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This below is Chapter 4 Section 8:
Total Mobilization
Comprehensive mobilization is with good reason regarded as the most general structural feature on which all totalitarian states agree. But it should not be overlooked that a certain kind of mobilization was already a basic characteristic of the liberal type of society which until the outbreak of the world war was generally regarded as the modern one. It stood in contrast to the traditional or static society in which agriculture was by far the most important branch of production, the monetary system was only of secondary importance, traffic was not little developed and the individual estates stood side by side in a largely segregated manner. It was the Industrial Revolution which gradually dissolved this traditional structure, and while the French Revolution was by no means in all its factors and manifestations a direct continuation or consequence of this more original and profound revolution, it nevertheless contributed significantly to the progress of the mobilization by breaking down the class barriers, promoting the banking system, bringing the nobility and church estates into free trade and, above all, by creating a new army organization that replaced the recruitment of mercenaries with general conscription. The freeing of the peasants in Prussia also belonged to this context, as did the incipient formation of the press and the parties. But only the state socialists envisaged a mobilization that would mean the complete service of all individuals by the state, which would be the only entrepreneur to organize vast armies of labor for the benefit of the whole people. The end, of course, was always to be the true freedom of the individual, which liberalism promised but did not realize because it did not get beyond a merely negative and therefore egotistical concept of freedom.
If one disregards the ultimate goals and global hopes, then, according to a few unequivocal statements from Lenin, the Russian revolution was nothing more than a comprehensive mobilization born of necessity, which gathered together through concentration and “forced syndication” the country’s small forces and put each individual into the service, self-assertion, and further development of the state. In the early days, however, the emphasis was still entirely on the military. Mobilizing all resources and, if necessary, using scorched-earth tactics was what Lenin called for in his February 21, 1918 appeal “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger,” which had in mind the possibility of the Germans resuming the war. This danger passed quickly because the peace of Brest-Litovsk was signed, but the civil war that soon broke out did not permit relaxation, and by means hitherto unknown a new army was created from the ruins of the old one, which eventually included several million soldiers. The commander-in-chief of the Red Army, S. S. Kamenev, later explained that what was absolutely new in warfare during those years was the demand “to subordinate the whole internal life of the country to the war.”
This was not quite right in the literal sense, as a glance at the German “Hindenburg Program” of 1916 and Ludendorff’s corresponding demands shows. Incidentally, it is well known how much Lenin was fascinated by the example of the German wartime economy. What was really characteristic and novel was that the Red Army was not really demobilized even after the end of the civil war and that the war economy continued. At the beginning of 1920, on Trotsky’s orders, a number of Red Army units were reorganized into labor armies and deployed en masse in the national economy. But conversely, peasant labor was being militarized, and 6 million peasants with about the same number of horses were being mustered to do a variety of jobs. The urban populace was also called up through the “Communist Saturdays,” which Party members led the way with unpaid work.
Given the character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a party of change, progress and energy, there was no doubt from the outset that the introduction of the New Economic Policy would mean only a limited phase of détente. As early as 1920, a separate department (“Uchraspred”) had been set up within the Central Committee bureaucracy, responsible for “mobilizing, transferring and appointing party members.” Such mobilizations soon extended to Komsomol members, and they might as well have included the obligation to take part in construction work in the Far East as as the assumption of certain tasks in the administration of the party or youth league. What everywhere in the West had been the result of slow development involving many factors was now brought about by orders from the headquarters and by decisions of the will. Another type of mobilization was the new marriage legislation, which made divorce possible through the unilateral decision of one of the partners and seemed to be a consequence of the complete equality of women, an equality that above all brought the labor power of all women into all branches of the national economy.
Like Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, veils and harems, and then madrasas and mosques disappeared in the Muslim parts of the Soviet Union by the will of the supreme authorities and their party. Trucks took the place of camels, and textile machines supplanted hand-weavers. But the greatest and most successful of all mobilizations was collectivization and the first five-year plan. The lives of all peasants were fundamentally transformed, industrial plants and settlements grew up in the steppes and virgin forests, office buildings and asphalt roads arose amidst the wooden houses of the old cities. But many ready-made industrial plants were also imported from capitalist countries and set up under the direction of American or German engineers; this resulted in unheard-of demands on the workers, who often had to master in a few months what in America had been the result of many years of work.
