Unit 10 - The Impact of War (1939-1945)

The impact of Allied bombing

- Allied bombing: We saw in the previously in Topic 1 - The impact of war on German society how Allied bombing, alongside wartime deprivations and shortages, had affected German morale. It is worth looking more closely at the fine detail of these offensives for they reveal much about the changing nature of the war, and the gradual dominance of the Allied powers. Moreover, Allied targets reveal the difficulties which the Nazis had in maintaining a vibrant industrial base, and illustrate the achievements of Nazi technocrats and planners in overcoming some of these problems. The concept of Strategic Air Offensive was developed in Britain during the later years of the First World war, partly as a means of justifying expenditure on the infant Royal Air Force, originally known as the Royal Flying Corps. These theories were supported in the United States by Brigadier-General William Mitchell in the 1920s. By the 1930s it was widely believed that air power could win wars and that massed bombing planes would always get through to destroy cities. German air attacks during the Spanish Civil War appeared to show the efficacy of this kind of warfare. War in the air was a minor part of the First World War but British political leaders accepted the lobbying of the advocates of air power that it would be a vital strategic element in any future war. German raids using Zeppelins on Britain during the First World War had caused much anxiety among the civilian population and the psychological fear induced by air attacks impressed many contemporaries. A Sub-Committee of the British Imperial War Cabinet in 1917 reported: "The day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and the destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate". The veteran British Conservative politician Stanley Baldwin warned on 10 November 1932 that "the bomber will always get through". This fear of long-range bombing as a new element in warfare led to British rearmament beginning with an element of defensive measures against the much-feared bombers. Deterrence and defence, rather than offensive capability, was central to the increased expenditure on the RAF in July 1934, followed by further increases in May 1935, February 1936, and February 1937. It was common knowledge that these increases were made to keep pace with Germany. Yet despite these developments relating to defence from bombers, by 1939, neither Germany, Britain, the United States, France, or Russia, possessed operational heavy bombers. Britain and the United States began production shortly after the outbreak of the war, and when German attacks on British cities opened in 1940, Britain considered itself duty-bound to retaliate. Daytime raids proved to be too costly, but from May 1940 until the end of 1941, the RAF sent out 44,000 night sorties, dropping 45,000 tons of bombs to hit specific targets like oil refineries and armament factories. Analysis of bombing patterns proved that the raids were usually wildly inaccurate, and the RAF decided to concentrate on broader targets, like railway yards or large centres of population. Berlin was bombed as early as August 1940, but distance from Britain and lack of suitable aircraft meant that raids on Hitler's capital city were very limited. Later, as more long-range aircraft became available, newer types introduced, and bases seized closer to Germany, the pace and scale of attacks increased. Nevertheless, the first air-raids of 1940 came as a shock to population of Berlin. British bombers directly over Berlin, in the first big-air-raid of the war, suffered no casualties from anti-aircraft fire. William Shirer reported: "The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Göring assured them it couldn't. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital's anti-aircraft defence." (William Shirer, Berlin Diary) In the early stages of the war, Britain's RAF had little ability to strike targets effectively in Germany. Almost all targets were on the coast and there were relatively small numbers of bombing aircraft available. Disruption to German life was slight, except that the black-out, the switching off all lights at night to make it harder for enemy aircraft to find their way to their targets, caused considerable inconvenience. At first, more casualties were caused by accidents in the dark rather than by bombing. Crime rates also increased under the cover of darkness. Bombing did little damage to German industry at this stage of the war. In August 1940, the great Siemens works was hit, prompting the Berlin newspaper Börsen Zeitung to emblazon the headline 'British Air Pirates over Berlin'. Even German officials admitted the damage was greater than before, but this type of success for British bombing raids was rare. German war production was hardly affected by the bombing. The damage was greatest in the Ruhr industrial area, but more so in the loss of working hours and loss of productivity through lack of sleep than through extensive damage to industrial plant and machinery. The British had the great problem that a long flight time from Britain to Germany meant that more of their load was devoted to fuel and oil rather than bombs. While limiting the effectiveness of the bombing, the German public was perturbed that the British were retaliating for the bombing of British cities. As the war progressed, more and better aircraft became available to the Allies and attacks become heavier. As four-engine Lancaster bombers became available, massive attacks were made from February 1942 on accessible coastal towns like Rostock and Lübeck. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, its aircraft began to attack Germany. Especially for those Germans living in the industrial areas of the Rhineland and the Ruhr and close to the North Sea and Baltic coasts, and from August 1942, the RAF was joined by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). The USAAF preferred daylight bombing to minimise civilian casualties but they encountered more resistance from German fighters. Protection came in the form of the Mustang, available from December 1943, powered by Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, which provided the long-range fighter escorts which the USAAF desperately needed. In May 1942, the first RAF 1,000 bomber raid was undertaken at Cologne, followed by raids on the industrial areas of the Ruhr, Essen, and Dusseldorf. In the same month, the first massed air raids deliberately targeting residential areas took place against Germany at Lübeck. This was the beginning of area bombing. In 1943, the RAF dropped 200,000 tonnes of bombs—large scale bombing of the cities became a regular occurrence. Incendiary bombing caused uncontrollable firestorms at Hamburg, Nuremberg, Munich, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, and Allied bombing inflicted widespread damage on Duisberg, Dortmund, Bochun and Aachen. A major bombing offensive was conducted against Berlin between November 1943 and April 1944, when aircraft were switched to support the D-Day landings in Normandy. Raids in November 1943 alone made 400,000 Berliners homeless. Despite the huge numbers of people killed and injured, it is difficult to detect any real breakdown in the morale of the civilian population. Despite requests from local Gauleiters, Hitler refused to visit the stricken areas, Goering made fewer public appearances though Goebbels did visit bomb-hit areas and appreciated the physical and psychological effects of the damage inflicted. In relation to the Hamburg bombing, Goebbels recorded how Gauleiter Kaufmann speaking of a catastrophe "the extent of which blunts the imagination. A city of one million people has been devastated in a manner unknown before in history". From the Normandy landing onwards, the two air-forces were assigned separate tasks. RAF Bomber Command concentrated on destroying communications systems behind the Normandy front lines while the US Eighth Air Force attacked Germany's oil production depots and factories. By July 1944, every major oil plant in Germany had been attacked and by September, the fuel supply for the Luftwaffe had been reduced to 10,000 tons of octane against a monthly requirement of 160,000 tons. After the lull occasioned by D-Day, the allies resumed their heavy bombing of Germany in the autumn of 1944, and Berlin continued to be attacked until it fell to the Red Army in April 1945. During this final stage of the war, Allied air forces were dominant and German resistance minimal. Industrial targets were viable but Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris directed his bombers into the towns. Harris believed that Germany would only be brought to her knees by the destruction of civilian morale. The morality of these acts has been vigorously debated since the end of the war especially since the USAAF adopted markedly different targeting policy, aiming at industrial weak spots like oil and ball-bearings factories. From February 1945, raids were also made at the request of the Red Army to block the movement of German troops. Berlin, Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Dresden were areas where there were heavy war casualties towards the end of the war. Approximately 120,000 people died in the great Dresden raids with RAF and USAAF combining to create a firestorm. Germans described it as "terror bombing" which based on the evidence is a difficult term to refute. Estimates of those killed in Germany by allied bombing vary between 350,000 and 500,000 people between 1939 and 1945. Many more were seriously injured and millions were made homeless. Bombing eventually had a major disruptive effect on the German population. Aside from the casualties and physical damage caused, loss of sleep and interruption to water and power supplies caused considerable inconvenience and fatigue. Nevertheless, bombing tended to stiffen resolve and draw people together, whether they supported Hitler or not. Evacuation, initially of children but later of women and the elderly, was organised and proved very unpopular, at least in the early stages. Later, as the cities were attacked severely, people wanted to get themselves or their loved ones away from the danger areas. However, catering adequately for the millions of homeless and displaced persons proved impossible. Conditions for evacuees often were poor and many chose to return to the cities despite the dangers and hardships. Transcript: "Press on your attack. If you individually succeed, you will have delivered the most devastating blow against the very vitals of the enemy. Let him have it right on the chin. Send that message to all groups and stations." That was how Air Marshall Harris, Commander in Chief, Bomber Command, gave his instructions for the largest air raid the world has ever known. At aerodromes up and down the country, well over 1,000 British-built bombers were being prepared for their journey over the heart of Germany's biggest industrial center, The Ruhr. While armorers and fitters were at work on the machines, the air crews were receiving final instructions from station commanders. "In the opinion of the weather prophets this is the night, and the plan is on. Now the target is an old friend to many of you, it is the City of Cologne. The route is almost direct. I'll show it to you. It's almost direct, base - Ouddorp - direct to Cologne. Bomb your target there, turn southwest - Euskirchen, then direct to Noordlund, and then direct to base. That's all, good luck to all." Outside, the huge bombers were being loaded with the largest cargo of high-explosive and incendiary bombs ever to be carried by one striking force to a single objective. As you can see, the WAAF were directly concerned in this all-important job. Tons and tons of beautiful bombs were tucked away ready for the night's operation. At dusk, the colossal force set out. Heavy bombers of many types took off from aerodromes all over the country. Only perfect staffwork could've achieved the devastating success of this raid. For something like an hour and a half, bombs were dropping at the rate of about 20 tons a minute. Just work that out. Maybe the Hun is less proud now of the Luftwaffe's savage attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade and elsewhere. The pall of smoke which covered the target area for days afterwards made reconnaissance photographs difficult to get. But from these picture of previous raid results, it's easy to imagine what Cologne looks like today. We already know what the RAF have done to Rostock, Lubeck and other places. This was before the 1,000 plan came into operation. Home again, the boys certainly seem satisfied with their night's work and rightly so. "Well, we certainly gave Cologne a good pasting this time, anyway. I looked down over the target, nothing but a sea of fire." "Never seen so many aircraft in the air before in my life." "I think the amount of aircraft we sent over and the amount of bombs dropped and everything else really completely foxed their defenses, etc." "Well, did anyone see any Jerrys?" "Er, no, sir, there wasn't any room. There were too many of our own up there." "Excellent, no fighters." "Well, has anyone else got anything of interest to say? What about the flak?" "Well, there's always a bit there and of course we found it as usual." "Here's a piece of it anyway." "Well, where did you find this?" "Just take it out of my sleeve." "You were very lucky." "Thank you." At Cologne and again at Essen, Germany has felt the growing might of the Royal Air Force. Soon America's strength will be added to ours. Air Marshall Harris has this to say. "Hello, Lübeck, Rostock. That's only just the beginning. Let the Nazis take good note of the Western horizon. There they will see a cloud as yet no bigger than a man's hand. But behind that cloud, lies the whole massive power of the United States of America. When the storm bursts over Germany, they will look back to the days of Lubeck, and Rostock, and Cologne as a man caught in the blasts of a hurricane will look back to the gentle zephers of last Summer. There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see. Germany, clinging ever more and more desperately to her widespread conquest and foolishness striving for more will make a most interesting initial experiment. Japan will provide the confirmation."

Religious opposition

As in the 1930s, the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the Nazi regime was influenced by their desire to protect their own organisations, and by the support for the Nazis which existed among many of their congregation and senior Church officials. The Church hierarchy itself supported Germany's war aims in 1939 and had approved of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Church as an institution did little to oppose the Nazis and it was left to individual Churchmen to voice dissent. The most prominent among this group was Bishop Galen of Munster, who in 1940 raised concerns over the euthanasia programme applied by the Nazis to the physically and mentally disabled. Galen stated: "For some months now we have been hearing that mental patients who have been ill for a long time and are apparently incurable have been removed from the hospitals by force, on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives are informed after a short while that the patient has died, the body has been created, and the ashes may be called for. There is a widespread suspicion, verging on certainty, that the many unexpected deaths among mental patients have not been due to natural causes but have been deliberately arranged and that the officials follow the precept that it is permissible to destroy "life which does not deserve to live" - to kill innocent persons, if it is decided that such lives are no longer of value to the Volk and the state. It is a terrible doctrine, which excuses the murder of innocent people, which gives express licence to kill unemployable invalids, cripples, incurables, and the seniles and those who suffer from incurable diseases." Galen's message struck a chord with many other Christians and this led to a temporary halting of the programme. On 6 December 1940, the Vatican condemned the mercy killings. The Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office held that 'such killings are contrary to both national and divine law'. Galen was not persecuted but those who distributed his sermon were, with three Roman Catholic priests executed. The other leading Catholic who spoke out against the regime was Archbishop Frings of Cologne who condemned the killing of prisoners of war. The only Christian body in Germany to protest publicly about the treatment of Jews was the Protestant Confessional Church of Prussia. In 1943, a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer was read in the pulpits of Protestant Churches, an outspoken critic of the regime since 1933, who called for wider Christian resistance to the treatment of the Jews. After 1940 he had been banned from speaking in public and his criticism could not reach a wide audience in Germany. Bonhoeffer had a long history of involvement with other critics of the Nazi regime and had extensive contacts abroad. He was eventually arrested and held in prison until being executed in 1945, shortly before the end of the war.

Rudolf Hoess and Auschwitz

Auschwitz is often seen as the keystone in the arch of Nazi death camps. Its notoriety is in some ways hard to explain but sheer scale and the industrial-type of operations involved in mass murder is the most likely explanation for its position as leitmotif for the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1943-4, the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few miles west of Krakow, became the hub of a vast killing machine established by the Nazis. The development of Auschwitz took some time—until 1943, the main death camps were at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, but most of these camps were closed after the Jewish population in their vicinity had been killed. Auschwitz was more than just a death camp but a sprawling complex of buildings with very different functions. Auschwitz I. was an old army barracks which remained active but was overshadowed by Auschwitz II., consisting of the large camp at Birkenau, the arrival centre for transports from the West, and the place where the main gas chambers and crematoria were located. Auschwitz III was on the other side of the railway tracks at Monowitz, and was a huge industrial complex, producing munitions and other goods for the war effort. In the outlying districts, a chain of smaller satellite camps contained industrial enterprises which were run by the SS, and which were dependent on the forced labour provided from Auschwitz. Some insight into the scale and scope of Auschwitz can be gleaned from the testimony of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, who at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after the war spoke about the scale of operations. Hoess had been a member of the NSDAP since 1922, a member of the SS since 1934, and a member of the Waffen-SS since 1939. From 1 December 1934, he had been a participant in the SS Guard Unit, the so-called Deathshead Formation (Totenkopf Verband). He commanded Auschwitz between May 1940 (when it was simply a labour camp) and December 1943. In his original deposition at Nuremberg, he stated that 2.5 million people had been executed by gassing and burning, and 500,000 died from starvation and disease, making a total of 3 million, which represented 70-80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz. The method of execution changed during the time Hoess commanded Auschwitz. Mobile gas chambers which leaked carbon monoxide from the vehicles into sealed trucks containing prisoners had been used in the early years of the war but Hoess introduced Zyklon-B, which was based on prussic acid and highly toxic. Groups of approximately 250 victims were brought to the camp and marched to a building marked 'Disinfection' outside where they undressed, and were then sent in, with the doors closed behind them, and one or two tins of Zyklon-B dropped in. All the prisoners were dead within half an hour. A special squad of concentration camp prisoners would drag the dead bodies out of the chamber for cremation. At first Hoess used pits filled with firewood and soaked in kerosene for cremation but by late 1942 crematoria buildings had been designed and built, which greatly improved the disposal rate of the bodies. In a later statement, Hoess said the figures he had given had been supplied by Adolf Eichmann, who had given it to Hoess's superior officer, SS General Glűcks. Hoess went on to state: "I think the number of 2½ million is much too high. Even in Auschwitz, there were limits to the possibilities of destruction ... The two great crematories I and II were built in the winter of 1942-43, and put into use in the spring of 1943. Each had five three-retort ovens, and each would cremate about 2000 bodies within 24 hours. Technical reasons connected with keeping the fires going made it impossible to increase the capacity of the ovens. Attempts to do so resulted in serious damage, which on several occasions meant a complete breakdown of operations." The casual way in which Hoess bandied figures about is horrifying, but it is essential to understand the mindset of those tasked with such barbarian practices. As the historian Hannah Arendt described it in her influential phrase "the banality of evil", crimes against humanity had become accepted and implemented by Nazi functionaries without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance. The Holocaust, conducted in a bureaucratic, rational, and routine manner by thousands of officials without question, was Arendt's topic which she approached through analysis of the role of Adolf Eichmann in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. Arendt saw Eichmann as an example of the way 'ordinary' people could become accomplices and perpetrators of unspeakable crimes. Transcript: At Nuremberg, the Hitler gang has gone on trial. For the first time, criminal war leaders are being judged by an international court, by mankind. Goering, Hess, Von Ribbentrop and the 17 others, men who had planned world conquest and the death and enslavement of millions are now tried under law. And the law in all nations has rules for dealing with criminals. Men of all the world took hope, peace and decency were assured. "If these accused person had been taken out and shot, you know, without any trial, there would've been no record for history. But by reason of this trial, the facts were developed which are irreparable and that they will live forever. And thats one of the greatest contributions of the Nuremberg trial, er, to justice." Transcript 2: After a trial that had lasted some four months, Adolf Eichmann has had his defense rejected. He's been judged guilty of the major crimes in this indictment. "Particulars of offense. The accused, together with others, during the period 1939 to 1945, caused the killing of millions of Jews. In his capacity as the person responsible for the execution of the Nazi plan, for the physical extermination of the Jews. Known as the final solution of the Jewish problem."

