At first glance the Ukraine Project was a fantasy affair, maybe even harebrained.Footnote 1 In simplest terms it concerned German efforts during the Second World War to enlist Dutch colonial companies from the East Indies for large-scale commodity production in occupied Ukraine. Investment in the German East would compensate lost holdings in the overseas East following Japanese conquest and occupation of the Netherlands’ tropical empire. The prime target was the Deli Maatschappij (or Deli Mij), a giant tobacco plantation company and the premier enterprise in northeastern Sumatra. Once in, it would bring along the others. But the Project went nowhere. The Dutch were not biting and stalled as long as they could, sending study trips to Ukraine with predictably negative conclusions, until by the first months of 1944, with German armies in retreat, the Ukraine Project was as dead as a doornail, its results as whimsical as its origins. That whimsy was congruent with the seemingly oddball character of the project from the beginning. Neither of the two figures at its center, a mere captain attached to Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan—Arthur Salcher—and a former estate manager for the Deli-Batavia Rubber Maatschappij—Friedrich Jarl—appeared commensurate with the scale of the undertaking. There was nothing in the career of Arthur Salcher, who dreamed up the scheme and commanded the Ukraine Project, to explain his sudden elevation to the head of all Dutch East Indies plantation firms placed under German administration (Verwaltung). Mostly his personnel file from his previous and relatively minor posting as Salzburg propaganda chief revealed a penchant for getting into trouble.Footnote 2 Jarl had years of experience as a planter,Footnote 3 but this was a far cry from the position of Verwalter, which during the German occupation gave him, in theory, full supervisory power over an enterprise, and which Jarl came to hold at the vast Deli Mij and perhaps as many as two dozen other Dutch colonial firms under Salcher's larger purview, including Internatio, the largest Dutch trading company in the archipelago.Footnote 4 Nor did Oskar Kufahl, another German who had worked years on East Indies estates and who came to hold a third, if lesser, leadership position, all the while engaged in shady dealings on the side, add gravitas to the venture. The sense of disconnect that adhered to the project throughout its brief lifespan was thus palpable at the start, when a hitherto unknown Heer Jarl arrived at Deli Mij headquarters in Den Haag and, after being asked to wait by the porter, announced, almost apologetically, that he was, in effect, taking over the firm.Footnote 5 Yet in conception and failure of execution, the Ukraine Project takes us to the heart of a dispute over empire in the Nazi and the maritime east, and even to the question of how to conceptualize imperial history. Both the perception of similitude and the reality of difference between the two colonial histories marked every stage of this plan to transplant one imperial experience into the other.
German historians, but equally historians of the broader concept of empire, have hotly debated the question of linkage between overseas European empires and Nazi rule in eastern Europe. Adolf Hitler's thinking out loud—“What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us”—is well known to historians, but not all would take it for confirmation that the British Raj was “Hitler's model for domination and exploitation.”Footnote 6 Studies of German imperialism have in fact stressed how Nazi insistence upon continental Lebensraum carried with it a marginalization, and even scorn, for the colonial inheritance of the past.Footnote 7 Whether the “classic” imperial experience provided a model, prelude, or even a parallel to Nazi conquest, colonization, and mass murder in the Second World War has fostered much conflicting, and conflicted, discussion over the past two decades.
Some recent scholarship, building upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin, has identified a direct line between Europe's overseas colonies and Nazi imperialism in the Second World War. In its bluntest formulation, Germany's Herero War in Southwest Africa at the turn of the century paved the way for later genocide. Variations on this theme have globalized the debate beyond German history to stress that mass murder, concentration camps, and race-based law occurred across imperial domains, including settler conquest of the American west.Footnote 8 Curiously, some of the most powerful statements that tie the two colonialisms together reveal an ambiguity about that connection. One need look no further than David Furber and Wendy Lower's article on Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine, or Lower's more comprehensive monograph. In both the authors are explicit about the traditional colonial dimensions to Nazi rule. Yet, as Lower avers in her more detailed study, “There was something unprecedented about the Nazi case.”Footnote 9 That equivocality courses through another side of the literature that reverses the balance between continuities and disparities.
Shelley Baranowski's Nazi Empire exemplifies the counterpoint. Setting Nazi conquest within the longer history of German imperialism, Baranowski cannot write about the Nazis without reference to the colonial past. Yet repeatedly she finds discordance in the comparison.Footnote 10 Baranowski's refusal to flatten out imperial history into a Nazi prequel recurs through a wide stratum of writing about the two empires, although for these scholars, too, comparisons between the imperial experiences remain inescapable.Footnote 11 Thomas Kühne's judicious summation of the literature mirrors best this entanglement. Forever seeking evidence rather than resemblance, Kühne repeatedly questions the continuity thesis. Yet neither is he able to get altogether beyond it.Footnote 12
The ambiguity on both sides mirrors one commonly held assumption: classic overseas imperialism was a shared European experience. Indeed an ascending school of thought on the history of empire now posits that the colonial past was always a transnational (reconceived as a trans-imperial or inter-imperial) one. The writing of trans-imperial history has taken multiple forms, but in nearly all cases it has coalesced around the belief that empires were analogous and permeable and thus open to the transfer of experience across empires. There was an imperial world.Footnote 13 Still, how far could one imperialism really fold into another, and did Nazi Germany constitute an exception? The principal figures in the Ukraine Project had spent years in the Dutch empire and predicated their faith in the scheme upon the transferability of Dutch East Indies expertise into the Nazi continental East, only to run up against a brick wall of Dutch colonizers who refused to behave like trans-imperialists. The Ukraine Project sought to bring together two empires a hemisphere apart. But was it a demonstration or negation of trans-imperialism?
