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

by Nicholas Stargardt

Hoping that America would join Germany in saving Europe from Bolshevism offered a final reason to play for time and spend lives. Though the Wehrmacht High Command no longer knew the scale of its own losses, in 1945 each day of fighting would cost the lives of 10,000 German soldiers. As long as the Rhine held, the Wehrmacht was defending a coherent, if greatly shrunken, territory, in which every week kept the prospect alive that the Grand Alliance against the Reich might still fall apart.

After going through a final flowering during the autumn of 1944, national solidarity disintegrated under the force of the Allied invasion. The collapse of the Reich, region by region, naturally exacerbated local loyalties and robbed people of any sense of belonging to a larger ‘community of fate’, to use one of Goebbels’s favoured terms.

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.

Fascinating. But a tiny minority?

I've always wondered why more didn't try to escape in this fashion. And, maybe perversely, the same for the SS - they must have known all was lost. Why not simply leave?

Every time I read a book about or tangentially related to German persecution of Jews and others, I wonder how the state possibly kept close track of registered people in a time before computers, digital files, location history, etc. And again, the question that bothers me constantly: why not simply leave? How was a border guard to know who you were?

On 28 March, Churchill bowed to public pressure and ordered a halt to the bombing of German cities. The heroism of Bomber Command had been lauded when Britain had possessed no other effective weapon against Germany, but now there was a queasy sense that an ethical line had been crossed.31

This time, the local population refused to flee. White flags were hung out from houses to prevent the destruction of villages. In some places, people stopped German troops from shooting; in one village, local farmers with pitchforks set on the soldiers trying to detonate charges. A group of soldiers who reached the German lines after escaping from encirclement was greeted with shouts of ‘You’re prolonging the war!’

Defeatism was spreading further along the Rhine as soldiers withdrawing from its western bank told of the flight of Nazi Party functionaries and the sea of white flags that had greeted the Americans in Neuss and Krefeld. They described their own powerlessness in the face of their enemies’ incredible firepower and control of the air. In Bochum, the local Party propaganda department conceded the hopelessness of dragooning workers to listen to set-piece speeches by uniformed Party officials. Instead, in mid-March it sent out thirty trained public speakers wearing plain clothes, to spread ‘word-of-mouth propaganda’ at railway stations, on trains, in air raid shelters – wherever people gathered and opinions were noisily exchanged.

For years, labour details of concentration camp prisoners had been an increasingly common sight in German town and cities; now the evacuation marches tore the last veil of secrecy away from their treatment. Many onlookers were shocked by the emaciated, shambling figures and the brutality of their guards, and recoiled behind closed doors in quiet horror. But feelings of compassion and guilt were less prevalent than fear. Even the prisoners’ suffering damned them. Germans told themselves, ‘What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly!’ When the prisoners from Auschwitz were marched through Polish towns in Silesia in January, they were sometimes hidden and often given food and drink by sympathetic locals; but as the exhausted columns wound their way through German towns and villages in the spring of 1945, the general reaction was revulsion and fear. More people jeered, spat and threw stones at them than offered assistance.

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

The logical course.

While the fighting in the west was turning into a series of gigantic mopping-up operations for the Western Allies, as long as the Oder front held, Germans still wanted Heinrici’s armies to halt the ‘Asiatic hordes’ from the ‘steppes’. This imperative continued even after the military map of a defensible ‘Reich’ had been erased in the west: in the final weeks of the war, German soldiers fought on for a variety of motives – out of automatism, because this was what they had been instructed to do, because they were still trying to hold back the ‘red tide’, or because they wanted to be conquered and taken prisoner by the Western Allies.

Meanwhile, in the capital, graffiti with Soviet stars started to appear on formerly communist housing estates. More generally, most Berliners vented their bitterness at their plight on the Party and its meddling in military affairs, but there was still a clamour for Hitler, or even Goebbels, to speak ‘now in the hour of greatest need’. Flight seemed pointless: ‘Where should one flee to?’ The only hope lay in the very speed of the Americans’ advance towards the Elbe during the previous week, as people canvassed the possibility ‘that the Anglo-Americans will still reach Berlin ahead of the Soviets’.15

The 49-year-old novelist felt confident that the older Volkssturm men would throw away their weapons in good time, but she was not so sure about the 14 to 16-year-olds, as she watched them lugging rifles almost as big as they were while their greatcoats trailed on the ground behind them.

