6

“Who Still Talks of the Armenians?”

Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.1 Reports from German-occupied Poland suggest that the SS gassed a number of Polish prostitutes at about the same time.²

The bulk of the Nazi killings prior to 1941 were what the Poles termed “cold pogroms”: deportation of tens of thousands of people to barren wastelands or to desperately overcrowded Jewish ghettos where death came slowly through hunger, disease, or exposure to the elements. Nazi concentration camps during this period were prison camps, not extermination centers. True, German security troops and paramilitary gangs undertook thousands of massacres of Jews, Communists, Romanis (Gypsies), and others. But they carried out these killings on a local scale, generally taking the lives of between five and fifty persons at a time.³

The cold pogroms were kindred to Turkey’s World War I extermination of Armenians in several ways. Both were driven primarily by a determination to achieve “security” through wiping out a race of people, rather than by conventional economic or military actions. The Germans used administrative methods similar to those of the Turks, and both campaigns chose local pogroms, hunger, and exposure to the elements as their chief instruments of death. The Nazis organized the extirpation of between 700,000 and one million Jews and Poles between September 1939 and the summer of 19424—a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time using nearly identical methods.

Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the “extermination of the Armenians” had led him to “the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine” over which Aryans would eventually triumph.⁵ He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: “Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality,” he exclaimed. “Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder.… Thus for the time being I have sent to the East … my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”⁶ On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey’s regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.⁷

A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their subunits, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen’s net also caught hundreds of thousands of Communists, Slavs, Romanis, Poles, homosexuals, hospital patients, unarmed prisoners of war, and even orphan children. These two million murders, moreover, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death factories that began in the wake of the invasion.⁸

A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland smuggled out of Warsaw by the Jewish Labor Bund provided remarkably detailed and accurate early documentation of the work of the Einsatzkommandos.

From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using the Ukrainians and Lithuanian fascists for this job. It began in Eastern Galicia in the summer months of 1941. The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were carried off to an “unknown destination” and killed in the adjacent woods. Thirty thousand Jews were killed in L’wow [Lvov], 15,000 in Stanislawow, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 2,000 in Zloczow, 4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has happened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sambor, Stryj, Drohobycz, Zbaraz, Przemyslany, Kuty, Sniatyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places.… The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.9

The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler’s government and German society. In January 1942, fourteen senior German government bureaucrats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin, to coordinate efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the “Jewish Question.” Officials in charge of the economic exploitation of the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of able-bodied Jews as slave laborers, while Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had pushed for mass execution by the Einsatzgruppen. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees and the extent of terror to wreak upon them.

The Wannsee meeting changed all that. There, SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich enlisted the support of each of the major government ministries and Nazi party organizations in a concerted effort to “clear … the German Lebensraum [“living space”] of Jews in a legal way,” [emphasis added]. The tactics were relatively simple. “Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East,” Heydrich commented. “Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts [i.e.: Nazi-occupied territories on the Eastern Front] for work on roads … in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it … would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction.” All German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the “final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe.”10

Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jews to be “cleaned up” in this fashion; he provided a country-by-country breakdown of Jewish populations to help plan tactics. There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.¹¹

Heydrich’s emphasis on “legality” was crucial to the social psychology of the extermination program and to its functioning on a practical level. For Adolf Eichmann, the Wannsee decisions dispelled his lingering doubts about the propriety of mass murder. “Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich,” Eichmann said. “Not only Hitler, not only Heydrich, or [Gestapo chief] Müller, or the SS, or the Party, but the elite of the Civil Service had registered their support.… At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt,” Eichmann testified at his later trial for crimes against humanity. “Who was I to judge? Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?’”¹²

On an operational level, each German government ministry took responsibility for only part of the overall program—the registration of Jews, the seizure of their property, physical transportation across Europe, and so on—and each part had an easy appearance of legality, of sanction by the state and even of a certain sort of normality. Each act of the extermination program, except for the actual gassing, came complete with a more or less reasonable explanation available to the perpetrators and to the world at large. The government was deporting Jews as a security measure and to put them to work, the story went. This would benefit German society and perhaps even benefit the Jewish deportees (as in the case of aged Jews who were to be sent to a special ghetto at Theresienstadt).

By dividing up responsibility for extermination into explicable, functional parts, the Nazi party and SS enlisted and united the German state and most of German society in the countless little tasks necessary to conduct mass murder. They openly promoted the slogan “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as a rallying cry in the Nazi-controlled press.13 Knowledge of the true meaning of the phrase seeped slowly through the informal networks of the governmental, business, and police elites.

Note that even at Wannsee the truth that millions of Jews were to be gassed and shot rather than worked to death was not openly discussed. Almost all of the Jews were said to be “eliminated by natural causes,” as Heydrich put it, rather than simply killed.¹⁴ This simple deceit can be traced to the police security surrounding the gassing installations and to the psychological need of most people to evade open complicity in murder.

The SS did not fool German bureaucrats into cooperation. Rather, the Wannsee conference illustrates how Nazi-dominated society created a social consciousness that both facilitated the extermination program and denied its existence. The “legalization” established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination. Many more people knew of (or suspected) the extermination program than could directly acknowledge it, in part because this was a classified government program during wartime. Yet, widespread possession of unofficial or “denied” knowledge became crucial to the success of the extermination effort; without it, the Third Reich would have failed to coordinate its constantly squabbling ministries well enough to carry out the massive effort.

