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

by Nicholas Stargardt

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 remarkable success against Soviet troops in the recent Winter War encouraged expectations that victory should be won within three months. The more people talked, the more relieved they were that ‘the Führer had recognised the true intentions of Russia and also of England’.