 when, Antonescu having been overthrown by the tides of war, they were extracted to form a phantom Rumanian government in Vienna.

Italy was an ally of a different sort and its collapse in 1943 caused the biggest alteration to the pattern of German occupation before the retreat of the Germans themselves. The Germans were obliged to occupy those areas in south-eastern Europe which had been left to the Italians and to worry about the quantities of Italian arms which passed into the hands of Yugoslav and Greek partisans. Even more serious was the problem of Italy itself. Hitler was ill-informed about Italy. He had forbidden secret service activities there and the reporting of his civilian and service emissaries was deplorably poor. His belief in Mussolini made him reject warnings of the coming collapse. He helped Mussolini, rescued from captivity on the Gran Sasso by a spectacular piece of kidnapping in a small aircraft, to create a new Italian republic in the north, whose unreality and incapacity merely confused the picture but were not allowed by the German military and police commanders in the field to interfere with their respective businesses. Italy north of the allied line of advance became German occupied territory under military rule.

This patchwork of alliance and domination arose out of the needs and fortunes of war. It was not meant to endure. While it did, its function was to secure obedience to German wishes and, increasingly, to supply the German war machine with materials, goods, food and labour. As German needs became more urgent, German methods became harsher and resistance grew.

The German armies were accompanied in their invasions by special economic squads, whose first tasks were to seize what Germany wanted by way of pillage – raw materials and manufactured goods, gold and foreign currencies, machinery and rolling stock – and to protect valuable installations and essential factories, which were to be exploited as going concerns. Once these immediate aims had been achieved, the Germans began to look further ahead, but because they looked to an early peace and not to a long war they made mistakes. In either event the industries of non-German lands were to supplement the German economy, but expectations of an easy war led the economic planners to plan initially in terms of the New Order and, particularly in the east, to neglect or dismantle heavy industry: for over a year no attempt was made to repair factories and plants damaged by the retreating Russians, so that these were back in working order only shortly before the retreating Germans had to blow them up again.

The German economy had not been prepared for a long war. Hitler expected the war to be short and the German economy to take it in its stride. Production was adapted to the needs of the moment but not at first expanded. Thus in 1940 aircraft production was reduced (by 40 per cent) because the army needed more tanks and the navy more submarines, while in the next year factories which had made this switch were required to revert to aircraft because the Luftwaffe regained priority over the army and the navy in the light of its need to repair before Barbarossa the damage it had suffered in the Battle of Britain. But with the failure of Barbarossa to achieve its objectives by the end of the year it became inescapably clear that Germany needed a greatly expanded arms base and must also exploit the industrial potential of conquered countries both to contribute to Germany’s arms production and to manufacture those other goods which Germany was ceasing to make for itself as its industry was converted to materials of war.

In areas formally or virtually annexed to the Reich, where there was no collision between short-term and long-term aims, industries were incorporated into German industry in order to enlarge its capacity. In Silesia, for example, coal production was very greatly expanded, synthetic oil refineries were built, and heavy engineering and arms production were developed. To the east of the areas which were treated as part of the Reich Goering ordered the transfer to Germany of all enterprises ‘not absolutely essential for the maintenance of the bare existence of the inhabitants at a low level’, unless transport difficulties made it more practicable to keep them at work on German orders where they were. In general, industry in the east was limited to producing goods and services required by Germany’s armed forces and administrators, satisfying what Goering considered to be the bare needs of the local population and processing raw materials. In the west, after an initial few months of looting stocks and equipment, the policy was to exploit industrial capacity by nurturing and milking useful enterprises and to close down the rest by depriving them of raw materials. Factories which went on working had to deliver a high proportion of their output to the Germans; in some cases these levies reached 100 per cent (for example, of magnesium, heavy castings, industrial precision parts). The equipment of factories which closed was either taken to Germany or left to rot, while their labour was transferred to war work in Germany or occupied countries or assigned to the Todt Organization, which constructed the defences, installations and buildings needed by the armed forces outside Germany. Production of non-military goods was increased as German industry became more exclusively concentrated on war production, and towards the end of the war there was some dispersal of war production from Germany as a result of bombing.

