The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (72 page)

Pearl Harbor.

Still, Nazi Europe seemed entirely secure at this point. German submarines kept Britain under siege and slowed the American

deployment to Europe. In 1942, renewed German offensives pushed

the Third Reich’s boundaries to the Volga River. With a fi rm hold

over western Europe and its armies advancing steadily in Russia and

North Africa, the Nazi regime had the breathing space to begin the

process of organizing its conquests into a formal empire.

In terms of administration, the workings of the German metropole

remained largely unchanged from the prewar era, and the annexed

territories restored to the fatherland became
Gaue
. Based on the old

Reichstag electoral districts, these Nazi administrative units allowed

party luminaries to exercise sweeping executive powers. The conquered peoples living in the new
Gaue
became eligible for citizenship

if they were suffi ciently “German” or faced expulsion and enslavement if they were not.

The necessity of keeping the Vichy French regime compliant dissuaded the Nazis from formally annexing Alsace-Lorraine, but both

regions came under the authority of the adjoining German
Gaue
. Hitler ordered their
Gauleiters
to return the largely German-speaking

Alsatian population to their Teutonic roots. The result was a program

of forced Germanization that deported hundreds of thousands of Jews

and French-speakers to France, imposed German as the language of

administration and commerce, and imported uniformed teachers

from the Reich to staff the schools. The Germans stripped buildings

370 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

of French architectural features, pulled down statues of Joan of Arc,

burned French books, and decreed that wedding rings be worn on

the right hand, in the proper German fashion. Speaking French or

even wearing berets brought fi nes and imprisonment, but those who

embraced their new Germanness had the dubious privilege of becoming eligible for conscription into Hitler’s army.

The Reich Ministry of the Interior was responsible for creating a uniform administrative system for the occupied territories

that the Nazis did not annex. Not surprisingly, military viceroys

and civilian governors answered directly to Hitler, who tended to

make policy decisions based on personal whims. This meant that

there never was a coherent system of Nazi imperial rule. The Third

Reich actually governed Europe through a patchwork arrangement

of satellite states, puppet regimes, military governments, and civil

administrations.

In the occupied western territories Hitler was generally willing

to make a show of following the Hague Conventions on conquest

and occupation so long as their populations accepted their subject status passively. This policy produced the standard system of indirect

rule that was common to most empires. Werner Best, the chief of the

civil administration in France and Reich plenipotentiary in Denmark,

described the German version of governance in western Europe as

wenig zu regieren
(govern little). This approach was born of the

same realities that shaped earlier imperial administrative systems:

the Nazis lacked the manpower and resources to rule directly. With

only three thousand offi cials in all of occupied France, the German

administration had no choice but to rely on French bureaucrats and

policemen.19 This meant they had to temper their demands on subject

populations out of sheer necessity.

The Nazis treaded the most gently in Denmark and Norway

because they considered Scandinavians fellow Aryans. Overruling

the generals who lobbied for military rule, Hitler placed the Danes

and Norwegians under the German Foreign Offi ce. In Denmark, German troops had orders not to offend the Danes’ national honor, and

the government that surrendered in 1940 ran the country under German supervision until limited Danish resistance forced the Nazis to

assert more direct control in 1943. In Norway, King Haakon escaped

to Britain, but the Germans found willing allies in Vidkun Quisling

and a small group of Norwegian fascists. Quisling’s role in passing

France under the Nazis 371

Norwegian military secrets to the Nazis made him so unpopular that

his name became synonymous with treason, but the Germans still

managed to cobble together an effective government of Norwegian

ministers under his nominal supervision.

In the Low Countries, the Nazi regime similarly ruled through

senior bureaucrats after the Dutch and Belgian prime ministers

established governments in exile in London. Queen Wilhelmina of

the Netherlands also escaped, but King Leopold III let the Germans

capture him. His unexpected decision to surrender the Belgian army

during the Nazi invasion left the Allied forces vulnerable and cost

him much of his legitimacy after the Belgian government in Britain

repudiated his actions. The Austrian Nazi Party functionary Artur

Seyss-Inquart was the
Reichskommissar
in the Netherlands, while

Belgium’s strategic value as a staging area for the air war against

Britain kept it under direct military rule. The Germans had to carry

out the day-to-day administration of both countries through highranking civil servants in key government ministries and insisted on

direct control over only the police and security services.

While most western Europeans tried to keep the Nazis at arm’s

length, as in all imperial societies there were still individuals who

made themselves useful to the conquering regime. Some were committed fascists who enthusiastically sought an infl uential role in the

new Europe by forging an alliance with the Nazis, but Hitler distrusted them as potential competitors. They also lacked suffi cient popular support to play an effective role in indirect rule. The most useful

Nazi intermediaries were actually the civil servants who remained at

their posts. Some simply hoped to spare their countrymen from the

abuses of direct imperial rule, but others were apolitical functionaries who advanced their careers through service to the new regime.

