All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [316]
In occupied western Europe in 1940–41, the Nazis encountered many active or potential collaborators. The leaders of Vichy France were eager to pursue a partnership with the Reich, which could have gained the support of many people in France, and conceivably led to French belligerence against Britain. But Hitler’s economic exploitation of Pétain’s nation, notably by imposing an artificially high exchange rate for the mark against the franc, progressively alienated the French, even before the 1943 introduction of forced labour in Germany, the detested Service de Travail Obligatoire.
The Nazis’ mass deportations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine gravely damaged agricultural production. Many of the ethnic German colonists intended to replace the native inhabitants proved reluctant, as well as technically unqualified, to fulfil their appointed destinies. All history’s successful empires have rested partly on force majeure, but partly also upon offering conquered peoples compensations for subjection: stability, prosperity and a rule of law. The Nazis, by contrast, offered only brutality, corruption and administrative incompetence. They themselves would have argued that their cruelties were successful in suppressing strategically significant resistance to occupation everywhere save in Yugoslavia and Russia. This was true, but is only part of the story.
Many of the occupied countries, and especially France, made useful contributions to the German war economy under compulsion: in all, they supplied some 9.3 per cent of the Reich’s armaments, and Danish agriculture provided 10 per cent of Germany’s food needs. But Hitler might have fared better had he offered conquered peoples incentives as well as threats, rewards as well as draconian confiscations of property and commodities. The Nazis’ view of economics was grotesquely primitive. They regarded wealth creation as a zero-sum game, in which for Germany to gain, someone else must lose. The consequence was that, from 1940 onwards, Hitler’s empire was progressively pillaged to fund his war, a process that could end only in its bankruptcy.
The Nazi hierarchy was slow to comprehend the folly of slaughtering prospective slaves amid the national manpower crisis created by mobilisation of most of Germany’s population of military age. Adam Tooze has calculated that, in all, seven million men of working age – notably Jews, Poles and Russian PoWs – were killed or allowed to die by the Germans, most between 1941 and 1943. He describes the Holocaust as ‘a catastrophic destruction of labour power’. The Nazis in 1941–42 reasoned that their difficulties in feeding the German people were best assuaged by eliminating every unwanted mouth within their reach. At a Berlin meeting attended by Goering on 16 September 1941, food shortages were highlighted. The Reichsmarschal declared it to be unthinkable to reduce rations for Germany’s civilian population, ‘given the mood at home’: Hitler’s people required material as well as moral reassurance that the war was worth fighting.
The only answer, the Nazis concluded, was to reduce provision for native inhabitants of the occupied territories and Russian PoWs. On 13 November, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told his heads of department that ‘prisoners of war who are not working will have to starve’. Thus Russian prisoners began to die in vast numbers, some of hunger and others at the hands of guards granted unlimited licence to kill in order to control the herds of desperate humanity for which they were responsible. By 1 February 1942, almost 60 per cent of 3.35 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had perished; by 1945, 3.3 million were dead out of 5.7