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In July 1942, Krupp worked closely with Speer, armaments minister, and history’s greatest slave master accepted ‘45,000 Russians, 120,000 prisoners, 6,000 civilians’ for his steelworks and coal mines. But this was just the start. Krupp got Hitler’s permission to use Auschwitz’s Jewish slaves to build the Berthawerk factory (named after his mother) in Silesia and soon more arrived in Essen, where signs read: ‘Slavs are slaves’. Corporate memoranda openly reported that ‘slaves’ had arrived from the ‘slave market’, with Alfried Krupp designated the Sklavenhalter – slave owner. Krupp controlled thirty-eight camps guarded by SS and his own Kruppstahl guards with blackjacks. ‘You must be careful History doesn’t call you a slave trader,’ warned one of his directors.

In October 1942, Krupp opened a gun-fuse factory at Auschwitz ‘to make use of the people there’, the details worked out by Krupp and the commandant Rudolf Höss. ‘As regards the cooperation of our technical office in Breslau, I can only say that, between that office and Auschwitz, the closest understanding exists,’ wrote Krupp in September 1943, ‘and is guaranteed for the future.’ Right to the end of the war, noted one of his managers, ‘Krupp considered it a duty to make 520 Jewish girls, some of them little more than children, work under the most brutal conditions in the heart of the concern, in Essen.’

These crimes were made possible by the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people, each of whom bears precisely the same guilt as Hitler himself. It was quickly known to the leadership and most of the German public via events on their streets, if not via the stories of soldiers. Many who should have known better did nothing; Pope Pius did scarcely anything. Yet there were many brave people, many but not enough, who protected Jews, some of them rogues – the profiteer Oskar Schindler saved 1,400 Polish Jews – but most were ordinary people of courage, and some were royal. In Romania, King Mihai visited Odessa with Antonescu, impotently protesting against the massacres. But when Himmler ordered the killing of all Romanian Jews, he and his mother Queen Helena refused to countenance it. ‘By 1942,’ Mihai said, ‘I was convinced something had to be done.’

‘Keep quiet,’ barked Antonescu, ‘you’re still a child.’ But Mihai won the release of Romanian Jewish leaders and stopped the deportations to Belzec, a notable achievement in the midst of the appalling Romanian crimes.^*

Meanwhile Hitler had a more immediate concern. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to liquidate this entire war.’

HITLER’S BATTLE FOR OIL

That summer of 1942, Hitler was planning Operation Blue, an offensive against Russia to secure Stalingrad on the Volga and the oilfields in Baku, Maikop and Grozny. The capture of Russian fuel depots did not help: Russian tanks ran on diesel, German on gasoline. Stalin was the master of industrial production, moving entire industries eastwards: his T-34 tank, simple and manoeuvrable was, agreed German generals, ‘the best tank in the war’, its largest factory in Leningrad being totally moved to Chelyabinsk which became Tankograd (Tank City), soon producing 1,300 a month, outstripping German production under Speer.^* But it all depended on oil.

In June, General Erwin Rommel forced the surrender of thousands of British troops in Tobruk, and his forces were soon heading for Egypt. If Hitler seized the Caucasus, he would secure the oil in Iraq and Iran – and win the war. Palestinian Jews were afraid as Rommel approached Egypt.^* British forces, aided by Jewish fighters, including the young Zionist Moshe Dayan, had seized Syria from the Vichy French: Dayan lost an eye in the battle. Churchill took no risks with his oilfields. In Iraq, where King Faisal’s grandson Faisal II, aged six, was too young to rule, the British had overthrown a pro-German general. In Iran, Reza Shah tried to play Britain off against Germany, but in August 1941 Stalin and Churchill invaded, swept aside his vaunted army (at which the shah beat his general with his cane) and forced his abdication and exile, replacing him with his son Mohammad Reza, now twenty-one.