Introduction
In October 1941, the Norwegian minister of Culture and Popular Enlightenment, Gulbrand Lunde, gave a lecture in Königsberg, Germany, on the Norwegian contribution to the future development of the European economy. As a convinced National Socialist, Lunde professed to see contours of a new and happier continent taking shape. To this Europe, Norway would contribute its fish, its hydropower, iron ore, copper, nickel and molybdenum, but would also mobilize its racial abilities as a part of the Germanic brotherhood. Lunde suggested that if Norway could be won for these ideas, the peaceful re-construction of a new Europe would be ensured.1 The speech encapsulates the competing rationales that gave shape to the German occupation of Norway, i.e. the exploitation of its natural resources for German purposes, its integration into a European-wide economic system, but also the necessity of making the Norwegian people work towards a future dominated by Nazi Germany.
The objective of this book is to show how economic exploitation was organized in Norway and other countries in Western Europe, how the Germans facilitated collaboration and exerted control, and how the extractive industries in occupied countries responded. While Norway is the primary objective of investigation, we will proceed on a comparative basis in order to elucidate similarities and differences in both the economic regulation and varying state intervention across extractive sectors, and finally the extent of corporate autonomy and the different firm responses, whether full cooperation, under-production, or outright refusal. By drawing together studies of these five Western European countries, based on extensive archival research, we show how the wartime history of Norway was deeply embedded in a larger European context.
While there are many similarities that emerge in the German exploitation of Western Europe, the occupation of Norway also exhibited some idiosyncrasies. These were shaped by the competing German ideas about its role as a potential allied people and simultaneously as a source of vital raw materials. Before the occupation, Norway was a small, open economy that relied mainly on exports of raw materials and semi-finished goods. After ocean shipping, metals, minerals, chemical products, along with timber, pulp and wood products were the largest earners of foreign exchange, followed by fresh fish and whale-oil tied with other industrial products for last place.2 Norway, therefore, could mainly supply natural resource exports to the German Reich, like many Southern and Eastern European countries that were ruthlessly pillaged. But like the Western European countries with their more advanced industries, the Norwegian population was not deemed to be among Germany’s “natural enemies”, but rather an integral part of the Germanic brotherhood. Norway therefore provides a natural prism through which to study the question of whether economic or ideological considerations weighed more heavily in Nazi Germany’s planning and policies.
Variations in Exploitation
During the Second World War, the formidable Norwegian Labor politician Haakon Lie observed that the Nazi occupation regime represented a “scientific and systematic policy of plunder unlike anything the world has ever seen. The Germans have perfected the art of stealing.”3 Subsequent historical research has shown that German policies in the occupied countries were neither scientific nor systematic. In Eastern Europe, the Germans frequently resorted to large-scale plundering, and dismantled factories and states alike. Life under Nazi rule became nasty, brutish, and short. The differences between the Nazi occupation in the East and West are so substantial that it is tempting to see them as separate phenomena, even though they were linked by ideas, practices, and people that flowed between the regions.4 The Germans took a different approach to the mature economies in Western Europe, with their high productivity, extensive industrial infrastructure, and more developed administrative apparatuses. Some common principles seem to have existed for Nazi exploitation in this region, for instance in the management of financial policy or in the placement of industrial orders, but these were not uniformly applied.5 Furthermore the occupation regimes exhibited great variation in the institutional set-up, the relationship to the local political collaborators and state bureaucracy, in addition to the different socio-economic contexts and political contingencies that gave shape to the wartime history of Western Europe.
