A Patriot's History of the Modern World (68 page)

Productivity statistics from slave workers remain murky, but even after allowing for the additional costs of guards and an overall productivity level only 40 percent that of a free German laborer, prisoner labor still constituted a net gain for the Nazis. Not all forced laborers were equally productive, and French prisoners seemed less efficient than German Jews or other German prisoners, while Poles and Soviets badly underperformed western Europeans. In short, Nazi Germany's experience with slave labor scarcely
differed from that of the American Confederacy—and these were generally industrial workers already capable of performing mechanized tasks. And, as always, better-fed workers tended to be more efficient.

Here was the internal contradiction of the “Hunger Plan”—the program of systematic starvation of Jews and other foreign prisoners: performance at even low levels demanded a certain caloric intake. Food set aside for workers was food not going to the Wehrmacht, yet without workers, the army had no guns, tanks, or ammunition. Ultimately, the Nazis reverted back to the racial genocide decided upon earlier, creating a “perverse functional connection between the extermination of the Jewish population…and the improvement in food rations that was necessary to sustain the labor force working in the mines and factories of the Reich.”
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The Jews would be excluded from food supplies, regardless of the industrial cost. In the short run, the mass murder of Jews freed up substantial food stores for the military. Exclusion of Poles from rations soon followed in March 1943 when they lost their bread allotments. After that (with a few exceptions), it was only a matter of time before even the most productive Jews and Poles became useless.

Concomitant to the extermination program, Nazi doctors struggled with the dual challenges of keeping their own soldiers protected from typhus and other easily transmitted diseases (which required protection for all populations, including Jews and Russians) while at the same time advancing the mission of murder.
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One solution was to combine “disinfecting” with the extermination process, and to burn bodies after killing them. Already the terminology of Jews as “lice” was in vogue; hence it was a short step to move from disinfecting in the literal sense to the Nazi application of racial purification through gas and fire. Again, however, battles within Nazi ideology had to be fought over even something as inhumane and twisted as the cremation of bodies killed for racial cleansing. In 1932, the Nazi Party condemned cremation as left-wing and materialist, but a concerted effort to embed the process into Nazi policy succeeded, and within a year, cremation was not only acceptable, but also (like everything in a totalitarian society) written into law. Inside the Nazi health establishment (itself an oxymoron), the new German mythos portrayed cremation as “a heroic Nordic rite for the master race,” certainly not a fitting end to “lice,” although it did become the preferred method for ridding camps of their Jewish prisoners.
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Following the
Einsatzgruppen
(SS death squads) program of exterminating Soviet Bolsheviks, Nazi leadership had to finally come to grips with the
herculean task of murdering entire populations. Large-scale executions began in Poland in October 1939, but were still oriented toward eliminating Polish leadership, not exterminating Jews.
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Bullets and fire were too time-consuming and costly, and early experiments with mobile gas vans likewise proved ineffective. Heinrich Himmler, the “architect of genocide,” insisted on “a more clinical approach from his SS general(s) and troops.”
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With the Holocaust's institutional underpinnings already in place under the delousing programs necessary for evacuated peoples in the East and for forced labor sent to Germany, it was then only a small step to apply the delousing infrastructure—which already included both chemical “showers” and cremation facilities for bodies—to Judeocide. As Himmler put it,

The concentration of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, justified as a sanitary precaution, in fact magnified the spread of disease. Warsaw alone had twenty delousing stations capable of servicing seven thousand prisoners a day, which were later easily converted into gassing centers. Nazi propaganda increasingly linked Jews and disease, portraying Jews as inherent typhus carriers—a point that worked in the inmates' favor at Auschwitz, where indications of typhus tended to ward off SS guards, providing precious extra days or weeks of life.
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Within ghettos and most camps, however, preventing typhus became a symbol of resistance, an act in defiance of the program of mass murder. At any rate, mass delousing became a near impossibility as the Wehrmacht absorbed millions of Russian prisoners and still more civilians from captured lands.