Preparations for a blitzkrieg-style attack on Jews in the occupied areas of Western Europe had been under way for some months by the time of the Wannsee gathering. The SS had begun tests of Zyklon-B poison gas for mass killings of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews at Auschwitz at least as early as September 1941, and the following month there were similar experimental executions at the Sachsenhausen camp. This new technique was extraordinarily effective, from the Nazis’ point of view, and they immediately built centers devoted exclusively to murder by gassing at Belzec (near the Lublin Jewish reservation) and at Chelmno (near the Lodz ghetto). They gassed about 5,000 Romanis at Chelmno at just about the same time that Heydrich was meeting with the leaders of the civil service at Wannsee in mid-January.15

The previous October, Hitler had ordered that virtually all Jews remaining in Germany were to be deported to the East, supposedly as a security measure. The Nazi occupation governments in France, Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, and Greece soon issued similar decrees. They hit the so-called stateless, or refugee, Jews first; most of those people were deported to Auschwitz and killed there. In mid-July, French collaborationist police captured almost 13,000 stateless Jews in Paris and deported 9,000 of them—including about 4,000 children—to a transit camp at Drancy, from which they went on to Auschwitz. Vichy France then began rounding up French Jews, deporting at least 7,000 of them during August. The collaborationist governments in Belgium and the Netherlands cooperated in similar deportations. Mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp began on July 22. Surviving SS records show that the Nazis murdered more than 200,000 people during the last two weeks of August 1942 alone at the death camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno. Comparable killings were then under way at Auschwitz and Sobibor.¹⁶

Business channels—the information pathways of day-to-day commerce in German society—proved to be one of the most important sources of information about the extermination campaign. Officially, the gassings and mass murders were a German state secret of the highest order. But this information could not be fully concealed from the corporate community because many enterprises were closely intertwined with the murder effort. At Auschwitz, “The great extent of industrial activity in this camp resulted in a constant stream of incoming and outgoing corporation officials, engineers, construction men and other temporary personnel, all excellent carriers of gossip to the farthest corners of the Reich,” Raul Hilberg reports. He recounts a revealing incident that took place in January 1942—only weeks after the initiation of mass gassings of prisoners at the camp—involving an IG Farben official, Ernst A. Struss. Returning by train to Breslau after a short visit to IG Farben’s factory at the camp, Struss “overheard a [German] worker remarking in a loud voice that in Auschwitz large numbers of people were being burnt, that the cremations were being carried out in crematories and on stakes, and that the air in the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz was putrid with the smell of corpses.

“Struss jumped up and shouted, ‘These are lies; you should not spread such lies!’

“The man answered, ‘No, these are not lies; in Auschwitz there are 10,000 workers and all know it.’” Similarly, executives in the central insurance department at IG Farben were uncertain over how to process the reports of mass deaths among laborers at Auschwitz and other IG Farben facilities.17

The evidence shows that, despite later denials, much of the corporate elite of Germany was well aware of the Nazis’ extermination programs. Thousands of German corporate directors and senior managers knowingly contributed to murders carried out by their institutions, in many cases even after they had become disenchanted with Hitler and knew that the war was lost. The SS and the Nazi party could at least point to their ideology as an explanation of sorts for their participation in crime. But the business elite could not make even that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of doing business.

One clear indicator that corporate executives did often have detailed knowledge of the Nazi genocide campaigns is the record of a handful of businessmen who became spies for the Allies during the conflict. Significantly, these agents were not members of the Nazi inner circle; they were simply prosperous businessmen who broke with their government out of political or moral disgust. These spies were relatively isolated within German society, and their sources of information concerning the exterminations were limited to the usual business and social contacts typical of persons of their class. Nevertheless, within weeks after the gassings began, these men were able to report accurately on the existence and on many operational details of the supposedly highly secret mass murder programs.

Industrialist Eduard Schulte, for example, owned strategically important zinc mines and other real estate near what had once been the German-Polish border. He was a conservative Christian Democrat and a committed anti-Nazi who repeatedly risked his life and fortune to spy on the Nazis on behalf of the Polish, Swiss, and eventually U.S. intelligence services.18

Schulte picked up most of his information by listening to the political gossip of German industrialists, through family ties (his cousin was an Abwehr officer), and through talking with the local Nazi district leader, with whom he met because of his mining operations. Such sources consistently knew more of Germany’s most secret affairs than they were officially supposed to know, and with a little prodding from Schulte, they showed off their knowledge in casual conversation. The results of this simple espionage were impressive: Schulte provided early warning to the Allies of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, of the USSR in 1941, and perhaps—though the evidence is less certain on this point—of Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark as well. He passed on dozens of bits of information concerning German military campaigns, petroleum stocks, and resource shortages.¹⁹ Though his information was sometimes incorrect, the Allied agents who handled him from Zurich had little doubt that Schulte was on the whole a reliable and effective secret agent.

As early as July 1942—less than six months after the Wannsee conference—Schulte reported the essential facts of the Final Solution in an urgent message to a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Zurich. The details were sketchy, but Schulte accurately reported that Hitler had decided to kill all Jewish deportees as quickly as was practical; that “3½ to 4 million” people in the territories then in German hands were already scheduled for extermination; and that the killings were to be carried out through gassings involving prussic acid.²⁰

There was, of course, much more to the story than Schulte knew, and Polish intelligence had already pieced together a grim, horrifying study of Nazi crimes in Poland that was more detailed than Schulte’s account*.²¹ The point here, however, is that this relatively minor industrialist, working on his own and without access to secret SS or Nazi party messages, had succeeded in piecing together the essential fact that an intentional campaign of genocide was under way.

