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

by Nicholas Stargardt

German soldiers’ optimism had reached a peak in October 1941, fuelled by the prospect of a rapid victory. In November, as the advance slowed, fewer letters home expressed such confidence.

By late October, Erna Paulus was sending her son up to three packets a day, containing a warm jumper, winter underwear and apples. As the mail became more erratic, she started listing the parcels she had sent him and begged Helmut to tell her which ones had arrived. Despite the interruptions and delays, the flow of sustenance from home continued: jars of honey and plum and strawberry jam; a pair of boots resoled by their trusted cobbler; the broken watch mended; the infantry campaign medal and the Iron Cross 2nd Class issued for him in Pforzheim, along with home-made Advent biscuits. By early November, Erna Paulus was sending woollens, long johns and mittens, as well as a scarf and chest warmer she had sewn.

December 1941 found Helmut Paulus in a dugout in the front line of Army Group South, guarding the far bank of the river Mius. As darkness fell on Christmas Eve, he and his comrades lit the candles on the little tree which his aunt had sent, draping it with his mother’s decorations.

Despite the enormous disappointment of not being relieved from the front line on 23 December, as promised, the men had cheered up on Christmas Eve. The post had arrived, bringing a deluge of letters and parcels. Helmut had received ‘numerous parcels from home with biscuits, jam, brandy, lemons, [his sister] Irmgard’s notebook, the new fountain pen, goose fat’. The new pen was particularly welcome, for just two days earlier the old one had burst when the ink froze. In addition, Helmut was inundated with offerings from friends, relatives and the pastor in Pforzheim, alongside special military rations – ‘a mass of baked items, chocolate and spirits

One way or another – this I want to tell you quite openly – an end must be made with the Jews . . . We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will find ways of somehow succeeding in destroying them in conjunction with the great measures being discussed in the Reich.

In 1939, when many people had expected him to sanction a new pogrom, he held back, still hoping to reach an accommodation with Britain and France. Once the Reich was at war with the United States, the die was cast and the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ rapidly took on a new form. By New Year, Hitler was no longer prepared to listen to Todt or anyone else proposing peace, unequivocally rejecting Ribbentrop’s suggestion that he should start negotiations with Moscow.

Fritz Todt visited Hitler’s field headquarters once again on 7 February 1942, but on his return flight to Berlin the next morning, the plane crashed on take-off, killing Todt instantly. He was replaced by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, a court favourite who would soon prove himself an effective technocrat, prepared to push up armaments production by the most ruthless

In occupied Poland Jews were immediately forbidden to own furs and ordered to hand them in: this yielded 16,654 fur coats and fur-lined coats, 18,000 fur jackets, 8,300 muffs and 74,446 fur collars in Warsaw alone. The Polish underground resistance took heart from this first sign of vulnerability, putting up posters depicting a German soldier huddled in a woman’s fox-fur collar while he warmed his hands in her muff.

It was indeed a surprising gesture from a dictator who generally avoided direct contact with the soldiers and later on the civilians who bore the scars of his war. Hitler had immured himself all winter far from both the front and Berlin, in the windowless room of his field headquarters in the woodland outside Rastenburg in East Prussia, drinking herbal tea to relieve his stress and insomnia. Now, on the radio, in his conversations with the wounded, Hitler came across as a ‘man and a comrade

Listeners picked over another pregnant phrase in the speech where Hitler declared ‘that the Bolshevik colossus will find its final borders far away from Europe’s pleasant pastures’. Did he mean that the Soviets could not be completely defeated, only pushed back and penned in behind some kind of ‘East Wall’? people asked each other.

If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived. Germany’s cities and the country’s infrastructure might have emerged virtually unscathed from the bombing; as in 1918, the battles had been fought beyond its own borders. There would have been tales of Nazi atrocities: of the gassing of German and Polish psychiatric patients, mass shootings of Poles and Jews, the burning of Russian and Ukrainian villages and towns and the starving to death of 2.5 million Red Army prisoners. This would already have taken Hitler’s war beyond any precedent, but far greater destruction was to come. At the beginning of 1942, most of Europe’s Jews were still alive; by the end of the year, the majority were not.

