Nazi atrocities against the Russians

[Pumpkin]

What atrocities did nazi Germay commit against the Russian (and other eastern European) civilians?

I mean culturally/racially motivated atrocities that cannot be politically or militarily rationalized. It is often claimed that the German atrocities against the Russian civilians strengthened the will of the Soviet's to fight. I'd like to learn more about the character of such atrocities. Was the occupied Russian "intelligencia" exterminated? How many Russian scientists and well-educated were killed for that reason?

I wish to exclude the on-the-spot-shooting of captured suspected communists and the partisan war (being of political and military nature). Also the atrocities against Russian jews would be another story.

[Davey Boy]

What atrocities did nazi Germay commit against the Russian (and other eastern European) civilians?

I mean culturally/racially motivated atrocities that cannot be politically or militarily rationalized. It is often claimed that the German atrocities against the Russian civilians strengthened the will of the Soviet's to fight. I'd like to learn more about the character of such atrocities. Was the occupied Russian "intelligencia" exterminated? How many Russian scientists and well-educated were killed for that reason?

I wish to exclude the on-the-spot-shooting of captured suspected communists and the partisan war (being of political and military nature). Also the atrocities against Russian jews would be another story.

The Soviets exterminated their own intelligentsia.

However, the Germans did largerly exterminate the Polish intelligentsia (which was then finished off by the Soviets) and killed a great many Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants. And obviously, the Nazis were merciless towards Communists.

Have a look over the older threads here, and on the old forum, and you'll find a wealth of information.

[Roberto]

What atrocities did nazi Germay commit against the Russian (and other eastern European) civilians?

I mean culturally/racially motivated atrocities that cannot be politically or militarily rationalized. It is often claimed that the German atrocities against the Russian civilians strengthened the will of the Soviet's to fight. I'd like to learn more about the character of such atrocities. Was the occupied Russian "intelligencia" exterminated? How many Russian scientists and well-educated were killed for that reason?

I wish to exclude the on-the-spot-shooting of captured suspected communists and the partisan war (being of political and military nature). Also the atrocities against Russian jews would be another story.

I don't think you'll find any Nazi atrocities against non-combatants in the Soviet Union that can be explained on a purely cultural/racial basis. Just as you'll find none that had a purely political and/or military reasoning behind them.

Most if not all atrocities committed by the Nazis on the territory of the former Soviet Union were principally rooted in the following three factors:

a) The intention to ruthlessly exploit the resources of the occupied territories in terms of food, raw material and manpower for the benefit of the Germanic empire that the Nazis strove to create;

b) The racist bias held against certain ethnic groups considered "sub-human", namely the Slavs and to an even greater extent the gypsies and the Jews;

c) The hatred of Bolshevism and the resulting will to utterly destroy the Bolshevik state.

These three factors, although with a different relative importance from case to case, were present in all atrocities committed by the Nazis against the peoples of the Soviet Union. Examples:

1. The massacre or deliberate starvation of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war resulted from a policy of allowing the Wehrmacht to live completely off the land and still to send enough foodstuffs to the Reich to allow for a quasi-peacetime standard of living at the home front, but it would hardly have been carried out had it not been for the racist contempt the Nazis felt in regard to the Slav "sub-humans" and for their hatred of Bolshevism, i.e. it would not have happened if the POWs had been British, French or even Polish (the Nazis had in fact captured ca. 2 million French prisoners in 1940, none of whom is known to have starved to death).

2. The killing of ca. one million people in the course of rural anti-partisan operations was motivated by the desire to stamp out partisan resistance, but it is highly doubtful whether the Germans would have carried out such wildly disproportionate killing sprees - annihilating hundreds of villages with all their inhabitants, burning people alive inside churches or barns, leaving vast areas without a single living inhabitant, forcing civilians to clear minefields with their feet - if the local population had not consisted of "inferior" Slavic beings.

3. The intention to annihilate the population of Leningrad by air and artillery bombardment and by starvation, which was carried out to the extent of claiming over a million civilian victims, was motivated by the desire to avoid having to feed the city's population, but it is highly doubtful that the Nazis would have adopted such a policy if the population of Leningrad had not consisted of Slav "sub-humans" and if Leningrad had not furthermore been the hated cradle of Bolshevism.

4. Even the massacre of up to 2 million or more Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and other German formations was not a purely culturally/racially motivated affair. The identification of Jews with Bolshevism and the will to obtain a maximum of food supplies from the occupied territories also played a part in the Nazis' killing program against the Soviet Jews - as it also did in the extermination actions against Polish Jews, at least those carried out until the end of 1942.

A good concise description of how cold and rational occupation and food supply policies combined with racial/cultural bias to induce the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war and of Soviet and Polish Jews can be found in the book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, by German historian Christian Gerlach.

[Pumpkin]

Thanks, Roberto! Do you think it's fair to make this distinction between the view on slavs and jews:

- Slavs were looked upon as a "natural resource", like a life-stock, that should be economically exploited (much like the UK and other empires viewed inhabitants of their colonies in older times). In "managing" this "resource", the nazis believed that it was efficient to use terror and a degrading attitude. There was however no plan to exterminate the slavs. (?)

- Jews were just to be exterminated, even if better "economic use" could've been made of them. (?)

The massacre or deliberate starvation of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war resulted from a policy of allowing the Wehrmacht to live completely off the land and still to send enough foodstuffs to the Reich

Why was it economically benefitial to have three million men in their best years killed? Wouldn't their work effort have been worth more than the cost of feeding them?

Also, how were these starvations conducted? Were thousands and thousands of POW's crowded in numerous camps and given nothing to eat? Was this starvations performed at the end of the war, when food reserves were running desperately low?

