1941: Germany

Bid for World Conquest.

The year 1941 was the third year of Germany's tremendous bid for world conquest, an effort which made her take on during the year, in addition to Great Britain, two other great powers as enemies, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. By the end of the year, Germany had become master of most of the European continent. Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Belgium, two-thirds of France, Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, Lithuania. Latvia, Esthonia, the whole of western Russia from the gates of Leningrad to the southern tip of the Crimea, Yugoslavia and Greece were under direct German control and formed part of a new and immense German Empire, while Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, and unoccupied France were under Germany's indirect control in varying degrees, and countries like Spain showed every desire for closest collaboration under Germany's leadership. At the same time Germany, with her ally, Japan, found herself involved in a world wide struggle, covering all the continents and all the oceans on the globe. In this struggle Germany pretended to speak on behalf of a Europe united under her leadership in, what was termed by the National Socialists and their friends, a new European order (See NEW WORLD ORDER). How precarious this new European order was, however, how much more it was an unprecedented disorder into which old and renowned countries, long glorified by peaceful prosperity, had been thrown by wanton German aggression, could be seen not only by the starvation characteristic of all these countries, but also by the acts of revolt and continuous protest, by the need of savage terror and military occupation, which alone kept these unfortunate lands in Germany's grasp. An unprecedented régime of oppression and censorship silenced all these peoples; nevertheless there could be no doubt about their refusal to accept the new order.

Their starvation and their reduction to serfdom was largely caused by the fact that the Germans conducted an economic system of the most naked plundering of all the occupied countries, not only as regards food stuffs and raw materials, but also as regards manufactured articles of all kinds. This method of economic exploitation has been described in detail in a number of recent studies, of which Thomas Reveille's, The Spoil of Europe: The Nazi Technique in Political and Economic Conquest; Frank Munk's. The Economics of Force and Antonin Basch's, The New Economic Warfare, should be mentioned. As a result of this spoilation of Europe, to which the countries allied with Germany—such as Italy, Spain and Rumania—were as much subject as the countries conquered by Germany—like Bohemia or Norway—the standard of living in Germany was higher than in the other European countries, the food situation infinitely better, and the lack of raw materials less damaging to the industrial effort. But by 1941 Germany found herself in the ninth year of war economy and war psychology; the preparation for total war had begun in 1933 with the accession to power of the National Socialist government, and had never been relaxed, but steadily intensified, while the democratic nations went about business as usual and were found unprepared in their hour of need. On the other hand there can be no doubt that the German psychology and the German equipment began to show the strain of the serious situation by the end of 1941.

It is difficult to give a well-rounded picture of German conditions for 1941, because contact between Germany and the outside world was virtually cut off by strict censorship and the general blackout, of which the whole European continent with the exception of Sweden and Switzerland suffered by the end of 1941, descended also upon Germany. The American newspaper correspondents and broadcasters were less frequently allowed to give an unbiased picture of conditions in Germany and were more and more barred from all sources of real information. Some of them published revealing accounts, as soon as they found themselves back in the United States and liberated from the shackles of censorship. But even their reports naturally do not cover the later part of the year 1941. Among these reports some won the wide attention of the American public, like William Shirer's Berlin Diary, Joseph Harsch's, Pattern of Conquest and Gregor Ziemer's, Education for Death, while books like Leland Stowe's, No Other Road to Freedom, Thomas Kernan's, France on Berlin Time and Robert St. John's, From the Land of Silent People describe the conditions in German-occupied countries. Edith Roper and Clara Leiser in their Skeleton of Justice and Ernest Fraenkel in The Dual State describe the development of German justice and of German life as mirrored in court proceedings in Hitler's new Germany.

German Economic Achievements.

On the whole, Germany's history during the year 1941 was closely interwoven with Germany's war effort, and has therefore been dealt with largely in the article on World War II. This picture can however be supplemented by reports on internal conditions in that country. The tremendous rate of German war production and the need of manpower for an army of many millions caused an unprecedented labor shortage in Germany. Authorized German sources declared that at the beginning of 1941 not less than 3,400,000 foreigners were employed in the Reich. Of these 1,390,000 were prisoners of war, of whom about half were employed in agriculture. The others were 'voluntary' foreign laborers, of whom 469,000 were Polish peasants, 218,000 industrial workers from France and the Low Countries, 70,000 industrial workers and 47,000 farm laborers from Italy, 46,000 factory workers and 32,000 farm laborers from Slovakia. Of the 2,010,000 foreigners employed in Germany who were not war prisoners, about two thirds were employed in agriculture and about one third in factories and other non-agricultural work. These figures give some idea of the tremendous strain upon Germany's labor resources.