The imports, however, had to be paid for, and the dark root of this industrialization was the unthinking deforestation of huge woodlands, the ruthless use of forced labor by the kulaks who had been driven from their homeland, the poorest living conditions, and a rationing which hardly provided the most elementary necessities of life to the individual. The extensive industrial espionage in Western countries must also be counted among the dark aspects. From this point of view, the Soviet Union could be viewed as a developmental dictatorship which, through a conscious effort and through very specific sacrifices, reproduced the industrialization and modernization that had taken place in Western Europe and the United States subcutaneously, so to speak, and in any case, in such a way that by no means all forces had been used and mobilized for this.
But the Soviet Union differed from all developmental dictatorships in that it was the largest state in the world in terms of area, and that it was ruled by a party which ascribed itself to a world-mission. Thus building heavy industry was at the same time the building of an armaments industry, and it was not surprising that in the eyes of the neighboring countries, the concentration on industry and the mechanization of agriculture was identical with a concentration on rearmament and the threat of war. As early as 1927 the “Ossoaviachime” had been set up, the “Organization for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation and Chemical Weapons,” and every member of the Komsomol came into contact with it. The all-pervasive atmosphere of the country was that of incessant top-down urging and commanding, which had its apex in the Kremlin but which worked its way through the various levels of organization down to the backmost collective farm, on which an almost unimaginably high level of delivery obligations was imposed, so that the peasants were often left with the bare necessities for subsistence. Any privileges granted to the party leaders, the specialists, or the Stakhanov workers were therefore of a highly precarious nature, and they could be considered on the whole as a kind of wartime award, which were withdrawn at the slightest failure.
How much money was allocated to the armaments industry cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, since the ruble was a domestic currency and since the sums shown in the state budget for the army represented only a fraction of the real expenditure, which could be hidden in the budgets of numerous other ministries and thus sectors of the economy. In any case, the sum of 5 billion spent in 1935 was already very considerable and significantly higher than the German armaments expenditure of the same year, and in 1938 it had risen to 23 billion rubles. However, the information in a circular letter from Stalin from the end of June 1937, which was not published and was found in the Smolensk archives, is probably more revealing: since the start of collectivization, 5,616 machine-tractor stations have been created, with a stock of 41,000 caterpillar tractors, 270,000 tractors and 86,000 combine harvesters. In 1939 the Soviet Union was the third largest steel producer in the world after the USA and Germany, and in total industrial production it ranked second behind the USA with a share of almost 20%. That was a remarkable record of success and reason enough for legitimate pride, if one did not count the millions of victims; but it was also alarming news for all other states, especially when they took note of the military doctrine of this country, which, while always speaking of imperialist aggressors, as early as 1939 set itself the goal of crushing the armies of these aggressors on several fronts. Not even National Socialist Germany could set itself such a goal, although it too wanted to mobilize all its forces and produced an analogue of the wartime economy of the Hindenburg program even in peacetime.
Leaving aside this possible or probable objective, the mobilization of the Soviet Union was partly a substitute for capitalist mobilization, partly a sharpened continuation of it: enormous numbers of peasants were set free, a large percentage of national income flowed into the investments necessary for industrialization, an industrially-minded elite leadership replaced a traditionalist ruling class. But what had happened comparatively slowly in Europe was happening very quickly here in the breathlessness of the great catch-up, and entire classes that had merely faded into the background in Europe but had still made significant contributions were annihilated in the Soviet Union. At the same time, certainly, the essential difference between party-state capitalist dictatorship and liberal-capitalist pluralism was increasingly accentuated, but from a purely economic point of view it is still permissible to understand the mobilization of the Soviet Union as the path of a developmental dictatorship.
Germany could not go this way. Around 1930, as in 1910, the German Reich was a fully developed industrial country in terms of world conditions: the first industrial power on the continent and second in the world to the United States, which was immensely favored by the circumstances. Its problem around 1930 was not a lack of development, but a lack of utilization of its production apparatus and thus of employment for its workers. Here it could not be a question of creating an industry out of nothing or from comparatively weak beginnings, but to get the existing industry going into fill swing again. In order to achieve this goal, the NSDAP also believed that it had to destroy obstacles, e.g. the multiplicity of political parties, since these stood in the way of the necessary concentration of will, but this destruction was not an exaggerated continuation of the original mobilization but opposed it in essential points, as the justification of the party’s antisemitism, but also show the concepts of race and blood and the example of the hereditary farm law show.