You seem to have endless resources on these topics, Roberto, and I'd be glad to learn your views here!

[Roberto]

Thanks, Roberto! Do you think it's fair to make this distinction between the view on slavs and jews:

- Slavs were looked upon as a "natural resource", like a life-stock, that should be economically exploited (much like the UK and other empires viewed inhabitants of their colonies in older times). In "managing" this "resource", the nazis believed that it was efficient to use terror and a degrading attitude. There was however no plan to exterminate the slavs. (?)

- Jews were just to be exterminated, even if better "economic use" could've been made of them. (?)

The Nazis didn't just use terror in order to make the Slavs into docile slaves (that's Goldhagen's judeocentric theory, but it is wrong). They envisaged a reduction of the Slav population by thirty million through starvation as a consequence of directing food supplies from the Soviet agricultural production areas ("Überschussgebiete") not to the Soviet consumer areas ("Zuschussgebiete"), but to the Wehrmacht and the Reich. When it turned out that the population of the "Zuschussgebiete" could not just be starved to death by sealing off these areas (except in the case of Leningrad, where about one million people died of starvation during the German blockade), they went over to reducing the number of "useless eaters" by killing off certain segments of the population, which of course were those that a) ranked lowest in their racial/cultural/political hierarchy and b) they could best control or single out for killing - the prisoners of war and the Jews.

For the understanding of the decision process towards murder an approach via the term of the utopian seems useful. Of course ideas about the annihilation of the Jews and the respective preparedness had been there for many years prior to 1941, especially on the part of Hitler. Yet there was a difference between ideas, firm intentions to commit genocide and the implementation thereof. The first plans for a “final solution” contained strongly destructive aspects of slow decimation through horrible living conditions and impediment of reproduction, but also utopian aspects characterized by the impossibility of carrying out these seriously pursued solutions in practice. This applies to the plans of 1939/40 for the “pushing away” of the Jews to the Lublin district as well as to Madagascar. The destructive elements became stronger in the plan to deport Jews to the Soviet Union after a military victory over that country. The procedure of annihilation only became imaginable gradually – despite the widespread preparedness for it. The steps from utopian resettlement and extermination programs to actually executable murder programs were decisive for the execution of the mass murder. Thus the plan decided upon at the beginning of 1941 to force about 30 million people in the Soviet Union to starve to death in order to guarantee the feeding of German-dominated Europe turned out to be unfeasible. It was thereupon replaced in the autumn of 1941 by programs for the murder of certain segments of the populations, such as millions of Soviet prisoners of war “unfit to work”. For the intentions directed against the Jews the point-settings in December 1941 constituted a crucial step towards the realization, i.e. the implementation of the plans for genocide.

Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, page 165 (my translation).

The massacre or deliberate starvation of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war resulted from a policy of allowing the Wehrmacht to live completely off the land and still to send enough foodstuffs to the Reich

Why was it economically benefitial to have three million men in their best years killed? Wouldn't their work effort have been worth more than the cost of feeding them?

This is what the Nazis eventually realized, after about two million Soviet POWs had died of starvation between the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1942. Treatment of Soviet prisoners of war improved slightly due to this belated realization, but not much. Out of ca. 5.7 million Soviet POW’s who fell into German hands until the end of the war, about 3.3 million perished in German captivity.

The following I translated from Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, Bonn 1997, page 10:

Beside the 2 million prisoners of war who were already dead when the memorandum quoted at the beginning [Rosenberg’s letter to Keitel of 28 February 1942] was written, another 1.3 million died until the end of the war - about 3.3 million of a total of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war (57.8 per cent) died in German captivity.
A comparison with the fate of Russian prisoners of war in the First World War raises the question as to the causes of this enormously high mortality. Back then 1,434,500 Russians had been taken prisoner by the Germans. The mortality of Russian prisoners was 5.4 per cent and thus corresponded to the average mortality of prisoners in the custody of the Western and Central European powers, although it was higher than that of the other prisoners in German hands (3.5 per cent).

Also, how were these starvations conducted? Were thousands and thousands of POW's crowded in numerous camps and given nothing to eat?

The food rations accorded to Soviet prisoners of war were barely enough to keep them alive under the best of conditions. Long exhausting marches and exposure to wetness and cold would thus necessarily lead to an enormous mortality, which the Germans didn’t mind.

