From the perspective of the [Axis] employers this was an economic necessity since the tasks assigned to the units could not have been executed without sufficiently qualified workers—many of whom were Jews. Moreover, these had to accept minimum wages, making their labor unbeatably cheap.

Initially, the Wehrmacht paid no more than 10 Pfennige per hour to male workers; women and adolescents received 7.5 and 5 Pfennige, respectively. Only later on were military employers charged the same amount as private firms, i.e. twice as much, half of it being a rental fee that was demanded by the civil administration which was responsible for ghetto affairs.¹⁹ For the Jews, however, these slave wages—which did not even pretend to provide an essential minimum—were of rather minor importance.

(I feel like noting that by relying on modern capitalism’s criterion for poverty—fewer than two dollars a day—these neoslaves would fail to qualify as impoverished!)

Since the establishment of the [Axis] workshops coincided with the prelude of extermination, a job at a Wehrmacht office was often identical with survival. In particular, the skilled‐worker certificates, the infamous Gelbe Scheine (printed on yellowish paper), would soon become the only chance of avoiding the mass murders of the first five months of occupation.

During the initial phase of the so‐called Aktionen perpetrated by [Axis] SS and police units and their [collaborationist] auxiliaries in the first six weeks of occupation,²⁰ Wehrmacht officers were frequently able to save their workers from falling victim to the executions. This was by and large due to the fact that the civil administration had not yet arrived. The administrative vacuum during these early weeks was filled by the army whose position was thus strengthened in regard to Security Police and SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD, i.e. the SS secret service).²¹

[…]

The common element of the above‐mentioned rescue efforts is tightly linked to the ubiquitous question of labor supply. As Jewish lives depended increasingly on their usefulness as (skilled) workers, the rôle of the Wehrmacht, probably the single most important employer in the occupied territories, grew proportionally stronger. Labor shortage was indeed one of the most pressing problems of the [Fascist] war economy.

In the Reich proper, the massive rearmament boom had led from large‐scale unemployment in the early 1930s to an ever‐increasing deficit in available manpower by 1939. Though preparing for war, the [Fascist] economy at the same time lacked the essential prerequisites.⁴⁸ Even before the attack on Poland, General Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s leading armaments expert, therefore stressed the need to boost industrial production, foreign currency reserves, the production of staple commodities—and the number of “men.”⁴⁹

While the former problems could be solved at least partially by sustained internal action, the latter exceeded the capabilities even of an enlarged [Reich]. Indeed, these shortcomings did not only prove to be the precondition but also a major objective of the war to come.⁵⁰

In particular, the growing discrepancy between the available human resources and the various claims on these posed a severe threat to the [Axis] war effort. The recourse to forced labor offered the easiest way out of that dilemma. POWs from Poland as well as from the west, especially from France, were drafted by the thousands and were soon joined by predominantly Polish civilians. By June 1940, 348,000 POWs and 800,000 Polish civilians had been brought to [the Third Reich].

However, recruitment for operations “Sealion” (GB) and “Barbarossa” (SU) caused a further aggravation of the situation at the home front. From May 1939 to May 1941, the German workforce was reduced by six million and would undergo even further strains once fighting had started. In a mere three months the Wehrmacht lost 520,000 men in the east and by the end of February 1942 the one‐million watermark had been passed.

Inevitably, the continual replacements led to a breakdown of the Reich’s labor market. The number of male civilian workers that had peaked at 24.5 million before the Second World War was down to 13.5 million in September 1944.⁵¹

Once more, an extensive forced labor program would have been the easiest solution to [Fascism’s] economic deficiencies. But due to mistaken hopes for a rapid victory over the USSR and the ideologically motivated rejection of bringing both “Bolshevists” and “subhumans” to the Reich, no such plans were made in the early stages of the war. Only in October, when the dream of a swift Soviet defeat obviously clashed with reality, did [Berlin] consent to the recruitment of Red Army POWs and civilians from the eastern territories.⁵²

The above paragraph holds important implications for the present: since Zionism’s economy has been suffering as a consequence of its prolonged warfare, it is probable that the neocolony is in turn intensifying its exploitation of lower‐class Palestinians, especially neoslaves. The only problem with this prediction is that we have surprisingly little evidence to substantiate it (at least for now).