Whether that answer is affirmative or negative hinges upon the more fundamental dispute over linkage between maritime and Nazi empires: Did the latter represent continuity or disjunction? What happens then if one inserts the Ukraine Project into the debate? On one critical level—the origins of the Holocaust—it has little to offer because it occurred after most of Ukraine's Jews had been murdered. Project travel reports simply noted the absence of Jews and the woeful sight of an evacuated ghetto. But an examination of the Ukraine Project offers two things practically no other study does: it shows what happened when efforts were made to bring the two imperialisms together, and it focuses on the colonizers themselves.Footnote 14 These connections qualify both positions. The Deli Mij's thorough distaste for the project, not only for national and ideological reasons but because it could see no parallel between its experience on Sumatra and colonial development of the Nazi East, does not sit easily with the position of advocates. That the men who conceived and attempted to carry through the Ukraine Project possessed overseas colonial records and intended to re-create the East they had known wrong-foots the skeptics. Their instrument—the Deli companies—possessed impeccable pioneering colonial credentials. Most, too, were Nazis, so it does not do to draw a line between dyed-in-the-wool colonialists on the one hand and the Nazi East on the other. The presence in Ukraine and Poland of individuals and companies with imperial backgrounds was, in fact, considerable.
What is more, for all its fantastic quality, the Ukraine Project had always been about practicality. There was nothing fanciful about bringing colonial tobacco growers to southern Russia. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of the tobacco consumed by Russians had been cultivated in Ukraine, Kuban, Crimea, and the Caucasus.Footnote 15 German intentions to convert the Russian tobacco-growing lands, where mostly a low-grade variety known as makhorka was produced, into a source for homeland consumption made sense out of introducing premier western cultivators, like the Dutch, into the region. Even before the Ukraine Project surfaced, German occupation forces had expanded the area under cultivation.Footnote 16
Nor was the Ukraine Project the only plan to introduce Dutch colonizers and investment into the conquered territories. Meinhoud Rost van Tonningen, the son of a Dutch colonial general and a member of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland (Dutch National Socialist Movement, NSB) since 1936, had taken for his mission Dutch colonial penetration of the German East to replace an overseas empire fallen to Japanese conquest. His grand scheme—the Nederlandse Oost Compagnie (Dutch East Company, NOC)—was conceived as a monopoly trading firm, consciously modeled on the Dutch East India Company of the past. Yet little came of this, save a few enterprises here and there and the export of six to seven thousand Dutch settlers, mostly members of the NSB or forced laborers. The major colonial companies would have nothing to do with it.Footnote 17 The fiasco of the NOC was Salcher's justification for his own Ukraine Project. Attached to the Four Year Plan rather than Rosenberg's Ostministerium, Salcher touted the feasibility of his scheme. Never would the powerful and respectable Dutch colonial companies join a venture as tainted as the NOC, but they might be led into Ukraine under an alternative format. Salcher was, moreover, a good operations man. There is even reason to believe that Rosenberg's own people regarded Salcher as a man who knew how to get things done.Footnote 18
Thus if the weight of the outcome falls primarily to the skeptics’ side—practicality revealed as irreality—the logic was not altogether flawed. Salcher and Jarl had lived in the Dutch colonial East and knew firsthand what Dutch planters might accomplish in the Nazi East. In fact, the origins of the Ukraine Project arose in part from ideas about the future of German imperialism overseas. Nearly everything about the Ukraine Project thus forces us to reconsider how we apply colonial definitions to the Nazi conquests. Even the shadier edges of the project—the entanglement of project members with Nazi plundering of Jewish diamonds—revisit the presumption of imperial universals—corruption—across distinctive empires. The Ukraine Project may have been daft in its beginnings and without consequence, but it shows what actually occurred when the two Easts were mixed together.
Classical Template: The Deli Mij and the Tropical East
To understand the Ukraine Project, one must begin with the Deli Mij. This was not only the largest tobacco grower in the northeastern sector of Sumatra known as Deli,Footnote 19 but the founding company and practically ruling power in one of the greatest commodity producing lands in the world.
It had been the very first firm. The origins traced back to the early 1860s when Jacobus Nienhuys, acting on a tip about the extraordinary qualities of tobacco grown by Malays in northeastern Sumatra, joined an exploratory expedition into the region, stayed, received the support of the sultan of Deli, began to export tiny quantities of tobacco back to Europe, and in 1869, with further backing from investors in the Netherlands, founded the Deli Mij to cultivate tobacco leaf for commercial exportation. The original concession of 7,000 hectares was not insubstantial, but it paled alongside the 180,000 hectares under Deli Mij management at the time of the Second World War.
