How the "Good Nazi" Built a Slave Economy - WW2 Special

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

I do wonder what wehraboo think of this, note that the video debunk the clean wehrmacht too

👍︎︎ 106 👤︎︎ u/Thebunkerparodie 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Sorted comments by new, the whatasboutism is omnipresent.

👍︎︎ 85 👤︎︎ u/Rationalinsanity1990 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Ive said it before and ill say it again. The more i learn about Nazi Germany, the less i can understand how so many were on board with it.

👍︎︎ 50 👤︎︎ u/Cohacq 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

They also made a great video specifically targeting the clean wehrmacht myth, I love those guys.

👍︎︎ 26 👤︎︎ u/Jakutsk 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Yo Speer

👍︎︎ 22 👤︎︎ u/Artistic_Mouse_5389 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

So they were Socialists all along ! CHECKMATE LIBS!

/s

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/unbelteduser 📅︎︎ Sep 10 2021 🗫︎ replies

Funni dentist man

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/piant_genis1234 📅︎︎ Sep 10 2021 🗫︎ replies

Tno reference???

👍︎︎ 44 👤︎︎ u/Jurefranceticnijelit 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

The Dengist

Bottom Text

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/SampoCLOUD 📅︎︎ Sep 12 2021 🗫︎ replies
Captions
When you think of the biggest slave labor based economy in modern history, you might think that it’s the US Southern States of the mid 19th century. But it’s not the biggest… by 1942, Nazi Germany has created the biggest slave labor force in modern history. This is a WW2 in Real Time Special Episode on the Nazi German Slave Economy - I’m Spartacus Olsson. Slavery has been part of humanity, possibly since the origin of our species. Before the 19th century it was considered normal, and well into the 20th century serfdom was in many places still accepted. Russia, Sweden, and other European nations only abolish serfdom at the cusp of the 20th century. As WW2 is on the horizon, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, the US and the Japanese still maintain colonial territories held in some degree of serfdom. Although slavery has been abolished in the United States, the country remains racially divided, with most people of color living in a near indentured state. Across the world, the idea that there are master races and lesser races that should serve these masters is, arguably, a majority sentiment. In Mein Kampf Hitler rails against the injustice that has been imposed on the German Race by denying them a colonial empire. He is firmly convinced that the Aryan Race - in his confused musings we can only vaguely understand that he means ‘Europeans’ - have been the origin of all culture, and have a natural right to subjugate the rest of the world. Or as he puts it himself: “If we divide mankind into three categories--founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture--the Aryan alone can be considered as representing the first category. It was he who laid the groundwork and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.” He reimagines the history of civilization as a plant that has grown out of the subjugation by these “Aryans” of other peoples. He even thinks that the “Aryans” have grown to be the greatest race through the very act of subjugating and enslaving other peoples. “Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their new country offered them […] and profiting also by the abundance of manual labour furnished them by the inferior race, they developed intellectual and organizing faculties which had hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes.” These are central ideas towards the principles of racial policy of the Nazi ideology, and when they take power in Germany they set about to make them real. The Jew, synonymous for anything that is imagined to oppose the German race, is of course the main target. The plan is that stealing, or extorting the Jewish population will release a massive flood of money into the German economy. However, the idea that the tiny minority of Jews have any real impact on the German economy is an anti-Semitic myth. Their wealth, and control of business make up far less than 1% of the nation’s economy. That doesn’t stop the Nazis from pursuing their fantasy based policies - in the process of which they instead damage the basis for German economic growth. With the Nuremberg Race Laws, those considered Jewish are effectively banned from most economic activity starting in 1935. The Nazis then ban women from most forms of work that is not related to ‘typical female’ activities. As the Nazi reign tightens around German life more and more intellectuals, scientists, and skilled professional leave the country - either because they are Jewish, or simply opposed to the Nazis. Finally, Hitler’s plans for war funnels more and more men into the Wehrmacht. By 1938 the country’s economy has lost some its biggest brains, and a large portion of the German workforce has been excluded. On paper German unemployment goes down dramatically during this time - this is a combined effect of actual increases in employment, moving uninsured employees into the insured column, and excluding people like women from the unemployment data. But, the long and short of it is that the available German workforce has been reduced, and if the Nazi policies shall be maintained, the economy now needs some other source of laborers. To bridge the gap Nazi second in command, Hermann Göring orders