On Jan. 30, the eighth anniversary of the National Socialists' accession to power in Germany was celebrated with the usual great eulogies for the achievements of the immediate past and with loud expressions of unswerving confidence in the near and the distant future. Wilhelm Keppler, the economic expert of the Nazi party, asserted that German economic strength rested on the slogan, 'Service and Sacrifice.' Not gold anymore, but labor and production were regarded as the great national assets, upon which the economic domination of the continent by Germany was based, a domination to be expanded after the war. Dr. Fritz Todt, Hitler's chief help in building the strategic motor roads and the army fortifications, praised the new state control of German industry which had achieved and assured a mobility of production unattainable under a system of individual enterprise. Dr. Todt boasted that the present accumulation of German war supplies was unparalleled in world history. Whether that was still the fact at the time of the German retreat in Russia at the end of 1941 has not yet been disclosed. The same holds true of a similar claim by Maj. Gen. Adolph von Schell, the undersecretary of the Reich traffic ministry in charge of the motorization of the war, who declared that Germany had become independent of foreign sources of motor fuel through the efficiency of home production. He declared that motor vehicles had been standardized in Germany by reducing the number of types from 113 to 19, thus accelerating and simplifying the production and use of motor units in the war. Similarly the Secretary of State in the Food Ministry, Herbert Backe, claimed that the rationalization of agricultural production and especially the strict disciplining of producers and consumers had created a remarkable stability of the nation's food situation. In view of the intense campaign for more children in the German Reich, a campaign which has led to the glorification of illegitimate childbirth and has imposed upon every German young woman the duty of bearing a child every year, whether married or unmarried, it was claimed that the German birth rate had risen to 20.3 for 1939-40 as compared with 14.7 in 1933 and 19.7 in 1938.

All these boasts of achievements, past and future, were surpassed in the speech which Chancellor Hitler delivered on the same day in the Berlin Sportpalast to a wildly cheering crowd. His ninety-minute speech promised a final German victory in 1941 and said that Germany had big surprises of secret weapons in store for the mighty assault on Britain. 'The year 1941 will be, of that I am convinced, the historical year of the great new order for Europe.' The chief target of Mr. Hitler's attacks was Britain and the British, of whom, in his rather strange interpretation of history, he said that they had always hated Germany regardless of what kind of state it is, whether it is under a Kaiser or is national socialistic or democratic or authoritarian. The same strange interpretation of history was shown in his attacks upon Jews. Like the Nazi propagandists outside Germany, and especially in America, he tried to read history in such a way as to say that only the Jews wished the war, and that, should they succeed in spreading or prolonging the war, they will be exterminated. He reserved his usual caustic sarcasm for the democracies and, as he called it, their 'softening of the brain.' He did not mention in his speech the Soviet Union or Japan, but stressed his great friendship for Italy and for Signor Mussolini personally. 'Il Duce and I are neither Jews nor opportunists. When we shake hands it is a handshake of men of honor. I hope that will be impressed on those (British) gentlemen during the course of this year.'

Hess's Flight to Britain.

On Feb. 9 Rudolph Hess, the deputy fuehrer of the Reich, spoke at Breslau where he declared that the British enemy should not be deluded by the temporary inactivity of the German war-machine. The British apparently, he said, regard any 'period' in which 'no opponent is being beaten down by us' as a pause in Germany's military activity. They should not forget, the deputy fuehrer added, that the largest war machine of all times is ready for a decisive battle. Economic organization of the whole European continent has made Germany immune to Britain's blockade, it was asserted, but the submarine warfare which was to begin in the spring, will break the blockade and will defeat England. Hess threatened that what the British had suffered so far was only a foretaste of what they will experience in the future. It was only three months later that instead of a destruction of England, Hess brought himself to England on a still not entirely revealed mission. Hess was the Number 3 man in rank in the Nazi Party, immediately after Hitler and Goering, but he was a much closer friend of Hitler than anybody else and known in Germany as Hitler's shadow. He was a member of the Reich cabinet without portfolio and also a member of the inner War Council (the Cabinet Council for the Defense of the Reich created Aug. 30, 1939, and which consisted of Reich Marshal Hermann Goering as chairman, Gen. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Commissioner General of Reich Government Administration, Walther Funk, Commissioner General of Economy, and Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery) and Executive Secretary of the War Council, in which he was the representative of the Nazi Party.

The Germans were very much embarrassed by the sudden flight of Hess to Scotland, and could not give any reassuring explanations to their own people. It was officially maintained that Hess had been in failing health and mentally disturbed, although British sources described Hess as completely sane and healthy. And it was difficult to understand why a mentally unbalanced person had occupied for so many years one of the most exalted positions in Nazi Germany, and had been able to fly alone, and successfully, a distance of about 800 miles. It is doubtful whether the German official propaganda did any service to the German cause by maintaining that he was a deranged and muddled idealist ridden with hallucinations due to injuries in the first World War, for even some Germans might have asked themselves whether other persons high in command in the Nazi régime might not be 'deranged and muddled' without the German public's having noticed it. The official propaganda did everything to make the German people quickly forget the Hess affair.

Nazi Legal System.

