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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
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For a regime that worshipped the right of might, ‘terror bombing’ raised the spectre of German weakness and demoralisation. Goebbels was anxious not to broadcast anything like the real toll on civilian life, and so the media stuck to reporting on the destruction of cultural monuments, painstakingly listing the number of churches desecrated and destroyed, and, in the case of Cologne, describing in detail the damage sustained by the cathedral.
For Germans, the central message was simple and stark from the outset. ‘Mass Murder of Katyn: Work of Jewish Butchers’, read the Völkischer Beobachter’s headline. The fact that 700–900 of the Polish officers were Jews was of course suppressed. As the campaign continued, the formula of Germans’ ‘defence’ against Jewish plans to destroy them became ever more explicit.
To the delight of the Nazi leaders, Katyn created strains in the Allied coalition, with General Sikorski’s Polish government-in-exile in London endorsing German calls for the International Red Cross to investigate the massacre and challenging the denial which the Soviet Information Bureau had issued. Stalin responded by breaking off diplomatic relations with the London Poles. But it did not break up the Allied coalition. Whatever their private misgivings, Churchill and Roosevelt blocked the involvement of the International Red Cross in the investigation of the massacre, at the same time as
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Among the 18,474 people killed that night were Ingeborg Hey’s parents.
Recycling Jewish goods played a role in the relief operation too. When the Jews were deported from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1942–43, their furniture was seized and redistributed under ‘Aktion-M’ (for Möbel), under the auspices of the ‘Western Office’ of the Eastern Ministry and the SS. From Bamberg to Frankfurt am Main, the authorities reported that people were calling for the warehouses holding Jewish goods to be opened up to help the bombed-out.
Instead of being grateful, the beneficiaries were often aggrieved at what they received. In late September 1943, reports were reaching Berlin from Münster and Frankfurt on the Oder, about how ‘disappointed the population was with the used furniture reaching them from the occupied territories, especially the Jewish furniture’. Either the pieces came from large villas and would not fit into small flats, or they were infested with vermin, smashed in transit, or simply too old and shabby to be suitable for Germans: it seemed that the Jews had either been too rich or too poor.
In Hitler’s adopted home town of Linz the local Party leader was forced to beat a hasty retreat from a condolence visit in the face of a torrent of abuse: the cause of his outrage, the bereaved father claimed, was not his son’s death, but the fact that the Nazi Party had recently prevented his sister from buying ‘a Jew’s house
On 6 August 1943, Goebbels caused panic in Berlin by ordering an immediate, partial evacuation of the capital.
Many noted a minor item reporting the banning of the Fascist Party. If this could occur overnight after twenty years of Fascist rule, then, people were speculating quite openly, ‘National Socialism could be got rid of even more quickly after a ten-year rule
Whatever the rage against the English and Americans for their inhuman way of waging war, one has to say quite objectively 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 Cologne and Aachen, people connected the burnt synagogues with the churches destroyed in the air raids, evoking a sense of divine retribution.
As a clerical informer summarised such views for the local Gestapo: ‘Yes, it’s deserved . . . everything avenges itself on earth.’ Thus, many people saw 1938 as the start of the German war against the Jews, which set in motion the chain of escalating mutual retaliation. By the late summer and autumn such hitherto rare admissions of German responsibility and guilt had spread to parts of Germany which had not been bombed at
As they spoke about this throughout the Reich, people inadvertently disclosed something which had previously been half concealed – their own knowledge that all the abstract Nazi rhetoric about exterminating the Jews had been literally accomplished. In 1941 and 1942, when the deportations were at their height; when many people had bid at auctions in Hamburg and other cities for Jewish furniture and fittings; when many witnesses had returned with details of the mass graves and mass shootings in the east; and when, above all, any widespread German opposition to the killing might have saved Jewish
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The popular search for literal and moral equivalence was helped by the absence of hard facts about the numbers of dead either from bombing or the murder of the Jews. The SS’s own statistical count of April 1943 was top secret; yet people were aware that only a tiny number of Jews still remained in Germany.
