Although the partisans enjoyed some sporadic success in disrupting rail traffic and supply movements, the partisan war itself was hardly, in 1942, the great “people’s struggle” of later Soviet myth. Despite often brutal measures directed against the peasantry, the partisans largely failed to break their wait-and-see attitude—that resulted primarily from the military setbacks of 1942–1943, which made a German victory less likely, and the Reich’s escalating economic demands, which inherently contradicted any attempt at real pacification. Faced with the pitiless logic of total war, German officials combined economic considerations with existing ideological predispositions and security concerns to unleash devastation on great swaths of occupied territory. The large-scale combing sweeps, the Großunternehmen, now aimed not so much at rooting out guerrillas as at plundering anything of value in the so-called bandit areas. German economic officials directed the seizure of crops and livestock, the destruction of villages, the wholesale evacuation of the inhabitants for forced labor, and the liquidation of those deemed unfit for work. The sheer ruthlessness and brutality of this policy have led the historian Christian Gerlach to speak of the emergence of a Tote Zonen (dead zones) policy that envisioned the cultivation of select parts of the rear area and the complete evacuation and utter destruction of others. By the end of the year, the explosion of brutality associated with the Tote Zonen policy had resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths as well as the emergence of a full-blown partisan movement capable of extensive disruption of rear-area operations. This counted for little with Nazi officials, however, obsessed as they were with avoiding a repetition of 1918.52
By mid-1943, growing coercion on the home front, the need to mobilize all resources for war, and the increasing demand for labor had created a logic of escalating terror. Determined to root out defeatism and mobilize fully for war, Speer now moved into an ever-closer alliance with Himmler as both made use of the full repressive apparatus of the Nazi state. Forced by military reverses on the eastern front to abandon Generalplan Ost, for which the SS had begun creating slave labor camps under the catchphrase Vernichtung durch Arbeit, Himmler from spring 1943 sought to gain advantage from the crisis by emphasizing the economic utility of turning concentration camps into work facilities for arms production. Speer was also eager to use these labor resources to aid the war effort, as was German industry, which, in its search for cheap and docile labor, looked eagerly at concentration camp inmates. As a wide range of businesses made use of prisoner labor, a vast network of sub-camps sprang up throughout Germany, with the result that by late 1943, as Richard Evans has noted, “there was scarcely a town in the Reich that did not have concentration camp prisoners working in or near it.”53
As with the Ostarbeiter, living and working conditions were deplorable, even though the need for labor somewhat reduced the ideological pressure for annihilation. Mortality rates were appallingly high, particularly when the supply of such prisoners seemed unending. Although conditions improved somewhat through 1943, Himmler conceding that “the food issued should be like that provided… to Egyptian slaves, which contained all the vitamins and was simple and cheap,” the hope of survival of most individual inmates depended on special skills or training that could not be easily replaced. By August 1943, SS-run labor camps held 224,000 prisoners, a number that would double and then triple over the next year and a half; in January 1945, nearly 715,000 inmates toiled in the system. The Nazi attitude toward this slave labor was, perhaps, best epitomized by the August 1943 decision to use thousands of prisoners to blast tunnels out of the Harz Mountains for the production of V-2 rockets. Urged on by the head of the SS Building Directorate, Hans Kammler, a “cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic… [and] unscrupulous,” the men toiled in inhuman conditions. Determined to finish the project as quickly as possible, and, thus, unwilling to waste time and money to build barracks off site, Kammler instead forced the workers to sleep in wooden bunks four levels high within the cold, damp confines of the tunnels, with no proper sanitary facilities or adequate water supplies. They were allowed outside only once a week during weekly roll call. Each morning, SS guards punched workers in the face: those who did not fall were considered fit for work. “Pay no attention to the human cost,” Kammler declared in response to the rising death toll from dysentery and sheer exhaustion. “The work must go ahead, and in the shortest possible time.” Eventually, one in every three of the men forced to work on the V-2 production facility would die of disease, starvation, or maltreatment, some 20,000 in all. Speer, however, was ecstatic, in mid-December congratulating Kammler on his success in setting up the production center in only two months, an accomplishment “that far exceeds anything ever done in Europe, and is unsurpassed even by American standards.”54
Speer’s cooperation with Himmler was sealed in early October at a joint appearance at the annual gathering of Gauleiter in Posen. In his address to the regional party leaders, Speer bluntly accented the critical military situation, noting the damage done to armaments production by Allied bombing and the stark fact that the enemy now dictated what Germany had to do. Only the “sharpest measures,” he stressed, could improve the state of affairs. As if to stiffen the resolve of the Gauleiter for the “necessary brutality” in mobilizing all Germany’s resources, Himmler then made them openly complicit in the ongoing Judeocide: “You all accept happily the obvious fact that there are no more Jews in your province. All Germans, with very few exceptions, realize perfectly well that we could not have lasted through the bombs and stresses of the… war, if this destructive pestilence were still present within our body politic…. The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth…. About the matter of the Jews… you are now informed.” Aside from revealing his belief in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy and reminding his audience that they had no choice but to fight on since, with the murder of the Jews, the Nazi bridges were burned behind them, Himmler’s speech was notable for one other aspect: he pointedly threatened the Gauleiter that methods similar to those used against the Jews would now be employed against Germans who refused to accept the sacrifices necessary for radical mobilization of the economy and society.55
Despite these exertions and the deaths of tens of thousands of slave laborers, Speer was never able to boost German war production sufficiently to challenge that of Germany’s enemies. In the end, no amount of rationalization, labor mobilization, threats, or intimidation would have worked once the war became one of attrition. Given Hitler’s unwillingness to squeeze civilian living standards as harshly as Stalin had done, Speer and Himmler responded with a brutal exploitation of foreign labor. The crisis unleashed by the stunning defeat at Stalingrad thus fed a process of intensifying violence and radicalism that allowed the Reich to continue the war beyond 1943, but with no hope of actually winning. When, in January 1944, the realization finally sank in that all his efforts would, ultimately, be fruitless, Speer suffered a physical breakdown that incapacitated him for nearly four months. The forces that he had helped set in motion, however harsh and irrational, nonetheless ensured that the regime would not crumble—a collapse of war production in 1943 had been averted. Although the British Joint Intelligence Subcommittee expressed the hope that autumn that “the German people [would] no longer be willing to endure useless bloodshed and destruction” and, consequently, that “some sudden change of regime to prepare the way for… an armistice” might result, these experts were to be terribly disappointed. November 1943 also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the armistice of 1918, a humiliation that Hitler had repeatedly vowed would never happen again. In this, he was true to his word, but the struggle over the next year and a half would cost the Wehrmacht more than twice as many soldiers as the first four years of war combined.56