Hans Deichmann, a junior executive at IG Farben during the early 1940s, reports a similar experience. In March 1942, Deichmann’s work as a manager of Italian contract labor took him to the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz, where many of the Italian workers he had enlisted were working. Even at that early date, Deichmann says, “no one could have approached the IG Farben works without becoming horribly, fearfully aware of what was happening nearby.” The stink of burning flesh hung in the air, and work columns from “the world of the dead” could be seen on the roads leading from the nearby concentration camp to the IG Farben factory. “I went to Auschwitz ten times between March 1942 and November 1944, each time for one day, and everyone I met spoke of almost nothing but the concentration camp and the systematic extermination,” Deichmann recalls. “‘My’ Italians, who in theory couldn’t understand the people around them, quickly managed to learn even more of the ghastly details than the others knew.”22

The fact that anti-Nazi “outsiders” such as Schulte and Deichmann learned of the extermination programs within weeks after they began does not prove that every other industrialist also knew, of course. But it does establish that such information was readily available through business channels for those individuals with the moral conscience necessary to confront it. Schulte and Deichmann’s experiences strongly suggest that the postwar denials by many industrialists that their decisions during 1943, 1944, and early 1945 were made in ignorance of the ongoing extermination campaigns cannot be taken seriously.

IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camp labor into modern industrial production, and it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new technique. Farben executives even provided advice and training on the large-scale use of forced labor for executives from Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and other major companies.23

Hans Deichmann recalls a lunch he attended for senior IG Farben managers in the autumn of 1940, shortly after the fall of France and before the mass gassings of concentration camp prisoners had begun. “The Four Year Plan’s administrators had given IG Farben the job of building a giant synthetic rubber factory in Upper Silesia, but a site had not yet been chosen,” Deichmann recalled recently in an interview with journalist Harvey Sachs. “It would have to be near an area with an abundance either of essential natural resources—coal, for instance—or of manpower. The IG’s commercial and technical directors, Georg von Schnitzler and Fritz ter Meer, assumed that the other people present at the lunch knew that Hitler’s largest camp for enemies of the regime was at Auschwitz, and they referred to it as the only sure source of manpower.

“The sole inconvenient aspect [they said] was the probable necessity of occasionally but suddenly having to replace carefully trained ‘personnel’ with people who were not yet ready for the task,” Deichmann continued. “Although this was over a year before the implementation of the Final Solution—before the gas chambers and cremetoriums were put into action—Auschwitz was already known to these industrialists as a place where thousands of the regime’s opponents were being murdered. Yet they made their decision [to build the plant at Auschwitz] without a hint of criticism or displeasure or remorse, while sipping their soup.”²⁴

In the beginning, the SS intended to create its own factories for manufacturing war material right inside the concentration camps. This was strongly opposed by most of the German industrial elite, however, and by Albert Speer’s Ministry for Armaments and War Production. Industrialists complained bitterly that the SS had ambitions of competing with private industry and eventually supplanting it altogether in some National Socialist millennium to come. Furthermore, the critics continued, building new factories inside the concentration camps would only aggravate the acute shortages of labor and materials at existing production centers.

If the factories would not come to the camps, German industrial leaders contended, then let the camps come to the factories. The SS could supply forced laborers to industry for their mutual profit—and with relatively little reorganization of either the camps or the companies. “Concentration camp prisoners could be of valuable assistance in the factories already existing in the industrial sector,” Albert Speer wrote. “These factories would merely have to be expanded by means of more buildings and additional machines. An experienced stock of specialists and engineers was already available.… This argument for private business instantly won Hitler over,” Speer remembered.25

From mid-1942 on, the SS became a major provider of slave labor to industry. German corporate leaders assiduously courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess confirms this; his affidavit during his trial for crimes against humanity states that “[t]he concentration camps have at no time offered labor to the industry. On the contrary, prisoners were sent to enterprises only after the enterprises had made a request for concentration camp prisoners. In their letters of request the enterprises had to state in detail which measures had been taken by them, even before the arrival of the prisoners, to guard them, quarter them, etc. I visited officially many such establishments to verify such statements.… During my official trips I was constantly told by executives of the enterprises that they want more prisoners.”²⁶ Similarly, Oswald Pohl, the SS’s chief of the entire slave labor program, testified that “nearly all arms producers came to my department to get labor from the concentration camps. Those who already employed such labor forces usually asked for an increase in their amount of prisoners.”²⁷

Members of the boards of directors at IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Volkswagen, and other major companies that desired large numbers of forced laborers personally took on the task of high-level liaison with the SS on labor matters. According to Pohl, senior corporate leaders with whom he personally negotiated for distribution of prisoners included IG Farben directors Otto Ambros and Fritz ter Meer, Siemens director Rudolf Bingel, and Volkswagen’s Ferdinand Porsche.28 Pohl’s assistant, Karl Sommer, who was responsible for many of the day-to-day details of SS negotiations with corporate customers, left a similar affidavit. Sommer recalled SS agreements for provision of concentration camp inmates negotiated with Porsche of Volkswagen, director Paul Plieger of the giant Salzgitter steelworks and Reichswerke Hermann Göring, Fritz Kranefuss of the Dresdner Bank and the BRABAG energy syndicate, Siemens officer Friedrich Lueschen, and others.²⁹

