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

by Nicholas Stargardt

Throughout the war, men had justified their military service above all in terms of a patriotism grounded in the family and where they came from. Mass evacuation from the cities – with all its attendant conflicts between town and village, Catholics and Protestants, north and south and east and west – had only underlined the extent to which Germany remained a nation of provincials. By 8 May 1945, Germany had become a nation of migrants and refugees, as millions of displaced soldiers and civilians tried to survive far from home, and calls to self-sacrifice and national solidarity were finally exhausted. The German nation state was destroyed not only by the four-power occupation which was to come, but by its own disintegration in the final months of the war. Defeat did not destroy German nationalism; many of its exclusive hatreds could not be so easily excised. But its positive meanings, its ability to harness social effort and motivate self-sacrifice for a national cause, promptly collapsed. Just as workers in the Ruhr had wished for someone else to be bombed in 1943, so, as the fighting crossed into the Reich in January 1945, everyone wanted to escape the war zone themselves.