Ostkrieg (52 page)

In anticipation of imminent victory, and eager to realize his utopian blueprint, Himmler hurriedly pushed ahead with his pilot schemes. Thus, even though Nazi authorities had already begun work in the spring of 1942 on a limited plan for building a “Germanic bridge” between Lithuania and the Czech lands by resettling Volksdeutsche, Himmler promoted a much more ambitious project. The focal point for the immediate implementation of his plans was to be the provincial town of Zamosc, southeast of Lublin. In the Generalplan, Lublin lay in a key region, situated at the junction of two main axes of settlement, so the project at Zamosc was seen as a key test of the entire colonization
policy. The SS experts responsible for carrying out the scheme planned to “bottle up” the Polish population living in the region and “suppress their economic and biological development.” In blunter terms, Himmler meant to tear down the entire town, deport the Poles living in the region, and replace them with German settlers. The Nazi governor-general, Hans Frank, worried about opposition by the Poles and the possible disruption of their contribution to the war economy, wanted to wait until the end of the war for implementation of the project, but Himmler saw no reason for delay.
²⁹

Put under the direction of the thuggish and odious Odilo Globocnik, this trial run to sort out the problems involved in the implementation of population policy proved disastrous, as Globocnik's violent and harsh methods provoked exactly the sort of backlash that Frank had feared. In order to make room for German colonists, in November 1942 Globocnik's men began uprooting over 100,000 people from some three hundred villages in the Zamosc region who were then sent for “selection” to camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz. There, they were racially screened: some of the adults and children were to be Germanized and “won back to the German nation”; the remaining children and the elderly were sent to “retirement villages,” where they would starve to death; other adults were to replace Jewish forced laborers, who would then be killed; the rest would be sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
³⁰

From mid-December on, transports with the first Zamosc deportees began arriving at Auschwitz, while other trains arrived in Berlin with Poles bound for work in the armaments industry. There, they were exchanged with the so-called arms factory Jews, who had stayed alive working in the armaments industry but were now superfluous. Trains from Berlin would then carry the Jews to Auschwitz; after unloading their “cargo,” they would then transport Volksdeutsche, primarily from Southeastern Europe, to the Zamosc region. Here, the incoming German colonists would be met by SS resettlement agents, relocated in the surrounding area, and given land that had been seized from the Poles. From Zamosc, the trains would return to Auschwitz with those Poles deemed “undesirable.” This “population exchange” was, thus, part of a pilot demographic project in which highly productive German agricultural settlements would be created in the east, with the Poles displaced either Germanized, put in forced labor, or killed and the Jews murdered immediately.
³¹

In the Zamosc area, things did not go as smoothly as in Berlin or Auschwitz. Within weeks of the first “evacuation” drive, the region was in revolt: the new settlers were attacked and some killed; farmers fled
to join partisan bands; and partisan warfare flared in an area that up to that point had been quiet. Himmler ordered vicious reprisals against the Poles, but this failed to quell the unrest, which continued into the spring of the following year. Frank was furious; because of Himmler's impatience and Globocnik's brutality, the Poles in the General Government were in an uproar, fearful that, as an SS leader put it, “after the Jews are annihilated [the Germans] will try to use the same methods to drive the Poles out of this area and liquidate them just like the Jews.” In May 1943, Frank complained that “a state of open rebellion” existed in the Zamosc area, with SS actions having caused an “indescribable panic.” Entire districts were being depopulated, both by the resettlement action and by Poles fleeing the land, with resulting disruption of both the economic and the security situation.
³²

