A World at Arms (104 page)

By the time this grisly drama was enacted, the Germans had added a portion of the eastern Ukraine, allocated to the Soviet Union in 1939, to the territory designated as “General Government” as a residual Polish area though characteristically deprived even of any Polish name. Alone of the occupied countries, Poland produced no collaborationist government. In the face of a harsh and deliberately extreme occupation administration, the population tried to survive and to resist. Hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease, while hundreds of thousands of others were killed as undesirable intellectuals, hostages, reprisal victims, or
whatever other excuses the imagination could conceive. Some 10,000 were killed in mental institutions, hospitals or old people’s homes in an extension from Germany to the occupied territories of the program for the systematic killing of those deemed “unfit to live.”
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These repressive measures, and many more,
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however, did not bring the Germans the quiet they sought. The Polish underground army had massive support among the population. It drew on its members and supporters for an extensive intelligence network which provided the London government-in-exile and through it the Western Allies highly significant information on subjects ranging from German military moves through the program for the extermination of Jews to key details on secret weapons and even actual parts of them.
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The hope of the underground army was to rise against the Germans as they eventually retreated, but in this regard the government-in-exile and the Armya Krajowa leadership made a terrible misjudgement which has not been explained. The plan was to rise in the countryside, so the available weapons were largely hidden there; but in 1944, the uprising was ordered in Warsaw where few preparations for it had been made and equipment was inadequate. The resulting terrible drama, in which the Red Army was halted so that the Germans could crush the Poles, and every possible obstacle was placed in the way of Western efforts to assist the insurgents, is reviewed in
Chapter 12
. Upon the defeat of the uprising, Hitler ordered Warsaw levelled, a directive carried out with brutal thoroughness.

There was a small Communist underground in German-occupied Poland which grew somewhat as the Red Army approached and built up Polish units, the Berling army, to fight alongside it. The Poland which emerged, battered and terribly depleted, from the conflict would be altered in both regime and borders. A Communist regime was imposed by the Soviet Union and its few Polish supporters. The borders were redrawn to return most of the territory occupied by the Soviet Union under the Nazi-Soviet Pact to it, while in the north Poland acquired the southern portion of what had been called East Prussia as well as Danzig and in the west received the former German territories east of the rivers Oder and Neisse and some land even beyond that line. The country had lost its Ukrainian and Belorussian peoples in the East, its Jewish population had been murdered or was chased out after the war, and the bulk of the Germans in pre-war Poland as well as the large newly acquired former German areas either fled or were driven out.

The Poland which emerged from the war was thus a very different country from that of 1939. It was smaller and had lost enormously in
population and wealth; it had acquired land basically more valuable than the territory it had lost; and it was very much more homogeneous than ever before. But it was saddled with a regime and a social system few Poles wanted and had come, at least for the time being, under a new foreign domination which most Poles bitterly resented.

The large remaining European area under German control for much of World War II was the portion of the U.S.S.R. seized in 1941 and 1942 and under German occupation, at least in part, until late 1944 with a minimal bit of western Latvia held until May 1945. As has been explained in
Chapter 5
, all this territory and more was to be the living space of the Germanic people with vast and steadily expanding German settlements, while a decimated and steadily shrinking indigenous population would be toiling for the new masters until their remnants were either expelled or exterminated.
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Beyond the role of the area as a place of agricultural settlement, it was to be a source of raw materials for German industry and war production: oil, iron, coal, manganese and other non-ferrous metals. In addition to these known resources, which the Germans expected to exploit much more efficiently than their prior owners had, new crops would be introduced in large areas to make up deficits in the German economy: soybeans to provide vegetable oil and rubber trees to produce the natural rubber of which small quantities were still needed by the synthetic rubber industry.

The Jewish population, which was very numerous in the areas first overrun, was to be killed, and over one and a quarter million were indeed slaughtered, most of them in the first year after June 22, 1941. Some 10,000 mentally ill and elderly people were also murdered in an extension of the so-called euthanasia program into the occupied territory.
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Communist party officials as well as political officers among the prisoners of war were also to be killed, and enormous numbers became victims of this policy.

The basic assumption always was, and remained until the Germans had been driven out again, that this would all be German territory, at least to the line Archangel-Astrakhan, perhaps to the Urals. Certainly the national aspirations of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union were not to be met. Ironically, those who were most inclined to welcome the initial German invasion because of their hopes of national revival, people in the Baltic States and the Ukraine, lived in regions designed for German settlement and were therefore quickly disabused of their hopes.

The plan to deprive the population of as much food as possible to feed the German army and much of the German population similarly meant that the collective farm system, which allowed the government the first
claim on the crop and made the peasant a residual claimant, would be maintained. This source of opposition to the Soviet regime was thus also kept, and the nominal “agrarian reform” instituted early in 1942 made no real change in the system. On the contrary, the Germans were so enthusiastic about the advantages of the collective farm system as a means of getting their hands on the harvest that they forced the last remaining individual farmers, operating in small scattered numbers in the marginal agricultural areas of Belorussia, into collectives. That these measures created both antagonism in the country–side and famine in the cities, especially in the winter, was hardly surprising.

