Armageddon - Max Hastings [122]
The Greater German Reich created by Hitler embraced a population of 116 million people and an area of 344,000 square miles including much of Poland and Czechoslovakia, together with Alsace-Lorraine. Yet German industry had become heavily dependent upon foreign labour: 28.6 million German factory workers—14.1 million men, 14.5 million women—now required the support of 7.8 million foreigners, and still there were never enough hands at the lathes and assembly lines (not surprising, one might think, when to sustain morale the Nazis encouraged Germans to retain their domestic servants, of whom almost a million and a half were still butlering and maiding to the very end). Some of the foreign workers were volunteers, who had come to Germany in search of higher wages than they could hope to earn in their own occupied countries. Most, however, were forced labourers, rounded up in tens of thousands by German troops in France, Poland, Russia and every other nation under Nazi domination, for shipment under guard to Germany. The failure to exploit their individual skills, the policy of treating them merely as working animals—sending the biggest and fittest to the mines, for instance—was one of the most serious mistakes of Hitler’s war economy.
Though all the labourers suffered hunger, the intensity of their sufferings varied immensely. The west Europeans were treated far better than the peoples from the east, whose plight will be examined below. In addition, German industry and agriculture were bolstered by 1.8 million prisoners of war. By 1945 imported workers of one kind or another made up a fifth of Germany’s entire civilian labour force. Almost every community and farm in Germany possessed its quota of enemy aliens, some resigned to their lot, many treated as neither more nor less than slaves. Without them the German war economy would have collapsed long before it did. Since the Germans troubled themselves little about protecting PoWs and foreign workers from air raids, allied bombing killed thousands of such Nazi captives. A statistical breakdown of 8,000 victims of the catastrophic RAF raid on Darmstadt in September 1944 showed that 936 were military personnel; 1,766 were male civilians, 2,742 female; 2,129 children; 368 prisoners of war; and 492 foreign labourers. These proportions were approximately replicated in every German city which suffered bombardment. The RAF’s legendary Dambusters’ raid in 1943 killed 147 Germans, together with 712 prisoners of war and foreign labourers, 493 of these Ukrainian women. Among 720 victims of a typical RAF raid on Berlin, 249 were slave labourers permitted no access to shelters.
Above all, Germany faced a desperate shortage of fuel. The loss of eastern oilfields to the Soviets, together with American bombing, had imposed upon Hitler’s empire a crisis that was strangling the training of pilots, the deployment of armies, even the movement of tanks on the battlefield. Charcoal-driven cars, trucks and buses, together with horses and carts, had replaced petrol-fuelled transport throughout Germany, for everyone save the armed forces and the Nazi bureaucracy. Allied assaults on communications imposed chronic delay on all train journeys. Astonishingly, however, so dense was the rail net that until the spring of 1945 it remained possible to travel by train across the country for anyone willing to endure interruptions, diversions and sometimes Allied strafing. German soldiers continued to receive rations and mail in the most desperate circumstances. “It was fantastic how well the logistical arrangements worked, almost to the end,” observed Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder.
One of the few merits of Germany’s vastly shortened lines of communication was that many soldiers now received mail from home a week after it was posted, rather than a month or more, as was commonplace in the days when Hitler