By the middle of the war, Germany had become dependent on forced labor in almost every important sector of its economy. Some 19.7 percent of the entire workforce in Germany was made up of forced laborers, later studies found. Most of them were concentrated in industry, where they made up almost a third of the workforce. Almost 40 percent of IG Farben’s workers were forced laborers, including tens of thousands of inmates from Auschwitz and other concentration camps. At the Reich’s vast holding company for aircraft and arms production, the Reichswerke Hermann Goering, no less than 58 percent of the employees were forced laborers.*³⁰

These numbers reveal German industry’s pervasive participation in human suffering on a massive scale. German business fed on forced labor throughout the war, exploiting the SS extermination-through-work programs to fulfill military production contracts. Contrary to postwar claims, the initiative for these programs came from industry, not from the Nazi state.

Private industry’s quotas for steel production, aircraft, weapons, and other war materiel—and the labor requisitions necessary to produce these items—were determined through government/industry consultation—not by Nazi fiat.31 There were frictions, of course, and there was no shortage of Nazi bluster about the war emergency as the joint government/industry committees hammered out production schedules. In mid-1942, Hitler gave Albert Speer the task of coordinating German war production. “Realizing that he was no expert in industrial management, [Speer] personally went about selecting persons in industry who were considered experts by their peers,” writes Edward Zilbert, author of the RAND Corporation’s analysis of Speer’s military production techniques. “The men were not made civil servants, but instead were recognized as honorary members of the Ministry, in a fashion analogous to the drafting of prominent industrial leaders in the United States for war production and attaching them to the government as ‘dollar-a-year’ men.… At the same time, [Speer] permitted these experts the greatest possible latitude in the operation of their particular specialities. This policy was given the name of self-regulation or self-administration of industry. That is, the responsibility for production programs rested on the individuals concerned with the actual production …” and not with the SS, the armaments, ministry or other German government agencies.³²

German industry’s unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust. But it is often overlooked in the popular imagination and in media portrayals of Nazi crimes, which tend to stress the role of the political police or the grotesque and horrifying extermination camps.

Forced labor in Germany can be divided into three overlapping categories: press-ganged foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates. Each group is frequently described as slaves or even, as Ben Ferencz has eloquently described Jewish forced laborers, as less than slaves.33 Still, there were important differences among these categories as far as the laborers themselves were concerned.

The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, though virtually every European nationality was represented. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agricultural labor. “All of the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way that they produce to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure,” Labor Minister Sauckel ordered.³⁴ (Sauckel refers here only to men, but in fact about 25 percent of these workers were female.) As ominous as Sauckel’s phrase was, it nevertheless suggested that industry and the German state would make some minimal effort to keep most of these workers alive, if only to use them a bit longer. The workers were often euphemistically referred to as “foreign workers” or even as gastarbeiters—“guest workers.”

In contrast, Jewish concentration camp inmates and many Soviet POWs were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them. This procedure typically required between one and six months.³⁵ The SS, which ran the concentration camps, teetered uneasily between contradictory policies of deriving valuable labor from camp inmates or of simply murdering Jews and other targeted groups as quickly as possible, regardless of the economic consequences. In practice, the police agency pursued both ends simultaneously, selecting some inmates for death-through-labor while immediately killing others wholesale.³⁶ The prisoners worked to death were primarily Jews, though they were in time joined by groups of Polish and Russian POWs, homosexuals, “guest workers” who had attempted to escape from corporate work gangs, and others.

The Germans created a hierarchy among those they declared to be subhuman, and this structure—combined with heavy doses of police terror—contributed to keeping the system of forced labor and mass murder viable for several years. Typically, the Germans sent those at the bottom of the pyramid to be gassed: Jews who were old, weak, or very young; handicapped persons; and injured prisoners. They murdered millions of healthy Jews as well, as part of their Final Solution.

On the next step up, the SS in some cases preserved the stronger or more economically useful Jews, at least for a time. They worked these men and women to death in vast construction or mining projects; some were even used in less deadly skilled production tasks. On this same step could also be found many unskilled workers from the East, Soviet and French POWs, and others destined to be worked to death. Then came another group, which included laborers from Vichy France, Italy, Belgium, and Western Europe, who were ostensibly “volunteers” but who were in reality often captives of the German companies they served. There were still further variations of status and treatment among the foreign workers, depending upon the nationality and gender of the worker and the industry to which he or she was assigned.37

This system employed both coercion and reward within its cramped boundaries. Foreign laborers could gain improved rations or other benefits as a reward for increased production, for example. On the other hand, corporate managers could and often did push slackers and troublemakers down among the Jews and those marked for death.

As the war turned against Germany, the Labor Ministry turned to simple press-ganging of foreign workers. Sauckel told Albert Speer in early 1944 that “out of five million foreign workers who [recently] arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily.”³⁸ Sauckel’s ministry began manhunts and roundups in the Nazi-occupied areas that hit consumer-goods factories, workers’ homes, theaters, and churches. In many instances, captives were shipped to Germany before they could bid good-bye to families or gather boots and winter clothes. Sauckel’s men treated Ukrainian and Russian women with special cruelty; females surprised in their beds were in some cases loaded into boxcars and shipped across Europe wearing only their underwear or a nightdress, much to the amusement of the guards.

