The Third Reich at War (60 page)

On 1 September 1939, to be sure, Hitler called on women to join in Germany’s ‘fighting community’ and make their contribution to the war effort. But what was that contribution?
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The regime’s attempts to boost the role of the mother in the German ‘national community’ continued unabated during the war: Nazi women’s organizations carried on with the travelling exhibitions on motherhood, courses on child-rearing, and celebrations of Mother’s Day that they had organized before the war.
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Alongside the ongoing publication of literature praising the German mother, new collections of essays now appeared, intended for consumption by women, recounting the lives of heroic German women of the past. Their heroism, however, consisted not of warlike deeds which they carried out on their own behalf, but of nobly assisting their menfolk, sending their husbands and sons off to battle, or protecting their children when the enemy loomed. Women’s courage in wartime was shown mainly by their refusal to give in to despair when told of the death of a loved one in battle. As housewives, so propaganda in various media insisted, women could contribute to the war effort by behaving responsibly as consumers and keeping the family clothed and fed in difficult economic circumstances. If women were to be persuaded to engage in war work, then it had to be war work in keeping with what Nazi ideology regarded as their feminine essence. If they served as air-raid wardens, then they did so to protect the German family; if they made munitions in a factory, then they were supplying the nation’s sons with the arms they needed to survive in battle. Selfless sacrifice was to be their lot. ‘Earlier,’ one woman who worked in a factory while her son was serving at the front was reported as saying, ‘I buttered bread for him, now I paint grenades and think, this is for him.’
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There was no German equivalent of the much-vaunted American propaganda icon ‘Rosie the Riveter’, who cheerfully rolled up her sleeves to help the war effort by doing what had traditionally been regarded as a man’s job in a man’s industrial world.
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For all the welfare measures designed to protect working mothers, the fact remained that in Germany, as in other countries, the majority of women in full-time paid work were young and unmarried. Organizations like the League of German Girls and the German Labour Front went to some lengths to recruit women in various kinds of war-related jobs, and the extent to which committed young Nazi women volunteered for labour service out of enthusiasm for the cause should not be underestimated. Women’s share in the German civilian labour force did increase, according to one estimate, from 37 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent in 1944, and there were also 3.5 million women working part-time in shifts of up to eight hours by this latter date. But of course the German civilian labour force was shrinking all the time. More and more German men were leaving for the front, so the actual number of German women in paid employment only increased from 14,626,000 in May 1939 to 14,897,000 in September 1944.
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Employers simply found it much easier to rely on foreign labour. They could obtain workers from France or the conquered areas of the Soviet Union who were skilled, or at least trained, and in any case capable (at least in theory) of tough physical labour. And they could employ them for very low wages and without having to organize and provide the extensive benefits and privileges to which German female workers were entitled.
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Employers did not object to women workers as such, of course. Indeed, by May 1944 women made up some 58 per cent of all Polish and Soviet civilian workers in Germany. Many of them were employed as domestic servants, to help German women in the home while the young German girls who in peacetime would normally have taken on this role were sent on a year of compulsory labour service instead. On 10 September 1942 Sauckel issued a decree for the importation of female domestic workers from the east. In part, this was regularizing a situation in which many civilian administrators and officers in the armed forces had already brought women from the occupied territories to their homes in Germany as domestic servants. Consulted on the matter, Hitler brushed aside possible racial objections: many women in the Ukraine, he declared, were of German descent anyway, and if they were blonde and blue-eyed, they could be Germanized after a suitable period of service in the Reich. Sauckel’s decree duly required that the women, who were to be between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, should look as much like German women as possible. Middle-class families eagerly grasped at the opportunity. Employing a domestic servant from the east became a new status symbol. Unlike German servants, eastern women could be given any kind of job to do, no matter how dirty or heavy; they were cheap; they could be made to work long hours without holidays; and they could be kept in a position of absolute subordination.

As the Security Service of the SS reported, ‘a large proportion of housewives have repeatedly complained that, in contrast to the Russian girls, German domestic helpers are often cheeky, lazy and licentious, and permit themselves every liberty’.
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Having a Russian servant in the home enabled middle-class families to hark back to the good old days when servants knew their place and did as they were told.
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Similar reasoning was brought to bear by industrial employers. Unlike their German counterparts, women from the east could be put to work on night shifts and given heavy physical tasks to perform. They could not take holidays, and they were regarded as docile and compliant. ‘We want more eastern female workers!’ declared the management at the Carl Zeiss optics factory in Jena in June 1943.
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Given these numbers, it was inevitable that there should be sexual liaisons between German men and female foreign workers on quite a large scale. Typically, Himmler and the SS became concerned about the children resulting from such relationships. Some Polish and other women deliberately sought pregnancy because they thought this would get them sent home.
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But from the end of 1942 pregnant female foreign workers were not to be deported back to their place of origin, but were to be examined to determine whether the child was likely to be of ‘good racial stock’. If the diagnosis was positive they were to be taken from their mothers after weaning, put in special nursing homes - without the mother’s permission if she was from the east - and brought up as Germans. The others were placed in nursing homes for foreign children. These infants remained a low priority in terms of nourishment and overall standards of care and support. In one such home, near Helmstedt, 96 per cent of the Polish and Russian children died between May and December 1944 from disease and malnutrition, while forty-eight out of 120 in another home in Voerde died in a diphtheria epidemic in the same year. The death rate among the babies of Russian and Polish women workers placed in the children’s home at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg was comparable. An SS general reported to Himmler on 11 August 1943 that the children in one home he visited were obviously being ‘allowed to starve slowly to death’.
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Policies such as these must have had an effect on the morale and commitment of many foreign workers. Yet while between 1939 and 1941 output per worker in the arms industry declined by nearly a quarter, it began to recover in 1942, and productivity had improved markedly by 1944. The reason for this lay above all in the principles of rationalization introduced by Speer and his allies and pushed through with such determination that 1944 was to prove the high-water mark of the German war economy.

