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Only in 1943 did the Nazis acknowledge that hungry mouths also had useful hands: they belatedly accepted the value, indeed indispensability, of keeping prisoners alive to bolster Germany’s shrinking industrial labour force. When this new policy was implemented, Goering observed with complacency that Russians performed 80 per cent of the construction work on his Ju87 Stukas. By the autumn of 1944, almost eight million foreign labourers and PoWs were engaged in the German economy, 20 per cent of its workforce. BMW employed 16,600 prisoners at its Munich plant alone; though still treated with institutionalised cruelty, their rations were increased just sufficiently to sustain life. Industrial employers asked that punishments should be administered behind the wire of workers’ quarters, rather than in open view on factory premises, to avoid distressing German staff. A vast complex of guarded quarters was established in and around every major German city, to house foreigners of all kinds. The Munich area harboured 120 PoW facilities, 286 barracks and hostels for civilians and a brothel to service them, together with seven concentration camp outstations including a branch of Dachau – 80,000 bedspaces.

It was impossible for most German civilians credibly to deny knowledge of the concentration camps or the slave-labour system: little girls living near Ravensbrück were seen playing a game of ‘camp guards’; prisoners were widely used for firefighting, rescue work and clearing rubble in the wake of air raids. They were also dispatched to deal with unexploded bombs, a task so often fatal that SS men convicted of crimes were preferred as guards for such squads. To ensure that slaves were readily available, local satellite camps were established in urban areas. Prisoners from Sachsenhausen, for instance, were drafted into nearby Berlin, where their striped clothing caused civilians to refer to them as ‘zebras’. In Osnabrück, mothers complained to the SS that children in the schoolyard were obliged to witness slaves being beaten by their guards. The SS responded that ‘If the children aren’t tough enough yet, they have to be hardened.’

Local authorities were generally appreciative of such cheap labour, which the Mayor of Duisburg described as ‘highly satisfactory’. But some civilians deplored alleged coddling: a road contractor wrote in March 1944, ‘We are still much too soft on PoWs and other labour squads in our streets. I say, better throw one man overboard than let us drown.’ The SS frequently used prisoners to collect loot from wrecked buildings for their own profit – in Düsseldorf two men were shot lest they reveal their jailers’ racketeering. Civilian doctors frequently signed false death certificates for prisoners shot or beaten to death; in this as in much else, the German medical profession displayed its readiness to oblige the Nazi regime. Slave labourers continued to die even after being enlisted in the service of Reich industries, partly because a tension persisted between the need for their services, and Nazi reluctance to feed them. By one calculation, 170,000 of 2.77 million Russian civilian workers perished, along with 130,000 Poles and 32,000 Italian PoWs.

From 1943 onwards, however, prisoner mortality declined sharply. Even some Jews were kept alive, notably as workers at the huge IG Farben complex beside Auschwitz-Birkenau. The major Holocaust killings, save those of Hungary’s Jews, were already completed. Foreign workers and slaves never provided a wholly satisfactory substitute labour force – they were thought to underperform their German counterparts by at least 15 per cent, perhaps as much as 30 per cent. It was a folly, as well as a barbarity, to suppose that starved and brutalised slave labourers could achieve as much useful productivity as those treated with minimal humanity. The concentration camp system, which the SS sought to make a profit centre, was inefficient even on its own terms, but slave labour alone made it possible for Germany to continue the war until 1945.

2 KILLING