Civilian targets and strategic bombing

Between May 1942 and May 1945, as we have seen, Britain and the United States carried out extensive bombing raids against Germany. For ordinary Germans, the bombing was relentless, depressing, and damaging to Germany's industrial capacity and civilian morale. Nevertheless, the industrial gains made under Speer were largely maintained despite the damage caused by the air raids. Bombing did have an impact on production, as the supply lines were damaged, factories had to be dispersed, and worker morale was affected. In January 1945, Ministry of Armaments officials calculated that bombing had resulted in 35% fewer tanks, 31% fewer aircraft, and 42% fewer lorries being produced than would otherwise have been the case. The intensive bombing between January and May 1945, however, caused an actual reduction in the amount of armaments that were produced. Nearly thirty years later, Albert Speer gave his observations on the economic impact of Allied bombing: "The first thousand bomber raid in May 1942 gave us a taste of what was to come. But, in spite of the devastation, we were producing more, not less. Any loss of production was balanced out by increased effort. From my visits to armaments plants and contacts with ordinary Germans, I had the impression of growing toughness amongst the population. Neither did the bombings and the hardships weaken morale or increase opposition. Hitler's concern to avoid discontent was shown by the money spent on supplies of consumer goods, military pensions and compensation for losses. However, what saved us from defeat within months was the enemy's decision to continue its indiscriminate attacks upon our cities instead of concentrating on a few key industries." (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (1970)) From mid-1944 at the latest the war was irrevocably lost for Germany. Italy was out of the war, the western allies were landing in France, and the Russians were pushing the Germans back on the Eastern Front, and Allied air-raids were destroying German cities. Many German cities presented partial areas of vast devastation. Perhaps the outstanding example was Hamburg, where a series of attacks in July and August of 1943 destroyed 55 to 60 percent of the city, damaging an area of 30 square miles, completely burning out 12.5 square miles, wiping out 300,000 dwelling units, and making 750,000 people homeless. Many of those killed were in shelters where they were poisoned by carbon-monoxide. The attacks used both high-explosive and incendiary bombs as it was thought by the Air Forces and later confirmed that the former created roadblocks, broke water mains, disrupted communications, opened buildings, broke windows, and displaced roofing. Most important, they kept fire-fighters in shelters until the incendiaries became effective. Yet 75 to 80 percent of the property destruction was due to fires, particularly to those in which the so-called firestorm phenomenon was observed. It was the deliberate policy of the Royal Air Force (RAF), in contrast to the US Air Force, to conduct area bombing of large industrial cities using large numbers of incendiary bombs against predominantly residential districts. It was argued, on the basis of Germany bombing of Britain during the Blitz, that this method achieved higher levels of destruction and industrial dislocation, especially in heavily-bombed cities like Hamburg and Dresden. Arthur Harris (Commander-in Chief of RAF Bomber Command) believed that greater damage could be inflicted by using incendiary bombs which would cause larger, more intense fires in German cities. The 'firestorm phenomenon' was created as a result of the 'chimney effect' as the heat of the original fire drew in more and more of the surrounding air. Small fires thus combined to produce a powerful, fast-moving fire aided by strong gusts destroying all in its path. The destruction of utilities and public service buildings was particularly disastrous for the German population. As the Police President of Hamburg reported after an investigation of the fires: "An estimate of the force of the firestorm could be obtained only by analysing it soberly as a meteorological phenomenon: as a result of the sudden linking of a number of fires, the air above was heated to such an extent that a violent updraft occurred which, in turn, caused the surrounding fresh air to be sucked in from all sides to the centre of the fire area. This tremendous suction caused movements of air of far greater force than normal winds. In meteorology the differences of temperatures involved are of the order of 20 to 30 degrees. In the firestorm they were of the order of 600, 800 or even 1,000 degrees. This explained the colossal force of the firestorm winds." Table 1: Allied Bombing by Tonnage in Germany and German-occupied Europe between 1940 and 1945 As the United States' Strategic Bombing Survey of 30 September 1945 indicated in the report 'Physical Damage from Bombing', fire was the chief case of damage from bombing. Ignition in many instances followed the use of high-explosive bombs as when highly-combustible materials were released and then ignited by hot gasses of the explosion or when electrical equipment was short-circuited or stoves or heaters overturned, but the principal weapon for setting fires was the incendiary bomb, which was most effective in causing destruction in high residential and city areas, and fire-storms were common across Hamburg, Kassel, Darmstadt, and Dresden.

The 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question

Estimates of how many Jews were murdered by the Nazis are largely based on the number of Jews living in Europe in 1933 compared to 1945, and a figure of between five and six million Jews has been generally accepted by historians as likely to be fairly accurate. Not all were murdered in the camps, with many being victims of the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads that followed in the wake of the German army in Eastern Europe. The historian Martin Gilbert claims nearly 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, which would represent approximately 78% of the number of Jews living in Germany and the German-occupied territories at that time. In addition, between 90,000 and 220,000 Romany Gypsies were murdered, 270,000 mentally and physically disabled people, between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals, and between 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses. Precise figures will never be possible to determine but the mass extermination of human beings, planned and coordinated by a government of a European state, remains one of the greatest crimes against humanity the world has ever seen. What was behind this idea of the 'Final Solution'? The idea was complex and deep-rooted, and drawing on anti-Semitic feeling which was not confined to Germany but which was widespread in many areas of Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe. Hitler's theoretical anti-Semitism as outlined in Mein Kampf was made a reality with the Kristallnacht and the violent persecution of Jews which followed (See more in Unit 9 Topic 3 - Anti-Semitism intensified, 1938-41). As they posed a danger to German racial purity, Hitler directed a comprehensive attack on the Jews. As he had shown earlier, conversion to Christianity made no difference, nor did medals Jews had won fighting for Germany in the First World War. This stance had meant that Hitler would not honour commitments made by Hindenburg towards Jews in these categories. Hitler wanted Jews evacuated from the large Germanic Reich which he aimed to construct, but by late 1941, the Nazis had to accept that the complete conquest of the Soviet Union had not been achieved and that final victory would have to wait until the summer of 1942 at the earliest. Earlier plans to send millions of Jews to be settled on the island of Madagascar or to Siberia were abandoned. A vast number of Jews had by that date already been deported to the General Government area of Poland, and were too numerous for the authorities to cope with. It was the urgency of the problems facing the Nazis that led them to embrace more radical, murderous policies. The view of a great Germanic Empire gradually crumbled from late 1941 as the Nazis became embroiled in the struggle against a reinvigorated Soviet Russia and the British Empire newly reinforced by the US. Military stalemate and resulting logistical and demographic bottlenecks in early 1942 led to a shift in German policy. To make good manpower losses and preserve the military-industrial complex, the Nazis decided to maximise its labour potential of subject populations, with the result that millions of Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Czechs and other Europeans were brought into the Reich to work. Simultaneously, Jews were being deported out of the central Reich territories to the East. Franz Rademacher, responsible for Jewish Affairs at the German Foreign Ministry wrote to Foreign Office Departments on 10 February 1942 informing them of a decision Hitler had made several months earlier: "The war in the Soviet Union in the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence, the Führer has decided the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final Solution." (cited in Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust) In shelving the Madagascar plan, and planning to re-settle the Jews in the East, Hitler began a new phase in how the Nazis proposed to deal with the Jewish question.

Hitler's racial and strategic agenda

In the early years of Hitler's leadership, it was not clear that his aims went any further than revision of the Versailles Treaty. In 1924, Hitler had written Mein Kampf, outlining Germany's interest in expansion in Central and Eastern Europe, but how far he would seek to implement such a programme was open to considerable doubt. The Hitler of 1924, radical agitator, racial theorist, and fervent German nationalist, was not necessarily the Hitler of 1935, as leader of the German nation. Nevertheless, it was clear that, at the very least, Hitler possessed a 'racial' agenda, meaning that ethnic Germans placed in Czechoslovakia and the Polish Corridor must be brought back within Germany. Union with Austria was projected for the same reason of promoting a German racial state based on blood and culture. None of this was necessarily inconsistent with a revision of Versailles but the manner and language of Hitler's regime indicated that he envisioned a wider programme of German expansion. Indeed, Hitler's actions in 1938 and 1939 went beyond these limited aims, with the annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and the tripartite division of Poland between Germany, the Soviet Union, and the General-Government area of central Poland. While Hitler may not have calculated that a general European war would break out in 1939, by then the German economy had switched to a war footing. - German planning assumptions: During wartime, victory was the 'be all and end all' of economic policy. There is general agreement among historians that Hitler did not plan to go to war with France and Britain in 1939. He had only envisaged a localised Polish war, requiring limited resources which would be well within the capacity of the armaments build-up of the past three years. Once general war broke out, though, Hitler was obliged to push the economy to its limits. By the summer of 1941, two-thirds of Germany's industrial workforce was involved in war-linked activities. Economic and political planning based on the mistaken assumption of a war beginning in 1942 envisaged the expansion of the Luftwaffe in 1942 and a great development of naval forces, due to be completed in 1944/5. Thus, the early stages of the Four-Year Plan from 1936 saw the building up of Germany's productive potential through increasing iron and steel production, which provided the base materials for machine tools, and the development of artificial alternatives to oil and rubber. Once this stage had been completed and expanded, the full-scale development of armaments could begin. The outbreak of Europe-wide war in 1939 came as a surprise and disrupted this timetable. The German arms industry also suffered from structural weaknesses, with different branches demanding highly-specialised equipment of a very high quality. Moreover, the production of weapons was very expensive and required a highly-skilled labour force. The break-neck speed with which rearmament had taken place and the reckless military expenditure which was needed to finance it, had earlier led to Schacht's removal and his replacement by the more compliant Walther Funk as Economics Minister. Hitler was sufficiently magnanimous to inform Schacht that "Your name, above all, will always be connected with the first epoch of national rearmament." Yet Schacht remained in a position of influence, and on 7 January 1939, he and other directors of the Reichsbank wrote a memorandum to Hitler, urging that he balance the budget in view of the threatening danger of inflation. Reviewing and implicitly approving rearmament and the foreign policy objectives it aimed at, the memorandum continued: "From the beginning the Reichsbank has been aware of the fact that a successful foreign policy can be attained only by the reconstruction of the German armed forces. It [the Reichsbank] therefore assumed to a very great extent the responsibility to finance the rearmament in spite of the inherent dangers to the currency. The justification thereof was the necessity, which pushed all other considerations into the background, to carry through the armament at once, out of nothing, and furthermore under camouflage, which made a respect-commanding foreign policy possible." By 1939, as befitted an economy which was engaged in war-like preparations, German industry soon came to be dominated by the chemical and metallurgical industries. Huge industrial cartels and large-scale enterprises were highly-favoured by the Nazis. Great firms like Krupp and I.G. Farben expanded their profits and their labour force. Responding to Hitler's directive for autarky, Krupp were engaged in the production of synthetic rubber, and Farben were producing petrol from lignite amid a general drive to manufacture substitutes for imported petrol and rubber.

The German New World Order

Internments at the beginning of the war were mainly Communists and socialists moved to concentration camps to prevent them becoming a Fifth Column. In German conquests throughout Europe, internments and deportations were part of a grand plan for the ethnic and economic reconstruction of the German New World Order. In conquered areas Hitler ordered Himmler to gather together the ethnic German elements in Eastern Europe, even from allied and satellite states, so that a solid core of German racial stock could be constructed from whom colonisers and administrators would be chosen for the new German empire. The plan was to move 650,000 to 740,000 Germans scattered across the East back to a new Germanic homeland in Poland. Poles and Czechs were thrown off their farms to make way for German settlers. As Albert Speer recalled, Hitler envisaged a greater German empire which, while administered by the Aryan race, would not obliterate national and cultural differences among the different Germanic peoples: "The idea of the power and greatness of the British Empire led him to his own imperial plans. He wanted to incorporate all the Germanic peoples into his empire: Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Flemings. But unlike Himmler, he did not want to Germanize them. For him, the idiosyncrasies of the different stocks, Bavarians, Swabians, or Rhinelanders, always seemed beneficial. He did not want to impinge on their individuality, although occasionally he thought the dialects too coarse. Thus, in a hundred years the different Germanic peoples would contribute to the variety and energy of the empire he intended to found: but the German language would be the general means of communication, like English in the Commonwealth." (Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries) In 1941 Himmler authorised the drawing up of General Plan East in which it was proposed that after victory over the Soviet Union, 80% of Poles, 75% of Belorussians and 64% of Western Ukrainians were to be deported to Siberia. Deportations and planned food deprivation were expected to reduce the population to 31 million. In prison after the war, Albert Speer discussed with Walther Funk, the Reich Minister for Economic Affairs between 1938 and 1945, the plans for settlement of Eastern Europe: "We go from one thing to another and finally arrive at Hitler's plans for the settlement and development of the conquered eastern territories. We reflect on how that would have kept us occupied for the rest of our lives. It would have been my task to plan and supervise the layout of towns, military bases, highways, and so on. Funk would have had to direct the economic development." (Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, entry for 21 July 1950) Ultimately the plan failed to materialise, except for the part of it aimed at eliminating the Gypsy and Jewish population in Europe. - Use of slave labour and prisoners of war: From June 1940 until the spring of 1942, foreign workers in Germany were mainly recruited from the occupied countries of western Europe. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, there was a dramatic increase in the number of prisoners of war, and in October 1941, Hitler agreed that Russian prisoners of war could be used as slave labour. By December 1941, there were approximately 4 million foreign workers employed in Germany. Severe shortages of labour in led to large-scale programmes of forced labour, with recruitment from the German-dominated areas of Europe. The exact number of foreign workers transported to Germany during the war is not known with certainty. Official figures suggest approximately 7 million by 1944 but there were high death rates, estimated at 2.5 million labourers during the war. Very few of these impressed workers were permitted to return home, and most enjoyed an existence not very different from internees except that they were paid a wage and were generally better fed. Conditions varied widely between hard conditions for Polish and Russian labourers and more lenient conditions for Western European workers. Dutch workers were often termed 'voluntary' workers but behind this description lay a harsher reality. In the years 1940 and 1941, between 180,000 and 200,000 Dutch workers moved to Germany 'voluntarily' to work but there was an element of compulsion. While some were cross-border workers well-accustomed to working seasonally in Germany, a large number, approximately 133,000, moved to Germany to work, motivated by the determination of the Dutch government to tackle its unemployment problem. The Dutch government's refusal to pay unemployment benefit to those who refused to move to Germany for work, proved to be a powerful stimulus for the Dutch workforce, though approximately 94,000 of these workers returned to the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944. In France, with a large industrial workforce, recruitment proved to be difficult and when compulsion was introduced many workers disappeared into hiding. In 1943 it was decided that German orders could be fulfilled better by workers staying in France rather than moving to the Reich. Over the course of the war, some 1.2 million French workers were sent to Germany but by autumn 1944 there were only 646,000 left. A similar situation pertained in Italy. However, deportation remained a permanent threat in areas under German rule, representing a further invasion of the civilian sphere, along with internment, the problems surrounding evacuation and the constant search for food.

Propaganda and morale

It was probably the case that large numbers of Germans did not want another war with the enemies of 1914, however strongly they resented the way Germany had been treated by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Perhaps Hitler himself did not want a full-scale European war but the decision for war with Poland in August 1939 meant there was no turning-back short of a humiliating climb-down or a change of leadership, and neither of those scenarios was likely. As the historian Richard Overy has described, the Second World War was viewed by Nazis as a battle for the salvation of German culture and served also to heighten the major propaganda themes of the regime. In striking contrast to what had happened during the First World War, during the 1939-45 war, millions of Germans encountered for the first time deadly and destructive violence within Germany. Revealingly, the suffering of war was almost totally absent from the art of the time. Artists were discouraged from recording how civilians coped with the pressure of Allied bombing raids on their cities. This type of fortitude was not considered sufficiently "heroic" and instead art was used to bolster the lie of a victorious Germany. In more general terms, the impact of the bombing of German cities was covered up by the Nazis through censorship of the press. Goebbels attempted to minimise the bombing. In the early years of the war, he permitted local newspapers to report a six-line communique, to the effect that enemy planes flew over the capital, dropped a few incendiary bombs on two suburbs and damaged one wooden hut in a garden (Shirer, Berlin Diary, 26 August 1940). Shirer noted that the British dropped a few leaflets telling the populace "the war which Hitler started will go on, and it will last as long as Hitler does", and while considering this "good propaganda" claimed that few people were able to obtain the leaflets as only a small number were dropped. Nevertheless, no-one understood the importance of propaganda better than Goebbels, and he was quick to respond, over time changing tack from denial of the impact of the bombing to attacking Churchill for ordering attacks on non-military targets, contrasting this with the Luftwaffe purportedly attacking purely military targets. Before the war, the Nazis had become very proficient at staging rallies and pageants at which Hitler often appeared and spoke. Although this was not possible during wartime, Hitler continued to be seen on film, heard through the radio and attend smaller gatherings. However, by 1943, confidence in Hitler began to slip as the war turned against Germany and he failed to deliver his promises. He became more and more reclusive and his last radio broadcast was on 30 January 1945. His last public appearance was on 20 April 1945, his 56th birthday, when he presented Iron Cross medals to Hitler Youth boys in the garden of his Chancellery. By the last months of the war, with German cities in ruins from relentless Allied bombing, the German people had become very cynical about official news, especially in Berlin which had always been the most anti-Nazi area of Germany. By 1945, public opinion was more influenced by rumour and unofficial news than on the Nazi-controlled official news media.

Food and fuel supply for heating and cooking

Many Berliners grew herbs and vegetables in their gardens or on allotments. Rabbits were also raised and could be kept in apartments. They were known as 'balcony pigs'. In many families, caring for the rabbits became the responsibility of children. Soldiers in newly occupied areas often sent their families suitcases and even crates filled with fresh eggs, cheese, and chocolate. There was a thriving barter business and people would often travel into the countryside to swap goods for fresh food supplies. Those lucky enough to have friends or family in the countryside found it easier to cope. Although refrigerators had been invented, they were rare, even in shops. A typical grocer who had meat would have had a display case kept cool with blocks of ice. Fresh produce was available during the late spring, summer, and early autumn. It was not rationed but subject to availability. Some of the larger employers, particularly armament plants, had canteens for the convenience of their employees, but even then, food quality and selection was very limited. Numerous urban homes were heated with steam radiators that required coal to fuel the boilers. Many kitchens had cast iron stoves and were also fuelled with coal or wood. Many parks, such as the extensive Tiergarten in Berlin, were stripped of trees for use as fuel for heating and cooking. All over Germany, Hitler Youth and members of the labour service harvested potato stalks to ship to a plant in Weimar where they were turned into fuel pellets. Gas stoves and ovens were also commonly available. Although electric stoves existed as early as 1890, they were rare. In any case, electric power became more erratic as bombing took effect later in the war. Near the end of the war, power supplies failed completely in Berlin, wood had run out and supplies of coal ceased. In the latter years of the war, meat could not be eaten every day, and other goods were in very short supply. There was massive inflation in food prices by the end of the war and especially in the cities, food supplies were very precarious and unpredictable, with the result that many Germans faced hunger and malnutrition. In the countryside, farmers had greater access to food supplies though they did experience shortages of animal feed, fuel and replacement tools, which limited their ability to grow crops, tend livestock, and produce food. Scarce resources and the pressure to conform and for total compliance in the war effort led to a more repressive stance from the regime. On 3 September 1939, Hitler vowed to "liquidate persons involved in hoarding and sabotage". The number of executions rose rapidly, largely as the number of crimes punishable by execution increased to over forty. By 1944, any crime was punishable by death so long as 'healthy public feeling' existed in pursuing this course of action.