On Jan. 28 Germany lost another member of the German cabinet. Franz Guertner, Minister of Justice died and was replaced by Dr. Franz Schlegelberger. Dr. Guertner had been Minister of Justice in Bavaria from 1922 to 1932, became Reichs-minister of Justice in the Von Papen régime and was taken over by Chancellor Hitler. He was responsible for some of the most drastic changes of law and legal procedure which ever occurred in the civilized world and which entirely undermined the civilized concepts of law. In 1934 he instituted the People's Court for all cases of sedition or treason, manned by Nazis, including Storm Troop leaders who had special experience with dealing with subversive activities. Its procedure was independent of precedent, its guiding principle was that 'the law and the will of the Fuehrer are one.' In amendments to the German penal code in 1935 it was provided that in a conflict between the interests of the state and of the individual, the interests of the individual must be sacrificed. Judges were freed from the limitations of codified law and had the right to punish acts which they believed contrary to the health and moral feeling of the German people. Criminal laws were made retroactive, and judges received the power to decide, out of the popular sense of the German people for what is right, whether somebody should be committed to prison or sentenced even without any law warranting it. As Dr. Guertner declared in August 1935 before an international congress of criminologists: 'Everything will be regarded as a crime which is counter to the vital objectives sought by the community. As the chief executive of Germany, the Fuehrer is ceaselessly endeavoring to be an embodied expression of the people's will, and thus a judge may be able to find in the will of the Fuehrer a guiding light to aid him in his own task.'

On Sept. 19 a rewriting of German criminal law was officially announced, imposing extremely severe penalties for many crimes. In future, murder will no longer be judged exclusively on the basis of whether or not it was premeditated as in the past. Habitual criminals will be sentenced to death even when the particular breach of the law is not significant. A law of July 15 gave to the public attorney the right to interfere even in all civil and commercial cases if the interest of the state in his opinion demanded it. Even valid judgments in civil or commercial lawsuits can be set aside by the Reich Attorney within one year after their validity.

German Finances and Internal Situation.

The budget of the Reich has not been published. It is being fixed by decree, of the finance minister. Strictest economy in all public expenditures has been decreed, and all non-defense outlays have been sharply cut. As the third war winter approached, Germany's internal situation began to look more gloomy. During the first two years of the war the only important food product that had not been rationed had been potatoes, and thus they had become the main item of the German diet. In September 1941 the rationing of potatoes was introduced as a result of uncertain crop prospects, caused by the persistent cold and rainy weather in the late summer. The daily consumption of potatoes of Berlin alone amounted to 2,000 tons in the first year of the war. In 1940 Germany had a bumper crop of potatoes of 70,000,000 tons but the 1941 crop threatened to be much lower, particularly because with the restriction of fodder imports by the blockade, potatoes had to be used as fodder for cattle and hogs.

On Oct. 29 the assistant minister of finance appealed to the Germans in a nation-wide broadcast to intensify their savings efforts to help finance the war. He strongly deprecated malicious rumours about inflation and threatened merciless procedure against all those who disseminated such rumours. A new kind of savings account for wage earners was introduced, the so-called 'iron saving accounts,' repayment of which can be only asked twelve months after the termination of the war. In exchange these deposits and all interest on them are exempt from all taxes. Nobody is allowed to deposit more than 26 marks a month in these tax-free savings. These savings will be deducted by the employer from the weekly payment. As Christmas approached, the Nazi press started also a sharp campaign against buying. The number of goods to be bought in the stores had dwindled to practically nothing; many goods could be bought only on the so-called black market, and there at fantastic prices. The purchase of anything but the bare necessities of life was branded as unpatriotic. Especially sought after but practically unobtainable in spite of strict rationing were clothing, garments, underwear and stockings made from good material. Wool and silk had disappeared long ago. The situation was aggravated by the early advent of winter in October. Civilian passenger train services were severely curtailed to much less than a third of peacetime schedules, and that at a time when no private cars were running. After Nov. 1, official permits were required for purchasing transportation tickets except within the cities themselves. The heavy luxury taxes on tobacco and other consumer goods were sharply increased. A 'cheap' package of five cigarettes of very inferior quality, the ration for each purchaser and obtainable only after standing in line for an hour, cost 30 pfennigs or about 12 cents by Nov. 1.

These conditions explain the new tone which crept into the articles and broadcasts of Propaganda Minister Goebbels by the beginning of November, several weeks before the reverses on the Russian and African fronts and before the entry of the United States into the war. At the beginning of November Dr. Goebbels published an article in the ranking German weekly Das Reich under the title 'When or How?', in which he deprecated all notions of a quick victory which the German masses were led to expect in 1940, and told the Germans that they must resign themselves to a 'hard and relentless' war, 'a gigantic expense of national strength from which no one can be spared. We must do all that serves victory and brings it closer, and cease doing all that hinders or removes it from us. It must not be asked when victory is to come, but it must be made certain that it will come.'

It is doubtful whether the Germans received any comfort for this sudden revelation of the seriousness of the situation from the ban which was placed by Dr. Goebbels on one of the most popular plays of German classical literature, the famous Wilhelm Tell of Friedrich von Schiller, who for five generations had been the favorite German author. The play, which will now be forbidden on all German stages and will not be included in class readings or studies, glorified the patriotic deeds of a Swiss medieval hero, Wilhelm Tell, who freed Switzerland from Austrian oppression. Apparently the German authorities do not like to remind the German people that small and democratic peoples like the Swiss can raise patriotic heroes in the fight for liberation.

Nazi Statements on the War.

