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July 16 - August 7, 2021
Neither Nazism nor the war itself could be rejected, because Germans envisaged their own defeat in existential terms. The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became. Far from leading to collapse, successive crises acted as catalysts of radical transformation, as Germans tried to master the situation and rethink what they could expect. Major disasters like Stalingrad and Hamburg did indeed lead to a catastrophic fall in the regime’s popularity, but they did not in themselves call patriotic commitment into question.
The first lesson of 1914–18 was not to repeat it. When war and rationing came, both were greeted with profound gloom.
On the eve of war most Germans belonged to both an established Christian denomination and a Nazi Party organisation; far more of them – 94 per cent – remained members of a Catholic or Protestant church than the two-thirds who belonged to Nazi organisations. The churches were the most important independent civic institutions in Germany, and a number of obdurate priests and pastors were sent to concentration camps for criticising Nazi actions from the pulpit.
When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet there was no great soul-searching about why it had occurred. Whereas in Britain and France it was self-evident that Hitler was waging a war of conquest by launching an unprovoked attack on Poland, it was equally obvious to most Germans that they were caught up in a war of national defence, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression.
In 1941, it was not difficult to persuade the population that the new war in Russia had to be fought to a finish so that the next generation would not have to go through it again. From the veterans of the eastern front from 1914–17 to young soldiers just out of school and teenagers still at home, families identified the war, not with the Nazi regime, but with their own intergenerational familial responsibilities.
Many reasoned – in much the same way as Hitler did himself – that the Western powers were not likely to go to war over Danzig, having given way over the Sudetenland. Nevertheless, the fear that the disasters of the First World War were about to be repeated was palpable.17
As Germans closed ranks, they convinced themselves that war had been forced upon them.27
No one could see how Germany could ever defeat France and Britain, and the failure of diplomatic overtures in late August and again in early October deepened the sense of national gloom.
In the early 1920s, German culture had been awash with predictions of post-war decay, decline and degeneration, epitomised by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. These dire predictions had been overturned by the ‘national rebirth’ in 1933, and many Catholic and Protestant intellectuals continued to hope that the Nazis’ ‘national revolution’ would lead to a spiritual revival even after their first flush of enthusiasm had been tempered by disappointments with the Nazi Party, if not with Hitler himself. Yet their key ideas – especially their rejection of Weimar democracy, liberalism, pacifism,
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German society was full of people who broke Nazi regulations in small ways and upheld them in large ones, thereby helping to shape a ‘national community’ constructed on violence, merit and exclusion. It proved impossible to silence critical voices when it came to inequities in rationing, but people generally silenced themselves when it came to the principal targets of Nazi repression.
Unlike Stalin’s regime, which was willing to wage war on the majority of its population in order to push through its social revolution, Hitler’s dictatorship continued to calibrate its violence so that the majority of Germans did not feel it.
This was the murder of psychiatric patients in Germany’s asylums. Like the execution of conscientious objectors, it began as soon as war broke out and would continue until the very end: by May 1945, it would claim at least 216,400 victims’ lives, outstripping even the number of German Jews who were killed by the regime.
Throughout the 1920s, German schoolchildren had been taught to see France as ‘the hereditary enemy’. Now, like a mythological monster, it lay vanquished. All the luck and improvisation that had gone into the victory were swiftly corralled into a doctrine of invincible mobile warfare, with Wilhelm Keitel leading the praise for Hitler as ‘the greatest warlord of all time’.
Forgetting that Britain was not yet defeated and forgetting – briefly – their normal gripes about shortages and the venality of the ‘big shots’, their euphoria focused on him. Even the proverbially dour Swabians acknowledged ‘wholly, joyfully, and thankfully the superhuman greatness of the Führer and his work’. After conquering Poland, few Germans had felt like celebrating. But now clamour for new photos of the Führer was accompanied by doting discussion of his expressions. Tough, working-class districts which had seen much street fighting between Nazi storm troopers and communists in the
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Now it was time to end the conflict with Britain too and restore the peace the whole population craved.34
The Führer may have misjudged the British government, but not the mood in Germany. With the magnanimity of the true conqueror, Hitler had given Britain the chance to end the conflict – and all the responsibility for prolonging it.
