The initial victories of the Germans and the Japanese gave them the opportunity to create new orders in Europe and Asia. Although both countries presented positive images of these new orders for publicity purposes, in practice both followed policies of ruthless domination of their subject peoples.
After the German victories in Europe, Nazi propagandists created glowing images of a new European order based on “equal chances” for all nations and an integrated economic community. This was not Hitler’s conception of a European New Order. He saw the Europe he had conquered simply as subject to German domination. Only the Germans, he once said, “can really organize Europe.”
The Nazi empire stretched across continental Europe from the English Channel in the west to the outskirts of Moscow in the east. In no way was this empire organized systematically or governed efficiently. Some states – Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, and Turkey – remained neutral and outside the empire. Germany’s allies-Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland-kept their independence but found themselves increasingly restricted by the Germans as the war progressed. The remainder of Europe was largely organized in one of two ways. Some areas, such as western Poland, were directly annexed by Nazi Germany and made into German provinces. Most of occupied Europe was administered by German military or civilian officials, combined with varying degrees of indirect control from collaborationist regimes. Competing lines of authority by different offices in occupied Europe made German occupation inefficient.
Racial considerations played an important role in how conquered peoples were treated in the Nazi New Order. The Germans established civil administrations in Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands because the Nazis considered their peoples Aryan, racially akin to the Germans and hence worthy of more lenient treatment. “Inferior” Latin peoples, such as the occupied French, were given military administrations. By 1943, however, as Nazi losses continued to multiply, all the occupied territories of northern and western Europe were ruthlessly exploited for material goods and workers for Germany’s war needs.
PLANS FOR AN ARYAN RACIAL EMPIRE Because the conquered lands in the east contained the living space for German expansion and were populated in Nazi eyes by racially inferior Slavic peoples, Nazi administration there was considerably more brutal. Hitler’s racial ideology and his plans for an Aryan racial empire were so important to him that he and the Nazis began to implement their racial program soon after the conquest of Poland. Heinrich Himmler, a strong believer in Nazi racial ideology and the leader of the SS, was put in charge of German resettlement plans in the east. Himmler’s task was to evacuate the inferior Slavic peoples and replace them with Germans, a policy first applied to the new German provinces created from the lands of western Poland. One million Poles were uprooted and dumped in southern Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans (descendants of Germans who had migrated years earlier from Germany to various parts of southern and eastern Europe) were encouraged to colonize the designated areas in Poland. By 1942, 2 million ethnic Germans had settled in Poland.The invasion of the Soviet Union inflated Nazi visions of German colonization in the east. Hitler spoke to his intimate circle of a colossal project of social engineering after the war, in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Soviets would become slave labor and German peasants would settle on the abandoned lands and Germanize them (see the box above). Nazis involved in this kind of planning were well aware of the human costs. Himmler told a gathering of SS officers that although the destruction of 30 million Slavs was a prerequisite for German plans in the east, “whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. Otherwise it is of no interest. “9
ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION Economically, the Nazi New Order meant the ruthless exploitation of conquered Europe’s resources. In eastern Europe, economic exploitation was direct and severe. The Germans seized raw materials, machines, and food, leaving only enough to maintain local peoples at a bare subsistence level. Although the Germans adopted legal formalities in their economic exploitation of western Europe, military supplies and important raw materials were taken outright. As Nazi policies created drastic shortages of food, clothing, and shelter, many Europeans suffered severely. USE OF FOREIGN WORKERS Labor shortages in Germany led to a policy of forced mobilization of foreign labor for Germany. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the 4 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans became a major source of heavy labor, but it was wasted by allowing 3 million of them to die from neglect. In 1942, a special office was created to recruit labor for German farms and industries. By the summer of 1944, 7 million foreign workers were laboring in Germany and constituted 20 percent of Germany’s labor force. At the same time, another 7 million workers were supplying forced labor in their own countries on farms, in industries, and even in military camps. Forced labor of ten proved counterproductive, however, because it created economic chaos in occupied countries and disrupted industrial production that could have helped Germany. Even worse for the Germans, the brutal character of Germany’s recruitment policies of ten caused more and more people to resist the Nazi occupation forces.German policies toward conquered peoples quickly led to the emergence of resistance movements throughout Europe, especially in the east, where brutality toward the native peoples produced a strong reaction. In Ukraine and the Baltic states, for example, the Germans were initially hailed as liberators from Communist rule, but Hitler’s policies of treating Slavic peoples as subhumans only drove those peoples to support and join guerrilla forces.
RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE Resistance movements were formed throughout Europe. Active resisters committed acts of sabotage against German installations, assassinated German officials, disseminated anti-German newspapers, wrote anti-German sentiments on walls, and spied on German military positions for the Allies. Some anti-Nazi groups from occupied countries, such as the Free French movement under Charles de Gaulle (SHAHRL duh GOHL), created governments-in-exile in London. In some countries, resistance groups even grew strong enough to take on the Germans in pitched battles. In Yugoslavia, for example, Josip Broz (yaw-SEEP BRAWZ), known as Tito (TEE-toh) (1892-1980), led a band of guerrillas against German occupation forces. By 1944, his partisan army numbered 250,000, including 100,000 women.After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Communists throughout Europe assumed leadership roles in underground resistance movements. This sometimes led to conflict with other local resistance groups who feared the postwar consequences of Communist power. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement, for example, thwarted the attempt of French Communists to dominate the major French resistance groups.
Women, too, joined resistance movements in large numbers throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Women served as message carriers, planted bombs in Nazi headquarters, assassinated Nazi officers, published and distributed anti-German underground newspapers, spied on German military movements and positions, and used shopping baskets to carry weapons, medicines, and money to help their causes. In Norway, women smuggled Jews into neutral Sweden. In Greece, wives dressed their husbands as women to save them when the Nazis tried to stop acts of sabotage by vicious reprisals in which they executed all the males of a village.
RESISTANCE IN GERMANY Germany had its resistance movements, too, although the increased control of the SS over everyday life made resistance both dangerous and ineffectual. The White Rose movement involved an attempt by a small group of students and one professor at the University of Munich to distribute pamphlets denouncing the Nazi regime as lawless, criminal, and godless. Its members were caught, attested, and promptly executed. Likewise, the Gestapo (guh-STAH-poh) (the secret police) crushed most Communist resistance groups.Only one plot against Hitler and the Nazi regime came remotely close to success. It was the work primarily of a group of military officers and conservative politicians who were appalled at Hitler’s warmongering and sickened by the wartime atrocities he had encouraged. One of their number, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg (KLOWSS fun SHTOW-fen-berk) (1907-1944), believed that only the elimination of Hitler would bring the overthrow of the Nazi regime. On July 20, 1944, a bomb planted by Stauffenberg in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters exploded, but it failed to kill the dictator. The plot was then quickly uncovered and crushed. Five thousand people were executed, and Hitler remained in control of Germany.
No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more terrifying than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe. Racial struggle was a key element in Hitler’s ideology and meant to him a clearly defined conflict of opposites: the Aryans, creators of human cultural development, against the Jews, parasites who were trying to destroy the Aryans. At a meeting of the Nazi Party in 1922, Hitler proclaimed, “There can be no compromise-there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” Although Hitler later toned down his anti-Semitic message when his party sought mass electoral victories, anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in Nazism and resulted in a wave of legislative acts against the Jews between 1933 and 1939 (see Chapter 26).
EARLY NAZI POLICY By the beginning of 1939, Nazi policy focused on promoting the “emigration” of German Jews from Germany. At the same time, Hitler had given ominous warnings about the future of Europe’s Jewish population. When he addressed the German Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he stated:I have of ten been a prophet in life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state and thereby of the entire Volk and then, among many other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem .. .. Today I will be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.