Another factor [contributing to the huge mortality of Soviet POWs] was the operative planning of “Operation Barbarossa”. The army command relied without reservations on a lightning victory. The operations plan was to a large degree based on the premise that of several possible alternatives the one most favorable in each case would occur. According to its conception it was bound to lead to the capture of huge parts of the Red Army in several great encirclement battles within a short time, but there is no indication that anyone thought beyond the momentary victory. Insofar as the fate of Soviet prisoners of war was taken into consideration, the most favorable of possible alternatives was expected to occur also in this respect. The rations that, according to the Army Sanitary Inspection, were “sufficient”, may actually have been enough to keep the prisoners alive under certain specific conditions: if the prisoners were not required to work, if they were granted a lot of rest and protected from the weather, especially from the cold. As the basic physiological requirements were not met, it was known from the start that there would be hunger and malnourishment. This, however, was the most favorable alternative. If during battle or after capture the prisoners were subjected to even short periods of hunger, if they were required to do heavy physical work or march long distances, if they were exposed to cold or wetness for a longer time, the loss of energy resulting therefrom could no longer be recovered with the rations granted, and mass dying was the unavoidable consequence.
There are no indications, by the way, that the NS leadership even had to exercise any pressure to conduct the planning of the army command in this direction. Despite all differences of perception that representatives of the “conservative line” had in regard to the NS - leadership, they agreed with it in that the “mood” of the [German] population must under no circumstances be endangered.
It must surely be conceded that even under “normal” circumstances, i.e. if the will had existed to do everything possible in order to save the prisoners, the feeding of the prisoners from the great encirlement battles of Kiev, Vyazma and Bryansk would have been extremely difficult and a high mortality would have been unavoidable: the weather, the roads and the railway connections made transportation and feeding extraordinarily difficult. The development of mass mortality in the General Government shows, however, that this mass problem was by no means the decisive factor. Among the 309,816 prisoners - 85 percent of those in custody in that area - who perished there until 15 April 1942, there were hardly any prisoners from the three encirclement battles, most of the prisoners had been taken before the beginning of September.
Considering the above it must be left open, in the face of the sources available, to what extent the attitude that “it would be quite good if the prisoners of war disappeared” prevailed in the army command and with the troops. The repeated shootings of exhausted prisoners - which in von Reichenau’s 6th Army had even been ordered -, the draconian “reprisal measures” in case of attacks or escape attempts by the prisoners and the assistance of Wehrmacht authorities in the liquidation of “unbearable” prisoners make clear that this attitude indeed was present in various degrees. On the other hand the orders of von Bock, von Schenkendorff and von Tettau on the one hand and the repeated attempts to present the starvation rations as an objective necessity on the other show that this attitude was not universally supported. It should be noted, however, that the orders issued by von Bock and von Shcenkendorff were primarily aimed at safeguarding the discipline of the troops. None of both questioned the priorities set in the feeding of the prisoners and both cooperated without friction with the Einsatzgruppe B; the liquidation of Jews and Communists was accepted, provided that it was camouflaged as the liquidation of “bandits and criminals”, and the commissar order was only criticized when it turned out to be counterproductive from a military point of view.

Source of quote: Streit, as above, pages 188 and following.

Was this starvations performed at the end of the war, when food reserves were running desperately low?

No, it was mostly performed at the beginning of the war, when enough food supplies could have been provided if it had not been for the Nazis' policy to give absolute priority to the needs of the Wehrmacht and the home front over those of the Soviet prisoners of war and the civilian population of the occupied territories.

You seem to have endless resources on these topics, Roberto, and I'd be glad to learn your views here!

Not endless resources, but a few good ones. When you have read the above, you may have a look at my posts on the thread

Non-Jewish victims of Nazi violence
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... D=79.topic

of the old forum. I’ll be glad to answer any further questions you may have.

Best regards,

Roberto

[Pumpkin]

On more semi-related question: To what extent did the Red Cross and similar organizations have access to inspect POW camps during (and after) the war? Were there no institutions that could make sure that the Geneva convention was followed?

[Scott Smith]

On more semi-related question: To what extent did the Red Cross and similar organizations have access to inspect POW camps during (and after) the war? Were there no institutions that could make sure that the Geneva convention was followed?

No, because the Soviets did not sign the Geneva conventions, which are international agreements and not laws binding upon sovereign states. The French POWs after 1940 were reclassed as foreign laborers for the duration of the war in accordance with the Armistice. They were even given leaves and paid IIRC. In 1944, during the fighterplane crash program it was worried whether French workers would come back if given their leaves that were due.

[Tarpon27]

Scott wrote:

The French POWs after 1940 were reclassed as foreign laborers for the duration of the war in accordance with the Armistice. They were even given leaves and paid IIRC. In 1944, during the fighterplane crash program it was worried whether French workers would come back if given their leaves that were due.

Could you point me to a source where I can read about French workers being paid, getting leaves, etc., while working for German munitions and armaments industries?

For example, the histroy of using French POWs and French workers at Ford's truck plants reads a bit differently than your statement.

Thanks,

Mark

-----
[...]

Estimates of the total number of civilians and POWs subject to forced labor under the Nazis in World War II vary from 10 million to 12 million. The vast majority of the German Reich's slaves were rounded up in the Soviet Union and Poland. Returning home after the war as "displaced persons," many were treated as collaborators or fell silent about their wartime experiences. With the end of the cold war and with lawsuits filed by former forced laborers against German companies as well as against Ford and GM, the subject finally gained public attention.

As early as 1940, Ford Werke was using French POWs as forced laborers. Karola Fings, a leading German historian of forced labor, writes in her chapter that by June 1943, about half of Ford's 5,000 employees were forced laborers, and at the main Ford factory in Cologne, the racist order of the Nazis was applied. As one former forced laborer recalled, "The French weren't treated so badly, but Poles and Russians and Yugoslavs, those were the so-called subhumans."

Conditions in one camp were described by a woman inmate: "In the middle of the barrack there was iron oven. At night it was locked up and some iron bucket would be set [on the floor]. That was our toilet. Around the camp there was a barbed wire fence, guard posts everywhere." Other inmates described beatings and pervasive hunger.

Ford was an important partner of the Wehrmacht up to and during the war. For example, fully a third ofthe 350,000 Wehrmacht trucks in 1942, some 120,000, were built by Ford. "It can be stated," Fings writes, "that Ford Werke's course in the 1940s was followed with the full knowledge and support of the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn." When the war ended, many of the same executives who had been in charge of Ford Werke after a brief hiatus returned to their old jobs.

General Motors' Opel division was in many ways a mirror image of Ford's Werke subsidiary: Headquarters was in touch during the war with its subsidiary; the company was an integral part of the German war machine (manufacturing, among other things, trucks, tanks and aircraft); it made high profits and it used large numbers of slave laborers. (POW forced labor began in 1940, and American executives of GM witnessed it.) During the war, the SS guarded the forced laborers, a number of whom were women.