But if National Socialism did not want to be merely a reactionary and thus hopeless middle-class and farmers’ movement, then it had to set in motion its own kind of mobilization, which in its tendency was exactly the opposite of that of the earlier mobilization, but still went a long way in common with it. Its peculiarity cannot be recognized by an isolated consideration of the economic measures. The establishment of the sole sovereignty of the leader was just as important as the capillary function of the party, terror as well as the education of the youth. Only in this context do the economic measures prove to be what they were: as consistent preparations for war that did not lag behind the Soviet ones in terms of energy, but did not have the same alternative, namely to switch from the war economy to the peace economy as soon as obvious goals had been achieved and certain fears had not been realized.
The elimination of even the moderate left and the terrorization of their followers meant the elimination of the firmest core of pacifist and internationalist thought, and the fight against church influence opened the way for the autocracy of the spirit, which is expressed in the quoted line of the song: “God is the fight and fight is our blood and that’s why we were born.” On the other hand, the economic measures were at first entirely within the framework of the old system and were a continuation of measures taken by the Papen and Schleicher governments; not coincidentally, they took place under the direction of the former President of the Reichsbank in the Weimar Republic and now Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht.
The decline in production as a result of the world economic crisis had been no less than 47% in Germany from 1929 to 1932, and the loss of national income, though not quite so large as a result of the fall in import prices, was still considerable. The gold and foreign exchange holdings had fallen sharply as a result of the foreign loans being called. Brüning tried to bring about rehabilitation by introducing foreign exchange control and a restrictive fiscal policy, i.e. by deflation. However, this intensified the contraction process and aggravated the political situation, since the strong position of the unions made it impossible to reduce the relative share of wages. Papen made a significant change of course. Under him began what John Maynard Keynes would later make famous with the concept of “deficit spending”: job creation through government contracts, wage bonuses for entrepreneurs for each additional worker hired, tax vouchers, etc. All these measures were continued under Hitler and supplemented by others such as the construction of highways and the so-called Reinhardt program, which provided marriage loans and large grants for repair work on residential buildings. But Brüning’s tax hikes were not reversed, and the tendency was obviously to curb consumption and to place the emphasis entirely on boosting the capital goods industries. In this context, the armament measures began in 1934 and were largely financed by Schacht’s ingenious artifice of the “mefo bills.” In 1934 4 billion were already spent compared to 750 million in 1933, in 1935 over 5 billion, in 1936 over 10 billion. Of course, there was a corresponding increase in the floating Reich debt, from 3 to 12 billion. Nevertheless, the armaments expenditure was valuable as an initial spark. Around this time, Keynes used plausible arguments to explain the economic benefit of unproductive expenditure such as the building of pyramids or the mere movement of masses of dirt. In this respect, Hitler was the first to tread a path that Roosevelt and Léon Blum followed after him.
In 1936 Germany came to a crossroads. Schacht now apparently wanted to switch gears and achieve a self-sustaining economy by curbing armaments expenditure. But it was precisely in 1936 that the second four-year plan began, at the head of which Hermann Göring as “commissioner” and thus as Germany’s potential economic dictator. In August 1936, in his memorandum on the tasks of a four-year plan, Hitler, with express reference to the “giant plan” of the Soviet state, demanded that “similar to the military and political rearmament or mobilization of our people” there should also be an economic one, and he concluded with the sentences: “I. The German army must be ready for action in four years. II. The German economy must be ready for war in four years.” He bluntly threatened “some economists” with doom, and a year later he said in even clearer terms that if private industry did not carry out the four-year plan, the state would take full control. Göring, for his part, emphasized the desire for self-sufficiency on which the plan was based, and left no doubt that, in view of the magnitude of the task, both regard for profits and compliance with the law had become irrelevant. Schacht publicly and vehemently opposed such views, and in November 1937 he resigned. Armaments expenditure rose to 11 billion in 1937 and 23 in 1938, or to 17 billion according to other calculations. The entire Reich debt grew to an sum of 42 billion, which was enormous for that time. At the same time, the establishment of the “Reichswerke Hermann Göring” in Salzgitter marked the beginnings of a state or party economy. However, there were no work levies comparable to those of the Soviet Union until 1939, not even during the construction of the “West Wall” [the Siegfried Line].