Most responsible for this extraordinary advance was Nienhyuys's successor, Jacob Theodoor Cremer, who later served as the Dutch Minister of Colonies. Cremer would forever be associated with the rise of the Deli Mij to powerhouse plantation and institutional status. He achieved this identity—the great avenue in the center of Medan, regional capital and the company's headquarters, was Cremer Way—not only for his contributions to the growth of the firm but because he undertook the infrastructural development of the Deli region that made possible its rapid evolution into an immense agribusiness machine. It was Cremer who constructed the Deli Railway Company to join estates to Medan and the port of Belawan. The Deli Mij Cremer built led in the creation of the Deli water company, the harbor authority, schools and hospitals, and later, jointly with the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij, an East Indies airline. From Cremer too came the tone of cooperation among the tobacco growers’ oligopoly in Deli. Three other great tobacco companies—the Deli-Batavia Maatschappij, the Tabak Maatschappij “Arendsburg,” and the Senembah Maatschappij—joined the Deli Mij in what became the “Big Four.” Together they dominated tobacco production through their expansive acquisition of smaller failing companies when the price of tobacco dropped. Under Cremer's initiative, the four firms created the Deli Planters Union to organize and control labor recruitment and management. Yet the Deli Mij was unmistakably primus inter pares.Footnote 20 A visitor to Medan in the late 1940s described how one came across a great way (Cremer Way), from which radiated Deli Mij Avenue, “where a great building stands, like the theater in Batavia, with a number of large homes grouped around it. In the great building is established the head office of the Deli Mij and in the houses, when they are not set aside for the delegate of the High Representative of the Crown, the Territorial Commander for Sumatra East Coast, and so forth and so forth, live the Head Administrator and his staff.”Footnote 21
Size and command thus defined the Deli Mij, but so too did its self-cultivated representation as a pioneering, colonizing force. The frontier spirit pervaded Deli Mij lore. As house or general histories told it, Cremer and his fellow planters had built a company, but also an empire. Central to this legend were two fundamental concepts: that they the planters, not the state, had made Deli what it was and that they had been civilization's agents “who in a half century of unflagging industry … and constructive Deligeest … transformed as if by magic … a mostly swampy land” thinly populated by peoples “living under primitive circumstances.”Footnote 22 Linking both was an underlying image of Deli men as pioneers in a wild and dangerous land. For the first three decades of the plantations’ history, attacks from Aceh to the north or from neighboring Batak peoples, or from Chinese sea pirates had been sufficiently common that J. L. Leyssius, one of the founders of the nearby Deli-Batavia Maatschappij, counseled his two sons working on the estates not to go out without a pistol.Footnote 23 As late as 1941, house history continued to recount the story of the building of the Deli Railway as a heroic conquest of technology over nature, but also how the first train traveling over a 360-meter bridge had been forced to a halt because it had run over a crocodile.Footnote 24
For Nazi empire builders, the Deli Mij offered, potentially, a perfect colonial model. The pioneering and frontier spirit with which it enrobed itself, the hardy reputation of its planters, its penetration and transformation of a wasteland into something of immense value, the empire-building qualities of its founders, the presumption to the right to rule and reconstruct a foreign land, and its elite status all spoke to German visions of their imperial East. Particularly eye-catching would have been the white man's fiefdom that the Deli planters had established on Sumatra. Armed with a penal sanction that conferred police and judicial powers, estate companies enforced contracts with fines or imprisonment when met with refusal to work. Violence and strict racial hierarchy were inbred into the system.Footnote 25
For the originators of the Ukraine Project, there were additional reasons to look to the tropical Dutch to lead the way. For one thing, German overseas shipping and trading networks were accustomed to working within the wider colonial world. Even if the First World War had breached this cosmopolitan culture, it was often old contacts with former enemies that enabled German companies to rebuild global markets and traffics after 1918.Footnote 26 For another, if German empire came to an end in 1918, individual German participation in empire did not. All three of the central figures in the Ukraine Project—Salcher, Jarl, and Oskar Kufahl—had spent years in the Dutch East Indies, and they were far from exceptions. In the last years before the war, approximately twenty Germans were managers or assistant managers of Deli Mij estates.Footnote 27 Most of the men who gathered around Salcher's office in Amsterdam had had East Indies experience. Salcher's secretary, Gertrud Dirnberger, who knew them all and had an affair with one of them, Robert Pilchowski, who had been a tea planter on Java, ascribed to them qualities, forged in the tropics, that fit her boss's expectations of what they could bring to the eastern front: rough, hard-drinking men of nerve who could make it through the laborious and mindless daily grind of plantation work. Pilchowski, later in the war, left for the Caucasus to set up tea estates.Footnote 28
In their reconnoitering travels, Ukraine Project people came across “old Deli hands” working for the German state tobacco monopoly in Ukraine.Footnote 29 The German excolonial presence in Ukraine was indeed substantial. Dirk van Laak has remarked on the increase in the number of German companies that continued to do business in the former German empire after the war.Footnote 30 He and Karsten Linne have also pointed to the persistence of an Africa lobby, not only through the familiar figure of Franz Ritter von Epp but also in the lesser known Deko-Gruppe created by the Deutsche Bank's Kurt Weigelt at roughly the same time as the Four Year Plan, which grew in association with it.Footnote 31 Jarl and possibly Salcher had worked with this Deko-Gruppe.Footnote 32 Irredentist, and disappointed in Nazi disinterest at the top in a return to overseas imperialism, it nonetheless reoriented upon the Nazi East. This was also true of Hamburg and Bremen trading and estate firms who set up shop in Poland and Ukraine because British closure of the seas impelled a search for continental alternatives.Footnote 33 This explains why the Deli delegates on the first study trip in 1942—H. C. A. Gransberg, a former Deli Mij head administrator, and Heer Raadsheer, the Medan agent of the Handelsvereeniging Amsterdam, another giant colonial firm—ran into a sense of trespass from Germans already engaged in tobacco planting.Footnote 34 The latter were often old estate hands or practiced businessmen in the tobacco tradeFootnote 35 with plans to make something out of this empire. Still, Göring's plans to milk conquered Soviet territories for their raw materials and foodstuffs would have created a certain receptivity to the idea of bringing in the master planters from the Indies.Footnote 36 Even before Salcher hawked his plan, the Reichskreditgesellschaft was compiling a file on the Deli Mij, which extolled its pioneering work on Sumatra.Footnote 37 At ground level, many were coming to see the Nazi East as a classic colonial land of opportunity.