RAF targeting was so inaccurate, however, that by July farmhouses and villages were being hit. Both the regularity and the aimlessness of the bombing forced German civil defence volunteers to tighten air raid precautions across the towns and cities of north-western Germany. In Hamburg, the ‘chief complaint’, Shirer found, ‘was not the damage caused but the fact that the British raids robbed them of their sleep’, as every false alarm drove the city’s entire population from their beds. The clamour for retaliation grew.40
A second minor raid on Berlin followed on 29–30 August, killing ten and injuring twenty-one people. The psychological and strategic consequences were enormous. Berliners were shocked that British planes could penetrate so deeply into German airspace; Hitler also.44
Even Hitler’s overt threat was couched in what had become the accustomed, defensive, retaliatory terms with which each step of the war had been justified. A few days earlier, Shirer had recorded a conversation with his cleaner, a woman from a working-class family, married, he surmised, to an ex-communist or socialist. ‘Why do they do it?’ she asked. ‘Because you bomb London,’ Shirer replied. ‘Yes, but we hit military objectives, while the British they bomb our homes.’ ‘Maybe,’ Shirer interjected, ‘you bomb their homes too.’ ‘Our papers say not,’ she argued. ‘Why didn’t the British accept the
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If the Luftwaffe’s bombing led to ‘eight million going mad’ in London, Hitler mused on 14 September, it would force Britain out of the war and make an invasion unnecessary. Two days later, Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to focus on night-time bombing, and on the 17th Hitler shelved his plans for the invasion indefinitely. The public was not told. Instead, on 18 September, the radio commentator Hans Fritzsche warned in his ‘front reports’ that London had to choose ‘between the fate of Warsaw and Paris’ – between being blasted from the skies or declaring itself an ‘open’ city and surrendering. By
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The longer the British held out, however, the more it impressed German opinion. By mid-January 1941, reports of bleak social conditions in Britain were ‘meeting with a critical reaction’.
As the Christmas holidays passed uneventfully in Münster, Paulheinz Wantzen thought that ‘in general people are reckoning with a long war, without being particularly worried or bothered about it. In its current phase the war is hardly noticeable.’71
These public and degrading forms of capital punishment were designed to deter others. Although the Nazi state in principle penetrated as far down as the ranks of concierges, porters and schoolchildren, it lacked the active manpower to do more than demonstrate the risks of ‘forbidden relations’. The Gestapo might enjoy its omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent reputation but its totalitarian aspirations were curtailed by staff shortages, which became worse during the war. Just as when policing contact between Jewish men and ‘Aryan’ women before the war, so now the Gestapo depended on
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By continuing to mount major bombing raids against Britain into June 1941, the Luftwaffe succeeded in disguising the movement of most of its forces to the east. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, was certainly fooled, as was Stalin. So, too, were most Germans.
But, remarkably swiftly, people adjusted to the reality. By the first afternoon and evening the conviction was being expressed in many reports that the ‘Reich government could not have done otherwise than to answer Russia’s “treacherous conduct” with military force’. Some raised the spectre of a longer war, pointing out that the campaign in the east could help buy Britain time and might also herald America’s entry into the war. Women, in particular, worried aloud about the cost in German lives and about the subjection of prisoners of war to the Soviets’ ‘Asiatic methods’. However, Finland’s
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Despite the lack of any evidence of Soviet plans to attack Germany, it was a claim that found ready credence on the German home front.9 In mobilising the deep-seated fear of ‘Bolshevism’, the Nazis were appealing to the same broad coalition of German public opinion as had come together to repel ‘Russian barbarism’ in 1914. From former Social Democratic voters to conservative nationalists, this was a matter of profound – and axiomatic – importance.
Studies of German soldiers’ letters have found that mention of Jews was either absent or peripheral, with Jewish ghettos, forced labour and confiscation of property mentioned only in passing.
Freed from the strict controls enforced in occupied western Europe, soldiers on the eastern front could – and did – perpetrate extreme sexual violence with impunity.34
For a man like Robert R., therefore, the horrible conduct of the war both unsettled him and intensified his commitment. Such a war must never come home to Germany, and it had to be won decisively. Soldiers and their families identified the war, not with the Nazi regime, but with their own intergenerational responsibilities. It proved the strongest foundation for their patriotism.47
German soldiers now acted on their own initiative and began killing Jews and shooting Soviet prisoners rather than taking them to distant reception points. Judging how to respond to civilian threats was no longer the prerogative of senior officers, and the log of official executions dwindled. As this central element of military discipline disappeared, the genocidal war of the rear finally caught up with the front line.
