SLAVE LABOR AND BIG CAPITAL
The class character of German fascism
By
Leslie Feinberg
On Feb. 16, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
announced that 12 German companies that squeezed mega-profits
from slave labor during the Nazi era are willing to set up a
compensation fund for survivors and their families. Only the
amount is in dispute.
The 12 companies include DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bank,
Volkswagen, Siemens, Hoechst, Dresdner Bank, Krupp, Allianz,
BASF, Bayer, BMW and Degussa. The chief executives of these
titans of industry and finance suggested other companies should
also ante up.
Millions of European Jews, Poles, Russians, Czechs,
Ukrainians and people of other nationalities were enslaved
during World War II to work for German industry. A Polish
government spokesperson, quoted in the Feb. 17 New York Times,
reported that there are more than 500,000 surviving people in
Poland today who were forced laborers.
But it wasn't just German capitalists who raked in lucrative
profits from slave labor. According to the Feb. 22 Newsweek,
half a dozen U.S. companies with German subsidiaries--including
Ford and General Motors--also face litigation.
The article continued that "lawyers have filed more than two
dozen class-action lawsuits alleging that manufacturers, banks
and insurance companies in Europe, Britain and the United
States profited from the Holocaust."
Last year, under the threat of massive class-action
lawsuits, Swiss banks were forced to fork over a $1.25 billion
settlement. The banks were charged with pocketing much of the
wealth stolen from Jews and other victims of the Nazis.
Jewish organizations are planning to make a similar demand
for compensation from French banks that serviced Nazi loot.
Why now?
Why are German bankers and industrialists in the spotlight
now for profits they made during the Nazi era? And why, after
decades of management denials, are these capitalists suddenly
ready to negotiate compensation?
Certainly the corporations are eager to avoid potentially
damaging lawsuits. Some reports also indicate Bonn is anxious
to begin payments by Sept. 1--the 60th anniversary of the
opening shots of World War II.
But a question that might reveal more about the overall
timing of these long-known "revelations" is: Why are U.S.
politicians and lawyers helping to press these lawsuits against
German corporations?
The New York Times article noted that Schröder's
announcement "came after protracted negotiations led by ... Mr.
Schröder's chief of staff, and Stuart E. Eizenstat, the
State Department Under Secretary for Business and Economic
Affairs."
Alan Hevesi, New York's comptroller, also helped win the
Swiss bank settlement. He has blocked a $10.1 billion buyout of
Bankers Trust by Deutsche Bank until its management agrees to
reparations.
Hevesi, it should be recalled, managed to press the flesh
for votes at a small parade in the borough of Queens last
summer without "noticing" a fascist float mocking African
Americans and the racist lynching of James Byrd Jr. A year
earlier, participants in the same annual parade had derided
Jews.
According to Newsday, Hevesi's role in these lawsuits is
determined by the fact that he heads a nationwide network of
900 state and city officials who control hundreds of billions
of dollars in pension funds. That money buys stock of global
corporations like Deutsche Bank. These are assets the German
bank would love to manage if it takes over Bankers Trust.
After World War II, the U.S. government, through its high
commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, presided over the
rehabilitation of the big German bourgeoisie and elements in
the German military. They were to be a bulwark against
communism. Now that the imperialists have overturned socialist
relations in East Germany, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
the rivalry between U.S. and German capital is once again
coming to the fore.
The fact that German capitalists accumulated astronomical
profits during the Nazi era is a well-known fact. But the
struggle to force some of these corporations and banks to
negotiate compensation has opened up a valuable opportunity to
re-examine the capitalist economic foundation of fascism.
This class character of fascism is purposefully camouflaged
in all bourgeois accounts.
While the Nazis recruited most of their shock troops from
Germany's desperate middle class--financially ruined farmers,
shopkeepers, small entrepreneurs and unemployed officials--they
were financed by big German capitalists to act as an
anti-communist, anti-working-class weapon. Anti-Semitism and
other forms of racism and national chauvinism went hand in hand
to achieve those goals.
To stress the class foundation of Nazi Germany is not to
downplay its systematic genocide of nearly 6 million Jewish
women, men and children. Just the opposite.
