Executions were mostly carried out in concentration camps. The SS and security police officials who undertook these killings received formal protection from inquiries by the state prosecutors by the introduction of special SS and p>olice tribunals in October 1939. The total number of concentration camp prisoners in Germany between 1934 and 1938, when the Nazi regime was relatively moderate, was around 7,000 to 10,000, but after the beginning of the war the imprisonment of those from occupied countries suspected of opp>osition and the erection of new camps pushed the figure up to some 100,000 by
1942. But the highest numbers are to be found in the last war years (1944-45) when, under the forced labour scheme for armaments production, some half a million prisoners of all nationalities were crammed together in twenty main camps and 165 subsidiary camps.
From the start of the war, Hitler sought to link his fight against external enemies with the eradication of internal enemies and 'inferior’ national elements. His aim was made quite explicit by his secret order of September 1939 to kill all the mentally ill. Under the euthanasia programme, for which a secretly selected commission of doctors was responsible, about 70,000 mentally ill were killed in hospitals in Bernburg, Hadamar, Hartheim, and elsewhere, until, in 1941, Hitler felt himself obliged to call a halt in response to various protests, especially from clergy.
Calculation and hale
The more extreme nature of the Nazi regime in 1941-42 was directly connected with the critical military situation. The combination of rational calculation and pathological hate, which increasingly dominated Hitler’s decisions the more he was dominated by the idea of his role in history, was especially apparent in his decision to attack Russia.
This decision had no necessity other than as an escape from the military dead-end Hitler had reached in the West over Great Britain. It was akso, however, an attempt to wage his own war, the war he had planned two decades before with the intention of conquering the Lebensrauni of the East and destroying 'Jewish Bolshevism’.
His decision linked many elements: an ob. stinate determination to keep the initiative, if not against Great Britain, then against the last potentially dominant p<jwcT on the continent, an impatient, halfblind impulse to take action (always a characteristic of Hitler and the Nazi movement as a whole), bitterne. ss and anger that the Blitzkrieg strategy had not brought victfjry, increasing hate of the world-wide enemy, Jewry, on which he blamed his own miscalculations, and an increasingly fanatical desire for destruction.
Thus, significantly, it was in connection with the preparations for the Russian campaign that Hitler issued the brutal secret orders which were later to acquire such terrible infamy in the Nazi war crimes trials: the order for the 'final solution of the Jewish problem’, the order that captured Soviet commissars should be shot (an order which the Wehrmacht did not oppose), and the 'Night and Fog’ decree of September
1941, which as a deterrent against sabotage in the Western occupied territories laid down that those suspected of opposition shoula be seized by police and whisked away to German prisons without any information being given to their families as to their fate.
At the same time, the German police introduced a mass of oppressive new measures against the churches, mostly the Catholic Church, with tighter bans on church demonstrations and the seizure of some 100 monasteries.
Failure and forced labour The battle for Moscow during the winter of 1941-42 and the long drawn-out attacks of 1942 revealed what the battle of Stalingrad (October 1942 to February 1943) then confirmed: that victory in the East was no longer within reach. In the West, too, the initiative passed to the other side after the United States entered the war (December 1941). From 1942, 'area bombing’ by the British and American air forces, which from 1943 possessed undisputed mastery of the air over Germany, had a disastrous effect on Germany’s war economy and on the German population. Bombs killed some 400,000 civilians, and destroyed countless towns and industrial plants. The Anglo-American landing in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 forced the capitulation of the Afrika Korps in May 1943. The Allied invasion of southern Italy in July 1943 also led to a German retreat. Mussolini’s subsequent fall and the withdrawal of Italy from the Axis in August 1943 — which also brought into question the reliability of Germany’s smaller allies (Hungary and Rumania) —threw the Nazi regime into its most. severe political crisis to date.
This string of failures accelerated the growing extremism of Nazi policy inside Germany and caused further lasting changes in the Party’s power structure in accordance with the 'total warfare’ which had now been instituted. Symptomatic of this were the innovations in armaments production and labour allocation in March
1942. Particularly successful was the appointment of Albert Speer as Reich minister for armaments and production; the energetic and talented direction of
German cartoon of 1940 accuses Churchill of sinking the Athenia to arouse antiGerman feeling. The British liner was sunk a few hours after war started by a German U-boat, drowning 112 people, twenty-eight of them Americans. Mindful of how the sinking of the Lusitania helped bring America into the First World War, Hitler ordered a denial that a U-boat was involved and in October the official Nazi newspaper proclaimed: 'Churchill sank the Athenia’. The naval leaders who knew the truth were ordered to keep silent. Hitler had taken a further step towards total control of Germany and her people
The former architect put Germany’s armaments economy into high gear, and made possible a three-fold increase in arms production in 1943-44 compared with 1941, despite the Allied bombing raids. This brilliant technical and organizational feat was, however, closely bound up with the simultaneous massive extension of forced labour, for which responsibility was borne by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, named plenipotentiary general for the allocation of labour in March 1942, and —in the control of concentration camps —by Himmler. Millions of Russians —referred to derogatorily as Ostarbeiter (Eastern workers) — and Poles were forcibly brought to work in the Reich (as were French, Belgians, Dutch, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, and others). The building of the underground V-weapon production plant in the Harz mountains transferred from Peenemiinde after the RAF' attack in 1943) was largely the work of 30,000 concentration camp prisoners.
World History