Jewish resistance and risings

One of the most persistent myths about the Holocaust is that of Jewish passivity—the idea that Jews accepted their fate with docility and resignation. The charge of Jewish passivity is the common argument most forcefully put forth by Raul Hilberg in his book The Destruction of the European Jews. Yet there was often Jewish resistance, though the Nazi authorities went to great lengths to prevent it both by intimidation and by concealing what was happening until the last moment. There were in fact many instances of protest: the fact that most of it was small-scale and had little chance of success should not obscure the fact that these protests did happen. During the war years, Jews in Germany and outside carried out dangerous illegal actions, ranging from sabotage, assassination attempts, and pacifist propaganda to helping Allied prisoners of war to escape. Across Eastern Europe, groups of partisan fighters established base camps deep in the forests and carried out acts of sabotage against German occupation. Many of these partisans were nationalists or communists but there were also numerous Jewish groups, with for example an estimated 10,000 Jewish partisans active in Lithuania in early 1942. In the Government General, the Nazi Governor, Hans Frank, had to commit numerous security forces to deal with more than 20 different Jewish partisan groups. The most militant resistance and rebellion came from Lithuanian Jewry. The Zionist Pioneer Youth Group claimed that "Hitler aims to destroy all the Jews of Europe' and that Lithuanian Jews were 'fated to be the first in line." On 31 December 1941, Abba Kovner, the leader of the group stated: "Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murders is self-defence." In Belarus from autumn 1941 onwards, Jewish resistance groups led by the Bielski brothers eventually became a permanent community of 1,200 partisans. In addition to acts of sabotage the Bielski group also provided a refuge for Jews escaping from the ghetto. Sporadic revolts in ghettos and camps included a violent uprising in the Bialystok ghetto. Jewish Youth Groups were more receptive to action, and there were armed revolts in at least 20 ghettos in Eastern Europe, the best known being the Warsaw rising between 19 April and 15 May 1943. As 80% of the Jews of Warsaw had already been sent to Treblinka, the rising took the SS by surprise. The first attempt to crush the rising failed and it was only in May 1943 that the last resistance was finally overcome by 2,000 troops equipped with heavy machine guns, howitzers, artillery, and armoured vehicles, reinforced by tanks and bombers. More than 15,000 Jews died in the battle and more than 50,000 were captured and sent to death camps. Organised revolts occurred at Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in August and October 1943, and at Auschwitz in 1944 Jewish prisoners blew up Crematorium 4. Jewish organisations informed the Western Allied powers, via embassies, of what was going on in the camps but they were unsuccessful in motivating Western governments towards any kind of direct action, partly because many governments found it difficult to take in the full horror of what was happening, and partly because there were considerable strategic and practical difficulties in the way of military action.

The black market

Ration stamps did not entitle civilians to free hand-outs; items still had to be paid for. Food stamps were also needed to eat in restaurants. The waiter would remove the stamps needed to produce the meal in addition to taking payment. Theft of stamps or counterfeiting them was a criminal offence and typically resulted in a spell of detention at a forced labour camp. Shortages resulted in a thriving black market, where nearly anything was available for a price or for barter. Officially, selling and buying goods on the black market might result in a death sentence but there was widespread corruption and Nazi officials often turned a blind eye in return for bribes in cash or goods. In the first two years of the war, rationing allowances remained largely unchanged, with the Nazis reluctant to risk raising anti-war sentiments by cutting rations too much. Nevertheless, civilian consumption was cut more than that of Great Britain at the start of the war. The rationing system worked reasonably well and there were no serious shortages of staple items between 1939 and 1941 but coal, shoes, soap, and washing powder shortages caused discontent among sections of the population. In December 1940, William Shirer summed up the effects of the rationing regime on Berliners: "The people in this country still eat fairly well. The diet is not fancy and Americans could barely subsist on it, but Germans, whose bodies in the last century became accustomed to large amounts of potatoes, cabbage, and bread, are still doing pretty well—on potatoes, cabbage, and bread. What they lack are enough meats, fats, butter, and fruit." The latter articles were those in short supply and were increasingly subject in the following years to further reductions in the ration allocation. As the war began to go against Germany in the Soviet Union and as Allied bombing began to affect domestic production, a more severe rationing program had to be introduced. Allowances on meat, bread, and fats were progressively reduced during the war. The pressure on resources was eased somewhat by access to food supplies in German-occupied territories, and with the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, grain was imported into Germany from the Soviet Union. The table below shows a housewife's basic weekly rations (in grammes) for non-productive workers. Table 2: Basic weekly rations (in grammes) for non-productive workers, this example relates to a housewife. At the start of the war, German rations were the highest in Continental Europe, though British rations were consistently higher, averaging 795 grammes for meat and 225 grammes for fats. The system allowed extra rations for men involved in heavy industry, but supplied only starvation rations for Jews and Poles in German-occupied areas. In April 1942, bread, meat and fat rations all were reduced. This was explained to people at the time by the poor harvest, lack of manpower for farming, and the increased need to feed the armed forces and the millions of forced labourers and refugees that had come to Germany.

Holocaust denial

The horrific nature of the death camps provokes revulsion and raises the question of how much the German population knew about their existence. It is a very emotive question which is hotly-debated. In the last thirty years, the historical community has been subjected to the views of a vociferous minority, termed 'Holocaust-deniers' who refuse to believe that the Nazis embarked on a clear and systematic policy of genocide against the Jewish population of Europe. They argue that although many people died in concentration camps, they died from epidemics and diseases, and were not murdered by the Nazis. Others deny Hitler knew the extent of the atrocities. Clearly, most if not all these people stake these claims on bogus 'evidence' and are motivated by their own political prejudices. Too much evidence exists to the contrary to make their claims at all tenable. However, as we have seen, there is no single document containing an order from Hitler for the mass extermination of the Jews, and this continues to provide apologists and Nazi-sympathizers with a fragment of an argument to deny there was any intention of mass extermination. However, evidence exists from numerous other sources which make it more than likely that Hitler knew what was going on in the death camps. For example, Himmler famously stated in a speech to SS leaders in Poland about the killing of Jews: "Let me, in all frankness, mention a terribly hard chapter to you. Among ourselves, we can openly talk about it, though we will never speak a word of it in public ... I am speaking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. That is one of those things where the words come so easily. "The Jewish people will be exterminated," says every party member, "of course. It's in our programme. Exclusion of the Jews, extermination. We'll take care of it." And then they come, these nice 80 million Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of all those who talk like that, not one has been a witness, not one has stood his ground. Most of you will know what it means to have seen 100 corpses together, or 500, or 1000. To have made one's way through that, and—some instances of human weakness aside—to have remained a decent person throughout, that is what has made us hard. That is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written ... We had the moral right, and the duty, toward our nation to kill this people which wished to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with a single fur or a watch, a mark, a cigarette, or who knows what else. We do not, because we were exterminating a bacillus, wish to be infected by that bacillus in the end and die. I will not sit idly by as even the smallest of putrid spots appears or remains. Where such a spot should appear, we together will cauterize it. But in all, we can say that we fulfilled this heaviest of tasks in love to our people." Extermination of Jews in the camps was stopped by Himmler's orders in the autumn of 1944. By then, the Jewish population of Europe had been decimated.

Economic expansion and problems

The proportion of arms production within the German economy increased from 21% to 55% between September 1939 and January 1941 but the supply of weapons remained very slow. The mass production of more standardised weapons would have been cheaper, and it would have been easier to produce the quantities of equipment required, but a great number of German firms were not set up in such a way as to be able to diversify production into arms production. It was also the case that the military demanded and ordered many different versions of some weapons, thus making standardisation almost impossible to achieve. At the heart of Germany's production problems was a political problem, for Goering, despite having a key role in the planning and direction of the German economy, lacked the technical and economic knowledge necessary to perform the tasks of the job effectively. Poor relations existed between Goering and military leaders and large companies; the German war economy needed greater centralised coordination but Goering was incapable of providing this type of leadership and expertise. Throughout these preparations for war, a clash of wills had ensued between Goering and Schacht, which led to Schacht resigning his position as head of the Ministry of Economics and Plenipotentiary for the War Economy in November 1937. In 1939-40, Goering's shortcomings were masked by the success of the German armed forces in Europe, but by 1941 the weaknesses of the Four-Year Plan and Goering's inefficient management of the economy became increasingly apparent. Albert Speer, appointed Armaments Minister from 1942, described Goering's years in charge as an "era of incompetence, arrogance and egotism". In broad terms Germany began the war far from self-sufficient but the military victories and territorial conquests of 1939-40 opened a greater prospect of an ample supply of raw materials. Of the staple industrial products needed, Germany had plenty of iron, and from Yugoslavia and France she could procure bauxite which would allow her to manufacture aluminium, essential for her expanding programme of aircraft production. Germany did suffer from shortages of tin and copper but procured large amounts from the Balkans and from Russia (in the first stage of the war, due to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Germany was freely trading with the USSR). Crucially, Germany was self-sufficient in oil, and her air-force totally independent of imported stocks of oil. All German aircraft were designed and manufactured to operate a synthetic gasoline which Germany manufactured herself from her own coal reserves. This process had been developed at the end of the First World War and by 1939 was operating smoothly. The British could interrupt the oil supply by bombing the refineries but in the early years of the war, bombing had not been very successful and had not affected output to any great extent. Germany also obtained the complete output of the Romanian oil-fields as well as receiving oil from Russia. When the war started, Germany possessed large stocks of oil and gained a windfall of oil supplies from Norway, Holland, and Belgium in consequence of her early conquests. The military use of oil was maximised by the cuts in civilian consumption, with oil prohibited for heating purposes and no private cars allowed. Moreover, very few delivery trucks were permitted to operate.

The spread of hostilities, June-December 1941

The second stage of the war began when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, an offensive known as 'Operation Barbarossa'. After a rapid advance, the Red Army eventually launched a counter-offensive which halted the German advance. Additionally, Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941: a foolish move by Hitler to show solidarity with its fascist ally Japan. These two events meant that hopes of a short, victorious war were now over, for Germany now faced the 'Grand Alliance' of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain. The German war against the Soviet Union was presented by the Nazis as a crusade against Jewish Bolshevism, and while the retreat of the Red Army might have engendered a feeling of optimism that victory would be delivered in a short time, SD reports indicated that many people feared that the war would go on for many years. After making great progress in the initial stages of the invasion, largely because Stalin had chosen not to believe the reports of German troops massing on the borders, the Soviets recovered, and two months after the invasion, the Germans were running into far greater resistance. Despite catastrophic losses, the Soviet armed forces did not collapse, and after months of campaigning, the German army was becoming exhausted. Having expected a rapid victory, the German army had not been equipped to deal with the Russian winter, and there was insufficient clothing, food, and medicine. Nazi propaganda down-played the extent of Soviet successes but letters home from soldiers to their families undermined the propaganda. German troops spoke of the harsh conditions, and the apparent limitless supply of manpower and military equipment of the Soviets. A letter from an unknown soldier at Stalingrad from approximately January 1943, written as the German army faced encirclement, was notable for its simple, understated sentiments: "I love you very much, and you love me, and so you are to know the truth. It is in this letter. The truth is the knowledge that this is the grimmest of struggles in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and terrible ways of dying. More I will not say about it. I did not talk about it when here on leave, either, nor was there anything about it in my letters ... But the truth also is the knowledge that what I wrote above is no plaint and no lament but a statement of objective fact". (cited in Remak, The Nazi years) Facing military failure for the first time, the Nazis needed other scapegoats to explain the setbacks they encountered and the spreading of the war in 1941. They found the answer in their foremost enemy: the Jews. Nazi propaganda stated that behind the Grand Alliance lay an international Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race and the Third Reich, and unsurprisingly there was a significant increase in anti-Jewish propaganda during this phase of the war

Sauckel, foreign labour, and the effects on industry

Vital for the maintenance of a viable wartime economy were the exploitation and plundering of the raw materials and foodstuffs of the occupied territories of Europe. This was particularly so in the conquered lands of Eastern Europe, which provided forced and slave labour to help boost the war effort. In March 1942, Hitler established the Plenipotentiary-General for Labour Allocation to supervise and organise centralised procurement and allocation of foreign labour. The agency was headed by Fritz Sauckel, a Gauleiter who rounded up foreign civilians quite ruthlessly to increase their use in the workforce. Between 1942 and 1945, Sauckel succeeded in transporting to Germany 2.8 million workers from Eastern Europe; by 1944, over seven million foreigners were working in the German economy, 20 per cent of the total German workforce, and seven million people in occupied countries were working for the German war effort. The seizure of Russian citizens alone within a year of Hitler's invasion numbered over a million. Sauckel considered that this foreign labour must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the least possible cost. Conditions for workers were harsh, with wages low and discipline severe. Whereas volunteer "guest workers" from Western Europe were usually given the same wages and conditions as German workers, forced labourers from Eastern Europe were paid about half this amount. Efforts by Joseph Goebbels, appointed Total War Plenipotentiary in 1944 to drive the war effort, for example by restricting the employment of servants to release women for war work, proved largely unsuccessful. The internal supplies of labour and resources were squeezed to the maximum, and without the fruits of conquest, both raw materials and human labour, there is little doubt that the German economy and war effort would have ground to a halt before 1945. All the large German companies such as Thyssen and I. G. Farben used foreign forced labour during the war and most German factories had some foreign labourers. By 1944, it has been estimated that foreign labour made up between 20-25% of the German labour force. Many German businesses made the most of the economic advantages of war, notably though not only in the cheap available labour. One of the most prominent examples of the close ties between industry and the government was probably I.G. Farben, a cartel formed from the leading chemical companies after the end of the First World War. The military-industrial partnership was best symbolised by Carl Krauch who, from 1938, was Goering's Plenipotentiary for Chemical Production, and who was also a senior member of the I. G. Farben managing board. In the early years of the war, Farben produced almost all Germany's synthetic lubricating oils and gasoline, synthetic rubber, poison gases, explosives, methane, plasticisers, dyestuffs and nickel. In 1940, Hitler presented Krauch with the Knight's Cross for victories won "on the battlefield of German industry". Close ties such as these could make industrialists complicit in Nazi war crimes of the use of slave labour. After the war, Speer was questioned by an American judge at Nuremberg (See The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal) in relation to the trial of the industrialist Friedrich Flick, who controlled United Steel, Daimler-Benz, and Nobel Dynamite. Though he had been more at home politically with the Liberal and Centre parties (DDP, DVP and Zentrum) when they existed, Flick had, after 1933, made sizable donations to the Nazi party, and became an extremely influential supporter, partly on the basis of his friendship with Heinrich Himmler. As many of 48,000 slave workers were employed by his companies, with some from the concentration camps and others from Eastern Europe, and 80% of his slave labour workforce had died by the end of the war. Speer was asked, post-war, whether industrialists could be blamed for requesting labour assignments. Speer said that businesses had to put in a request for the number of workers needed for their production quotas imposed on them. Businessmen could not choose whether they received forced labour or prisoners, nor the working hours and the treatment workers received. Sauckel was, Speer claimed, responsible for decisions of this nature. He even said that for practical reasons, businessmen in general had resisted the imposition of employing forced labour, and many had tried to improve working and living conditions. Most industrialists' sullen acceptance of these diktats can perhaps be explained by the fear that open disobedience of Nazi directives was likely to have led to incarceration in a concentration camp, as had happened to Fritz Thyssen, despite his many practical and financial services to the party. The 'captains of industry' such as Flick, Gustav Krupp, and Albert Vögler had deliberately kept their distance from Hitler during the war, though only one industrialist, Ewald Löser, is known to have been involved in the 1944 July Plot to assassinate Hitler. - Productivity Maintained: It was undoubtedly the case Germany had problems in supplying the armed forces fast enough in the early years of the war, despite the German economy having been placed on a war footing from as early as 1936. Despite the mobilisation of labour and capital for war-related industries, problems of coordination, limited capacity, skill-base, and productivity levels continued to dog German industrial expansion. After Speer was appointed Minister of Armaments in 1942, the immediate production problems were largely resolved, and weapons began to be produced in much larger quantities. While the Allied bombing campaign subjected most German cities and the industries within them to severe damage and destruction, it was never enough to halt German war-related industries from continuing production at high levels.