A thorough analysis of the relationship of class forces that
gave rise to fascism will help anti-fascists to ensure that it
never triumphs again.
The specter
haunting Europe
From its defeat in World War I until Hitler seized power in
1933, capitalist Germany went through one crisis after another.
On one side was the working class, which had the potential to
take power but was bitterly divided between communists and
social democrats. On the other was big business, which was
determined to hold on to the economic and social reins.
The German working-class movement had been split by the war.
When the war broke out in 1914, only a small grouping within
the very large social-democratic movement stayed true to
socialist doctrine and called it what it was: an imperialist
war to redivide the colonial world. Most succumbed to
patriotism and chauvinism, voting in the parliament for the
credits to fund the war.
The small group of internationalists, led by Karl Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg, grew as the workers experienced the horrors
of the war. Known as the communists, as opposed to the social
democrats, they urged the German workers to turn their guns
around and defeat their own ruling class.
World War I lasted for four years. It eventually claimed 20
million lives. Conditions of life became so intolerable that
the war sparked revolutionary workers' and soldier's rebellions
in some of the leading capitalist countries in Europe.
The imperialist war also provoked struggle in Asia. And it
laid the groundwork for the development of national-liberation
movements around the world seeking to shake off the European
colonial powers.
The monumental 1917 Russian Revolution erupted out of the
war. That successful socialist revolution in turn inspired
workers across Europe, as well as around the world.
By the end of 1917, a British naval blockade was causing
drastic food shortages throughout Germany. In response to a
communist call for a general strike, thousands of Berlin
munitions workers walked off their jobs demanding an end to the
war, increased food rations, and worker representation in
negotiations with the Allies. Disorders were reported on troop
trains carrying soldiers to the front. (Pool)
Germany officially surrendered on Oct. 3, 1918. On Oct. 28,
the crews on several battleships in the northern German port
town of Kiel mutinied, captured their officers and established
a sailors' soviet, or council.
Red flags flew from most of the ships in Kiel harbor. The
sailors then liberated the city of Kiel. (Fischer)
The revolutionary wave swept other German port towns and
cities. On Nov. 7, a council of workers, soldiers and peasants
established the socialist Republic of Bavaria. A socialist
republic was proclaimed in Berlin on Nov. 9.
The kaiser abdicated a day later. The form of Germany's
state changed from a monarchy to the Weimar Republic. But most
of Germany was still under the dictatorship of big
business.
Friedrich Ebert, a leader of the Social Democratic Party,
was appointed president. The Social Democratic leaders
supported social reform, but were dead set against socialist
revolution.
Many who longed for communist leadership were not satisfied.
Some 3,000 sailors took over the kaiser's palace in protest and
defied the Ebert government order to leave.
On Jan. 5, revolutionaries took control of the Berlin
railway station, newspaper offices and significant government
buildings.
Ebert called out the special units called the Free
Corps--rabidly anti-communist army officers who hired out as
mercenary killers--to retake Berlin. Heavy fighting raged until
Jan. 12 when the Free Corps prevailed.
A few days later, the Free Corps troops, on orders of the
Social Democratic authorities, killed communist leaders Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Communist uprisings broke out in Leipzig, Hamburg, Bremen
and the industrialized Ruhr and later in Munich. But they were
crushed by the army.
The demands of the powerful socialist-led workers' movement
wres-ted some significant democratic reforms from the Weimar
Republic from 1919 to 1927: formal equality and suffrage for
women, an easing of press censorship, recognition of
independent unions, wage contracts underwritten by the state,
unemployment insurance, paid holidays and the right of
association for collective bargaining, and changes in aspects
of family life, education and social sexual attitudes.
(Grunberger)
Fanning the flames
The Versailles Treaty that formally ended World War I had
imposed onerous conditions on Germany that laid the basis for
the growth and development of Nazism. The United States,
England and France redrew the map of Europe. They chopped up
Germany in a way that would block international working-class
solidarity in Europe and foment national hatreds.
This gave the right-wing parties in Germany, especially the
Nazis, the opportunity to fan the flames of national
chauvinism.
The Allies also ordered Germany to make a provisional
payment of 20 billion marks--designed to bleed the working
class dry. But the decision on reparations was deferred until
1921 in order to give the German capitalists a chance to crush
the workers' revolutionary struggle.
