The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (187 page)

There was also an argument on the best methods of policing the conquered Russian people. Hitler suggested the German police be equipped with armored cars. Goering doubted that they would be necessary. His planes could “drop bombs in case of riots,” he said.

Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan, was also put in charge of the economic exploitation of Russia.
^†
“Plunder” would be a better word, as Goering made clear in a speech to the Nazi commissioners for the occupied territories on August 6, 1942. “It used to be called plundering,” he said. “But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.”
⁸
On this, at least, he was as good as his word, not only in Russia but throughout Nazi-conquered Europe. It was all part of the New Order.

The total amount of loot will never be known; it has proved beyond man’s capacity to accurately compute. But some figures are available, many of them from the Germans themselves. They show with what Germanic thoroughness the instructions which Goering once gave to his subordinates were carried out.

A great deal was taken out, not only in goods and services but in banknotes and gold. Whenever Hitler occupied a country, his financial agents seized the gold and foreign holdings of its national bank. That was a mere beginning. Staggering “occupation costs” were immediately assessed. By the end of February 1944, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Nazi Minister of Finance, put the total take from such payments at some 48 billion marks (roughly $12,000,000,000), of which France, which was milked heavier than any other conquered country, furnished more than half. By the end of the war, receipts from occupation assessments amounted to an estimated 60 billion marks ($15,000,000,000).

France was forced to pay 31.5 billions of this total, its annual contributions of more than 7 billions coming to over four times the yearly sums which Germany had paid in reparations under the Dawes and
Young plan
s after the first war—a tribute which had seemed such a heinous crime to Hitler. In addition the
Bank of France
was forced to grant “credits” to Germany totaling 4.5 billion marks and the French government to pay a further half billion in “fines.” At Nuremberg it was estimated that the Germans extracted in occupation costs and “credits” two thirds of Belgium’s national income and a similar percentage from the Netherlands. Altogether, according to a study by the
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
, Germany extracted in tribute from the conquered nations a total of 104 billion marks ($26,000,000,000).
^*

But the goods seized and transported to the Reich without even the formality of payment can never possibly be estimated. Figures kept pouring in at Nuremberg until they overwhelmed one; but no expert, so far as I know, was ever able to straighten them out and compute totals. In France, for example, it was estimated that the Germans carted off (as “levies in kind”) 9 million tons of cereals, 75 per cent of the total production of oats, 80 per cent of oil, 74 per cent of steel, and so on, for a grand total of 184.5 billion francs.

Russia, devastated by warfare and German savagery, proved harder to
milk. Nazi documents are full of reports of Soviet “deliveries.” In 1943, for example, 9 million tons of cereals, 2 million tons of fodder, 3 million tons of potatoes, 662,000 tons of meat were listed by the Germans among the “deliveries,” to which the Soviet Committee of Investigation added—for the duration of the occupation—9 million cattle, 12 million pigs, 13 million sheep, to mention a few items. But Russian “deliveries” proved much less than expected; the Germans calculated them as worth a net of only some 4 billion marks ($1,000,000,000).
^*

Everything possible was squeezed out of Poland by the greedy Nazi conquerors. “I shall endeavor,” said Dr. Frank, the Governor General, “to squeeze out of this province everything that is still possible to squeeze out.” This was at the end of 1942, and in the three years since the occupation he had already squeezed out, as he continually boasted, a great deal, especially in foodstuffs for hungry Germans in the Reich. He warned, however, that “if the new food scheme is carried out in 1943 a half-million people in
Warsaw
and its suburbs alone will be deprived of food.”
¹⁰

The nature of the New Order in Poland had been laid down as soon as the country was conquered. On October 3, 1939, Frank informed the Army of Hitler’s orders.

Rudolf Hess
, the Nazi deputy Fuehrer, added that Hitler had decided that “Warsaw shall not be rebuilt, nor is it the intention of the Fuehrer to rebuild or reconstruct any industry in the Government General.”
¹²

By decree of Dr. Frank, all property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Polish-owned farms were simply grabbed and handed over to German settlers. By May 31, 1943, in the four Polish districts annexed to Germany (
West Prussia
,
Posen
,
Zichenau
,
Silesia
) some 700,000 estates comprising 15 million acres were “seized” and 9,500 estates totaling 6.5 million acres “confiscated.” The difference between “seizure” and “confiscation” is not explained in the elaborate table prepared by the German “Central Estate Office,”
¹³
and to the dispossessed Poles it must not have mattered.

