Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (15 page)

Puhl’s summary continued: “By transferring the financing responsibilities described above to the occupied countries, Reich Credit Banks allow us to cover our financial needs without burdening the reichsmark and thus to strengthen the German currency. The covert fiduciary means and methods by which the RKKs penetrate a country and render it useful for our wartime finances have proved very effective in practice.”
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Statement such as this belie Puhl’s postwar claim to have been nothing more than an apolitical civil servant who had done his best to prevent the worst abuses.
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RKK certificates were the means by which military “victory could be exploited economically.” The Reichsbank’s leadership praised the RKKs themselves as currency instruments “whose unwavering efficiency and limitless flexibility have never before been witnessed in wartime.”
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The Reichsbank directors had succeeded in developing a method of payment that made possible the gradual impoverishment of conquered lands. It also guaranteed the stability of the reichsmark by softening the national currencies of occupied Europe.

French experts quickly recognized that the procedures introduced by the country’s German occupiers would lead “to the exhaustion of our economic foundation and the ruin of our currency.”
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And in July 1940, former Leipzig mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, by now a leading critic of Hitler, analyzed the effects of RKK certificates and concluded: “This system of unrestrained exploitation via unrestrained financial practices will lead inexorably to privation and starvation—first in Germany’s European neighbors, then in Germany itself.” He warned his countrymen that they would “one day bitterly regret, and be forced to pay for, their gullibility.” The following year, Goerdeler complained about the heedless “economic depletion” of European states allied with or occupied by Germany, whose economies, “perhaps with the exception of Denmark,” had already been completely ruined. Goerdeler also wrote about the motivations behind Nazi policies of rampant exploitation: “The voracious insistence on maintaining power and fooling the people into thinking that war can be profitable has apparently drowned out all reasonable considerations. There are no longer any brakes such as might be applied by moral principles or a sense of ordinary responsibility.”
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On September 3,1939, Heinrich Böll—then a soldier in the Wehrmacht—wrote his family in Cologne that he couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with his “fantastic wage of 25 marks.” Sometime later, Böll reported that he was able to purchase a half pound of coffee, back then a luxury item, in Rotterdam for “all of fifty pfennigs.” He sent the coffee home, expressing his regret that as a common soldier he was “allowed only one 500-gram package per week.” “I’m not very optimistic about Mother’s hopes for more coffee,” he went on to write from the northern French coast. “But please send me whatever money you have. Perhaps I’ll be able to step up my efforts on the coffee front. It can be German money. I’ll just exchange it in the canteen.”
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At that point in the war, German soldiers were allowed to receive up to 50 marks per month—their families transferred the money via army postal service, and it was paid out in the native currency of the countries where soldiers were stationed. Soon the allowance was raised to 100, and before Christmas 1939 it went up to 200 marks, “so that soldiers at least have the opportunity to buy the customary presents.”
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The increase drew a word of caution from the Wehrmacht intendant in charge of Belgium: “I cannot help but mention that, thanks to this measure, the country’s shelves are in danger of being stripped completely bare.”
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Soldiers in the Netherlands were allowed to receive the massive monthly sum of 1,000 marks (around $12,000 today) for shopping purposes. The German bank commissioner complained that “the largest sums” of German money were flowing into Holland from relatives of Wehrmacht soldiers and that the influx would necessarily lead to “damaging effects in currency matters.” German economists overseeing Belgium’s finances were astonished to find that, in the first year of occupation, relatives of Wehrmacht soldiers had transferred some 34 million marks—and that figure did not include the members of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Armies—via the army postal service. They warned of “untenable consequences” if they were to have to pay out those transfers from their budget for occupying Belgium. The Finance Ministry, however, turned a deaf ear to their complaints.
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And despite the official regulations, soldiers were allowed to take as much money with them as they wanted when entering or leaving Germany during their frequent leaves. In the fall of 1940, the Reichsbank board of directors expressed concern about the situation at the currency exchange office in the Herzogenrath train station near Germany’s western border. The office was “under extraordinary pressure from Wehrmacht soldiers in transit,” noted one board member, yet employees in Herzogenrath had been “instructed to exchange any and all sums.”
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Starting in January 1941, German customs officials gave up the sporadic “checks for currency” they had been performing on soldiers. Such checks, it was concluded, only caused delays at the border and “irritated” the soldiers.
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In 1941, the amount of money soldiers entering Belgium could legally exchange was raised to 300 reichsmarks—considerably more than the average monthly wage of a German worker. Occupation authorities pleaded for the exchange limit to be capped at 50 marks per person, arguing that they needed “to protect the [Belgian] currency” and “curb the inflationary increase in hard currency.”
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The quartermaster general objected, “pointing out that troops from the Eastern Front” on leave in Belgium “were especially in need of relief.”
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The Wehrmacht High Command refused the request “on general grounds of troop support.”
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The army field postmaster general reported regularly about the “huge numbers of packages in his territory being sent back from the field to Germany.”
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German soldiers literally emptied the shelves of Europe. They sent millions of packages back home from the front. The recipients were mainly women. When one asks the now elderlywitnesses about this period in history, their eyes still gleam at the memory of the shoes from North Africa, the velvet, silk, liqueurs, and coffee from France, the tobacco from Greece, the honey and bacon from Russia, and the tons of herring from Norway—not to mention the various gifts that poured in from Germany’s allies Romania, Hungary, and Italy.
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An open letter, published in 2003, from this author to older readers of the weekly newspaper
Die Zeit
asked them to share their recollections. Many respondents reported that what they received depended on whether they were lucky enough to have generous relatives. “I remember a number of nice things,” one woman wrote, “that friends and relatives would proudly unpack from parcels received from ‘abroad.’. . . People had more respect for the sender and compared him favorably with those who hadn’t sent anything back.” People who received such luxuries “boasted and bragged to others who had gotten only letters.”
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Interestingly, while female respondents offered accurate descriptions of the period, the men, without exception, denied ever having sent a single package home.

