Powell
Guru
Joined: 27 Nov 2004
{Posts: 2123 }
|
 Posted: Tue 23 Sep 2008 05:20 Post subject: White slaves of the Third Reich |
 |
|
| Quote: | Their struggle
By Niall Ferguson
Published: September 13 2008 00:22 | Last updated: September 13 2008 00:22
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
By Mark Mazower
Allen Lane £30, 726 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24
Hitler
By Ian Kershaw
Allen Lane £30, 1,030 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24
Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution
By Ian Kershaw
Yale University Press £19.99, 394 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.99
In September 1942 Heinrich Himmler had an imperial vision. In the 20 years after Germany’s victory in the war, “the Germanic peoples” would grow in number from 83 million to 120 million and would resettle all the land Germany had conquered from Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union. They would go forth and multiply in splendid new provinces with names such as “Ingermanland”. Autobahns and high-speed railways would connect a “string of pearls” – fortified German outposts – as far as the Don, the Volga and ultimately even the Urals. In Himmler’s words, the German conquest of “the East” would be “the greatest piece of colonisation which the world will ever have seen”.
In reality, the Nazi empire turned out to be the least successful piece of colonisation ever seen. Launched in 1938, the campaign to expand beyond Germany’s 1871 borders peaked in late 1942, by which time the empire encompassed around one-third of the European land-mass and nearly half its inhabitants – 244 million people. Yet by October 1944, when the Red Army marched into East Prussia, it was gone, making it one of the shortest-lived empires in all history, as well as one of the worst.
Why was the Nazi empire such a horrible failure? Was it because it was so out-gunned? Or because it was so bad?
In his deeply researched new history of what he calls Hitler’s Empire, Mark Mazower follows in the footsteps of a number of historians who have recently attempted large synthesising works on the Third Reich. Like Michael Burleigh and Adam Tooze, Mazower grasps the fact that the Nazi regime revealed its true character only in war and conquest. Nor was it simply a renegade nation state; from the outset it was intent on being an empire.
Mazower compares the first Nazi colony – the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” set up in place of the dismembered Czechoslovakia – with protectorates earlier established by the French in Tunis and Morocco or by the British in Egypt and Iraq. It was no mere coincidence that the provincial governor of wartime Posen, Viktor Böttcher, had been a civil servant in the German Cameroons before 1914. He was one of a number of Nazi functionaries who sought “to perform now in the east of the Reich the constructive work that they had once carried out in Africa”. The Nazis always intended to regard the territories taken from the Soviet Union “from a colonial viewpoint”, to be “exploited economically with colonial methods”.
As Mazower notes, the difference that most struck contemporaries was that, in eastern Europe, the colonised were the same colour as the colonisers. “No nation belonging to the white race has ever before had such conditions forced upon it,” wrote Eugene Erdely, one of the earliest commentators on Nazi imperial rule in 1941. Yet the Nazis had no difficulty with that, thanks to the warped ingenuity of their own racial theories. To Himmler, the Slavic peoples were all “Mongol types” who had to be replaced with “Aryans” to create a new “blond province” in the east. To Hitler, the Russians could be equated with “Redskins”.
The short duration of the Nazi empire was, of course, primarily for military reasons. Once the Third Reich was embroiled in a war with not only the British Empire but also the Soviet Union and the US, its empire was surely doomed. Yet Mazower’s book offers a secondary, endogenous explanation for the Third Reich’s failure as an empire.
In terms of simple demographics, there was nothing implausible about putting 80 million Germans in charge of the European continent. In theory, it should have been easier for Germany to rule Ukraine than it was for Britain to rule Uttar Pradesh. For one thing, Kiev was nearer to Berlin than Kanpur was to London. For another, the Germans were genuinely welcomed as liberators in many parts of Ukraine in 1941. Not only there. All over the western USSR Stalin had treated ethnic minorities with suspicion and violence in the 1930s. Most assumed German rule would be an improvement.
Yet, as Mazower shows, the Germans failed to exploit these advantages. What went wrong? The answer can be given in four words: arrogance, callousness, brutality and ineptitude. All empires are prone to these vices, of course. But the Nazi empire took them to such an extreme that any possibility of sustainable rule was destroyed. Later empires worried about winning hearts and minds. The Nazi empire was both heartless and mindless.
The “arrogant and overbearing Reich Germans”, strutting around in their fancy uniforms, alienated even the ethnic Germans they claimed to have freed from foreign oppression. Moreover, they took positive pride in starving the newly subject peoples.
“I will pump every last thing out of this country,” declared Reichskommissar Erich Koch, when put in charge of the Ukraine. “I did not come here to spread bliss ... ”
Hermann Göring boasted that he “could not care less” if non-Germans were “collapsing from hunger”.