At the time, emigration was still the favored policy. Once the war began in September 1939, the so-called Jewish problem took on new dimensions. For a while, there was discussion of the Madagascar Plan, which aspired to the mass shipment of Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa. When war contingencies made this plan impracticable, an even more drastic policy was conceived (see the Film & History feature above).
THE SS AND THE EINSATZGRUPPEN Heinrich Himmler and the SS organization closely shared Adolf Hitler’s racial ideology. The SS was given responsibility for what the Nazis called their Final Solution to the Jewish problem-the annihilation of the Jewish people. Reinhard Heydrich (RYN-hart HY-drikh) (1904-1942), head of the SS’s Security Service, was assigned administrative responsibility for the Final Solution. After the defeat of Poland, Heydrich ordered the special strike forces – Einsatzgruppen (YN-zahtz-groop-un) – that he had created to round up all Polish Jews and concentrate them in ghettos established in a number of Polish cities.In June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were given new responsibilities as mobile killing units. These SS death squads followed the regular army’s advance into the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jews in their villages and execute and bury them in mass graves, of ten giant pits dug by the victims themselves before they were shot. The leader of one of these death squads described the mode of operation:
The unit selected for this task would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables to the leaders of the unit, and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women, and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch.
Such regular killing created morale problems among the SS executioners. During a visit to Minsk in the Soviet Union, SS leader Himmler tried to build morale by pointing out that “he would not like it if Germans did such a thing gladly. But their conscience was in no way impaired, for they were soldiers who had to carry out every order unconditionally. He alone had responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that was happening, ... and he was acting from a deep understanding of the necessity for this operation.”
THE DEATH CAMPS Although it has been estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed as many as one million Jews, this approach to solving the Jewish problem was soon perceived as inadequate. Instead, the Nazis opted for the systematic annihilation of the European Jewish population in specially built death camps. The plan was simple. Jews from countries occupied by Germany (or sympathetic to Germany) would be rounded up, packed like cattle into freight trains, and shipped to Poland, where six extermination centers were built for this purpose (see Map 27.4). The largest and most infamous was Auschwitz-Birkenau (OWSH-vitz-BEER-kuh-now). Technical assistance for the construction of the camps was provided by experts from the T -4 program, which had been responsible for the extermination of 80,000 alleged racially unfit mental and physical defectives in Germany between 1938 and 1941. Based on their experiences, medical technicians chose Zyklon B (the commercial name for hydrogen cyanide) as the most effective gas for quickly killing large numbers of people in gas chambers designed to look like shower rooms to facilitate the cooperation of the victims. After gassing, the corpses would be burned in specially built crematoria. To inform party and state officials of the general procedures for the Final Solution, a conference was held at Wannsee (VAHN-zay), outside Berlin, on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich outlined the steps that would now be taken to “solve the Jewish question.” He explained how “in the course of the practical implementation of the final solution Europe is to be combed through from west to east” for Jews, who would then be brought “group by group, into so-called transit ghettos, to be transported from there farther to the east.” The conference then worked out all of the bureaucratic details so that party and state officials would cooperate fully in the final elimination of the Jews.By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in operation. Although the elimination of the ghettos in Poland was the first priority, by the summer of 1942, Jews were also being shipped from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In 1943, there were shipments of Jews from the capital cities of Berlin, Vienna, and Prague and from Greece, southern France, Italy, and Denmark. Even as the Allies were making important advances in 1944, Jews were being shipped from Greece and Hungary. These shipments depended on the cooperation of Germany’s Transport Ministry, and despite desperate military needs, the Final Solution had priority in using railroad cars for the transportation of Jews to the death camps. Even the military argument that Jews could be used to produce armaments was overridden by the demands of extermination.
A harrowing experience awaited the Jews when they arrived at one of the six death camps. Rudolf Hess (HESS), commandant at Auschwitz-Birkenau, described it:
We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. . .. At Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact.
