The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

The aim of the war against the Soviet Union, SS chief Heinrich Himmler told SS leaders at the Wewelsburg Castle in January 1941, was to reduce the Slavic population by 30 million, a figure that was later repeated by other Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, who told the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano on 15 November 1941: ‘This year, 20 – 30 million people in Russia will starve.’

Hitler, the Nazis and most of the leading generals saw Poles as little more than Slavic subhumans, but they saw the Soviet Union as a threat, since its Slav inhabitants were led by what they regarded as ruthless and cunning leaders of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ world conspiracy to undermine the German race and German civilization.

While he had nothing but contempt for the Poles and their leaders, Hitler repeatedly expressed his personal admiration for Stalin, ‘one of the most extraordinary figures in world history’, as he called him in July 1941.176 ‘Stalin, too,’ Hitler told his dinner companions a year later, ‘must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghiz Khan and the others, very well . . .’177 ‘Stalin,’ said Hitler on another occasion, ‘is half beast, half giant . . . If we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as it was at the time of the Huns.’178 Thus, Hitler told army chiefs on 17 March 1941, ‘The intelligentsia deployed by Stalin must be annihilated.’179 Just as the Polish intelligentsia had been killed, now the same fate was to befall its Soviet counterpart.

Most of them were recruited from the lower middle class; it was assumed that the Order Police members had small businesses which their wives could carry on in their absence. From the middle of May 1941 they were put into training at the Border Police School in Pretzsch, near Leipzig, where they were subjected to ideological training that would amply reinforce their existing prejudices against Slavs and Jews. These were, therefore, despite claims to the contrary by later historians, neither ‘ordinary men’ nor ‘ordinary Germans’.

They were equipped with 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motor vehicles and 700,000 field guns and other artillery. Some 2,700 aircraft, more than half the entire strength of the German air force, had been assembled behind the lines. As the first motorized ground assaults began, 500 bombers, 270 dive-bombers and 480 fighter planes flew overhead and onwards, to wreak destruction on Soviet military airfields. This was the largest invading force assembled in the whole of human history to this point.

more of the total of 23,000 tanks deployed by the Red Army in 1941 were lost through breakdowns than to enemy action.

The prisoners were starving. When one of them died, the others fell upon the corpse and devoured it. On one occasion, twelve men were shot for cannibalism. All of them were lice-ridden, and typhus spread rapidly. Their light summer uniforms were totally inadequate to protect them from the bitter winter cold. By February 1942 only 3,000 out of the original 80,000 were left alive.

The prisoners are packed so tightly together in this area that they can hardly move and have to relieve themselves where they stand. They are guarded by a company-strong unit of active soldiers. The small size of the guard unit means that it can only control the camp by using the most brutal level of force. The problem of feeding the prisoners of war is virtually insoluble.

Over the whole course of the war, German forces took some 5.7 million Soviet prisoners. Official German records showed that 3,300,000 of them had perished by the time the war was over, or some 58 per cent of the total. The actual number was probably a good deal higher. By comparison 356,687 out of about 2 million German prisoners taken by the Red Army, mostly in the later stages of the war, did not survive, a death rate of almost 18 per cent. This was far in excess of the mortality rates of British, French and other servicemen in German captivity, which were below 2 per cent until the last chaotic months of the war, not to mention those of German servicemen taken prisoner by the Western Allies.

But the high mortality rates of German prisoners in Soviet camps reflected the terrible conditions of life in the Soviet Union, and in the Gulag camp system in general, following the massive destruction wrought by the war, and the bad harvests of the immediate postwar period, rather than any particular spirit of revenge towards the Germans on the part of their captors. Indeed, there is no evidence that German prisoners were treated any differently from other prisoners in Soviet camps, except in the intensity with which they were subjected as ‘fascists’ to programmes of political re-education.

Those prisoners who were eventually liberated and returned to the Soviet Union – well over one and a half million – had to face extensive discrimination following an order issued by Stalin in August 1941 equating surrender with treason. Many of them were despatched to the labour camps of the Gulag after being screened by Soviet military counter-intelligence.

The announcement of the invasion took most German people almost completely by surprise. On many previous occasions, the imminence of war had been obvious in a massive escalation of hostile propaganda pumped out against the prospective enemy by Goebbels’s media machine. But because Hitler had wanted to deceive Stalin into thinking there would be no attack, such propaganda had been entirely absent on this occasion, and indeed in mid-June there were even rumours that Stalin was about to pay a formal visit to the German Reich.

Communist Party propaganda began to emphasize the defence not of the revolution but of the motherland.