The German government made the workers and middle class bear
the brunt of the reparations by printing money wildly--creating
out-of-control inflation. The German mark, normally four to the
U.S. dollar, began to fall. In 1923, after the French invaded
the industrial Ruhr region, the currency collapsed. Runaway
inflation ruined the middle classes and further impoverished
the working class.
By November 1923 the dollar was officially worth 5 trillion
marks--unofficially 7 trillion. (Pool) The middle class was
devastated. Small businesses went under. Farmers refused to
sell their produce for worthless paper money.
Banks began mailing back life savings of tens of thousands
of marks, but the money was worthless. Just the stamp on the
envelope cost 5 million marks. (Pool)
Workers took home their wages in sacks and still starved. An
egg cost 80 million marks, a pound of potatoes 50 million, a
pound of meat 3.2 billion. (Fischer)
Continued from page 13
By mid-1923 German economic life was at a standstill.
Widespread strikes and rebellions broke out in many
industrial cities. Communists took over the state governments
in Saxony and Thuringia. Peasant uprisings rocked the
countryside.
The currency crisis stabilized, but the fascist movement
began recruiting among the ruined middle class. Then came the
world capitalist economic depression beginning in 1929.
The depression posed the question: Which class would rule?
Everyone talked about the possibility of a revolution. But the
workers were divided between two parties, the Social Democrats
and the Communists. Together they had a majority of the votes,
but they failed to unite to stop the fascist threat.
By 1930, some 6 million workers--one-third of the labor
force--were unemployed. Wages had dropped by 33 percent.
(Grunberger)
Some of the same capitalists who financed the pro-war forces
before World War I helped finance the rise of fascism.
Historian Richard Grunberger wrote, "Up to the slump the
industrialists themselves had distributed money freely among
all respectable [sic] anti-Marxist forces, but from 1931
onwards they directed their largesse increasingly toward the
mushrooming Nazi movement."
Additionally, the Nazis had received financial aid from
counter-revolutionary Russian grand dukes, counts and generals
anxious to overthrow the Bolshevik Revolution.
And, as former U.S. Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd
admitted in an interview, "certain American industrialists had
a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in
both Germany and Italy." (Seldes)
Crushing the unions
Hitler called his party National Socialists because
capitalism was so discredited among the masses. But his aim was
to divert the anger of the middle classes against the Jews and
the working class.
Given the long history of European
anti-Semitism--particularly among the middle classes--the Jews
made an easy target for scapegoating. Yet there were only
500,000 Jews in Germany--less than 1 percent of the total
population in 1933.
In April 1933 the Nazis led a boycott of Jewish shops and
removed Jewish students from schools. The Jewish population
felt the cruel impact of these escalating anti-Semitic
blows.
At the same time as the increasingly brutal campaign against
the Jews, Hitler went for the throat of the workers'
organizations. Daniel Guerin, in "Fascism and Big Business,"
described how the unions were crushed.
Hitler took power in January 1933. On May 1, storm troopers
occupied all union buildings. Union leaders were rounded up,
beaten and imprisoned. The fascist Labor Front became the new
"union."
Communists, socialists and anyone else opposed to the
Nazis--the most active leaders of the working class--were the
majority of concentration camp prisoners at first. James Pool
observed that the camps "were to imprison the major opponents
of the regime; second, they were to terrorize the significant
percentage of the population that did not support Hitler."
On May 16, the right to strike was abolished. On May 19, the
weakened unions were barred from negotiating contracts. All
prior union contracts were nullified. Between Jan. 1 and Oct.
1, 1934, the unions were dismantled--one by one.
And anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda was reaching a fever
pitch.
The Labor Front worked hand in glove with the SS--the
fascist police. Membership in the Labor Front was not
officially mandatory, but employers wrote provisions into their
contracts that only members could be employed.
Employers were given absolute rule over their employees.
Shop regulations were so extensive and the punishments so
severe that even the Labor Front daily newspaper admitted on
Oct. 1, 1936 that "some shop regulations are reminiscent of
penal codes."
On Feb. 26, 1935, workers were required to produce a "labor
passport" in which the last employer wrote up an
evaluation.