About 30 percent of the arrivals at Auschwitz were sent to a labor camp; the remainder went to the gas chambers. A French doctor described the process:
It is mid-day, when a long line of women, children, and old people enter the yard.... The senior official in charge ... climbs on a bench to tell them that they are going to have a bath and that afterward they will get a drink of hot coffee. They all undress in the yard. . . . The doors are opened and an indescribable jostling begins. The first people to enter the gas chamber begin to draw back. They sense the death which awaits them. The SS men put an end to this pushing and shoving with blows from their rifle butts beating the heads of the horrified women who are desperately hugging their children. The massive oak double doors are shut. For two endless minutes one can hear banging on the walls and screams which are no longer human. And then-not a sound. Five minutes later the doors are opened. The corpses, squashed together and distorted, fall out like a waterfall.... The bodies which are still warm pass through the hands of the hairdresser who cuts their hair and the dentist who pulls out their gold teeth.... One more transport has just been processed through No. IV crematorium.
After they had been gassed, the bodies were burned in the crematoria. The victims’ goods and even their bodies were used for economic gain. Female hair was cut off, collected, and turned into mattresses or cloth. Some inmates were also subjected to cruel and painful “medical” experiments. The Germans killed between 5 and 6 million Jews, more than 3 million of them in the death camps. Virtually 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Germany were exterminated. Overall, the Holocaust was responsible for the death of nearly two out of every three European Jews (see the box on p. 855).
THE OTHER HOLOCAUST The Nazis were also responsible for the deliberate death by shooting, starvation, or overwork of at least another 9 to 10 million people. Because the Nazis also considered the Gypsies of Europe (like the Jews) a race containing alien blood, they were systematically rounded up for extermination. About 40 percent of Europe’s one million Gypsies were killed in the death camps. The leading elements of the “subhuman” Slavic peoples-the clergy, intelligentsia, civil leaders, judges, and lawyers-were arrested and deliberately killed. Probably, an additional 4 million Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians lost their lives as slave laborers for Nazi Germany, and at least 3 to 4 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed in captivity. The Nazis also singled out homosexuals for persecution, and thousands lost their lives in concentration camps.Once Japan’s takeover was completed, Japanese war policy in the occupied areas in Asia became essentially defensive, as Japan hoped to use its new possessions to meet its needs for raw materials, such as tin, oil, and rubber, as well as to serve as an outlet for Japanese manufactured goods. To provide a structure for the arrangement, Japanese leaders set up the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a self-sufficient community designed to provide mutual benefits to the occupied areas and the home country.
The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia had been accomplished under the slogan “Asia for the Asians.” Japanese officials in occupied territories quickly promised that independent governments would be established under Japanese tutelage. Such governments were eventually established in Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
In fact, however, real power rested with Japanese military authorities in each territory, and the local Japanese military command was directly subordinated to the army general staff in Tokyo. The economic resources of the colonies were exploited for the benefit of the Japanese war machine, while natives were recruited to serve in local military units or were conscripted to work on public works projects. In some cases, the people living in the occupied areas were subjected to severe hardships.
Like German soldiers in occupied Europe, Japanese military forces of ten had little respect for the lives of their subject peoples. In their conquest of Nanjing, China, in 1937, Japanese soldiers had spent several days killing, raping, and looting. Almost 800,000 Koreans were sent overseas, most of them as forced laborers, to Japan. Tens of thousands of Korean women were forced to serve as “comfort women” (prostitutes) for Japanese troops. In construction projects to help their war effort, the Japanese also made extensive use of labor forces composed of both prisoners of war and local peoples. In building the Burma-Thailand railway in 1943, for example, the Japanese used 61,000 Australian, British, and Dutch prisoners of war and almost 300,000 workers from Burma, Malaya, Thailand, and the Dutch East Indies. By the time the railway was completed, 12,000 Allied prisoners of war and 90,000 native workers had died from the inadequate diet and appalling working conditions in an unhealthy climate.