[...]


_The Nation_
May 21, 2001

Hitler's Willing Executives
By John Friedman

Copy available online at:

http://www.edwinblack.com/reviews/the_nation.html
--------

[Scott Smith]

Scott wrote:

The French POWs after 1940 were reclassed as foreign laborers for the duration of the war in accordance with the Armistice. They were even given leaves and paid IIRC. In 1944, during the fighterplane crash program it was worried whether French workers would come back if given their leaves that were due.

Could you point me to a source where I can read about French workers being paid, getting leaves, etc., while working for German munitions and armaments industries?

All I know comes from Irving's biography of Milch or Milch's own diary, where he hopes he can reduce absenteeism by cancelling leaves to France and putting in whorehouses at the armaments plants or something like that. I have also read the Pohl and Milch trials in the NMT Green books, but that was some time ago and I don't have them easily at my disposal.

Obviously, skilled labor, or semi-skilled labor involved in critical projects like aircraft during the Jägerstab program, were treated better than others. Among the lowest on the totem pole were those building underground shelters for the SS V-weapons. But the building of the Atlantic Wall fortifications also involved unskilled labor, "as Hitler tried to pour concrete to victory" as Ambrose called it, was largely done with French labor, and often for lucrative contracts as I understand it.

Sorry, but I'm not an expert on this; my intent is NOT to argue that these workers got union benefits during their indentured servitude or semi-captivity or anything like that. However, when it is argued by many authors that workers in Nazi Germany were not well-paid, i.e., in order to argue that the "socialism" aspect of National Socialism was a joke, it is usually taken out of context. In other words, it WAS wartime and the German/European situation cannot be compared to wages/working conditions in the USA, which was not under siege and was wealthy enough to fight a two-front war AND expand the standard-of-living AND arm the entire world against the Axis.

Conditions for Russian POWs improved once the military and the SS found work for them, which is not to justify their ill-treatment in the first place. But that was due to a complete lack of logistical planning by the General Staff for Barbarossa and not Nazi ideology, per se. Goggi, our sometime forum poster, said that as a boy in 1945 he rode on a train with Soviet POWs who were traveling to work assignments. They were either unguarded or possibly very-lightly guarded as he recalls, and using the same strafed and shot-up cattle cars that German civilians used for transportation then.

Elie Wiesel also willingly went West with the German Death March instead of being liberated when Auschwitz was evacuated in 1945. He apparently would rather collaborate and work for the Germans who were supposedly trying to exterminate his race.

[Tarpon27]

Scott, you initially wrote this:

The French POWs after 1940 were reclassed as foreign laborers for the duration of the war in accordance with the Armistice. They were even given leaves and paid IIRC. In 1944, during the fighterplane crash program it was worried whether French workers would come back if given their leaves that were due.

I don't where you got the information, and apparently neither do you, but let's start with the Armistice.

This is Article XX of the German-French Armistice:

ARTICLE XX.
French troops in German prison camps will remain prisoners of war until conclusion of a peace.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/frgearm.htm


Now, I have done some reading on the use of forced labor by Germany during the war. For example, Jews used in forced labor were paid by corporations and businesses; however the money went to the SS coffers for providing the labor.

I am not aware of reports of French POWs, used in the armaments industries, with paid wages and leaves; why would a French POW return to imprisonment once he arrives back in France? This smacks of swimming pools and orchestras at Auschwitz for the guests' enjoyment.

And why would Germany give up any labor, when Albert Speer was making constant and never-ending demands for more laborers for the Reich's industries?

In just the last few years, the Schroeder government also pushed for reparations to survivors who were forced labor Germany.

Obviously, skilled labor, or semi-skilled labor involved in critical projects like aircraft during the Jägerstab program, were treated better than others. Among the lowest on the totem pole were those building underground shelters for the SS V-weapons. But the building of the Atlantic Wall fortifications also involved unskilled labor, "as Hitler tried to pour concrete to victory" as Ambrose called it, was largely done with French labor, and often for lucrative contracts as I understand it.

That implies that French POWs were then "skilled labor" in aircraft production, and why that is so, you need to show. IOW, why are French POWs skilled or even semi-skilled machinists, metal workers, technical manufacturing workers? And if some were, or were trained, why would they have the comparitive freedom to travel back to France as POWs at a time when Nazi Germany required higher production levels of armaments?

I don't know, and neither do you, what, if anything, the French were paid for the Atlantic Wall work. I do know this, from the Armistice:

ARTICLE XVII.
The French Government obligates itself to prevent every transference of economic valuables and provisions from the territory to be occupied by German troops into unoccupied territory or abroad.

These valuables and provisions in occupied territory are to be disposed of only in agreement with the German Government. In that connection, the German Government will consider the necessities of life of the population in unoccupied territory.

ARTICLE XVIII.
The French-Government will bear the costs of maintenance of German occupation troops on French soil.

Sorry, but I'm not an expert on this; my intent is NOT to argue that these workers got union benefits during their indentured servitude or semi-captivity or anything like that. However, when it is argued by many authors that workers in Nazi Germany were not well-paid, i.e., in order to argue that the "socialism" aspect of National Socialism was a joke, it is usually taken out of context. In other words, it WAS wartime and the German/European situation cannot be compared to wages/working conditions in the USA, which was not under siege and was wealthy enough to fight a two-front war AND expand the standard-of-living AND arm the entire world against the Axis.

Thanks, but this has nothing to do with your assertion on French POWs or even French citizens working in the Reich.

