World Wars of the Twentieth Century 353But the Red Army, unexpectedly, survived the Nazi onslaught. Two
days before the Japanese brought the United States into the war as an
active belligerent by attacking the United States Navy at Pearl Har
bor, Hitler was compelled to announce, on 5 December 1941, that the
Reichswehr’s advance on Moscow had been suspended. This meant that
the war of attrition that Hitler had intended to avoid loomed omi
nously before the Germans once again. But Germany was in a better
position to face such a war than had been the case in 1914 inasmuch as
a broad expanse of conquered Europe could be organized to supple
ment Germany’s own production. In spite of Nazi doctrine and racial
prejudices, therefore, the Germans presided over a transnational war
effort from 1942 onwards. As time passed, they also became more
ruthless, drawing resources from conquered lands by force and threat
of force. Seven and a half million foreign workers supplied about a
fifth of the entire German work force by 1944. Some were POWs,
some were at least nominally free, but most had been rounded up in
manhunts and shipped to Germany as “slave labor.”^82 Armaments
production peaked in July 1944; thereafter, critical shortages broke
out everywhere more or less all at once and brought the German war
economy swiftly to collapse by May 1945.^83
All the other major belligerents also mounted their war effort on a
transnational basis. Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Pacific and Far
East was by far the weakest and least well integrated. The vast majority
of the population coming under Japanese control were peasants,
whose skills, capital, and productive capacities were relatively small
and could not readily be enlarged. The most numerous of them, the
Chinese, were disinclined to cooperate. Even where Japan’s attack on
white supremacy met with an initial welcome, relatively few commit
ted themselves wholeheartedly to collaboration with the new Japanese
masters. Shipping needed to link the Japanese islands with distant
parts soon ran seriously short, owing to sinkings by American sub
marines and other war losses. By 1943, supplying remote garrisons
became impossible; and new designs of airplanes and other weapons
- Edward L. Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 1967), pp. 232.
Ironically, the experience of work in Germany was a factor in paving the way for
postwar European integration. Hitler and his brutal subordinate Fritz Sauckel deserve
to rank with Jean Monnet and General George Marshall among the makers of the
European Economic Community. - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (London, 1970); Milward, German
Economy at War; Alan S. Milward, The New Order and the French Economy (London,
1970); Friedrich Forstmeier and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Kriegswirtschaft und Rüs
tung, 1939–1945 (Düsseldorf, 1977); and from a Marxist perspective, Dietrich
Eicholtz, Geschichte der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft. 1939–1945 (Berlin, 1969).