The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

The repulse before Moscow combined with the American entry into the war made December 1941 the geo-political turning point. From that moment, Germany became incapable of winning the Second World War outright, even though it still retained the power to inflict appalling damage and death.

in a perverse contradiction of Japanese propaganda, which claimed that they were undertaking a war to liberate Asia from the whites, officers made little effort to restrain their men from raping Hong Kong Chinese women. More than 10,000 are estimated to have been gang-raped

(It was later striking how many Germans convinced themselves by the end of the war that it had been the United States which declared war on Germany, not the other way round.)

The Victory Program, originally suggested by Jean Monnet, one of the few Frenchmen whom the American administration truly respected, was already starting.

Crows, pigeons and seagulls were eaten first, then cats and dogs (even Pavlov’s famous experimental dogs were consumed at the Physiological Institute) and finally rats.

Soviet history has tried to pretend that there was no cannibalism, but both anecdotal and archive sources indicate otherwise. Some 2,000 people were arrested for ‘the use of human meat as food’ during the siege, 886 of them during the first winter of 1941–2.

Parents, not surprisingly, kept their children in their apartments for fear of what might befall them. It was said that the flesh of children, followed by that of young women, was the tenderest.

Leningraders were angry that the western Allies were reluctant to regard Finland as an enemy country.

A member of the 15th Panzer Division wrote home on 23 January to say: ‘once again we are rommeling ahead!’

Despite his apocalyptic diatribes against the Jews, he does seem to have been remarkably reluctant to hear details of mass killings, rather as he shied away from any image of suffering in battle or from bombing. His desire to keep violence abstract was a significant psychological paradox in one who had done more than almost anyone else in history to promote it.

Some have argued that the production-line method of the extermination camps was strongly influenced by Henry Ford, who in turn had obtained his ideas from the Chicago slaughterhouses. Ford, who had been a ferocious anti-semite since 1920, was revered by Hitler and other leading Nazis.

Hitler kept a portrait of Ford hanging on the wall in his office in Munich, and in 1938 awarded him the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.

As Ian Kershaw wrote: ‘the road to Auschwitz was built by hatred, but paved with indifference’.

The ghetto was razed to the ground. Vasily Grossman, who entered Warsaw with the Red Army in January 1945, described the scene: ‘Waves of stone, crushed bricks, a sea of brick. There isn’t a single wall intact – the beast’s anger was terrible.’

the New Zealand Division broke through the 21st Panzer Division in a vicious night attack, killing wounded, medics and combatants alike, an action which the Germans considered a war crime.

For the Jewish community the prospect was terrifying, but although the British authorities in Cairo offered them priority on the trains to Palestine, the Palestine administration refused them visas. Jewish fears were not misplaced. An SS Einsatzkommando unit was waiting in Athens to begin work in Egypt, and then in Palestine if Rommel’s string of victories continued.

A rifleman declared to his comrades that ‘when he made it home he was going to spend his time eating chocolate ice creams while sitting on the toilet and enjoying the luxury of pulling the chain’.

A battalion commander in the 294th Infantry Division wrote in his diary of ‘the great alarm which we all feel about the power and the importance of the SS… They already say in Germany that as soon as the Army returns home with victory, the SS will disarm it on the frontier.’

The disaster which ensued over the next ten days – almost entirely the making of Stalin’s favourite commissar, Lev Mekhlis – led to the loss of 176,000 men, 400 aircraft, 347 tanks and 4,000 guns. Mekhlis tried to put the blame on the troops, especially the Azeris, but the terrible losses created a great hatred in the Caucasus. Mekhlis was demoted, but Stalin soon found him another post.

The Russians are undertaking more and more measures on preventing desertion and absconding from the battlefield. Now there are so-called guard companies, which have only one task: to prevent their own units from retreating.

Khrushchev demanded to speak to Stalin himself. Stalin refused and told Malenkov to find out what he wanted. When Stalin heard the reason he shouted that ‘Military orders must be obeyed,’ and instructed Malenkov to end the call. Khrushchev’s hatred for Stalin is said to have dated from this point, and led to his passionate denunciation of the dictator at the XX Party Conference in 1956.

Stalin, in characteristic fashion, simply humiliated Khrushchev by tapping out the ash from his pipe on Khrushchev’s bald crown, saying that it was a Roman tradition for a commander who had lost a battle to pour ashes on his head in penance.

For the local people, we come as liberators,’ wrote an Obergefreiter bitterly, ‘as liberators of their last seed corn, vegetables, cooking oil and so forth.’

Red Army soldiers were more cynical. When opening tins of American Lend–Lease Spam (which they called tushonka – or stewed meat), they would say ‘Let’s open the Second Front.’

Courage was an exhaustible currency.