It had been assumed by the Germans that the fighting in the East would be over quickly. The advancing armies would briefly exercise authority over the occupied territory, followed by equally transient Army Group rear area commands, a new creation for this campaign. After the short interval of military government would come the permanent civilian administration under Reich Commissars for huge areas with regional commissars under them, all nominally reporting to a new Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in Berlin headed by the Nazi Party theoretician and supposed expert on the Soviet Union, Alfred Rosenberg. In reality, as the German army was slowed down and then halted, and finally driven back by the Red Army, civilian administration was established in only parts of the occupied U.S.S.R. and about half of the area remained under military administration for the period of German rule.
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In general, the military administration was governed somewhat more by practical than ideological considerations and hence proved slightly less harsh. Because a large variety of economic and police agencies operated in both spheres, however, and acted equally ruthlessly in both, this differentiation did not substantially alleviate the situation of the population. Concessions which were made by the military in the Caucasus areas temporarily occupied by the Germans in the second half of 1942 had little significance for the occupied people. They were very much more affected by the forced labor program, established in the same year, under which hundreds of thousands were to all intents and purposes kidnapped and carried off to work in German factories under horrendous conditions.

There was considerable debate within and between the innumerable German agencies which vied with each other for important roles in the occupied U.S.S.R., and some of these involved arguments over policies designed to be more appealing and less repressive to the population under German control; but all these debates, however extensive their paper trail in the archives, produced no significant modification in a ruthlessly exploitive policy.
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Minimal concessions were temporarily
made in the Baltic States, but as German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop explained in response to a plea in February 1943 from Finnish Marshal Mannerheim urging independence for Estonia, Germany was fighting not for the Estonians but for her own gains.
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Suggestions in the same direction from Germany’s Japanese ally met with similar responses; concessions to nationalities within the German-occupied Soviet territories made no sense to a Hitler determined on the equal subjugation of all its people.
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Arguments over this issue, as well as the related ones of decent treatment for Ukrainians and the possible recruitment of Russians to fight alongside Germany against the Red Army under General Vlasov, were put forward in the spring and summer of 1943 from inside as well as outside the German government, after the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad might have indicated even to Hitler that some changes in policy were indicated. He firmly rejected them all.
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The horrendous reprisals taken by the Germans against all real and imagined resistance, and the massive slaughters of civilians which were a standard feature of German anti-partisan operations, contributed their share to the burdens of the people in the occupied territory. As the Germans retreated before the offensives of the Red Army, deliberate mass demolitions and the driving off of people and farm animals added to the destruction of war.

As if all these losses of life, health, and property were not enough, the Soviet victory did not end the travail of the people overrun by the Germans. Those deported to forced labor as well as the liberated Soviet ex–prisoners of war were under suspicion of collaboration with the Germans; they frequently ended up being sent to slave labor camps after the Allied victory. Even the end of the war did not terminate the horrors which the German invasion imposed on the Soviet population. A long, slow and difficult period of reconstruction lay ahead.

Throughout occupied Europe, as in the states nominally or actually independent but under German control, the issues of collaboration or resistance affected people at the time and influenced perspectives and controversies afterwards. In most satellites there were different opinions on the advisability of cooperating with the Axis and the extent to which that cooperation might forestall German occupation and even worse treatment of the people. In the areas under more complete German control, this issue was yet more difficult. Did it help the Germans more
or did it protect the population more to continue in administrative positions in the occupied countries? The Germans clearly lacked the personnel to run the huge areas they dominated, but what would happen if everyone quit? As for resistance activity, how could one risk not only one’s life and that of one’s family, but also the lives of others likely to be killed in retaliation? These very hard questions were made even more difficult by the general impression in 1940 and 1941 that Germany was likely to win the war and even after 1941 that the Third Reich was unlikely to be completely defeated.

It was in this context that individuals chose to collaborate or to resist or, in a very large number of cases, to do some of both. As the brutality of the Germans became both greater and more obvious and as the appearance of an inevitable German triumph was replaced by first the hope and then the certainty of defeat, more and more turned to resistance. The resisters often assisted the victims of German terror, helped Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war get back to the Allies, provided intelligence, and, on an ever larger scale, engaged in acts of sabotage and other overt acts of defiance. By such acts they contributed to Allied victory and their own country’s liberation, but perhaps their main contribution lay in a different sphere.

The resistance by its existence and its spreading of news through word of mouth, leaflets, and illegal newspapers showed fellow citizens that not all had given up, that there were those with hope and alternatives to collaboration. Furthermore, this reminded those who helped the invaders that they were being watched and might well find themselves called to account for their actions after the war. And there was a still more important long-term contribution made by the resistance. The conquered people of Europe were all liberated primarily by the efforts of others, by the exertions and the sacrifices of the British, the Russians, the Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and soldiers from additional far away countries. For their own subsequent self–respect and for their later national development, it was of great significance that some Frenchmen and Norwegians, Dutchmen and Belgians, Poles and Yugoslavs, Greeks and people from additional German-controlled areas had made a contribution to the Allied victory which restored a measure of independence to them after dark years of foreign domination. As one of the most talented chroniclers of the resistance concluded: “It gave back to people in the occupied countries the self–respect that they lost in the moment of occupation.”
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JAPANESE-OCCUPIED AREAS

For the people in the areas of East and Southeast Asia overrun by the Japanese the same thing was true, but in a different way. With the exception of Thailand, all had been under direct or indirect rule by Europeans before 1941. Thailand came to be controlled by Japan and was required to declare war on the Western Allies but kept its formal independence; the war really meant that its economy was developed further, even as there were some strains imposed upon it. For the other territories (except for the Philippines) conquered by Japan, the war meant in the first instance and in the final analysis the destruction of the prestige and status of the former colonial masters. It was they who had been defeated, and defeated completely and quickly, by the Japanese, an Asian people. There might be and temporarily would be a restored control by the European powers–and in the South Pacific, by people of European background from Australia and New Zealand–but the aura of power of the colonial authorities had been shattered permanently.
^p
Few situations more precisely fitted the saying that “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could not put the colonial empires together again.