It is also interesting to note that in his article in Das Reich which was referred to above, Dr. Goebbels said: 'No one would assume that all of Europe's problems would have been solved had Poland in the summer of 1939 renounced Danzig and granted Germany a passage through the Corridor, or had England and France, following the victorious termination of the Polish campaign, been willing to discuss the Fuehrer's peace offer. Could anyone believe that London would have left us in peace, or that the Soviet Union would for certain decide that it would build up revolutionary armies just for fun? No. We would still have had to take up arms in a few years, but with the difference that our enemies, having learned much through the military experiences of the Polish campaign, would have faced us with arms that we could not have matched.'

Thus the German propaganda minister acknowledged that Germany would have had to make war even if Poland or England had accepted the so-called peace offers of the Fuehrer, and that the war in 1939 came, because in 1939 Germany knew that she was much better prepared than all other powers, and therefore wished to force a decision and to establish her world control, before the other powers could arm. This explains probably also why Japan and Germany attacked the United States in December 1941, not wishing to wait until America would have grown in military strength. As Dr. Goebbels rightly pointed out in a warning which was addressed to the German people but which could have been addressed to the democracies: 'When you are facing a pitiless adversary who is aiming his rifle towards you to fire from his most favorable position, the best policy is to anticipate his shots. A national leadership acts without responsibility when it simply lets matters come to a head without realizing the danger, then calls for arms when they have already lost their sharpness.'

With the increasing seriousness of the situation in Russia, the warning of Dr. Goebbels to the German people became more and more outspoken. Two weeks after the first article, in the issue of Das Reich of Nov. 22, he wrote that 'we do not belong to those dreamers and illusionists who prophesy the collapse of the British Empire tomorrow. What seems more important is the fact that England possesses no more chances for victory, and already is on the road to defeat. When this will actually happen nobody can say. We do not wage war with a stop watch.'

And Dr. Goebbels predicted on Dec. 1 in a speech before the German Academy at the University of Berlin that the United States cannot equal Europe's armaments. 'Trees in the United States do not grow sky high, and we know very well how to determine what is fact and what is bluff in our enemies' threats.' But Dr. Goebbels did not go so far as the head of the German Labor Front, Dr. Robert Ley, who on Nov. 21, told 15,000 workers from fourteen European countries that Americans are 'cultureless barbarians' and Mr. Roosevelt a 'poor fool.' He promised that Moscow will fall in one way or the other, and that 'capitalism has been broken and chased across the Ocean.'

By the end of the year, however, reliable sources reported that the Germans were working hard to build three lines of forts against a possible invasion by victorious Soviet Armies. The first of these lines was being built along the old Polish-Soviet frontier as it had existed before 1939, making use of the old Russian fortifications, which were known as the Stalin Line. A second line of fortification followed the Bug River, which was the line of demarcation in 1939 between the Polish territories occupied by Germany and those incorporated into the Soviet Union. There the Germans had begun to build fortifications soon after 1939, but the construction had been halted in June 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and believed in the speedy collapse of the Soviet Armies. But even on the old German territory along the Oder River, a line of fortification was now reported to be under construction, about 1,000 miles west of the line of the farthest German advance into Russia. All this work is being accomplished by Polish workers who, undernourished and badly treated and without garments to protect them against the hard winter, are being decimated. The whole of Poland seemed threatened at the same time by epidemics of spotted typhus, due to the horrible conditions of nourishment, housing and protection against the cold.

Administration of Conquered Territories.

Meanwhile the German army prepared the redivision and administration of the territories occupied by the Nazis. On Jan. 27 the Prussian Province of Silesia was split into the two provinces of Upper Silesia and Lower Silesia as the result of the acquisition of new territories from Polish Silesia and southwestern Poland. Silesia, with an estimated population of 7,500,000, had become too large for one province. The Gauleiter of Silesia Joseph Wagner, who is also the Reichs Price Commissar, was relieved of his office. The new province of Upper Silesia consisting of the districts of Kattowitz and Oppeln, with Kattowitz as its capital, was put under Fritz Bracht as Gauleiter, while Lower Silesia, consisting of the districts of Breslau and Liegnitz, with the provincial seat at Breslau, was put under Karl Hanke as Gauleiter. In the west the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg was incorporated into the German province of Coblenz-Trier which was renamed Moselland. In Luxemburg German was proclaimed the only official language, all French street signs and inscriptions were removed, and all residents were ordered to take German names instead of their former often French-sounding names. Gauleiter of the Moselland was Gustav Simon. Thus Luxemburg shared the fate of Alsace-Lorraine which had also been completely incorporated into Germany's new West Mark. This de facto aggrandizement of Germany was carried through, though no peace treaty had been concluded authorizing it. As in the former Polish lands, German laws, currency, customs and culture have been entirely introduced into these lands conquered in the west. As in the formerly Polish lands, so in Alsace-Lorraine a process of enforced Germanization was undertaken, as citizens with French sympathy were ejected and Germans were settled in their place. In the former Polish lands on the eastern border of Germany, two new provinces were created, Danzig-West Preussen and Wartheland.

Persecution of the Poles.