The sentiment – ‘if only we had not treated the Jews so badly’ – expressed an impossible wish. By searching for a way back through a cycle of escalation which could not be reversed, Germans were acknowledging precisely the bind that Goebbels had wanted to place them in. ‘Above all in the Jewish question, we have gone so far that for us there’s no escape. And that is just as well,’ Goebbels had consoled himself back in March. ‘Experience tells that a movement and a people, which has broken the bridges behind itself, fights much more unreservedly than those which still possess the possibility of
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Meanwhile, that autumn the Swiss consul in Cologne observed that the knowledge ‘that the evacuated Jews had been murdered in their totality’ was ‘seeping through ever more
Despite the religious significance of the day, the churches could not compete with the Party-led ritual which unfolded at the same time in front of the burnt-out shell of the town hall on Adolf Hitler Square.
The mass pilgrimage to the Ohlsdorf cemetery was repeated on 25 July 1944, the first anniversary of the attack, and has been every year since, the ritual’s success evident in the fact that its Nazi origins would be gradually
Neither the churches nor the Nazi Party could provide a meaningful interpretation of mass death. The crises of 1943 precipitated a search for personal meaning.
All of Kurt’s letters and war diaries were gone. Her professional archive of 6,000 photos, the negatives from their wedding, a mere two months earlier, had all been destroyed – as had her books and pictures, the mementoes from her travels, her collector’s edition of Faust, her record collection, ‘the beautiful lamp, oh everything, everything which I loved’. Worst of all was the loss of her violin, her ‘dear friend’. For months afterwards, in between her recurring nightmare of being caught in the open during air raids and watching buildings go up in flames, Liselotte dreamed of her violin.
Everything she had lost could be replaced, even his letters: ‘I will write you new ones, as many as you like’ – ‘Our wedding photos – we have enough prints! Pictures of our honeymoon – we’ll have a new, still more beautiful one . . . Books, pictures, radio, lamp – everything can be and will be replaced – by us two. We are just beginning! And no one can take our memories from us.’ It was different for her parents who had lost so much more, he added
Nightfall felt like ‘the witching hour’, and she fled to the security of white sheets and a clean bed with friends in Potsdam.
Three weeks after Kurt had returned to Army Group North, Liselotte began to hope for a baby and started thinking of children’s names. She was unpleasantly struck, on a shopping expedition with her friend Hada in Prague, by ‘the extraordinary fertility of the Czech women’: even the 19- and 20-year-olds all seemed to be pregnant – just ‘like rabbits’. It was a eugenics propagandist’s bad dream and Liselotte duly fell back on well-worn nationalist expressions, writing to her husband that ‘the best of our nation are being lost without producing any progeny or only one while in the East the
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She made up for it by taking the night-sleeper to Vienna with Hada, where, enchanted to be in a city ‘without rubble, without ruins and without permanent threat of air raids’, they put up at the smartest hotel they could find.
Instead of creating a single great catastrophe, the bombing of Berlin turned into a war of attrition, in which both sides tried to calculate their respective rates of loss of aircraft – and both speculated how long civilian morale would
The writer and journalist Margret Boveri chose that moment to return to the capital from Madrid, where she gave up a plum job at the German embassy. Against the advice of friends and family, including her American mother, Boveri committed herself ‘to stay in Berlin and really get to know German life under the bombs’ and started writing for Das Reich.
What made Germany different from Italy? An estimated 50,000–60,000 people died as a result of the air raids in Italy throughout the war; this was comparable to the losses sustained in Britain and France. By September 1944, the civilian death toll from bombing in Germany was closer to 200,000. What made Germany so different from Italy was not the absolute number killed, but the social impact of bombing. Italian cities lacked civil defences: there were few shelters, little antiaircraft artillery and almost no fighter squadrons. Their absence made people feel utterly undefended. As the Fascist
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Nazi Germany did not implode in this way in 1943–44. Not only were German cities better defended and supplied, but – despite all the inefficiencies and rivalries engendered by their overlapping jurisdictions – the institutions of the state, Party, local government and the military co-operated effectively to mobilise millions of Germans to participate in civil defence and mass evacuation. This was a triumph of organisation and mass mobilisation.
heart pains and trembling’. Feudell was sympathetic to his patients but he concluded
Women’s experience of the assistance provided by the NSV was often positive.
