This chapter on the German Confederation examines the largest cornerstone of the new European security system, designed to stabilise the European centre and provide an institutional structure for the cooperation of the thirty-eight remaining German states in relation to the other powers. After addressing and commenting upon the (lack of) historiography on the Bund, the chapter squarely puts this analysis of the Confederation in the context of European collective security operations, with the Bund as one of the pillars of this new post-Napoleonic security edifice, especially tasked with securing a ‘double balance of power’. The chapter ultimately fleshes out the role of the Confederation as laid down in the Bundeskriegsverfassung: to provide security for the states of the German Confederation and at the same time be the ‘pacific state of Europe’ (Heeren).

PERSECUTORY POLICY IN 1938 AND INITIAL PLANS FOR FORCED LABOR

Historical researchers and the public still usually associate forced labor by German Jews in the Nazi period with work in concentration camps, or sometimes with assignment to industrial enterprises shortly before deportation. The fact that forced labor had already functioned as an integral component of anti-Jewish policy since 1938 was scarcely known until recently. In the concepts and plans for persecution of Jews developed after 1933 by leading Nazis, there was initially no reference to forced labor. The foremost objective was rapid and complete expulsion of Jewish Germans from Germany. However, with the Anschluss, 200,000 additional Jews came under German rule. At the same time, obstacles to mass emigration proliferated. The greater the number of persecutory measures introduced, the deeper the Jews sank into poverty. Without financial means, leaving remained illusory for most Jews. At the same time, willingness abroad to accept refugees diminished. It dawned on the Nazi leadership that their goal of expelling all Jews could no longer be attained with the methods used before.

Thus, ideas about forced labor first evolved primarily as a spontaneous means of exerting pressure to force departure, then later as a planned element of the changed persecutory policy. At the end of May 1938, for example, Hitler demanded that “asocial and criminal Jews” be arrested to “perform important excavation work throughout the Reich.” Whether this was intended as a real work project or not is difficult to assess.

ESTABLISHMENT OF AN UNUSUAL FORCED-LABOR AGENCY

Little more is known about the forced labor of Polish Jews in Silesia than about the use of Jews from the Warthegau in the Old Reich. The forced labor and camps predominantly for Jews from eastern Upper Silesia differ more in structure and control from the camps opened in connection with segregated labor deployment than do the camps of the Reich Autobahn authorities, because in Silesia the SS took over control from the labor administration.

In eastern Upper Silesia (occupied after the attack on Poland and later to become part of the restructured province of Upper Silesia) the German authorities quickly shut Jews out of the economy and trade. (See map 8, p. 215.) The number of people without earnings or means grew rapidly. Initially, the plan was to deport the Jewish population out of the region expeditiously, but despite transports to Nisko during the fall, this objective for the most part had not been achieved by summer 1940. Himmler therefore ordered, most likely on September 12, 1940, that an SS agency be established to intern the Jews of eastern Upper Silesia “energetically” in “separate camps” and to force them to work “in quarries and on streets.” He appointed SS Brigadeführer Albrecht Schmelt to the position of “Special Commissioner of the Reichsführer SS for Utilization of Foreign Nationals as Labor in Upper Silesia” (Sonderbeauftragter des Reichsführers der SS für fremdvölkischen Arbeitseinsatz in Oberschlesien) and personally installed him in his new office.

For millions of people in German-occupied countries in World War II, forced labor was the order of the day. As one of the first persecutory measures after occupation, the National Socialists regularly imposed forced labor on the local Jewish population, whether in Poland, the Soviet Union, Norway, Serbia, the Netherlands, France, or even Tunisia. Utilization of forced labor began in Germany itself after Kristallnacht at the end of 1938, with obligatory assignment of German Jews to manual labor in municipalities and private enterprises. Forced labor ended where it began, in Germany, with the exploitation of Hungarian Jews and concentration camp prisoners in underground construction and factories for war production. At the zenith of Jewish forced labor, more than one million Jewish men and women, many of them elderly or young people, toiled for the German economy in occupied Europe.

After the war, Hugo Schriesheimer wrote about his experiences as a forced laborer in the Nazi state: “It was heavy physical labor to which we were not accustomed…. I thought of the process in biblical times, when the Jews in Egypt had to perform compulsory labor for the pharaoh and to haul bricks for his temple…. Except that our tormentor was not the pharaoh but Hitler.” As for Hugo Schriesheimer, forced labor thus shaped the daily lives of countless Jews under Nazi rule. Almost every Jewish family was affected directly or indirectly.

TEN THOUSAND GERMAN JEWS FOR THE AUTOBAHN: A PLAN OF THE SS AND FRITZ TODT

In mid-October 1940, Arthur Greiser, the Reichsstatthalter in Posen, announced to journalists that he “had received permission to construct a Reich Autobahn from Frankfurt an der Oder to Posen that would provide work for a large number of unemployed Warthegau Jews.” Against the background of years-long persecution of Jews on the one hand, and on the other the forced labor introduced since the beginning of the war in the occupied Polish territories for the Jews living there, this announcement of a special forced-labor project to develop the east–west connection critical to the war was nothing spectacular. Buried in this news, however, was an ideologically explosive problem: Part of the stretch of road was located on Old Reich territory, the region that all the efforts of the National Socialists had sought since 1933 to “cleanse” of Jews – whatever their nationality. From the Nazi perspective, establishing dozens of labor camps for Polish Jews in this sector was out of the question.

The responsible officials therefore initially intended to employ German Jewish forced laborers for this segment. For this, they actually could have relied on the help of the Reich labor administration, which had been arranging segregated labor deployment since the beginning of 1939. Nevertheless, the General Inspector for the German Roadway System (Generalinspektor für das Deutsche Straßenwesen, or GIS), Fritz Todt, at the beginning of October 1940 pressed the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), not the labor administration, to supply laborers quickly to the highway construction sites important for the war.

THE LABOR CAMPS UNTIL THE DEPORTATIONS IN 1941

Under the direction of the Reich labor administration, a network of at least forty now-confirmed camps arose on German territory – independent of the concentration camp system – between 1939 and 1941; that camp system, mostly for German but also for Austrian Jews, has not been described in the literature before now (see map 2, p. 35). In 1939, the Security Main Office wrote in its first situation report, which was intended for a broader audience, “Many Jews became unemployed when Jewish commercial establishments were shut down. In many places, establishment of collective labor camps for Jews became necessary.” While this sounded rather laconic, and the measures haphazard, the Jewish section of the SS Security Service openly expressed the underlying intent in an internal report some months later: “In the businesses in which Jews must work directly with Germans,” it stated, contacts occurred “even though separate eating and changing facilities for Jews had been established,” which indicated “how little effect the National Socialist views on race have had,” especially in Catholic regions. For that reason, the report continued, the SD was pleased that on large construction projects, “use of Jewish labor” could “be effected smoothly,” because “the Jews were housed in camps where they could be kept completely separate from the population living in the vicinity.”

Initiatives of municipal welfare offices had established separate camps for anti-Jewish labor programs even before segregated labor deployment was established.

ANNEXATION, ANTI-JEWISH POLICIES, AND THE LABOR MARKET

Photographs in which Jewish men and women can be seen cleaning Vienna's streets, forced to do so by the SA and SS and surrounded by curious onlookers, illustrate the reports on Austria and persecution in the Nazi era. These images of public humiliation rituals from the days after Austria's annexation to the German Reich dominate our historical memory today. At the same time, scarcely any pictures or reports from the special labor camps for Jews established after 1939 have entered public consciousness, despite the fact that thousands of Austrian Jews had to perform the most strenuous possible forced labor there for months or years. Studies on the persecution of Jews in Austria, or Vienna, ignored this subject. So far, Austrian research on the National Socialists has in fact associated forced labor with the concentration camps alone.

As already stated, the expulsion of Jewish Germans was regarded within the Nazi leadership as the uncontested objective of persecution, even after Austria's annexation in March 1938. Not until summer 1938 did the concept of forced labor surface, initially more as a spontaneous means of applying pressure, the way it was in Austria, with the objective of forcing departure. The reasons for reorienting persecutory policies emerged earlier and more noticeably in Austria than in the Old Reich, because Austrian Jews' social situation was traditionally far worse than that of German Jews and deteriorated enormously after March 1938 as an effect of brutal persecution.