The worst treatment of all the conquered peoples was meted out to the Poles in the eastern border regions of Germany. At the beginning of October reports published in Vatican City from the information brought from Poland by Catholic priests and laymen, made it clear beyond doubt that the régime of terrorism in Poland had one goal, to exterminate the Polish nation. 'No basic right of man, not even the sacred rights of the Church, has escaped being violated by the German régime,' said the Vatican report. Approximately 20,000,000 Poles are crowded into a territory of 38,000 square miles which is completely isolated and cannot be self-sufficient. All property owned by Poles in that large part of Poland which was annexed outright by Germany was entirely confiscated and handed over to Germans as was 60 per cent of Polish property in the remaining part of Poland. 'No Pole has any juridical recourse against illegal seizure of property. Normal jurisdiction is not functioning and special and military German tribunals are more anxious to terrorize the population than to safeguard legitimate rights.' All able-bodied Poles are pressed into forced labor under the most pitiful conditions. Many are sent to Germany. They are insufficiently fed and clothed, and have to wear on their breast a yellow P sewn on a mauve background. Thousands of intellectuals are being physically and mentally broken by forced hard labor. The German population is not allowed to have any intercourse with the Poles, and is permanently exhorted to hate them. Thus the Poles live a life of constant terror, subject at any moment to torture or execution, humiliation or imprisonment without any judgment. The Vatican report closed with the following words: 'In exposing all these facts, we have tried to be moderate. We need only recall the words of Cardinal Mercier of Belgium in 1914: 'When we speak of German warfare we try to attenuate the impression, for we feel that the naked truth exceeds the limits of what can be believed.''

Treatment of the Ukrainians.

The treatment of the Poles is no isolated case. It is the example of what will happen to all the populations under German rule, once they have become helpless by military defeat or by a policy of appeasement. The fate of the population in the conquered parts of Russia was even worse than the fate of the Poles, Serbs, Czechs and other peoples. In these regions Germany had originally promised to fulfill the national aspirations of the peoples or at least of some of their leaders, of the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Letts and others. For that reason Germany had supported revolutionary movements and had made use of the national aspirations of different groups. But as soon as Germany had conquered each land, none of these promises were fulfilled and all those who had helped the Germans or counted upon them were grievously disappointed. This was especially remarkable in the case of the Ukrainians, because for several years the German propaganda and the German administration had promised the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, in Poland and in Carpathian-Ukraine, then a part of Czechoslovakia, to support the formation of a great Ukrainian state. As against this promise Germany has demanded, and also received, the cooperation of some nationalist leaders of the Ukrainians. Many Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union had shown during the last years definite sympathies for National Socialism hoping for the overthrow of the Soviet régime with German help. But as soon as the Germans had conquered the western parts of the Soviet Union it became clear, that they wished to annex all these lands for the future colonization by German peasants and that they wished partly to enslave and partly to eject the inhabitants of these lands. The old program of Adolf Hitler and his expert on Russia, Alfred Rosenberg, was to be put into execution, the depopulation of eastern Europe of its Slavonic and other inhabitants and the resettlement of these countries by German peasants.

Already at the beginning of August the Ukrainian lands which are known as eastern Galicia with the cities Lwow, Tarnopol and Stanislav, and which had belonged, in spite of the protest of the Ukrainian inhabitants, until 1939 to Poland and had then been incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine, were not constituted by the German conquerors as a Ukrainian state, but were incorporated into the Polish government general, the remnant of former Poland which was worst treated of all. The lands of Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia and Byelo Russia (White Russia), which were conquered by the Germans in the summer of 1941, were not reconstituted as independent or even autonomous countries under local administration, but were constituted as Ostland, a part of Germany, under Heinrich Lohse, the former Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, as Reichs Commissar with the seat in Riga. His assistant in charge of the White Russian lands is Wilhelm Kube, one of the most feared Nazi administrators, who resides in Minsk. For the Ukraine, Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, was appointed as Reichs Commissar, while Dr. Alfred Rosenberg was appointed on Nov. 17 as Reich Minister for the East with Dr. Alfred Meyer, former Gauleiter of West-phalia, as his deputy and assistant minister. The total Soviet territory occupied by the German armies up to Oct. 31 and now put under Dr. Rosenberg was estimated at 615,000 square miles or three times the size of Germany in 1936. It was also reported that Germany was planning to sell the industrial plants in the occupied Soviet territories to German private interests for the purpose of helping the financing of the war. The German government was apparently not interested in operating the plants because they had been so much destroyed by the retreating Russians that they would require very substantial capital investments. Thus the industry of eastern Europe was to fall into German hands.

German Industrial and Financial Control of Europe.

By a similar process the industries of all the other parts of occupied Europe, including Italy and Spain, had in great measure come under German control. The huge French payments for the upkeep of the German army were used to buy the commanding interest in the most important French industries. The fact that all raw material in Europe was controlled by Germany was also used as a means for gaining further control over all the industrial output and management in all the European countries. The big three German banks have penetrated deeply into the banking systems of all European countries. The process of the so-called Aryanization of the economic life of all European countries with the exception of Sweden and Switzerland has also afforded unique opportunities for the acquisition of local business enterprises by Germans. Finally the German Reichsmark has become the decisive currency throughout the continent of Europe.

