Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (21 page)

PARALLEL TO the furniture operation, the Nazi political leadership attempted to placate residents of burned-out cities with extra allocations of food. Together with Goebbels and the Reich commissioner for Ukraine, Erich Koch, Rosenberg and Göring organized “the special delivery of food by train into the Reich for extraordinary circumstances.” The supplies came from Ukraine to the detriment of that country’s urban population. This relief operation was officially described as a “donation of food from the East.”
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At the same time, Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Hencke, a personal friend of Göring’s, was setting up the Western Exterior Office, which purchased clothing and issued contracts to Dutch, Belgian, and French textile manufacturers. In the fall of 1942, the military commander in these regions appropriated around 8 million reichsmarks per month from the operational budget for the occupation to buy textiles on the black market in France. The goods were earmarked for “the especially needy segment of the German population, in particular those who suffered from air raids.”
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The delivery of ready-to-wear clothing, bought up in large lots or seized from the households of deported Jews, “proceeded under the auspices of the Western Exterior Office using freight trucks driven directly to the affected cities.” Those in charge of the operation decreed that convoys of trucks had to be kept permanently ready “so that in the event of an air raid they can be deployed without delay.” In addition to clothing and material, the trucks also carried “means of personal fortification such as wine and cognac.”
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Meanwhile, in the summer of 1942, Göring was also busy planning his “Christmas operation,” the purchase of gifts and toys in occupied Western Europe for Germans to put under their trees. Asate as December 20, Göring was still ordering that “cosmetics, toys, and general gift items” be acquired in France. This bounty was then transported in 2,306 freight cars and several barges, “primarily to bomb-damaged regions.” Shipments were also directed to cities and regions where war morale was threatening to decline: Vienna, Bratislava, Königsberg, and the industrial regions of Silesia.
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To the same end, Göring spent 176 million reichsmarks in Holland.
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The sums of money used for the handout started out high and kept growing. Despite repeated efforts by occupation authorities to reduce nonessential expenditures, by June 1942 the Wehrmacht High Command had already set aside 200 million reichsmarks’ worth of French francs for such purchases. A further allotment of 100 million reichsmarks followed in August, while a supplemental 200 million was demanded on September 9 and again in October. On November 20, the Wehrmacht High Command ordained that “244,500,000 reichsmarks in French francs” were to be made available so that, as Göring had ordered, “the procurements on the black market do not lose momentum.”
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All told, in the latter half of 1942, 18.5 billion francs of High Command money were spent on the Christmas operation. The finance minister himself approved the “black market operations” and reported them with a clear conscience to the General Auditor’s Office.
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According to Reichsbank figures, “some 3 billion marks in occupation costs” were used in France in 1942 for the purpose of “importing scarce commodities into Germany” more than a fifth of which were for the Christmas operation.
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Göring announced his plans for the Christmas operation to the Reich leadership on August 6, 1942. In the assembly hall named after himself in the Aviation Ministry, he called on the assembled ministers and leaders of occupied territories “to extract the maximum so that the German people can live their lives.” After complaining that looting was no longer considered a matter of course in war, he declared: “I intend to loot anyway, and to loot thoroughly, insofar as I am sending a series of purchasers, equipped with special dispensation, first to Holland and Belgium, then to France. They will have until Christmas to buy up more or less everything available in the best stores and warehouses. I will then hang these things in shopwindows here at Christmas so that the German people can buy them.” Göring envisioned shoppers’ being able to snap up “clothing, shoes—whatever’s available.”
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By early November 1942, food rationing offices were already issuing supplemental Christmas vouchers. The public responded with gratitude. The Security Service reported: “The announcement of an allowance for wine and liquor for those working long hours or doing heavy manual labor was particularly welcomed. . . . All in all, the special Christmas allocations have allowed many ethnic comrades to forget their pressing everyday concerns.”
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The windfall of goods wasn’t truly cheap. Procurement of gifts was funded as usual from the occupation budgets, and Germans enjoying these privileges paid for them as well, bringing more money into the state coffers. Nonetheless, people had enough income at their disposal to spend on gifts, wine, schnapps, coffee, butter, and sugar. And when they did so, the Christmas ation had the additional, calculated benefits of lowering inflation by curbing excess domestic spending power and bringing new revenues into the treasury.