The development of the camp system

When the war turned against Germany in 1942-3, it might have been expected that the Nazis would slacken their efforts to exterminate the Jews, and focus on fighting the Allies. Yet, mass killings were accelerated and appear if anything to have been given a higher priority than military requirements. The intensification of Nazi propaganda went in tandem with a crisis in the German war effort: it became even more malevolent. In February 1943, after the German retreat at Stalingrad, Goebbels delivered his most famous speech, known as the 'Total War' speech, to a large but carefully-selected audience in Berlin - which was closely followed by a massive propaganda drive. The crisis in the German war effort signalled by the speech also led to a search for scapegoats. Unsurprisingly, the Nazis blamed the Jews for their failures on the Eastern front. Goebbels said in May 1943 that: "Even in Germany, the Jews laughed when we stood up for the first time against them. Among them laughter is now a thing of the past. They chose to wage war against us. But Jewry now understands that the war has become a war against them. When European Jewry conceived of the plan for the total extermination of the German people, it wrote its own death sentence." By autumn, with Germany suffering the effects of mass bombing raids, and with the Red Army beginning to push back German forces in the East, another bout of anti-Jewish activity occurred, and the familiar pattern was repeated in the summer of 1944 when the Allied landings in France provided the spark for another propaganda drive. Speeches by Goebbels and other leading Nazis had made it clear for years that the war would result in the removal of European Jewry. At the Party Congress at Nuremberg in September 1937, Goebbels stated: "We want to point the finger at the Jew, as the inspirer, the originator, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe [the Spanish Civil War]. This is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the plastic demon of the decay of humanity." In his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler stated: "Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Himmler even justified the killing of Jewish women and children, when he stated at Poznan, Poland, on 6 October 1943: "I did not consider myself justified—as far as Jewish women and children were concerned—in allowing children to grow up to be the avengers who would kill our fathers and our grandchildren. I would have seen that as cowardly. As a result, the issue was solved uncompromisingly." The general threat of destruction of Germany at the hands of 'international Jewry' was hammered out on a regular basis, and radical propaganda was reflected in the urgency of the Nazis' actions from 1943 onwards. Mass killings escalated, with the Jewish populations of France, Italy, Greece, and Slovakia rounded up for deportation. The Jewish ghettos in Minsk and Vilnius were destroyed and in February 1944 the remaining Jews of Amsterdam were deported to Auschwitz. Imminent military defeat did not cause the Final Solution to be abandoned, and it was only in November 1944 when the Red Army penetrated deep into Poland did the Nazis begin to close the buildings where the killings had occurred, and to try and conceal what had happened. The crematories at Auschwitz were blown up and the surviving prisoners pressed into forced marches westwards, away from the advancing Red Army. The military defeat of the Third Reich did not therefore bring a tidy end to the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust. From autumn 1944, as the Germans retreated, the Nazi regime carried out a frantic programme of evacuation and forced marches. These marches caused terrible suffering and loss of life, with freezing weather, malnourishment and inadequate clothing all major problems. Many died of illness and exhaustion and hundreds were shot by guards for failing to keep pace. Estimates of the number of deaths range from 250,000 to 400,000, and the marches continued right up until the end of the war. Concealment of the death camps was botched, incomplete and futile because the scale of operations meant that it would be impossible to completely remove all trace of such extensive activity. For example, the sheer size of the camp complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau, at 30.3km2, and consisting of three camps - a prison camp, a slave labour camp, and an extermination camp - made complete destruction impossible.

Responsibility for the Holocaust

- Bureaucracy and mass murder: The conquest of a large expanse of territory in the East in pursuit of lebensraum brought millions more Jews under German rule and created the conditions under which the SS could begin to implement the Final Solution. Nazi ideology made it clear that the aim of anti-Semitic policies was the eradication of the Jewish race from Europe, and the Wannsee Conference concerned the implementation of a policy leading to the transportation of millions of Jews and others to extermination camps. It now seems clear that the proposed measures aimed at extermination of the Jews, as the 'final solution' to the 'Jewish question'. Asked about the Nazis' intentions, at his trial in Israel in 1962, Adolf Eichmann, a leading Nazi charged with organizing the movement of the Jews to the death camps, testified: "I never saw a written order. All I know is that Heydrich told me, 'the Führer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews'. He said this quite early and with certainty, the way I repeat it at this moment." (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy) Eichmann was present at the meeting and stated that the official minutes were heavily edited, and that in informal discussions after the formal meeting, he was aware that those attending were discussing genocide of the Jews. Eichmann was responsible for coordinating the government Ministries involved in the arrest, transportation, and extermination of the Jews. His defence, that he was merely 'following orders' implicated the highest authorities of the Nazi regime as the authors of mass extermination, and it seems inconceivable this was not the case. Nevertheless, Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust is often thought of in simplistic terms. As Hitler was fanatically anti-Semitic, and he dominated all areas of power and propaganda while exercising a personal dictatorship, it is often considered that without Hitler there would have been no Holocaust. While Hitler could not have been anything other than a central figure, it remains true that the 'Final Solution' involved more than the actions of one man. The scale of operations required the actions and decisions of many Nazi leaders and thousands of lesser officials. Indeed, historians such as Hans Mommsen argue that Hitler was a weak dictator and that the Holocaust was essentially a rationalised, quasi-automatic process, with human agency and volition performing a secondary function. Mommsen stated: "The bureaucratic machinery created by Eichmann and Heydrich functioned more or less automatically." Yet, millions of ordinary people were involved in some way in acts of persecutions, deportations or murders. Apportioning responsibility for the Holocaust raises many difficult questions. Did Hitler force through the Final Solution by force, terror, and secrecy, or did he provide the German people with an alibi for crimes in which they were responsible for but which could be excused as "evil Nazis" versus "good Germans"? - Historical interpretations: The chaotic elements in the policy-making process of the Nazi regime are some indication that not all that was done was done at the behest of Hitler. However central his role, the responsibility could not have been his alone. There were many overlapping centres of power and authority and many rival Nazis vying for power and influence who were seeking Hitler's approval. Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann were the key architects in the bureaucratic organisation of mass murder but other leading Nazis, like Goering, Goebbels and Speer, were also involved as they provided the labour force and the propagandist apparatus. In the middle and lower levels of the Nazi regime, thousands of lesser officials carried out the orders that meant persecution, deportation, and death for Holocaust victims—all shared at least some of the responsibility. These divisions are reflected in the position taken by different historians. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on the Holocaust. Firstly, the "Intentionalist" school who argue for the centrality of Hitler and for a coordinated, pre-planned decision to murder European Jewry. Secondly, the "Functionalist" school who argue that the Final Solution was not the product of a grand design but initially an extemporised response caused by the Nazi regime being administered by a maze of competing power groups and rival bureaucracies seeking Hitler's favour. In this view, the Nazis had no grand plan to solve the 'Jewish Question' but drifted down a very twisted road to genocide. Local and ad hoc initiatives to solve problems evolved, and once the practice of liquidation was established it was transformed into a comprehensive programme. However, this view accords less importance to the constant incitements made by Hitler against the Jews, while stressing that he left the execution of policy to subordinates. It is an interpretation which suggests Hitler was not all-powerful, or, at least, that he was too idle to interest himself in the practical policy of genocide. On the other hand, "Functionalists" concede that local decisions were made and local initiatives taken but within an overall framework of deeply ingrained anti-Semitism, and that the impetus given from the centre of government was important. Research in local areas over the years has shown radical influences and initiatives in the periphery but this type of research occasionally blurs the decisive role played by Hitler and the elite. Localised research also tends to stress the primitive mode of killing, with a larger number of perpetrators involved. In this sense the Holocaust is viewed by the historian Robert S. Wistrich in the wider ambit of genocidal atrocities: "No high technology was required for the 40 per cent of Holocaust victims who died through malnutrition, famine, and disease in the ghettos, through being worked to death in labour camps, through deportations late in the war that turned into death marches, or through the gruesome executions in pits, trenches, and ravines, using machine guns, rifles, and revolvers. There was nothing particularly modern or civilised about such genocidal acts, any more than there is about those since 1945 in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and other "backward" parts of the world." (Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust) While no spectacular industrial measures were needed for the purposes of mass executions, it seems clear that the Holocaust was nonetheless unprecedented—perhaps not so much in the statistics of the dead but in the devilish scale of the sufferings inflicted on the victims and the depravity of their tormentors. There are some who take the "Functionalist" argument much further, in arguing that the German people as a whole were responsible for genocide, arguing from often tenuous historical evidence and questionable assumptions, that there was a national defect in German character that made them vote for Hitler and become his "willing executioners." This type of argument is far too simplistic in its view of the 'German people' as if they were one undifferentiated mass, when in fact the German people consisted of a countless number of diverse elements, some of whom were vehemently opposed to the Nazis. Many well-intentioned Germans found themselves compelled against their will to compromise or to keep silent, and in broad terms, it remains true that many ordinary Germans became complicit, willingly or not, in Nazi war crimes

The impact of war on different sections of German society

- Elites: Divergent views were expressed by different elements within German elites. Some felt moral repugnance at the Nazi regime, while others, despite being patriotic, believed that Hitler was leading Germany to destruction. Some were democrats but others were traditional, autocratic conservatives who wanted a return to an authoritarian, non-Nazi rule style of government. There were still others - both conservatives and liberals - who believed in personal freedom and individual responsibility. As we will see when we consider wartime opposition, the lack of unity among opponents of the regime worked to the Nazis' advantage, as did fear of the repressive police apparatus, and the support for the Nazi regime from much of the German population for much of the war. It is always more difficult for political opposition to make progress against a government in wartime for patriotism and national sentiments tend towards loyalty towards one's country, often regardless of the political complexion or nature of the government. - Workers: It was important for the Nazis to retain the goodwill of workers but this desire had to be balanced against wartime needs. In the Decree on the Conversion of the German Economy onto a War Footing of 3 September 1939, Hitler imposed wage reductions and a ban on bonus payments for overtime, Sunday working, and night shift. These measures caused discontent, which was reflected in higher levels of absenteeism. The regime relented in October 1939 with wages restored to pre-war levels and bonuses reinstated, but wage rates were not allowed to increase. Total war impacted more directly on workers in 1943 and 1944. In August 1944, a total ban on holidays was imposed, the working week was increased to 60 hours per week, and extra payments for working overtime were abolished. Increasing pressure on workers resulted in greater absenteeism, but employers had disciplinary tools at their disposal to ensure a high degree of compliance. Workers could have their reserved status revoked, leading to conscription into the armed forces, and a possible posting to the Eastern Front. Also, extra food rations could be awarded to those employees who had good attendance records, and fines could be imposed for absenteeism and bad time-keeping. The Nazis also use the DAF or German Labour Front factory cell system, where workers were divided into groups under a loyal Nazi party member responsible for attendance of workers in his cell, to instil loyalty and obedience. Incentives were used to encourage workers to raise productivity, and many factories switched to piecework rather than hourly wage rates, where workers could earn more if they worked harder and produced more. However, an increase in working hours resulted in a greater impact on workers' health and welfare, with more accidents at work and poorer health for many workers.

Policies towards Jews and the 'untermenschen'

- Racial theory and practice: From the position of viewing human society as a battle of races, in which the strongest would prevail, and from seeing certain races as 'inferior', the Nazis, in search of a 'pure' and 'racial' state, embarked on the mass murder of entire races and types of people. As we have seen, concentration camps were not initially camps where people were deliberately killed (though many died from disease, malnourishment, or ill-treatment), but from 1942 extermination camps began to appear, built by the Nazis to systematically murder millions of people, mostly but not only Jews, by gassing. The small group of concentration camps established by 1939, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and a women's camp at Ravensbrück developed from 1942 into an extensive system of far more camps, incorporating occupied countries as well. After the outbreak of war, foreign prisoners from German-occupied territories were increasingly placed in camps, and came to constitute most of the inmates. The maltreatment of Jews and other 'undesirable' groups worsened rapidly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, and the function of the camps eventually shifted from forced labour to mass extermination and genocide. The Nazis deported Jews from all over Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps. Most of the extermination camps were in occupied Poland, where the greatest number of intended victims lived, which was out of sight of the ordinary German population. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs, and other racial minorities perished in the death camps. From 1942, the linkage between the ghettos and the camps was made, with Jews transported from the former to the latter. As merely one example, nearly 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka over the course of fifty-two days between June and September 1942. There were six major death camps: - Auschwitz-Birkenau - Chelmno - Belzec - Majdanek - Sobibor - Treblinka Fig 10.1: Map showing main extermination camps within Poland 1942 Within the camps, the processes of extermination were controlled by the forces of the Sonderkommando (Special Detachment), who led people into 'shower rooms' for 'delousing', when in fact, they were entering gas chambers. At these camps, the entire apparatus of the modern German state was placed at the disposal of the SS to carry out streamlined extermination. This procedure involved thousands of other Germans, and was the product of a highly-organised and bureaucratic society, based on fragmented and demarcated responsibilities (See more in Unit 8 Topic 1 - Hitler's consolidation of power, March 1933-1934), and the routinizing of operations. Only after the Jews were successfully identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, deportation, ghettoization, slave labour, and ultimately extermination. In 1940, there was a "trial run" with the murder of 80,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans, in operation Aktion T4, personally ordered by Hitler.

The impact of rationing

- Shortages: Some aspects of life in Germany changed immediately upon the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, while others changed more slowly. At first, Germany did not fully mobilise for war. In fact, it was not until 1943 that Germany focussed its entire economy on war production. In the early years of the war, Nazi policy aimed at not burdening the people on the home front out of fear of domestic unrest and general discontent—something the Nazis believed had led to Germany's capitulation in 1918. For most Germans on the home front, life during the early stages of the war was reasonably comfortable. Germany was blockaded by Britain so there were some shortages, especially of oil, rare metals, and some foodstuffs, and general building materials had been diverted to war purposes and were difficult to obtain. However, thanks to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, large shipments of raw materials were regularly being sent from the Soviet Union. In addition, Germany ruthlessly plundered the countries it occupied, seizing military hardware, industrial plant, railway stock, manufactured goods, foodstuffs and livestock. In the second stage of the war, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, life in Germany began to deteriorate. The supply of raw materials dried up and there were long delays before arrangements could be made to plunder the Soviet Union on any meaningful scale. Indeed, this strategy of plunder was made far more difficult by the actions of retreating Soviet forces, carrying out a ruthless 'scorched earth' policy, that is, destroying anything useful they could not carry away with them. - Ration allowances: As shortages of food and fuel had been one of the main causes of war-weariness in the First World War, the Nazis were determined not to make the same mistakes as the Kaiser's government. Decrees on rationing were published before the war broke out, anticipating the military conflict. The American journalist William Shirer reported from Berlin on 27 August 1939 that fixing food rations came as a shock to many people. On 29 August, he claimed: "The average German today looks dejected. He can't get over the blow of the ration cards, which to him spells war." (William Shirer, Berlin Diary) Meat - 500g Butter - 125g Margarine - 100g Sugar - 250g Cheese - 62.5g Eggs - One Table 1: Ration allowances in Aug. 1939 (per person per week) For city-dwellers, access to meat, fruit, fish, and vegetables declined rapidly, and the average diet quickly became a monotonous round of substitute (ersatz) food and drink, potatoes and occasional supplies of meat, margarine and dried fish. The available evidence suggests that the rural population coped better with food shortages. Rations were sufficient to live off, but did not permit luxuries. Whipped cream, chocolates, and cakes were unavailable. Meat could not be eaten every day. Many other items were not rationed, but simply became unavailable as they had to be imported from overseas, especially tea, coffee, and chocolate. Vegetables and local fruit were not rationed, but imported fruits like oranges and bananas became unavailable. Ration allocation was based on age, occupation, and race. Manual labourers received more rations, while Jews received smaller rations. There were special allocations for special category groups like pregnant women and nursing mothers. Ration stamps were issued to all civilians. These stamps were colour-coded and covered sugar, meat, fruit and nuts, eggs, dairy products, margarine, cooking oil, grains, bread, jams and fruit jellies. Various imitation foods were produced. Imitation coffee was made from roasted barley, oats, chicory and acorns. Cooked rice mashed into patties and fried in mutton fat became ersatz meat. Rice was also mixed with onions and the oil reserved from tinned fish to form ersatz fish. Flour for bread was eked out using ground horse-chestnuts, pea meal, potato meal, and barley. Salad spreads were made using chopped herbs mixed with salt and red wine vinegar. Nettles and goat's rue were used in soups or were cooked and mixed together as spinach substitutes. Clothing was not included in the ration allowance but permits were required which led to panic buying, and ultimately led to the government including clothing within the rationing scheme in November 1939. It was a serious deficiency for the high degree of military activity meant there was a greater need for military clothing. Civilian clothing was therefore scarce and was a continuing problem. Makeshift, used, and old clothing was the standard for most Germans throughout the war. Previous

The Wannsee Conference

- The purpose of the Conference: An important development in Nazi policy occurred in 1942, with the order to implement Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation of Jews, Gypsies, and other racial and asocial 'enemies' of the Nazis to extermination camps. The implementation of this plan was to be conveyed to leading Nazis at the Wannsee Conference, which had been originally scheduled for December 1941 but the timetable had been pushed back owing to the military crisis caused by the Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow in December 1941, followed by Pearl Harbour and the entry of the United States and Japan into the war. The focus of the Nazis was increasingly on the 'Jewish question' but how, why, and exactly when they moved from persecuting and removing the Jews from German living space to pursuing a policy of extermination towards an entire race of people remain among the most difficult questions in the study of history. What is known about the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 is that the Chairman of the Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, announced to fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials (Hitler and Himmler were not present) his appointment as 'Plenipotentiary for Preparation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Population'. Heydrich was second-in-command in the S.S. and had received orders from Goering as to the 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question. Heydrich explained that actions against the Jews so far had been aimed at removing them from German people's "living space". Now, with the approval of Hitler, a new phase was to begin, of evacuation of the Jews to the East. Heydrich did not specifically say that the Jews were to be exterminated, and this type of language did not appear in the official minutes of the meeting. He did say that "In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from West to East" and towards the end of the meeting, the minutes record that "various types of solution possibilities were discussed." Ten days later, Hitler said in a speech that "the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews." (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy) Wannsee was a meeting to inform senior Nazi bureaucrats of their role in implementing a decision that had already been taken. Most historians agree that a decision on the Jewish question was made at some point soon after the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. It remains unknown what that decision was. It may have been an order for an all-out genocide of the Jews or it may have been a substantial escalation and wider scope of "deportations" to the East. It may have been an emergency decision taken in the context of Germany's stalled invasion of the Soviet Union. There is a dispute which goes to the heart of the history of the Holocaust as to whether the orders relating to the Jews came from Hitler, or whether Heydrich had taken the initiative to enhance his own power base (though the notion that Hitler was unaware of the genocidal policy is not entertained by any reputable historian). Either way, deportation of the Jews was now a more clear-cut process, in deporting Jews to specific areas where there was an organised camp system, leaving the way open to coordinate and accommodate mass killings. Significantly, the Wannsee Conference's impetus to action resulted in more than half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust being murdered between February 1942 and February 1943. In implementing the policy, as one historian demonstrates, practical arrangements in perfecting the machinery of mass extermination had to be made: "By the end of January 1942, the Germans needed only to establish the apparatus of total destruction: death camps in remote areas, rolling stock, timetables, confiscation patterns, deportation schedules, and camps; and then to rely upon the tacit, unspoken, unrecorded connivance of thousands of people; administrators and bureaucrats who would do their duty, organize round-ups, supervise detention centres, coordinate schedules, and send local Jews on their way to a distant 'unknown destination', to 'work camps' in 'Poland', to 'resettlement' in 'the East'." (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy) The absence of specific written orders and the creative use of obfuscation in terminology should not be taken as an absence of evidence of systematically-conducted mass killings. To choose one example among many, but from someone who was in a good position to know the truth, we might consider the words of Hans Frank on 2 August 1943. He considered the numbers killed within his territory, that is, the General Government of Poland: "Things are very clear here. To somebody who says: What's to become of the National Socialist party? We can reply: The National Socialist party surely will survive the Jews. We started with three and a half million Jews here. Of that number, only a few work companies remain. Everybody else has—let us say—emigrated."

