Wartime Third Reich 30: Hitler's Unsolvable Human Resource Dead End

Chang Siyong (public number: sense of common sense) today

Dead knots on the total amount

Before the war began in 1939, the total population of Germany was about 69 million, and together with the population of the regions it annexed, Austria and other regions, it totaled about 80 million people. At that time, the populations of France and The United Kingdom were 41.9 million and 48 million, respectively, and Poland was 34 million. Although the combined populations of France, Great Britain, Poland, and Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were much larger than germany's population at the time, the populations of their individual countries were far smaller than those of Germany; and hitler's blitzkrieg was a rapid and overwhelming victory on the Western Front, and it seemed that Nazi Germany had more abundant human resources.

After 1942, however, as the wars in the East became more and more brutal, Hitler and the Nazi authorities felt more and more deeply that human resources had become the strongest binding force on Germany's wartime military and economy.

First, the Soviet Union, which was then a population of 160 million, had a steady stream of manpower to replenish its troops and invest in the wartime economy. For Nazi Germany, as the fighting on the Eastern Front became brutal, from June 1941 to May 1944, the German armed forces lost an average of 60,000 troops per month on the Eastern Front. In addition, the Germans lost thousands of troops due to capture, wounding, and illness.

Secondly, with the brutality of the war on the front line, the requirements for military production and economic growth in the rear have been further aggravated, and it is also urgent to increase the investment of human resources. Later, as the United States declared war on Germany, the pressure was greater, and the total number of dead knots was more "dead".

Third, the war on the Eastern Front strengthened the confidence of the people on the Western Front and the German-occupied areas in resisting Nazi rule, making it impossible for the Nazis to draw forces from the Western Front to reinforce the Eastern Front.

What to do? To this end, on 21 March 1942, Hitler created a new position called Plenipotentiary for the Redeployment of Labour, which was specifically responsible for recruiting new foreign workers.

Thus, throughout the war, the Third Reich had nearly 8 million foreign workers. Among them: foreign workers account for 46% in agriculture, 33% in mining, 30% in metals, 32% in construction, 28% in chemical industry and 26% in transportation. In the last year of the war, more than a quarter of Germany's workforce was foreign citizens.

Structurally dead knots

In order to fill the shortfall, in 1942 the Nazi authorities recruited nearly 1 million new recruits by lowering the age of recruitment and raising the upper limit of the age of recruitment; another 200,000 were recruited from the workers of the military industry, which until then enjoyed the privilege of not being recruited.

Thus, the greater the number of German casualties on the Eastern Front, the greater the number of formerly protected German military industrial workers forcibly conscripted, and these industries required more foreign workers to fill the labor vacancies left by their own employees.

Initially Nazi Germany captured a large number of French and British by requisitioning its invasions to occupy the western countries to engage in military production. By July 1940, 200,000 of them had been sent to Germany, and a month later, that number had soared to 600,000, and by October it had surged to 1.2 million. But the results are not ideal. By December 1940, more than half of the prisoners of war, like the Poles, had been sent to farm work.

As a result, labour vacancies in weapons production had to be filled by civilian volunteers. They were recruited from the occupied countries of Western Europe and the allies of Germany, so in theory their remuneration and working conditions should be in line with those of german workers. As of October 1941, 300,000 civilian workers in Germany were from Western European countries, as well as 270,000 Italians, 80,000 Slovaks and 35,000 Hungarians. Because the Nazi government was reluctant to raise the salaries of foreign workers and improve their working environment, this would arouse the indignation of the people in the country, which in turn made the foreign workers very dissatisfied.

The brutality of the fighting forced the Nazi authorities to further intensify the recruitment of civilian foreign skilled workers in the western occupied areas. On 6 June 1942, Hitler and Vichy Chancellor Pierre Reivar agreed to release 50,000 French prisoners of war in return for sending 150,000 civilian workers to Germany, an exchange program that would be further expanded. In early 1942, the Nazis demanded that one-third of all Of France's metalworkers – a total of 150,000 skilled workers – be transferred to Germany, while at the same time asking France to send 250,000 workers from all walks of life to Germany. By December 1943, there were more than 666,000 French workers working in Germany, along with 223,000 Belgian workers and 274,000 Dutch workers.

Because these civilian skilled workers were forcibly recruited by the Germans, coupled with poor remuneration and working conditions, these workers were passively willing to resist. In this way, the greater the pressure exerted by the German side, the stronger the resistance of the people.