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

by Nicholas Stargardt

ruined walls of the town hall. The potent symbolism of this ‘Kölsche Boor’ moved him deeply and two weeks later he wrote to his son again, quoting the words of the nationalist song: ‘We are keeping watch on the Rhine’. No Nazi, but a Catholic conservative and First World War veteran, Dünnwald was moved by civic patriotism, writing of the ‘artworks and countless treasures’ which the ‘filthy Tommy’ had ‘violated and destroyed’ in his ‘cowardly madness of destruction’. Despite much damage, the twin towers of the cathedral still stood, drawing the refugees back to their ‘shadow through homesickness’, whilst ‘pointing in warning for all eternity’ at the crime that had been perpetrated. Shaken by the detonations rocking the city as unstable buildings were brought down by the clean-up squads, Dünnwald refused to be downhearted, vowing to stand and fight: ‘The day is coming!’28 As psychological shock waves followed the physical ones, few people were ready for such intransigent rhetoric. The Swiss consul, Franz-Rudolf von Weiss, observed the homeless sitting listlessly on their suitcases near the soup kitchens. He described the general mood as one of ‘deep apathy, general indifference and the wish for peace’. He had been bombed out too and moved to the small town of Bad Godesberg. The young and newly divorced Christa Lehmacher described to her brother at the front how she and their mother had lost everything and how she had obtained a dress from the War Reparations Office, which al...