More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
These actions were not confined to the SS. From the very beginning, too, Nazi Party officials, stormtroopers, civilian officials and especially junior army officers and ordinary soldiers joined in, to be followed in due course by German settlers moved into Poland from outside.
Popular hatred and contempt for Poles, as for Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians, and even more for ‘Eastern Jews’, were deeply rooted in Germany.
Toughness, hardness, brutality, the use of
from 1933 onwards,
Nazism taught that might was right, winners took all, and the racially inferior were free game.
population of Kiev, for instance, fell by half, from 600,000 to 300,000 –
German military violence against civilians soon dissipated the support the invaders had initially won from the local population. Partisan
Kiev, Kharkov and most of central and eastern Ukraine were occupied in late September and October, and on 21 November 1941 German forces took
Info
Using a mixture of advertising and inducements on the one hand, and coercion and terror on the other, the German civil and military authorities in the occupied eastern territories launched a massive campaign to recruit civilian workers even before Sauckel came into office. Armed recruitment commissions roamed the countryside arresting and imprisoning young, able-bodied men and women, or, if they had gone into hiding, maltreating their parents and families until they surrendered.
As the military situation on the Eastern Front became more difficult, the army, the occupation authorities and the SS all began to abandon any remaining scruples in the recruitment of local inhabitants for labour. Speaking in Posen in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.’81
picked up potential workers off the streets, and took hostages until sufficient candidates for conscription came forward – all measures that further fuelled recruitment for the partisans.
they were prisoners of war, or drafted from the east – in specially constructed and heavily guarded camps.
badly built, with inadequate sanitation and a lack of bed-linen and other equipment. A large number of the civilians were under the age of eighteen. The diet they were allocated was markedly
Corruption was rife in the foreign workers’ camps, with commandants and officers siphoning off supplies and
Sexual liaisons were common between German camp officials and female inmates; they were often coerced, and rape was not uncommon. For the sexual needs of the foreign workers, sixty brothels had
Good reference
process that began with their political opponents in Germany . . . And we idiots believed they could bring us a better future. Every person who approved of this system even to the smallest degree has to be ashamed today of having done so.159
Dispatch Courier
hunting lodge at Carinhall,
Page 588
Joining the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS three years later, von Braun possessed the credentials, connections, charm
At his subsequent trial in Nuremberg, Speer denied ever having visited a labour camp of any kind, and did not mention the Dora-Central Works complex.47 In fact, however, as his Ministry’s chronicle reveals, Speer visited the new V-2 production centre on 10 December
evidence that either Dornberger or von Braun, or for that matter Speer, ever did anything to try to improve the situation. Only in September 1944, when the teething
‘Never has
people supported such a bad cause with such enthusiasm,’ she wrote on 8 May 1945, perhaps thinking of her own earlier attitudes, ‘never so impelled itself
rewarded Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz for his loyalty by making him Reich President, a post which Hitler had once said was so bound up with the memory of the previous
end of 8 May
7 May 1945.
The war was over.237
Melita Maschmann,
Leni Riefenstahl found
Triumph of the Will were
power of nationalism had also been broken,
that it made Germany great again.