How real the chance of a transition to the welfare state was in 1936 cannot be determined with certainty. In any case, its implementation would have meant settling for national restitution and the establishment of a defense capability. It would therefore have been identical with the aim of the Weimar Republic and was thus out of the question for Hitler. The fact that his method promised success was proven by the events of March 1938 to March 1939, which, from the overpowering of Schuschnigg and the incorporation of the Sudetenland to the occupation of Prague and the “rest of the Czech Republic,” were practically bloodless acts of war. But since 1936, as a result of the enormously increasing debts, Hitler and Germany with him had embarked on a one-way street with the telos of war, or at least of bloodless successes through threats of war. Even the Jewish tribute and the occupation of Czechoslovakia were pronounced acts of a looting economy. Total expenditure on armaments up to September 1939 was around 60 billion Reichsmarks. In the “Table Talks” Hitler later said that he had invested the entire fortune of the German people in weapons; thus, only by means of a worthwhile war could this fortune be appropriately exploited.
Surely a successful threat of war would have served the same purpose just as well and better. But was it really conceivable that Poland and England would have yielded in the summer of 1939 because, in view of Germany’s astonishing display of strength, it would have seemed inevitable to them that the non-Soviet continent would now have to be ruled by what was undoubtedly its strongest and, moreover, centrally located state? Germany was obviously not strong enough, and above all not popular enough with the other Europeans for such a claim to have been enforceable without decisive resistance. Moreover, there were grave reasons for believing that this “leadership” would mean domination and exploitation by a system which denied the main features of European history and was preparing to eliminate them with ever-increasing determination. Therefore, despite the apparent insignificance of the occasion, nothing was more consistent than the Polish-English-French resistance and with it the war in September 1939. But Adolf Hitler then proved that Germany was the strongest power in Europe, to an even greater extent than anyone but himself in the summer 1939 had assumed, and this could not be solely due to the fact that by 1939 it had spent as much on armaments as France, Great Britain and the USA combined. Thus although the predictions of his opponents, that he would have to go to war, had proved correct, they were correct only because he could not, as the Soviet Union did, demand arbitrary sacrifices from the population and reduce the standard of living of the great masses to subsistence level. The Soviet Union, if it had been unthreatened and had bid farewell to ideologically based plans for world conquest, could have decided in 1941 in view of its wealth of space and raw materials to make use of the industrialization that had finally been carried out to gradually raise the standard of living of the people. In 1939 Hitler could not do that. He had to wage war, indeed, and a war of conquest, for the sake of plunder. The question was whether he was still in the same position in May/June 1941. His troops were stationed at the North Cape and in the Libyan desert, on the banks of the Bug River and on the Pyrenees border with friendly Spain. The resources of all continental Europe were at his disposal. Germany was now undoubtedly the leading power on the continent. There was hardly any sign of serious resistance even in France. Admittedly, this Germany had made two of the European nations, the Czechs and the Poles, into a kind of colonial peoples, and the positive support of conservative regimes and fascist movements, even Mussolini’s Italy, was not too reliable. Hitler’s specific type of mobilization, which was equally distant from the methods of developmental dictatorship and that of the welfare state, had brought him to this climax of his power because it restarted an dormant production apparatus for the sole possible purpose of waging war. But as master of continental Europe he was at war with the naval power of England and practically with America, and the Soviet Union, which had spent more than he had spent on armaments and war preparations, faced him on land with a neutrality which prevented him from starting the confrontation to end with England by invading the island. He would have had to resort to war or the threat of war against her, even if Russia had been a democratic state or had been under the rule of a tsar, unless she had offered absolutely reliable guarantees of her own accord. But throughout his political life she had been his nightmare and at the same time and to some extent his role model, as the justification he gave for the four-year plan showed. In the face of her and her ideology, his empire was supposed to be the only adequate answer; against them and their ideology he had appealed to the community of the best forces of all Aryan peoples, who were to recognize in Judaism their common enemy. With regard to Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, however, many of his followers and his generals also had very definite views, and it was not a given that he could easily disregard all of them. When, after the Molotov visit, Hitler finally made the decision to “overthrow” the Soviet Union “in a quick campaign,” despite the frivolity of this turn of expression and many similar statements, it must have been clear to him deep in his innermost being that this decision had a completely different weight than the decisions to attack Poland, France or Yugoslavia, and just the way in which he had mobilized the German people did not necessarily provide the answer to the most essential of all questions: would this war be a decisive struggle for supremacy in Europe between Germany and Russia, or an anti-Bolshevik war of liberation in an alliance with many Europeans and very many Russians and Ukrainians, or a war of annihilation for the purpose of conquering gigantic “living spaces” and exterminating Jewry as the alleged world enemy of all peoples?