The less there was left to defend, the more draconian the orders. Keitel, Bormann and Himmler instructed the military, Party officials and the SS to defend every town to the last man and reject all offers to surrender. Himmler told the SS to shoot all men ‘in a house where a white flag appears’, dropping his earlier reluctance to impose collective reprisals on Germans.

How the war ended would be decided city by city, town by town, and village by village.

The delusion, remarkable to the bitter end.

Appalled and enraged by what they saw on entering the camp, some of the US soldiers simply gunned down the SS guards or shot them in the legs and let the prisoners finish them off.

Nothing had prepared the American soldiers for these sights. In the next few days, as local residents pushed their bicycles down the camp road to collect loot from the SS warehouses, US soldiers were astonished to see them passing the goods train with its freight of dead with no apparent concern.27

Shortly before the attack across the Oder, Soviet propaganda had changed dramatically: in place of inciting troops to kill Germans, the message was to distinguish between Nazis and ordinary Germans. The final conquest of Germany was meant to be more orderly. By comparison with the chaos and massacres of civilians during the winter conquest of East Prussia and Silesia, it was. Nonetheless, it still took weeks to bring the troops under control in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.31

Flammensbeck was busy shedding his Nazi persona and rediscovering his Catholic heritage. As Victor Klemperer noted, the farmers’ leader now accused the Nazis of having ‘been “too radical”, they had deviated from their programme, they had not treated religion with consideration’.

Whatever knowledge he had accumulated about transport trains and gas chambers he had pushed aside until Germany’s final defeat forced him to reflect once more on what he knew. But by equating the murder of the Jews with Allied bombing and Bolshevik terror, morally condemning these acts of extreme immorality as ‘godless’, his words acknowledged and simultaneously dissipated guilt by relativising and diffusing it.

They had wanted too much, there had been atrocities, the way people had been treated in Poland and Russia, inhuman! ‘But the Führer probably knew nothing about it’ . . . Neither quite believed in the ‘turning-point’ and the imminent war between the USA and Russia, but they did a little bit nevertheless.

This time the home front had stood the test: there had been no repeat of November 1918.

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

‘From one day to the next. First they are all Nazis and suddenly Communists. Out of the brown skin into the red one,’ the 17-year-old noted in her diary, resolving that ‘I will keep clear of the whole infatuation with the Party. At the most a Social Democrat like my parents.’ As news of the suicide of Hitler and Goebbels spread, people’s sense of rage at having been abandoned by their leaders rapidly grew; so too did the feeling that having lived under a dictatorship absolved one of personal responsibility for all that had happened.3

While the battle for Aachen was still raging in mid-October 1944, a US Army psychological warfare unit filed one of the first reports from German territory. It found ‘a latent and possibly deep-seated sense of guilt, owing to the brutalities committed by the German armies in Europe, particularly in the east and against the Jews’, adding that: ‘Germans have resigned themselves to the idea of retribution and only hope that the Americans would moderate the rage of those who will punish them. But the idea of punishment they do accept.’4

Fascinating.

But for many Germans it was an all-too-brief moment of openness, which did not endure beyond the immediate aftermath of defeat. By the time Hannah Arendt visited Germany in 1949, she was struck by her former fellow countrymen’s lack of emotional engagement and unwillingness to discuss what had happened. And when Ursula von Kardorff prepared her diary for publication in 1962, she quietly cut her acknowledgement of German guilt.

This dissonant dualism of German guilt – the crimes committed against the Jews and the greater crime to have lost the war – became more, not less, entrenched in the post-war years. Despite the markedly different ideological approaches to ‘re-education’ pursued by the occupying powers, by the time the Third Reich’s three successor states had been founded in 1949 in all of them a sense of German victimhood came to overshadow any sense of shared responsibility for the suffering of Germany’s victims. Mass death, homelessness, expulsion and hunger rendered defeat and the first years of occupation far worse for many German civilians than their experience of the war itself. And there was now no greater national cause which could be invoked to justify or compensate for enduring such suffering.

