rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE NEW ORDER 851claims for himself will be loaded into two railroad cars which will beattached to the Reich Marshal’s special train . . . to Berlin. 1165Many more carloads followed. According to a secret official German reportsome 137 freight cars loaded with 4,174 cases of art works comprising21,903 objects, including 10,890 paintings, made the journey from the West toGermany up to July 1944. 1166 They included works of, among others, Rembrandt,Rubens, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Murillo, Goya, Vecchio, Watteau,Fragonard, Reynolds and Gainsborough. As early as January 1941, Rosenbergestimated the art loot from France alone as worth a billion marks. 1167The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, though it reducedthe occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimes starvationand violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, might have beenexcused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by the harsh exigenciesof total war. But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler’s war machine.It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and Goering.All this plunder and spoliation the conquered populations could have endured– wars and enemy occupation had always brought privation in their wake.But this was only a part of the New Order – the mildest part. It was in theplunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-livedNew Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a levelseldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocentmen and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormentedin the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there werefour and a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberatelystarved to death and their remains – in order to remove the traces – burned.This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully documentedand testified to by the perpetrators themselves. What follows here – amere summary, which must because of limitations of space leave out a thousandshocking details – is based on that incontrovertible evidence, with occasionalcorroboration from the eyewitness accounts of the few survivors.SLAVE LABOR IN THE NEW ORDERBy the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreignerswere toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been roundedup by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water orany sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines.They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and oftenleft to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreign laborforce, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments andmunitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions,which stipulated that no war prisoners could be employed in such tasks. ∗ Thisfigure did not include the hundreds of thousands of other POWs who wereimpressed into the building of fortifications and in carrying ammunition to the∗ Albert Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production, admitted at Nuremberg that40 per cent of all prisoners of war were employed in 1944 in the production of weapons andmunitions and in subsidiary industries. 1168