The Allied bomber offensive also provoked a crisis of morale among the German civilian population best illustrated by the three-day assault on Hamburg in late July. It created a firestorm so intense that bodies mummified, glass melted, and asphalt ran in the streets; 40,000 people suffocated or were burned alive, and another 500,000 were left homeless. Large parts of the great port city had been reduced to mountains of rubble, while thousands fled in sheer terror, spreading panic and disorder throughout the surrounding area. As the news from Hamburg leaked out, the Gestapo reported shock and dismay across the country, while the SD noted that hardly any senior industrial leaders believed any longer that victory was possible. In mid-August, in despair at the destruction of German cities, Hans Jeschonnek, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, shot himself. Among average Germans, anger at the failure of the regime to protect them from enemy air raids was widespread. Speer feared that a few more such raids might lead to a total collapse of German morale and a complete halt to arms production. The disaster was put off for another year, however, as the Allies mistakenly chose not to keep hammering at the Ruhr choke point, while the Germans initiated effective new defensive measures. At the same time, the regime responded to the crisis, in typical fashion, by imposing greater discipline on the home front. At the end of July, Speer had agreed to allow the SS to oversee security operations in the armaments industry, while, in early October, he authorized the SD to check on civilian production in industry. Moreover, any hint of defeatism was met with harsh punishment, including the death penalty. As Hitler repeatedly emphasized, there would not be another November 1918.47
Even as the Germans struggled to maintain output under the onslaught of Allied bombers, a shortage of the other key resource necessary to step up production—labor—loomed as a major obstacle. Although German industrialists had long been pressing for an increased use of women, Hitler had consistently rejected their conscription into war industries, whether from ideological objections (the birth rate would fall, undermining the nation’s racial essence) or fears of domestic unrest such as occurred in 1918. When the war began, Germany actually experienced a fall in female employment as consumer goods production was cut back. Over the next few years, the number working in war production gradually rose, but generous government allowances to wives and widows of soldiers offset any inducements to work. By early 1943, however, the worsening labor situation compelled Hitler to concede that a greater use of female workers could no longer be avoided. The problem, however, was that any dramatic increase in female employment in industry was unlikely. Despite claims to the contrary, German women participated in the labor force to a much higher degree than in either Great Britain or the United States, with the great majority engaged in agriculture. In 1943, millions of women labored on the small farms so characteristic of much of Germany, an obstacle both to efficient production and to the employment of women in industry. Most experts conceded that even the most vigorous measures to mobilize women would result in little more than a million new workers, a fraction of the number needed if output was to be increased significantly.48
A brutal logic now emerged: if larger numbers of German women could not be brought into the workforce, Sauckel’s legions would simply have to procure more workers from the east. After all, foreign workers could be forced to do tough physical labor for longer hours at low pay, could not take holidays, and were docile and compliant. Despite the fact that Sauckel’s roundups continued to foment unrest and contributed to a surge in partisan resistance, the needs of the Reich came first. The urgency, after Stalingrad, of securing foreign labor was reflected in the numbers: almost half the nearly 8.5 million forced laborers in Germany at the end of the war had arrived since 1943. Although the living and working conditions for foreign workers continued to be atrocious, noticeable improvements were made after the declaration of total war, when Nazi officials recognized the necessity of increasing the output of Ostarbeiter. From mid-1943, almost all sectors reported a rise in productivity and output, and, by mid-1944, foreign labor had become the backbone of the German war economy. Any improvement in the working conditions of the eastern workers, however, was more than offset by the harsh racial attitudes with which they were confronted. The racial inferiority of the Ostarbeiter was constantly emphasized to both German civilians and the workers themselves through leaflets and posters, with pointed reminders to Germans to act as racial masters. Reich authorities worried incessantly about sexual contact between the eastern workers and German women and, thus, imposed draconian punishments for any sort of fraternization of a sexual nature. Moreover, Ostarbeiter were frequently warned that they risked being sent to a concentration camp if they slacked off at work or upset production. They were paid minimal wages, worked long hours, kept under strict control, subjected to harsh discipline, and regarded with utter contempt. When Allied bombers rumbled overhead, foreign workers were kept out of the municipal air raid shelters, with the result that disproportionate numbers died in the bombing attacks. Little wonder, then, that most felt they were “no better off than pigs.”49
The same economic requirements that led to the brutal Menschenjagd also contributed to an intensification of the partisan war in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Although Hitler had initially welcomed Stalin’s call to action in July 1941 as a cover for the deadly operations of the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht had from the outset struggled to control the vast regions it had conquered. The harsh measures directed at the local population, the often contemptuous behavior of German troops, the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, and the mass shootings of the murder squads all contributed to a growing embitterment that aided the spread of the partisan movement. German security divisions, with their overage, badly trained, ill-equipped, and overstretched troops, struggled against a ruthless foe who used a mix of inducements and terror to tighten his hold over ever-larger areas. By early summer 1942, economic exploitation, harsh pacification policies, and increasing impoverishment of the rural population had created a cruel dynamic that fed the growth of the partisan forces. As they became increasingly bold and began to assume operational importance in some rear areas, German forces responded with large-scale search-and-destroy operations that resulted in very high civilian body counts but little diminution of partisan activities.50
In the first year of the war, German security troops killed some 80,000 alleged partisans, at a loss of a little over a thousand of their own men, only to find that their brutality had simply fueled an increase in guerrilla numbers. In Belorussia alone, German figures indicated a kill ratio of seventy-three to one, and, during the entire war, German casualties in the central sector of roughly 34,000 were dwarfed by some 300,000 partisan deaths, yet partisan numbers tripled during 1942. Although many German officers on the ground understood the necessity of better treatment of the rural population as a prerequisite for regaining their support, Hitler responded by entrusting the SS with sole authority for combating the partisans. Thus empowered, Himmler in August 1942 appointed the ruthless SS police leader and Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to lead the fight against “bandits,” charging him with the pacification of central Russia. If von dem Bach was not already aware of what pacification meant, an addendum by Hitler to his own October directive that all partisans were to be killed spelled it out with brutal clarity: the partisan war in the east, he stressed, was “a struggle for the total extirpation of one side or the other.”51