The German apparatus of control was very powerful. Allocations of fuel and raw materials were regulated by licences issued by special agencies which were either German or under close German supervision. German specialists were often attached to industrial concerns. All contracts above a certain value had to be reported to the authorities and any firm attempting to do business without such notification lost its allocations. This relatively negative kind of control was supplemented by the active desire of collaborationist governments to keep their industries going and to maintain employment and the capital resources of the country. They therefore welcomed German orders. In some cases the German authorities placed orders with particular firms for goods which went straight to Germany and were paid for either through a clearing system or by being set against the occupation costs which the Germans charged for their presence and sustenance in occupied countries. (These occupation costs were far higher than the real costs of occupation. They were in fact huge, continuing fines.) In other cases general agreements were made covering whole industries, for example textiles, automobiles. In these cases the type of the product was fixed to suit the Germans, who took what they needed but set aside a proportion for the producing country: the Germans were also able to fix prices since they were the principal purchasers. Thus subordinate governments and foreign industrialists were largely in German hands. Either they worked for the Germans or they were forced to close, and if they were forced to close their employees would probably be sent to do forced labour in Germany. By August 1942 it was estimated that firms could only survive if at least three quarters of their output was for the Germans. The firms which remained in operation lost their independence. If the directors collaborated they had to allow German observers into their plants; if they refused, they were evicted and replaced by German managers and technicians.

Besides this subjection of industry by official processes, businesses in occupied countries were taken over either by confiscation or by purchase. Jewish property was confiscated without compensation. So, later, was the property of enemies of the Reich, a category which was interpreted by Seyss-Inquart to include those who had assisted, were assisting or might be expected to assist anti-German activities. In the USSR, where the German state was declared to be the successor in title of the Soviet state, property of the Communist Party or any political association was, together with state property strictly so called, transferred into German state ownership. The same rules were applied to the Baltic states even though property had only been transferred to state ownership in 1939 and the population was markedly pro-German. In Poland an organization was established to confiscate land without compensation and re-sell it to Germans at nominal rates. The German banks extended German control by buying shares in foreign enterprises or in foreign banks which themselves had substantial holdings in such enterprises. In these ways the commanding heights of the economies of conquered countries were captured at practically no cost either by the German state or by major German industrial and financial groups. If this dual approach to expropriation contained within it the seeds of a conflict in Germany between state control and private control, the conflict itself was averted, or postponed, by the loss of the war.

Control was likewise imposed on agriculture. Again, the annexed areas were integrated with the Reich. In western and south-eastern Europe the Germans preferred to exercise control indirectly by strengthening the powers of local Ministries of Agriculture and forcing them to use their powers to implement the requirements of the Reich’s Food Office, which prescribed production and delivery quotas, prices, subsidies, and feeding and seeding rates. Germany looked to these territories for much of its food and so kept them at first well equipped with farm machinery and fertilizers – many eastern districts were better supplied than before the war – but from 1941–2 the exigencies of the Russian campaign disrupted this policy. Before the war ended food production in occupied Europe fell by about a quarter and much of it was requisitioned. The requisitions were generally addressed to the individual farmer, who was required to deliver up his produce in return for a claim slip with which he was left to get what compensation he could from his government. Other materials, such as coal, were requisitioned in the same way.

The food left over for civilian consumption became increasingly hard to move as the transport system failed. As a result of shortages of fuel, rubber and rolling stock, food was either not distributed at all or went bad during interminable waits at sidings. The use of canals and barges, where these existed, provided a partial alleviation, but shortages and distribution bottlenecks operating upon each other caused prices to rise steeply. Black markets flourished. Some governments tried to beat them by fixing prices and buying in essential products in order to regulate supply. They were unsuccessful: at one time it was estimated that nine out of every ten eggs marketed in the département of the Seine were being sold on the black market. Rations, which were introduced all over occupied Europe at a lower level (Denmark alone excepted) than in Germany, were frequently not honoured. Diets became increasingly vegetarian, and while country people often managed to live well enough half the population was required to exist on two thirds or a half of the pre-war normal.

