The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Chapter 27: The New Order Summary

Book Five: Beginning of the End

• In the first chapter of Book Five: Beginning of the End, Shirer describes Hitler's plans for a new organization of Europe.
• Hitler's "New Order" would be "a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose 'undesirable elements'—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated." (5.27.1)
• The Jews and Slavs were considered to be untermenschen—subhumans—who could be murdered without a thought. They had no right to live except to the extent that they could slave for the Germans.
• Europe was to become "Jew-free."
• In Shirer's words, this is the book's darkest chapter—just as the New Order itself was, for the people who lived through it or those killed, the darkest chapter in the history of the Reich.
• Shirer begins by describing the Nazi plans to exterminate or enslave the Slavic peoples east of Germany, and he focuses especially on the Nazis' treatment of the Russians throughout the long years of the war.
• Soviet POWs were subject to savage and barbaric treatment, and Russian men and women were kidnapped and shipped to Germany for slave labor.
• Hitler planned that the Baltics would be resettled with Germans, and Germany would annex the Crimea. Germany would appropriate all the natural resources for their own use.
• And if any riots broke out, bombing and shooting on the spot would take care of that.

The Nazi Plunder of Europe

• The Nazis accumulated enormous wealth during the war due to their plundering the riches and cultural treasures of Europe. The amount of loot was beyond belief.
• They looted gold and banknotes from conquered countries, as well extorting costs of the occupation from the occupied countries.
• He describes the monetary value of the goods and raw materials that were seized by the Nazis, including things like grains, meat, produce, oil, and steel.
• The Nazis seized property throughout the Reich, including millions of priceless art treasures throughout Europe, a topic that George Clooney and the gang take on in The Monuments Men.
• They also plundered human lives.

Slave Labor in the New Order

• By September, 1944, about 7.5 million Europeans were providing slave labor for the Third Reich.
• Almost all had been "rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any 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 often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter." (5.27.72)
• The Nazi slave labor force also included two million prisoners of war, a quarter of whom were put to work in munitions factories, in violation of The Hague and Geneva conventions.
• Why are we not surprised?
• The Nazis perpetrated atrocities like the kidnapping of children, the razing of villages (in order to seize their inhabitants), the murder of newborn infants, the starvation of slave laborers, and the housing of men and women in dog kennels.
• Shirer believes that this kind of enslavement and brutal treatment wouldn't have been limited to wartime. If the Nazis had been victorious in the war, the new world order would have seen a German master race enslaving the populations of Europe and Russia for the glory of the thousand-year Reich.

The Prisoners of War

• Roughly two million Soviet war prisoners died from disease and starvation.
• There were summary executions of war prisoners who belonged to targeted racial and political groups.
• The Nazi treatment of prisoners from Western nations was better than how the Russians were treated, but not by much. Captured flyers were often shot on sight or turned over to the S.D. to be tortured to death.
• Because of the success of Allied commando raids, Hitler gave orders that all captured enemy forces were to be shot—a literal take-no-prisoners order. The military commanders were too frightened to disobey.

Nazi Terror in the Conquered Lands

• The Nazis had a common practice of shooting hostages in conquered nations. The "Night and Fog Decree," ordered secret murders of persons who were made to vanish without a trace.
• Exterminations were carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen—Special Action Groups, which was a euphemism for mobile extermination squads.
• They'd go around rounding up people and killing them en masse in various ways, like mass shootings and truck-mounted gas chambers.
• The Einsatzgruppen are known to be responsible for the deaths of roughly 750,000 people, the vast majority of them Jews.
• This number paled in comparison to the numbers of Jews killed in extermination camps.

"The Final Solution"

• The term "final solution" was the euphemism that the Nazis used for the extermination of all Jews and and the complete destruction of Jewish culture in Europe and beyond. It was the final solution to the "jewfish problem."
• Hitler had this plan in mind as early as 1939, but things really got going when Reinhard Heydrich decided in 1942 that the time had come to carry it out and finish the job.
• Heydrich estimated that there were 11 million Jews in all of Europe and Britain, and that all of them had to be exterminated.
• The initial plan? Send the Jews to eastern Europe, work to death people who could work, then kill the survivors.
• But this would take too much time. Himmler had a better idea: mass slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen.
• In one speech to the S.S. generals, Himmler congratulated them for being able to look at 1000 corpses lying side by side and still manage to remain "decent fellows."