On Christmas Eve 1942, Goebbels reflected with satisfaction on the Nazi policy of full stomachs and happy hearts: “The special allocations of foodstuffs have paid off again. My gifts of something extra for old people and large families have worked wonders.”
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That same day, as it became clear that celebrations planned for January 30 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Nazis’ assumption of power would coincide with the no longer concealable news of German defeat at the battle of Stalingrad, Hitler found himself longing for the next public relations miracle. Martin Bormann noted: “The Führer repeatedly emphasized that we could achieve the maximum effect if we announced to the German people that day another increase in food rations and other allowances.” Hitler wanted to keep the German people eating from his hand. (This was “no longer possible,” however, after the overblown Christmas operation.)
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Nonetheless, Hitler insisted on the “maintenance” of rations “at their current level by increasing the contributions of the occupied territories.”
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In the summer of 1943, plans began for the next Christmas operation. Jews had been systematically stripped of their property, and the currencies in occupied countries had been ruined. In light of the situation, Göring decided to fall back on the assets of “enemies of the state” to raise the means to “purchase coffee and other items on the black market in France and Belgium.”
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He had shied away from such a step in the past to avoid German assets abroad being confiscated in retaliation. But by summer 1943, his scruples toward ethnic comrades who owned foreign assets had disappeared. The material welfare of the masses had greater priority.

In the fall of 1941, Heinrich Böll was temporarily transferred from France back to the Cologne area. His task there was to guard Soviet prisoners. The sight of these men—shattered by the harrowing war on the Eastern Front and weakened by captivity—left him depressed. For him the fate of the prisoners reflected the tedium of his own existence, both in his lowly soldier’s duties and as a member of the Wehrmacht. Böll began daydreaming about Belgium, a country he had come to know during the German invasion and occupation of May 1940: “My one great worry right now is whether I can get to Antwerp or not. All the nice things that I want to bring back—coffee, cigars, and cloth, ah, if only it could be.” Böll got to make his trip, and his fiancée, Annemarie Czech, received “a short sleeveless sweater.”
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During the spring of 1943, to ensure that soldiers’ wives and girlfriends were kept supplied with such amenities, Hermann Göring ordered that “the visual appearance of retail stores in Belgium, as well as other spots where people enjoy themselves, be maintained in conditions almost like those of peacetime.”
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By decree, “gourmet establishments, bars, and other enjoyment spots” in occupied Europe were to be kept open, “if they were or could be frequented by German soldiers for the purposes of rest and relaxation.” Stores where “nonessential goods” were sold were also to remain in business “so that German soldiers can buy whatever their hearts desire, as long as there are wares on the shelves. Prices have to be kept at an appropriate level.” Against Göring’s will, shops and other establishments in the Netherlands deemed “nonessential to the war” had been closed. They were to be “reopened as inconspicuously as possible.”
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In such establishments German soldiers were able to spend Dutch and Belgian money freely.

But where was the Reich getting the money to fund its soldiers’ extravagance? The answer is, from the occupied countries themselves, through a range of methods that varied from state to state but everywhere attempted to preserve the appearance of legality. Shortly after the invasion, the Wehrmacht intendant responsible for Belgium summarized how the German occupiers set the contribution to be paid to the Reich: “For political reasons, the finances and economy of the Belgian state have to be kept largely intact. It has been agreed to demand of the Belgian state, as a partial payment toward occupation costs, a sum of money that it can just barely, with the greatest of sacrifice, raise.”
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In addition to the official contribution, both France and Belgium were compelled to make further payments for “accommodation services”
(Quartierdienste)
.
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The monthly sum was initially set at more than double the state’s normal monthly tax revenues.
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It was raised from an initial 80 million reichsmarks to 120 million in the first quarter of 1941.
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To maintain currency stability, the German occupiers subsequently capped the official contribution at 80 million reichsmarks a month, but the Wehrmacht consistently demanded an additional 20 to 30 million for the quartering of troops.
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By September 1941 the level of actual monthly payments had settled at 120 million.