The establishment of 200 official army brothels for the troops in the east did little to alleviate this situation.

The houses in which famous Russian cultural figures had lived were deliberately targeted: manuscripts at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana were burned in the stoves, while the composer Tchaikovsky’s house was trashed and army motorcycles driven over the musical manuscripts that littered the floor.

Stalin also ordered a series of massive ethnic cleansing operations to remove what he and the Soviet leadership thought of as potential by subversive elements from the theatre of war. More than 390,000 ethnic Germans in the Ukraine were forcibly deported eastwards from September 1941. Altogether there were nearly one and a half million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. 15,000 Soviet secret policemen descended upon the Volga to begin the expulsion of the ethnic Germans living there, removing 50,000 of them already by the middle of August 1941.

In mid-September 1941, expulsions began from the major cities. By the end of 1942, more than 1,200,000 ethnic Germans had been deported to Siberia and other remote areas. Perhaps as many as 175,000 died as a result of police brutality, starvation and disease. Many of them spoke no German, and were German only by virtue of remote ancestry.

The expanse of Russia was too vast for the German air force to establish permanent air superiority, however great its effectiveness in a tactical role.

Backed by further intelligence reports, this led to a decisive move: on 12 October Stalin ordered 400,000 experienced troops, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 planes westward across Siberia into position behind Moscow, replacing them with enough newly recruited soldiers to deter the Japanese should they change their minds.

This was the beginning of a long-lived legend, repeated by many of Hitler’s surviving generals after the war, according to which if only they had been left by Hitler to get on with it, they could have achieved victory. Professional generalship was what won wars; the interference of an amateur like Hitler, however gifted he might be, could only bring ruin in the end. The truth, however, was very different. The generals’ blind insistence on attack through the autumn and early winter of 1941, their failure to prepare defensive positions for overwintering, their naive optimism in the face of what they knew to be a determined and well-equipped enemy, their studious refusal to draw the consequences from the increasing tiredness of their troops, the growing difficulties of supply and the failure of much of their equipment in the bitter cold of the Russian winter brought them to a situation by December where they were paralysed by despair and indecision.

The losses inflicted on the German armed forces were enormous. In 1939, only 19,000 had been killed; and in all the campaigns of 1940, German losses had totalled no more than 83,000 – serious enough, indeed, but not irreplaceable. In 1941, however, 357,000 German troops were reported killed or missing in action, over 300,000 of them on the Eastern Front.

What happened on the Soviet Front dwarfed anything seen in France, Denmark, Norway or the Low Countries. From 22 June 1941 onwards, at least two-thirds of the German armed forces were always engaged on the Eastern Front. More people fought and died on and behind the Eastern Front than in all the other theatres of war in 1939 – 45 put together, including the Far East. The sheer scale of the struggle was extraordinary. So too was its bitterness and its ideological fanaticism, on both sides. It was in the end on the Eastern Front, more than any other, that the fortunes of war were decided.

Pogroms of this kind took place in many areas in the first few days of German occupation. Antisemitism in the Baltic states had been fuelled by the experience of Soviet occupation since the spring of 1940, under which native elites and nationalists had been persecuted, arrested, deported or killed. Stalin had encouraged the Russian and Jewish minorities to help build the new Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and two-thirds of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party were either Russian or Jewish in origin, though like all Communists, of course, they rejected their previous ethnic and religious identities in favour of secular Bolshevik internationalism.

The great majority of officers and men took part willingly, however, and raised no objections. Deep-seated antisemitism mingled with the desire not to appear weak and a variety of other motives, not the least of which was greed, for, as in Babi Yar, the victims’ possessions in all these massacres were looted, their houses ransacked, and their property confiscated. Plunder, as a police official involved in the murders later admitted, was to be had for all.43

Within a year of beginning their campaign, the Romanian forces, sometimes in conjunction with German SS and police units, more often acting on their own, had killed between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews, the largest number murdered by any independent European country during the Second World War apart from Germany.

Here too, as in other instances, the Nazi chain of command worked indirectly. There was no one specific, precise order; Hitler set the overall parameters of action, Himmler interpreted them, and the SS officers on the ground, with his encouragement, used their initiative in deciding when and how to put them into effect, as the uneven timing of the transition from shooting Jewish men to shooting Jewish women and children clearly showed. Nevertheless, it is clear that the mass murder of Eastern European Jews that began at this time was above all a reflection of Hitler’s own personal desires and beliefs, repeatedly articulated both in public and in private during these months.

Thus not only Hitler but also many people in the senior ranks of the Party and state administration were fully informed of the massacres being carried out by the SS Task Forces in the east.