Chelmno became the first fixed killing installation, commencing operations on the same day Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. There and at Belzec by August 1942, the killing chambers were first disguised as disinfectant showers, invoking antityphus measures. Sobibor and Treblinka had already installed their own gas chambers, complete with signs saying “
FOR DISINFECTION
.” Auschwitz soon followed the others, gassing Poles and Russians for several months before being converted to a Jewish extermination center. Crematoria technology had been modified to mass-process
bodies, with new designs such as that at Birkenau consisting of a two-floor arrangement: gas chambers underground and crematoria above, with bodies carried up via elevators. Rudolf Hess boasted, “Now we had the gas and we had the procedure.”
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Not quite: what Hess still lacked was complete authority from Hitler over Jews, which was given to Himmler in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. There, in a posh, elegant villa, “in a cultivated suburb, in one of Europe's most sophisticated capitals,” fifteen well-educated and supposedly civilized bureaucrats decorously and methodically (and certainly enthusiastically) agreed to the systematic execution of nine million people.
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That the originators of this carnage had such high levels of education typified the entire German extermination experience—a point that should concern politicians espousing education as a means of producing civil and tolerant bureaucrats. Of twenty-five
Einsatzgruppen
leaders, fifteen possessed the equivalents of Ph.D.s in jurisprudence or philosophy. And most of the Wannsee conferees were young—half were under forty—giving the lie to the premise that the youth are necessarily pure and gentle.
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Wannsee marked the last step in the Nazi murder march that had begun in many ways two decades earlier through the systematic destruction of Jewish civil rights. Hitler and his henchmen briefly dabbled in an expulsion policy, discussing relocation of Jews to Madagascar. This transitioned to a policy of relocation inside the German empire with the opening of Polish lands, then Russia (where Hitler intended to create a “Garden of Eden”), then, following setbacks in Russia, vanished in a sea of impracticality and irrelevance. A temporary measure fell to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's subordinate, following the conquest of Poland in 1939. Heydrich established enclosed ghettos in which Jews were to be confined in Polish cities. Lodz, the first ghetto within the German empire, set the standard by which others would be created and governed.
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Heydrich preferred concentrating Jews in major cities alongside rail routes so “future measures can be accomplished more easily,” a phrase that indicated ghettoization was not, in fact, the end point.
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Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, at his interrogation in 1961, said the expression for removal of the Jews commonly used—
Die Endlösung
(“the final solution”)—during 1941 referred to “physical extermination,” meaning the principle of mass executions was on the table much earlier than Wannsee. In July 1941, in fact, Hitler had already decided to permanently eradicate the Jews, leaving the details to Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann to perfect methods of killing.
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By that point, concentration camps already existed for prisoners and
condemned workers, and the practice of allocating half rations to the ghettos meant that slowly the death rate was producing the intended result through starvation.

Thus the tension between wartime production and Jewish extermination increased. With each new country that fell into Hitler's grasp, a network of identification and deportation of Jews followed, although German Jews were not entirely shipped east until 1943. Reich officials such as Joseph Goebbels were shocked to learn from Eichmann in March 1941 that “the Jews…cannot be evacuated from Berlin because 30,000 of them are working in armaments factories.”
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Only in April 1941 did Hitler mandate that no Jews could remain in Germany for any reason, and six months later Heydrich ordered there could be “no emigration by Jews to overseas.”
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All that remained was to determine the definitive methodology accomplishing the final solution and what processes would be required. The Wannsee Conference stipulated that all previous plans had been “interim solutions” providing “practical experience” in dealing with Jews. Wannsee definitively established when and how to kill, although the conflict between needing laborers and the imperative to exterminate Jewry continued until almost the end of the war.
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Himmler, who had been appointed as Reich commissioner for consolidation of German nationhood in 1939, had already ordered a “racial cleanup” in the East, and in 1941 he led a genocide conference aimed at the decimation of Russian Slavic populations, then put at 30 million.
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But once the decision was made to trap all Jews in Europe, no outcome other than death was possible, except through an Allied victory.