the forced conscription of Jewish able bodied men, and anyone labeled as Arbeitsscheu ‘work shy’ into compulsory labor columns in 1938. By the summer of 1939, around 200,000 of these serfs are toiling mainly in public infrastructure projects. Many still live with their families, but some are transported to remote locations and incarcerated in one of the 30 indentured labor camps, now erected across the country. Private industry, and regional administrations are offered the serfs too, but express reluctancy by their employees to work with Jews, and unwillingness to rebuild their facilities to meet the ideological demand to keep the Jewish workers strictly separated. When Germany goes to war this method to feed bodies into the German war economy takes on monstrous proportions. The mobilization and conscription of more, and more civilian men into the armed forces aggravates the self inflicted labor shortage. Once Poland has been occupied they begin pressing Polish men and women into indentured labor, shipping them off to Germany. When they receive wages at all, these are not enough to keep them out of being indentured. This will be symptomatic to the Nazi slave operations. By contrast the Polish Jews are not included in these labor shipments for the Reich, although the first forced labor camps soon start springing up in the vicinity of the Ghettos, where by 1941 nearly all Poles considered Jewish are imprisoned, So the Poles arriving in the Reich do not have the stigma of Jewry, and the Nazis now find takers in the private sector as well. The entire German economy now profits from the slave system. From filmmakers like Leni Riefenstahl using slaves as extras and crew, to wealthy families holding slaves in their household staff, to individual farmers replacing their missing farmhands, to mid sized and big manufacturing companies filling their production lines. On top of being enslaved for labor, many young Polish women will also be forced into prostitution in the Wehrmacht brothels, and in private bordellos across the country. In essence the entire German occupied part of Poland is transformed into a reservoir of human livestock. If the conscription by year of birth and residence is not enough to fill the quotas, the Reich Labor Service organizes raids into the countryside to kidnap Poles, who are then sold on slave markets. One victim will recall: “We were so humiliated, frightened and also ashamed of our nakedness. They were very elegant, in uniform… We were blue, exhausted, skinny, ruined. […] we could not recognize each other anymore – our hair cut, in strange clothes. We cried terribly when we saw each other.” In March 1940, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler codifies the oppression into law, stipulating draconian punishments for any disobedience. Poles taken to the Reich are denoted by a P in their paper and on badges on their clothes - clearly signaling that they are non-citizens, and unprotected by any German civilian laws. Throughout the war some 1,4 million non-Jewish Poles will be enslaved in the Nazi German Reich. Another 300,000 Polish Prisoners of War will also be forced labor for the Nazi war machine. And that is the beginning of the next major escalation of the Nazi slave system. After the West-European campaign, well over a million POWs from France, Great Britain and the Benelux countries enter the German economy. By the spring of 1941, Germany holds 1.2 million POW’s and 1.3 million civilian workers as slaves - the vast majority of PoWs French, and the vast majority of civilians Polish. That is 8.4 percent of the German workforce. A year later, one million more civilians, again mostly Poles, have been enslaved. Tens of thousand more are added after the Baltic campaign. When Germany invades the USSR in June 1941, millions and millions of Soviet PoWs are taken, but they are not made slaves. Instead, they are deliberately starved to death as part of the Hunger Plan, within the Generalplan Ost. Between one and two million die in 1941 and early 42. But, by then, the Red Army PoWs begin to be moved into the concentration camp system, where they will be put to work. To administer these masses of slaves, the Nazis soon need a dedicated organization. In February 42 Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite Architect, takes charge of Organization Todt, after its first leader Fritz Todt dies in a plane crash. The organization was created in the 30s to carry out public works like the Autobahn System. The workers were recruited from unemployment programs. Speer is now going to transform Organization Todt into a slave labor service for the German war industry - and for that he will need many, many more slaves. The first major project begins already in March 42; the building of an Atlantic Wall along the northern French and Belgian coast, to hold off an Allied invasion there. By early 1942, Germany is also facing an increasing food shortage, again Speer proposes increased slave labor as the solution. To satisfy Speer’s needs, on March 21, 1942, Hitler appoints Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel to become director of the Arbeitseinsatz, the office for labor mobilization. He starts to ‘mobilize’ millions of workers all over Europe. Masses of men and women, and children, twelve years and older, are taken from the Baltics, Belorussia and Ukraine. Sauckel’s pressgangs are soon also active in France, the Benelux, Italy, and the Czech Protectorate, delivering an additional 2.8 million slaves until June 1943, bringing the total of foreign laborers in the German Reich