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

by Nicholas Stargardt

Meat shortages were altogether more serious. Germany depended on the import of animal feeds from North America, now cut by the British naval blockade. The cost of feed led to culls in the German swine herd in early autumn. Unlike in Britain, in Germany many industrial workers had traditionally supplemented their wages by tending allotments and keeping rabbits or even a pig, a common practice particularly amongst coal miners. More town-dwellers of all classes now started to cultivate vegetables and keep hens or rabbits, but keeping pigs became less popular, not just because of the high cost of feed but also because such ‘self-providers’ were not entitled to meat rations.

Throughout Germany, children found that they suddenly enjoyed greater freedom and teenagers were asked to take on more responsibility

all three men were beheaded just after 6 a.m. the next day. They were all Jehovah’s Witnesses and refused to swear oaths to Hitler or perform military service.

The so-called ‘euthanasia action’ began with the children. On 18 August 1939, the Reich Committee for the Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses made it compulsory for doctors to report all newborn children suffering from idiocy, Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, spastic paralysis or missing limbs.

Against the ‘empty’ formal freedoms of liberal Britain, Germany had guaranteed the greatest freedom of all: social freedom from want. It had overcome the poverty and hunger of the Depression years, solved unemployment and abolished free-market capitalism.

I cannot square it with my National Socialist outlook to devote medical resources, be they medicinal or any other kind, to prolonging the life of these individuals who have completely fallen out of human society, most of all in the current time of our struggle for existence, in which each bed is needed for the most valued of our people.61

For the first time, the SD noted, civilians were abandoning official sources of information altogether. They were turning instead to ‘rumours, stories of soldiers and people with “political connections”, military post and the like, to construct “their picture”, into which the most baseless rumours are often incorporated with astonishing lack of critical control.’

The socia networks of that time. Nazis would say: all fake news, let s create an agency to control the spread of it.

Banned under paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, male homosexuals had long become adept at keeping their social circles and sexual lives hidden to escape social discrimination, homophobia and police persecution.

Just like in Cuba...

There were parallels here with Stalin’s forced collectivisation and first Five Year Plan, which had caused a huge famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s: to Soviet planners, it had not mattered if Ukrainian peasants starved or if agricultural output nosedived, just as long as they delivered their quotas.

That s because nazism is a rikght wing ideology

Most cyclists were increasingly concerned with mundane problems like how to replace worn-out tyres now the British naval blockade had closed off imports of rubber. A common, though slow and extremely bumpy, solution was to wire together lengths of garden hose.

Survival hack of the time

Left in charge of their own affairs, Danish government administrators had adopted a pricing and rationing policy which encouraged farmers to increase the supply of pork, beef and milk and raise exports to Germany, without imposing harsh restrictions on domestic consumption or stimulating a black market.

The outcome of this system of direct economic incentives was spectacular: with a population of 4 million, Denmark became an ever more important exporter to the German Reich, contributing some 10–12 per cent of its beef, pork and butter. By 1944, German cities may have drawn as much as a fifth of their meat supplies

Only in the Netherlands and Denmark were there public and courageous acts of support.

In Denmark, anti-Semitism was so unpopular that the Germans did not attempt to deport the Jews until the summer of 1943, because they knew that it would spell the end of collaboration with the Danish constitutional monarchy.

When the Reich Plenipotentiary finally took this step in September 1943, the date of the planned action was leaked and all but 485 of the country’s 7,000 Jews were smuggled across the Baltic narrows to the safety of neutral Sweden.27

But these were exceptions to the silence and passivity which generally blanketed the Continent. Everywhere apart from Denmark the occupation tended ...

The Germans drew the line at re-establishing a Muftiat in the Crimea, lest it provided a focus for political demands, but the local ulema helped to raise recruits for the militias attached to Manstein’s 11th Army. At a conference of the Tatar Committee in Simferopol in early 1942 one of the mullahs confirmed that ‘their religion and their faith commands them to take part in this holy battle alongside the Germans’ against Bolshevism. The whole Tatar gathering rose to their feet and prayed for ‘the achievement of a speedy victory . . . as well as for the long life of the Führer, Adolf Hitler’. By March, 20,000 Muslims had joined the militias.

‘We have . . . shattered the Red Russian Army so that it can never recover. The word of the victor is with us. Allah has also given Adolf Effendi to us, therefore we will always remain winners.’15

It was more difficult to introduce ritual slaughter of livestock, because ‘animal protection’ legislation had been rushed through in April 1933 by the Nazis in order to close down kosher butchers in Germany,

Hosenfeld had trouble finding houses to serve as billets and offices for the regiment’s new headquarters. While he was looking over a house in the Niepodległoci Avenue on 17 November, Hosenfeld came upon the skeletal figure of a Jew searching for food in the kitchen – and, after hearing him play Chopin, helped him to hide in the attic. That night, as Hosenfeld lay awake in the dark, he imagined conversations with his dead comrades. ‘It is incredibly comforting to speak with them,’ he told his wife. ‘I feel fully alive and held in this closed company . . . And then I see my loved ones at home, you and the children. I see the little ones asleep, the tired boys, the big girl and you with large, wakeful eyes looking into the night and coming to me.’

‘Englishmen, Americans, Russians, listen to our voice,’ ran the text proposed by the director of the engineering institute in Kaiserslautern: Don’t sacrifice your lives any longer for the Jewish bloodsuckers who are only driving you to the butcher’s block so that they can enjoy ruling the whole world . . . Christians, you should never fight for Jews! . . . help us found the United States of Europe in which there are no more Jews.

United States of Europe. The nazi dream coming true through Angela Merkel and Jean Claude Junker.

‘Europeans of all countries unite!’

Europe united against Americans, British and Russians. Looks like history is repeating itself.

There was a prospect that the German divisions cut off in Courland could be brought back to Copenhagen, which was still under German occupation, or to the German North Sea ports.

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’.

The Americans found that their efforts were bearing little fruit. Between November 1945 and December 1946 they had conducted eleven polls, finding that on average 47 per cent endorsed the proposition that National Socialism had been ‘a good idea carried out badly’; in August 1947, 55 per cent of those polled endorsed this view. The level of support amongst those under 30, those with high-school education, amongst Protestants, and those living in West Berlin and in Hesse was even higher, reaching 60–68 per cent – and this at a time when openly advocating National Socialism still potentially carried the death penalty.40 *