How the Holocaust escaped Allied knowledge for so long—if it did at all—was explained in part by the fact that until Wannsee, the façade of delousing had permitted the Germans to conceal exterminations. Nonetheless, the Vatican learned about extermination of Jews in Poland as early as February of 1942, according to later military tribunals.
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Representatives of the Jewish Agency sent a letter to the apostolic nuncio in Berne on March 17, 1942, outlining in detail Nazi crimes against Jews in Eastern Europe.
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At the same time as Wannsee, the Vatican lobbied South American nations at the Rio de Janeiro Conference to continue their neutrality rather than declaring war on Germany as desired by the United States.
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During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, RAF squadrons flew support missions passing over Auschwitz on a daily basis yet failed to take notice of what was happening there. Facilities were soundproofed and camouflaged, but word leaked out nonetheless. A British consular official in Switzerland, relying
on Czech underground information, transmitted the ghastly plan in July 1942, and FDR learned about the genocide that year. When it finally became possible to bomb the rail lines in 1944, Churchill met with Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, and agreed that something should be done. Shortly thereafter, the Jewish Agency sent a note to Roosevelt urging action against Auschwitz itself. It didn't take long for the British Air Ministry to reject the notion, or for John J. McCloy, the U.S. assistant secretary of war, to similarly dismiss attacks as impractical and a diversion of resources. Years later, McCloy would claim that FDR likewise opposed the idea, but Roosevelt allowed no notes to be taken during his conferences or meetings and there is no supporting evidence that this was the case.

To what extent the average soldiers of the Wehrmacht willingly joined in the brutalization of Jews and occupied peoples is a legitimate question, and new studies have heaped guilt on the entire German army. As of 1995, a slight majority of Germans believed the Wehrmacht had committed war crimes, but two thirds of those above the age of sixty-five rejected the proposition.
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Nevertheless, scholars today debate only the motivations of troops in engaging in extraordinarily cruel behavior, especially to Jews and Russians, not the fact that such monstrous behavior occurred. Nor is there much debate about the fact that intelligent and educated men carried out systematized murder. Nazis with Ph.D.s led the “Extraordinary Pacification Programme” and shot 3,500 Polish intellectuals outside of Warsaw. Overall, the attitude of the German population ranged from passive indifference to objective complicity to energetic enthusiasm. Ian Kershaw summarized the Holocaust and its relationship to ordinary Germans by noting that the most important success of Nazi propaganda was to depersonalize the Jews, and that

The “road to Auschwitz,” he wrote, “was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.”
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Deadly Seas and Sands

The ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Japanese came in a slightly different form, and with smaller total numbers, largely because Japan had not racialized its murder system to one particular group: all foreigners were
gaijin
(“barbarians”) and subject to death if necessary. More important, the Japanese had failed to gain control over China's population the way the Nazis had in Europe. Examples of extermination abound, including the “Rape of Nanking” and the murder of 250,000 Chinese peasants in reprisal for helping conceal Doolittle airmen after the raid. Nor could Japanese civilians claim to have no knowledge of these atrocities: Japanese newspapers widely publicized killing contests near Nanking, making heroes out of two sublieutenants who raced to see which one could behead a hundred captives first. The contest was ruled a tie when both murderers exceeded a hundred victims. Perhaps worst of all was the mass distribution of opium by Japanese to Chinese; some 20 million Chinese became addicted to the narcotic and were summarily eliminated from providing effective resistance to Japanese authority. However, pockets of resistance dotted China, and the jungles of Southeast Asia facilitated guerrilla warfare such as the Germans found only in the Balkan Mountains. That Japan saw China swallow massive amounts of men and supplies—more than half of the Japanese army was in China—demands a new interpretation of the “ineffectiveness” of Chiang Kai-shek's resistance.