Conditions for Russian POWs improved once the military and the SS found work for them, which is not to justify their ill-treatment in the first place. But that was due to a complete lack of logistical planning by the General Staff for Barbarossa and not Nazi ideology, per se. Goggi, our sometime forum poster, said that as a boy in 1945 he rode on a train with Soviet POWs who were traveling to work assignments. They were either unguarded or possibly very-lightly guarded as he recalls, and using the same strafed and shot-up cattle cars that German civilians used for transportation then.

So Nazi ideology had nothing to do with the treatment of Russian POWs? That is an amazing statement, Scott.

Elie Wiesel also willingly went West with the German Death March instead of being liberated when Auschwitz was evacuated in 1945. He apparently would rather collaborate and work for the Germans who were supposedly trying to exterminate his race.

You know exactly why Wiesel went West? Please, tell me more.

And Jews are not a "race".

Mark

[Scott Smith]

Scott, you initially wrote this:

The French POWs after 1940 were reclassed as foreign laborers for the duration of the war in accordance with the Armistice. They were even given leaves and paid IIRC. In 1944, during the fighterplane crash program it was worried whether French workers would come back if given their leaves that were due.

I don't where you got the information, and apparently neither do you, but let's start with the Armistice.

This is Article XX of the German-French Armistice:

ARTICLE XX.
French troops in German prison camps will remain prisoners of war until conclusion of a peace.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/frgearm.htm

What's your point, Mark? The Germans used conscript labor during the war. I did not say the French POWs were released. POWs cannot be used for forced-labor in armaments under the Geneva conventions, and if they were then used for labor, forced or otherwise, it was in accordance with the terms of the Armistice and whatever conditions of German parole, which should not be confused with a peace agreement and repatriation. Rather like German POWs were "reclassifed" after the war but effectively remained prisoners-of-war, and sometimes used for forced-labor, oops "reparations."

Now, I have done some reading on the use of forced labor by Germany during the war. For example, Jews used in forced labor were paid by corporations and businesses; however the money went to the SS coffers for providing the labor.

I never said that Jews were paid. They were enemy aliens who were considered subversives and were treated accordingly. I was talking about forced-labor, which includes labor conscripts from various countries, some of which were paid and even went home on leave.

I am not aware of reports of French POWs, used in the armaments industries, with paid wages and leaves; why would a French POW return to imprisonment once he arrives back in France? This smacks of swimming pools and orchestras at Auschwitz for the guests' enjoyment.

Do some more reading about Milch, Speer, Saur, and Sauckel. Why would any conscript return to duty after being on leave? The possibility of punishment? A sense of duty and patriotism? Naturally a French labor conscript would be less enthusiastic, and desertion was commonplace, especially in 1944. But remember that after 1940 it looked like the Germans would win the war. Like it or not, many people in occupied (and supposedly oppressed countries) joined the Germans to work and fight. Few would want to remember that today since the Germans lost the Holy War and all.

And why would Germany give up any labor, when Albert Speer was making constant and never-ending demands for more laborers for the Reich's industries?

Well, that was the deal. I don't remember if the leaves were cancelled or not. I assume so, as the Germans were expecting lots of desertions with the Allies poised for invasion. It was suggested by somebody that all Milch would have to do is build whorehouses and then he could cancel the leaves. Anywho...

In just the last few years, the Schroeder government also pushed for reparations to survivors who were forced labor Germany.

So, why not? But prisoners are the property of the State, and that's who should pay the reparations. Besides, as you said, the corporations paid the government for the use of the labor.

Obviously, skilled labor, or semi-skilled labor involved in critical projects like aircraft during the Jägerstab program, were treated better than others. Among the lowest on the totem pole were those building underground shelters for the SS V-weapons. But the building of the Atlantic Wall fortifications also involved unskilled labor, "as Hitler tried to pour concrete to victory" as Ambrose called it, was largely done with French labor, and often for lucrative contracts as I understand it.

That implies that French POWs were then "skilled labor" in aircraft production, and why that is so, you need to show. IOW, why are French POWs skilled or even semi-skilled machinists, metal workers, technical manufacturing workers? And if some were, or were trained, why would they have the comparitive freedom to travel back to France as POWs at a time when Nazi Germany required higher production levels of armaments?

It is hard for many managerial types to understand this but if you've been doing the same job for years you develop some skills. You can do the job better than somebody with the five-star training in some cases. And where else are you going to get a job? For the highly-skilled I'm sure they got wages comparable to German workers; for the semi-skilled, well they were still labor conscripts and Vichy would help enforce this contract, including enforcing upon the Germans to allow the leaves that were due.

Really, it is not so difficult to understand but I suppose it doesn't fit the Genocide theory-of-history, where the Nazis conscripted labor as slaves to accomodate their racist system and did not merely resort to impressment as a serious wartime expedient (which the Allies certainly would have done themselves if their situation had been similar).

I don't know, and neither do you, what, if anything, the French were paid for the Atlantic Wall work. I do know this, from the Armistice:

Well, if you are interested, don't whine to me, just do some research and draw your own conclusions.

ARTICLE XVII.
The French Government obligates itself to prevent every transference of economic valuables and provisions from the territory to be occupied by German troops into unoccupied territory or abroad.

These valuables and provisions in occupied territory are to be disposed of only in agreement with the German Government. In that connection, the German Government will consider the necessities of life of the population in unoccupied territory.

ARTICLE XVIII.
The French-Government will bear the costs of maintenance of German occupation troops on French soil.

I'm not seeing your point, Mark, but I'll bet you didn't know that the Nazis organized war-industry as a single supranational economic consortium, a modern Zollverein, that later formed the basis for the EEC. I suppose you will want a source for this, but it is well-known.

