Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [102]
The Germans responded by taking hostages, executing them and, in many cases, wiping out whole villages. Himmler announced that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was to reduce the population of “Slavdom” by thirty million, and the anti-partisan operations were partly used as an excuse to do so.
There were of course ironic and tragic side-effects to all this. As the Germans needed more men, thousands of non-Communist or anti-Communist Russians were recruited into the German Army. Just as Russians who had tried to wipe out Poles later raised Polish bodies of troops, whom they eventually released to the West, so Germans who had tried to wipe out Russians raised Russian bodies of troops. A captured Russian general, Andrei Vlassov, was used as a rallying-point for Russian prisoners. Relatively few joined him, mostly to escape death in one form or another, and the force never became effective; the Germans could not overcome their ideological preconceptions and frittered away whatever chance there might have been of sowing political confusion in Russia. Not that there was much chance once their policies created opposition, anyway. In all, probably three of the five million prisoners taken by the Germans died, as well as fifteen to twenty million Russian soldiers and civilians. Nothing could overcome the hatred generated by that fact.
The survivors of the German camps did not fare much better once they were released. Official Communist doctrine was that it was a sin to surrender to the enemy. At the end of the war returning prisoners were treated very badly; many of them went from German prison camps to Russian labor camps, in some cases not to be released until the death of Stalin in 1953. Needless to say, German prisoners of war in Russia were treated the same way.
If Poles and Russians were to be reduced to subhuman levels, the Jews were to be exterminated. This policy developed during the war. Before 1939, the Germans were content to rob, beat, and deport German Jews; their ideas evolved with success. In the early stages of the war, they moved toward the creation of a super-ghetto in the Government General of Poland, herding Polish Jews into it and then gradually bringing in Jews from other conquered areas as well. When they took over France, they toyed momentarily with the idea of creating a great Jewish ghetto in the French colonial territory of Madagascar. The idea lacked practicality, however, so as they moved into Russia, and brought several million more Jews under their control, they hit on a logically more satisfying approach, a “final solution” to their problem. To Hitler and his followers the Jews represented all that was decadent and despicable. They would, therefore, produce an aesthetically and philosophically satisfying answer to what to do with them: they would kill them all.
The problem of how to do it was handed by Goering to Reinhard Heydrich of the SS. By late 1941 and early 1942, things were moving. The Germans had already introduced mobile vans into the Government General. Jews were placed in these, ostensibly for delousing, and gassed, after which the truck simply drove off with the bodies. It was a relatively small-scale operation, however, and the Germans soon moved to the idea of extermination camps, based on their own already existent concentration camps. They built four of these in Poland—Belsen, Maydanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka—and converted a labor camp in Silesia named Auschwitz. The Jews were systematically rounded up, loaded aboard trains or truck convoys, and taken on their one-way journey to the camps. Auschwitz achieved for its rulers a proud record of peak performance: 12,000 victims a day, sorted, gassed, cremated, disposed of. There were “scientific” experiments as well: how long could a man stay in freezing water before it killed him; how much faster could you operate without