territory to 6.5 million. There is one problem here though, while the slaves are treated abominably, dying form mistreatment by the thousands, there is still a degree of resistance by ordinary Germans to ruthlessly work other people to death, and then just replace them. With euphemisms like Ostarbeiter, Hilfsarbeiter, and Freiwillige Arbeitskräfte, they convince themselves that what they are doing is not really slavery, and perfectly acceptable. To expand faster, and cheaper the Nazis need a source of people that no one cares about. They turn to the hundreds of thousands just waiting to be put to work in the Concentration Camps. The original concept for the camps was meaningless physical labor to break the spirit of the victims, like crushing stones into gravel by hand. It’s the Dachau Model, conceived by the Dachau camp commandant, Theodor Eicke already in 1933. But as the camps start growing and increasing in number the cost of building and maintaining the camps increases. The solution is to let inmates build the camps themselves, like when the first prisoners in Auschwitz are taken from the Buchenwald Camp and forced to build their own new prison in early 1940. But while this might solve the construction cost for the camps, it does not resolve the continued labor shortage. Or as Himmler puts it in the Summer of 1942: “If we do not fill our camps with slaves - in this room I mean to say things very firmly and very clearly - with worker slaves, who will build our cities, our villages, our farms without regard to any losses, then even after years of war we will not have enough money to be able to equip the settlements in such a manner that real Germanic people can live there and take root in the first generation.” The solution has already been engineered at Auschwitz, where Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss has long realized that he is sitting on a goldmine. Tens of thousands of potential workers, secluded from the public eye. Together with German companies like IG Farben, Siemens, and Krupp, he sets up the first dedicated closed industrial scale, forced labor camp in mid 1941. In the autumn of 1942, IG Farben even begins construction on its very own Concentration Camp, Auschwitz III Monowitz to hold 3,500 slaves working at the adjacent IG Farben plant . At Monowitz, death, and exhaustion leading to being murdered will reduce the workforce by one fifth each month, always replenished by new inmates from the other Auschwitz camps. While Höss, and the third most powerful man in the SS, Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, and overseer of the concentration camp system start expanding their business venture, the rest of the SS and Nazi leadership debate the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Work them to death, or kill them right away? Until that decision falls, like in Auschwitz, Ghetto administrators set up production lines inside the Ghettos, and rent out their free labor to yet more companies. But, in December 1941, Hitler finally sides with extermination, although a small percentage of Jews will be selected for labor on arrival at the gas chambers. It is never more than ten percent, but that will still provide hundreds of thousands of additional bodies for the slave machine. A motor to the German economy, running on blood, grinding down human beings, mercilessly breaking their bodies and spirits, often until they die. The Nazis will enslave up to 15 million people, about 8.4 million civilians, 4.6 million prisoners of war, and about 1.7 million concentration camp inmates. Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs, 60% or roughly 3.3 million die in captivity, 1 million of them worked to death. 45,000 French PoWs and 35,000 civilians, 10,000 Belgians, 25,000 Czechoslovaks, 10,000 Dutch, 20,000 Italian and thousands of other nationalities also succumb. But the largest civilian death tolls by country are from Eastern Europe with 130,000 Poles and 250,000 Soviet citizens from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. One in six of the slaves will not live to be liberated. Over 2.5 million men, women and children die when they are forced to live, and work under the most degrading circumstances imaginable. The survivors will carry the scars for the rest of their lives, but they will have prevailed in the face of absolute evil, or in the words of Belgian Resistance fighter José Fosty, interned at Buchenwald: "The inmates, beaten until they were half dead, injured or tortured, were able to keep their dignity. Only the executioner was without honour.” Or as Alex Hacker, survivor of Flossenbürg, Mittelbau-Dora, and Bergen-Belsen will one day write on the disappearing wall at the Mittelbau-Dora memorial: “Message to Hitler: I’m still here, you bastard.” In 2021 Alex Hacker is 95 years old, and lives in Toronto, Canada. Never Forget.
Info
Channel: World War Two
Views: 139,722
Rating: 4.8858342 out of 5
Keywords: The Great War, Wold War Two, WWII, WWI, Axis, Pacific War, European War, TimeGhost, WW2, Indy Neidell, Indy Neidell WW2, Second World War, World War Two Day by Day, World War Two in realtime, World War Two YouTube, YouTube, Documentary, Historian, History, Forced Labor, Slave Labor, Slaves, exploitation, Hitler, Himmler, Todt, Sauckel, Speer, Arbeitseinsatz, labor force, Organization Todt, Atlantic Wall, Labor camp, IG Farben, Auschwitz Monowitz, Jewish, Holocaust, Genocide, Eicke, Alex Hacker
Id: _eqk24it02M
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)
Published: Thu Sep 09 2021
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.