After Operation Barbarossa, for example, Red Army prisoners were treated with such vicious indifference that by February 1942 only 1.1 million were still alive of the 3.9 million originally captured. Herded together in barbed wire stockades, they were left to the ravages of malnutrition and disease.
Nor were the Nazis content to starve the conquered. They also relished inflicting violence on them, ranging from impromptu beatings (which could be administered either for failing to give the Hitler salute or for presumptuously giving it, according to taste) all the way to industrialised genocide.
A few Germans saw the folly of this, as Mazower notes. In the words of Gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld in February 1944: “The principle of ruthless brutality, the treatment of the country [Ukraine] according to points of view and methods used in past centuries against coloured slave peoples ... all this bears testimony to the complete lack of instinct with regard to the treatment of alien peoples, which in view of its consequences can only be called ... disastrous.”
It was, as one of Alfred Rosenberg’s associates at the Ministry for the East put it, a “masterpiece of wrong treatment ... to have, within a year, chased into the woods and swamps, as partisans, a people which was absolutely pro-German and had jubilantly greeted us as their liberator”.
Added to arrogance, callousness and brutality was downright ineptitude. As early as 1938 a Wehrmacht staff officer remarked on the “crass extent” of “the State’s inability to govern” in the newly acquired Sudetenland. Rosenberg’s Ministry for the East (Ost-Ministerium) was soon nicknamed the “Ministry for Chaos” (Cha-Ost-Ministerium). The SS aspired to establish some kind of centralising grip on the empire. But Mazower shows in considerable detail how Himmler and his lackeys bungled the resettlement of 800,000 ethnic Germans.
Even Otto Ohlendorf – who, as a loyal Einsatzgruppe commander, was responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews – lamented that Himmler’s speciality was “organizing disorder”. Yet ultimate responsibility for the dysfunctional character of the Nazi Empire lay not with Rosenberg or Himmler but with their master. After all, it was Hitler who was in charge of the Third Reich. Of 650 major legislative orders issued during the war, all but 72 were decrees or orders issued in his name.
It was Hitler who argued, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, that: “In view of the vast size of the conquered territories in the East, the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if, instead of punishing resistance by sentences in a court of law, the occupying forces spread such terror as to crush every will to resist among the population.” It was Hitler whose preferred method for pacifying occupied territory was “shooting everyone who looked in any way suspicious”.
In the eyes of Werner Best, one of the rare figures in the Third Reich with a semi-sane conception of imperial rule, Hitler was a latter-day Genghis Khan – a specialist in destruction, whose empire could not hope to endure. Mazower agrees, though without saying how long it would have endured if (as nearly happened) Stalin’s regime had collapsed in 1941, or if the US had adopted a Pacific First strategy.
This interpretation will come as no surprise to readers of Sir Ian Kershaw’s monumental biography of Hitler, now republished (shorn of endnotes) in a single volume by Penguin. Kershaw’s early work focused on popular attitudes towards the Third Reich, aligning him with “structuralists” rather than “intentionalists” in the great historiographical debate of the 1970s. But as his biography evolved, the centrality of Hitler became inescapable.
As Kershsaw writes in Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution, one of the most recent of the essays in a separate collection published by Yale: “No Hitler: no SS-police state ... no Hitler: no general European war by the late 1930s ... No Hitler: no attack on the Soviet Union ... No Hitler: no Holocaust.”
That does not mean Hitler explicitly ordered every detail of what was done in his name. The other Nazis – those responsible for the Nazi Empire’s “cumulative radicalization” – saw themselves as rather vaguely “working towards the Führer”. Yet they would not have worked in the directions they took had Hitler not been there.
In many ways Hitler’s Empire was the reductio ad absurdum of a concept that by 1945 had passed its historical sell-by date. It had seemed plausible for centuries that the road to riches lay through the exploitation of foreign peoples and their land. Long before the word Lebensraum was coined, empires had contended for new places to settle, new people to tax. Yet in the course of the 20th century, it gradually became apparent that an industrial economy could operate perfectly well without colonies. Indeed, colonies might be something of a needless burden.
Writing in 1942, the economist Helmut Schubert noted that Germany’s real future was as “a large industrial zone”, dependent on “a permanent and growing presence of foreign workers”.
Germanisation of the east was an impossibility; easternisation of Germany was far more likely as the secular shift of labour from agriculture to industry continued. The exigencies of the war economy vindicated this view. By the end of 1944 around five million foreigners had been conscripted to work in the factories and mines of the old Reich. By a rich irony, the dream of a racially pure imperium had turned Germany itself into a multi-ethnic slave state.
But then, of course, unintentional consequences are most likely when intentions are least thought through. Hitler’s interpreter later remarked: “The Nazis kept on talking about a thousand-year Reich, but they couldn’t think ahead for five minutes.” If only the duration of their empire could have been so brief. Even six years was far, far too long.
Niall Ferguson is contributing editor of the Financial Times |
|
|
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