In August 1943, the Fulda Bishops’ Conference rejected the proposal. In any case, it was too late: by this time, most of the Jews were dead. The most influential figure in German Catholicism, Cardinal Bertram, refused to be briefed any further by Margarete Sommer, insisting that he was only willing to receive written reports from her if they were countersigned by Preysing to guarantee their authenticity. Such a procedure, as the cardinal was well aware, would also have exposed both signatories to the Gestapo. If Bertram did not know what had happened to the Jews, it was because he made every effort not to

Nazi ideologues may have regarded the Church as an international conspiracy, but the German clergy knew its national

Spectators were split between churchgoers – some of whom even warned that the German people were inviting ‘divine punishment’ – and right-thinking National Socialists, who seem to have been in the minority in this case.

ec, Sobibor and Treblinka. One of those who did leave a record was an SS officer and disinfection expert, Kurt Gerstein, who visited Bełec on 20 August 1942. There he witnessed the arrival and gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwów. The diesel engine would not start and the Jews were kept locked in the gas chambers for two and a half hours while it was repaired. The gassing itself took a further thirty-two minutes. Gerstein’s task was to advise on how to disinfect the clothing and he was accompanied to Bełec by a part-time SS consultant, the Professor of Hygiene at the University of Marburg, Dr Wilhelm Pfannenstiel. The professor was fascinated by what was taking place and stood by the door with his eye glued to the glass peephole until it misted over. He commented that the wailing of the naked Jews crammed inside sounded ‘like in a synagogue’. The two men went to view the much bigger facility at Treblinka the next day, where Pfannenstiel complimented their hosts in an after-dinner speech on ‘the greatness of the work’ they were doing.35 Gerstein returned to Berlin by night train, where he found himself sharing a compartment with the Swedish attaché at the embassy in Berlin, Göran von Otter. Profoundly disturbed by his experience, Gerstein took the risk of disclosing what he knew to Otter, and urged him to tell the outside world. He even revealed his own identity and, as a devout Protestant, named the liberal Protestant Bishop of Berlin, Otto Dibelius, as a character ref...

During 1942 and 1943, the few Jews left in the Reich were more isolated than ever. Segregated at work from their ‘Aryan’ colleagues, confined to unsocial hours of shopping and forced to move into ‘Jewish’ houses, there were few spaces left where Jews and non-Jews could meet.

Why Hitler felt it was necessary for Germany to declare war on the United States on 11 December is less clear.

Declaring war on America was an unnecessary act – a provocation which threw all prior caution to the winds: it was no accident that, instead of threatening to take action against the Jews in Europe in order to curb their warmongering in America, Hitler authorised the first deportations of German Jews at this time. There would be no de-escalation, no negotiated settlement. Once again the United States, Britain and Russia were ranged against Germany, just as in 1917. If Hitler’s political career had been dedicated to re-fighting and this time winning the First World War, now he had his ‘world war’.

By 1942–43, Germany was drawing more than 20 per cent of its grain, 25 per cent of its fats and nearly 30 per cent of its meat from occupied Europe.

Nazi policy-makers, their reasoning based on a mix of racial policy and economic utility, regarded Norway as more ‘Aryan’ than the Reich and – by German standards – the country underwent a ‘model’ occupation.

In the summer of 1943, she was returning from shopping in Lwów when she saw a group of nearly naked children crouching by the side of the road. She stopped the carriage, calmed the six frightened children and took them home, where she gave them some food and waited for her husband to return. When he did not turn up, she took matters into her own hands. Pocketing an old service revolver which her father had given her as a parting gift, Erna Petri led the children through the woods to a pit where she knew other Jews had been shot and buried. There she lined them up in front of the ditch and went along the line firing into the back of each child’s neck. She remembered that after the first two, the others ‘began to cry’, but ‘not loudly, they whimpered

Soon Himmler’s SS resettlement commissions were scouring the orphanages of Poland, Ukraine and Belorussia to pick out suitably ‘Aryan’-looking children they could ‘Germanise’ themselves. With too much ‘living space’ now available to Germans, Himmler told the guardians of racial purity to dilute their criteria and to ‘distil’ every ‘drop of good blood’ out of the racial ‘mish-mash’ of the eastern nations.