By the beginning of the year 1941 the director of the Deutsche Bank reported, that the Germans paid annually 34,000,000,000 marks in war taxes, and Germany's national debt was estimated at 79,000,000,000 marks, an increase of 45,000,000,000 marks since the beginning of the war. The American Commerce Department reported in the spring of 1941, that the annual war expenditure in Germany stood at 72,000,000,000 marks, out of a national income estimated at 100,000,000,000 marks. The 72,000,000,000 marks of German war expenditure do not include the cost of occupation imposed upon France, the Low Countries, Norway and Denmark. The inflationary tendencies of German war economy had been kept in check through rigid controls on prices, wages, production and consumption as well as over foreign trade and international payments, while the increased income from longer working hours and greater production has been absorbed by taxes, loans and savings.

The Reich Minister of Economics and President of the Reichs Bank, Walther Funk, in an address to the stockholders of the Reichs Bank on March 12 declared that Germany would never revert to the gold standard: 'in this question Germany admits no compromise.' He announced that all dividends over 6 per cent would be taxed away, and warned sternly that 'when private business does not take risks, it gives itself up, and then we no longer need private enterprise.' The fact that Germany possesses a virtual coal monopoly in central and western Europe, as a result of the conquest of Poland and France, has enabled Germany to use its coal for pressure on other countries which cannot import British coal anymore and have thus become dependent on Germany. This was especially the case in Italy.

The Deutsche Volkswirtschaft, the leading German economic weekly, on Sept. 11, published revealing figures on Germany's war finance. According to this journal the military expenditure of the Reich during the first two years of the war has amounted to 100,000,000,000 marks to which must be added the 90,000,000,000 marks which Germany has spent for armament, according to Chancellor Hitler, before September 1939. Non-military expenditure for the current fiscal year was given as 20,000,000,000 marks. Tax revenue was estimated for the current fiscal year at 31,000,000,000 marks against more than 27,000,000,000 marks in 1940 and more than 23,000,000,000 marks in 1939. In addition, the Reich could count upon 9,000,000,000 marks in other revenues of outside loans, of which more than 2,500,000,000 marks came from Bohemia and occupied territories. The national debt was estimated at 107,000,000,000 marks on Sept. 1, 1941.

It should be pointed out that Germany pays larger allowances to wives and families of men in the armed services than does any other European country, and that on May 20 the minister of labor announced that, without any increase in the premiums payable by the insured, the 30,000,000 German workers benefiting from the National Sickness Insurance would receive greater benefits in the future, the benefits will be also extended to dependents of the worker.

Decline of German Economic Structure.

Towards the end of the year the economic position of the Reich seemed to become more and more unfavorable. As long as Chancellor Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union the blockade of Germany and of German ruled Europe was very incomplete. The invasion of the Soviet Union completed the blockade; no further vital products arrived in Germany from Russia, the Middle and the Far East, and the scorched earth policy, adopted by the Russians, deprived Germany of any benefit which she could have derived from her conquests of the vast Russian territories. Germany had received through Russia cotton and hides from Iran, rubber and tin from Eastern Asia, and soya beans from Manchuria. German machinery and industrial equipment, as was revealed in an address of the President of the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce, on Oct. 21, was in need of repairs which have to be postponed until the end of the war causing the German industry a yearly loss of 5,000,000,000 marks. The value of these industrial replacements which have to be postponed on account of shortage of raw materials and labor, shows the tendency to rise in geometrical progression as the wear and tear of machinery increases. After the end of the war the reequipment of Germany's industrial machinery will have to take precedence over the production of consumers' goods. But the speaker comforted himself with the picture of a future European economy under German domination. This German continental economic empire, from which England and Russia would be excluded, would have a population of 320,000,000 people with 45,000,000 industrial workers. All armament industries would be concentrated in Germany proper, while other countries would produce light consumer goods, food stuffs and raw materials. The purchasing power of the mark would be restored by the influx of cheap goods from the conquered areas. But this hopeful picture belongs to the future for the time being. By the end of November new measures were introduced to keep down prices and profits. All regular corporate income taxes were so raised as to absorb 50 per cent of the net profits, all dividends over a maximum of 6 per cent were restricted, and all business concerns which in 1940 had realized higher profits than in the last peace year, were ordered to surrender their excess profits to the government and to lower the prices of their products, so as to lower their future earnings.

Religion in Germany.

The stress of war conditions did not halt the efforts of the National Socialist government and party to unify the German people behind a 'German religion' which would replace the existing Christian churches. The objection to these churches was not only based on the fact that they divided the German people into Catholics and Protestants and thus undermined the desirability of a racial community entirely homogeneous in its spirit and outlook. And the objection was not only to the Roman Catholic Church because it was thought to be subservient to an extraneous power, the non-Germanic pope, an objection which, as is well known, Bismarck had already raised when he had waged the long and bitter Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in the 1870's. This time the objection was not only directed against the Roman Church, but against the whole Christian faith which was regarded as an imposition of Palestinian and Mediterranean ways of thought and attitudes upon the Germanic mind. Christianity in all its forms was rejected as fundamentally alien to the German mind, and the religion of the Cross, of pity and charity, of self-denial and of the oneness of mankind, was contemptuously rejected as against a German religious conception of Fuehrer-worship and racialism.

