Now I Am in Distant Germany, It Could Be That I Will Die: Colonial Precedent, Wartime Contingency, and Crisis Mentality in the Transition from Subjugation to Decimation of Foreign Workers in the Nazi Ruhr

• Other Authors: Osmar, Christopher Michael (author)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: History
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/2018_Fall_Osmar_fsu_0071E_14915

By the end of the Second World War over half a million foreign civilians were living within the confines of a system of forced labor in and around the Ruhr region of Germany. While the use of some degree of coercion had characterized this foreign labor deployment scheme since its institution in 1939, mass execution was not introduced as a tool for controlling foreign workers until September 1944. What prompted this resort to extreme violence? The conventional explanation for so-called crimes of the end phase of this sort has been that the collapse of German society at the end of the war removed constraints on ideologically committed perpetrators who had become increasingly radicalized and brutalized by the war, creating a vacuum of authority where they could act on violent impulses. This dissertation seeks to correct the prevailing view, arguing instead that moments of crisis activated longstanding institutional and cultural norms that endorsed specific kinds of violence within specific contexts, and that a series of these crises in western Germany prompted the resort to executions as a temporary measure to prevent societal collapse within a restructured but still functioning system of authority. This dissertation traces the genealogy of end phase violence and the wider system for controlling forced labor back to the German colonial experience. Colonial notions of extracting labor within the tight controls of an apartheid regime persisted into the Third Reich, as did patterns of thinking that criminalized resistance to domination and justified the utilization of extreme violence when resistance occurred within a climate of crisis. Still, there was not a straight line from Africa to the mass execution of foreign workers in the Ruhr, and norms established in the colonies were malleable and subject to change when confronted by historical contingency. Nazi conception of race and community elaborated on the colonial foundation, while the subsequent conquest and subjugation of people in the East, along with the experience of the partisan war in the Soviet Union, further refined ideas about managing coerced labor and resistance to it. The Second World War also introduced problems that had not been encountered in the colonies. With the weaponization of morale, Allied and National Socialist propaganda organizations vied for control of both attitudes about foreign workers and the attitudes of the foreigners themselves. The strategic bombing campaign was an important component of this morale war in which foreign workers would play a role. In considering the protection to afford to foreigners threatened by bombs, German captors were confronted with questions about how to balance economic and ideological needs, and often determined that the lives of foreigners were expendable. In the end, Germany won the morale war, and the will of the people to continue to resist did not break. The Allies were victorious, however, in the propaganda battle over perceptions of foreigners, succeeding in instilling a deep fear of an impending foreigner uprising the minds of German security forces. When the war front finally reached the German border it brought with it a crisis that would prompt a shift in the Gestapo's frame of reference from that of domestic policing to that of rear-area security. This shift activated norms for combating recalcitrant forced laborers developed in the colonies and filtered through the experience of the anti-partisan war. Even in the end phase, however, crisis was not a perpetual state. The Gestapo's reliance on violence fluctuated as the intensity of the emergency ebbed and flowed with the local contingencies of the war. Amidst these crises Berlin reorganized the Gestapo in the Ruhr and relinquished some of its authority over them, but it remained intact and continued to engage with local, regional, and national authorities in negotiating its execution policy. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Fall Semester 2018. === November 14, 2018. === Colonialism, Forced Labor, Gestapo, National Socialism, Propaganda, War Crimes === Includes bibliographical references. === Nathan Stoltzfus, Professor Directing Dissertation; Daniel Maier-Katkin, University Representative; George Williamson, Committee Member; Will Hanley, Committee Member; Jonathan Grant, Committee Member.