Himmler, however, doggedly pursued his utopian dreams. In mid-September 1942, he stressed to his associates that the chief task in the first two decades after the war would be to gather the Germanic peoples and finish construction of the great German empire that would stretch to the Urals. Amazingly, on 23 November, the very day that the Soviet ring closed around Stalingrad, he could assert in a speech that the east “would be colonies today, settlement area tomorrow, and German territory the day after tomorrow.” In practice, however, the turnabout in the military situation at Stalingrad largely caused his schemes to grind to a halt in the winter of 1942–1943. His pilot project at Zamosc, and similar smaller ones in Ukraine, had failed miserably and brought only turmoil and economic disruption. The Nazis had amply demonstrated their willingness and ability to uproot and destroy entire groups of people, but the very war that had made these radical measures possible now forced a halt to their utopian ventures. Generalplan Ost had envisioned a vast racial restructuring of Eastern Europe. One component was to be the extermination of the local Jewish population as well as the deportation and annihilation of perhaps 30–40 million Slavs. A second aspect was the resettlement of millions of Volksdeutsche, Germans, or others of Germanic origins in the evacuated areas, while the final component was the employment of millions of Slavs in forced labor. By the end of 1942, the destruction of the Polish Jews under German control was largely complete, while military setbacks halted the vast resettlement schemes. Those same military reverses, however, now brought the third aspect of the plan to the forefront as the Germans desperately needed foreign labor for their war economy.
³³

While, as noted above, Sauckel proved adept in his
Menschenjagd
(slave labor hunts), Himmler, with a nose for power, sensed a way for the
SS to profit as well. With the demands of the war economy paramount, and with labor a key commodity within that economy, he realized that control of the flow of workers would confer great power. Although ideological imperatives were always predominant in Himmler's mind, the Reichsführer-SS also understood that huge pools of labor would be required for the vast construction projects of Generalplan Ost. “If we do not fill our camps with slaves,” he emphasized in June 1942, “with worker slaves who will build our cities, our villages, our farms . . . , then even after years of war we will not have enough money to be able to equip the settlements in such a manner that real Germanic people can live there.” In conjunction with implementation of Generalplan Ost, then, Himmler expanded the WVHA (Economic and Administrative Main Office) of the SS to take full advantage of the forced labor potential in the concentration camp system. Under the leadership of the energetic Oswald Pohl, the population of the camp system skyrocketed, growing from roughly 20,000 in September 1939, to 75,000 in April 1942, and 224,000 in August 1943. By January 1945, the camp system held an astonishing 714,000 people, the great majority non-Jewish (political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and Ostarbeiter), and had effectively been transformed into a Soviet-style labor gulag. Although Himmler wanted to extract maximum economic benefit from these prisoners, he could not quite suspend his racial principles, so a sort of murderous compromise between ideology and pragmatism evolved: Vernichtung durch Arbeit. Thus, although Pohl urged his camp commandants to act as managers and make their enterprises economically productive, he still reminded them that the work must be “in the true meaning of the word, exhaustive.”
³⁴

Pohl also held out the lure of cheap labor in order to attract industrial investment as a means to expand the scope of the WVHA from construction projects to armament work. The result was a dramatic expansion of its network of labor camps adjacent to the larger concentration and extermination facilities. Auschwitz, for example, not only rented out its inmates to the nearby I. G. Farben facilities at Monowitz, but also sent prisoners to industrial sites throughout Silesia. Eventually, when Himmler's opposition to such workers within the Reich receded, the SS supplied forced labor to Heinkel (Oranienburg), Siemens (Ravensbrück), BMW (Dachau), and Daimler-Benz (Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen). Opposition from Speer to Himmler's power grab, however, prevented a large penetration of the SS into armaments production in 1942. Not only were such enterprises grossly inefficient, but camp managers also tended to take Vernichtung durch Arbeit far too seriously. Mortality rates in 1942 soared so high that the WVHA could not meet its own targets for
the slave labor population. If Himmler was going to be able to leverage the labor reservoir of the concentration camps to increase the power of his SS empire, these staggeringly high rates of attrition would have to be brought down. Only after the military debacle at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–1943, however, did the SS set about making changes, but by then it would be too late. The key period was 1942, the last opportunity the Reich had to win the war in the east before it faced the full power of the enemies stacked against it. The tension between racial impulses and economic pragmatism, as well as the use of brutal colonial methods against other European peoples, resulted in an astonishing misuse of labor. Although the Nazis modified their policies in 1943, the damage could not be undone: in the crucial phase of the war, they had not been able to convert the resources under their control into weapons as effectively as their opponents. Nazi officials had begun to realize their conundrum: they could have racial purity or an effective war economy, but not both.
³⁵