It is therefore natural that the relations between the Churches and the German government became more and more strained. The famous Protestant pastor, Martin Niemöller, was still in a concentration camp and his fate unknown. The last twenty-eight sermons which he had been allowed to preach were published recently in America under the title God Is My Fuehrer with an important preface by Thomas Mann. The Protestant bishop of Wurrtemberg, Dr. Theophil Wurm, addressed a conference of the provincial church at the beginning of the third winter of war and said: 'You know that religious education has been falling into decay for a long time. Since the beginning of the war one measure has followed another, having for their goal the expulsion of the Church from its proper work among the people.' The National Socialists War Veterans Union has forbidden its members to participate as a unit in any church affair. Individual attendance at church is permitted, but no clergyman is allowed to hold an office in the war veterans union. On Sept. 5 Christian Science Churches were confiscated in Germany and all their properties seized. Christian Science had been banned in Germany on July 31 for 'the protection of the public and the state.'

It is highly significant that the Protestant State Church of Norway has taken an outspoken stand against the new Nordic order which the Germans and their Quislings tried to impose upon Norway. In a declaration, signed by all seven bishops of the Norwegian Church, it was stated that needless to say the attitude of the Church is at all times governed by three basic principles, Norway's (pre-Nazi) constitution, the articles of faith and the Bible. And the bishops asked: 'Can the Church quietly sit on the sidelines while the commandments of God are set aside and while many other events take place which dissolve law and order? ... When the authorities permit acts of violence and injustice and exert pressure on our souls, then the Church becomes the defender of the peoples' conscience. One single human soul is worth more than the entire world. Despite all its human shortcomings the Church has been given divine authority to spread His law and Gospel among all peoples. The Church can therefore never be silent.'

Especially bitter was the conflict between the Catholic Church and the German authorities. The Bishop of Muenster, Clemens August, Count Galen, has spoken out more fearlessly than any other of the Prelates. The Catholic bishops of Greater Germany appealed on July 6 to Roman Catholics to stand firm in their faith at a time when 'existence of non-existence of Christianity' in Germany was at stake. At Fulda, with its traditions of Christianization of German paganism, where St. Boniface, the Apostle to the Germans, was martyred in the eighth century, the Catholic bishops had drawn up a pastoral letter assailing sharply the Nazi anti-Church attitude. 'We have lost our schools, and now our kindergartens must be closed.' The Benedictine monks were expelled suddenly from their famous monastery at Bregenz, and had to leave all their property behind, including the famous library. An example of how far courageous Catholic priests went in their condemnation of Nazi paganism may be seen from the fact, that, as was officially reported from Berlin, the prominent Catholic prelate, Bernhard Lichtenberg, Dean of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, was arrested by the Gestapo at the beginning of November for having offered prayers for the Jews. The Catholic clergy of Belgium circulated throughout the country a pastoral letter signed by Joseph Ernest, Cardinal van Roey, Archbishop of Malines, and five other Belgian bishops, on Oct. 7, in which it was said to the Belgians: 'It is doubtless necessary to recognize the occupying power as the de facto power and to obey within the limits of international conventions. But the Belgian fatherland continues to exist, and all its children owe it fidelity and assistance. Moral unity of all Belgians must be maintained at all costs.'

Persecution of Jews.

It is easily understandable that with this wide persecution of Christianity as an alien element to Germany, the persecution of the Jews and their extermination as 'enemies of Germanism' assumed unprecedented proportions. All human rights and all possibilities of earning a living had been ended for Jews in Germany in November 1938, in the days of the famous pogroms. Now the German conquests brought not only additional millions of Jews under direct German domination, but increased the necessity for the Nazi propaganda to find in the Jews the scape-goat for the war and all its ills. Thus it is not astonishing that though Jews were drafted in the great labor shortage for compulsory work, they remained subject to the most rigid ostracism, were barred from any contact with non-Jews, were not allowed to enter any theatres, movie houses, libraries, museums, restaurants, parks or any other places of cultural or physical recreation, received less food than other people and no clothing and no coal, and were forced to wear a distinguishing sign which made them everywhere immediately recognizable. The ultimate goal was to deport all Jews from Germany and German-occupied territories to eastern Poland where they were shut up in ghettos under nightmare conditions of over-crowding, lack of nourishment, lack of fuel and of sanitation and medical supplies, so that not only their power of physical and moral resistance was completely broken but that their rate of mortality reached a high unknown at any other time in German history. At the same time all German official publications were full of an unparalleled hatred for the Jews, with complete extermination depicted as the desirable goal in the interests of Germany. This hatred of, and contempt for, the Jews, together with an interpretation of history according to which the Jew had always been the archvillain, was carried by German propaganda to all other peoples; anti-Semitic propaganda became the chief weapon by which National Socialism tried to prepare other peoples for the acceptance of its domination. It was its most potent weapon for the undermining of democracy and of Christian standards of life and a successful instrument in softening up the will to resistance in other nations, by diverting their attention from the German menace to a fictitious Jewish menace. The Jew was depicted as the war-monger who alone wishes to resist the peaceful intentions of national socialist Germany. All friends of national socialist aspirations and all enemies of democracy and of the free peoples outside Germany and Japan could be easily detected by their sometimes thinly veiled or shamefully hidden use of anti-Semitism. (See also RELIGION: Jews.)

