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What guided my selection was the opposite principle: I wanted to read collections of letters in which both sides of the correspondence are preserved and which continued for several years at least, so that it would be possible to see how the personal relationships between the correspondents – their principal purpose in writing at all – developed and altered over the course of the war.
To wage a war on this scale the Nazis had to harness levels of social mobilisation and personal commitment which went far deeper than anything they had tried to achieve in the pre-war period. Yet, seventy years on – despite whole libraries of books about the war’s origins, course and atrocities – we still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end. This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war.
In fact, in the summer and autumn of 1943, Germans began to talk openly in public about the murder of the Jews, equating it with the Allied bombing of German civilians. In Hamburg it was noted ‘that the common people, the middle classes, and the rest of the population make repeated remarks in intimate circles and also in larger gatherings that the attacks count as retaliation for our treatment of the Jews’. In Schweinfurt in Bavaria, people were saying exactly the same thing: ‘the terror attacks are a consequence of the measures carried out against the Jews’.
How did it affect Germans to gradually realise that they were fighting a genocidal war? Or to put it the other way around, how did the war shape their perception of genocide?
What fuelled the sense of crisis in the summer of 1943 was a widespread fear that Germans could not escape the consequences of a ruthless racial war of their own making.
The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became. Far from leading to collapse, successive crises acted as catalysts of radical transformation, as Germans tried to master the situation and rethink what they could expect.
However unpopular the war became, it still remained legitimate – more so than Nazism itself. Germany’s mid-war crises resulted not in defeatism but in a hardening of social attitudes.
Overall by 1939, two-thirds of the population signed up to at least one of the Party’s mass organisations.
On the eve of war most Germans belonged to both an established Christian denomination and a Nazi Party organisation; far more of them – 94 per cent – remained members of a Catholic or Protestant church than the two-thirds who belonged to Nazi organisations.
Their plan to withdraw into the interior was rendered hopeless when the Red Army invaded Poland from the east, on 17 September, finally fulfilling its secret pact with Germany. With nowhere left to retreat to, President Mo
Speaking to his senior military commanders on 22 August, Hitler had had no compunction in advising them that they were to wage a racial war. His main points are preserved in graphic diary notes: ‘In the foreground the destruction of Poland. Aim is not reaching a particular line, but getting rid of the living reserves . . . Close the heart against sympathy. Brutal action. 80 million [German] people must have their rights. Their existence must be secured. The stronger has the right. Greatest harshness.
On 10 September, General Fedor von Bock issued an order to Army Group North: ‘If there is shooting from a village behind the front and if it proves impossible to identify the house from which the shots came, then the whole village is to be burned to the ground.’ Other commanders followed suit. It was no more than what Gerhard M. and his comrades were already doing. During the four weeks of fighting and the further four weeks of German military administration in Poland, between 16,000 and 27,000 Poles were executed and 531 towns and villages torched.
From their derogatory references to ‘Polacks’ to the expectation that they would be shot at from behind, the German armies had been ideologically primed to fight a culturally inferior and cowardly opponent.
Although the Jewish communities in West Prussia declared their unshakeable allegiances to ‘Germandom’ as early as 1919, decrying ‘Polish arbitrariness and intolerance’ as the greater threat, their loyalty did not save them two decades later.
When German militiamen entered Konitz in 1939, they immediately turned on their Polish Catholic and Jewish neighbours. On 26 September, they shot forty people. The next day a Polish priest was killed, and the day after that the killing extended to the 208 psychiatric patients at the Konitz hospital. By January 1940, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, the local militias had killed 900 Poles and Jews from Konitz and its surrounding villages.
Hitler was set on preventing the Polish ruling class from re-establishing an independent nation state.
Many of the soldiers who witnessed such events across Poland took rolls of photographs, which they sent home to be developed and printed. In this way, a visual record passed through the hands of parents, wives and photographic assistants before being returned to the ‘execution tourists’ in Poland.