Epidemics developed – tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio – and were made worse by a shortage of medicines. One of the by-products of undernourishment was an increase in industrial accidents which probably damaged production more than sabotage did. In particular areas at particular times the daily diet sank catastrophically. The worst examples were Athens and some of the Greek islands where it was 600–800 calories in the winter of 1941–2 and some Dutch cities where it fell to 500 calories in the winter of 1944–5. Hunger was made all the more insupportable by cold. Clothing and fuel both became desperately hard to get and – between the drop in real wages and the black market – impossibly expensive. Dutch city-dwellers were reduced to cutting down trees in parks and stealing any scrap which they could find to burn to keep their enfeebled bodies warm. In the east the situation became a tragic farce. The produce of the great granary of the Ukraine was garnered for the Reich but then left to rot because there were not enough trains to move it, until the Reich Commissar, Erich Koch, hit on the idea of doling out surplus stocks to service men going on leave in the form of ‘Führer food parcels’. Germany got less out of the USSR after invading it than before. But occupied Europe was forced to yield 25 million tons of food to Germany, most of it requisitioned. During 1941 – 3 these supplies increased Germany’s civilian ration by something between a fifth and a quarter.

It is difficult to give a picture of life in occupied Europe in terms of individuals as opposed to statistics because conditions varied enormously from place to place and from month to month. The constant factor was uncertainty – uncertainty about what could be got and, if it could, what it would cost. Necessities were frequently unobtainable and then suddenly on the market – the black market – at impossible prices. In France, for which reliable figures are easier to come by, the official cost of a kilo of butter rose from forty to sixty-one francs during 1941–3 but this price was entirely unreal, for when butter was available in, say, Paris it fetched by 1943 600–800 francs. Tobacco and wine were rationed to a packet of the one and a litre of the other per adult per week but the rations were notional and black market prices were ten to twelve times the official price. Meat was frequently unobtainable for a month at a time. Meals could be got in subsidized works canteens or restaurants, but each lunch might cost a fifth of a weekly wage, so that a lunch a day more than consumed an entire pay packet. Shoes and clothes were already scarce and expensive by the winter of 1940 when a yard of woollen fabric or a pair of shoes cost the equivalent of half a weekly wage; by 1943 a pair of shoes absorbed six weeks’ wages, a suit four to five months’. Coal and electricity were so rigorously restricted that the fuel ration was not enough to cook with, especially as the inferior food available could only be made edible by slow cooking. In Paris a ton of coal rose to the equivalent of two to four months’ wages.

The most important of all the commodities which the Germans had to regulate was labour. Germany was short of labour before the war, while in a number of European countries there was appreciable unemployment. This imbalance was accentuated by the call-up of men for the German armed services and by the dislocations of war which put men and women out of work in conquered countries. The Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland had automatically increased the Reich’s labour force and there were in addition about 300,000 foreign workers in Germany in 1939 as a result of the operation of the law of supply and demand. During the war this force was enormously increased by three main methods: encouragement of more or less voluntary migration, the use of prisoners of war, and forcible recruitment.

In western and southern countries the Germans advertised the advantages of going to Germany for jobs: sure employment, good conditions, good pay, good holidays. Germany also made agreements with a number of satellite and allied governments, including Italy and Spain, for the supply of permanent and seasonal workers. The response was, however, inadequate, especially when reports of actual conditions in Germany filtered through and showed up the fraudulence of German enticements. Although a foreign worker from the west or south (as distinct from an eastern worker whose wage was derisory) was entitled to the same wage as a German worker, he was often put to less skilled work than he had been doing and so found himself earning less than he had expected. He had to pay German taxes and contribute to social insurance schemes from which he was not likely to benefit, since he did not expect to remain in Germany; and when inflation took hold of his home country without any corresponding increase in his German wage, he and his family found that the real return for his labours was drastically cut.

The Germans had therefore to stimulate volunteering by making work in occupied countries more difficult to come by and more unpleasant. Men who were physically fit but who declined to volunteer to go to Germany lost unemployment pay; men in prison for civil offences were released if they promised to go; managements were forced to dismiss entire categories of workers needed in Germany; factories were closed; normal working hours were extended to a seventy-two-hour week or a thirteen-hour day; ration cards were withheld. These measures were the bridge between voluntary recruitment and the use of physical force. Between May 1940 and May 1941 the foreign labour force in the Reich rose by almost two million, the percentage of foreign labour from 3.2 to 8.4. By mid-1944 the percentage was 19.7. The voluntary element became very thin, the more so after allied bombing added to the discomforts of working in Germany. Sauckel estimated in 1944 that out of five million foreigners working in Germany fewer than 200,000 had come voluntarily.