IV

A key part of Speer’s management of the arms economy was his collaboration not only with the SS but also with German industry. Here, a nexus of common interests soon emerged. In their search for cheap and pliant labour, industrial firms across Germany looked beyond the available foreign workers and began to recruit concentration camp inmates. By October 1944, for example, the 83,300 foreign workers employed by the giant chemicals combine I. G. Farben - 46 per cent of the total workforce - included not only 9,600 prisoners of war but also 10,900 prisoners supplied by the camp system. Among the key industrial sites set up by the combine during the war was a large buna (synthetic rubber) factory at Monowitz, three miles from the town of Auschwitz. It was far enough to the east to be out of range of bombing raids, but enjoyed good railway connections and was close to good supplies of water, lime and coal. Once its construction had been agreed, on 6 February 1941, Carl Krauch, the I. G. Farben director who was also head of research and development for Hermann G̈ring’s Four-Year Plan organization, got G̈ring to ask Himmler to supply labour both from resettled ethnic Germans in the area and from inmates of the nearby concentration camp (at this time Polish political and military prisoners) in order to speed up construction. The company agreed to pay the SS 3 to 4 marks for each nine-to-eleven-hour shift completed by each prisoner, while the camp commandant Rudolf Ḧss agreed to provide, train, feed and guard the inmates and to build a bridge and rail spur from the camp to the site. By the spring of 1942 there were 11,200 men working on the site, 2,000 of them from the camp. Otto Ambros, who led the buna programme within I. G. Farben, declared that the company would ‘make this industrial foundation a strong cornerstone for a virile, healthy Germanism in the east’. ‘Our new friendship with the SS,’ he reported privately to his boss within the company, Fritz terMeer, ‘is proving very beneficial.’
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By late 1943, however, the building was still far from complete. Up to 29,000 workers were employed at Monowitz, roughly half of them foreigners, about a quarter ethnic Germans and the rest camp inmates. Maltreatment of the prisoners by SS guards, together with the poor rations they received and the lack of basic medical and sanitary facilities at the construction site barracks, where they were sleeping two or three to a bed, meant that increasing numbers of them fell sick or were unable to do the long hours of heavy physical labour required on the site. By this time, too, the great majority of camp inmates were Jewish. Most likely at the invitation of company managers on the spot, an SS officer was summoned from the camp, inspected the 3,500 prisoners engaged on construction work and sent those judged no longer fit to work back to the main Auschwitz camp to be gassed. From now on, these ‘selections’ were repeated at frequent intervals, so that in 1943-4 a total of 35,000 inmates passed through Morowitz, of whom 23,000 are known to have died from disease or exhaustion or been sent to the gas chambers; the total may have been as high as 30,000. In their living quarters, the company managers were exposed to a continual stench from the crematoria chimneys and even more, at intervals from September 1942 onwards, from the grilles on which large numbers of dead bodies were sometimes burned in the open air. I. G. Farben overseers and managers knew of the mass extermination in progress at Birkenau, and of the fate that awaited those identified by the SS as unfit to work on the Monowitz site: indeed, some of them even used the gas chambers as a threat to prisoners they did not think were working hard enough. Meanwhile, the SS was garnering a tidy income from its collaboration with the giant chemicals firm, altogether collecting something like 20 million Reichsmarks in payments for these labourers from the company.
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The use of concentration camp prisoners as workers was the outcome of a significant change in the nature, extent and administration of the camps that took place early in 1942. Almost as soon as the war broke out, Theodor Eicke, who had been running the camps since the early days of the Third Reich, was transferred to military duties; he was killed in action in Russia on 16 February 1943. Under his successor, Richard Gl̈cks, the overall population of the camp system expanded rapidly from a total of 21,000 on the eve of war to 110,000 in September 1942. This total did not of course include the Reinhard Action extermination camps, where prisoners were not registered but went straight to the gas chambers, except for a small number employed for a time in the Special Detachments. Large numbers of the new inmates were Polish workers, and from 1940 also known or suspected opponents of the German occupation regime in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, France, Belgium, Norway, Holland and Serbia. Workers, professionals and clergy were a particular target. With the invasion of the Soviet Union came further arrests. A table of the arrests made by the Gestapo in October 1941 across the Reich showed that the month’s total stood at 544 arrests for ‘Communism and Marxism’, 1,518 for ‘opposition’, 531 for ‘prohibited association with Poles or prisoners of war’, and no fewer than 7,729 for ‘ceasing work’. Smaller numbers were arrested for religious opposition to the regime, or because they were Jews who had been released from a camp after the pogrom of November 1938 on condition that they emigrated and had then failed to do so.
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The expansion of the system in the first two and a half years of the war involved the establishment of new camps, including Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Stutthof. Despite Himmler’s attempt to insist that some of the new foundations were really labour camps, the distinction between a concentration camp, a labour camp and a ghetto became rather blurred as the war progressed. This was not least because the rapidly growing need for labour in the German war economy made the camp population an increasingly obvious source of workers for war-related industries. The most important change in this respect came as part of the general reorganization of the war economy following the defeat of the German army before Moscow and then the appointment of Albert Speer as Armaments Minister. On 16 March 1942, Himmler transferred the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps to the Economy and Administration Head Office of the SS, run by Oswald Pohl. This became the channel through which firms requested the provision of labour, and the SS put more and more Poles and eastern workers in the camps so that they could meet this demand. On 30 April 1942 Pohl wrote to Himmler summarizing the change of function that was now taking place in the camps: