And in the newest installment the Nazis get to do what they always intended to do, which reminds us that dystopias are best observed rather than practiced.
Chapter VII: Master Plan for the East and Building Germania, 1943-1946.
Without the Eastern Front to worry about anymore, at least for the medium term, a shift took place in the Nazi regime’s priorities. An occupational force consisting of some fifty divisions remained behind in the occupied Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, many of which were second and third rate divisions as they were usually sufficient for security purposes. Roughly 150 divisions and 3.000 aircraft were redeployed to Western and Southern Europe as well as North Africa. Industrial production was shifted away from tanks and artillery and toward airplanes and anti-aircraft guns.
While the war continued in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and in North Africa and was eventually concluded in the summer of 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler began to implement the Generalplan Ost (Master Plan for the East), which was the plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Generalplan Ost envisaged differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanization, destruction, expulsion and other fates, the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would be Germanized. In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines in Europe and whom the Nazis viewed as racially inferior. Jews (100%), Poles (85%), Byelorussians (75%), Ukrainians (65%) and Russians (50%) were considered racially undesirable and would be subjected to removal.
This number of people to be removed amounted to 45 million people that couldn’t be Germanized, of whom 31 million were racially undesirable with the other 14 million to be kept as slaves. In their place about 8-10 million Germans would be settled in an extended “living space” (Lebensraum). Because the number of Germans appeared to be insufficient to populate the vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht), namely Latvians and even Czechs, were also supposed to be resettled there. The “Small Plan” was to be put into practice as the Germans conquered the areas to the east of their pre-war borders and involved the extermination of the Jews, which continued unabated. The “Big Plan” to exterminate or ethnically cleanse all the other sub-humans commenced once peace had been concluded with the Soviet Union and sped up when the war ended in summer 1943.
Himmler used men freed up from frontline duty to vastly increase the expulsion of Poles and focus shifted more and more away from the General Government and toward the Polenlager. The Polenlager or Polish Camps were Nazi forced labour and concentration camps, originally intended for Poles from Silesia. Given that the General Government would also eventually be colonized, it made sense to start clearing that out too by beginning to work the Polish people to death in camps. Generalplan Ost estimated that only 15% of the Polish population was suitable for Germanization anyway. Most of them were judged to be not much better than Jews. Waffen SS divisions and units like the criminal Dirlewanger Brigade, which made even hardened SS veterans tremble with fear, began culling the Polish population in the General Government.
To make matters worse, the SS concocted a mass sterilization program for the inmates, rendering them infertile, which was supposed to eventually lead to a population decline since more Poles would die than were born. As far as female prisoners were concerned, their sterilization served a second purpose: SS men who were far from home now got an option for sexual release without the risk of racial pollution, i.e. the mixing of pure Aryan genes with “Slavic garbage genetic material”. This grew into the organized forced prostitution of tens of thousands of Polish women, which Himmler viewed as a lesser evil than rapes that led to mixed breeds being born. Addiction to opium and later heroine was used to make these women more compliant. Similar fates would befall the other peoples of Central and Eastern Europe if the Nazis had their way.
The prostitution scheme spawned plans that were even more disturbing, for as far as that was possible. Himmler made a statement at a meeting for his Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and Police Leaders, HSSPF) that took place at his Wewelsburg castle headquarters in August 1943. He stated: “The process of Ostsiedlung has been ongoing for a millennium. In a time that the grave consequences of racial miscegenation were not known, sexual relations between Germans and Slavs were undoubtedly common. This means that a subset of the Slavic population has Aryan genes in varying degrees. It’s our task to preserve those specimens that are of sufficiently superior Germanic genetic stock to be of use for the greater good of the Volksgemeinschaft.” The kidnapping and forced Germanization of Polish children with purportedly Aryan-Nordic traits continued and the project was expanded to the occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Over one million would be kidnapped to help raise the birth rate of Aryan children (resistant children would be sent to the concentration camps for forced labour or medical experiments). The kidnapping program was officially put under the authority of the Lebensborn program.
Lebensborn went further when Himmler authorized the selection of women from the occupied populations with desirable racial traits, starting by sifting through the women arriving at the Polenlager. In 1943-’44, 50.000 blonde, blue-eyed Polish women were used as sows, impregnated by SS men. The goal was to increase the Aryan birth rate even further and to achieve the desired phenotype through breeding back. Deemed a success, the program (which was essentially legalized rape and kidnapping) was expanded radically after the war. By 1950, the number of women in the program had increased tenfold, leading to 500.000 births every nine months, or 2 million every three years. About twenty years later, by 1965, more than 13 million children had been born as a result of Lebensborn on top of Germany’s normal population growth.
Exactly the same measures were unfolded in Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and those parts of Russia west of the Leningrad-Astrakhan line. Under SS supervision, forced labour camps were built by the prisoners themselves to extract resources like oil, coal, iron ore, manganese, peat, timber, grain and cotton or to provide workers for specific infrastructural projects like new asphalted roads, railroads, bridges, airfields and so on. Special attention was of course paid to estates, hotels and spas on the Crimea as it was to become a German Riviera. Under threat of violence, people worked 12-16 hour shifts while getting 1.000 calories a day at best and even the strongest eventually succumbed and died of disease, terrible physical abuse, malnutrition or a combination of those. To prevent sub-humans from breeding, mass sterilization was applied to female prisoners arriving in the concentration camps. The sterilized female prisoners thought to be attractive were spared hard physical labour, but wound up in brothels instead and were made dependent on drugs to ensure compliance. Those who were deemed to have Aryan-Nordic traits weren’t sterilized and were raped by SS men to produce children that were adopted by families in Germany. These women didn’t get any kind of drugs to mitigate the experience because of the potentially harmful effects on their children. Resistance and acts of sabotage were responded to with horrific violence: typically, the nearest German unit would move to a local town or village to execute all men, lock people in a central building like a church and then torch said building and/or spray it with bullets before raising the town to the ground.
Any “surplus sub-human people” that remained after all the aforementioned horrors were killed in mass executions or driven across the new border with the USSR with machine gun fire. The fate of those driven east made the Trail of Tears look humane: they were sent deep into Russia in cattle cars that stopped for hours or days at a time and only one bucket per car was available for sanitary needs, without toilet paper. In the summer the heat was almost unbearable, while in the winter people froze to death on these trains. After the malnourished and abused deportees crossed the border into the Soviet Union, Stalin had to figure out what to do with them. Most endured hardship as they were sent to southern parts of Siberia or to Central Asia to cultivate the steppe.
Acts of mass murder became easier as SS and Wehrmacht men arrived in the east that had been raised with Nazi ideology from the cradle. By the mid-50s a lot of the NCOs, both in the regular Wehrmacht and the SS, belonged to that age category and were so indoctrinated they could shoot Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and so on without a second thought. That enabled the continuation of the Master Plan for the East. The policies of ethnic cleansing by deportation and mass murder through forced sterilization as well as working people to death intensified as the resumption of the war loomed. In 1946 Hitler decided it was time to finish the job in the east and launched a war against the shaky rump-USSR still led by Stalin on May 26th.
As far as the fate of the Jews went, their horrific extermination continued unabated as they were no longer really needed to work given how many Slavs were available. About 95% of the Jews arriving in Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek and other extermination camps were therefore killed upon arrival in the gas chambers. The only exceptions were the Jewish communities in countries that were never directly occupied by Germany: Ireland, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the microstates Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino. Even Hitler’s principal ally in Europe, Mussolini, refused to deport Italy’s Jews and the Jewish communities of Italian-controlled areas such as Savoy, Nice and Crete. Franco followed the latter’s example and so did Bulgaria and Finland.
Meanwhile, the “Comprehensive Construction Plan for the Reich Capital” now started in earnest, after some preparatory work had been done during the war. The plan was motivated by the feeling that Berlin’s architecture was too provincial, and that there was a driving need to put Berlin on a par with, and exceed the quality of, other world capitals such as London, Paris and especially Rome. One of the pieces of Speer’s architecture already in place was the Reich Chancellery, which included a vast hall twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. The series of rooms comprising the approach to Hitler's reception gallery were decorated with a rich variety of materials and colours and totalled 220 metres in length. The gallery itself was 145 metres long. Hitler's own office was 400 square meters in size. From the outside, the chancellery had a stern, authoritarian appearance. Much more colossal constructions followed.
An Avenue of Splendours (German: Prachtallee) was the North-South Axis, running south from the crossing with the East-West Axis close to the Brandenburg Gate, following the course of the old Siegesallee through the Tiergarten before continuing down to an area just west of Tempelhof Airport (renamed Hermann Goering Airport). This new North-South Axis served as a parade ground, and was closed off to traffic. Vehicles were instead diverted into an underground highway running directly underneath the parade route. The plan also called for the building of two new large railway stations as the planned North-South Axis would have severed the tracks leading to the old Anhalter and Potsdamer stations, forcing their closure. These new stations would be built on the city’s main Hundekopf (dog’s head) geography S-Bahn ring with the Nordbahnhof in Wedding and the larger Südbahnhof in Tempelhof-Schöneberg at the southern end of the avenue. The Anhalter Bahnhof, no longer used as a railway station, was turned into a swimming pool.
At the northern end of the avenue on the site of the Königsplatz construction began on a large open forum known as Grosser Platz (Grand Square) with an area of around 350.000 square metres. This square would be surrounded by the grandest buildings of all, with the Führer's palace on the west side on the site of the former Kroll Opera House, the 1894 Reichstag Building on the east side and the third Reich Chancellery and high command of the German Army on the south side (on either side of the square’s entrance from the Avenue of Splendours).
On the north side of the plaza, straddling the river Spree, construction began on the planned centrepiece of the new Berlin, a marble and granite domed colossus, the Volkshalle (people's hall), designed by Hitler himself. It remains the largest enclosed space in the world. The building is almost 300 metres high and the dome by itself is 250 metres in diameter, sixteen times larger than the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, rising from a massive granite podium of 315 by 315 metres. Many of the Volkshalle’s interior features are reminiscent of the Roman Pantheon such as the coffered dome, though the seating arrangements followed those of the Colosseum. At the northern end of the building, a large 50 metre by 28 metre niche is surfaced with gold mosaic and encloses an eagle 24 metres high, beneath which was situated Hitler’s tribunal. From here he would address 180.000 listeners, some standing in the central round arena, others seated in three concentric tiers of seats crowned by one hundred marble pillars, 24 metres high, which rose to meet the base of the ceiling suspended from steel girders sheathed on the exterior with copper. On top of the dome's lantern was the German heraldic eagle clutching the globe of the Earth (Erdball) to emphasize Germany’s domination. The globe on the dome’s lantern was enhanced and emphasized by two monumental sculptures by Breker, each 15 metres high, which flanked the north façade of the building: at its west end Atlas supporting the heavens, at its east end Tellus supporting the Earth. When in use, the building has its own “weather” caused by the breathing and perspiration of 180.000 occupants precipitating in the high dome. Massive dehumidification and ventilation systems were latter installed to deal with that.
Another building that dominates Germania’s skyline (formerly Berlin) is the Arch of Triumph towards the southern end of the avenue, a triumphal arch based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but again, much larger; it’s almost one hundred metres high, and the Arc de Triomphe (at the time the largest triumphal arch in existence) fits inside its opening. Inside this generously proportioned monument, the 1.8 million names of all of Germany’s war dead of the Great War (1914-’18) were carved. In Hitler’s mind, the Second World War was waged in part to avenge the stab in the back delivered by the Jews and their leftist November Criminal puppets to the troops who hadn’t been defeated on the field of honour in 1918, both the veterans who survived and those who had died for the fatherland.
Germania also became the nexus of Hitler’s dreamed “Breitspurbahnen” or broad-gauge railways with a width of three metres on which double-deck coaches transported travellers in comfort akin to a hotel with ornate wooden panelling, classy bars and high end restaurants. Besides that, these super trains could also haul vast amounts of cargo, which was useful as the Ukraine and the Volga basin were now the Reich’s granaries. Four routes were realized: firstly an East-West route from Rostov to Paris through Donetsk, Poltava, Kiev, Lvov, Krakow, Kattowitz, Breslau, Cottbus, Germania, Hanover, Bielefeld, Aachen, Liège, and St. Quentin. The North-Southeast route connected Hamburg to Istanbul through Wittenberge, Leipzig, Gotha, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Munich, Simbach am Inn, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest and Varna. The North-South Parallel Route connected Germania and Rome through Dresden, Aussig, Prague, Jihlava, Znojmo, Vienna and Trieste. A second East-West line linked Munich to Barcelona through Augsburg, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Metz, Reims, Paris and Marseille. A third East-West line was added later to connect Germania to its main administrative seat in the east, Moscow, and had stops at Warsaw, Minsk and St. Petersburg.
Another major construction project was Linz, the Austrian town where Hitler had spent his childhood. Hitler wanted to turn Linz into a “German Budapest” – a city which, in Hitler’s mind, then surpassed German cities of the Danube in beauty. Linz was to be “the new metropolis of the Danube,” eclipsing Vienna, a city he detested. Linz would expand three or four times from its then current size. The bank of the Danube was built up with magnificent private homes, and a new “Hitler Centre” (Hitlerzentrum) was to be furnished with new community buildings. Major building projects were a “Strength through Joy” hotel, new municipal buildings designed by Hermann Giesler, an NSDAP party house designed by Roderick Fick, a Wehrmacht Headquarters, an Olympic Stadium, and “as a counter to the pseudoscience of the Catholic Church” an observatory representing “the three great cosmological conceptions of history – those of Ptolemy, of Copernicus and of Hörbiger.” A new Gau house for Reichsgau Oberdonau featured a hall and a tower, under which Hitler’s mausoleum was located. Monuments and buildings to commemorate the Anschluss were also built. A gigantic suspension bridge connected the banks of the Danube, which had a decorative frieze depicting the Nibelungen saga with monumental equestrian statues in pairs of Siegfried and Kriemhild and Gunther and Brünhild. The Führer Museum featuring a 150-metre (490 ft) long colonnade, contained the largest and most comprehensive painting collection in Europe, built around the art the Nazis had looted from Western Europe and stolen from rich Jews in Germany. The museum anchored Linz’s European Cultural Centre.
Meanwhile, doubts persisted at the time as to whether the marshy Berlin ground could have taken the load of the proposed projects, leading to the construction of an exploration building (Schwerbelastungskörper, literal translation: heavy load-bearing bodies), which existed near the site of the Arch of Triumph. Such a body was basically an extremely heavy block of concrete used by the architects to test how much weight the ground was able to carry. Instruments monitored how far the block sank into the ground. The heavy load-bearing body sank 18 centimetres in the three years it was to be used for testing, compared to a maximum allowable settlement of 6 cm. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it was unlikely the marshy soil could have supported such structures without further preparation. The solution was simple: the Slavic forced labourers building Hitler’s dream capital had to drive pilings all the way down to the bedrock. Nothing would stand in the way of completing World Capital Germania and any lives of slave labourers lost were irrelevant to the Nazis. Construction commenced in full in the autumn of 1943 and downtown Berlin would be a construction site for years to come.