German military victories and morale

- Wartime indoctrination and propaganda: The war can be divided into four distinct phases, each with characteristics relative to the state of the conflict and the position of the combatants. Each stage of the war influenced German public opinion to varying degrees, depending on the state of the military position, and the sources of information available to the German population. Maintaining morale was a high priority for the Nazis, and Goebbels had established a sophisticated and extensive propaganda system with a steady flow of information tailored towards moulding German public opinion. The Nazis also used the secret police to monitor the public mood and public opinion, and to assess the effectiveness of the propaganda they dispensed. SD reports provided valuable information for the Nazis (and for historians) on the state of German public opinion throughout the war. The undulating mood of public opinion was highly influenced by military events and the propagandist efforts of the Nazi state, though the pace and nature of these changes varied considerably, and was neither even nor consistent. - The Blitzkrieg, September 1939-June 1941: The first stage of the war saw a series of German military victories which were as comprehensive as they were swift. After the defeat of Poland in the East, German forces achieved a succession of quick military victories in Western Europe, using Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) techniques, which involved the rapid concentration and deployment of troops and military resources along a narrow front, breaching enemy lines, and causing disorder and confusion among opposing troops. Supporting aircraft prevented re-deployment and support reaching enemy troops. These techniques were perfected by the German army, and Western European armies were unable to effectively counter them. Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece, all succumbed to these military operations between April 1940 and April 1941. British troops were driven from Continental Europe, and while the heroic Dunkirk evacuation was celebrated as a display of British tenacity and ingenuity, with even the German High Command admitting that the British fought with courage, it was fundamentally a crushing defeat for Britain, and symbolic of the Nazis' dominance of Europe. In three weeks, the Nazis had overrun Holland and Belgium, forcing both armies to surrender, and had advanced far to the south of the Maginot Line on a front extending over 200 miles from Montmėdy to Dunkirk. They then destroyed the 1st, 7th and 9th French armies which were cut off when the German army broke through to the sea. In these manoeuvres, the British Expeditionary Forces were left isolated and had to be hastily evacuated from Dunkirk. Through these operations, the Nazis acquired Dutch, French, and Belgian Channel ports which could act as a base for an invasion of Britain. The Germans also acquired important coalmines and industrial centres in Belgium and Northern France. Despite these impressive victories, the public mood in German in this period of the war was volatile, and there appeared to be little overt celebration. Nevertheless, on 2 June 1940, Shirer noted a more positive attitude to the Nazis after these victories: "Despite the lack of popular enthusiasm for this colossal German victory in Flanders, I gather quite a few Germans are beginning to feel that the deprivations which Hitler has forced on them for five years have not been without reason. Said my room waiter this morning: "Perhaps the English and French now wish they had had less butter and more cannon." Propaganda was not always effective, though Goebbels understood its importance. Quick, easy victories were a cause for celebration, and Hitler was presented as a military genius who had masterminded these victories. Edited newsreels showed German forces sweeping aside opposition and achieving stunning victories. Hitler's speeches, broadcast on the radio, were vital in bolstering national morale, and between January 1940 and June 1941, Hitler made nine major speeches. Nazi propaganda at this stage led the German people to believe that the war would soon be over. When the fall of France did not bring immediate peace, Britain was blamed for prolonging the war, when the expected British search for peace negotiations did not materialise. The fall of Paris did however mean a lot to many Germans, for the memory of the 1918 peace treaty and the punitive terms imposed by France then and in the aftermath, in the 1920s with the Ruhr crisis, was a bitter one. AS William Shirer reported in 14 June 1940: "It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the taking of Paris has not stirred something very deep in the hearts of most Germans. It was always a wish-dream of millions here. And it helps wipe out the bitter memories of 1918 which have lain so long—twenty-two years—in the German soul." While the Nazis had gone a long way to deal with the national humiliation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty, they were now moving well beyond those objectives and into the strategic and military objectives associated with Hitler's theories of racial hierarchy and lebensraum. On 1 December 1940, as he prepared to depart from Germany, William Shirer offered an interesting summary of the state of opinion of the German people: "After a year and a half of actual total war German morale is still good. Let us admit the fact. There is no popular enthusiasm for the war. There never was. And after eight years of deprivation caused by Nazi preparation for war, the people are weary and fatigued. They crave peace. They are disappointed, depressed, disillusioned that peace did not come this fall, as promised. Yet as the war goes into its second long, dark winter, public morale is fairly high." Shirer attributed this state of morale to an acceptance that the Nazis had achieved some far-reaching objectives which were of long-term importance to Germans and to German national identity. Most, notably, the desire for political union, avenging the terrible defeat of 1918, and fear of the consequences of defeat, for, after the way the Nazis had treated Jews and other nationalities, retaliation and reprisals would most likely be very severe.

The July 1944 bomb plot

After several failed attempts in 1943 and early 1944, an assassination attempt was planned for 20 July 1944. A rising was planned after Hitler's death had been confirmed. The prime mover in the plot was Lieutenant-Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenburg but many officers were involved, most notably Karl Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck. Even Erwin Rommel, the 'Desert Fox', the great German commander of the North African campaign was implicated. The attempt was to be made at Hitler's headquarters, the 'Wolf's Lair' near Rastenburg in East Prussia. With the war going badly, Hitler now rarely appeared in public, and divided his time between the headquarters at Rastenberg and Obersalzberg in the Bavarian mountains. He was always under heavy guard, for Himmler was increasingly (and correctly) suspicious of the loyalty of Army General Staff officers. It has even been suggested that Himmler knew of the plot and allowed it to go ahead, but this is merely speculation and no conclusive evidence exists that this was the case. The von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler was to be followed by a seizure of government with the aid of sympathisers close to the machinery of power, especially in the army. A Provisional Government would be established which would immediately open peace negotiations with the Allies. Beck had drafted a speech which, as temporary head of the German state, he would read out if the plot was successful. In it he criticised Hitler's policies, conduct, abuse of power, and rash course of action: "Monstrous things have taken placed under our eyes in the years past. Against the advice of his experts, Hitler has unscrupulously sacrificed whole armies for his desire for glory, his presumption of power, his blasphemous delusion of being the chosen and inspired instrument of what he calls "providence". Not elected by the German people, but reaching supreme power by the worst of intrigues, he has created confusion by his demoniacal arts and lies, and by his incredible waste, which appeared to bring benefits to all, but which in reality has thrown the German people into tremendous debt. To maintain his power, he has established an unbridled reign of terror, destroying justice, banishing decency, mocking the divine commands of pure humanity, and destroying the happiness of millions. With deadly certainty, his mad contempt for all mankind had to result in catastrophe for our people. His self-bestowed generalship had to lead our brave sons, fathers, husbands, brothers into disaster. His bloody terror against defenceless people had to bring disgrace to the German name. Lawlessness, forced consciences, crimes, and corruption are what he enthroned in our fatherland, which before had always been proud of its justice and decency." The essential elements of the plot were in place when von Stauffenburg was appointed Chief of Staff to General Fromm on 1 July 1944. This appointment allowed von Stauffenburg security clearance to attend Hitler's military conferences. On 20 July, he did so and left a briefcase with a bomb in it under the conference table. Excusing himself to take a pre-arranged phone call, von Stauffenburg heard the explosion minutes later and made his escape. The bomb destroyed the Conference Room but Hitler suffered only minor injuries. After a brief seizure of the War Ministry in Berlin, the planned coup was aborted when it was discovered, via a radio broadcast made by Hitler, that he had survived the explosion. The plot had failed. - The aftermath of the bomb plot: In the following days, most of the conspirators either committed suicide or were arrested and shot. Approximately 7,000 people were arrested by the Gestapo, with an estimated 5,000 executed in the aftermath, effectively destroying the resistance movement in Germany. Of the leaders, Beck committed suicide, von Stauffenburg was shot and Goerdeler was hanged. Hitler knew it would be a scandal to execute Rommel so he offered him the choice of suicide by cyanide capsule or a trial at the Nazi 'People's Court'. Rommel knew the latter would mean that his family and staff would also be executed so he chose suicide. He was buried with full military honours, and the affair did not come to light until after the end of the war. In the aftermath of the plot, the German army lost the last vestiges of independence as it was placed under the control of the SS. The military opposition to Hitler was destroyed by the failure of the plot, and Hitler continued to lead Germany to defeat and destruction. Surprisingly, the plot appears to have gained little sympathy from most ordinary Germans. One reason may have been that the plotters were from the old elite and had made no attempt to obtain popular support. Intelligence reports from inside Germany spoke of widespread relief that the plot had failed and there is no obvious reason to doubt the general accuracy of these reports. The plotters were vilified as traitors by the regime, and this was a view that seems to have been generally accepted by most Germans. Despite the failure of the plot, by 1944, and arguably from as early as 1942, the Nazis had lost the ability to infuse the German population with enthusiasm for their ideology. With a succession of military defeats, and Allied forces pushing back German forces East and West, it was only a matter of time before Germany was defeated and the Nazi regime overthrown.

Overview of the Nazi state by 1945

After the bomb plot of July 1944, Hitler rarely appeared in public, and never knew the true extent of the disasters inflicted on the German armed forces, and Germany's cities and industries. Unlike Churchill in Britain, Hitler never, during the entire war, visited a bombed city. As he withdrew from contact with the outside world, except for his most trusted advisers and colleagues, he became more contemptuous and distrustful, and became much closer to his long-term companion Eva Braun. By 20 April 1945, Hitler's birthday, Germany was almost torn in two. Only a narrow corridor divided American forces from Russian forces, as Allied forces pressed upon Dresden and Berlin. In the north, the British were on the outskirts of Bremen and Hamburg, and in the South, French troops were on the upper Danube, and Russian forces were at Vienna. Hitler was located at his headquarters, the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Many of the offices were bombed and burnt out but in the warren-like 'Bunker', Hitler and his closest associates played out the last days of the Nazi regime. By now, Hitler's physical and mental condition had deteriorated but he was still capable of commanding tremendous loyalty, most notably from his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. As German resistance crumbled and Allied forces circled Berlin, Hitler held meetings with military leaders on 20 April, also meeting leading Nazis Albert Speer and Martin Bormann. Speer had come to the Bunker with the view that the war was lost and that the German people should surrender to the Allies. Hitler's colleagues pressed on him the need to flee Berlin before the road to the south was closed. When this happened, there would be no escape. Hitler remained indecisive, and while most of his Ministers left never to return, he stayed, refusing to surrender and insisting on further resistance. However, all was lost, and by 28 April, Hitler recognized this reality. Through the night of April 28-29, Hitler drafted a Political Will, and his Personal Will and Testament. These are extraordinary documents: Hitler expelled Goering and Himmler from the Nazi party for supposed treachery, and appointed a new government. These were fanciful notions, for the Nazi party was no longer in existence, and Goering and Himmler were now purely concerned with saving their lives, and there would be no new German government. Hitler blamed the war on Jewish influence on the Western Powers, and made his final statement and justification: "After a six-years' war, which in spite of all set-backs will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people's will to live, I cannot forsake the city which is the capital of this state. Since our forces are too small to withstand any longer the enemy's attack on this place, and since our own resistance will be gradually worn down by an army of blind automata, I wish to share the fate that millions of others have accepted and to remain here in the city. Further, I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle, exhibited by the Jews, to divert his hysterical masses. I have therefore decided to remain in Berlin, and there to choose death voluntarily at the moment when I believe that the residence of the Führer and Chancellor can no longer be held." (Hugh Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947)) On 30 April 1945, Hitler shot himself, though he may have also taken poison, and Eva Braun poisoned herself. The bodies were burned by Soviet forces, and the location of the ashes will never be known. The fanatically-loyal Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children.

Women and the war economy

In November 1943, Hitler was asked to approve raising the upper age limit for women to register to work to that age of 50. He refused, but by the summer of 1944 the situation had become so serious that he eventually was persuaded to agree to the scheme. The recruitment of female workers proceeded tentatively and unevenly and even as late as April 1944, Hitler was unwilling to let go of key ideological principles in favour of military-strategic considerations. Although women were needed in production, they were not to threaten the supremacy of men. Hitler held a meeting attended by Martin Bormann, Dr Robert Ley, and Fritz Sauckel, among others, and a protocol issued on 25 April 1944 rejecting the prospect of equal pay between women and men. Hitler held to a gendered conception of the workplace and home, and still sought to draw distinctions between 'women's work' and 'men's work'. Despite these objections, more women were recruited and by 1945, women represented 60% of the workforce. Despite Hitler's misgivings, women were also immediately assigned to auxiliary roles within the armed forces, that is, within non-combat units which supported the fighting troops. As early as 1943, women had begun to replace men in servicing anti-aircraft guns and in 1944 women began to operate searchlights. By the end of the war, there were 50,000 women involved in anti-aircraft operations and another 30,000 on searchlights. In the summer of 1944, the army established an auxiliary corps for women serving with the armed forces, and by January 1945, there were 470,000 female auxiliaries—many had been conscripted. The duties were mainly secretarial and working on radio and telephone communications, but in many cases involved serving on the front line. The militarisation of women was taken further in the final stages of the war when women's battalions were established and women trained for combat roles. - Children and youth: Evacuation of children from the cities suffering from bombing attacks began in September 1940. Initially, it was only children from Berlin and Hamburg - but as more cities were bombed, the scheme was extended. The authorities charged with evacuation organisation set up their own companies to receive evacuees while also requisitioning hotels and guest-houses. Other evacuees were accommodated in foster families, and although the evacuee scheme was supposed to be voluntary it was difficult for children to opt out since entire schools were evacuated together and there was strong social pressure to participate. By 1939, membership of the Hitler Youth and the BDM was compulsory for all. The Nazis treated the welfare and indoctrination of youth as a high priority and believed young people could contribute to the war effort. Yet, as an SD report of 12 August 1943 noted, the attitude of many young people towards the party was that of: "Indifference and a lack of inward commitment. Large numbers of young people see joining the Party not as a particularly desirable goal but rather as "good form", in fact as "necessary evil"". The military rather than the party was viewed as a much more desirable, practical and exciting career goal. In the early years of the war, the Nazis did not believe it would be necessary to conscript young people, and Hitler Youth activities continued in wartime in much the same way as they had in peacetime though there was perhaps inevitably a greater emphasis on preparing boys for military services by training and shooting exercises. Hitler Youth boys were also sent to help with the harvest and young people were expected to help with collecting money for the Winter Aid Fund programme. The transition to total war had a great impact on young people. Even before 1942, the age at which young people were conscripted had been reduced. In 1940, youth were liable to be called-up at age 19, which was reduced in 1941 to 18, and to 17 in 1943. There was also an increase in the demands placed on younger teenagers. In 1942, 600,000 boys and 1.4 million girls had been organised to help with gathering the harvest. The Hitler Youth placed more emphasis on military training at camps, where 17 year olds would attend three-week courses under army and Waffen SS instructions. By 1942, 120 of these camps had been established. In January 1943, as part of the implementation of total war policies, schoolboys aged 16 and 17 were conscripted as Luftwaffe and naval auxiliaries and deployed on air defence duties. Whole classes were conscripted and boys continued their education under visiting teachers. In the final stages of the war, the young were militarised to an unprecedented extent. In 1945, the age of conscription was further reduced to 16. Conscription into the Volkssturm (home guard) was also introduced in September 1944, for 16-60 year olds who were not fit for active service. - The Volkssturm: Founded on Hitler's orders, the Volkssturm was intended to be a force of six million members though this total was never achieved. Local units were under the control of Gauleiters to ensure that they showed the necessary ideological commitment to the struggle to defend Germany. The Volkssturm was referred to as the National Militia, for those aged 13-60 who were not directly engaged in the war and organised by the Nazi party. Young men dug anti-tank ditches and were trained to use anti-tank weapons. By the end of the war, boys as young as 12 were being conscripted into the Volkssturm. In 1945, a special Hitler Youth division of the Waffen SS was set up for boys aged 16 to 18 selected by Hitler Youth group leaders. This division of boys was sent to France in 1944 and saw action during the Battle of Normandy. Many units were sent to the front-line, especially during the last battles in the defence of Berlin. The quality of the units varied greatly but the way the troops was deployed also limited their effectiveness. Possibly if they had fought in their own areas they might have made a significant defence contribution, had they not been thrown into the last battles around Berlin when defeat was only a matter of time.