Many French prisoners of war had obtained German civilian suits or work clothes, and were flooding into cafés, cinemas and pubs. Outside Innsbruck, they were seen sunning themselves in the deckchairs on the terrace of the Berg Hotel. Propagandists might exhort their national comrades to keep their distance from the foreigners in their midst but they were soon developing ever more complex ties to them, by turns opportunistic, exploitative and intimate.

Of the 1.65 million concentration camp prisoners deployed in Germany, at least 800,000 died; a further 300,000 prisoners were worked to death deliberately because they were Jews slated for ‘destruction through labour’. Including Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet and Polish civilian workers, even the official – and therefore also inherently conservative – figures show that at least 2.4 million people were worked to death in Germany itself following the military crisis of 1941

In an attempt to rationalise the attrition rates and select which workers would survive in a more economical fashion, the chairman of the coal organisation of Upper Silesia, Günther Falkenhahn, pioneered a system of ‘performance feeding’ for the ‘easterners’ working in his Plesschen Werke pit, taking away food from those who underperformed and redistributing it to those who exceeded their norms. He did not reduce the demand for new transports to replace the workers who died. As this cannibalistic version of Social Darwinism spread within the Silesian coal industry, it attracted Albert Speer’s enthusiastic endorsement and gradually became standard practice in the German armaments industry.

German people, you must know: if the war is lost, then you are annihilated . . . This war is not the Second World War, this war is the Great Race War. Whether the German and Aryan stands here or whether the Jew rules the world, that is what is at stake and that is what we are fighting for out there.

To most Germans, the war still remained one of national defence, but during 1942 they had adapted to its changing character, learning to scour occupied Europe for the resources to fight a much longer and deeper kind of struggle. That brought with it a half-articulated, often discomforting awareness of how imperial and genocidal their war had become.

After its recent catastrophic failure to gauge Soviet strength, German Army intelligence had carried out a new assessment; but, again, the Germans severely underestimated Soviet armament, troop numbers and reserves, assuming that their principal adversary could not recover from the winter losses.

Whereas in 1941 tradition-conscious Prussian generals had wanted to focus on defeating the Red Army in a decisive battle of annihilation for Moscow, Hitler had been more interested in seizing the breadbasket of Ukraine and the oil wells.

Helmut, meanwhile, was worrying about life back in Pforzheim: he had read that potatoes were being rationed for the first time, had heard disturbing comments from a returning comrade about ‘the mood and life at home’ and wondered if his mother was right to give up her chocolate ration for him.

When the men watched a comedy, The Merry Vagabonds, Helmut was struck by the change it revealed: ‘Laughter has become rare amongst us . . . If you think that pretty much every one of them has at least ten Russians on his conscience, you do have to wonder a bit at this

He lost his metal spoon and had to ask his family for a replacement, unwilling to make do with a wooden one like the locals – ‘designed for the mouth of a crocodile and with which no educated central European can eat’.

In pursuit of their motorised enemy, the German infantrymen had to make ever longer forced marches, mostly on foot. The few German trucks were used sparingly.

Despite an explicit order from Hitler forbidding such measures, the number of ‘Russians’ in Wehrmacht uniform kept climbing in the spring and summer of 1942. Most ‘volunteers’ simply wanted to escape the festering and famine-ridden camps and were allotted menial, non-combat roles, as servants to officers, medics, cooks, translators and drivers of trucks or horse-drawn carts. It was the simplest and most practicable way of making up the chronic under-strength of German units.