The True Believers
Against this backdrop the Ukraine Project took shape. In a sense it began not with Salcher but with Hauptsturmführer Walter Müller, the head of the foreign intelligence section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Den Haag. Out of work and hoping to get assigned a Verwaltung, Jarl had turned up in Müller's office in 1941 on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, whom Jarl had met during his time with the Deko-Gruppe in Berlin. Little did he know the good and bad fortune he was about to embark upon. Hans-Joachim Fahrenholtz, Müller's wartime colleague in the SD and later cell mate in the postwar Dutch prison system, has left the portrait of a man of considerable charm, an operator and schemer skilled at using people for his own ends. And here was this mark, knocking on his door asking for a helping hand. Müller got Jarl the Verwaltung over Internatio, the powerful Dutch East Indies trading house. In 1942, when Salcher appeared upon the scene with his Four Year Plan credentials and Ukraine Project, it was Müller who introduced him to Jarl as the man to put in charge of the Deli Mij. Initially, Müller's plan was to use his surrogate to expand German trading prospects after the war. As the war continued, and the Japanese moved into the East Indies, Müller's strategies evolved. He was concerned about preserving German claims (through Verwaltungen over colonial companies) to future interests in the archipelago. He wanted to build a spy ring that would keep him informed about what was happening overseas and that could then be used to extend German influence in the East Indies once the war was over. Jarl's past experience as a Deli planter, his circle of acquaintances among old Deli hands, and his institutional position as Verwalter of multiple colonial companies made him a valuable source of information and an instrument for constructing that network. At the same time, Müller shared Salcher's perception that the Dutch colonial companies would never have anything to do with Rost van Tonningen, but that they could, under Salcher's scheme, be put to use in the East and that here again Jarl's colonial experience would come in handy. His and Salcher's principal agendas were different yet overlapped. Plus, Jarl, as his contact man, would keep him informed of what Salcher was doing. According to Fahrenholtz, Jarl learned his role well, coming often to Den Haag to report to Müller. Müller, then, was the godfather of the Ukraine Project. But if so, what stands out is the prominence of traditional maritime imperialism in its origins. From Müller's perspective, Jarl and Salcher were to be used not only to create an equivalent colonial empire in the Nazi East, but to advance German interests in the old, and far from outmoded, overseas East. At its start, the Ukraine Project was globally imagined.Footnote 38
How deeply this stamp of traditional empire impressed upon the Ukraine Project from the beginning was manifest in the lives and outlooks of its three main agents: Jarl, Salcher, and Kufahl. All three had spent a large part of their careers in the Dutch East Indies; all three carried over from that experience an abiding respect, bordering on veneration, for Dutch colonial prowess. Deli Mij lore was, in certain ways, their template.
Jarl was very “old hand.” He had arrived in Medan, in his twenty-second year, in April 1914. By 1926, he was an estate manager on the Deli-Batavia Rubber Company's combined tobacco and rubber plantation, Rantau Prapat. His wealth of experience was matched by his wealth of contacts. He got to know Dutch, English, American, Belgian, German, and Swedish planters across the commodity spectrum. Müller's plans for the uses to which he could be put were not without foundation. When the company dismissed him in 1936 to make way for younger men, the decision hit him hard. Eventually, he landed with the Deko-Gruppe through his connection to one of its experts, Ernest Fickendey, another hard-drinking buddy Jarl had known on Sumatra. For two years Jarl worked for this colonial institute and traveled on fact-finding missions to Cameroon and the British Straits Settlement, Malakka. Overseas empire was what he knew best, when he arrived in occupied Holland.Footnote 39
In a series of postwar questionnaires sent to companies where Jarl had been installed as Verwalter, the uniform response was that he had been largely superfluous but had behaved honorably.Footnote 40 This was not the only side to his tenure. While at Internatio he had overseen the removal of a few Jewish administrators. He made very good money out of his postings. His effort to prolong his Verwaltungen in 1944 provoked suspicions that he and Salcher were doing everything they could to keep from being sent to the eastern front. Yet Deli men also came to speak of Jarl as someone who had protected them against more dangerous incursions by the occupier.Footnote 41 In the business history of the Third Reich, the use of Verwaltungen has been understood either as an instrument by which recalcitrant or Allied-owned enterprises were to be harnessed to the German war effort or as an instrument for sheer plunder, especially of Jewish-owned firms.Footnote 42 The story of Friedrich Jarl and the Ukraine Project, however, reminds us that Verwalter could comport themselves in multiple ways and that the reasons behind their appointment were often freighted with wider ulterior motivations.
Whether sympathetic or looking after number one, the essential Jarl was the man who had fallen under the spell of the Dutch and their empire since childhood in Vienna. Educated for a legal and commercial career by his father, Jarl dreamed of becoming a planter in the Dutch East Indies and got his wish.Footnote 43 Müller's and Salcher's choice of point man for the Ukraine Project was thus a true believer. Jarl may have protected the companies under his supervision, but he was committed to taking them into the Nazi East. The fiasco of the first study trip, where repeatedly they met with indifference and surprise, if not hostility—“Why did you come here and who sent you?”—stung him to the quick.Footnote 44 When Deli men produced yet another negative report and highlighted the insecurity of the region, Jarl waved it away as “defeatist” and recalled that the original Deli planters had faced comparable difficulties and dangers and had not “recoiled.”Footnote 45 One side of Jarl seems to have understood perfectly the reluctance of his firms to engage; another seems to have taken that reluctance as a betrayal of his life's fantasies. As he traveled east, he reminisced about the old days on Sumatra. He talked about what had been done in Cameroon and how the Dutch in the East Indies had done things better. Classic empire was his frame of reference, the Deli Dutch its past masters.Footnote 46