In Ukraine, the violence accompanying labor recruitment grew so severe that even the Nazis’ own quislings complained to Berlin. One protest in 1943 from a German-sponsored local administration lists sixteen instances of violence during the supposedly voluntary labor enlistment campaigns; in one Ukrainian village that failed to meet its labor quota, the Germans murdered forty-five people, eighteen of them children between the ages of three and fifteen.*³⁹

Industrial barracks for foreign laborers became de facto concentration camps, complete with barbed wire, searchlights, and armed guards hired by the companies. Corporate managers from Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler Benz, and similar companies enforced regulations under which laborers who “sabotaged production” or left their posts without permission were punished by beatings, hangings, or deportation to death camps. As the war ground down to its desperate conclusion, the rations for workers in some factories fell to fewer than 800 calories a day, guaranteeing epidemics, physical collapse, and a lingering death.

In the end, German industry worked several million of these men and women to death, and permanently injured millions more. One indication of the scale of the carnage can be gleaned from the difference between the number of job slots filled by foreign laborers and the number of workers actually shipped to fill those slots. If the German government reports are correct, German industry destroyed at least three million foreign workers between 1942 and 1944 alone. That, moreover, was before the winter of 1944–45, when mass starvation set in.⁴⁰

The conditions in the SS concentration camps were still worse. In some, the starvation-killings began at least as early as 1939 and continued without respite for the rest of the war. There was no medical care to speak of, little clean water, no toilets, and no rest. Inmates who collapsed or failed to turn out for the morning roll call faced beatings or execution. There was no Red Cross, no correspondence with families, no redress for grievances, no holidays, no pay.

By the end of the war, the SS had created a network of twenty-three main concentration camps that served as the hubs of a submerged nation of prison laborers.⁴¹ These camps included Buchenwald in central Germany, Dachau near Munich, Mauthausen in Austria, Sachsenhausen just north of Berlin, and Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. These labor camps were usually separate from the extermination centers such as Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. The sprawling complex at Auschwitz, however, combined slave labor and mass extermination, and the inmate population there was at times larger than that of a small city—at least until the gas chambers could catch up.

The main SS labor camps were surrounded by at least 1,000 nebelgänger, “side camps,” established by German companies or by the SS.42 These facilities came under the administrative umbrella of the main SS camps, but as a practical matter they were maintained and run by the corporation or SS unit sponsoring the side camp. The Krupp steelworks, for example, controlled fifty-five of these camps in the Essen area alone. The guards at each were Krupp company employees, not SS.⁴³ At some Krupp camps, inmates slept in barracks; at others, they slept in tents, in bombed-out buildings, or in piles of construction materials. The company kept 1,100 French prisoners of war in dog kennels at Noeggerathstrasse in Essen, where each six-foot-wide, three-foot-high enclosure provided sleeping space for five inmates. There was no water at the Noeggerathstrasse center.⁴⁴

Health conditions were appalling. Many Krupp inmates had spotted fever, company doctor Wilhelm Jaeger reported to Krupp headquarters in 1942. “Lice, the carrier of this disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin, tortured the inhabitants of these camps.” Nearly all of the inmates became infected with skin diseases as a result of the filthy conditions, Jaeger said. The shortages of food also caused many cases of hunger edema (the starvation affliction first seen in World War I camps), nephritis (kidney disease), and Shiga-Kruse disease (dysentery).⁴⁵ Most Krupp doctors refused even to enter the prisoners’ camps, fearing that they, too, might become infected by the typhus and other plagues prevalent there.

Despite this widespread and often public brutality, industrial exploitation of concentration camp labor paradoxically provided an important element in the SS’s cover story for the mass murders that it had begun at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other killing centers. The relatively visible forced labor of camp inmates provided some answer, however unsatisfactory, to the nagging questions concerning what had become of the hundreds of thousands of German Jews who had been quite publicly deported to the East.

Meanwhile, the Allies’ carpet bombing of Berlin and other cities accelerated German exploitation of forced labor. The Allied bombing—itself a war crime, some observers contend—tended to reinforce Nazi efforts to mobilize German society to carry out anti-Semitic measures, particularly the deportation of German Jews during the first years of the war. Clearly, Allied bombings did not cause the Holocaust. For Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other committed Nazis, the elimination of Jews was desirable in itself, requiring no justification. But for millions of ordinary Germans—for the “bystanders,” to use psychologist Ervin Staub’s term—whose active and tacit cooperation was necessary to implement Hitler’s genocidal designs, Allied bombing seemed to be a war crime against Germans that justified harsh retaliation against the supposed enemies in their midst, the Jews.46

