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

by Nicholas Stargardt

With their thirst for information, people also picked up the millions of leaflets which the RAF dropped that winter, although they did not necessarily believe what they read. In Essen, Carola Reissner was outraged. ‘They are apparently trying to inflame the population,’ she wrote to her relatives, adding forcefully, ‘these are obviously Jewish ploys.’ The suspicion came naturally, for she had heard for years how the Jews had manipulated and tricked their way to power and influence in Germany.

War immediately provoked fears of a new pogrom. Instead, Jochen Klepper and Victor Klemperer were astonished to find that the media quickly toned its anti-Semitic rhetoric down, perhaps as a gesture towards its new Soviet ally. Then, at 9.20 p.m. on 8 November, a bomb went off without warning in the Munich beer cellar where the ‘old fighters’ of the Nazi movement were gathered for the annual celebration of their putsch attempt of 1923. Hitler had left to catch the train back to Berlin a mere ten minutes before the bomb exploded in the pillar behind the podium where he had stood, killing eight people and injuring sixty-four others. As news of the assassination attempt spread the next day, many employers called special workplace meetings and extra assemblies were held at schools where the children gave thanks for the Führer’s providential escape by singing the Lutheran hymn ‘Now Let All Give Thanks to God’. People spoke bitterly about those they presumed to be responsible for the attack – ‘the English and the Jews’ – and expected retaliation against both.

He and his comrades went swimming morning and evening, but made the local women taste their drinking water first because they feared poisoned wells. For preference they quenched their thirst on wine. On Sunday 2 June, they marched 35 kilometres before making camp. A 200-litre barrel of wine got tent room. A cow was slaughtered and hung from a tree to be carved. The locals, Ernst reported, just kept repeating

The young high-school graduate Hans Albring began the campaign in the west with a yearning to see the great French cathedrals. Girding himself morally like Christ before ‘this terrible Passion, which our soldiers but especially the French are suffering’, with the help of a dictionary he read Racine and Paul Claudel in his trench. A fervent Catholic from the Münsterland, Hans confided to his closest friend, Eugen Altrogge, that there were so few military chaplains that he feared being ‘without any opportunity for confession and communion’. He wondered too why the French hated the Germans so

After a shell had burst 200 metres away, Hans broached the personal question of all wars with Eugen: ‘If I . . . and not you, look after my books and pictures. The letters should be burned.

While battle was still raging in France and Belgium, German radio journalists and cameramen brought the sights and sounds of the conflict to home audiences. Three successive newsreels accompanied the French campaign, and they doubled in length to forty minutes. Embedded in the fighting units, German cameramen had unparalleled access to the front; and also re-enacted key scenes for the camera. People marvelled at the risks reporters ran in order to bring them images of combat, gasping and shouting as they beheld the scenes of destruction. Crafted to give viewers the sense of being eyewitnesses to events, the cameras often looked up into German soldiers’ faces from slightly below, throwing their angular, battle-hardened features into relief. With added sound effects and dramatic musical accompaniment – often adaptations of classical pieces by the house composer Franz R. Friedl – the newsreels aimed to draw in and overwhelm the viewer.

Travelling in a truck and a signals van, Hans Albring had far more leisure to write than the infantryman Ernst Guicking. With ambitions to become an artist, he tried to sketch word pictures for his rapidly shifting impressions – the old man at the farm gazing in bitter silence through puckered eyelids, the captured officer by the roadside, looking at the victorious Germans ‘confidently and coldly, quite composed with a terrible, extreme calm’. In Poitiers, the beauty of the frescoes in the ancient Baptistery won him over, and he grieved at the loss of so many stained-glass windows. The plump, well-fed women seemed to come straight out of a Van Eyck canvas. From the grunting pigs in the sties where he slept to the prodigious quantities of butter, cheese, meat, home-made preserves, snow-white bread and deep-red wine, as heavy as oil, the cornucopia of France amazed him.

The French government fled on 10 June, declaring Paris an open city. Four days later German troops entered the capital.