Indeed, in spring 1943, when Goebbels tried to mobilise public opinion – for the one and only time – in sympathy with the Poles, in order to showcase the far greater threat of Soviet terror, he had to contend with the popular memories of 1939. People pointed to the ‘fact’ that 60,000 Germans had been killed by Poles and asked why they merited German sympathy, even against killers from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The Propaganda Ministry could not remake public sympathies at will.
Poland itself rapidly became a non-topic in Germany. By mid-October 1939, a mere two weeks after Hitler had reviewed his victorious troops in Warsaw and only a week after the church bells had stopped ringing in celebration, an undercover reporter for the exiled German Social Democrats could find ‘hardly a single person who still spoke of the “victory” over Poland’.
Seated with the rest of the press in the gallery of the former opera house, Shirer had a sense of déjà vu. Hitler’s words, he noted, were almost identical with those I’ve heard him offer from the same rostrum after every conquest he has made since the march into the Rhineland in 1936 . . . And though they were the fifth at least, and just like the others and just as sincerely spoken, most Germans I’ve talked to since seem aghast if you suggest that perhaps the outside world will put no more trust in them than they have learned by bitter experience to put in the others.
Perhaps, Shirer remarked wearily, ‘If the Nazis were sincere they might have spoken this sweet language before the “counter-attack” was launched.
On Monday 9 October, troops returning to Vienna from Poland were greeted with the news that the British government had resigned and the war was over. The next morning excited civilians shouted the wonderful news to the troop trains as they passed through the outskirts of Berlin: ‘You can go home, the war’s over!’ As the news spread in the capital, people ran out into the streets and squares to celebrate. Students rushed from the lecture halls and held spontaneous meetings. At the weekly farmers’ market in the Berlin neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, new customers refused to add their names to
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So great was the popular desire for peace that it took a radio announcement to bring the speculation to an
The main achievement of Hitler’s initiative was to continue the pretence of speaking peace in order to usher the German people further down the path of war.
When the evacuees finally returned home two months later, it came none too soon for the old man: ‘In the long run we couldn’t have kept them here. Just think of how dreadful the beds looked. We couldn’t cope because they were very unclean.’
This was exactly the kind of patriotism the Nazis had aimed to foster before the war through Hot Pot Sundays where middle-class professionals and managers ate from the same pot of stew along with their workers, or by taking youth groups to different parts of the Reich so as to overcome regional antagonisms and prejudices.
When the French pulled back from the territory along the Rhine near Kehl, which they had briefly occupied during the Polish campaign, Ernst Guicking grabbed the supplies they abandoned. He was able to send a packet of real coffee back to Irene and her aunt in Giessen.
They were delighted to have a break from the synthetic brew known colloquially as ‘Horst Wessel coffee’ because – like the eponymous Nazi martyr of the Party anthem – ‘the beans only marched with them in
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.
In western Germany the cattle herds were so depleted that only 35–40 per cent of the meat quotas could be handed out, while there was a temporary abundance in the south, with one old Social Democrat marvelling at his butcher’s ability to offer ‘sides of bacon without ration
On Sundays local trains were full of people – including teenagers in Hitler Youth uniform – all leaving the towns to go foraging for foodstuffs in the countryside, much as in the previous war.
On 4 September 1939, a draconian War Economy Decree introduced compulsory Sunday working, froze wages, cut overtime rates and increased taxes. The police presence in factories had to be stepped up immediately.
While Nazi surveillance of the shop floor repressed any form of collective action, by the summer of 1939 labour discipline in the heartland of heavy industry in the Ruhr was described as ‘catastrophic’.
When the waterways froze in early January, coal barges could not make deliveries in Berlin. With temperatures plummeting to −15°C, the American journalist William Shirer was moved to pity as he watched ‘people carrying a sack of coal home in a baby-carriage or on their shoulders . . . Everyone is grumbling. Nothing like continual cold to lower your
In 1914 a news-hungry public had stormed the kiosks, buying up special editions. September 1939 saw the greatest spike in demand for radio receivers, with sales rocketing by 75 per cent compared to a year before, bringing total ownership of private sets up to 13,435,301. Listening to the news became more important than ever, though the lack of action made people worry that the government was keeping bad news from them, especially losses of air and submarine crews.