In the background of Hitler’s mind throughout Operation Barbarossa and what followed was the thought that the rapid defeat of the Soviet Union would also bring about the capitulation of the British. The attempt to bomb the British into submission in 1940 had clearly failed. But there were other ways of bringing them to the negotiating table. Chief among these was the disruption of their supplies, which by necessity had to come by sea, partly from Britain’s far-flung Empire, but principally from the United States.

Then, gambling on America’s preoccupation with the Pacific, he issued a formal declaration of war on 11 December 1941.

The rapidly increasing American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union deepened Hitler’s conviction that the USA was effectively participating in the war in a secret, Jewish-dominated alliance with Churchill and Stalin.

On 14 February 1942 Klemperer, aged sixty and in less than perfect health, was ordered to report for work clearing snow off the streets. Arriving at the venue, he discovered that he was the youngest of the twelve Jewish men on the site. Fortunately, he reported, the overseers from the municipal cleansing department were decent and polite, allowed the men to stand around chatting, and told Klemperer: ‘You must not over-exert yourself, the state does not require it.’

Although the mass murder, as Goebbels hinted, was, for obvious reasons of practicality, to be carried out in stages, there was now no doubt that, as Alfred Rosenberg put it, speaking at a press conference on 18 November 1941, that the aim was the ‘biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe’.

But already it was becoming clear that mass shooting could not achieve the scale of extermination that Himmler was demanding. Moreover, complaints were coming in from Task Force leaders that continual mass shootings of defenceless women and children were placing an intolerable strain on their men. As Rudolf Höss, a senior SS officer, later recalled, ‘I always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out exterminations by shooting, when I thought of the vast numbers concerned, and of the women and children.’ Many members of the Task Forces, ‘unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most . . . had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible work.’152 The numbers of Jews to be shot were so great that one Task Force report concluded on 3 November 1941: ‘Despite the fact that up to now a total of some 75,000 Jews have been liquidated in this way, it has nevertheless become apparent that this method will not provide a solution to the Jewish problem.’153

No operation of this size and scale could have taken place in the Third Reich without the knowledge of Hitler, whose position as Leader made him the person to whom all these institutions were ultimately responsible. It was Hitler’s murderous, but deliberately generalized, antisemitic rhetoric, repeated on many occasions in the second half of 1941, that gave Himmler and his subordinates the essential impulse to carry out the killings.172 On occasion, Hitler confirmed his approval of the murders directly. Meeting with Himmler on 18 December, for example, he told the SS leader, according to the latter’s notes, ‘Jewish question/to be exterminated as partisans’.

late July 1943, after four months, the task of digging up and incinerating some 700,000 corpses that had been crudely buried in mass pits was almost complete.

Back at the camp, Stangl packed his bags, then called together all the remaining Jewish labourers ‘because’, he said later without the slightest trace of irony, ‘I wanted to say goodbye to them. I shook hands with some of them.’258 After he left, they were killed.

At Majdanek, all the Jewish inmates were selected and, together with many more Jews brought in from the smaller labour camps in the Lublin district, were made to undress, driven to previously prepared trenches and shot. As the trenches filled up, the newly arriving naked victims were made to lie on top of the dead bodies before they were shot themselves. Beginning around six in the morning, the killings continued until five in the afternoon. Some 18,000 Jews were murdered in the camp on this single day. At Travniki and Majdanek, camp loudspeakers broadcast dance music at full volume throughout the action, to drown out the sound of the shooting and the cries of the victims. All in all, ‘Operation Harvest Festival’ killed a total of 42,000.259

Following the uprising, the remaining buildings at Treblinka were demolished, the land was grassed over and planted with flowers and trees, and the bricks from the gas chambers were used to build a small farm, designed to be lived in by a Ukrainian who promised to tell visitors that he had been there for decades.260 But local Polish people knew what had been there, and in the summer of 1944 rumours spread that Jews had been buried there without having had their gold teeth removed, and that their clothing, full of jewellery and valuables, had been buried with them. For many months, large numbers of peasants and farm workers scoured the area, looking for buried treasure. When a member of the Polish state war crimes commission visited the site of Treblinka on 7 November 1945 she found ‘masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand. They removed decaying limbs from the dust [and] bones and garbage that were thrown there.’ The macabre treasure-hunt ended only when the Polish government set up official memorials on the camp sites and posted guards around them.