Guerin explained that as a result of breaking the back of
organized labor, between Jan. 30, 1933, and the summer of 1935,
wages were slashed 25 to 40 percent.
Taxes deducted from wages increased 25 to 35 percent. Social
insurance benefits won through earlier struggles were slashed.
Workers also faced speed-ups and longer work days.
Industrial unrest did result in underground organizing,
grassroots resistance and lightning strikes. There were even
strikes during wartime among Ruhr miners, Hamburg dockers and
Dortmund port workers. (Grunberger) But without their unions,
the workers were deprived of the organizational means for
collective struggle.
The buildup of a war economy helped muffle mass worker
resistance. In 1934 unemployment was halved. By 1939 the
rearmament-driven economy produced demand for labor that
exceeded supply by half a million--laying the basis for the
widespread use of slave labor to replace the many regular
workers mobilized into the army. (Grunberger)
Raking in profits
Not all the capitalists were pleased with Nazi state
intervention into their business affairs. But none could argue
that fascism did not create a boom for German capitalism as a
whole. The terrible cost would be felt later.
Rather than live up to the anti-capitalist promises he'd
used to win over the middle classes, Hitler subordinated small
businesses to the development of heavy industry.
Grunberger pointed out that "the net profits of large
corporations quadrupled within the first four years of Nazi
rule, and managerial and entrepreneurial income rose by nearly
50 percent." Between 1939 and 1942, he noted, "German industry
expanded as much as it had during the preceding 50 years."
This economic growth thrilled many capitalists in other
countries--including those in the United States like Henry Ford
who thought the ruling class here had much to learn from
fascism.
During the Weimar Republic, some heavy industry and banks
had been nationalized. But as soon as the Nazis came to power
they announced that "state enterprises will again be
transformed into private enterprises." Big industrialists like
the Kirdorks and Thyssens got back their corporations. The
Dresdener Bank, Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions
were also returned to private ownership. (Guerin)
Desperate for capital for rearmament, in November 1938
Hitler seized Jewish-owned property the way he'd seized all the
assets of the unions. Pool wrote that Jewish-owned companies
were given "as choice rewards to Hitler's big contributors for
the money they had given to the Nazis."
War against USSR
Pool recalled, "As early as May 1939 top German
industrialists and bankers at a board meeting of the Reichsbank
had discussed the necessity of `Germanizing' Russia as far back
as the Urals."
In fact, I.G. Farben executives were so excited at the
prospects of seizing Russia's huge chemical and synthetic
rubber factories that they asked permission to follow the front
line troops in order to be first on the scene.
And as the Nazi armies marched into Russia, Alfred
Krupp--patriarch of the Krupp steel empire--stuck red pins in a
map to mark the factories and mines he'd already claimed.
The plan for the mass extermination of all the Jews of
Europe swung into action as Hitler's troops marched east into
Poland and Russia. Of the almost 6 million Jews murdered by the
Nazis, 4,100,000 were in those two countries.
Hitler's blueprint to exterminate the Jews and Slavs was
reportedly inspired in part by the genocidal techniques the
European colonialists had used against Native nations in North
America.
As the Soviet peoples fought back against Hitler with all
their might, Germany needed to send massive numbers of workers
to the front. Yet there was already a labor shortage and the
armament industry needed even more beefing up.
Lengthened work days, Sunday and holiday work, night shifts,
speed-up under threat of being sent to the front--none of these
measures used against the German working class could provide
enough labor for the accelerating war industries.
According to Pool, Hitler "apparently developed the plan of
using Jewish slave labor and building factories at the
concentration camps in a series of private conversations with
top Nazi industrialists."
Large-scale use of slave labor began around 1940-41. The
Nazis began rounding up millions of Jews, Poles, Russians and
Czechs--along with workers from other occupied territories.
Laborers were literally worked to death--particularly Jewish
prisoners.
Inmates from 138 concentration camps provided slave labor
for the 400-year-old Krupp family military-industrial dynasty.
Still hungry for more profits, Krupp organized slave-raiding
expeditions of his own--with government approval. (Pool)
The Farben executives, angered at losing the work time that
prisoners spent marching four miles back and forth to work,
built their own concentration camp: I.G. Monowitz. Barracks
built to hold 5,000 workers reportedly were used to house
20,000.