Probst complained about the French prisoners idling away in their camps while he and his comrades rebuilt what they had destroyed: ‘Is that really right?’ he wrote to Hildegard. Quite suddenly, they entered a landscape untouched by war. Quartered in a chocolate factory, Probst and his comrades were prevented by orders against looting from sending any confectionery home, but not from gorging

Across Germany, audiences recoiled in horror and disgust from the French West African troops they saw on screen: ‘The French and English let such animals loose on us – the Devil take them!’ and ‘That’s an infamy for a civilised nation which debases England and France for ever!’ were typical exclamations. In Reichenberg, women confessed they felt paralysed with fear by the ‘coloured’ faces, and could breathe again only when German soldiers reappeared on screen. In many cinemas, according to the SD, audiences shouted: ‘Shoot these black beasts immediately after taking them prisoner.’ Fritz Probst agreed, warning his wife that ‘no one would have survived if this rabble had reached Germany’. What went unreported, except in private letters such as Hans Albring’s, was that several thousand Senegalese soldiers were butchered as they tried to surrender or when already in captivity.

On 22 June, the French surrendered. Hitler insisted on an exact replay of the armistice of November 1918, and the next newsreel culminated with the acceptance of German terms in the same railway carriage in the forest clearing at Compiègne. Afterwards, in a classic compensatory gesture, the carriage was brought to Berlin and exhibited at the foot of the steps to the Museum of Antiquities.

Addressing the conference of Bavarian Protestant pastors, Bishop Meiser declared that the hot breath of history strikes us in the face. Without doubt we cannot measure the greatness of the world event of today . . . a new world is arising out of the primal depths of being. Our German people stands at the centre of this event. It is the core strength from which a new, transfiguring will spreads over the whole

When the dreaded battles in the west finally began, the first news of bulletins had confirmed a universal sense of replay of the battles in Flanders and of impending carnage. Instead, at the end of June 1940 Ernst Guicking found himself in Toulon, eating first pork leg, then roast calf, sausage with vegetables and to finish a wonderful dessert. Apricots with cherries. To go with it two bottles of red wine. And the whole lot cost the impossible price of nine francs. That’s 75 German pfennig. Yes, yes, you’re right. We’re living like ‘God in

He reminded the holiday crowd that the last time troops had marched through the Gate was on 16 December 1918, when the returning Prussian Guard regiments were met by ‘gangsters and strikers’: ‘Not this time!’ he shouted.

There was no note of hysteria, the American journalist observed; indeed the Führer’s voice was pitched slightly deeper than usual, the movement of his hands and body almost as expressive as his words. ‘The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight’, Shirer noted down a few hours later, ‘was the conqueror, and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top.

They were astonished by the ease with which they were winning the battle.

The psychological and strategic consequences were enormous. Berliners were shocked that British planes could penetrate so deeply into German airspace; Hitler

Against the ‘empty’ formal freedoms of liberal Britain, Germany had guaranteed the greatest freedom of all: social freedom from want.

During the 1930s Shakespeare had been performed more frequently in Germany than in Britain. Hitler, who once remarked that ‘in no other country is Shakespeare performed as badly as in England’, intervened personally to have the enemy dramatist unbanned after the outbreak of war. The director of the German Theatre in Berlin, Heinz Hilpert, responded to the bombing of Britain by planning to put on no fewer than three plays by Shaw and another three by Shakespeare in a single

If the Luftwaffe’s bombing led to ‘eight million going mad’ in London, Hitler mused on 14 September, it would force Britain out of the war and make an invasion unnecessary. Two days later, Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to focus on night-time bombing, and on the 17th Hitler shelved his plans for the invasion indefinitely.

In November 1940, German neurologists had found their first real evidence of the kind of ‘war neuroses’ they had been looking for since the beginning of the war, and recommended that air crews should be given spells of leave at home, in winter sports spas or in Paris and Brussels to relieve the stress. Psychiatric cases were treated at a hotel on the Breton coast.

Germans quietly adjusted. By end of 1940 bomb damage in Berlin had become a tourist attraction, to be photographed before it disappeared. Liselotte Purper was on a night train to the Netherlands, dreaming that she was back at school, when the sirens went. She did not even wake up till the all-clear sounded. Carola Reissner also stopped getting out of bed for air raid alarms in Essen. As the Christmas holidays passed uneventfully in Münster, Paulheinz Wantzen thought that ‘in general people are reckoning with a long war, without being particularly worried or bothered about it. In its current phase the war is hardly

By encouraging each other to finding a way of articulating their feelings and desires, by taking out their own sexual memories and intimate names and placing them on the page, Robert and Mia discovered a directness and candour which was highly unusual in wartime Germany.