Modern estimates put the total number killed at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka at around 1,700,000.264

These facilities, designed and supplied by the firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt, were patented for future use by their inventor, the engineer Kurt Prüfer, who came to Auschwitz on numerous occasions to supervise their construction, testing and initial operation. He introduced numerous small technical innovations, including, for example, the installation of heating in Crematorium II to speed up the dissolution of the Zyklon B on cold winter days. His plans have survived and have provided historians with important documentary evidence for the Crematorium’s modus operandi.

Over the whole period of the camp’s existence, at least 1.1 million and possibly as many as 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 90 per cent of them, probably about 960,000, were Jews, amounting to between a fifth and a quarter of all Jews killed in the war. They included 300,000 Jews from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from Holland, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Czechoslovakia (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), 27,000 from Slovakia, 25,000 from Belgium, 23,000 from Germany (the ‘Old Reich’), 10,000 from Croatia, 6,000 from Italy, the same number from Belarus, 1,600 from Austria and 700 from Norway. At a late stage in the war, as we shall see, some 394,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the gas chambers and put to death.

Often, particularly in the early stages of the murder programme, the German authorities convinced those selected for deportation that they were merely being moved to another ghetto or another camp. The vast majority of Jews were too weakened by prolonged hunger, privation and disease, and too preoccupied with the daily struggle to stay alive, to offer any resistance.

All in all, over 90 per cent of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews had been killed by this time.

The extermination of the Jews has sometimes been seen as a kind of industrialized, assembly-line kind of mass murder, and this picture has at least some element of truth to it. No other genocide in history has been carried out by mechanical means – gassing – in specially constructed facilities like those in operation at Auschwitz or Treblinka. At the same time, however, these facilities did not operate efficiently or effectively, and if the impression given by calling them industrialized is that they were automated or impersonal, then it is a false one.

What kept such men going was a belief that they were doing Hitler’s bidding, and killing the present and future enemies of the German race. They were not faceless bureaucrats or technologists of death; nor was the killing at any level simply the product of impersonal pressures to obey superior orders or the cold pursuit of material or military advantage for the Third Reich. The careers of SS men like Eichmann, Stangl and Höss revealed them to be hardened antisemites; the racial hatred of their subordinates, stoked and fuelled by years of propaganda, training and indoctrination, was scarcely less extreme. Translating visceral hatred of Jews in the abstract to violent acts of mass murder in reality proved not to be difficult for them, nor for a number of the SS Security Service bureaucrats who took over the leadership of the Task Forces in the east. Particularly in the lower ranks of the SS, but also in the regular army, Jews, when encountered individually or in small groups, frequently aroused a degree of personal, sadistic brutality, a desire to humiliate as well as destroy, that was seldom present when they dealt with ordinary Poles, Russians or other Slavs.

These men had good cause for concern. Despite all the Germans’ efforts, the British were continuing to out-produce them in tanks and other weapons. The armed forces procurement officials insisted on technological sophistication at the expense of mass production, and there was constant bickering between the army, the navy and the air force, each with its very plausible rival claims for priority in the allocation of resources. Focusing on complex weaponry brought higher profits to business than cheap mass production. All this slowed down production and reduced the quantities of armaments and equipment available to the armed forces.

He was all too aware of the rapidly increasing quantities of American arms and equipment that were managing to reach Britain. Already by the time America formally became a combatant nation, in December 1941, it was churning out quantities of armaments that Germany had so far shown no signs that it would be able to match. Army officers early in 1942 began to notice an improvement in Soviet military equipment and weaponry as well. To demand that German arms production match all this seemed completely unrealistic.

The air force had repeatedly demanded modifications and improvements to existing aircraft, thus slowing down production; by the end of 1942, indeed, the number of design changes recommended for the Junkers Ju88 bomber had reached 18,000, while the specifications for changes to the Heinkel He177 heavy bomber stored in Heinkel’s design offices filled no fewer than fifty-six stout files. Working together with Milch, Speer did his best to ward off new demands for design changes, but it was not until early 1944 that he managed to reduce the number of models of combat aircraft in production from forty-two to thirty, then to nine, and eventually to five.

This led to a major rethink, resulting in the production of two new tanks, the 56-ton Tiger and 45-ton Panther. These were formidable weapons, much more than a match for the T-34, and far more heavily gunned than their American counterparts.

But almost as soon as they began to be built in any numbers, Allied bombing began to destroy the factories where they were made, so they could never be turned out in sufficient numbers. By contrast Soviet industry was turning out four tanks to every one manufactured by the Germans by the beginning of 1943. The relocation of Soviet industry to the Urals had finally paid off.24 The German economy might have been able in some areas at least to produce better weapons than the economies of its enemies, but it was quite unable to match them for quantity. The move to standardized mass production came later in Germany than elsewhere; in the end, indeed, it came too late.