The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

by Nicholas Stargardt

In its final report on morale at the end of March 1945, the SD had broached the question of defeatism, the spreading certainty that nothing could rescue the war effort any more. Far from the revolutionary response the Nazis had always feared, they found ‘deep-seated disappointment at misplaced trust, a feeling of grief, despondency, bitterness and growing rage, above all amongst those who have known nothing in this war other than sacrifice and work’. The first response was not rebellion so much as a rush of self-pity, with people quoted as saying, ‘We did not deserve to be led into such a catastrophe.’ Such sentiments were more self-righteous than anti-Nazi, as people of all classes ‘excused themselves of any guilt for the course the war had taken’, insisting ‘that it was not they who had had responsibility for war leadership and politics’. For now the question of ‘guilt’ revolved around the agents of Germany’s greatest disaster. And for those who remembered Goebbels’s weekly articles in Das Reich in which he called on the German people to trust the Nazi leadership through all of the crises of the war, it was clear where responsibility for the nation’s defeat lay.2