Thanks, but this has nothing to do with your assertion on French POWs or even French citizens working in the Reich.

Well, let's ask some of the other knowledgable posters on the board, then. The Nazis were certainly employing foreigners in the Reich for armaments, often as conscripts, and often Frenchmen who had been POWs. Not British POWs, of course; there was no Armistice with Albion.

Conditions for Russian POWs improved once the military and the SS found work for them, which is not to justify their ill-treatment in the first place. But that was due to a complete lack of logistical planning by the General Staff for Barbarossa and not Nazi ideology, per se. Goggi, our sometime forum poster, said that as a boy in 1945 he rode on a train with Soviet POWs who were traveling to work assignments. They were either unguarded or possibly very-lightly guarded as he recalls, and using the same strafed and shot-up cattle cars that German civilians used for transportation then.

So Nazi ideology had nothing to do with the treatment of Russian POWs? That is an amazing statement, Scott.

I didn't say that. But less than is presumed, I would say. Russian POWs were not particularly well treated in WWI, which has nothing to do with Nazi ideology, and if it had not been a Nazi system during the war, I daresay the situation would have been the same for the huge Russian prisoner bag, or hardly better. The General Staff was almost blind to logistical problems anyway, and prisoners-of-war are always at the bottom of priorities historically unless there is reciprocity somehow. The Russians did not sign the Geneva conventions before the war, unfortunately. That would have helped, IMHO.

Elie Wiesel also willingly went West with the German Death March instead of being liberated when Auschwitz was evacuated in 1945. He apparently would rather collaborate and work for the Germans who were supposedly trying to exterminate his race.

You know exactly why Wiesel went West? Please, tell me more.

Why don't you read his book, Night, a supposed memoir but much more like a novel, with "geysers of blood" and so on. Anyway, I would like to ask Wiesel just that! And he wasn't the only one who voluntarily went West in 1945, either, just like Schindler's Jews.

Thus, Wiesel willingly collaborated with the Germans, whereas somebody who was assigned to KL duty while recovering from wounds or something like that is branded as a cog in the death-machine. The Ukrainian Demjanjuk is convicted by the Holocaust amen-corner of Genocide merely for allegedly having been a guard at Sobibor, and prior to that of allegedly gassing 875 thousand with diesel exhaust at Treblinka, without a shred of evidence. John Demjanjuk was able to prove that he wasn't Ivan Marchenko, something that Holocaust doyens like Yitzhak Arad already knew when testifying against him. But I digress...

And Jews are not a "race".

That's funny, Mark. Then why can atheist Jews who were born in the United States move to Israel under the law-of-return to displace Gentile Arabs who were born in Palestine? It's an Apartheid system, pure and simple, supported by the USA.

If Jews are not a race then they can be a religion; if they are not a religion, then they can be an ethnicity, or a nationality, or whatever. The meaning of who is a Jew and who is a Gentile can be quite complicated and I could care less, but being an atheist myself I see both Christians and Jews as the overarching problem in politics and foreign affairs. But obviously we are not talking about skin color here as Americans would usually see the term "race" used. Race has many definitions, new and archaic, Mark.

Even Churchill defined Jews as a "RACE," or is this a forgery:

"Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable RACE which has ever appeared in the world." (Emphasis added.)

ZIONISM versus BOLSHEVISM: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE, by the Rte. Hon. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL.

[michael mills]

I don't think you'll find any Nazi atrocities against non-combatants in the Soviet Union that can be explained on a purely cultural/racial basis. Just as you'll find none that had a purely political and/or military reasoning behind them.

Most if not all atrocities committed by the Nazis on the territory of the former Soviet Union were principally rooted in the following three factors:

a) The intention to ruthlessly exploit the resources of the occupied territories in terms of food, raw material and manpower for the benefit of the Germanic empire that the Nazis strove to create;

b) The racist bias held against certain ethnic groups considered "sub-human", namely the Slavs and to an even greater extent the gypsies and the Jews;

c) The hatred of Bolshevism and the resulting will to utterly destroy the Bolshevik state.

These three factors, although with a different relative importance from case to case, were present in all atrocities committed by the Nazis against the peoples of the Soviet Union

Even the massacre of up to 2 million or more Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and other German formations was not a purely culturally/racially motivated affair. The identification of Jews with Bolshevism and the will to obtain a maximum of food supplies from the occupied territories also played a part in the Nazis' killing program against the Soviet Jews - as it also did in the extermination actions against Polish Jews, at least those carried out until the end of 1942.

I endorse the above statements by Mr Muehlenkamp. They are issues on which we agree, despite our differences of opinion on some other matters.

I have also read the two books by Gerlach, "Krieg, Ernaehrung, Voelkermord", and "Kalkulierte Morde", and like Mr Muehlenkamp I would thoroughly recommend them to readers. On the question of the motivation for the vast massacres carried out by German forces in the occupied Soviet Union (not only the SS), I think Gerlach's theses are correct in essence.

Of course, no one historian can be absolutely correct about everything, and I note that some historians have questioned Gerlach's thesis about a general authorisation for the extermination of the Jews in toto issued by Hitler on 12 December 1941. But in relation to the atrocities in the occupied Soviet Union, I share Mr Muehlenkamp's endorsement of Gerlach.

[michael mills]

Could you point me to a source where I can read about French workers being paid, getting leaves, etc., while working for German munitions and armaments industries?

A good source is "Hitler's foreign workers : enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich" by Ulrich Herbert.

It should be noted that foreign labourers brought to Germany to replace German labour called up for military service were definitely not "slave labour", in the sense that concentration camp prisoners were. Some of them volunteered to work in Germany, but the majority were conscripted. However, they were paid and did receive certain benefits, in the same way as men conscripted into the armed forces. Again like military conscripts or volunteers, they were subject to some pretty tough wartime discipline.

