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

by Nicholas Stargardt

In August, US Intelligence in Germany reported that only the Russians were hated more than the Americans. Germans were willing to accept that Britain and France had been forced into the war but could not understand US intervention. No one seemed to remember that it was Hitler who had declared war on the United States. Interviewers found that the ‘Jewish war’ still provided the key explanation for American actions against Germany, and German defeat seemed only to have confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry’. Hardly anybody thought that the German people as a whole were responsible for the suffering of the Jews, although 64 per cent agreed that the persecution of the Jews had been decisive in making Germany lose the war. Still, there was a large minority of respondents – 37 per cent – who, even in conditions of Allied occupation, were prepared to endorse the view that ‘the extermination of the Jews and the Poles and other non-Aryans’ had been necessary for ‘the security of the Germans’. It was clear that most Germans still believed they had fought a legitimate war of national defence.39