Everywhere, the crisis prompted thoughts of defeat. General Gotthard Heinrici, who had led the infantry attack on the Tula highway, wrote home ten days into the Soviet counter-offensive, predicting that ‘we can’t recover from the blow, for so much is done for’. Fritz Farnbacher could not stop thinking about ‘Napoleon’s Russian experiences’. He was not alone in seeing the shadow of 1812.11
3.2 million Soviet prisoners of war,
By that time, at least two million Soviet prisoners had perished in German custody.13
a new phase of the war, where decisions on the life and death of Red Army prisoners and civilians were made on the spot without recourse to higher authority.
But how many were like him?
The Germans mastered their existential crisis by perpetrating extreme violence. It made no difference which part of the Reich the units were recruited from or whether their civilian environment had been hostile to or supportive of National Socialism.
In the heartlands of Germany and Austria, there were no cases of mass desertion until the final weeks of the war. Until it became a mass phenomenon, the apparatus of terror remained effective precisely because it only had to target relatively isolated individuals. But exhortations of loyalty and patriotism were not just external demands imposed by the regime; they were maxims repeated within civilian society at all levels, ending with the most powerful and primary appeals of all – from mothers, fathers, wives and lovers.24
By March, the Army High Command accepted that 104 of its 162 divisions on the eastern front were barely capable of defending themselves: no more than eight divisions were ready for offensive operations. Morale was disastrously low, and upbeat propaganda only made it worse.
A week before the Red Army counter-attacked, on 29 November 1941, Fritz Todt went to see Hitler to tell him that ‘this war can no longer be won by military means’.
Far from heeding this sound advice, within the fortnight Hitler declared war on the United States.
Once the Reich was at war with the United States, the die was cast and the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ rapidly took on a new form. By New Year, Hitler was no longer prepared to listen to Todt or anyone else proposing peace, unequivocally rejecting Ribbentrop’s suggestion that he should start negotiations with Moscow.
At the beginning of 1942, most of Europe’s Jews were still alive; by the end of the year, the majority were not.1
As important power-holders in Washington and London, helping to orchestrate the Allied coalition, the Jews were seen as a unified, international enemy, a way of thinking encapsulated by the use of the collective singular, ‘Jewry’, or, more simply, ‘the Jew’. By autumn 1941, people were imagining how the Jews would orchestrate retaliation against Germany – despite the fact that it had not happened. Within three months of introducing the yellow star, Germany was at war with America.
From the outset, the Gestapo involved the local Jewish community organisations in drawing up lists of those to be deported, giving them the power to decide whom to exclude from transports as well as the responsibility for informing those whom they had included.
Hitler himself repeated his ‘prophecy’ in his public speeches no less than four times in 1942, now using the unmistakable ‘Ausrottung’ – ‘extermination’. The Völkische Beobachter followed its master’s voice on 27 February 1942, screaming, ‘The Jew will be exterminated!’
from 22 July, during a two-month ‘action’, 300,000 Jews were sent from Warsaw to Treblinka, destroying Europe’s largest Jewish community. In parts of Ukraine, the ‘sweeps’ by the mobile squads, the Einsatzgruppen, went on without interruption until all the Jewish villages and towns had been wiped out. In the summer of 1942, the remaining Jewish ghettos in the Soviet territories were eliminated.23
But it was the mass deportations from western Europe which spelled out that this was a centrally directed and pan-European programme, not just an extreme form of anti-partisan warfare on the eastern front. The deportations to the death camps also involved too many different authorities for them ever to have been kept secret.
Goebbels’s new tactic experimented with a tacit and collusive way of managing – and partially silencing – moral disquiet. Instead of waging an explicit propaganda campaign to win public support for the regime’s action, as he had originally hoped to do, he would let awareness of the actions seep in and foster a sense of complicity.26
fear of isolation and social sanctions tends to silence individuals who feel that they are in the minority, reducing their potential number; meanwhile, press reporting of the ‘majority’ viewpoint augments and stabilises its moral position.
Karl Dürkefälden’s Social Democratic values had become old-fashioned, his humanitarian outlook embarrassing: he had become part of a beleaguered minority, silenced not by the Gestapo or by Party hacks but by the pressure to conform exerted within his own family.28