Labour conscripts from the East ("Ostarbeiter") were certainly treated worse than workers from the West, eg from France. Ostarbeiter had to wear a badge on their clothing; there was for Poles and another one for Russians, and they were introduced BEFORE the Jewish badge. They also received lower pay than western workers, were subject to harsher discipline, and could be punished with death for "Rassenschande", ie sex with German women, something that did not apply to French workers ( all the German farmers' wives would have been up in arms if it had!)

It should be noted that the recently introduced compensation provisions for wartime foreign labourers distinguish between "forced labour" and "slave labour", the latter being the condition of concentration camp prisoners used for labour, mostly Jewish. The compensation for the latter is much higher, since their condition was of course far worse. The compensation for "forced labourers" generally consists of the difference between the wages they received and the wages for german workers doing the same work.

With regard to conscription of labour, that was quite common in wartime, in all countries. There was recently a TV series here called "The 1940s House", in which a modern British family lived for a time under simulated wartime conditions. The series explained the various rules and regulations under which British civilians lived, and showed how the system of social control and labour discipline became totalitarian, even more rigorous than that applying to German civilians. Labour conscription existed in Britain; civilians could be called up to work in specified jobs, and could be required to leave their homes to work in distant localities. There were onerous fines for those who refused a labour assignment.

Obviously the conditions of conscript labour in Britain were not as harsh as those for foreign conscript labour in Germany, but I would suggest it was a difference of degree rather than of kind.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks for the information, Michael.

[Roberto]

No, because the Soviets did not sign the Geneva conventions, which are international agreements and not laws binding upon sovereign states.

Which doesn’t mean that the Germans were free to just kill them off. Curiously, Stalin proposed a bilateral adhesion to the Geneva and Hague conventions shortly after the commencement of the German attack - not out of any humanitarian considerations but because the Nazis’ ferocity had scared him shitless. The offer didn’t fit into Hitler’s concept, of course, and was accordingly ignored.

Conditions for Russian POWs improved once the military and the SS found work for them, which is not to justify their ill-treatment in the first place.

They don’t seem to have improved all that much:

Beside the 2 million prisoners of war who were already dead when the memorandum quoted at the beginning [Rosenberg’s letter to Keitel of 28 February 1942], another 1.3 million died until the end of the war - about 3.3 million of a total of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war (57.8 per cent) died in German captivity.

The above I translated from Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945[i/], Bonn 1997, page 10.

But that was due to a complete lack of logistical planning by the General Staff for Barbarossa and not Nazi ideology, per se.

One may wonder whether this complete lack of logistical planning for Soviet POWs, which stood in stark contrast to the careful planning from which other prisoners of war - such as the ca. two million French soldiers taken prisoner in 1940 - had benefited, did not stem from the ideologically motivated contempt for the Soviet soldier, whom the Führer pronounced to be “no comrade before and after”, coupled with the intention to secure food supplies from the Soviet lands for the Wehrmacht and the home front at the expense of the starvation death of many millions of people.

Goggi, our sometime forum poster, said that as a boy in 1945 he rode on a train with Soviet POWs who were traveling to work assignments. They were either unguarded or possibly very-lightly guarded as he recalls, and using the same strafed and shot-up cattle cars that German civilians used for transportation then.

Interesting. May we see what exactly Goggi wrote? I remember his description of an encounter with concentration camp inmates (which included many relatively privileged political prisoners of German nationality). Could it be that we are talking about the same account?

Elie Wiesel also willingly went West with the German Death March instead of being liberated when Auschwitz was evacuated in 1945. He apparently would rather collaborate and work for the Germans who were supposedly trying to exterminate his race.

No longer so in January 1945, because Himmler had called off the “Final Solution” in October of the previous year. As to the why Wiesel left with the Germans, I presume he was taken along because he was still able to work, rather than having come along voluntarily. Or then he had reasons to do so which he no doubt described in his writings, from which Smith still hasn’t provided a quote to back up this repeated assertion of his.

I never said that Jews were paid. They were enemy aliens who were considered subversives and were treated accordingly.

They were considered vermin and treated accordingly (i.e. exterminated) insofar as their labor force could be done without, I would say. That’s a lot closer to the facts than Smith’s apologetic propaganda.

Really, it is not so difficult to understand but I suppose it doesn't fit the Genocide theory-of-history,

What’s that theory supposed to be about, Mr. Smith?

I didn't say that. But less than is presumed, I would say. Russian POWs were not particularly well treated in WWI, which has nothing to do with Nazi ideology, and if it had not been a Nazi system during the war, I daresay the situation would have been the same for the huge Russian prisoner bag, or hardly better.

Yeah, sure. I presume that’s why so many of the two million French prisoners of war taken in 1940 starved to death. As to Russian prisoners in World War I:

A comparison with the fate of Russian prisoners of war in the First World War raises the question as to the causes of this enormously high mortality. Back then 1,434,500 Russians hat been taken prisoner by the Germans. The mortality of Russian prisoners was 5.4 per cent and thus corresponded to the average mortality of prisoners in the custody of the Western and Central European powers, although it was higher than that of the other prisoners in German hands (3.5 per cent).

Streit, as above. Is Smith trying to tell us that the mortality rate among Soviet POWs in World War II, which was more than ten times higher than in World War I, had nothing to do with a particularly hostile and contemptuous attitude toward Soviet prisoners that resulted from Nazi ideology?