Jacobus Lambertus Lentz, the head of the Inspectorate for Population

Registers, was one such opportunist who helped the Nazis implement

a highly effi cient identity card system in the Netherlands because the

Dutch government had blocked his plans for a similar system on the

grounds that it treated citizens like criminals.20

Eastern Europeans, by comparison, did not have the opportunity to

collaborate in similar fashion. While the Nazis created puppet regimes

in the Balkans, they followed a hybrid imperial/colonial strategy in

the east that aimed to either exploit the labor of subject populations

or destroy them entirely to create room for German settlers. These

372 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

agendas were obviously contradictory, for it was impossible to wring

wealth out of people that had been exterminated. As an army logistics

expert in the Ukraine warned: “If we shoot the Jews, let the prisoners

of war die, allow much of the big city population to starve to death,

we cannot answer the question: who will then produce economic

assets here?”21 The Nazis’ imperial incoherency was due primarily

to the competition between civil administrators, labor ministry offi cials, central planners, social scientists,
Gauleiters
, and SS ideologues

to advance their personal agendas in the occupied eastern territories.

The result was a sort of reverse eastward barbarian invasion with the

Nazis playing the role of the Goths and Huns who had preyed on the

Roman Empire.

The Poles were the fi rst to suffer the consequences of the German

eastern imperial agenda. Just as the delegates to the Berlin Conference redrew the political map of Africa, the Nazis reordered what was

left of Poland. To populate this new eastern frontier, Heinrich Himmler’s Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Nationhood

recruited two million ethnic Germans from throughout the region.

After carving out German settlement colonies, they left the Poles a

rump state called the General Government of the Occupied Polish

Territories. Rejecting the Poles’ right to nationhood, the Nazi imperial

regime set out to destroy them as a people. It banished the Polish language from government, cut wages, instituted crushing taxes, plundered bank accounts, and banned all cultural activities. Even though

they were burdened by Polish deportees from the annexed western

regions, the General Government’s population of eleven million still

shrank at the rate of three thousand per day as the Poles perished

from violence, disease, and starvation.22

Occupied Poland’s governor-general and Reich minister, Hans

Frank, alternatively depicted the Nazi rump state as part of the German fatherland and a model settlement colony. In fact, the Nazi

imperial regime in Poland was an incoherent mess. Frank could

not even decide whether he wanted to turn the Poles into helots

or exterminate them. It also proved embarrassingly diffi cult to fi x

the boundary between citizen and subject in a population where

intermarriage between Germans and Poles was not uncommon. To

further complicate matters, the Nazis discovered illiterate “renegade

Germans” who had betrayed their membership in the
Volk
by adopting elements of Polish culture. Frank’s offi cials therefore had to issue

France under the Nazis 373

special identity badges to distinguish who was really a German and

who was not.

The German imperial agenda in the Soviet occupied territories was

even more incoherent and bloody. Here too social scientists seeking

to prove their racist
Lebensraum
theories vied with fortune-hunting party functionaries and strategically minded generals to set the

agenda in the newly conquered lands. Imagining the possibilities of

a German version of the North American frontier, Nazi ideologues

came up with fantastically unrealistic but chillingly barbarous plans.

They envisioned eliminating as many as thirty million Slavs through

planned famines and mass prophylactic and sterilization programs.

In their place they expected to settle millions of ethnic Germans in

agrarian soldiers’ colonies based on the ancient Roman model. Hitler

spoke of linking these settlements to the Reich through enormous

raised roads and building double-decker trains to take German veterans to Crimean vacation resorts.

This was pure fantasy, and the Nazis struggled to institute the

most basic and rudimentary systems of imperial rule in the Soviet

east. Offi cially,
Reichsleiter
Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the

Occupied Eastern Territories (OMi) had authority over all territory up

to two hundred kilometers behind the front lines. Assuming that German troops would advance to the Urals by the end of 1941, the ministry planned to establish the Reich commissariats of Ostland, Ukraine,

Moscovy, and the Caucasus in the conquered lands. In keeping with

the standard geographical template of imperial administration, these

commissariats would be divided into provincial and district units. Not

content to wait for the expected fl ood of settlers from the Reich, the

Ethnic German Liaison Offi ce focused on organizing local communities of ethnic Germans into privileged settlement colonies.

In practice, the Nazis’ shifting military fortunes meant that they

were able to establish only the Ostland and Ukrainian commissariats.

The OMi was also profoundly impotent when it came to actual imperial rule. The ministry’s functionaries, whose yellow-brown uniforms

earned them the derisive nickname of “gold pheasants,” could not

control the
Gauleiters
who used personal ties to Hitler to turn the

commissariats into personal fi efs. Hermann Göring’s Central Offi ce of

the Four-Year Plan, Fritz Sauckel’s labor recruiting agency, and Albert

Speer’s armaments ministry also undercut Rosenberg’s authority by

following their own extractive agendas.

374 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler, however, was the true power in

the east. Although it was technically subordinate to the OMi, his SS

exercised real authority in the Nazi commissariats through its control

of the police and security forces. Himmler’s troops operated independently in their campaign to murder Jews and Soviet commissars and

turned the Ukraine and Ostland into unoffi cial SS police states. The

Reichsführer
also pursued his own pet projects, such as the
Hegewald

(forest reserve) that was to be the prototype for a string of fortifi ed

SS colonies for ethnic Germans designed to hold the conquered territories against Soviet counterattacks.

Although the Nazis never realized their genocidal ambition to

wipe out the entire population of the east, they treated conquered

Slavic peoples as an exploitable and expendable resource. This was

a grim departure from the standard imperial model. Even the most

brutal empire builders in earlier eras recognized the inherent value

of suffi ciently pacifi ed subject communities. Furthermore, European

settlers in Australia and the Americas did not explicitly seek to exterminate indigenous populations; they merely took advantage of the