Unlike young Danes, the Germans had a lot of free time. Military drill aside, the life of occupying troops was one of profound idleness, with abundant opportunities for courtship, friendships and hobbies which they would have had difficulty pursuing in civilian life.

When a group of Danish girls was interviewed shortly after the war, the most significant reason they gave for preferring Germans over Danes was that they had better, more courtly manners.

A small number thought they were better lovers, showing, as one put it, ‘consideration for the soul of the woman concerned’. In line with the German attempt to exercise a model occupation in Denmark, local German commanders made a determined effort to hold their troops in check, issuing strict guidelines ...

In the Lublin office of the SD, Alouis Fischotter fell in love with one of the secretaries, Uszula B., and after lengthy personal negotiations with Himmler obtained his permission to marry and make their child legitimate.

For Ernst Guicking, it was France’s abundance that promised to rescue the newly-weds from the strictures of wartime rationing at home. In early August 1940, he was proud to send Irene a parcel of red and blue silk for her and some cloth to have a suit made for himself. Then came a knitted waistcoat, trousers, and 4 metres of the brown fabric for French uniforms: he advised her to have it dyed before having it made into overcoats.

A member of a flak battery in the Netherlands was able to ship back a valuable Philips radio by using their motor vehicles. Those with connections to the quartermaster’s department or the Staff section in Paris managed to bring home Persian carpets and fine china.

This lively traffic was further aided by the abolition of the customs border between the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 1 October 1940, which, according to one eyewitness, saw German officers’ luggage bulging with Czech ‘furs, watches, medicines, shoes, in quite unimaginable

Ernst Guicking’s spendthrift side was a natural response to years of suppressed demand in which Germans had saved because there was relatively little to buy. When Germany went to war, 20 per cent of economic production was allocated to armament and this had rapidly increased to over a third of GDP. Suppressed domestic demand led to high rates of savings. Through regulatory controls these private savings accounts were themselves silently redeployed by the government to finance the war effort, thus avoiding a repeat of the public appeals to buy war bonds which had been such a feature of the First World

From the point of view of the German consumer, 1940 spelled a sudden bonanza, made possible by the fact that the Reichsmark was deliberately overvalued in each country the Wehrmacht

Above all, Göring ordered that soldiers were to be permitted to bring home as much as they could carry themselves without interference from customs. Long discussions ensued about whether soldiers should be forbidden from strapping their excess luggage on to a carrying harness in case it prevented them from saluting their superiors. In any case, whatever restrictions were imposed on luggage were routinely disregarded. At the Gare de l’Est in Paris, hordes of German soldiers swarmed across the station concourse, staggering under inordinate amounts of luggage, bound for home.

In 1940–41, for instance, a group of employees from the railway postal service were discovered to be sending their empty postal wagon from Nuremberg as far as Metz, where they handed it over to their French colleagues along with tens of thousands of marks’ worth of Reich Credit Notes. Each week, the wagon returned from Paris filled with ‘scarce goods like coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate, brandy, champagne, wine, spirits, clothes, stockings, etc.’ The Nuremberg employees sold on most of the goods to other postal workers, setting off a small chain of black-market

Coffee remained a particular favourite. In the 1930s the import and sale of coffee beans had been sharply restricted in Germany in order to safeguard the country’s scarce foreign currency reserves. Coffee substitutes had never gone down well with German consumers, and so it came as little surprise that when Heinrich Böll reached Rotterdam the first thing he bought was a half-pound of coffee, which had survived the incendiary bombing of the docks.

The generation of Germans that grew up in the 1920s and ’30s had been taught to detest France but to admire and emulate French culture. If their Blitzkrieg victory purged their fear of French martial virtue, their cultural curiosity and respect remained intact.