Hitler and his henchmen had little care for established borders or national sovereignties. The transcontinental and transboundary ambitions driving Nazi Germany’s imperialism are readily apparent in its various plans to tap Nordic blood in Scandinavia, Germanize parts of the western European populations, re-settle the East with a militarized peasantry, as well as to impose a new colonial rule to extract food and resources from Africa.6 The enormous scale of the German conquests gave most European societies a first-hand experience of Nazi rule as a basis for comparison. Even so, the histories of Nazi occupation have frequently treated the experiences of the wartime years as a highly specific and sharply delineated national trauma, a historical parenthesis largely without either precursor or parallel. Responsibility for what transpired is externalized, and national participation marginalized. Such modes of history writing, which underlined the separation of German occupation from whatever came before or after, have served important functions in re-establishing political legitimacy and social coherence across Europe.7 However, these national processes of consolidation of historical memory have led to a paucity of comparative studies, as well as strong emphasis on the military, political, and social histories of war, occupation, and resistance.8 Economic histories of the war have been fewer in number, and particularly we lack comparative studies of Nazi economic policies in occupied Europe.9
While comparative history is no “new panacea” as Marc Bloch once remarked,10 it is only by comparing German policies across countries and different national sectors that we can arrive at a fuller understanding of how Nazi Germany exploited the advanced economies that were engulfed by its conquests. As this book shows, there were also varieties of exploitation, or different approaches to extracting the resources of the occupied territories of the continent. These modes can be described as plundering, mustering, or coopting. The first denotes outright looting and requisitioning. Mustering refers to the monopolization of input factors by the occupying power through the use of more indirect means, such as using the potentially unlimited purchasing power of the Wehrmacht. By exacting payments for occupation costs, using scrip money (Reichskreditkassenscheine) or manipulation of the exchange rate,11 the occupier was in a position to outbid the domestic industries in the competition for workers, food, and raw materials. Mustering refers to a modernized and monetized strategy of letting armies live off the land. Beyond the awesome institutional spending power of the Wehrmacht, even the individual German soldier became a formidable competitor for consumer goods in the occupied society.12 The final mode of exploitation, coopting, describes the mobilization of resources through collaboration with the domestic authorities. This approach, while premised on the implied threat of force and the asymmetric power structure inherent in the occupation, required the maintenance of a workable relationship with domestic authorities and firms, as well as a willingness to allocate scarce resources to the civilian sectors that did not produce directly or indirectly for Germany.13
Each mode of exploitation embodies varying structures of industrial relations, between labor, firms, and the authorities, entailing also different legal arrangements, incentive structures, employment and wage-setting practices, as well as corporate autonomy, scope for strategy, and mechanisms for balancing demand and supply. For instance, a policy of looting would require little in the way of wage-setting policy, as simple pressganging would be sufficient to secure labor for the occupier. A strategy based on mustering might entail free price formation for scarce resources, if only through black markets or the circumvention of the wage regulations, which allowed German agencies to outbid other potential buyers forced to adhere to price ceilings. A system of exploitation through coopting entails the use of strong incentives, matched by adherence to strict regulations in order to maintain an economic balance that would facilitate the maximum production compatible with the maintenance of social order.
In practice, these modalities shifted between countries. For instance, plundering was widely practiced in Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in the West. In Norway, there was a low prevalence of looting, as the German strategy for winning over the population ruled out large-scale requisition and confiscation.14 The modalities also varied over time and according to the preferences and the constellations of power between the different German institutions. The Reich’s economic mobilization supremo Hermann Göring was a forceful advocate of looting in Western Europe, but this strategy was circumscribed by other German actors. In France for instance, the German military governor explicitly condemned the use of “Polish methods,” because they hindered economic collaboration.15 In Norway, the Wehrmacht was an exponent of mustering, with its virtually unlimited demand for fortifications of a long coastline and construction of barracks for a garrison equivalent to 10 % of the local population. Even while the freedom of the individual soldiers to buy stuff in Norway to ship it off to Germany was severely limited in practice,16 the structural demand generated by the Wehrmacht’s ambitions was still far in excess of what the Norwegian economy could handle. Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, on the other hand, pursued a strategy of coopting. From his perspective, it would ultimately be more fruitful to secure Norwegian collaboration and to keep reasonable balance between supply and demand. He derided the Wehrmacht’s lack of moderation and unwillingness to prioritize, simply because they could force the Norwegians to pay: “Die Norskes zahlen.”17
Exploitation and Collaboration in Context: A Literature Review
The German exploitation of the Norwegian economy has become an enduring image of the occupation. Victor Mogens,...