ON OCTOBER 1, 1940, the customs border between Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was abolished, prompting the Reich protector, the Nazi leader in those territories, to complain about the uninhibited “purchasing frenzy” among German soldiers. “The luggage nets of the express trains,” wrote another German official, “are packed to the roof with heavy suitcases, bulky packages, and stuffed bags.” Even officers and high-ranking bureaucrats, he continued, were cramming their luggage with “the most extraordinary consumer goods—furs, watches, medicines, shoes—in nearly unimaginable quantities.”
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Wolf Goette, a young actor at the German theater in Prague who would later have a successful career in East Germany, wrote back home: “Please write and tell me if there’s anything I can bring back. I’ll do my very best.” He added: “Yesterday we bought a wonderful desk. We’re always being accosted by a colleague named Wiesner. He’s become a true antiques dealer. Yesterday he purchased a marvelous Empire-era etching. Today it was a Gothic Madonna from Spain. It’s not the worst idea in the world to invest your money in such tangible assets.” In another letter to his family, he wrote: “I’ve noted your various requests. Yesterday I purchased four kilos of cocoa for you (7 reichsmarks per kilo).” For a relative or acquaintance nicknamed Rolli, Goette procured “a supply of perfume and eau de cologne as well as some light-colored leather gloves for Donna.” For a certain Jürgen Müller, who had sent him money, Goette obtained “a portable electric cooking stove together with a pot and a pan.” He continued to take orders for goods from his family: “How many sheets of Japanese paper should I get hold of? A sheet costs fifty reichspfennigs. Has the package with the seeds arrived yet? Today I sent off the fifth package of books you requested. I’ll send the rest later with the final transport.”
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In an open letter written for but then censored by the daily newspaper in Worms, Fritz Boas, a junior officer stationed in France, reported the following: “The first thing one does is to ‘storm’ the shops. . . . Everyone has something to buy for his nearest and dearest back home. Today a letter from ‘Mama’ arrived requsting some material, if possible thin-striped brown, to make a formal dress, some chamois, and—if manageable—a couple of bars of fine soap and some whole-bean coffee. That’s all for now, darling, she says. I’ll write soon to tell you what else I’d like. Wait, I almost forgot. Do you still have almonds and white elastic bands?”
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“I’m going to pack the butter and the soap (four big bars),” wrote Heinrich Böll, “so that I can send them with the noon mail.” He then issued his regular, although officially forbidden, request to his family for more money (“best concealed in a cake”) for purchases. A few days later, Böll was again keeping accounts: “I sent another pound of butter yesterday. That makes four in all that are currently en route, as well as a package with a giant 400-gram bar of soap for Mother in honor of her name day. I’m 40 marks in debt, but I’m waiting for your package full of surprises.” He didn’t have to wait long. A short time later, he reported back home: “I’ve received the book ‘Barbara Naderer’ with what was inserted in it. That makes 60 marks (10 from you and 50 from my parents). . . . If you can ensure that things continue this way, I won’t have to pass on all the splendid things on the ‘black market.’. . . I’d be genuinely happy if I could send you something.”
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On one occasion it was “a nice engraving from Paris.” On others it was cosmetics, three pounds of onions for his mother, a pair of ladies’ shoes, and nail scissors. At one point, Böll announced he was undertaking “an exhausting shopping spree” the following day, hoping “to stumble across something” for himself and his wife, Annemarie.
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A few weeks later, he reported to his mother: “After mess, I returned to my quarters and sweated over the task of packing. No fewer than 11 packages in all: 2 for a comrade, one for the staff sergeant, and 8 for me: 2 for you, one with butter and one with writing paper, 2 for [his brother] Alois’s family, and 4 for my family. I’ll put the eggs in a package this week because I didn’t have enough to send two. You’ll be able to get some at home.” No sooner had these orders been filled than the young soldier was back in shopper’s heaven: “In Paris, I should be able to find some nice things, definitely some shoes for you and some material.”
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