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

by Nicholas Stargardt

Such violence extended beyond the ranks of the army, SS, police and Gestapo. So many German men and women played active roles in the mass organisations of the Party that no sharp line can be drawn between regime and society. Even after the Gestapo withdrew from the Ruhr to the schoolrooms at Hemer, their murderous role was filled by others. In early April 1945, four ‘Eastern’ workers were seen leaving a house in Oberhausen during a bombing raid. A group of German men, on air raid watch, set off in pursuit, seizing one of the men and beating him till he confessed to having stolen some potatoes. He was then beaten again by a group of German youths, before a telephone operator took the man first to the police and then on to a Wehrmacht office where he was loaned a pistol. Harried and beaten once more by a crowd with clubs and wooden fence slats, the ‘Eastern’ worker was led out to a sports field. There, in a bomb crater, the telephone operator shot him in the stomach and the crowd continued to beat him until he died.59