As Christian Streit has shown, this decision came far too late to be of any help in the short term. Anticipating directives from Berlin, the Wehrmacht had deliberately reduced supplies, housing, and medical care to less than a bare minimum causing the death of hundreds of thousands of [Soviet] POWs. Housing literally turned out to be the equivalent of Göring’s notorious “holes in the ground.”

Malnutrition as devised by Herbert Backe was practiced in all camps.⁵³ Thus, Soviet prisoners of war that were to be transferred to Lithuanian camps received a bare 100–200 g of bread and 20–30 g of millet a day while being forced on marches of about 40 kilometers. In Vilnius, the Armee‐Gefangenen‐Stelle 10, a temporary POW camp, supplied nothing but “100 g millet without bread” as the complete daily ration. Predictably, in October the aerodrome in nearby Kaunas reported a death toll of 130 per day and classified a mere 10% of all prisoners as fit to work.⁵⁴

This situation presented the [Axis] decision‐makers with a dilemma since the demand for Red Army prisoners was high, both at home and in the eastern territories where the exploitation of economic resources was now a prime objective of occupational policy. In the Reichskommissariat Ostland this led to a U‐turn in the way the Jewish population was treated.

In contrast to the first months of occupation, when the Wehrmacht economic sections had reduced the numbers of Jewish employees wherever possible, hoping that they could be replaced by the Lithuanian gentile population and POWs, the ailing and dying Soviet soldiers now made way for Jewish workers.⁵⁵

Realizing that all efforts to exploit the conquered territories would prove pointless without a sufficient and adequately trained labor reservoir on which to draw, the Wehrmacht increasingly pressed for significant exemptions of Jewish workers from the extermination process. The only case in which their re‐introduction into Wehrmacht production necessarily failed was Estonia: here, as the Rüstungsinspektion Ostland laconically remarked, there were no Jews left.⁵⁶

However, the fact that the military units fell back on Jewish labor did not indicate a wholehearted, long‐term interest of the Wehrmacht to spare the Jewish population in any of the eastern territories. As there could be no doubt about the general undesirability of Jewish participation in economic life, in the middle run these workers would have to be replaced by local gentiles.

Therefore, the availability of the latter would determine the fate of the former. In some cases, the substitution of Jews by gentiles was rapidly and successfully implemented: in Anykščiai, in the rayon of Utėna, a felt boot factory had lost 40 to 50 Jewish workers in a pogrom in the early days of the war. However, to the satisfaction of the [Axis] armaments office in Kaunas, this had not caused a halt in production. Instead, the immediate employment of Lithuanians had turned the “Jewish dump […] into an important workshop for the […] Wehrmacht.”⁵⁷

Still, this proved to be the exception to the rule. By spring 1942, a general distrust of [the Third Reich’s] labor policy was virulent among the Lithuanian population, which had significant repercussions on the question of Jewish labor. Of all people, it was Fritz Sauckel, the notorious plenipotentiary of labor service and head of the “biggest slave‐labour programme in history,”⁵⁸ who appeared on the scene just in time. His ever‐increasing demands for “volunteers” for the Reichseinsatz delivered the decisive blow to the Lithuanian labor market.