Later that year, art would imitate art in the first blockbuster feature film of the war. Entitled simply The Request Concert, it had the show’s compère, Heinz Goedecke, play himself, with the programme serving to reunite two lovers brought together in Berlin by the 1936 Olympics and separated soon afterwards by the hero’s military duty.
This was the lodestone the Nazis sought: a single moment of emotional unity in which all individual egotism dissolved into all-powerful national feeling.
Like Kühnel, 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
In the concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were unique amongst religious prisoners for being separated out from the ‘politicals’ and given their own marker, a purple triangle. Uniquely too amongst camp prisoners, many had the power to reverse their fate: all they had to do was to accept their call-up papers and enter the Wehrmacht.
The next day, a small item appeared in the German press, announcing Dickmann’s execution ‘for refusal to fulfil his duty as a soldier’. Dickmann, it was announced, ‘was a “Jehovah’s Witness”; he was a fanatical follower of the international sect of the Earnest Bible Students’. He was the first conscientious objector to be executed, and the sentence was publicised, as so often in Nazi Germany, because it served an educative, exemplary purpose.
The court duly affirmed that the duty to obey took precedence over ‘the duty to follow one’s conscience’.
The night before he was scheduled to die at Brandenburg-Görden prison, Bernhard Grimm received a visit from the prison chaplain, Dr Werner Jentsch. Afterwards, in the stillness of the night, the 19-year-old wrote his farewell letter to his mother and brother, telling them about ‘a Protestant Pastor who visited me [and] referred to the Old Testament as a history book of the Jews and the exegesis of Revelation as a very dangerous story and put the Day of Judgement off into the unknown future’.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were joined by small numbers of Reform Adventists and Christadelphians, one of whom, Albert Merz, was executed. But such was the pressure to participate that other ‘peace churches’ like the Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists negotiated non-combat roles for their members within the military, while the German Mennonites turned their back on their Anabaptist tradition and announced in 1936 that their youths were ‘enthusiastically ready’ to do military service.
The thin ranks of those who were willing to face execution for their pacifist beliefs were joined by a single Austrian Catholic priest, Franz Reinisch, who, in his turn, inspired the farmer Franz Jägerstätter to reject military service; and, in the whole Reich, there was just one Protestant conscientious objector, Hermann Stöhr.
At the end of November 1939, the Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, took the matter up with Hitler personally, who confirmed that, ‘if it is not possible to destroy the will of the man who refuses military service, the sentence has to be carried out’.
This generalised urge to avoid the mistakes of the previous war helps to explain why the Reich’s professional elites were so prepared to engage in lethal violence from the very outset. It also explains the fact that the most extreme measures were not always the work of the most obviously radical and Nazi
By the end of January 1940, Franz Gürtner, the Minister of Justice, counted eighteen extrajudicial executions by the Gestapo since the war began and complained that the civil courts were being bypassed. In fact, this relatively small number of interventions often stemmed directly from Hitler’s reading of the sensationalist crime reporting in the Völkischer Beobachter. In October 1939, he was outraged to learn about a petty thief in Munich who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing a woman’s purse during the evening blackout. Even though the purse only contained a few marks and
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It was one thing to strike against identified ‘enemies’, such as Communists, Freemasons, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who could expect to be sent before a special court or straight to a concentration camp if they were denounced for telling ‘defeatist’ jokes or trading on the black market. But relatively few people were punished for telling political jokes about the regime’s leaders.
Unlike Stalin’s regime, which was willing to wage war on the majority of its population in order to push through its social revolution, Hitler’s dictatorship continued to calibrate its violence so that the majority of Germans did not feel it.
One of the most contentious of the new prohibitions was listening to enemy radio. Labels pasted on all new sets warned that listening to foreign broadcasts was a ‘crime against national security’, but the ban was unenforceable. Despite its obsession with propaganda and image, the Nazi dictatorship enjoyed far less control over information than had Imperial Germany.