The Extermination Camps

• Warning: What follows are some graphic descriptions of death at the camps.
• Shirer notes that all 30 or so concentration camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries were death camps, because millions of people died in them from starvation and torture.
• But extermination camps were specifically designed for killing and carrying out the Final Solution.
• Jews were systematically rounded up in occupied countries and deported to the camps.
• The camps had gas chambers in which millions of men, women, and children were gassed to death with carbon monoxide gas or Zyklon B. Shirer devotes particular attention to the mass killings at Auschwitz, where over a million people died, 90% of them Jews.
• At one point, 6,000 people per day were being gassed at Auschwitz.
• He cites the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess at Nuremberg that his gas chambers at Auschwitz were an "improvement" over the ones at Treblinka, that only held 200 people. Hoess's could hold 2,000 people at a time.
• Hoess described the now well-known system of selection of prisoners as they exited the freight cars at the camp. Those fit to work were sent to the camp, the others, including all children, were immediately gassed.
• He thought it was great that they could fool the inmates about their imminent fate by decorating the gas chambers with lawns and flower beds, and with signs that said "Baths."
• People were herded into the chambers waiting for water to come out of the showerheads. Instead, gas crystals were dropped in.
• After everyone inside was dead (the Nazis watched through portholes), Jewish prisoners hosed down the blood and feces and dragged the piles of corpses apart. Their teeth and hair were removed for collection by the Germans.
• Cremation chambers were designed to incinerate corpses in the extermination camps, and Shirer explains how German businessmen competed to win the contracts to build the crematoria.
• (The captured German records included letters from various companies touting their superior workmanship, their use of the highest-quality materials etc.)
• While he's on the topic of the complicity of German businessmen, he makes note of the companies competing to be the commercial suppliers of the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.
• After making early estimates of the number of people who were murdered at Auschwitz, Shirer goes on to describe yet more forms of Nazi plunder: the removal of gold fillings from the ashes of the murdered victims, and the theft of those victims' personal belongings. (The inmates had been told to bring their treasured possessions and money for their new lives in the "resettlement" territories.)
• The Nazis took everything.
• Some of the jewelry and dental gold ended up in the vaults of branches of the Reichsbank. The bankers saw that a lot of it had come from Auschwitz and Lublin; they suspected the valuables had belonged to murdered Jews.
• They thought it was interesting.

"The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More"

• Jews in Warsaw and other cities throughout Europe had been forced into crowded ghettoes—walled-off areas of the city that were systematically starved as the people were waiting to be shipped off to extermination camps.
• In the spring of 1943, the 60,000 (out of 400,000) surviving Jews of the Warsaw ghetto mounted a valiant, desperate, and ultimately futile uprising against their Nazi oppressors.
• The uprising was detailed in an official account by Juergen Stroop, the S.S. officer who squashed the rebellion.
• The Jews held out for four weeks with some rifles, pistols, smuggled machine guns, and homemade grenades.
• Finally, the liquidation of the ghetto was ordered. (There's a long scene about it in Schindler's List.) The ghetto was burned down and survivors were ferreted out and shot.
• Shirer takes stock of a few different accounts of the final toll that the Nazis' "final solution" took on the Jews of Europe. He cites numbers that account for somewhere between four and six million deaths.
• This was the result of Hitler's obsession with the Jews: "There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers." (5.27.301)

The Medical Experiments

• Another kind of atrocity the Nazis visited upon their concentration camp prisoners during the course of Hitler's reign was the use of prisoners in medical experiments.
• These practices were a result of the worst kind of sadistic brutality.
• Throughout the next several pages, Shirer offers grim accounts of the various kinds of "medical" tests that were conducted by the Nazis.
• Prisoners were put in pressure chambers until they stopped breathing; they were injected with typhus; they were put in icy water or exposed naked in the snow to see how long it took them to freeze to death.
• And these were just a few of the experiments.

The Death of Heydrich and the End of Lidice

• Reinhard Heydrich, one of the planners of the Final Solution, died in June 1942 after his automobile was hit by a small, hand-thrown bomb thrown at him by Czech resistance fighters.
• The Nazi retribution was brutal: over one thousand Czechs were executed on the spot, and three thousand Czechoslovakian Jews were taken from Theresienstadt and shipped to other camps for extermination.
• The Nazis destroyed the small Czech village of Lidice by executing all of its adult male inhabitants, shipping its women and children to concentration camps, and then burning the village to the ground.
• Shirer moves on to discuss other examples of Nazi atrocities and describes the similar destruction of villages throughout other Nazi-occupied territories.
• Shirer ends this gruesome chapter with the following conclusion: "Such, as has been sketched in this chapter, were the beginnings of Hitler's New Order; such was the debut of the Nazi Gangster Empire in Europe. Fortunately for mankind it was destroyed in its infancy—not by any revolt of the German people against such a reversion to barbarism but by the defeat of German arms and the consequent fall of the Third Reich." (5.27.408)
• You can see where he's going here with his thesis that the German people were complicit in the savagery.