The British bombing strategy was calculated to kill or maim as many German civilians as possible, to spread terror and demoralization, and to disrupt industrial production by burning the working-class quarters of cities to the ground. This was not pinpoint bombing of military-industrial targets, as Allied spokesmen frequently claimed at the time, but rather “a new offensive of which the primary target would now be the homes of the German people,” according to strategic analyst George Quester. “No longer would a city in Germany be spared because of its remoteness from clearly military targets, [and] no longer would specific targets in large cities be aimed at, rather than the city as a whole.… The ferocity of the area assault was really now to be restrained only by technical or meteorological obstacles.”⁴⁷ The U.S. in time adopted many aspects of the British air strategy, as demonstrated in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and, later, in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the opening years of the war, when the U.S. was still officially neutral, President Franklin Roosevelt had forcefully condemned as a war crime any airborne bombing of undefended cities and towns. Great Britain and the U.S. were signatories to the 1907 Hague convention, Roosevelt said, which had banned “attack or bombardment by any means whatever of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended.” The phrase “by any means whatever” had been inserted specifically to deal with bombardments of undefended civilian targets from airplanes or—as had seemed more likely in 1907—from balloons.48

U.S. acknowledgment that bombing civilians constituted a war crime disappeared from Allied war propaganda after 1940. Great Britain and Germany began an escalating series of air strikes against one another in which each described its actions as legally sanctioned reprisals intended to deter attacks from the enemy. By the time the U.S. entered the war, the Allies had already concluded that British and U.S. air raids against German cities would remain among their most important tactics. Before World War II was over, both sides had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in this fashion, each blaming the other for initiating the carnage. As the Allies gained control of the skies over Europe, they stopped claiming that these acts of bombing were crimes, while the Germans stepped up their argument that the raids on cities were serious violations of the rules of war. The Nazis used Allied airborne “crimes against Germans” as a compelling and seemingly convincing reply for German audiences to the Allied charges of Nazi crimes in the occupied territories.⁴⁹

Thus, contrary to Allied intent, bombing raids tended to mobilize the German population (at least early in the war), reduce passive resistance to Hitler’s policies among the German military and industrial elite, and facilitate a more dramatic shift toward total war mobilization than had previously been possible.⁵⁰ The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, for example, found that Allied bombing had little negative impact on German war production up to the fall of 1944, and that the earlier Allied raids were actually accompanied by increases in the level and efficiency of German war production.⁵¹ (U.S. targeting of German oil and railroad centers in the last months of the war, in contrast, does seem to have had considerable military impact, though that conclusion remains in dispute among some senior bombing survey analysts.)⁵²

Inside Nazi Germany, the Allied bombing fed directly into Hitler’s war against Jews as well as into more conventional patriotic and civil-defense activities. Propaganda Minister Goebbels repeatedly linked the Nazis’ genocide of Jews to Allied bombing in his broadcast speeches and in front-page editorials in the mass circulation weekly Das Reich. In May and June 1942, for example, shortly after the first 1,000-bomber Allied raids on Cologne and Essen, Goebbels declared that Germany would repay England “blow for blow” for the attacks on German cities. He went on to blame the purportedly “Jewish press” of London and New York for instigating Britain’s “bloodthirsty malice” against Germany. These Jews, Goebbels continued, “will pay for it [the bombings] with the extermination of their race in all Europe and perhaps even beyond Europe.”53

Goebbels was a master propagandist with a keen sense of Germany’s mood and national culture. He clearly believed that the bombings fueled German mobilization for genocide, giving ordinary Germans a justification for the deportation of Jews, or at least a further reason to remain silent as government officials and Nazi activists did the dirty work. Further, the bombings provided an opening for Goebbels to publicly endorse race murder as a partial solution to Germany’s problems—while at the same time maintaining the ability to deny that this was government policy when it was opportune to do so.

Otto Ohlendorf, a leading SS intellectual and ideologue, offered similar reflections during his postwar trial for the murder of 90,000 civilians by an Einsatzgruppe under his command. As Ohlendorf saw it, the Nazis’ mass execution of Jewish children by gas and gunfire was directly comparable to Allied killings of German children by bombing. The murder of Jewish children, he claimed, was a “security measure,” because otherwise “the children would grow up, and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of their parents.” He continued: “I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations.”⁵⁴

The general public in Germany closely associated Jews with Allied bombing operations. At first, this took the form of popular hostility toward Jews as supposed foreign spies and manipulators behind Allied governments, a view that was systematically encouraged by the Nazi party and Goebbels’s ministry. Indeed, diehard Nazis and their sympathizers to this day present Auschwitz and other concentration camps as “security measures” created in response to Allied initiatives.⁵⁵

Later in the war, however, the reverse idea seems to have taken hold among the German public, much to Goebbels’s distress. Beginning at least as early as the summer of 1943, confidential police reports indicate a widespread popular belief that Allied bombing was retribution for Nazi mistreatment of Jews. Many Germans believed that cities and religious bishoprics that had supposedly been less hostile to Jews would be immune to Allied air attacks.⁵⁶

Similarly, many Germans throughout the war regarded Jews as useful hostages who could be employed to deter Allied bombers. In Schweinfurt, the elite Nazi intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD) reported that “Many national comrades [i.e., Nazi party members] are of the opinion that the Jewish Question has been solved by us in the most clumsy way possible. They say quite openly that … our cities would still be intact if we had only brought the Jews together in ghettos [without deporting them]. In that way we would have today a very effective means of threat and counter-measure at our disposal.”57 These sentiments can also be found in letters sent by ordinary Germans to the Goebbels ministry, historian Ian Kershaw has reported. Such notes frequently included suggestions that Jews “should not be allowed in air-raid shelters but should [instead] be herded together in the cities threatened by bombing and the numbers of their dead published immediately after each air-raid,” or that the “Americans and the British should be told that ten Jews would be shot for each civilian killed in a bomb-attack.”⁵⁸