For the starved and sick Japanese, their uniforms and boots in tatters, the retreat back through the mountain rainforest was a terrible experience. Many did not survive it. Advancing Australians found that the Japanese had been eating meat from human corpses.

Unable to resolve the impasse with MacArthur, the joint chiefs of staff compromised with a so-called Twin Axis policy which would follow both courses of action at once. Only the United States, with its astonishing output of ships and aircraft, was capable of achieving anything with such a prodigal dispersal of forces.

General Warlimont of the OKW staff, who returned after a short absence, was struck by the dramatic change in atmosphere. Hitler greeted him with a ‘long stare of burning hate’. Warlimont later claimed to have thought: ‘This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over.’ Other members of Hitler’s staff also found that he had become completely withdrawn. He no longer ate with his staff or shook their hands. He seemed to distrust everyone. Just over two weeks later Hitler dismissed General Halder as chief of the general staff.

Uzbeks and Tajiks, they were all still wearing their skull-caps, even at the front line. The Germans shouted to us in Russian through a megaphone: “Where did you get such animals from?”

Max was then parachuted behind Red Army lines in February 1942 and soon began to radio back plausible but inaccurate intelligence provided by his NKVD controllers.

Göring dismissed Allied air power, saying: ‘Americans can only make razor blades.’ ‘Herr Reichsmarschall,’ Rommel replied, ‘I wish we had such razor blades.’

Fortunately, the pragmatic General Conde Francisco de Jordana was again foreign minister after Franco had removed his pro-Nazi and over-ambitious brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer. The diminutive and elderly Jordana was determined to keep Spain out of the war, and his appointment in September was a great relief to the Allies.

The Italian attitude to the war against the Soviet Union was very different to the German. Italian officers were shocked by the Germans’ racist attitude towards the Slavs, and when they took over from Wehrmacht units they made much greater efforts to feed the Russian prisoners employed on heavy duties.

Yet Christian instincts did not extend to the Soviet prisoners held in two camps within the Kessel. Deprived of any food so as not to reduce German rations, the few survivors were reduced to eating the bodies of their comrades.

Another soldier wrote sarcastically: ‘On the first day of the holidays, we had goose with rice for dinner, on the second day, goose with peas. We have been eating geese for a long time. Only our geese have got four legs and horseshoes.’

they came across the last few surviving Russian prisoners who had been starved in another camp at Gumrak. Tragically, their rescuers killed them unintentionally by giving them too much food.

‘Such is the irony of fate,’ a German colonel announced, intending to be overheard. ‘A Jew is seeing to it that we are not harmed.’

By the spring of 1943, German strength stood at just over 2,700,000 men, while the Red Army mustered just under 5,800,000, with four and half times as many tanks, and three times as many guns and heavy mortars. The Red Army also possessed greater mobility, thanks to the flow of Jeeps and trucks provided by American Lend–Lease.

A soldier recounted how an officer ordered a young woman in their signals platoon to accompany a fighting patrol, simply because she had refused to sleep with him.

Major General E. N. Harmon witnessed the debacle. ‘It was the first – and only – time I saw an American army in rout. Jeeps, trucks, wheeled vehicles of every imaginable sort streamed up the road towards us, sometimes jammed two and even three abreast.

Hitler’s refusal to evacuate his men to defend southern Europe did little for morale. They found it unbelievable that he was still sending reinforcements in April and May, all of whom would become prisoners too.

Hitler persuaded himself that he had been right to keep fighting in North Africa to the very end, so as to delay an Allied invasion of southern Europe and to keep Mussolini in power. On the other hand, he had again lost forces which he would badly need in future battles.

Convinced Nazis did not just take pride in their pitilessness. Their dehumanization of victim categories – Jews, Slavs, Asiatics and Roma – was a deliberate form of self-fulfilling prophecy: to reduce them through humiliation, suffering and starvation to the level of animals, and thus ‘prove’ their genetic inferiority.

There was even a mad idea of packing Slavs off to Brazil and bringing back German settlers in their stead from Santa Caterina province.

While the partisans assaulted the Italian positions at each end, a demolition team flown in from Cairo attached large charges of plastic explosive to the piers which supported the bridge. It was one of the most successful sabotage missions of the war, cutting the railway line for four months.

Operation Mincemeat,

They were, at best, the Nazi equivalent of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.

On 16 July 1942, a total of 9,000 Parisian police under the orders of Bousquet launched dawn raids to seize ‘stateless’ Jews in Paris. Some 13,000, including 4,000 children who had not been asked for by the Germans, were held in the stadium of the Vélodrome d’Hiver and at a transit camp at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris before being sent on to death camps in the east.

many French under the occupation defied generalization. There were even bien pensant left-wingers who denounced Jews, and black marketeers who saved them, not always for a price.

The sight of another aircraft on fire produced a mixture of horror and relief that it was someone else.