Mass evacuation may have been an organisational triumph. It was not, however, a victory of the ‘national community’. On the contrary, the experience of evacuation in particular would engender whole new areas of conflict within German society. Time and again, the refusal to share kitchens and laundries with evacuees became flashpoints of conflict, and local Party officials had to mediate. The Nazi Women’s Organisation and the People’s Welfare set about establishing sewing centres, communal kitchens and laundries to defuse these
In the Rhineland Palatinate, a young woman evacuated from Bremen with her young daughter found the unfriendliness of the farmers’ families in the village as difficult to bear as their cold and damp lodgings. Homesick and isolated, she wrote to her mother-in-law of how ‘the farmers don’t want to be visited. On some farmsteads, they simply slam the door in your
With their petitions, complaints and occasional denunciations, Germans drew the authorities into their conflicts with one another, expecting them to impose a ‘fair’ solution. This pattern of behaviour gave the notion of a ‘national community’ a certain legitimacy, because it provided the framework for staking a claim – just as it automatically excluded Jews, Poles and other foreigners.
As expectations of spontaneous ‘national solidarity’ were progressively disappointed, people became more conscious of the immediate, everyday communities on which they could draw.
The thirst for private, non-political entertainment was irrepressible.
By the autumn of 1943, even the newsreels shied away from coverage of the front, prefering to dwell on what the SD called ‘peacetime matters’ such as sports, trivia and current
Ursula von Kardorff managed to attend, only hours after enduring a heavy American air raid. To reach the theatre she had to clamber over rubble, ‘past blood-spattered people with green-tinged faces’, as she noted in her diary that night. But it was worth it: ‘I felt almost physically lifted out of my present existence and transported into a dream
Hellingrath was killed at Verdun, but his version of Hölderlin entered public consciousness in Germany via the elitist ‘George circle’, which venerated a Hellenistic, aristocratic ‘secret Germany
In the winter of 1943–44, another young infantryman found himself in dialogue with the same writers when he sat down to turn his war diary into a memoir.
Willy Reese
Saved from the front by a sniper’s bullet, Reese returned to Germany a second time. Despite being plagued by nightmares in which, he wrote, ‘again and again I relived the horrors of the winter war, heard the shells’ howl, the cries of the wounded, saw soldiers advancing and dying, and saw myself like a stranger in my fate on the edge of no-man’s-land’, Reese volunteered to return to the eastern front for a third time in the summer of 1943. He now believed only in the spiritual journey which the war afforded him: ‘I wanted to conquer fire with fire, the war with the war,’ he wrote. Returning to
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For that I want to live and fight for Germany, for the spiritual, secret Germany, which only after defeat, after the end of the Hitler-period, can exist again and will regain the place in the world which belongs to Germany. If I fight, then for my life; if I should fall, then because it was my destiny. And I want to sacrifice myself too for the future, free, spiritual Germany – but never for the Third Reich.
Part of the appeal of Ernst Jünger’s existentialist epic and Hölderlin’s classical ‘fate’ for literary-minded Germans was that they avoided questions of responsibility and causation: they turned war into an elemental force, a natural disaster, beyond human morality or power.
Sent to work on the production line of a cardboard-box-making factory in Dresden, Victor Klemperer learned to overcome his conservative fears and middle-class disdain for the working class, finding many of his new ‘Aryan’ co-workers more critical, less Nazi and more generous towards him than his former academic colleagues.
Along the entire line of their retreat, the Germans set everything alight, using precious time and munitions to destroy as much as possible.
Guarding the German retreat, Willy Reese felt ‘torn apart by guilt’, appalled by a ‘scorched earth’ policy far worse than the Germans’ first efforts of 1941–42. He drank as he watched the villages and towns turned into a ‘depopulated, smoking, burning desert covered in ruins
As they drank and danced in the cattle trucks carrying them westwards towards Gomel, they found a woman prisoner and stripped her naked to dance for them, smearing her breasts with boot fat and making her ‘as drunk’, Reese wrote, ‘as we
By 1944, even wearing a wedding ring in Germany was not a clear marker. ‘Perhaps’, she reflected, ‘most people have bad experiences and prefer “not to ask”.’ Death and infidelity had made everything more complicated.
Lieutenant Peter St