Struggle Against Christianity.

The struggle against Christianity in Germany assumed greater proportions by the end of the year. On Nov. 10 the official Vatican radio station in Rome broadcast, without comment, a catechism published by the German weekly Nordland, organ of the 'German Believers in God,' in its issue of Sept. 15. There the principles of the German faith were given in the form of questions and answers. Some of the answers read: 'We National Socialists are believers in God because in us as German men veneration of the divine and faith in it are impressed in an indelible manner in our blood and being. We National Socialists believe: in the divine; in the unity of the universe; in Mother Earth; in destiny; in the creative force of our blood; in our people and its mission; in our Fuehrer; in the National Socialist peoples community; in ourselves.' In the catechism it was further said: 'The divine in its highest form is personified in the German people because ... the individual only within his people can develop his divine faculties and energies or rather only in the people can he live. What derives from the fact that the divine in the highest form is personified in the people? It derives from it that service for the Fuehrer, for the people, and for the fatherland is divine service. To believe in our people and in its mission means: to have unshakeable conviction that our people represents the highest worth of all humanity on earth; to follow the will of nature according to which the best people is called upon to command; to know that to be led by the best people redounds from the necessity of things in benediction on other nations; to work, sacrifice ourselves and fight indefatigably for the ascent and victory of our people.'

A book circulated by the end of November in 200,000 copies in Germany, especially among the Elite Guard and the youth and called Gott und Volk (God and People), outlined the national German faith which was to replace the Catholic and Protestant churches. The book had no author named, but the unknown writer identified his views with those of the Nazi party and of its Fuehrer. The wide and encouraged circulation at a time of extreme paper shortage was proof enough of the semi-official character of the book. There it was said: 'We Germans have been called by fate to be the first to break with Christianity; it is to be an honor ... For two thousand years the Church had time to begin molding mankind into a cleaner, higher striving race. The Church not only did nothing, but has degenerated into a restraining impediment. Finally, the Fuehrer and his movement have come, decried as heretic, to perceive and form true divine will. Christianity has failed and thus runs in its death hour. A thousand bonds tie us to the Christian belief. But one blow will make us free. To make Germans strong and ripe for this step is our task, our holiest obligation.' This new German faith is in no way dogmatic: 'German faith will not dictate to anyone his relationship to God. Everyone seeks his own way. But no one seeks it in Rome or Jerusalem. Germany is our Holy Land. It will be our religion ... We want faith which flames out of the depths of German nature and out of German hearts.' The Catholic bishops protested against the spread of this book in a letter read from all pulpits, in which they said: 'The existence of Christianity and of the Church in Germany is at stake. Recently a book has been spread in hundreds of thousands of copies which asserts we Germans have to choose between Christ and the German people. With flaming indignation, we German Catholics refuse to make such a choice.'

At the beginning of 1942 Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, who has been one of the spiritual fathers of National Socialism, has released for publication a 30 point program defining the 'religion of National Socialism.' The 30 points, which may be of immense importance for the future of Germany and of any German-controlled parts of the world, in view of the position of the author and the official character of the program, are the following: The National Reichs Church will take over all existing churches and chapels, which will become national churches. While no German is obliged to join the Church, that Church itself is called to serve its single doctrine—race and people. Its domain is limited by the territorial frontiers of the Reich and its colonies. Other churches or religious associations, above all those based on international bodies or directed from abroad, will not be tolerated in Germany. The National Reich Church has one immutable objective, to destroy that Christian belief whose tenets conflict with the German heart and the German mentality and which were introduced into Germany in that unfortunate year 800, when Charlemagne subjugated the pagan Saxons. In the National Reich Church there will be no pastors or theologians, only the national 'orators' of the Reich will be allowed to speak at the services which will be held on Saturday night. The 'orators' of the national church will be state officials; none of them will be allowed to do anything to perpetuate the Christian faith. No Church or sect can possess any parcel of German soil, for it is not the Church that conquered and tilled the land, but the German people. The printing and the dissemination of the Bible, as well as of all Sunday papers with religious content are to be forbidden in the Reich, and no Bibles are to be imported. Hitler's Mein Kampf contains the principles of the racial morals under which the German people must live. By that book all Germans must live. All future editions of that book shall contain its present number of pages and contents unmodified. This most saintly book will be placed on the altars of all churches, with a sword to its left, while all Bibles and crosses have to be removed. The orators of the Church will during the services explain the contents of Mein Kampf. There will be no remission of sins and no baptisms in the National Reich Church. Parents of new born German children will swear that they are of pure Aryan descent and that they will bring up the child in the pure German spirit for the German people. At the end of each school year, on Good Friday, a day of youth shall be celebrated in the Church. Kneeling in the Church is forbidden as undignified for a German. The oath will be rendered with the right hand touching the sword on the altar. Atop of the Churches will be found no longer the Cross, but the symbol of invincible Germany, the swastika. These are briefly the tenets of the new national church as envisaged by the leaders of National Socialism. Only the future will be able to tell whether Germany has really proven invincible and whether she will live under the sign of the swastika instead of the sign of the Cross which for 1,200 years has been the foundation of German civilization as a part of the common culture of civilized mankind. See also WORLD WAR II.