Cut off from foreign sources of capital, Germany paid for World War II through taxes and ruthless exploitation of occupied regions. Levies on conquered peoples amounted to 40 percent of the income raised by internal taxation, and 42 percent of that tribute came from France. The number of slave labourers deployed by various arms of the regime peaked at 7,100,000 in 1944; this figure included prisoners of war and “racial enemies” condemned to slavery until death in SS camps.

Seen only in cold economic terms, Nazi genocide against Jews and other groups, racially or ideologically or otherwise defined, was the height of irrationality. As early as January 1939 Hitler gave vent to his pathological hatred and fear of the Jews before the Reichstag: “If the international Jewish financiers…succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war the result will be the obliteration of the Jewish race in Europe.” The war gave Hitler the opportunity to seek a “final solution.” In 1939–40 the Nazis considered using Poland or Madagascar as dumping grounds for Jews. But the invasion of the U.S.S.R. emboldened Hitler, Göring, and SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich to decide instead on mass extermination in camps at Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Large numbers of SS troops, as well as railroads and rolling stock, were absorbed in capturing, transporting, and putting to death as many as 12,000 Jews per day. The total by war’s end would reach 6,000,000, almost half from Poland, and some 2,000,000 others including Gypsies, clergy, Communists, and other resisters. SS troops accompanied the regular army into the Soviet Union in 1941 and made racial war on the Slavs as well in order to prepare the farmlands of Ukraine for German settlement.

News of the Holocaust reached the West slowly but surely, although Auschwitz was able to keep its monstrous secret for more than two years after the first gassings in May 1942. Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva served as a conduit for information about what was occurring in Nazi Europe, but his and others’ efforts to promote action on the part of the Allies broke against political and practical barriers. The British, worried by the prospect of Arab revolt, limited Jewish emigration to Palestine, while quotas elsewhere in the world meant that even those Jews who managed to escape Europe sometimes had nowhere to go. Reports appearing in Western newspapers inspired the Allies to make a declaration on December 17, 1942, condemning “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination,” and on January 22, 1944, Roosevelt established a War Refugee Board “to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all Jews and other minorities.” But the Allies were unable to take direct action of any sort until the capture of Italy brought Allied bombers within range of the camps. Jewish leaders were then misled by hints that the Germans might negotiate about the Jews. Finally, after June 1944, when escapees confirmed the existence and nature of Auschwitz, the World Jewish Congress requested bombing of the gas chambers. But the Allied Bomber Command judged that its efforts should be directed only at military targets and that the best way of helping the Jews was to hasten the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Strategic bombing

Allied strategic bombing was the most deadly form of economic warfare ever devised and showed another side of the indiscriminateness of industrial war. But in mid-1941 the British Chiefs of Staff soberly concluded that morale, not industry, was Germany’s most vulnerable point and ordered Sir Arthur Harris of the RAF Bomber Command to concentrate on “area bombing” of cities. Churchill’s scientific adviser Professor L.A. Lindemann of Oxford (later Lord Cherwell) concurred in April 1942 that one-third of all Germans could be rendered homeless in 15 months by strategic bombing of cities. The Royal Air Force accordingly assigned its new Lancaster four-engine bombers to a total war on German civilians. After attacks on Lübeck and the Ruhr, Harris sent a thousand planes against Cologne on May 30–31 in an attack that battered one-third of the city. In 1943, after an interlude of bombing German submarine pens, the Lancasters launched the Battle of the Ruhr totaling 18,506 sorties and the Battle of Hamburg numbering 17,021. The fire raids in Hamburg killed 40,000 people and left a million homeless. The Royal Air Force then hit Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944) with 20,224 sorties, avenging many times over all the damage done by the Luftwaffe to London.

By early 1943 the U.S. 8th Air Force joined in the air campaign but eschewed terror bombing. Its B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators conducted daylight precision bombing of industrial targets. As a result, they suffered heavy losses that climaxed in October 1943 over the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants, when the United States lost 148 bombers in a week. The Army Air Forces suspended daylight sorties for months until the arrival of a long-range fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Bombing then resumed and concentrated on the German oil industry, creating a serious shortage that virtually grounded the Luftwaffe by the time of the D-Day invasion. The effectiveness of strategic bombing is a subject of great debate, since German war production actually increased over the years 1942–44. German engineers became masters at shielding equipment, restoring it to operation in a matter of days, or even moving plants underground. Nor did the German people crack under British devastation of their towns and homes. But the air offensive did force the Germans to divert as many as 1,500,000 workers to the constant task of rebuilding and established the Allied mastery of the air that permitted the success of the Normandy landings.