None of these popular German myths had any basis in fact. There is no indication in available intelligence records that the Allies avoided bombing Jews in German cities, nor did the treatment of Jews in any German locality play a role in Allied targeting decisions.⁵⁹ In fact, Allied bombing may have taken a disproportionately high toll of Jewish lives, because the air raids often targeted factories and docks where the Reich had concentrated thousands of forced laborers. British raids in March 1943, for example, wiped out 100 prisoners at one Krupp works in Essen, killed 820 and wounded 643 at another Krupp plant, then killed 230 prisoners at the Heinkel aircraft works north of Berlin. A Krupp management report filed late in the war indicated that three company prison camps had been “partially destroyed,” thirty-two camps had been “destroyed,” and twenty-two had been “twice destroyed” by Allied bombing. All of the Krupp camps in Essen had been damaged, compounding the existing health and shelter problems.⁶⁰

Allied bombing spurred German industry’s demands for concentration camp labor and often encouraged public acceptance of mass slave labor as a legitimate war measure. For example, Hamburg was the center of German submarine production and a likely target for Allied bombers. The city prepared for the worst and undertook extensive civil defense measures, requiring millions of tons of cement, bricks, and other construction material.61 The SS established a major concentration camp, brickworks, and stone quarry at Neuengamme, in Hamburg’s suburbs, in part to meet this demand. In time, the Neuengamme forced-labor center became the flagship of the SS’s commercial subsidiary, the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke AG (German Earth- and Stoneworks Company, or DESAG), which provided considerable income to the police agency. When the air raids came to Hamburg in 1943, the SS marched their tattered wretches out of the camp for new tasks in the center of town. There, tens of thousands of Germans saw forced laborers at work, excavating unexploded bombs, clearing rubble, and pouring new cement at docks and factories throughout the city.⁶²

By the end of that year, the Hamburg city government and a score of private German military contractors acquired squads of prison laborers from the SS for use in heavy construction, clearing bomb damage, and similar tasks. Within a year, hundreds of large companies in northern Germany had their own forced laborers, and several factories maintained full-scale, company-owned concentration camps for these workers. By the end of the war, the Neuengamme camp alone had distributed more than 100,000 inmates to factories throughout northern Germany.⁶³

City governments and private enterprises throughout Germany and the German-occupied territories followed roughly the same pattern of exploitation of concentration camp inmates for civil defense and bomb-clearing duties established by Hamburg. The Sachsenhausen camp fed much of Berlin’s demand for forced labor, Dachau provided for Munich, and Buchenwald sent thousands of inmates to toil in central Germany.⁶⁴

German subsidiaries of U.S. companies, including General Motors, Ford, and several oil companies, made extensive use of forced labor as well. Buchenwald concentration camp supplied labor to GM’s giant Russelsheim plant (which the Germans converted to aircraft engine production for Junkers during the war) and to the Ford truck plant at Cologne.⁶⁵ International Red Cross records suggest that Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück provided prisoners for the Ford and GM plants at Berlin and Brandenburg, but the evidence on that point remains fragmentary owing to the complexity of the German system for allocating forced laborers. It is clear, however, that camp inmates were used for bomb-clearing, cleanup, reconstruction, and other services essential to these factories, particularly during the later war years. Ford’s German management also extensively exploited Russian POWs for war production work, which is generally considered a war crime under the Geneva conventions.*⁶⁶

The prisoners’ civil defense work became an important pillar of the system of mass forced labor in Germany. By bringing the violence of war home to German cities, the Allied bombings contributed substantially to the atmosphere where mass slave labor could be accepted as an “ordinary” fact of life by Germany’s civilian population, at least for the duration of the war. If participation in genocide is in fact a learned behavior, as psychologist Staub contends, it was German industry’s Aryanizations, forced labor, and and response to Allied bombing that helped infect ordinary Germans with this disorder. A somewhat similar pattern of “learning by doing” emerged among SS men and German soldiers on the Eastern Front, reports historian Christian Streit.⁶⁷

Importantly, the framework of international law constructed by Robert Lansing, John Foster Dulles, and others in the wake of World War I obstructed efforts to confront Nazi crimes. Much of the expertise in international law in both the United States and the United Kingdom was centered in their foreign ministries, which dealt with international legal affairs daily. By the beginning of the Holocaust, these offices played a dominant and at times exclusive role in formulating international legal precepts and in defending the Lansing-Dulles status quo. The principal U.S. government experts on international law were usually staunch advocates of a cramped conception of legality that supported the Hitler government’s claims that it could treat its civilians as it wished.