Salcher was a more complicated figure. He had joined the Nazi Party in January 1934 when it was still illegal in Austria. But he did his best to protect the Jewish owner of a Dutch company, which he wanted to invest in the east, and when asked by his Jewish neighbor and cat-sitter in Amsterdam if association with a Jew wasn't compromising, Salcher answered that that sort of thing had nothing to do with him. It is even possible that he developed contacts with the Dutch resistance in the last stages of the war.Footnote 47 Gertrud Dirnberger, his secretary, whom he recruited for her looks and fell in love with while she was falling in love with Robert Pilchowski, found him “dazzling” and quite the charmer. But he had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way and getting into hot water.Footnote 48 Everywhere he sowed ambiguity, especially about his past.Footnote 49 His neighbor probably came closest when he described Salcher as “an adventurer.”Footnote 50 A near second was the Dutch War Crimes Commission captain looking into his case after the war, who pronounced him a “very dubious figure.”Footnote 51
Nowhere was this truer than his association with Baron Hermann von Rautenberg.Footnote 52 Rautenberg, a Nazi since 1930Footnote 53 and General Consul in Berlin for Costa Rica, was the proprietor of a carpet factory in Silesia and owner or co-owner of three jewelry firms: Julius Busse in Berlin, Goldfalken in Prague, and the N.V. Dunema in Amsterdam. All three trafficked in plundered Jewish diamonds and jewelry. The provenance of much of von Rautenberg's goods was Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. (Liro), a respectable Jewish bank in Amsterdam that the Nazis took over and used as cover to loot Dutch Jews of their moveable property. Busse and Goldfalken were Liro's two largest German purchasers of gold, silver, and jewelry.Footnote 54 The N.V. Dunema was his vehicle for purchasing diamonds by other sources; these too were then shipped to Busse and Goldfalken. Von Rautenberg additionally acquired the Netherlands Industry and Commercial Bank and used it as a cover for his operations. He and his partners also got their hands on a Jewish jewelry firm, L. I. Wolf & Zn, as Verwalter, used it as yet another instrument for their transactions, and swindled it to the point that having stripped it bare, they could buy it. Dutch postwar records estimated that von Rautenberg exported roughly 3 million florins in diamonds, other jewels, art works, and Persian carpets to Germany during the war, a vast sum in today's currency.Footnote 55
The baron moved in thoroughly corrupt circles. His accountant, Karl Kirchlechner, had in a previous life embezzled his Jewish father-in-law; Nazi Party reports from the Tyrol describe him as a confidence man void of scruples.Footnote 56 But as Gertrud Dirnberger recorded in her wartime diary, von Rautenberg, Salcher, and Oskar Kufahl were also thick as thieves.Footnote 57 Kufahl was deeply implicated in Rautenberg's manipulations. He was Rautenberg's partner in Dunema, an investor in Busse, and he succeeded Kirchlechner as the Verwalter for Wolf until he so lowered its value that he could buy it outright. Salcher's relationship was of another order. He and Rautenberg went back at least to the First World War and were personally close. No evidence links Salcher directly to the diamond traffic. Yet he knew enough to turn up in the Netherlands in 1945 with the proposition of trading release from imprisonment for tracking down 32,000 carats of stolen stones smuggled out of Holland by the Nazis. He also seems to have fed von Rautenberg some of his opportunities. The postwar trustee in charge of tracking down von Rautenberg's plunder suspected Salcher of “having acted as an important link” in the operations of von Rautenberg, Kirchlechner, and Kufahl.Footnote 58
Von Rautenberg's connections to the Ukraine Project were still more extensive. Espying opportunities in the eastern territories, he tried to sell gold watches, obtained from Liro, to the Reich Commissariat (Erich Koch himself?), and although this transaction fell through, he did sell off another Liro load of watches to the Commissariat.Footnote 59 He also formed the Ukraine Import and Export Company as a joint venture with Internatio, at the time under Jarl's Verwaltung. Once the Ukraine Project was fully underway, this firm was to get the contract for the purchase and transport of the tobacco plantation's equipment and other materials. Almost certainly none of this was accomplished without Salcher's intervention.Footnote 60 Salcher, as much as Kufahl, thus connected von Rautenberg with the Ukraine Project, and one must wonder just how much of the scheme was designed to advance this mere captain's own interests and aggrandizement. Once he sold his plans to Göring, Salcher oversaw somewhere between eight hundred and one thousand Dutch trading and estate companies,Footnote 61 including some of the Netherlands’ largest tropical enterprises.
Probably the answer lies somewhere within a remark by Kirchlechner, when asked in a postwar interrogation if Salcher was likely to retrieve the absent diamonds. Kirchlechner said he doubted it because Salcher was a fantast—dreamer, illusionist—and not to be trusted.Footnote 62 The Ukraine Project, Salcher's brainchild, appears to have inherited both traits, veering toward profiteering but almost certainly beginning as castle-building. There is not much doubt that Salcher threw himself fully into the project. Both Dirnberger and Fahrenholtz, whom Dirnberger later married, described him as a big thinker, a vital type, and committed to his plan. Gransberg's travel reports also conveyed the intensity of Salcher's faith in the scheme. The whole idea was rooted, moreover, in Salcher's past experience in the Dutch East Indies, where he had spent most of his adult life before the war. At his wartime office, he surrounded himself with old Indies hands. Different from Jarl, he, too, had been fashioned out of this milieu and remained a true believer. When he first proposed his ideas to the Deli Mij and met with objections, he recalled their great pioneering accomplishments, which he had witnessed firsthand during his fourteen years in their East. Now he was going to put those special talents to work in eastern Europe.Footnote 63
Even Kufahl fell into this pattern. He was the oldest of the old hands. Since the age of nineteen, he had worked as a planter in the East Indies: twenty-nine years altogether. From 1931 to 1939, he had managed an estate for the Deli Mij. He joined the Nazi Party (1933) while working in Sumatra and headed the local Medan section. At some point on leave in 1936, he crossed paths with von Rautenberg and mentioned that he would soon be retiring with 300,000 guilders and would like to invest them. Back in Europe for good in 1939, the two founded the N.V. Dunema in Amsterdam as a wholesale business in diamonds and jewelry.Footnote 64 At that time all intentions for this firm were probably legitimate. Once the Nazis had conquered Europe and wider business prospects arose, Kufahl seems to have displayed about as many scruples as his partner. Judging by receipts from Liro, or from his supplier of champagne and French wines, he had a very good war. How he connected with the Ukraine Project is not known. Quite likely the liaison came through von Rautenberg and Salcher. Kufahl reported to Salcher as Verwalter for a number of Dutch colonial companies, including the Tabak Mij “Arendsburg,” one of the big four on Deli. In records from the project, he comes across as a slick character, less trustworthy or sympathetic than Jarl or Salcher. Yet he too was indelibly marked by his Deli days. The Deli Mij's Heer Spruytenburg recorded from the second study trip that “for the rest of the evening, Heer Kufahl regaled us with a medley of his Indies experiences. It struck me how fondly the Heer Verwalters [Kufahl and Jarl] talk about the Indies. They recount to everyone how life was never so good and how perfectly the Dutch had ordered everything there.”Footnote 65 Everyone attached to the Ukraine Project—all, save Jarl, Nazis—seems to have retained as his reference point for empire the empire they had known back in the Dutch East. This was, moreover, a common refrain of German officials they met on their travels east, who valued the “pioneer spirit” of the colonial Dutch and the great use to be made of “our Indies experience.”Footnote 66