Shortly after his appointment, Sauckel fixed the number of men and women to be deported to [the Third Reich] by October 1942 at 45,000, and by the end of 1943 at 100,000. More than 200 recruiters were sent east, and police and Wehrmacht were asked for support.⁵⁹

The results were nonetheless disastrous. Of [the] 235,000 Lithuanians who had been ordered to muster in spring 1943, no more than 132,000 actually showed up, most of them after the deadline and only due to the threat and exemplary implementation of severe penalties. Up to February 12, 1944, no more than some 33,000 men, women and adolescents were actually deported to [the Third Reich].⁶⁰

Thus bereft of both [Soviet] POWs and a sufficient Lithuanian labor pool, the [Third Reich’s] civil and military sections had to rely on Jewish workers to a high degree. In Vilnius, the local Wehrmacht armaments office consequently justified the increase in the number of Jewish workers which had reached 7,238 by referring to the “general employment situation” in July 1942.

This trend continued in the following months so that in November the job center counted 8,824 employed Jews, of which 4,061 were working for the military forces, 4,319 for the civilian administration, and another 444 in private companies. Six months later a total of 11,560 Jews were reported to be in employer–employee relationships.⁶¹

The liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943 put an abrupt end to the widespread use of Jewish labor. All offices and workshops had to let go of their ghetto workforce, with the above‐mentioned four exceptions. The privileged status of HKP 562, which became the single most important employer of Jewish workers in Vilnius for the rest of the war, resulted by and large from the outstanding importance of its tasks.

[…]

The immense importance of Jewish labor thus provided the background against which Wehrmacht sections could argue for the indispensability of their workers and protect these from the grip of the SS. Moreover, in the summer of 1943, it was possible for Plagge to achieve a special provision and an additional extension of his workforce due to the fact that the problem of labor scarcity and the critical situation of Wehrmacht motorization coincided in the institution of the HKP.

These structural prerequisites notwithstanding, it depended on the individual officers whether, and to what extent and with what intentions, they made use of the potential of economic rationales. Indeed, in the overwhelming majority of cases the struggle for Jewish lives undertaken by Wehrmacht sections was due to strictly utilitarian considerations. Nor did all the protagonists of the present sample draw a sharp line between philanthropic reasons for their actions and practical considerations on how their military tasks could best be fulfilled.

In fact, at least two of the three men did not make such a distinction. Both Plagge and Schönbrunner explicitly intended to further the [Axis] war effort which essentially depended on labor recruitment. Some decades after, in a remarkably self‐conscious analysis, Schönbrunner would call his rescue efforts a “double‐edged affair.”⁶⁴

This is not to say that the rescuers’ actions were less than extraordinary. Among thousands of other Wehrmacht soldiers, officers as well as rank and file, they represented a tiny minority, wholly insignificant in terms of quantity, who developed a sense of responsibility for the Jews left at their command. In Vilnius, Schmid, Schönbrunner, and Plagge were the only ones who made extensive use of their competences and who found the courage to help their workers in times of need. Thus, they were the proverbial exception to the rule.⁶⁵

This thesis also supplies evidence against the myth that the Fascists micromanaged businesses to every last detail:

Schmid, Schönbrunner, and Plagge all benefited from their relative autonomy in their respective fields of action. While the Versprengtensammelstelle was detached from both Schmid’s battalion and his commanding officers in terms of tasks and location, Schönbrunner had not only been the guiding spirit behind the establishment of the tailor‐shop but also remained single‐handedly in charge of it until its dissolution.

Moreover, Schönbrunner was able to count on his commanding officer’s indifference. Zehnpfenning did by no means support Schönbrunner’s efforts when he learned about them, but neither did he take disciplinary action against his subordinate.⁸¹ In the case of HKP 562, Plagge was the quasi‐sovereign head of the repair unit. His work was hardly ever supervised, provided that everything went smoothly.⁸²

The autonomous disposition over available resources was thus a trait common to all three cases. Being removed from control, either in terms of hierarchy or geography or both, meant that the threat of sanction was significantly reduced (although a sword of Damocles it remained). One might also argue that the three protagonists were somewhat less exposed to the influence of obedience and peer group pressure as highlighted in the well‐known experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.⁸³

(Emphasis added in all cases.)