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

by Nicholas Stargardt

Two days after the invasion began, Peter Stölten was in the thick of the battle with the British 2nd Army for control of Caen.

Instead, he told Dorothee how he and the group of young officers who had gone through training together had appraised their military situation at the beginning of the invasion and came to the sober and simple conclusion that none of us would draw his head out of the noose and that our lives were now over … And now that not one of these lieutenants is still alive and all the Tigers are missing, I know that only my accident … saved me from what we expected.

Theo took the opposite, religious stance, insisting that men fall back in awe of the mystery of the divine: ‘My ways are not your ways, for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my thoughts above your thoughts.’ All that we find and say bears the imprint of the limitations of man. But religious awe is the first step beyond the painful experience of man’s boundaries: to want to know the infinite – but only to be able to know the finite.

By the time his division had been destroyed and his closest friends killed, Stölten knew that the Allies enjoyed a technological superiority which the Germans could not expect to defeat: ‘over time it is the material [advantage] that wins’, he had written to Dorothee.

As the German occupation became ever more murderous – culminating in forcibly transfusing blood for the wounded from children – even local Belorussian collaborators and police units began to join the partisans. The German methods also had a military price: by committing significant forces to ‘pacification’ in the rear, the overstretched German armies no longer possessed reserves which could be rushed in to resist a Soviet attack.

Willy Reese met the onslaught on the Vitebsk sector and belonged to the large number of those officially listed as ‘missing in action’; in the end, they would be counted amongst the 740,821 German soldiers who died on the eastern front in the second half of 1944.

But the Soviets had already shown that they would not tolerate any independent, non-Communist forces when they had promptly arrested the Home Army units they found patrolling Lublin on 22 July.

In the Wola district of Warsaw, the Dirlewanger Brigade – a special unit composed of German professional criminals, poachers and SS men on probation – executed all the civilians it could find, from patients in hospitals to young children, accounting for 30,000–40,000 deaths.

Stölten felt this sudden loss of confidence even more keenly as he busily wrote letters of condolence to the families of his dead men.

The 1st Cossack Division was formed in April 1943, the Estonian SS Division in May 1944: by the end of the war, half of all Waffen SS troops, some 500,000 men, did not come from the Reich. Many – but by no means all – of the atrocities committed in Warsaw were ascribed to such ill-disciplined

Throughout the sixty-three days of the rising, Hosenfeld had stuck to the official terminology, calling the insurgents ‘bandits’, describing the young female prisoners he wanted to save as misguided, and explaining all civilian support as coerced. Now that the German command had finally recognised them as a legitimate force to be accorded prisoner-of-war status, Hosenfeld felt free to express his full admiration: ‘What national spirit is and in what true spontaneous form it can express itself, when a people has endured five years of undeserved suffering, that one could experience here.

As he brooded on the destruction in his letters to Annemie, he asked, ‘Is it any different at home? What might Aachen look like now?

Brest

Panic gripped Germany’s western borderlands as the Allied armies swept onwards from Antwerp.

On 11 September, the first US troops crossed the German border, just south of Aachen.

On 16 September, Hitler turned the order into a general directive to all the armies in the west: ‘Every bunker, every block of houses in a German town, every German village, must become a fortification in which the enemy bleeds to death or the occupiers are entombed in man-to-man fighting.

In late August and September 1944, the Germans dug in, literally.

But the corvées of labour also renewed a sense of common endeavour, as restaurant waiters and students, printers and university professors trooped out of cities like Königsberg to pick up shovels. By the end of the year, their number had risen to 1.5 million.

The collecting drives for Winter Relief, summer camps and communal stews had long prepared Germans for such an effort. Years of war had completed the training in shared sacrifice.

The plotters failed to win over any high-level military commanders, with the exception of Erwin Rommel and the military commander in France, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. This lack of support and comprehension was still more evident lower down the chain of command: the conspirators might have been well connected but they were always an isolated minority.

‘If I speak to you today it is, first, in order that you should hear my voice and that you should know that I myself am unhurt and well; second, in order that you should know about a crime unparalleled in German history.

In the streets and shops of Königsberg and Berlin, women were said to have burst into tears of joy at news of Hitler’s survival: ‘Thank God, the Führer is alive’ was the typical expression of relief.

Goebbels instructed the press to be careful not to attack the officer corps as a whole.

For the first time German soldiers did not just face the firing squad. Increasingly Schörner’s command ordered that the condemned should be hanged, with demeaning placards attesting to their crime for all to see: a ‘dishonourable’ death which had so far been reserved for Jews and Slavs.

Despite new levels of coercion, the Nazi regime was still not ready to deploy at home the techniques of indiscriminate mass terror it had pioneered in occupied Europe.

In August, the Hitler Youth leader, Artur Axmann, issued a call for boys born in 1928 to volunteer for the Wehrmacht.

Now, as German women put on pistols to defend their gun emplacements, the myth that German men ‘out there’ were protecting women and children ‘at home’ completely crumbled. In 1941, audiences at home had unhesitatingly seen the ‘Bolshevik gun-woman’ as a freak against nature and a perversion of women’s vocation to nurture. As German women broke this final cultural barrier, it hardly seemed remarkable any more.