A Very Different East
It is difficult to imagine them getting it more wrong. Not that there was anything saintly about the Deli Mij. Directors and board members had not been above pressuring Emil Enthoven, a Jew and one of the leading figures in the firm, to leave to avoid a Jewish designation.Footnote 67 In negotiations over concession contracts, the company was hard-nosed and thorough (although objections to one article or another could also be chalked up to the deployment of business interest as a means of resistance).Footnote 68
On the other hand, recoil from the Ukraine Project was practically over-determined. There is no evidence of sympathy with Nazi ideology. Müller and Salcher got it at least partially right when they foresaw that the Dutch tropical companies would keep their distance from the NOC. What they failed to reckon with was the discomfort with anything that smacked of collaboration, at least by 1942.Footnote 69 Timing in this regard was particularly against the project. By the moment it got underway, many in the Netherlands were convinced that Germany was going to lose the war. Hein Klemann has shown how Dutch business profited substantially from German orders during the first eighteen months of the occupation, but how greater German centralization of resources following reverses led to a rise in resentment of the occupier.Footnote 70 Only the threat of shutting down a useless enterprise rattled the Deli firms into a greater pretense of activity, yet even then they found shelter under Jarl and Salcher's Verwaltungen. Once the Germans increased the pressure, time had already grown very short. Partisan attacks and a resurgent Red Army increasingly rendered moot any arguments for eastern investment. Moreover, basic business instincts told the Deli Mij from the start that this was a very bad bet. All study reports were full of business reasons to stay out, including the fundamental killer: they were not going to be masters of their own house.Footnote 71
But the Deli Mij also saw no connection between its history on Sumatra and project plans in Ukraine. Nor could they given empires were neither fixed quantities nor immutable. In the older East, the Deli Mij had initiated the insertion of the Sumatran east coast into a global liberal and capitalistic world order that drove East Indies exports and fueled the material consumption of the modern West. Power and racism were inseparable from this project, but it was not the same project the Nazis intended in their East.Footnote 72 The greater Deli region was intensely cosmopolitan, an open territory rather than designated Lebensraum. Moreover, if the Deli Mij assumed the role of master of its universe, this had certainly evolved into a different mental and moral universe than that of the Nazis. By the 1940s, the penal sanction had been abolished. Anniversary volumes of the Deli Mij celebrated an increasingly extensive paternalistic program—housing, hospitals, schools, creches, sickness funds, and pensions for long-time workers and their widows. No one could imagine the Nazis writing like this about their Ukraine.Footnote 73
Strangely, the project men, who had spent careers in the Indies and were spellbound by that experience, never grasped how deeply a specific sense of place and past was inscribed into the Deli Mij's sense of itself. Herbert Cremer, son of J. T. Cremer and the then-current head of the Deli Mij, tried to put Salcher straight on this at the first exposition of the project, when he said that firm statutes stipulated business activity only on Sumatra and that Dutch tropical companies “possess experience with work in the Netherlands Indies but in no way experience concerning lands such as Heer Salcher has described.”Footnote 74 Over the next twenty months, the Deli companies would return to this point in one form or another: there was nothing for them to do in Ukraine; the conditions were totally unlike those that existed on Sumatra and Java.Footnote 75
Tobacco planting explained this distinction perfectly. The Deli Mij was a massive complex of estates, but it had built its reputation and profits on the quality of its product: the famed Deli dekblad or cigar wrapper leaf. This special leaf could be grown in only one part of Deli, and then only after great care in planting and processing.Footnote 76 German plans for rapid and mass production of an inferior tobacco in Ukraine rubbed against every grain of the Deli Mij body. On his trip to Ukraine in 1943, Gransberg's response to Jarl's desire to start large was that in its first year on Sumatra the Deli Mij had only planted 50 hectares, 189 in the second year. They practiced horticulture, not mass production, and if Germany insisted on the latter, then it should send for potato farmers from Holland, not tobacco planters from the East Indies.Footnote 77 Ukraine meant nothing to the Deli Mij, except perhaps as a place where inferior tobacco was cultivated.
What Jarl, Salcher, and their cohorts got especially wrong was the pioneering spirit of the Deli Dutch. Planters and their lionizers vaunted their image as tough and tenacious men, possessors of moed, a word that signified spirit but also nerve,Footnote 78 but by the twentieth century Deli's frontier days were well behind it and the Deli Mij was a well-oiled corporation. Labor protest in the 1920s, during a decade of declining tobacco prices on the world market, had introduced a new wave of assaults on planters. Such assaults, however, were far less common in the 1930s, and those who would not go out without a Sten gun in the far more dangerous times of the late 1940s recalled that it was not normal to carry arms before the war.Footnote 79 Gransberg, on the trip to Ukraine in summer 1943, seeing automatic weapons on a table for use by Germans working the tobacco fields, remarked, “not without wistfulness,” how this recalled the old days in Deli when they knew how to assert their authority by means of “very antiquated Winchesters whose cartridges either because they were missing or because of dampness, made them useless,” an image that caught perfectly the anachronistic quality to the prevailing pioneering code.Footnote 80 Those who banked on transporting those qualities into Ukraine failed to see that the lore applied to a different place and a different time.
