Figure 1.--The Germans treated the occupied East as a vast pool of potential slave labor. This is an unidentified photograph showing German civilans and Ostarbeiter slave worker women. Unlike Jews Ostarbeiter had a chance of surviving the War. It all depended on their work assignments and the Geran employers involved.

The Soviet Union was unusual in Europe because for several years, therewas bith an unoccupied zine still fughting as well as an occupied zone. And these areas were fought over at least twice and in some areas multiple times. The resulting destruction was ednormpus. Some 80-90 million Soviet citizens, nearly half of the country's poulatuon were occupied by the Germans at some point of the War. [Pennington] This varied as the militry camnpigns ebbed and flowed. German treatment of the occupied people of the East is one of the great crimes of history. The Jews were immediately murdered. Most were shot. Some 2.5 of 5 million Soviets Jews were murdered. Most were shot in the Holocaust by bullet. Only about 2 percent of the Jews in the occupied areas survived. Himmler though that shooting Jews was too trasumsatic for thec SS men involved, which is why after 1941, the Germans shifted to gas chanbers. The Germans also began preparations for the eventul murder of the Slavic population. This began with starvation and the Hungerplan. The whole purpose of the War was to obrain the food and resources of the East for the German peoplw which meant denying them to the population of the people living there. It was not people caught in the crossfire of war, it was the intential Herman policy of mass murder. The East was to be ckared of its population to make the way for German colonists. Onr reason the Germans did not occupy Leningrad in 1941 was that by surrounding it, they hoped the population would starve, aving them the trouble of shooting them. And some 1 milliom did. The Hungerplan was applied to Red rmy POWs, some 3 milliom persished in German habds, starved todeartg. This was diner by the Wehrrmcht, not the SS. The Red Army Winter Offensive drove the Germans back from Moscow (December 1941), but it left the Germansxm in control of large areas of the western Soviet Union. They invcluded the Baltics, eastern Poland, Bylorussia, and the Ukraine. These areas included enormous resources. Hitler for his part had expected his conquests in the East to feed the German war economy. In fact, the reources from the east barely fed the enormous German and Axis ally armies deployed there. It did, however, deny those resources to the Soviets. And the mot important was food. The area occupied by the Germans included much of the most productive agricultural land of the Soviet Union--the incredibly productive back soil district. This created enormous food shortages in the unoccpied Soviet Union. And as priority was given to the Red Army, Soviet civilians were forced to survive on extemely low rations. The situation was, however, even worse in the German occupied areas. The German goal was to depopulate the East as part of Generalplan Ost and to destoy the industrial cites turning the East into a giant agricultural zone for German colonists. As a result, the Germans had no desire to use available food to feed the population in the occupied areas. [Pennington] Rations were only assigned to those working for the Germans in some way. The Wehrmacht attempted to get farms, mines, and even some factories back into operation to support the war effort. Those who did not work for the Germans in some way faced starvation. Many of the collective farms continued to operate. The Germans had more trouble getting the factories and mines working. Huge mumbers of homes were destroyed. Families were broken up. Humdreds of thousands of children were orphaned. The Germans used the occupied areas as a pool of slave labor. About 5 million Soviet citizens, mostly womn, were transported to thr Reich for war work and classified as Ostarbeiter. About half came from the Ukraine. Many were worked to death, but unlike Jews they had a chance to survive, depnding largely on their assignment. [Spoerer and Fleischhacker] Himmler in a 1943 speech to high-ranking SS officers told them, "Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collpse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch, interests ne only so far as the tank ditches completed for Germany." Of ciourse at the time, the idea that Gemany was going to lose the war was not yet clear to Himmler. A further tragedy was that when the survivors were liberated, many were raped by Red Army soldiers and treated as collaborators by Soviet authorities after te War (1945).

Sources

Pennington, Reina. Surviving Total War at Home," World War II Symposium (January 18, 2014).

Solzhenitsyn, Alexsanddr I. Trans, Thomas P. Wjitney. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-56: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Harper & Row: New York, 1973), 660p.

Spoerer, Mark and Jochen Fleischhacker. "Forced laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, numbers, and survivors," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 33, No. 2 (2002). pp. 169–204.

Created: 8:16 AM 10/22/2021
Last updated: 8:16 AM 10/22/2021