This burden was borne by a country with a population of only 8.3 million. The total Belgian state budget had been around 11 billion francs in 1938, with the government borrowing some 3 billion francs to stimulate an economy badly hit by the Depression. Now German occupiers were demanding an additional 18 billion or more annually.
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An anonymously circulated Resistance flyer from 1941 put the statistics in more or less accurate context: “If revenues from taxes and duties were raised from 11 to 16 billion [francs], as Germany is demanding, we’d still have to borrow 25.5 billion to fulfill the conditions dictated by Germany. From whom are we going to borrow? Add to these figures the reserves of raw materials and food that the Germans have taken from us, and you get a very clear picture of the policies of plunder and starvation that the Third Reich is pursuing against our country. Indeed, Germany is sacrificing our entire state to advance its imperialistic aims. It is treating us as a population of slaves who exist only for the benefit of the Reich.”
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In the summer of 1941, many German units stationed in Belgium were redeployed to the Eastern Front, but there was no reduction in occupation costs. The Wehrmacht commander in Belgium decided to appropriate funds to construct a number of airfields and gigantic bunkers along the Atlantic coast. For him it was a given “that everything we need to wage war here against England must come from here as well.”11

In late October 1941, German bank commissioner Hans von Becker warned of the instability of the Belgian currency. The chief intendant of the Reichsbank also advised that “occupation costs need to be adjusted to the capacities of the country.” He complained that “Belgium had been burdened with exceptionally high war-related costs” and was being “plundered from all sides without regard to the maintenance of its currency.”
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By August 1942, before the invasion of “purchasers” (led first by Göring, then by Albert Speer), the Reich Credit Bank in Brussels protested that about a third of the total occupation costs were being allocated for private and war-related “deliveries outside Belgium.”
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According to a survey commissioned by the military commander in Belgium, Germans “purchased”—with Belgian money—18,500 motor vehicles in 1941 alone. The German railway system acquired 1,086 locomotives and 22,120 freight cars there in the same period, as well as huge amounts of coal, cement, rolled steel, scrap metal, copper, lead, textiles, and industrial products of almost every variety. Between the start of the occupation in late 1940 and February 28,1942, Belgium contributed a total of 2.6 billion marks to the Reich. Military administrators bragged with sadistic pride of how efficiently they had driven Belgium “to the brink of exhausting its reserves.” Considering Belgium’s relatively small population, they boasted of achieving far better results than their colleagues in France or Holland.
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And that was just the beginning. As the tide of war turned against Germany in 1942, the demands placed on occupied countries knew no limits. In the first six months of 1942, the monthly burden on Belgium included 8 million reichsmarks for accommodation, 120 million in occupation costs, and 72 million in clearing advances for exports to Germany.
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The total amounted to 2.4 billion reichsmarks annually. In 1943, clearing payments exceeded even occupation costs.
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Purchasers hired by individuals, private German companies, and German government agencies made uninhibited use of the Belgian market. For 1942, the military administration estimated that black market transactions accounted for 30 percent of the total value of purchases made by Germans on Belgian soil in the local currency. These transactions were technically illicit, but some were actually approved by military agencies. The Surveillance Office of the Military High Command frequently granted entities claiming to have special needs permission to make purchases on the black market. Among them was the “Schmidt Task Force,” whose only purpose was “the acquisition of wares of all sorts.” The Armaments Ministry, the SS, the Motor Vehicles Division of the Central Western Army, and the Army Medical Station also exercised these privileges.
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