The international law experts at the U.S. Department of State considered German forced labor to be legal—or, perhaps more precisely, not illegal—under international law and custom as it then stood. They regarded it as inappropriate for outside governments to meddle in almost any form of exploitation that had been authorized by the German state, as long as it took place within the Reich itself. Further, Jewish (and other) activists in the West who sought to extend international legal authority to protect rights of slave laborers inside Germany were considered indirect threats to U.S. interests, because their proposals would require official U.S. recognition of the rights of laborers far beyond what the State Department regarded as prudent. Observers such as George Kennan, Joseph Grew, and other stalwarts of the “Riga” faction within the Foreign Service regarded almost any German depravity against the USSR to be legal, because they regarded the Soviet government to be an illegitimate regime that had refused to commit itself fully to civilized conventions.68

Most of these Western experts had difficulty coming to grips with the growing evidence of Nazi criminality. “It cannot be said that German policy is motivated by any sadistic desire to see other people suffer under German rule,” wrote George Kennan in April 1941, when he was chief administrative officer of the U.S. consulate in Berlin. (He wrote this after almost two years of well-publicized pogroms in Poland and mass deportations of German, French, and Dutch Jews to concentration camps.) “Germans are most anxious that their new subjects should be happy in their care; they are willing to make what seems to them important compromises to achieve this result, and they are unable to understand why these measures should not be successful.”⁶⁹ Kennan was out of step with President Franklin Roosevelt’s hard-line policies toward the Nazis, but he was not alone.

The public pattern of Nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal. For them, Germany’s forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to problems that were common to U.S. and German elites. They ignored the reports of the Holocaust that had begun to come out of Nazi-occupied Europe, and some even went out of their way to discredit accurate information about what the Nazis were up to.

* Schulte’s information concerning mass executions of Jews through the use of prussic acid—Zyklon-B gas—was the capstone of a mountain of evidence concerning the Nazis’ intentions that had been building over the previous twelve months. The Czech and Polish governments-in-exile in London had repeatedly brought forth detailed news of the “cold pogroms” and related terror. On July 2, 1942, BBC broadcasts featured Polish-Jewish spokesman Szmul Zygielbojm, who stated bluntly that the Nazis’ strategy in Poland consisted of the “planned extermination of a whole nation by means of shot, shell, starvation and poison gas. It will really be a shame to live on, a shame to belong to the human race,” he continued, “if means are not found at once to put an end to the greatest crime in human history.” Zygielbojm and the Polish National Council simultaneously presented a detailed report on Nazi atrocities in Poland to all members of both houses of the British Parliament. Even before the arrival of Schulte’s news concerning poison gas, the British government was prepared to concede on the basis of the Polish evidence that some 700,000 Jews “had been murdered or starved to death [in Poland alone] since the outbreak of the war.”

It was in this context that Schulte’s message became a political rallying symbol, at least among those who had been paying attention to events in Europe. Here at last was “proof,” said to be direct from the Führer’s headquarters, that in a few taut sentences summarized the thousands of earlier fragmentary reports. The Schulte telegram was not new information: It was a conclusion, and a symbol that was capable of crystallizing substantial new action in defense of Hitler’s victims.

* The true number of these workers will probably never be known, because postwar German industry has had a strong incentive to destroy all evidence of this aspect of its history. The estimate of the number of forced laborers most often cited is drawn from a 1944 end-of-year report to Hitler from Labor Minister Fritz Sauckel, where the minister proudly claims to have “recruited” 5.3 million foreign laborers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates for the Reich since his appointment as minister in 1942. The overwhelming majority of these “recruits” were in fact brought to Germany at gunpoint, as even Sauckel admitted. The 5.3 million figure was accepted by the prosecution at Nuremberg, in part because Sauckel could not deny having made it, and the enormous scale of the forced labor program eventually became an important factor in the court’s decision to convict and hang Sauckel for crimes against humanity.

But 5.3 million forced laborers is clearly an underestimate. The Ministry for Armaments and War Production (the Speer ministry), for example, calculated at about the same time that 8.1 million foreign laborers had been compelled to work in German industry between 1942 and 1944. Sauckel’s figures, as it turned out, concerned only the total number of work “slots” for forced laborers at the time of his report. He did not record statistics on those who had been worked to death or otherwise murdered, those who had escaped, or those who had been replaced for other reasons. Further, Nazi Germany had conscripted another five million laborers, most of them Poles and Jews, before 1942. These persons did not appear as statistics in either Sauckel’s or Speer’s report.

“This meant that a total of at least ten million foreigners were recruited” for labor, according to Edward Homze, a specialist in modern German labor history. “The [ten million] figure, however, must be considered a conservative estimate.… by the end of 1944, at the peak of employment of foreign workers, one out of every five workers employed in the Reich was a foreigner.”

* The Nazis’ forced labor program actually contributed significantly to the growth of anti-Nazi resistance in the occupied areas, contrary to the Germans’ intentions. That at least was the opinion of a committee of Wehrmacht generals, who petitioned Berlin during the war for a suspension of the labor program because it was sparking powerful opposition almost everywhere it was attempted. Similarly, the U.S. Army guerrilla warfare specialist Edgar Howell, who studied Nazi counterinsurgency tactics in the Ukraine during the development of the United States’ own counterinsurgency doctrine, concluded after the war that “the German labor program … probably contributed more to the ultimate frustration of the German war effort in the rear areas than any one other policy.”

* These subsidiary companies were not run from Detroit during the war, as has sometimes been alleged, nor did the German subsidiaries repatriate profits to the U.S. or report their activities to the parent companies. It is nonetheless true that the German directors and trustees who did manage those factories during the war—who competed for political influence, war-production contracts, and supplies of forced laborers—were to a large degree the same German bankers, lawyers, and corporate leaders who had been appointed by the parent companies in the U.S. to run these facilities prior to the war, and who often continued in their posts after the conflict ended. In Ford’s case, the ambitious Berlin attorney Heinrich Albert served as company director, tireless promoter of military production, and leader of Ford’s effort to “de-judify” the company before and during the war.