Tellingly, reports from study trips increasingly harped on the danger in Ukraine. Far from the swagger of the hard drinking, tough guy legend, these Dutch preferred to stay home. Nothing captured this better than the excuse A. C. Jaeggi, delegate for tobacco planters on Java, gave for pulling out of the second study voyage at the last minute: no company would write him an insurance policy.Footnote 81
The danger was real. In 1942, there were several thousand partisans active in Ukraine, and in 1943, partisan forces controlled 60 percent of the Zhytomyr general district, where the Ukraine Project was to be assigned. Killing Germans and their agents was a priority.Footnote 82 By the summer of 1943, travel reports stressed the complete insecurity of the area. On the first voyage in fall 1942, Gransberg and Raadsheer could travel safely after dark. One year later, the roads were off limits after four in the afternoon. Returning to Zhytomyr on July 28, the car carrying the Dutch delegation broke down with a flat tire. When they hailed a passing truck, the heavily armed officer who got out was astonished to discover they were traveling without weapons and told them he found this “irresponsible.” The previous day a car with Germans had been stopped and the occupants murdered. That word was not lost on the visitors. “The territory here is absolutely unsafe,” a Deli man reported back to the home office. He counseled that they stay out of Ukraine, and he found it unimaginable that any Dutch company would “take on the responsibility” of sending young men out into this peril. “Taking everything together I advise that we abandon any plans to come and plant tobacco here; this is better left to adventurers.”Footnote 83 Once, back in Deli, the Dutch might have gone out to the fields with guns strapped to their person. But they were not going to do so in Ukraine.
Conclusion
The interchange of empire was, therefore, no simple thing. The promise of what the Deli Mij might bring to the Nazi East and the realities that distanced one imperial world from the other made and broke the Ukraine Project. Thus neither historians who have argued that overseas empire set the precedent for Nazi conquests in eastern Europe nor historians who have denied that connection can find vindication in the Ukraine Project. But they would not be repudiated either. Walter Müller, Arthur Salcher, Friedrich Jarl, and Oskar Kufahl were convinced that Dutch accomplishments on Sumatra could repeat in Ukraine. All four took maritime imperial experience as the model for Nazi colonization. Three of these men were Nazis. Salcher, the initiator of the scheme, possessed the backing of Göring and the Four Year Plan. Three, too, had long experience in the Dutch East Indies, two of these as planters. The fourth, Müller, looked toward a postwar settlement where the tropical Dutch could advance German overseas colonial interests: one could even be tempted to see in the Ukraine Project a plan for incorporating the Nazi East into the larger global East, East meets East set in reverse. Gertrud Dirnberger believed Salcher shared this vision. If, then, what Hitler intended when he said “What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us” might be endlessly debated, what cannot be excluded are the Nazi classic imperial plans for eastern Europe, unless one distinguishes which Nazis one is referring to and which ones are being left out. Nor can it be said that there was little continuity between empires in the two Easts. Nor that, from the perspective of colonialists, eastern Europe was a to-be-accommodated alternative to the abandonment of Africa. The Ukraine Project shows us what the 1940s eastern conquests represented as imperialism to conquerors further down the chain of command. Those who see a bridge between the two colonialisms will not be discomforted by the answer. Indeed, the almost fairy-tale quality of Salcher's and Jarl's rise to exalted positions under the Ukraine Project mimicked the transformational experience ordinary white men enjoyed when they crossed east of Suez.
On the other hand, the Deli Mij, the oldest, tone-setting, and ruling firm on Sumatra spurned all efforts to take it into Ukraine. For business and national reasons, it wanted no part of the Nazi East. But it also stayed out because this empire was foreign to its formation in the East Indies. When Herbert Cremer told Salcher that the Deli Mij had no experience “concerning lands such as Herr Salcher has described,” he affirmed a classic understanding of colonial business as the commercial integration of overseas territories into a Western-led world of global exchange. Deli Mij history and identity had evolved out of that specific context and setting. The thinking, too, about empire, had also evolved. Colonial rule now signified the pacified, completed version found in the vast complex of colonial estates covering the Sumatra East Coast. So ingrained into a sense of purpose and accomplishment (and labor market necessity) were schools, hospitals, creches, and housing that the Deli Mij could not envision running a colonial enterprise without them. The Ukraine Project could thus place no call on its pioneering or conquering zeal; eastern Europe in the midst of the Second World War was simply a place to die in the service of an alien enterprise. One question the Ukraine Project cannot answer is whether Jarl and Salcher would have retained their commitment if forced to participate actively in the atrocities of Nazi rule. The response of the colonial blue bloods was unambiguous, however, and it ratifies arguments that draw a line between the two imperialisms.
The von Rautenberg connection spoke too to this distinction. On general levels, the von Rautenbergs of history—corrupt opportunists, rogue adventurers, fortune seekers, con men, and profiteers—were familiar accouterments to classic empire. They turn up as the influence-peddling nabobs of Bengal, the would-be kings of Asia, the frauds and swindlers of Leopold's Congo, or the river gamblers and confidence men accompanying the streams pouring into the American West.Footnote 84 That they should appear and proliferate in Nazi Europe is without enigma.
Still, corruption in the Nazi empire operated through its own dynamic. Frank Bajohr has underlined the endemic character to corruption under National Socialism. Nazi rule did not merely create vast opportunities for crookedness; crookedness was systemic and structural; indeed, it was the Nazi system.Footnote 85 Two factors amplified these built-in tendencies once Nazi rule became imperial: first, the concurrence of empire with the Second World War, and second, the Nazi assault upon Europe's Jews. Studies on wartime economies have stressed the massive black market trade, carried out on an industrial and professionally criminal as well as petty transactional scale, that reversed market norms in western and eastern Europe.Footnote 86 The advance east, and then the bogging down of millions of troops on the eastern front, produced too a colossal gap between supply and demand into which rushed willing entrepreneurs such as Oskar Schindler, who made a small fortune manufacturing field kitchenware on contract for the Wehrmacht and whose success in making money and saving Jews depended on a highly developed skill set for navigating a world rampant with bribery and corruption.Footnote 87 All these inherent tendencies intensified with the dispossession of Jews. Swindler operations like Liro or the stripping of assets that accompanied the bulk of Verwaltungen were part of an Aryanization program that Götz Aly has likened to “a gigantic, trans-European trafficking operation in stolen goods.”Footnote 88 The von Rautenbergs, Kufahls, and the multitudes of others who lifted their share of the plunder or their take off the black market—all these Schindlers ohne lists—were themselves the creatures of how a Nazi empire, entangled in world war, was bound to work.