Compared to the mass panic which had gripped many of its units on the western front in September, a month later the Wehrmacht presented a very different opponent. Allied commanders were shocked by the stiffening resistance of an enemy that they had assumed was on the point of collapse.

In mid-October 1944, the Western Allies could not be sure whether the stiffening German resistance amounted to a temporary pause or a real change in the balance of forces. Military historians now know that the defeats of the summer had ripped the Wehrmacht apart, its fighting power sapped beyond recovery.

‘Twelve million foreign workers in Germany,’ she mused, inflating the real figure by 50 per cent. ‘An army in itself. Some call them the Trojan Horse of this war.’ Indeed, rumours circulated that the foreign workers were about to be sent to concentration camps to prevent an uprising.

But words still mattered, binding Germans into patterns of rationalisation which they seemed unable to escape. Goebbels’s new slogan was ‘Time against space’: the promise that the soaring military casualty rate and bitter defensive battles of 1943 and 1944 had bought time for ‘new weapons’ to come on stream.

Fernau fed the hunger for uplifting news with promises of weapons of unequalled power.

Rage fills me! I have to tell you: close your soft German heart with hardness to the outside. No one in the whole world values or cares for soft fine feelings more than the Germans. But think of the cruelties to which your homeland is delivered, if . . . Think of the brutality with which we will be raped and murdered, think of the terrible misery, which the air terror alone is already bringing upon our country. No, let the farmer wail, if you have to kill their animals. Who cares about our suffering which you are adding to? – yes, you with your genuine German fine feelings. No, do the enemy harm where you can, that’s what you are there for, not to make it easier for him in his struggle against you.

In the second half of 1944, the Luftwaffe was effectively destroyed, losing 20,200 planes.

This was a massacre similar to those which many of the German investigators had themselves carried out in Soviet territory.

To the population of Stuttgart, on Germany’s western border, the Gumbinnen district was as remote as it had been possible to travel within the pre-war Reich, and here traditional Swabian hostility to everything Prussian had become stronger as the war dragged on.

According to the vox populi relayed by Stuttgart’s particularly downbeat SD office, the leadership should realise that the sight of these victims will remind every thinking person of the atrocities we have committed in enemy territory, even in Germany itself. Have we not murdered thousands of Jews? Don’t soldiers again and again report that Jews in Poland have had to dig their own graves? And how did we treat the Jews in the [Natzweiler] concentration camp in Alsace? Jews are human beings too. By doing all this we have shown the enemy what they can do to us if they

In this febrile atmosphere, an argument over seats on a Berlin tram was enough to prompt some passengers to point out that ‘One has to remain humane, because we have already weighed ourselves down with enough guilt for our treatment of the Jews and Poles, which will yet be paid back to us.

On 24 July 1944, the Soviet 2nd Tank Army had liberated a camp on the outskirts of Lublin, where they found 1,500 Soviet prisoners of war whom the fleeing SS guards had left behind.

The Soviet advance had been so rapid that the SS had had no time to destroy the camp. Majdanek was the first and – as events

Yuri Uspensky, a young officer with the Soviet 5th Artillery Corps, added Majdanek to the horrors he had seen in the villages he had liberated in the Smolensk region; as his unit fought its way towards the borders of East Prussia he would not forget ‘the German cold-bloodedness in Majdanek’, which he found ‘a hundred times worse’ than the worst actions committed by his own side – which indeed appalled him too.

Instead of fading away, news of death camps in which the victims were killed by mass electrocution or gassing grew during 1944, spreading throughout the Reich; it was even picked up by Allied observers of German prisoners of war in Italy.

‘Englishmen, Americans, Russians, listen to our voice,’ ran the text proposed by the director of the engineering institute in Kaiserslautern: Don’t sacrifice your lives any longer for the Jewish bloodsuckers who are only driving you to the butcher’s block so that they can enjoy ruling the whole world . . . Christians, you should never fight for Jews! . . . help us found the United States of Europe in which there are no more Jews.

But as an old doctor from Hamburg sadly lamented, there was always the danger that the English would not get the message: so, any leaflet would have to address them ‘in the style of someone who is slow on the uptake’ and even then it might all fail, because ‘We Germans are used to talking to educated nations . . . The English-speaking peoples do not come up to this level.’

As the joyful reports poured in, the Propaganda Ministry realised that the analogies being drawn with the rapid conquest of France in 1940 were highly dangerous. Goebbels immediately set about dampening expectations, using plain-clothes agents on the streets to prepare people for a more limited success.

Speer knew that coal was no longer reaching the power stations and that the loss of iron and steel from France, Belgium and Luxembourg could not be offset: German arms production was now in irreversible decline. Increasingly, the Armaments Minister devoted his efforts to keeping the rail network from collapsing completely.

On 29 December, the press acknowledged that the offensive had, in fact, stalled.

What was left to him was a romantic belief in the greater moral victory and faith in the future of the nation.

After twelve months of trading ‘space against time’, the lines had shifted from the Dniepr and the Atlantic to the German borderlands.