German occuption of Europe (1939 - 1945) [individual assignment]
The German occupation of Europe. BBC
Excerpts
In general, German rule in Eastern Europe was much harsher than in Western Europe. Hitler had long wanted to expand east into what he called Lebensraum, as Germany’s Aryan population grew. This expansion would be at the expense of the inferior Poles and Slavs of the East. Therefore, the German conquest of Eastern Europe was undertaken to expand Germany itself and in order to destroy the Nazis’ racial enemies.
In contrast, the conquest of Western Europe, as well as that of Denmark and Norway to the North, was completed for strategic reasons: to gain vital war resources and to pre-empt a French invasion of Germany. Western Europeans were not viewed as racially inferior and there was no long term plan to absorb these territories into Germany, but rather to keep them weak and dependent on an enlarged Germany.
As such, German rule in Western Europe largely focussed on keeping order and on the deportation of European Jews as part of the Final Solution. Southern France was even allowed to govern itself from the town of Vichy under Marshal Petain until 1944, when Italy invaded. However, the government in southern France were no more than Nazi puppets that would do as Hitler wanted. In Paris, artists and intellectuals like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre were able to go on working virtually unaffected by the Nazi occupation.
However, in Eastern Europe Nazi rule was brutal. In Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States the local populations were forcibly resettled to make way for Germans, used as forced labour or killed. In 1940, Hitler ordered that the Polish intelligentsia – politicians, academics, priests – be wiped out, in order to prevent a resistance movement developing. Poles were forced to survive on starvation rations as Poland’s food was confiscated for German soldiers and civilians. Around 6 million Poles, or 18 per cent of the country’s population, were killed during the war. The Poles were considered below the Aryan German people in Nazi racial ideology.
Serhy Yekelchyk
Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation
Excerpts
Nazi racial theories pictured Slavs in general and Ukrainians in particular as Untermcnschen, a "subhuman" species at best worthy of being enslaved to the German master race. Hitler envisaged the future German agrarian colonization of Ukraine requiring, in the short run, the decimation and enslavement of the local population, as well as the destruction of all major cities."…
Consequently, the German occupation policy in Ukraine was one of plunder, enslavement, and extermination. To kill all the Communists, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies) they could identify, Nazis set up special execution units, the Einsatzgruppen, that were staffed by the SS and Gestapo personnel. On September 29 and 30, 1941, in Kyiv, German machine gunners from Einzatzgruppe C shot 33,771 Jews, whom the local auxiliary police herded into the infamous ravine of Babi Yar (Babyn Yar). In other Ukrainian cities, the Nazis moved Jews into ghettos, which were gradually emptied by waves of executions. The total number of Ukrainian Jews who perished in the Holocaust is estimated at 1.4 to 1.5 million."
Although not singled out for immediate extermination, Ukrainians were subjected to racial segregation and genocidal policies. As German-only shops, restaurants, and trams appeared in Ukrainian cities, the Nazi administration curtailed medical services for the locals, closed down all universities, and abolished education beyond the fourth grade. Seeing no point in the existence of large Slavic urban centres in the future German agricultural colony, the Nazis forbade independent food deliveries to Kyiv and other cities, causing mass starvation and a population exodus to the countryside.
Hostage taking and mass executions in response to any act of resistance shocked urbanites, who would long remember gallows on their streets as the most visible symbol of the Nazi rule. In Kyiv, the Germans turned Babi Yar into a killing field where, in addition to 33,771 Jews, they executed more than 100,000 POWs, suspected Communists, Ukrainian nationalists…
To provide the Reich with cheap labour, the Nazis also conscripted healthy young workers in Ukraine. Thinking they would get to see Europe and earn a living there, some youths initially volunteered for the program, but word soon spread about the slave labour and inhuman treatment that the Ostarbeiter ("Workers from the East") were forced to endure in Germany. Then, the Nazis resorted to force by rounding up young people in public places, sending 2.3 million Ukrainian citizens to Germany as part of this forced labour program.
Birgit Beck
Sexual Violence and Its Prosecution by Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht
excerpts
A well-organized, bureaucratically supervised system of military brothels operated in France and elsewhere in an effort to prevent homosexual relationships and venereal disease.39 The German armed forces in France not only took over brothels that were already in existence, but they also forced French women from internment camps to become prostitutes in the military brothels. Records from similar brothels on the eastern front are missing, but evidence suggests that women in Poland and the Soviet Union were likewise forced into prostitution. The German brothel system was an institutionalized form of the broader phenomenon of sexual violence…
On both the eastern and western fronts, military law served primarily to maintain discipline among the troops; the protection of military interests, not what had been done to the women, was the decisive factor. Nonetheless, some soldiers on the eastern front were punished with lighter sentences than in France. The reason lay in the Nazi theory of race.
Soldiers who had committed sex crimes on the eastern front could expect light sentences whenever judges cited the supposed racial traits of the assaulted women. The rape of a Soviet woman was not regarded as a serious crime because, according to the National Socialist ideology, the Soviet people had no concept of women’s sexual integrity. Racism and Social Darwinism constituted the ideological bases for dehumanizing the enemy population; and this dehumanization informed the trials in which cases of sexual violence were heard.
Questions for experts
1. What are the main points of the Nazi occupation of Europe?
2. What factors influenced the behaviour of Nazi in Europe?
3. Compared with (to) the Japanese and Soviet occupations what differences did the Nazi one possess?
4. Why did the regimes like Nazi, Soviet and Japanese not behave slighter towards the populations they occupied?
5. Are the authoritarianism and totalitarianism as such predisposed to atrocities? Why do you think so?