Conclusion

In reflecting upon the events covered in this course, we can see that the Nazi era in Germany arose from a complex and often contradictory series of events. The politicians of the Weimar Republic faced a very difficult task reconciling a politically divided nation after defeat in the First World War. It was the manner of that defeat, and the position it placed Germany relative to other nations, which dominated German politics in the decades that followed. The approach of moderate politicians, particularly Stresemann, was that of promoting international conciliation and domestic harmony, which worked while the German economy was improving but faltered when the global depression damaged the German economy. The political dislocation which followed highlighted the deficiencies in the Weimar Constitution, as it allowed Hitler to wield far more political influence that he was entitled to, based on how much support he had. Hitler capitalised on the economic and political difficulties of Germany to attain greater support and coming to power at a time of crisis, he removed the political opposition and established a dictatorship, partly by quasi-constitutional methods, backed by armed force. The changes he then made to the German economy and German society transformed the country into a national and racial state, where 'Aryans' were accorded full citizenship, and all other racial groups were discriminated against and increasingly persecuted. Within Nazi Germany, the young, women, and the Churches, were assigned designated positions and roles within society, consistent with National Socialist ideology. Hitler achieved many of his aims by drawing upon the grievances of a lot of Germans. The land-owning conservatives mistakenly believed their position would remain intact under the Nazis. In 1938, though, the conservative army leaders were removed and Hitler made himself head of the army. While the conservatives lost political influence, industrialists gained economically from Hitler's rearmament programme and benefitted from the Nazi destruction of the trade unions. Many of the leading industrialists accepted the new regime in return for the benefits of controlling labour and the prospect of economic improvements. Only in defeat did the traditional conservatives act when they plotted - unsuccessfully - to kill Hitler in 1944. Few industrialists were among them. Once the war began to go badly for Germany and deprivation and suffering began to be inflicted on the German people, opposition began to emerge. From 1943, there was a growing awareness throughout German society that Germany could not win the war. Despite the danger of discovery and punishment, there existed individuals and groups prepared to resist the Nazi regime. Some were motivated by political beliefs, others by moral outrage at the atrocities the regime was carrying out in the name of the German people. The youth of Germany was increasingly nonconformist, in refusing to accept the moral values and outlook of the Nazis. Yet the courage of those who risked opposition should not blind us to the fact that the Nazi dictatorship appears never to have been in any danger of being overthrown. The opposition to Hitler was too dispersed and divided, and unable to rally the large mass of support which would be necessary to topple the regime. The invasion of the Soviet Union stands as the culminating point of the Nazis' racial obsession and hostility to Communism. Hitler's arrogant belief in his strategic and military ability led to over-confidence in the German military machine, for confidence in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht was an important impulse behind the fatal decision to invade the Soviet Union. As the tide of war turned against Germany throughout 1943 and 1944, it became obvious to most observers that Germany would not win the war. The decline and defeat of the Nazi regime was forged by military defeat in the East and the West, and the recognition that when the full truth of the atrocities committed by that regime became public knowledge, there would be no mercy for the perpetrators of such appalling acts. The Nazi dictatorship was over, but only after it had inflicted tremendous damage on the world, killing millions of people, and providing a shocking reminder of the capacity of human beings to commit evil and appalling acts.

Why was rationalisation and centralisation of production of war material important to the German war effort?

When Speer became Armaments Minister in 1942, he acted to deal with complaints over shortages in military material. Speer was given full executive power to establish a Central Planning Agency and, with Hitler's support, to control and coordinate the production processes without interference from the military and with the full cooperation of private companies. Under Speer's direction, rationalisation involved central coordination of the allocation of labour, equipment, and materials to arms factories. Concentration of production in fewer factories and on a narrower range of standardised products, the greater use of mass production techniques, and more intensive working patterns. These innovations resulted in the 'production miracle', with huge increases in military weaponry, and equipment. By streamlining and concentrating production organisation and techniques, greater control was exerted over the production process, which allowed for greater productivity and which improved the war effort immeasurably.

Women

Women bore the brunt of the hardships on the domestic front, arising from the multi-faceted roles they played in German society. As housewives, when shortages occurred, they spent a huge amount of time queueing for essential food supplies. As mothers, they had to shoulder more of the task of child care when husbands were away serving in the armed forces. As workers, women played an increasingly important role in the German war economy, working in industries directly or indirectly connected with the war effort. The tables below show the international comparison of women in wartime employment in Germany and Britain between 1939-1944. Table 3: Germany: women as percentage of total workforce Date Percentage of workforce May 1939 - 37.4 May 1941 - 42.6 May 1942 - 46.0 May 1943 - 48.8 May 1944 - 51.0 Table 4: Britain: women as percentage of total workforce Date Percentage of workforce June 1939 - 26.4 June 1941 - 33.2 June 1942 - 36.1 June 1943 - 37.7 June 1944 - 37.9 By May 1939, three years into the Four-Year Plan, the number of women in paid employment had increased, with 6.4 million married women in employment, and women in total, made up 37.4% of the industrial workforce. The need to increase arms production at a time when many male workers had been conscripted into the armed forces led to pressure for more women to be employed in industry. There was tension between Nazi ideology, which did not wish for women to be in full employment within industrial plants, and the human resource needs of the war economy. The official policy, outlined as early as 7 September 1939 was that married women should not be conscripted. - The mobilisation of women: National Socialist Women organisation, the NS-F, organised classes to teach women how to cope with wartime conditions. Cooking classes taught housewives how to make the most of the available food supplies and sewing classes to learn how to repair worn clothing. Women were also mobilised by the NS-F to help with the harvest, prepare parcels of food and clothing for soldiers at the front, and to help with evacuated children from the cities. Community evenings were organised to sustain morale and for the purposes of indoctrination. When Hitler was advised in the summer of 1940 that industry needed more women workers, he refused to grant it, because he thought women should primarily be focused on bearing and rearing children, and the powers relative to conscription of women workers into essential wartime work were used very sparingly, to begin with. By June 1940, only 250,000 women had been conscripted and they were mainly transferred from production of consumer goods into war work. The Nazis provided generous benefits for the families of conscripted soldiers, thus removing one of the incentives for married women to take up employment. The result was that the number of women workers in industry declined between 1939 and 1941, though an increasing number of women worked in agriculture. In June 1941, Goering issued a decree to the effect that all female workers who were in receipt of family allowances (a benefit to encourage families to have more children) and had given up paid employment but had not produced children, should be forced to register for work or lose their allowance. This represented the first tentative step towards conscription of female labour but in practice it had only a limited effect since it applied only to those women who had been previously employed. It did not apply to married women who had never worked outside the home: this group was overwhelmingly middle-class whereas those who had been previously employed were mainly from the working classes. Goering's decree stoked up class resentment, and resulting from this class bias, the Decree led to only 130,000 extra women being sent to the armaments factories. After the defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943, the total mobilisation of labour became essential. Another decree forced all women aged between 17 and 45 to register for work, and appeared to show that Hitler had abandoned his ideological objection to the employment of married women—in reality, he had only been persuaded to modify his views. It was at his insistence that older women were exempted from labour registration and there were many other exemptions, such as pregnant women, mothers with two or more children, and farmers' wives were not obliged to register. Working class women resented the number of exemptions, and the lack of consistency in implementing the Decree. By June 1943, fewer than half a million extra women had joined the industrial labour force.

The later years of the war and German military decline

- Total War and the defeat of Germany, February 1943-May 1945: In February 1943, Goebbels stated that the German nation was engaged in total war, and adversity in the Russian campaign was merely the prelude for a further display of determination to continue the fight, for: "The blows and misfortunes of the war only give us additional strength, firm resolve, and a spiritual and fighting will to overcome all difficulties and obstacles with revolutionary élan." Germany was now fighting on many fronts and the Allies were closing in, through the North Africa campaign, as well as the relentless bombing of Germany cities by the British and American air forces trying to cripple Germany's war effort. Against this backdrop of probable defeat, the Nazis shifted their position in the picture they presented to the German nation. Goebbels in his 1943 'Total War' speech had at least reflected the realities of the situation, and had struck a chord with the German population in mobilising the entire economy for the war effort. The main criticism of Germans was that these efforts had come too late, and should have been introduced earlier. The aftermath of defeat at Stalingrad was a critical time for the Nazi regime, for Hitler could no longer be portrayed as a military genius, and the survival of the regime was at stake. Some attempts were made to blame Germany's military officers for the defeat at Stalingrad, and the Nazis successfully deflected from the defeat by rallying German patriotism and appealing to the concept of struggle and hardships to be endured for the Volk—a powerful historical and cultural appeal to most Germans. Nevertheless, Hitler began to appear less frequently in public—a sure sign that Germany was facing defeat. By the spring of 1944, the military situation had declined even further, with almost continuous retreat on the Eastern Front, the failure of the U-boat campaign against Britain, and heavy Allied bombing of German cities leading to a depressed mood among the German population. The Allied landings at Normandy on D-Day on 6 June 1944 were a further blow to Germany though morale ironically picked up temporarily owing to some Germans relishing the thought that the long-held reckoning with the Allied powers was finally coming to fruition. A resurgence in German morale was also partly owing to Goebbels trying desperately to overcome defeatism with talk of secret weapons. The use of V-1 and V-2 missiles in 1944/5 temporarily raised spirits but the use of these weapons could not alone alter the course of events in the war. The V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe 1 or reprisal weapon) was a fast, pilotless flying bomb carrying a one-ton warhead. Psychologically, it was one of the war's most effective weapons. The V-1 buzzed (thus being given the name of 'buzz-bomb' by Londoners) like an angry hornet, before the engine cut out suddenly and dramatically over the 'target'. Those on the ground would then wait for the contact explosion of the warhead. In the summer of 1944, more than 8,000 V-1 bombs exploded on London—many were shot down over Kent and some even turned back by RAF fighters manging to nudge their wing-tips to re-direct them back across the Channel. The V-1 weapons were responsible for over 5,000 deaths and 40,000 wounded, with over 75,000 houses damaged or destroyed. The V-2 was the first ever long-range heavy rocket, which was developed by the German army and successfully operated in the last years of the war. In March 1944, the SS tried to take over control of the project, and arrested scientists, including Werner von Braun, with the intention of placing the research under their own organisation. Still convinced of victory as late as 1942, Hitler would not give priority to rocket research. Allied intelligence knew of the V-2 because a test-rocket had flown off-course and landed in Sweden, and pieces of another were smuggled to Britain by the Polish resistance. Photographic intelligence of rocket research and manufacturing plants led to heavy bombing raids, but despite these raids, the V-2 was brought into action in September 1944. At 50 feet, long and with a one-ton warhead, the V-2 was a formidable weapon, reaching a height of 60 miles and plunging down on its target at a speed of 3,500 miles per hour. Its range was a little over 200 miles, and between January 1944 and April 1945, about 6,000 were built, with over 1,265 launched at the port of Antwerp in Belgium and 1,050 against London and other parts of Britain. The V-2 was produced too late to win the war, and its development occurred despite of and not because of the Nazis. Werner von Braun and other leading scientists were taken to the United States after the war, where V-2 technology was used as a major step towards the NASA space programme. The development of the V-1 and V-2 could not alter the major strategic aspects of the war. By the end of August 1944, Paris had been liberated by the Allies, and with Germany suffering further losses in Eastern Europe, defeat began to be accepted as inevitable by most Germans. The final months of war saw a crumbling of the 'Hitler Myth' as widespread disillusionment set in among the German population.

The 1943 assassination plot

Although many ex-Nazis testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945-6 that Hitler possessed an excellent grasp of tactics and strategy, the mistakes he made in planning the invasion of Russia led to a nightmare vision among German officers of a Soviet invasion of Germany. By mid-1943, with the war going against Germany, the military opposition and their civilian allies were convinced that Hitler must be assassinated in order that Germany could negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies. There was added urgency to the plot since a Soviet invasion of Germany was becoming not only possible but probable. Not only would this be politically disastrous for Germany but the German population was expected to suffer severe reprisals from Soviet troops for the atrocities German troops had committed against the population of the Soviet Union. Among those involved in the 1938 plot, General Beck, Karl Friedrich Goerdeler, and Ulrich von Hassell continued to discuss acting against Hitler. These men had links to Bonhoeffer and General Hans Oster. At first, Beck and Goerdeler concentrated on trying to persuade senior army generals to arrest Hitler but most of the conspirators were realistic enough to know Hitler was uncompromising and would never admit defeat. Their efforts to contact the British government hoping to obtain a commitment to a negotiated peace if Hitler was removed did not prove to be effective. By 1943, the conspirators decided that assassination was the only option, for the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, due largely to Hitler's refusal to allow a retreat, confirmed that Germany's defeat was only a matter of time. In March 1943, the first assassination attempt was made when a bomb was placed on Hitler's plane. Although the plot was not discovered, the arrest of Bonhoeffer and others of the Kreisau circle was a warning that the Gestapo was getting close to exposing the conspiracy and the groups of conspirators.

The impact of bombing on morale

An important new development in the war began in March 1942 when Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) began a major bombing raid on Lűbeck. This bombing raid marked the beginning of a sustained Allied bombing campaign which lasted until the end of the war, and represented an acceleration and heightening of the bombing of Berlin and other cities earlier in the war. The RAF bombed Germany by night, while the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) bombed Germany by day, often with over 1,000 aircraft at a time. In 1943, these air attacks were intensified. All Germany's main industrial and port cities were attacked with a high proportion of raids on the Rhineland and the Ruhr areas. Official government reports spoke of the resilience of the civilian population and continuing support for the Nazi regime but other sources testified to declining morale and loss of support. It is perhaps an indication of falling morale that the Nazis took an increasingly repressive stance towards defeatist remarks which were broadly defined as any remark critical of the leadership or which showed a lack of faith in Germany's ability to win the war. Goebbels attempted to keep up morale with his talk of secret weapons which would transform the war but the persistent air-raids took their toll on German morale. The firestorms in many German cities devastated civil society, and led to loss of sleep, shortages, and lengthy queues for ration allowances. All these things exhausted the patience and influenced the temperament and attitude of the German population. Mass bombing was meant to break the will of the civilian population to carry on supporting the war but despite growing war-weariness, workers continue to turn up for work, and until the end of 1944, production was at least maintained. This remarkable continuity is perhaps explicable by the need of German workers for some stability in their lives, amid the chaos of wartime conditions, though pressure from the Nazi regime was also important. Bombing wore down and weakened the civilian population but did not break their will completely.

Introduction to Wartime policies, the 'Final Solution' and opposition

Between five and six million people were systemically murdered in consequence of the so-called 'Final Solution': most of them were Jews, from either the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, and from other countries which had succumbed to German military power and Nazi occupation, such as Poland, France, and Hungary. Within Germany, the advent of the war meant that the persecution of the Jews was turned into the killing of Jews. Countless other victims died the same way, from Soviet prisoners of war to Gypsies, the disabled, and dissidents regarded by the Nazis as "asocial" and "social undesirables". The killing only ended when the invading Allied armies liberated the camps in 1945. Active resistance to the Nazis during the war was not absent. The grave hardships suffered by the German people, combined with the fact that after the defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943, German defeat seemed ever more certain, led to a darker, more sceptical mood. Nazi propaganda became less effective as the deficiencies of the regime and the war effort became more apparent. Fewer people attended Nazi party meetings or participated in activities, and party membership fell. Nevertheless, there were huge obstacles to opposing the regime, and most Germans remained loyal or at least not disloyal. Groups that might have been the focus of opposition, such as trade unions and socialist parties, had been banned years before (menioned in Topic 1 - Hitler's consolidation of power, March 1933-1934), or had in the case of the Catholic Church and the army, compromised with the regime. In addition, the surveillance of the Gestapo was highly effective in detecting and breaking-up opposition circles before they became a threat. A small number continued to defy the regime, but they usually paid a heavy price for their courageous stance.

Describe the role played by Fritz Sauckel in labour allocation, and how important it was to the efficiency of the German war economy?

Fritz Sauckel played a vital role in labour allocation within the Third Reich. As Plenipotentiary-General for Labour Allocation, Sauckel supervised and organised the centralised procurement and allocation of foreign labour. Sauckel was a Gauleiter who rounded up foreign civilians quite ruthlessly to increase the German labour force. Between 1942 and 1945, Sauckel transported to Germany 2.8 million workers from Eastern Europe, and by 1944, over seven million foreigners were working in the German economy, 20+ per cent of the total German workforce, with seven million people in occupied countries working for the Germans. Sauckel had wide-ranging powers over where labour was employed, and allocated forced labour or prisoners to businesses, while stipulating working hours and the treatment workers received. Sauckel considered that this foreign labour must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the least possible cost. It was vital for the maintenance of a viable wartime economy to exploit and plunder the raw materials and foodstuffs of the occupied territories of Europe, for Germany was not self-sufficient, nor was she exploiting all her native labour resources. In the conquered lands of Eastern Europe, forced and slave labour was used to help boost Germany's war effort.

Topic 1 - The impact of war on German society

In 1939, unlike in 1914, there were no cheering crowds at the outbreak of war. The mood of the German people at the start of hostilities was one of reluctant loyalty. Patriotism was undercut by fear and worry as to what the war would mean for Germany and the German people. These concerns occurred despite the support of most Germans for Hitler's foreign policy triumphs earlier in the 1930s. There was no guarantee that these earlier victories, the re-occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the absorption of Czechoslovakia with the agreement of the Western powers, would continue into wartime against more significant powers like France and Great Britain. As they were aware of the German public's concern at the potential course and nature of the war, one of the principal aims of the Nazis in the early years of the conflict was to sustain morale on the home front and to eliminate any elements of weakness or war-weariness in the public mood. To do this required a great propaganda effort, alongside a willingness of the German public to accept that sacrifices had to be made if Germany was to fight at maximum efficiency. Over time, both these factors, when set alongside military defeats, were diluted though the Nazis maintained a strong base of support until the end of the war.

Why did Nazi Germany suffer from labour shortages and what measures were taken to address this problem?

In January 1943, Hitler issued a decree for deployment of the labour force and established a small committee to oversee mobilisation of the labour force for the war effort. Under this Decree, all men aged between 16 and 65 and women aged between 17 and 45 had to register for work with the local labour office. Small businesses that were not essential to the war effort were to be closed and employees transferred to more essential work. The German economy had clearly reached the point at which the demands of total war required government action, and a rigorous "comb-through" exercise was conducted to identify men who could be released from employment for military service. Labour conscription became a reality but a highly-gendered ideology still prevented the Nazis from treating female workers the same as male workers. Severe shortages of labour also led to large-scale programmes of forced labour, with recruitment from German-dominated areas of Europe. The exact number of foreign workers transported to Germany during the war is not known but official figures suggest approximately 7 million by 1944.

What was the impact of rationing on the German population between 1939 and 1941?

Ration allowances were drawn up from before the war. In the first two years of the war, rationing allowances remained largely unchanged, with the Nazis reluctant to risk raising anti-war sentiments by cutting rations too much, though civilian consumption was cut more than that of Great Britain at the start of the war. The rationing system worked reasonably well and there were no serious shortages between 1939 and 1941, though there were shortages of coal, shoes, soap, and washing powder, which did cause discontent among sections of the population. With access to meat, fruit, fish, and vegetables for most city-dwellers declining rapidly, the diet quickly became a monotonous round of substitute food and drink, potatoes and occasional supplies of meat, margarine and dried fish. Some items, though not rationed, were simply unavailable as they had to be imported from overseas, especially coffee. Vegetables and local fruit were not rationed, but imported fruits became unavailable. The available evidence suggests that the rural population, with more ready access to food, coped better with the shortages. Overall, the mixture of rationing and unavailability impacted the lives of Germans unevenly though all were affected in some way.