The General Staff was almost blind to logistical problems anyway, and prisoners-of-war are always at the bottom of priorities historically unless there is reciprocity somehow.

Always, Mr. Smith? I’m sure it wasn’t recommendable to be a prisoner of war to Genghis Khan’s forces – or those of Julius Caesar, for that matter. As to the 20th century and the German armed forces:

[…]There are many reasons why so many prisoners died, but one reason, in my opinion, has not been given enough attention. After all, it was not part of the tradition of the German Army to kill defenseless prisoners of war by the thousands and to deny them shelter and food. The popular explanation is that the entire Wehrmacht had adopted the Nazi concept that all Soviet citizens were “sub-humans” and that the German soldiers acted accordingly. There is some truth in this statement, but I do not think this was the single most important reason. Were this the case, it would be very difficult to explain why a significant number of senior officers, who were committed opponents of Hitler, and who later had a share in the 1944 movement, participated in the policy of destruction in 1941. Their behavior may be explained only if we identify anti-bolshevism as a powerful motive.
It is very significant that the first murderous activities that the military leaders were asked to accept were designed to eliminate Communist leaders. When the army leadership permitted the employment of the SS Einsatzgruppen in the rear army group and army areas, they did so because these Einsatzgruppen would destroy the party infrastructure.
The same motives made them accept the Commissar Order. It is equally significant that the first Einsatzgruppen massacres were labeled “retaliatory measures for Bolshevist crimes” or “punitive actions”. It seems that most German soldiers, if they ever learned about such massacres, accepted them because the Einsatzgruppen succeeded in identifying them as an integral part of the fight against what was called Jewish bolshevism, or as retaliation against real or alleged crimes of the Soviet regime.
The following example demonstrates how this mechanism worked even with officers for whom the concept of soldierly honour, or chivalrous warfare, was not just a meaningless slogan. On June 30, 1941, one week after the attack had started, Lieutenant General Lemelsen, commanding general of an armoured corps, issued an order sharply criticizing the fact that many Red Army soldiers had been shot upon capture in his command area. “This is murder!” The Soviet soldier who had fought bravely, Lemelsen continued, was entitled to decent treatment. These sentences were quite exceptional in an order pertaining to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. I have not been able to find anything comparable. But Lemelsen went on to say that this did not apply to commissars and partisans. They were to be led aside and shot on the order of an officer. It was quite obvious that even for Lemelsen, who adhered to the traditional military code of honor, the long-cherished military principle of giving quarter to an enemy who surrendered did not apply to Communists.

Source of quote:
The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War, by Christian Streit. Published in: A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. Edited by Michael Berenbaum. New York University Press, 1990. Emphases are mine.

The Russians did not sign the Geneva conventions before the war, unfortunately. That would have helped, IMHO.

Maybe so, but reciprocity was the last thing that the Nazi government and the Wehrmacht High Command were interested in. They had embarked on a war of annihilation, and Stalin’s above mentioned offer of a bilateral adherence to conventions would only have taken away a handy pretext for their killings, which is why it was ignored.

Why don't you read his book, Night, a supposed memoir but much more like a novel, with "geysers of blood" and so on.

Why don’t you give us the pertinent quotes from a novel that you apparently know so well, Mr. Smith?

Anyway, I would like to ask Wiesel just that!

Then what are you waiting for?

And he wasn't the only one who voluntarily went West in 1945, either, just like Schindler's Jews

The quote showing that and why Wiesel went “voluntarily”, please. As to Schindler’s Jews, Schindler managed to have them transferred from Plaszow to a camp near his home in the Sudetenland which was a comparative paradise, if I well remember.

Thus, Wiesel willingly collaborated with the Germans, whereas somebody who was assigned to KL duty while recovering from wounds or something like that is branded as a cog in the death-machine.

Evidence to that willing collaboration, please.

The Ukrainian Demjanjuk is convicted by the Holocaust amen-corner of Genocide merely for allegedly having been a guard at Sobibor, and prior to that of allegedly gassing 875 thousand with diesel exhaust at Treblinka, without a shred of evidence. John Demjanjuk was able to prove that he wasn't Ivan Marchenko, something that Holocaust doyens like Yitzhak Arad already knew when testifying against him. But I digress...

Looks like Smith is again trying to dish up his favorite nonsense. If I’m not mistaken - and Smith is welcome to correct me if he thinks I am - there is no evidence that anyone knew “Ivan the Terrible” had been Mr. Marchenko rather than Mr. Demjanjuk prior to the second round before the Israeli Court of Appeal, when evidence to the true identity of the Treblinka killer was produced for the first time. “Ivan the Terrible”, as we recall, was one of the Ukrainian guards who assisted the SS in the killing of up to 900,000 people at Treblinka extermination camp. The transportation to that camp of 713,555 people from the Polish General Government until 31.12.1942 alone is documented by the Höfle memorandum, and there is also a lot of other conclusive documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence to the mass killing that went on at this place. Smith calls it "KL duty". One thing that can be said in favor of “Ivan the Terrible” is that the alternative to volunteering for this kind of duty was starving to death in a POW camp. Still, it takes a certain kind of fellow to become a mass killer of innocent people in order to save his life.

The meaning of who is a Jew and who is a Gentile can be quite complicated and I could care less, ..."

Is that so, Mr. Smith? Then why this preoccupation with Jewish “accusations” against Germans in particular and Gentiles in general?

Here we have a monumental accusation made against Gentiles in general and Germany in particular, that harms the German people--except of course their leaders, and perhaps also the plastic-spoon generation of neo-Germans--and it harms all of the Palestinian people.

Scott Smith, Thu May 09, 2002 6:58 am Post subject: POINTLESS.
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