The first prisoners put to work were some two to three hundred thousand Poles captured in the 1939 campaign and this number was greatly increased by the German victories in west and east in 1940 and 1941. Thereafter there were close on two million prisoners working for Germany until the war ended. The rules of war which Germany had accepted permitted the employment of prisoners other than officers, but the conditions which Germany’s prisoners – most of them captured in the east – were forced to put up with during the Second World War contravened all the rules of war and of human decency. By 1944 about 40 per cent of them were, according to Albert Speer at Nuremberg, being used directly or indirectly in arms production. Non-commissioned officers were generally required to work and so too were Russian commissioned officers: the Nazis in effect did not recognize the validity of a Russian commission. Russian prisoners were paid half wages.

The German attitude to Russian combatants was one of calculated callousness. Since they regarded Slavs and communists as hardly better than Jews, the Germans killed them or allowed them to die with similar cruelty and, likewise, in millions. The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland. (About 800,000 were released either on the grounds that they were not Russians or for volunteering to serve against the Russians, leaving therefore about one million, of whom 875,000 were, by German standards, fit for work.) This slaughter of prisoners cannot be accounted for by the peculiar chaos of the war in the east. In such a war some prisoners will die through insufficient attention, but not millions of them. The true cause was the inhuman policy of the Nazis towards the Russians as a people and the acquiescence of army commanders in attitudes and conditions which amounted to a sentence of death on their prisoners. The Nazis encouraged barbarity against Russians by warning German troops to expect barbarity from them. The Russians were portrayed as uncivilized hordes. In addition the Germans made play with the fact that the USSR had not adhered to the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of prisoners of war, although it was known in Germany that the Russian armies had been ordered to observe the Geneva rules and the USSR had formally through Sweden requested reciprocal observance. In practice the Germans refused. Goering told Ciano that Russian prisoners of war, having eaten everything possible including the soles of their boots, had begun to eat each other and, ‘which is more serious, had also eaten a German sentry… some nations must be decimated… there is nothing to be done about it’.

As the war went on forced labour became the only possible answer to Germany’s problems. It was in addition sanctioned by ideology. On the day of the inauguration of Hans Frank’s régime in Poland all Jews were formally condemned to forced labour and all other Poles were equally formally deprived of any right to leisure. The obligation to work included the liability to be sent to work in Germany. These regulations were copied by Rosenberg in 1941 for the Baltic states and the USSR. They were enforced by terror. Any person resisting recruitment was likely to see his house burned down and his family seized as hostages and sent to a labour camp. One of Rosenberg’s principal officials compared the proceedings to the blackest days of the slave trade. He recorded that people were rounded up and shipped to Germany without any regard to health or age and that by 1942 over 100,000 had had to be sent back because they were utterly useless. Many of them died on the way and the next contingent of west-bound workers would have to wait until the dead bodies of their rejected compatriots had been thrown out of the windows in order to make room for them in the disgusting trains (which incidentally were badly needed by the army). Women gave birth in the trains and the babies were thrown out onto the embankment. One German official charged with the provision of skilled Ukrainian labour for the Reich complained that his trains were held up by returning transports filled with discarded persons packed fifty or sixty to a truck and that eastward and westward bound trains stood motionless alongside each other for long periods; he added that his recruits often went hungry in these circumstances and that even the German Red Cross refused to feed them on the grounds that they were Russian swine. Another official complained of the propaganda effects when 400,000 Ukrainian domestic helps were being sent to Germany and before they arrived the German press announced that they would have no free time, would not be allowed to go to cinemas, theatres or restaurants, and might only be absent from the house where they worked for three hours a week at the most. His memorandum denounced the political ineptitude of treating eastern Europeans as second class whites in the sight of the whole coloured world and reminded his colleagues that the Russians were fighting ‘with exceptional bravery and sacrifice for nothing more nor less than the recognition of their human dignity’. But the mixture of incompetence and callousness went on. By the end of the war the age limit for labour recruitment in the east had been lowered to ten.

The influx of foreign workers enabled Germany to shift labour from civilian to military employment – nearly six million by May 1941, nearly eight million a year later – without introducing compulsory service for women. In 1942 the number of women in civilian employment in Germany was lower by 189,000 than in 1939. But in 1942 the situation was radically altered by the failure to defeat the Russian armies in the field. In 1941 the German army had suffered heavy casualties for the first time and became a competitor with industry for men. In the autumn of 1942 Himmler concluded formal agreements with the Minister of Justice, Otto Thierack, and the Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, by which the inmates of concentration camps and prisoners of war were released for work in factories in return for the allocation to the SS of a percentage of their output of weapons. The hours of work of the concentration camp victims were unlimited and the Himmler-Thierack agreement provided that ‘antisocial’ persons might be worked to death.