By the end of the year, nearly half of the men in the 134th Infantry Division were ‘Russian volunteers’. In order to avoid associating the new units with Russian nationalist traditions, they were given geographical rather than historical names – ‘Dniepr’, ‘Pripet’ or ‘Berezina

Here the desire to rally all the non-Slav ethnic groups from the occupied Soviet territories and, later, the Balkans intersected happily with the pan-Islamic enthusiasms of the SS and the German Foreign Office, whose expertise dated back to stirring up the Middle East during the First World War. Over 500,000 men were raised in this way.13 When Army Group South entered the Crimea in autumn 1941, the Germans found themselves warmly welcomed by the population of 225,000 Tatars. As Sunni Muslims they had seen their mosques and madrasas desecrated, decommissioned and destroyed by the Soviets.

The Wehrmacht was quick to guarantee the right of religious observance within their Muslim units, enjoining German soldiers not to stare in curiosity and, above all, not to photograph acts of daily prayer.

Such cultural propaganda, with its limited scope for pluralism, may have served to dampen down support for the underground resistance movements, which remained very small at this stage. But it also proved difficult to persuade the Dutch, Belgians, French and Norwegians to volunteer for the Waffen SS divisions. It was far easier to recruit from ethnic Germans in Romania and Hungary or from Ukrainians in Galicia and Muslims in Bosnia.

The Thuringian family man still found time to shudder at the sight of the Soviet prisoners as they passed the German column. ‘You really have to see the Asiatic prisoners and the like, if they had come to our Fatherland, there’d have been such an enormous killing, because they aren’t human and also not harmless animals; they are wild beasts.’

These young men came from different parts of Germany, different Christian confessions and held different ranks in the army but they shared a deep attachment to the literary culture they had accumulated through their families and education. Lost in the vast, alien ‘deserts’ of the steppes, they found refuge in the classics.

When Bavarian mountain troops planted their battle flag on the west peak of Mount Elbrus on 23 August, their Führer was furious at the waste of effort.

Five days later, on 4 January 1943, under heavy air and artillery bombardment from the west, Moldenhauer could still strike an optimistic note: ‘Thanks to our good leadership, we can be confident. We want to hope that the Russians’ great offensive turns into a great success for us. I don’t just hope that, but I am firmly convinced that’s how it will turn out.’ It was his last

Saturday, 30 January 1943 marked the regime’s 10th anniversary. The main event was an address by Hermann Göring, whose Harvest Festival speech the previous October had made such a strong impression.

Göring’s speech marked the climax of the nationalist cult of heroic death, a tradition which the Nazis inherited but certainly did not invent. Thermopylae resonated deeply with educated Germans, brought up on the poetry of Friedrich Schiller and that of the soldier-poet of the ‘liberation wars’ against Napoleon, Theodor Körner.

These words were followed by muffled drum rolls and three stanzas of the soldiers’ song ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’ – ‘The Good Comrade’ – then the national anthems of Germany, Romania and Croatia, and, following the format of great victories, a three-minute silence. Three days of national mourning were declared, during which all theatres, cinemas and variety halls in the Reich would remain closed.

Stalingrad was the first and last defeat which the Nazi regime mythologised in this manner.

The Wehrmacht Information Office, on the other hand, did its best to block communication and suppress the fact that 113,000 German and Romanian soldiers had been taken prisoner.

On 15 February 1943, a ceremony took place for the first time which gave a new dimension to Germany’s mobilisation for war. The 15- and 16-year-old boys enrolled in classes 6 and 7 in the higher schools were sworn in as air force and naval auxiliaries. As they shed their Hitler Youth uniforms for the real thing and swore their military oaths of allegiance to the Führer, many were ecstatic. It was, one Cologne schoolboy wrote, ‘a momentous day’, which filled him ‘with a feeling of pride, for I know that I too can take part in the defence of the homeland’. Among these first two cohorts were Hans-Dietrich Genscher from Reideburg in Saxony, who would later become German Foreign Minister, the future novelist Günter Grass from Danzig and the seminarian Joseph Ratzinger from Traunstein in Bavaria, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

For the RAF’s Bomber Command, the Essen raids marked the beginning of an entirely new phase in the air war, the battle of the Ruhr.

With its double meaning of involuntary victim and active (self-)sacrifice, Opfer lay at the centre of the nationalist, as well as National Socialist, cult of Germany’s military dead.