The end of the war

The D-Day landings of June 1944 re-opened the Western Front in Europe, and by early 1945, Allied forces had entered Germany itself. Berlin was captured by Soviet forces in April 1945 and Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945. The last months of the war brought unrelenting misery to the German population. Millions of Germans were driven out of Poland, East Prussia, and Czechoslovakia by hostile local, and forced to trek westwards back to Germany, ahead of rapidly advancing Soviet forces. In January 1945, as Soviet forces entered Germany, 3.5 million Germans fled their homes to escape the fighting—they received no help from the retreating German army, and they had few means of escape by scarce motorised transport which was prioritised for military supplies and equipment. Evacuation was left to local Gauleiters, many of whom delayed the order to leave until the very last moment. The result was that people had to walk hundreds of miles facing cold, hunger, disease, and attacks by Allied forces. The death toll for these marches was estimated between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Reaching the German cities, the evacuees found cities devastated by Allied bombing and severe hardship. Bombing and the pressure of evacuees from the East left at least one-quarter of the civilian population homeless. Transport services, and essential supplies of water, gas, and electricity, were decimated, and epidemic diseases were beginning to appear. With food supplies running low and the risk of starvation in some areas, civilian morale collapsed. There were few signs of resistance, far less of rebellion. The German population largely reacted passively and with resignation to the final collapse of the German war effort. Germany's occupation by foreign forces bound the German population together in a 'community of fate' facing adversity on a national scale. Amidst military defeat and occupation, the Nazi regime quickly collapsed.

Why was the army the most dangerous source of opposition to the Nazi regime? Explain your answer.

The German army had always retained a degree of independence from Nazi control, and opposition to Hitler's military strategy was steadily consistent throughout the 1930s but especially since the outbreak of war in 1939. By mid-1943, with the war going against Germany, military opposition was convinced that Hitler must be assassinated in order that Germany could make a negotiated peace settlement with the Allies. There was added urgency to the plot since the nightmare scenario of a Soviet invasion of Germany was becoming not only possible but probable. As the armed forces were potentially at their disposal, military opposition among leading military figures was very dangerous as it possessed the means, capacity, and capability to represent a serious threat to the Nazi regime.

Why was the defeat of the German army at the Battle of Stalingrad such a setback for the Nazi regime?

The German defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943 was a turning-point, both militarily and on the domestic front, signalling a defeat for Nazi propaganda as much as a defeat for the German armed forces. The loss was a great shock to the German population, for Goebbels had built up expectations to such a high level and had concealed the truth of the desperate situation of the German forces. In 1942, Hitler had also led the German public to believe that victory was imminent. After defeat the emphasis shifted to the heroic sacrifices of German forces, while carefully omitting the detail relating to the surrender 110,000 troops under Field-Marshal Paulus. The defeat meant that the tables were now turned, and that the Soviet Red Army would now attempt to invade Germany. With the mass resources of the United States and Britain alongside the Soviets, it seemed clear that it would only be a matter of time before Germany lost the war. The defeat was therefore not only a shock in terms of the supposed invincibility of the German army, which had been propagated by Goebbels and relentlessly featured in Nazi propaganda, but also because militarily, it was clear that Germany would not win the war.

Why was Communist opposition to the Nazi regime ineffective?

The KPD was banned soon after the Nazis came to power, and members and leaders arrested or in exile. Despite Communist cells being maintained throughout the 1930s and 1940s the fear of discovery and the consequences made it a highly dangerous activity. Severely weakened by Nazi persecution, the pockets of communist resistance in some areas was never sufficiently large to trouble the Nazi regime. The Nazis themselves undermined communist resistance to the regime with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 which made communists complicit and collaborators in the survival of the Nazi regime but the breakdown of the pact and the invasion of the USSR in 1941 galvanised communist resistance but Gestapo infiltration limited the effectiveness and impact of communist underground networks which were severely depleted by the end of 1943. The connection with the USSR, the country most Germans considered as the main enemy, was always a major problem for the Communists and meant they had little chance of attracting further support, even if it had not been very dangerous to do so.

Describe the different sources of opposition to the Nazi regime and explain the similarities and differences between them.

The different sources of opposition to the regime consisted of those who opposed the regime from an opposing political stance, such as socialists and communists or from moderate centre and right-wing groups who were alarmed at the radical nature of the regime. Specific policy issues such as the euthanasia programme sparked opposition to the regime on moral and religious grounds. Military opposition to Hitler stemmed from the mistakes in tactics and the flawed strategy which saw Germany over-extended in many different theatres at war, the result of a reckless foreign policy. Religious, political, and military opposition were variations on the theme of the fear of many Germans that Hitler was leading to destruction. While the initial reason for opposition to the Nazis may have been different, all were agreed that Hitler should be overthrown.

What were Blitzkrieg tactics and how successful were they?

The first stage of the war, approximately 1939-41, witnessed a series of German military victories which were as comprehensive as they were swift. After the defeat of Poland in the East, German forces achieved a series of quick military victories in Western Europe, using Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) techniques, which involved the rapid concentration and deployment of troops and military resources along a narrow front, followed by a great advance to breach enemy lines, and which caused disorder and confusion among opposing troops. The use of swift and highly-mobile units was very successful against immobile troops, and was aided by supporting aircraft whose bombing prevented re-deployment and support reaching enemy troops. These techniques were perfected by the German army, and Western European armies were unable to deal with Blitzkrieg tactics and strategy. Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece, all quickly succumbed to these military operations between April 1940 and April 1941. Not only that but the British military presence on the Continent was driven from Europe, and while the heroic Dunkirk evacuation was celebrated as a display of British tenacity and ingenuity, it was fundamentally a crushing defeat for Britain, and a clear sign of the Nazi dominance of Europe.

The impact of war on the German economy

The reasons for the hindered war effort were not hard to find. Although Germany had been on a war footing from 1936, Hitler had not anticipated war beginning in 1939. Hitler aimed at making Germany self-sufficient in food and raw materials, and under the Nazis, the aim of self-sufficiency, known as autarky, was an ideological goal and an economic strategy for rearmament. Industry gave some support to the concept but, to Hitler, autarky was part of his vision for a racially-pure living-space for the German people. The world economic crisis (See Unit 7 Topic 1 - The economic, social and political impact of the Depression for more on the world economic crisis) gave support to ideas of an autarkic economy under National Socialism untouched by world economic developments, but since Germany could not support herself, the concept of 'Living Space' gained greater credibility. In the mid-1930s, Germany could not afford to pay for large imports of the raw materials necessary for arms production, but Hitler did not totally succeed. Heavy industry remained dependent on Swedish iron ore and it remained necessary to import some food items. Nevertheless, under the Four-Year Plan, begun in 1936, Germany moved towards self-sufficiency. Hitler aimed to achieve this goal by 1940, and this would mean that the German economy was prepared for war. A memorandum from Hitler in 1936 indicated his way of thinking: "Apart from Germany and Italy, only Japan can be considered as a power standing firm in the face of the world peril posed by Communism. A victory of Communism over Germany would lead to the annihilation of the German people. If we do not succeed in bringing the German army as rapidly as possible to the rank of premier army in the world, then Germany will be lost. Now, with iron determination, 100 percent self-sufficiency should be achieved in every sphere where it is possible. I thus set the following tasks: - The German armed forces must be operational within four years - The German economy must be fit for war within four years" Although much was achieved, it was an impossible task to make Germany totally self-sufficient. There were simply not enough raw materials within Germany's borders, and it became clear to Hitler that the only solution would be for Germany to procure supplies from other countries. The Nazi policy of Lebensraum therefore became closely linked with economic and foreign policy. Hitler had expected Britain and France to accept German demands over Poland, as they had over Austria and Czechoslovakia, and that war would not begin until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, which stood as a long-term objective for Hitler. This miscalculation on Hitler's part changed the nature of the war that Germany had to fight, and consequently influenced the pace and timing of the necessary economic expansion needed to equip Germany.

Topic 3 - Wartime policies, the 'Final Solution' and opposition

From 1942 to early 1945, the Nazi regime implemented the 'Final Solution' of the 'Jewish Question.' The terminology used was deliberately vague, though allusive, and intended to deceive and mislead. But what the Nazis undertook was nothing short of the genocide of the Jewish race in Nazi-occupied Europe. The uncontrolled and unsystematic killings of 1940-41, amidst military activity in the East, ghettoization, and deportations, were uncoordinated activities - but eventually the Nazis turned genocide into a bureaucratic exercise managed and administered by a large administration.

For the Nazis, what were the main aspects of the 'Jewish question'?

From as early as the 1920s Jews were viewed by the Nazis as enemies of the German people and it was Nazi policy to remove them from the territories of the German Reich. Removing Jews from German public life had first involved reducing their status in Germany so that they did not enjoy the same rights as Aryans, and were discriminated against in social and economic terms, with restrictions placed on Jewish activity in business and personal terms. The next phase was to remove Jews from the 'living space' of the German people, with ghettoization, evacuations and deportations to the East, where the escalation of Nazi terror against the Jews led to mass extermination and genocide in death camps in Nazi-occupied territories.

The mobilisation of the labour force

- Conscription of labour: War brought an increase in the number of men conscripted into the army. At the same time, there was an urgent need to increase arms production. With a limited supply of male labour, demands could only be met by using the available labour efficiently, supplemented by foreign workers. Large numbers of non-essential workers were released from military service, and the reduction of workers employed in the consumer goods industries was accompanied by a commensurate increase in the number of munitions workers. Full-scale conscription of labour into essential war work was not implemented in the first two years of the war but the German military reverses at Moscow in December 1941 brought the labour supply issue to a head. Efforts to take labour from civilian work had often been frustrated by local Gauleiters who were anxious to keep employment within their own areas. As Hitler was opposed to increasing the use of women in the labour force, the shortage of labour posed a serious threat to plans to increase production of vital war materials. Part of the answer to this dilemma was to increase the use of foreign labour but the domestic population also had to make sacrifices. After the defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943, more frantic measures were taken to increase the labour supply. Even before the surrender, on 13 January, Hitler issued a Decree for the Comprehensive Deployment of Men and Women for Reich Defence Tasks, and established a small Committee to oversee mobilisation of the labour force for the war effort. Under this Decree, all men aged between 16 and 65 and women aged between 17 and 45 had to register for work with the local labour office. Small businesses that were not essential to the war effort were to be closed and employees transferred to more essential work. The German economy had clearly reached the point at which the demands of total war began to have a significant impact. A rigorous "comb-through" exercise was conducted to identify men who could be released from employment for military service. Conscription of labour began to become a reality but a highly-gendered ideology still prevented the Nazis from treating female workers the same as male workers.

The mobilisation of the German economy

- German rearmament: In March 1935, Hitler denounced the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, claiming as a pretext the failure of other nations to disarm. This cleared the way for a major programme of German rearmament, and on 16 March 1935 he proclaimed his intention of introducing conscription, that is, compulsory military service. By the Law for the Creation of the Wehrmacht of 16 March 1935 and the Reich Defence Law of 21 May 1935, German rearmament was proclaimed in defiance of the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler also aimed at building up the peacetime army. The German army had been limited to 100,000 infantry by the Versailles Treaty. Germany embarked on a rapid programme of rearmament, with military expenditure increasing from 1,900 to 32,300 million marks between 1933 and 1939. By his appointment as Plenipotentiary-General of the War Economy, Hjalmar Schacht had the tasks of placing all economic forces of the nation in the services of the Nazi war machine. The Reich Defence Law in effect gave Schacht charge of the entire war economy. He aimed at placing all the economic forces of the German state into service for the conduct of war and to secure economically the life of the German people. These were important steps in the shift in German policy from a policy of treaty revision to one of expansion, for the scale of German rearmament clearly violated the Treaty of Versailles. Other than an official protest from the British government on 18 March 1935, the Western Powers failed to respond to Germany's rearmament. The only signs of opposition to, or fears of German rearmament, emerged from the formation of the 'Stresa Front' of Britain, France, and Italy which aimed at preventing Germany's revision of the Treaty of Versailles, despite considerable British sympathy towards such a revision. While the signatories agreed to resist further revision of the Versailles Treaty, by reinforcing the commitments made by Germany in the Locarno treaties of the 1920s, the agreement inadvertently encouraged Italian aggression in Abyssinia and it was this aggression which led to the collapse of the Stresa Front. On the other hand, France was fearful of German recovery but could not act against her alone. The options were in any case limited, and threats of military intervention could only be made with the force to back them. This meant French cooperation with Britain, but Britain was opposed to any threats of force, and was exasperated with constant French calls for security measures against Germany. German rearmament was therefore accepted as a fait accompli.

The wartime economy and the work of Albert Speer

- Speer as economic controller: Until the end of 1941, as we have seen, industrial production suffered from a mixture of poor central direction and inefficiency. The appointment of Albert Speer as Armaments Minister in February 1942 brought better central planning. Weapons production increased significantly, although some continuing inefficiencies and Anglo-American bombing of strategic targets combined to keep production below optimum capacity. For the Allies, the results of bombing in 1942 were better than in 1941 but still fairly poor in terms of accuracy. The weight of bombs dropped remained too small to inflict really serious damage on industrial production. From 1942, the US Eighth Air Force attacked targets in France and the Netherlands. The Americans intended to bomb precise targets, achieving through daytime bombing a high degree of precision though it was often impossible to separate out civilians from military targets. Hitler recognised the need for accelerating industrial production in the summer of 1941. It was necessary to do so but it was also essential to resolve the problems of lack of centralised coordination, and the interference of the military in civilian production. In 1941, Hitler had chosen to ignore the complaints of shortages of vital equipment during the Russian campaign and it was only after Albert Speer became Armaments Minister did change become more effective and the necessary changes were made. Speer was given full executive power to establish a Central Planning Agency and, with Hitler's support, to control and coordinate the production processes without interference from the military and with the full cooperation of private companies. - The rationalisation of production: Under Speer's direction, rationalisation involved the following processes: - Central coordination of the allocation of labour, equipment, and materials to arms factories - Concentration of production in fewer factories and on a narrower range of standardised products - Greater use of mass production techniques - More shift work to keep factories working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week Speer's innovations resulted in what was known as "production miracle". Between 1941 and 1943, aircraft production increased by 200% and tank production by 250%. The production of the Messerschmitt Bf. 109 was concentrated in three rather than in seven factories. By streamlining production in this way, greater control was exerted over the production process, which allowed for greater productivity and standardisation of parts. Despite the reduction in factory space, rationalised production methods led to aircraft production increasing from 180 to 1,000 per month.

Wartime opposition and resistance: the military

- The officer class of the German army: The most sustained opposition and the type which seriously threatened the Nazi regime came from within the army. A plot to overthrow Hitler in 1938 by members of the High Command and senior civil servants was never activated, and remained undiscovered by the Gestapo. News of Neville Chamberlain's visit to Munich in 1938 led to hopes that the war might be averted so the plot did not come to fruition. Those involved continued to oppose the regime but there was little unity of purpose among those who opposing Hitler. Some acted from the deep moral conviction that the Nazi regime was evil, while others acted out of patriotism and a belief that Hitler was leading Germany to destruction. The latter view was particularly prevalent after the series of defeats Germany sustained from 1942 onwards at El Alamein and Stalingrad, and with the Allied troop landings in North Africa (Operation Torch). By mid-1943, it was clear that the war could not be won, and if continued for any considerable time, would destroy Germany. German military successes between 1940 and 1942 had undermined opposition to Hitler, but with the military set-backs opposition revived. Military reverses exploded the myth of Hitler's invincibility, and once this confidence had been shaken by defeat, the opposition could express itself in action. - The Kreisau circle: Many of the diversity of views of those who opposed Hitler could be found among the Kreisau circle. Kreisau was the ancestral home of Count Helmut von Moltke, one of the leading figures of the group, which also included aristocrats, lawyers, SPD politicians, and Churchmen. The common denominator of the group was a belief in personal freedom and individual responsibility. This rather academic and intellectual assembly had the feel of a learned society but the intent of the group was highly political—to remove Hitler from power and restore cultured, intellectual, and responsible leadership to Germany. Many of the members of the circle translated their opposition in thought to opposition in action and became involved in plots to assassinate Hitler.