Forcible recruitment of labour was introduced in the west and southeast as well as in the east. Stricter controls were imposed in the Reich and in March 1942 Fritz Sauckel was appointed Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labour with extensive powers over the recruitment, use and distribution of German and foreign labour. Sauckel, whose appointment was part of no plan but a reaction to external events, collected over two million more foreign workers by May 1943 and increased the total labour force in Germany by just under two million in one year in spite of the drain caused by the demands of the fighting services. But his field for recruitment was narrowing. Poland had already been forced to contribute to the limit of its capacity. South-eastern Europe could not be denuded without imperilling the supplies of food which it provided for the Reich. In the USSR skilled labour had retreated eastward with the Russian armies and unskilled labour was largely required by the military and civilian authorities in the German occupied zones. In western Europe unemployment had been eliminated by earlier labour drives and by the demands of factories which were working for the Reich. From 1943 the difficulties became even acuter in both east and west – in the east because the advancing Russian armies reduced the area from which labour might be drawn, and in the west because labour was needed locally to make good the shortfall in German factories occasioned by bottlenecks and bombing. Moreover the machinery of German control was breaking down. Even in the west the Germans ceased to operate through local governments and began to round up labour in the streets of big cities – in one operation in Marseilles they kidnapped 1,000 French police by forcing them into lorries while they were on an exercise – and to seize the fathers of men who took to the woods and hills. Yet in Belgium 23,000 men evaded compulsory labour service by escaping to the Ardennes and in one area of France 95 per cent of those called for labour service during the winter of 1943–4 got away. Metaphorically Sauckel was being required to squeeze blood from a stone. In practice his minions squeezed it from human beings as they combed Europe for workers. Until the last year of the war Sauckel produced enough manpower to keep war production going and even to increase it, but after the middle of 1944 the economy began to crumble and not even the appointment of yet another plenipotentiary – this time Goebbels as Plenipotentiary for Total War – could keep the factories going.

The conditions of the millions of foreigners who worked for Nazi Germany varied according to their skills and racial ratings, but even the most favoured were shockingly treated. Jews as a rule were exterminated even if capable of working. Eastern workers fared worse than western or southern ones, Russians worse than Poles, Poles worse than the Baltic nations. The best treated were the skilled Danes, Flemings, Swiss and Hungarians, after them the French and Dutch, further down the scale the less skilled and racially inferior Balkan and Mediterranean peoples, including Italians and Spaniards, for whom the Germans had little respect even though they did not inspire the loathing directed against Slavs. For all of them Sauckel decreed that they should be fed, housed and treated in such a way as to ensure maximum production at minimum cost, and eastern workers in particular were kept in conditions which, besides being horridly inhumane, were also inefficient since they made them unfit for work and so reduced their output unnecessarily quickly. Agricultural workers were mostly housed and fed by their employers, but factory workers lived in barracks or in camps where they were segregated in huts by nationality. The camps, which were for western workers, were guarded by men and barbed wire; the inmates were not allowed out except to work. The huts were badly built, scantily furnished and scandalously lacking in sanitation. They were overcrowded, unheated and, as the war went on, unrepaired. Rations were in theory the same as those of German civilians, although in the case of eastern workers there was not even a pretence that they were: Goering ordered Russians to be fed lightly and without seriously interfering with German rations. In the camps ration cards were surrendered to the commandant who was free to provide what he thought fit in exchange. The diet of an eastern worker in a German labour camp was never within 1,000 calories of the lowest German ration, and the quality of the food was so poor that disease and mortality rates were preternaturally high. Concentration-camp workers received a diet roughly equivalent to the 1941–2 Athens famine rate.

But from the German point of view these miserable victims served their purpose. They constituted a fifth of Germany’s wartime labour force; in 1944 there were seven million of them in the Reich. According to Albert Speer the western and Italian workers among them were at this date responsible for 25–30 per cent of the German effort. In addition Europe made, over the whole period of Germany’s dominion from 1940 to 1944, contributions in kind equivalent to 14 per cent of Germany’s own gross product and so increased by rather more than 50 per cent the resources available to Germany for the purchase of arms and equipment. No slave-driver could have hoped for more.