The traffic in diamonds drew these associations in particularly strong relief. Göring's Four Year Plan hunted down every diamond it could get its hands on from the Jewish merchants and cutters in Antwerp and Amsterdam who largely controlled the European trade because industrial diamonds were critical for war production and because polished diamonds could be exchanged for more industrial diamonds or for hard currency for trade with neutrals. But diamonds were easy to hide. And purchasers in neutral countries were wary of stolen goods whose value would be nil if the Germans lost the war. Indeed, the Allies were tracking as best they could all diamond sales. Precluded from brute looting, which would simply drive more diamonds underground and make those they captured unsaleable, the Nazis descended into the shadow world of their own wartime making by creating a cover firm to mask their purchases and sales on the black market. Illegality, like the fraudulent Liro bank, was thus constitutive of the entire diamond confiscation program. Josef Veltjens, in charge of the Four Year Plan in the Netherlands, commanded the camouflage scheme; earlier he had launched a similar action for the purchase of Dutch raw materials. His second, the Hamburg businessman Hans Plümer, took over after Veltjens's death in a plane crash in 1943.Footnote 89 Corruption then begot corruption. Tens of thousands of carats went missing. Both Plümer and Friedrich Kadgien, head of diamond affairs within the Four Year Plan, were pursued by Dutch investigators in search of looted stones following the war.Footnote 90
The toxic dealings of von Rautenberg and Kufahl—neither of whom have left any record of illegal activity before the war—sprung from this tainted milieu. Corrupted by the opportunities opening before them, they were the private, parasitical version of Veltjens's and Plümer's trafficking for the Four Year Plan and not completely separate from it; von Rautenberg did some work for Plümer.Footnote 91 Salcher's connection was more opaque. There is no evidence that he was directly involved in the diamond traffic or with Liro. But he was attached to the Four Year Plan, was in close contact with Veltjens, to whom he reported, and, according to von Rautenberg, knew Plümer really well (“heel goed”). His claim to be able to lead the Dutch to the 32,000 carats Plümer had presumably embezzled out of the country forces the question of just how “heel goed” were his relations with the Nazi underworld.Footnote 92 Salcher was also a friend of Alois Miedl, who often served as middleman in Göring's acquisition of stolen art from Jewish collections, including the stripping of the J. Goudstikker gallery, perhaps the most notorious art grab in the Netherlands.Footnote 93 Again, no evidence ties Salcher to Miedl's dealings. But repeatedly this charmer and operator seems to have straddled the slippery line between state service and the criminality that pervaded occupation. Even Jarl, through his connections with von Rautenberg's Ukraine Import and Export Company, was not immune to contamination. The power of the Nazi empire to corrupt nearly everyone or everything within it thus seeped into the Ukraine Project and again demonstrated that this was not the empire Jarl, Salcher, and Kufahl had known in their East.
This blip, then, in the history of the Second World War, with its grandiose title—“The Ukraine Project”—and its dud conclusion turns out to tell us quite a lot about the Nazi conquests and about empires in general. Verwaltungen, by which the occupier administered his plunder, were also instruments that served other purposes with potentially contrary effects. German imbrication within European maritime empires remained considerable, despite the loss of colonies after 1919. For many Nazis, classic overseas empire remained the imperial reference point well into the 1940s. If good and needed work has recently recalled our attention to the Axis as a trans-imperial alliance, it cannot be said, as this literature proposes, that the Nazi empire must be reconceived within a new Axis model of colonization.Footnote 94 Neither this paradigm nor older presumptions about the end of colonial experience nor about the dismissal of classic imperial formats can account for the Friedrich Jarls, Arthur Salchers, and Oskar Kufahls, nor the Walter Müllers, nor the Deko-Gruppe and all the old colonial hands and companies that turned up in the eastern territories. Nor did trans-imperial transfer necessarily apply to the Nazi empire.
The Ukraine Project thus suggests some new directions in which the debate over Nazi imperialism might proceed. One is the value of looking more closely at local actors, like the Salchers and Jarls, who actively engaged in the two imperialisms. Another is the benefit to be gained from scaling down our examination of business history within Nazi-occupied Europe in accordance with the dynamics that overtook this scheme. The Ukraine Project, in timing and focus, may have skirted the Holocaust, but ultimately it too, through the connection with Rautenberg and his kind, led back to the despoliation and annihilation of Europe's Jews. This teeming and inevitably corrupt world of petty business operators, spawned by Nazi wartime rule and pervading the edges of the Ukraine Project, prompts the obvious comparison: if set alongside the same, small-time caliber of business opportunities begot and seized in maritime empire, what other similarities and gaps would emerge between the two imperial histories? The business history itself of such trivial enterprises, operating in a wartime environment of unimaginable and often unspeakable opportunities, is worth pursuing by business historians, who largely, if understandably, have concentrated on big business's relations with the Nazis. At broadest levels, the Ukraine Project offers a trans-imperial history of a different sort than we are accustomed to encountering. Here imperial expertise did not transfer easily, if at all, from one empire to another. The principal advocates of the project acted as historians seventy years later have come to expect of trans-imperialists, but the thoroughbred imperialists of the Deli Mij purposely saw their imperial world small: their corner of their island in the East Indies archipelago. Their demurral before engagement in the Nazi East highlights the boundaries—temporal, experiential, product-specific, and self-conceptual—that could just as readily shut off inter-imperial exchange.
In the end, however, one thing did unequivocally join the two imperial experiences, although, paradoxically, in reverse of how the connection was supposed to work. Upon the Deli Mij's return to its lands on Sumatra following the end of the war, the same insecurity prevailed as in Ukraine by 1943. Large security forces patrolled the estates in fear of Indonesian guerillas, and the impression of one visitor was that every night a drying shed went up in flames.Footnote 95 Ironically, what the Deli Mij had sought to avoid in Ukraine in 1942–1944 was exactly what it got back on its home island in 1945. The Ukraine Project had been predicated on the concept that traditional colonial experience overseas would serve as a model for the Nazi East. Instead, the Nazi East turned into a precursor of overseas imperial experience in a postwar world.
