Inferno - Max Hastings [318]
One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes, from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war. Almost all comparisons between Hitler and Churchill are otiose, but one seems significant: Britain’s leader provoked the exasperation of his ministers, as well as that of humbler fellow countrymen, by his refusal to seriously address domestic social reform until victory was achieved. Germany’s leader, in contrast, launched a drastic reordering of conquered societies in the east within weeks of their occupation. He conducted wholesale expulsions of indigenous populations to make way for German colonists, and slaughtered large numbers of people, notably Jews and social and political activists, heedless of whether they offered resistance to his hegemony. Ignoring the human horror—as of course did the Nazis—these policies imposed enormous economic and agricultural disruption on Hitler’s war machine. Some members of designated lesser races enlisted in Nazi service to secure food or pay, or because they hated Jews, or because they merely relished opportunities for exercising dominion and indulging cruelty; but oppression embittered millions of Stalin’s former subjects who might have become willing German acolytes.
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 the 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 it 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 percent of the Reich’s armaments, and Danish agriculture provided 10 percent 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