With some of his comrades Albring attended High Mass in the cathedral of St Pierre, where he was particularly moved by the Jubilate. As the choirboys’ treble voices resonated through the full height of the great building, Hans had an extraordinary sense of being lifted into the light of grace. He also noticed the deadly glances cast at him and the other Germans by the whole choir and congregation, and had the sense of being pursued by parochial

Albring’s next posting was to Rouen, where he celebrated his promotion to sergeant and increase in salary by buying several rare books with valuable woodcuts. Leafing through the bookseller’s stock of prints and antiquarian books, Hans spent hours in happy conversation with the Frenchman whose views he found ‘very sensitive and understated. I notice how everything he says is well-founded and profound, registered with all his senses.’ Eventually, the young soldier popped the question of whether the French hated the Germans. ‘No,’ the bookseller replied, ‘and if they do, it is like a child’s tantrum.’ But, surely, Albring insisted, the ruined buildings of Rouen must provoke the ‘desire for revenge’? No, came the reply. What the French want is ‘to be left to get on with their work; to be left with their constitution and form of

Full of the hyper-aestheticism of boys just out of grammar school, Hans Albring and Eugen Altrogge were both on a kind of cultural pilgrimage.

young Goethe when he first saw Strasbourg’s west facade and made him single it out as the epitome of ‘German architecture

Whenever the Alsatians seemed slow to embrace their new patriotic duties, the Nazi authorities responded with further educational measures, explaining their true national identity to them once again. The Jews, meanwhile, were summarily expelled.

In November 1940, Liselotte travelled on to document the resettlement of ethnic Romanian Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobruja. Joining the SS Resettlement Commission, Liselotte visited their villages near the Black Sea port of Constantia, with their tidy whitewashed houses, talking to families about their expectations as they packed their belongings.

The 18-year-old girls on Labour Service were frequently deployed in equal numbers alongside SS men in the resettlement actions. Some of them would go to the railway stations to welcome the German settlers, others would assist the SS in evicting Poles and then supervise Polish women who were forced to clean up and leave their homes spick and span for the new owners.

The moral guardian of national honour became the Nazi Party, with the head of the Office of Racial Policy asserting in August 1940 that There can be little doubt that racial policy considerations demand that we combat with all available means the extraordinary threat of contamination and pollution this concentration of foreign workers poses . . . to our Germanic lineage. This alien population was until recently our most bitter enemy, and inwardly remains so today, and we can and may not stand idly by while they invade the vital essence of our people, impregnate women of German blood, and corrupt our youth.

The new vogue for public executions was most successful in Thuringia. Even the SD was disturbed by the scale of popular enthusiasm when 800–1,000 spectators flocked to watch the mass hanging of twenty Poles in Hildburghausen – and that was not counting the 600–700 women and children whom the police prevented from attending. But this was a region conspicuous for its early conversion to National Socialism and where Protestant pastors had embraced the German Christian movement wholesale: there were no institutions here which encouraged any other view of

One reason for the humanitarian revulsion against the new rituals in Catholic areas was that the Poles and French were treated as coreligionists. In Kempen-Niederrhein near Düsseldorf the Gestapo ascribed the fairly hostile response to the hanging of a Pole to the influence of the Church and its rejection of such forms of public execution.

I Accuse came out just before Galen preached his devastating sermon, and it reached a national audience. By January 1945, 15.3 million people had gone to see it, but not all necessarily connected the intimate drama revolving around the dilemma of a patient’s choice with the wholesale killing actually under way in the wards of Germany’s asylums. Where people did make the connection, particularly in the Münsterland and Passau, the film flopped. But the fact that it was otherwise very successful indicates that Germany was not fully focused on the reality of medical killing. Both knowledge and protests remained

In August 1941, Hitler ordered a halt to T-4 killing of adult asylum patients. Yet the Church protests continued because the order could not be made public: after all, the programme of murder itself was a state secret. Prelates had their own reasons for keeping up pressure on the issue at this time. Their principal concern in the summer of 1941 was to defend Church houses and lands.

As Alsace and Luxembourg joined the western Polish provinces as areas annexed to the Reich, the government decided that the provisions of the 1933 Concordat with the Church did not apply to these territories. The Gestapo and Party bosses lost no time in falling on the spoils, and during 1940 and 1941 over 300 monasteries and other religious lands and buildings were expropriated.

That summer, the conflict between Church and Party ran out of control in Bavaria, almost entirely thanks to the efforts of Adolf Wagner, the Bavarian Minister for Education and Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria. Here the state takeover of Church lands and buildings disturbed an intense, local sense of sacred landscape and inherited order. Next Catholic journals, nurseries and, above all, education became targets for secularisation. Things came to a head when Wagner issued a decree that crucifixes and Christian pictures be removed from schools during the summer holidays. For hardliners like Wagner, it was time to complete the unfinished business of driving the Church out of education.