Even the art treasures in the occupied lands were looted, and, as the captured Nazi documents later revealed, on the express orders of Hitler and Goering, who thereby greatly augmented their “private” collections. The corpulent Reich Marshal, according to his own estimate, brought his own collection up to a value of 50 million Reichsmarks. Indeed, Goering was the driving force in this particular field of looting. Immediately upon the conquest of Poland he issued orders for the seizure of art treasures there and within six months the special commissioner appointed to carry out his command could report that he had taken over “almost the entire art treasury of the country.”
¹⁴

But it was in France where the bulk of the great art treasures of Europe lay, and no sooner was this country added to the Nazi conquests than Hitler and Goering decreed their seizure. To carry out this particular plunder Hitler appointed Rosenberg, who set up an organization called Einsatzstab Rosenberg, and who was assisted not only by Goering but by General
Keitel
. Indeed one order by Keitel to the Army in France stated that Rosenberg “is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Fuehrer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.”
¹⁵

An idea of Hitler’s decision “as to their use” is revealed in a secret order issued by Goering on November 5, 1940, specifying the distribution of art objects being collected at the
Louvre
in
Paris
. They were “to be disposed of in the following way”:

The French government protested the looting of the country’s art treasures, declaring that it was a violation of the
Hague convention
, and when one German art expert on Rosenberg’s staff, a Herr Bunjes, dared to call this to the attention of Goering, the fat one replied:

“My dear Bunjes, let me worry about that. I am the highest jurist in the state. It is my orders which are decisive and you will act accordingly.”

And so according to a report of Bunjes—it is his only appearance in the history of the Third Reich, so far as the documents show—

Many more carloads followed. According to a secret official German report some 137 freight cars loaded with 4,174 cases of art works comprising
21,903 objects, including 10,890 paintings, made the journey from the West to Germany up to July 1944.
¹⁸
They included works of, among others, Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Murillo, Goya, Vecchio, Watteau, Fragonard, Reynolds and Gainsborough. As early as January 1941, Rosenberg estimated the art loot from France alone as worth a billion marks.
¹⁹

The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, though it reduced the occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimes starvation and violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, might have been excused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by the harsh exigencies of total war. But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler’s war machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and Goering.

All this plunder and spoliation the conquered populations could have endured—wars and enemy occupation had always brought privation in their wake. But this was only a part of the New Order—the mildest part. It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there were four and a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains—in order to remove the traces—burned.

This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully documented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves. What follows here—a mere summary, which must because of limitations of space leave out a thousand shocking details—is based on that incontrovertible evidence, with occasional corroboration from the eyewitness accounts of the few survivors.

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines. They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.

In addition, two million
prisoners of war
were added to the foreign labor force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments and munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions, which stipulated that no war prisoners could be employed
in such tasks.
^*
This figure did not include the hundreds of thousands of other POWs who were impressed into the building of fortifications and in carrying ammunition to the front lines and even in manning antiaircraft guns in further disregard of the international conventions which Germany had signed.
^†

In the massive deportations of slave labor to the Reich, wives were torn away from their husbands, and children from their parents, and assigned to widely separated parts of Germany. The young, if they were old enough to work at all, were not spared. Even top generals of the Army co-operated in the kidnaping of children, who were carted off to the homeland to perform slave labor. A memorandum from Rosenberg’s files of June 12, 1944, reveals this practice in occupied Russia.

The kidnaping operation had a code name: “Hay Action.” It was also being carried out, the memorandum added, by Field Marshal Model’s Army Group
Ukraine-North
.
²²

Increasing terrorization was used to round up the victims. At first, comparatively mild methods were used. Persons coming out of church or the movies were nabbed. In the West especially, S.S. units merely blocked off a section of a town and seized all able-bodied men and women. Villages were surrounded and searched for the same purposes. In the East, when there was resistance to the forced-labor order, villages were simply burned down and their inhabitants carted off. Rosenberg’s captured files are replete with
German
reports of such happenings. In Poland, at least one German official thought things were going a little too far.