Abstract
This book sets out to answer a question that is often asked about the relationship between the systematic deportation and murder of Europe’s Jewish population in the ‘Final Solution’ and the German military effort on the Eastern Front. Since, according to Yaron Pasher, an estimated 700,000 to one million were deported eastwards in 1942 alone, there must be a prima facie case for arguing that at times and for certain operations, the Jewish deportations must have had a substantial impact on German military effectiveness.
This is a difficult case to prove because it is based on an untestable counterfactual: if more trains had been available would the German army have used them and would it have made a difference? Pasher concludes that at key moments it would have made a difference. He suggests that a couple more divisions moved up to the Moscow front in late 1941 might have enabled the Germans to take Moscow; he poses the hypothesis that an extra division at Stalingrad might have saved the 6th Army, though this seems on the face of it implausible. He also suggests that German logistics, unexpectedly reliant on horses on the Eastern Front, suffered from the diversion of cattle trucks to move Jews, which could instead have moved horses and fodder to Russia, or later on could have supplied the German army in France, where it struggled to cope with a rail network constantly under attack. He cites occasional complaints from military commanders who thought the deportations hampered short-term movement of resources for the army as further evidence that the deportations were a strategic mistake.
This argument begs a great many questions and it is not helped by the nature of the evidence that Pasher mobilizes. Much of the book gives a sketch of German strategy and operations based heavily on secondary sources. A rich list of archive sources can be found at the end of the book, but the notes show that archives have been used very sparingly despite the overwhelming amount of evidence available for every aspect of German operations and supply on the Eastern Front. A closer examination of particular operations and the organization of supplies would have given Pasher the opportunity to test his hypothesis more rigorously and to rely less on the published literature. There are also problems with the argument itself. The number of locomotives and trucks involved in the deportations has to be set alongside the total movement of rail-borne resources over time. The Reichsbahn moved millions of people around Germany and occupied Europe every week of the year. As a percentage of these passenger-miles over a three-year period, the deportations would look very small indeed. Nor is it the case that the Jewish deportations alone cost railway time; over these three years some seven million foreign workers and POWs were moved to the Reich; by 1944 some eight million evacuees had left Germany’s major cities to escape the bombing. This was a continent on the move and, awful though the experience of deportation was compared with other transports, it constituted a small fraction of overall movement by rail.
There is a case to be made that the deliberate mass murder of Europe’s Jews deprived the German war economy of a large quantity of skilled labour, which was in short supply by 1943. This too is a negative effect difficult to test, and the regime never shrank from seizing labour resources wherever they could be found. Counterfactual calculations of loss are much harder than calculating the gains made by expropriating Jewish homes, furnishings, wealth, and property, about which there is firm evidence of the net addition the Jewish persecution made to the German war effort. Pasher has certainly opened up the terms for a discussion of the negative impact of Jewish deportations on German military operations, but the thesis will need a more convincing set of proofs before anything more concrete can be said about what that relationship might be.