Inferno - Max Hastings [320]
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 percent, perhaps as much as 30 percent. 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 Jews
THE EDIFICE OF HOLOCAUST literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance. The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology but to Germany’s policies throughout the global conflict. The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfil objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime. Göring asserted at a key party meeting on 12 November 1938, following Kristallnacht: “If, in the near future, the German Reich should come into conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany should first of all let it come to a showdown with the Jews.”
At that time, Nazi policy still promoted the emigration of German Jews, but a November 1939 article in the SS journal Schwartze Korps asserted the commitment to “the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total extermination.” Many such remarks were made openly and publicly by leading Nazis: Hitler made his notorious “prophecy” in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, asserting that war would result in “the annihilation of European Jewry.” He sought to make it plain that every Jew within his reach was a hostage for the “good behaviour” of the Western powers. If the British and French declined to acquiesce in his ambitions—above all if they chose to oppose these with force—the consequences would be their responsibility.
The Western powers treated such remarks as hyperbolic. Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemispheric conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly educated and long-civilised European society could fulfil their leaders’ extravagant rhetoric and implement genocide. Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945, and even for a time afterwards.
The Nazi T4 euthanasia programme, which began in July 1939, killed German and Polish inmates of psychiatric units, categorised as “unfit for further existence,” at a rate of some 5,000 a month in 1940. Most were gassed, though some were shot, under Gestapo and SS supervision with assistance from doctors; between 4,000 and 5,000 of the 70,000 victims were Jewish. The T4 programme was historically important, because at an early stage it demonstrated the German government’s willingness to undertake an annihilatory process, minutely bureaucratised from Berlin, to eliminate a subgroup surplus to the Third Reich’s requirements.