The majority of the 17.3 million Wehrmacht soldiers had served on the eastern front, but only 3,060,000 men entered Soviet captivity. Most managed to switch across the fronts and surrender to the Western powers in the final weeks of fighting: 3.1 million prisoners were taken by the Americans, 3,640,000 by the British and 940,000 by the French.

By the end of 1948, however, most prisoners of war had returned to Germany from Western and Soviet captivity.

Once again, the ailing cardinal preached a sermon on the sacrifices made by German soldiers. Germany’s defeat might have been the result of the ‘inner foulness’ of National Socialism, he declaimed, but the honour of its soldiers remained unbesmirched:

When Martin Niemöller asked an audience of Erlangen students in January 1946 why no clergyman in Germany had preached about ‘the terrible suffering which we, we Germans caused other peoples, over what happened in Poland, over the depopulation of Russia and over the 5.6 million dead Jews’, he was shouted down. Niemöller remained a radical and outspoken figure.

Not until 1950 did the synod concede that ‘through acts of omission and silence’ German Protestants ‘have been guilty before the God of mercy for the iniquity which has been perpetrated against the Jews by members of our nation’. It would take decades to evoke a more candid and openly self-critical admission.36

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

This was not what any of the victorious Allies had intended. The Americans had pursued the most ambitious re-education and denazification policy in 1945 and 1946, forcing Germans to visit the liberated concentration camps or, sometimes, to view film footage from Buchenwald and Dachau before receiving ration cards. Many turned their faces away, unwilling or unable to look. Others began to disparage the films and photographs as propaganda staged by the Allies.

Here the shift from ‘collective guilt’ was effected far more smoothly than in the West. From 1947, East Germans were encouraged to commemorate their war dead on Remembrance Sunday as ‘victims of fascism’, exploited and sent to their death by the ‘Hitler clique’. Out of the heroic ‘Anti-fascist Resistance’, socialist Germany had been born.

The formal creation of two German states in 1949 was rapidly overshadowed by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Now both the Soviet Union and the United States urged their German clients to rearm. Official pronouncements in East Germany shifted dramatically. In February 1949, the official Socialist Unity Party paper, Neues Deutschland, dedicated half its Sunday supplement to commemorating the destruction of Dresden four years earlier. There were photographs, which would soon become iconic, of the dead piled up in the Altmarkt square to be burned, eyewitness reports and an article by the city’s mayor. For the first time, the wanton and needless destruction was blamed on the British and Americans. It set the tone for the new Cold War confrontation and there was again talk of the ‘Anglo-American terror attacks’ – only the ‘Jewish’ epithet was omitted from Goebbels’s original turn of phrase.

This is just sickening.

Despite the bitterness of Cold War polemics, it was hard to persuade the young on either side to become soldiers, especially not when a future German–German war lay in prospect. In East Germany, the 950,000 members of the Communist youth movement responded to calls to join the new National People’s Army by resigning en masse: they were not willing to jettison their ideals of ‘democractic pacifism’. Although most West Germans still regarded military service in the Wehrmacht in positive terms, rearmament and the reintroduction of conscription in 1956 were opposed by a loose coalition of Social Democrats, Christian pacifists and conservatives.

But even if reference to ‘the fallen’ still carried an echo of active, patriotic sacrifice, commemoration of the war was gravitating towards seeing soldiers as unwitting, passive and innocent victims.

In their 1950s version of the patriarchal nuclear family West Germans were keen to recompense themselves for having deferred personal life for so long. It was not untypical that, having finally secured the economic foundations of their family idyll, parents did not know what to tell their children. They might continue to believe that what they had done was justified but in many families new barriers of silence were erected between generations. While the next generation began to ask why Germans had unleashed such a calamity on the world, the older one was still locked into the calamity they had themselves suffered.