Wartime opposition and resistance: civilians

- Youth opposition to the Nazis: Among the German youth, there was evidence of discontent. From the beginning of the war the Nazis were losing the ability to infuse youthful Germans with the enthusiasm which had fuelled their rise to power. The early to mid-1930s had been the hey-day of youth movements, when the vibrancy of youth organizations, the enthusiasm of their leaders, and the appeal of outdoor and leisure activities was closely tied to the successes of the Nazi regime (for more on this see Unit 8 Topic 2 - The Nazi Dictatorship, 1933-1939). During the 1930s the Nazis had banned all independent youth groups and from December 1936 made membership of the Hitler Youth compulsory. The element of compulsion indicates resistance to the Nazis from German youth, and the discipline required provoked a reaction from those who had been forced to join and who were least likely to accept that they must be obedient and subordinate to authority figures. This clash of generations and ideals led to significant opposition to the Nazi regime among groups of German youths. By the end of the 1930s, thousands of young people were declining to take part in Hitler Youth activities and when forced to, did so while protesting that they participated under duress. The opposition and unwillingness of German youth to accept Nazi ideals was significant enough to be noted by those aware of the situation. The Reich youth leadership was sufficiently concerned by 1942 that the number of youth groups outside Hitler Youth had increased to such a degree "that a serious risk of the political, moral and criminal breakdown of youth must be said to exist." The Nazi government received reports from youth leaders detailing the increase in the number of cliques outside the Hitler Youth, which the Nazis identified as a prime cause of the increase in criminality and the moral degeneration of youth. The Nazis were well aware that the Hitler Youth did not incorporate German youth in its totality. As early as 1938, a SOPADE 'Report from Germany' noted that the initial enthusiasm of German youth towards the Hitler Youth was waning, with the organization increasingly rejected. As the Report noted, German youth was growing tired of the regimentation and stifling lack of freedom: "Young people are more easily influenced in terms of mood than are adults. This fact made it easier for the regime to win over young people in the first years after the seizure of power. It appears that the same fact is now making it hard for the regime to keep young people in thrall ... Young people are causing the relevant Party agencies much anxiety. Both boys and girls are trying by every means possible to dodge the year of Land Service [a compulsory year of working in agriculture]. In Greater Berlin in May 1938 a total of 918 boys and 268 girls were reported missing, having secretly run away from home because they did not want to go away on Land Service. Police patrols in the Grunewald, the Tegel forest and the Wannsee district periodically round up whole lorry-loads of young people, some Berliners, some from the provinces. There is a section of youth that wants the romantic life. Whole bundles of trashy literature have been found in small caves. Apprentices too are disappearing from home much more frequently and are drifting in the hurly-burly of the big cities." During the war, the situation worsened as a Reich youth leader noted gloomily in 1942: "The formation of cliques, i.e. groupings of young people outside the Hitler Youth, was on the a few years before the war, and has particularly increased during the war, to such a degree that a serious risk of the political, moral and criminal breakdown of youth must be said to exist." The Nazis were increasingly losing the 'hearts and minds' of the German population, a trend particularly notable in the fickle youth culture of Germany. - Working-class youth: There was a long-standing tradition among working-class youths to participate in non-aligned youth movements. Some of these groups, like the "wild cliques" were of a criminal or semi-criminal nature while others like the Wandervogel were law-abiding but unconventional and unorthodox. Despite the attempts of the Nazis, the "wild clique" groups were never completely eradicated, and during the war they began to re-emerge. One such group was the Edelweiss Pirates, which was mostly a working-class youth group active in the Rhineland and Ruhr areas. The name derived from their badge which had the emblem of an edelweiss flower on it. The group were not overtly political, though it was anti-Hitler Youth and members tried to avoid conscription to the armed forces. The Edelweiss Pirates consciously rejected the official, disciplined and militaristic culture of the Nazis by, for example, organising trips to the countryside where they sang songs banned by the Hitler Youth. During the war, there were an increasing number of clashes between the two groups. In 1944, the Cologne group became connected to an underground network which helped army deserters, escaped prisoners of war, forced labourers and prisoners from concentration camps. They obtained supplies by raiding military depots, whilst the increasing chaos and destruction caused by the relentless Allied bombing provided suitable conditions for developing underground activity. The Gestapo and Hitler Youth used their powers to crush the Edelweiss Pirates. When arrests, followed by having their heads shaved and banishment to labour camps did not seem to work, the government turned to more extreme measures. The Gestapo broke up 28 different groups in Dűsseldorf, Dűisberg, Eppen, and Wuppental, and the leaders of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates were publicly hanged in November 1944. - Middle-class youth and student opposition: A different type of youth rebellion developed from the more prosperous middle-class youth, known as 'Swing Youth'. Government reports indicated that these youths were motivated by the desire to have a good time. While appearing to be frivolous in nature and intent, the rejection of Nazi values which was implicit in their preferred types of activity was a serious concern. The Swing Youth listened to American and British swing and jazz music and wore English-style clothing. Clubs sprang up in Hamburg. Kiel, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and many other cities. By adopting jazz music, referred to by the Nazis as "negro music", as an emblem for an alternative youth culture, these youths placed themselves in direct opposition to the regime, despite not being overtly political nor attempting to overthrow the regime. The desire for pleasure and the supposed sleaziness which was attached to these activities offended the stern, puritanical nature of Nazism, and Himmler was keen to send some of the Swing Youth to concentration camps. More overtly political opposition, with its main target audience being the educated middle class, came from the White Rose group which emerged in Munich and Hamburg among students and intellectuals. Passive resistance was the keynote of the White Rose. While influenced to some extent by theologians such as Bishop Galen, the White Rose group placed great emphasis on individual freedom and personal responsibility and morality. The main figures in the movement were particularly moved to act by the treatment of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis. The passive resistance of the movement encompassed encouraging civil disobedience and committing acts of sabotage and vandalism but stopped short of sanctioning violence against individuals. The doctrine of passive resistance was fully enunciated in the third leaflet of the White Rose: "We have no great number of choices as to these means. The only one available is "passive resistance". The meaning and the goal of passive resistance is to topple National Socialism, and in this struggle, we must not recoil from any course, any action, whatever its nature. At all points we must oppose National Socialism, wherever it is open to attack. We must soon bring this monster of a state to an end. A victory of fascist Germany in this war would have immeasurable, frightful consequences. The military victory over Bolshevism dare not become the primary concern of the Germans. The defeat of the Nazis must "unconditionally" be the first order of business. The greater necessity of this latter requirement will be discussed in one of our forthcoming leaflets. And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present "state" in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end: Sabotage in armament plants and war industries, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party." Issuing six provocative leaflets in the short space of time when they were active, the White Rose group was eventually uncovered by the Gestapo. The leaflets were considered by those high in the party to be treasonous and "to constitute one of the greatest political "crimes" against the Third Reich." At the trial of Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst at the People's Court on 22 February 1943 the indictment read: "That the accused have in time of war by means of leaflets called for the sabotage of the war effort and armaments and for the overthrow of the National Socialist way of life of our people, have propagated defeatist ideas, and have most vulgarly defamed the Fűhrer, thereby giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and weakening the armed security of the nation. On this account they are to be punished by Death." (Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943) The death sentences thus ended the White Rose group, but in having the courage of their convictions in opposing the Nazi regime, had shown remarkable fortitude and bravery. - The 'German Resistance': There is now a considerable body of evidence of the extensive opposition to Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany during the war. The grim reality of war now faced Germans accustomed to having foreign policy victories delivered without firing a shot in anger. There were of course many who opposed Hitler for political reasons. Those on the Left, like communists and socialists, and even some traditional conservatives on the political Right, were ideologically opposed to National Socialism from the beginning. In those pre-war days, resistance to the Nazis was increasingly dangerous, and many people fled Germany rather than face the prospect of heightened persecution. With the beginning of the war, the deprivations and suffering associated with conflict tested the allegiance of the German population to the Nazi regime. The 'German resistance' was not an organized underground movement like the French resistance but consisted of different groups whose activities were rather isolated rather than being coordinated. Firstly, there was the opposition of individuals attached to socialist and communist groups, who had managed to escape imprisonment, along with numerous members of the Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, who had moral objections to Nazi policies, especially the 'euthanasia' policy for those with mental and physical disabilities. It is notable that this policy was one of the very few which provoked open dissent, with religious leaders protesting the policy, and circulating Cardinal von Galen's sermon against the policy. Secondly, there were individuals whose resistance was not immediately obvious because it was secretive. These people helped Jews hide, provided papers for threatened people, and in some cases, managed to help Jews escape. The most famous example of this type of person was the businessman Oskar Schindler, whose activities were recounted in the film Schindler's List. However, there were many others who tried to help persecuted groups and individuals. Yet the most serious resistance to the Nazis was among military officers, many of whom were traditionally conservative, authoritarian or monarchist, who were concerned that Hitler was leading Germany to destruction. - Communist opposition: Severely weakened by Nazi persecution in the 1930s, there were nevertheless pockets of communist resistance in some areas. The 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact undermined communist resistance to the regime now that the Nazis and Communists had collaborated, and the KPD struggled to explain the new arrangements and accommodations between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The invasion of the USSR in 1941, however, galvanised communist resistance. At the time of the invasion, the KPD had 89 underground cells operating in Berlin, with other cells in Hamburg and central Germany. The main means of spreading ideas and trying to recruit was through issuing leaflets attacking the regime but Gestapo infiltration limited the effectiveness and impact of communist underground networks. By the end of 1943, 22 of the communist cells in Berlin had been destroyed. The connection with the USSR, the country most Germans considered as the main enemy, was always a major problem for the Communists and meant they had little chance of attracting mass support, even if it had not been very dangerous to do so.

Industrial methods of mass murder

As we have seen, there were great differences between the camps established in the 1930s for political prisoners, criminals and social 'deviants', and the death camps of 1942-45. The former type of concentration camp was located near every major city in Germany. While conditions were brutal and degrading, they were not designed for exterminating the inhabitants. On the other hand, the system of extermination camps in the occupied territories in Eastern Europe from the end of 1941 was on an enormous scale. The camps fulfilled many different functions but the main purpose of the death camps was for the specific purpose of killing untermenschen like Jews and other, to the Nazis, racially-inferior people. The railway entrance to Auschwitz has become the ultimate emotive symbol of the Holocaust, for here was the point at which new arrivals to the camp were unloaded from trains, and those deemed "unproductive" (unable to work) selected for immediate transfer to the gas chambers. While it is central to perceptions of the Holocaust, Auschwitz accounted for no more than 20% of Holocaust victims. Other camps had a key role in the Final Solution. Chelmno (Kulmhof), about 40 miles from Lodz, was the first death camp to be established in December 1941. Killings were first carried out by mobile gas vans using carbon monoxide. (The use of Zyklon-B poison gas was developed in early 1942 by I. G. Farben). Moreover, Farben had even built a factory as part of the Auschwitz complex, and by 1944, Krupp were employing as many as 70,000 foreign labourers from throughout Europe. Approximately 450,000 people died at Chelmno, and while it was situated in a part of Poland designated for 'Germanisation', the other death camps were built further east, outside of the German Reich. Majdanek, near Lublin, was built late in 1940 as an ordinary concentration camp but from late 1941 it was converted into an extermination camp. Approximately 200,000 people, 60% of them Jews, died there; the other victims were Soviet prisoners of war and Polish political prisoners. At Belzec, near Lvov, a camp which was originally a labour camp, was used as a death camp from 1942 but was closed in 1943. More than half a million Jews and several thousand Gypsies were killed there. Sobibor, near Lublin, was part of the construction programme agreed on at Wannsee, and approximately 250,000 people were killed there, mostly Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. In October 1943, a Jewish revolt led to the escape of 800 prisoners and the camp was closed on Himmler's orders shortly afterwards. At Treblinka, about 75 miles from Warsaw, another camp was built solely for the purposes of mass killing. From July 1942 until operations ceased in September 1943, approximately 1,000,000 people were murdered there, initially mainly Jews from Warsaw, and later Jews from throughout Central Europe.

What measures were taken to prevent discontent among workers, and how successful were they?

In the Decree on the Conversion of the German Economy onto a War Footing of 3 September 1939, Hitler imposed wage reductions and a ban on payment of bonuses for overtime, Sunday working, and night shift. These measures caused discontent, shown in higher absenteeism. The regime relented in October 1939 with wages restored to pre-war levels and bonuses reinstated but wage rates were not allowed to increase. Total war impacted more directly on workers in 1943 and 1944. In August 1944, there was a total ban on holidays imposed, the working week was increased to 60 hours per week, and extra payments for working overtime were abolished. Increasing pressure on workers resulted in more absenteeism but employers had disciplinary tools at their disposal. Workers could have their reserved status revoked, imposing conscription into the armed forces, and possibly getting posted to the Eastern Front. Also, extra food rations could be awarded to those employees who had good attendance records, and fines could be imposed for absenteeism and bad time-keeping. The Nazis could also use the German Labour Front factory cell system, where workers were divided into groups under a loyal Nazi party member responsible for attendance of workers in his cell, to impose discipline. Incentives were used to encourage workers to raise productivity. Many factories switched to piecework rather than hourly wage rates, where workers could earn more if they worked harder and produced more. These measures appear to have been successful in maintaining productivity though of course other factors, such as the use of foreign and slave labour were important to this outcome.

The turning of the tide, January 1942-January 1943

In the harsh winter conditions, German losses in the Soviet campaign began to mount. An increasing number of casualties, and the volume of letters home gradually awakened the German population to the terrible realities of the war in the East. Goebbels' broadcast calling for winter clothing for German troops deepened the mood of gloom and pessimism that the war would not be over soon, and that the German army was in trouble. An SD report of January 1942 stated that faith in the Fűhrer remained strong but there was increasing scepticism about the propaganda which would over time shake the confidence of the German nation in the regime and their conduct of the war. The German defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943 was a turning-point, both militarily and on the domestic front, signalling a defeat for Nazi propaganda as much as a defeat for the German armed forces. The loss was a great shock to the German population, for Goebbels had built up expectations to such a high level and had concealed the truth of the desperate situation of the German forces. In 1942, Hitler had also led the German public to believe that victory was imminent. After defeat, the emphasis shifted to the heroic sacrifices of German forces, while carefully omitting the detail relating to the surrender of 110,000 troops under Field-Marshal Paulus. War-weariness was now much more evident than in earlier years. The 'Hitler Myth' of Hitler's visionary genius and ability was beginning to lose some of its potency. Nevertheless, there was an undeniable deep well of patriotism and a willingness to endure hardships which the Nazis exploited as a means of preparing the German nation for Total War. Transcript: Halfway around the world, on the plains outside Stalingrad, the Russians started their offensive. Two Russian armies, one in the north and one in the south, go forward in a powerful pincers movement to encircle the Germans. Four days later, the arms of this pincer had joined, cutting off the whole of the German armies in the Stalingrad area. Within the iron ring, the Russians began to liquidate the remaining German forces. Stalingrad seized cost the Germans over half a million men and immense masses of war material. The German's sixth army, which had spearheaded the drives into Poland and France, was completely destroyed.

Describe the linkage between Germany's foreign policy and her rate of rearmament, and what were the difficulties in securing alignment between them?

Since launching the Four-Year Plan in 1936, Germany had been preparing for war. On 3 September 1939, Hitler issued a Decree for the Conversion of the Whole German Economy onto a war footing but the German economy did not reach full mobilisation until 1942, which meant a shortage of weapons and equipment early in the war. Supply problems did not immediately hamper Germany, for in the early stages of the war the campaigns against Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were all quick successes through highly-effective Blitzkrieg tactics. By 1941 however, Germany was becoming strategically over-stretched in different theatres of war., with the result that supply problems began to hinder the war effort. Hitler had not anticipated war to begin in 1939. He had expected Britain and France to accept German demands over Poland, as they had over Austria and Czechoslovakia, and that war would not begin until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, which stood as a long-term objective for Hitler. This miscalculation on Hitler's part changed the nature of the war that Germany had to fight, and consequently influenced the pace and timing of the necessary economic expansion needed to equip Germany.

Topic 2 - The impact of war on the German economy

Since launching the Four-Year Plan in 1936, Germany had been preparing for war. On 3 September 1939, Hitler issued a Decree for the Conversion of the Whole German Economy onto a war footing. However, the German economy did not reach full mobilisation until 1942, which meant that in the early years of the war Germany suffered shortages of weapons and equipment. Supply problems did not immediately hamper Germany, for in the early stages of the war the campaigns against Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were all quick successes through highly-effective Blitzkrieg tactics. By 1941 however, Germany was becoming stretched, with war in the Mediterranean and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, that is, the invasion of the Soviet Union, testing the resource-base and the logistical abilities of the Third Reich. Strategic over-stretch in different theatres of war meant that supply problems began to hinder the war effort.

Why is there historical debate as to what was decided at the Wannsee Conference?

The Wannsee Conference consisted of a meeting of high-ranking Nazi officials, headed by Heydrich, whose position as 'Plenipotentiary for Preparation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Population' set the tone for the content of the meeting. In the official minutes of the Conference, it was not specifically stated that the Jews were to be exterminated. Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler had all alluded to the destruction of the Jewish people but the precise nature of the 'Final Solution' was never spelled out in precise language in official documents. Most historians agree a decision was made on the Jewish question at some point after the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. It remains unknown what that decision was. It may have been an order for an all-out genocide on the Jews or it may have been a substantial escalation and wider scope of "deportations". It is the ambiguity of the evidence and the fact that policies were discussed in coded terms, which has led to debate over the Wansee Conference.

What was the social and economic impact of Allied bombing to the German economy?

The air-raid attacks on Germany had a huge economic and social impact on the lives of ordinary Germans. German estimates range from 60,000 to 100,000 persons killed, many in shelters where they succumbed to carbon-monoxide poisoning. The bombing attacks used both high-explosive and incendiary bombs as it was thought by the Air Forces and later confirmed that the former created roadblocks, broke water mains, disrupted communications, opened buildings, broke windows, and displaced roofing. Most important, they kept the firefighters in shelters until the incendiaries became effective. Yet, 75 to 80 percent of the destruction was due to fires, particularly those in which firestorms occurred. Bombing eventually had a major disruptive effect on the German population. Aside from the casualties and physical damage caused, loss of sleep and interruption to water and power supplies caused considerable inconvenience, fatigue, and cost. In economic terms, while bombing did damage Germany's productive capacity, the industrial gains made under Speer were maintained. Bombing did have an impact on production levels, as supply lines were damaged, factories had to be dispersed, and worker morale was affected.

Why were women and younger people more involved in military activity in the later years of the war?

The transition to total war had a great impact on young people and women. With German facing war in many different theatres and being opposed by so many armies, it was necessary for the German state to mobilise as many of the population as was possible. By May 1939, the number of women in paid employment had increased, with 6.4 million married women in employment, and women in total, making up 37.4% of the industrial workforce. The need to increase arms production when many male workers had been conscripted into the armed forces led to pressure for more women to be employed in industry but there was tension between Nazi ideology which did not wish for women to be fully employed within industrial plants, and the human resource needs of the war economy. As the war progressed women played more of a role, in the home, at work, or as auxiliaries to the armed forces. Even before 1942, the age of conscription was reduced, from 19 in 1940 to 17 in 1943, and eventually to 16 in the final days of the war in 1945. There was an increase in demands placed on younger teenagers, such as helping with the harvest, and on undergoing military training in camps. By 1942, 120 of these training camps had been established. In January 1943, as part of the implementation of total war policies, schoolboys aged 16 and 17 were conscripted as Luftwaffe and naval auxiliaries and deployed on air defence duties. Conscription into the Volkssturm was also introduced in September 1944 and young men dug anti-tank ditches and were trained to use anti-tank weapons. By the end of the war, boys as young as 12 were being conscripted. In 1945, a special Hitler Youth division of the Waffen SS was set up for boys aged 16 to 18 selected by Hitler Youth group leaders.

Summary of Topic 1: The impact of war on German society

There was a clear and growing gap between the propaganda image of the German population united behind the Fűhrer and in support of the war effort, and the reality of growing war-weariness reported by the SD. Falling living standards, the increasing pressure of work and the hardships people had to ensure under the Allied bombing offensive eroded the belief in victory and tarnished Hitler's image. Nevertheless, there was no groundswell of opposition to the regime and most Germans retained their patriotism, if not their faith in victory, to the end of the war.