Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [100]
Another factor making for integration was the need for labor. As more Germans went into the armed forces, and as the country eventually awoke to the needs of a long war, the need for factory and farm labor gradually increased. Germany began to draw on foreign labor pools. First, in spite of international agreements to the contrary, they started putting prisoners of war to work. There were something like a million French soldiers in Germany as prisoners after 1940. The Germans drafted many of them into their factories. This was not nearly enough, as the war continued, so they began to conscript foreign labor outright. In Vichy France, there was a labor draft; at first it was presented to the French as a patriotic gesture: if France would send so many volunteer workers, the Germans would release an equivalent number of prisoners of war. Needless to say, volunteering was not too popular, and the Vichy authorities were soon forced to resort to outright conscription. One result of this was to send large numbers of young men into the hill country, where they became recruits for the Resistance movement.
Eventually, there were as many as ten million foreign workers in Germany, manning the factories, working on the farms, doing the jobs that would ordinarily have been filled by young Germans. The young Germans were at war. It was a vicious circle; in the name of Nazi ideology—racial purity, living space, and all that—millions of Germans were fighting and dying in Russia, North Africa, and the mid-Atlantic. To make up for their being away, millions of Russians, Czechs, and French were at home in Germany, keeping the economy going so that more millions of Germans could go off and fight—so that more millions of foreigners could be brought into Germany, and so forth. In the long run the Germans were trading their own blood and that of their allies and subjects for other peoples’ goods and services, and finally they would run out of blood.
The compulsory labor system helped generate the Resistance movements, and it provided the greatest displacement of peoples since the barbarian migrations. Yet it was merely a footnote to the larger policies for which Hitler’s Germany will always be remembered. The Nazis are inseparable from their policy of systematic terror in eastern Europe, and the worst expression of it, the attempt to wipe out the Slavs and the Jews.
One of the ostensible reasons for which Germany launched the war was her need for Lebensraum, “living space.” It was a Hitlerian idea that Poland and western Russia should be cleared of inhabitants and colonized by Germans. Bizarre though it sounds, it was again an idea with deep roots in German history. The German migration to the east had gone on since the Middle Ages, and indeed, most of twentieth-century Germany was land originally colonized by German settlers moving east from the Rhine or the Elbe. The Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Knights, the German share of the partitions of Poland, the large access of territory claimed from Russia in 1918 at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, all were expressions of the same urge to eastern expansion. The difference between Hitler and his predecessors was that they had come in as overlords and reduced the inhabitants to dependent status; he planned to kill them.
The Poles bore the brunt of this. They were conquered two years before the invasion of Russia. The southern Slavic states were in some sort of allied status, so it was primarily in Poland, and then later in Russia, that German policies received their most thorough development.
The Germans started by drawing up lists of Poles. Germans who had come to live in Poland through the drawing of boundaries