In late June, the operation that Hitler expected finally to end this “business in the east” began to unfold—two weeks late, beset by supply and transportation problems that hampered the assembly and deployment of the attacking force, and bedeviled by poor weather that worsened the already primitive road system. As originally conceived, Blue was an exceedingly complex operation designed to unfold in four successive stages, with success in each phase creating the condition for triumph in the next—with the intended result the destruction of Soviet forces west of the Don and cascading momentum that would propel German forces into the Caucasus. The operation would begin in the north, where Blue I aimed at seizing crossings over the Don River and the important transportation city of Voronezh, all the while trapping enemy forces and providing flank protection against Soviet counterattack. In the next phase, Blue II, German mobile forces would strike south from Voronezh along the Don while the Sixth Army launched an offensive from the area around Kharkov, with the spearheads to meet near the city of Millerovo. Again, if all went correctly, Soviet units would be herded together in another
Kessel
(pocket). At this point, Blue III dictated that Army Group South split in two, with Bock's Army Group B advancing across the great bend of the Don River toward Stalingrad. Seizing the city itself was regarded as largely inconsequential; the important thing was simply to neutralize it as a center for armaments production and transportation. Only then, after a solid defensive line had been established, would Army Group A under List unleash the final stage of the operation, with Blue IV the key
drive into the Caucasus to seize the vital oil fields and the passes over the mountains. Everything depended on the organization, coordination, and timely movement of forces across distances even greater than those covered by the central thrust the year before—and, above all, on speed since Hitler hoped to make up for the time lost in the preliminary operations by advancing the second and third phases of the operation.
³⁶

Beneath its complexity, Fall Blau betrayed a number of assumptions that should have given German generals pause to reflect on the prospect of success. In order to avoid the problems with large-scale encirclement operations experienced in the previous year, Directive No. 41 specified small, tight Kessels. Deep encirclements looked good on maps but had too often resulted in the mobile formations thrusting far ahead of the infantry, with panzer units being tied down, often for weeks, in fierce cauldron battles while large numbers of enemy troops managed to slip through the porous pockets. Smaller encirclements, both Hitler and many in the OKH believed, would allow the infantry to close faster, thus destroying a higher percentage of those trapped while allowing the panzers to move on. Certainly, much tactically spoke for this argument, but, at bottom, it meant a shift away from the flexibility and operational freedom that German commanders had traditionally enjoyed and from which much of their success had sprung. Instead, their actions would be monitored from Führer Headquarters, with Hitler increasingly micro-managing troop movements. Success now depended, to a great degree, on the Führer's willingness not to attempt to seize everything at once, never a good bet. In addition, the stress on small pockets was an implicit recognition of German deficiencies in mobile formations, fuel, and supply capabilities. From mid-July 1941, German logistic problems had limited advances to about ten days and no more than a hundred miles, after which the attacking forces had to pause for up to a week to replenish their depleted fuel and ammunition stocks. In terms of logistics, little had changed in 1942. In effect, Hitler and the OKH were trying to make a virtue of necessity since the Ostheer increasingly lacked the vital strength to conduct “deep war.” Finally, as Hitler recognized, the ranks of the newly constituted units of the Eastern Army were rife with young, hastily trained draftees for whom it was crucial that the initial battles go well. “The operation must begin with success,” Hitler emphasized in late March; “young troops must not suffer any setbacks.” Success in short encirclements, however, depended not just on German skill but on Soviet cooperation as well.
³⁷