Armageddon - Max Hastings [281]
By 1945, the custody, exploitation and murder of prisoners had become the largest activities in Germany beyond the military struggle. In computing scale, it is impossible to distinguish accurately between voluntary and forced labourers. Only approximate estimates are feasible. Even after the killing of nine million German captives since 1939, between eight and ten million foreign men, women and children remained in Hitler’s dominions, held in varying degrees of proximity to death. These figures take no account of entire nations still held captive, such as the Dutch. From every country which fell under Hitler’s sway after 1939, the Nazis herded men and women in vast numbers into the Greater Reich. The circumstances of their bondage varied greatly. First, there were American and British military PoWs. Although these suffered hunger and intermittent brutality, most were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Their captivity was relatively humane until the last months of the war. Many were then marched hundreds of miles under dreadful conditions, as the Germans sought to prevent their liberation. Some thousands died in consequence.
Next down the hierarchy came French, Polish and Italian PoWs, who were treated less well. Many were sent to work for German factories and farms in conditions that ranged between tolerable and barbaric. Some 1.8 million PoWs were directly employed in the German war economy. Beyond these, some 7.8 million paid and forced labourers from all over Europe sustained German industry in the absence at the front or in the grave of much of its workforce. Some 500,000 Ukrainian women, for instance, were shipped to Germany between 1942 and 1944 to boost civilian morale by reinforcing the ranks of domestic servants. Nothing gave greater impetus to Resistance movements throughout occupied Europe than the anxiety of young men to escape deportation for forced labour. Many of those shipped to Germany were treated as slaves. Hundreds of thousands died. Six hundred thousand Italian “military internees” were treated with special cruelty by Germans embittered about the perceived betrayal of the Reich by Italy’s 1943 surrender.
Beyond these again were the last categories: Jews, together with political prisoners and Russians. The Jews were singled out for extermination, and in that sense their fate was unique. In the last year of the war, the pace of killing quickened. Those who survived did so merely by accident, because the Nazi death machine faltered amid the disruptions and administrative inconveniences imposed by defeat. But in considering Nazi servitude as a phenomenon it should be remembered that Germany also presided over the killing of a host of people who were not Jewish. At least three million Russians and hundreds of thousands of other enemies of Hitler died in captivity. Two million Soviet prisoners, Poles, Gypsies and other “anti-social elements” were killed at Auschwitz alone, in addition to two million Jews. Many victims were merely allowed to perish in the concentration-camp system, rather than being deliberately gassed. Every Western allied prisoner who glimpsed a compound inhabited by Russians recognized how fortunate were his own circumstances in comparison. Germany’s excuse was that the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, and thus that Stalin’s soldiers could not expect its protection. Every day in every camp in which Russians were held, men died of disease, hunger or cruelty.
It is an odd reflection of the Nazi psyche that Hitler chose to keep millions of Russians on the brink of death rather than to shoot or gas them. The Third Reich’s immense network of camps required tens of thousands of staff to ser-vice and guard its inmates, men who might otherwise have rendered service at the front. The SS directly employed some 300,000 prisoners manufacturing consumer goods for commercial sale and small quantities of ammunition, but these activities were so inefficiently and corruptly