By the end of 1941 all the Daimler-Benz plants were run by
prisoner labor. There was no limit to their work hours.
(Gregor)
Because the Allies refused demands to bomb the
transportation lines to the camps, the German industrialists
stepped up their demands for concentration-camp prisoner
labor.
Two heating-equipment businesses profited from providing
ovens to the camps. Farben reportedly contracted for the poison
chemicals used in the gas chambers. Firms actually made money
from manufacturing mattresses from human hair, fertilizer from
bones and soap from human fat.
The current lawsuits against large German companies seek
compensation for some of these crimes.
Just weeks ago, Deutsche Bank admitted for the first time
that the bank financed much of the construction of the
Auschwitz concentration camp--the fascist killing center.
And Bayer--then part of the Farben conglomerate--has been
charged with using concentration camp prisoners for medical
experimentation.
Finding your place
Courageous resistance was mounted during the Nazi terror
reign.
The concentration camp Sobibor opened in May 1942 and closed
on Oct. 14, 1943--the day after a prisoner uprising. Treblinka
opened in July 1942 and closed in November 1943--a rebellion by
prisoners in early August 1943 had destroyed much of the camp.
Resistance movements existed in almost every ghetto and
concentration camp in Europe. (Wiesenthal)
In many countries the Nazis were resisted by guerrilla
movements, led mostly by communists.
By 1945, the Soviet Red Army had turned the tide. It marched
west, defeating the Nazis and liberating many of the
concentration camps. But the toll on the Soviet Union was
staggering: According to CNN's anti-communist TV series "Cold
War," 30 million Soviet workers and peasants died resisting the
Nazis. Three million Soviet prisoners of war were executed.
The total human toll included almost 6 million European
Jews--two out of three--some of whom were also communists and
socialists. Five million non-Jews also perished: communists,
trade unionists, Roma (Gypsies), Poles, gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender people, mentally and physically disabled
individuals, and others.
This staggering fascist genocide ranks--along with the
deaths of millions of African people during the Middle
Passage--among capitalism's most terrible crimes against
humanity.
The horrors resulting from European fascism have deeply
influenced the political determination of generations of
activists since World War II. Today many people struggling for
social and economic justice are determined to battle
scapegoating.
They see fascism as the extension of racism, anti-Semitism,
demonizing of immigrants and women and children on welfare, gay
bashing and other forms of bigotry and national chauvinism.
So these principled anti-fascists position themselves to be
on the front lines in the battle against the right wing of the
political establishment. And some look to the liberal
establishment to help buttress their struggle.
But those German capitalists who didn't directly fund the
Nazis also did not block the rise of fascism.
The capitalist economic system--no matter what form of
state, in war and in peacetime--continues to generate the
all-out competitive drive for super-profits. That is why the
oppression of nationalities and other forms of bigotry and
discrimination are endemic to this system.
It is in the interests of those who collectively do the work
of the world every day to transform this class-riven economy
into one based on equality, planning and cooperation. This is
the revolutionary task of the working class, including its most
oppressed sectors.
Sources:
Pool, James. "Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of
Hitler's Rise to Power, 1918-1933" (Pocket Books: New York,
1978)
Pool, James. "Hitler and His Secret Partners: Contributions,
Loot and Rewards, 1933-1945" (Pocket Books: New York, 1997)
Fischer, Klaus P. "Nazi Germany: A New History" (Continuum:
New York, 1998)
Grunberger, Richard. "The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of
Nazi Germany 1933-1945" (Da Capo Press: New York, 1995)
Seldes, Georg. "Facts and Fascism" (New York: 1943)
Guerin, Daniel. "Fascism and Big Business" (Monad Press
Book: New York, 1973)
Noakes, J. and G. Pridham, eds. "Nazism 1919-1945--A
Documentary Reader," Vol. 2: State, Economy and Society
1933-1939 (Univ. of Exeter Press: England, 1984)
Manchester, William. "The Arms of Krupp: 1587-1968" (Little,
Brown & Co.: Canada, 1968)
Gregor, Neil. "Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich" (Yale Univ.
Press: New Haven, 1998)
The Simon Wiesenthal Center web site: www.wiesenthal.com
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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