The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

With his concentration of power in military affairs, he now, for the first time in his life, had to work extremely hard, abandoning the casual and chaotic lifestyle of his earlier years as dictator, with its social evenings listening to music, watching old movies or playing with the architectural models created by Speer. Now he spent his time conferring with, or rather arguing with and browbeating, his generals, poring over military maps and thinking out military plans, often down to the last detail. Convinced more than ever of his own infallible genius, he became increasingly consumed by suspicion and distrust of his subordinates, expecially in military matters. No major decisions could be taken without him. Never one to take physical exercise, he relied increasingly on pills and remedies prescribed him by Dr Theo Morell, his personal physician since 1936: over twenty-eight different pills a day by the later stages of the war, and so many injections that Göring dubbed Morell ‘The Reich Master of Injections’.

But he was unable to deal effectively with Hitler’s physical deterioration under the strain to which he was now subjecting himself. From 1941 onwards electrocardiograms began to show progressive heart disease, probably caused by sclerosis of the coronary arteries. Beginning in the spring of 1943 Hitler suffered from chronic indigestion, with periodic stomach cramps (at least twenty-four bouts by the end of 1944), which may have been made worse by Morell’s treatment. A tremor began in his left hand, becoming markedly worse from the end of 1942, and accompanied by a growing stoop and jerking movements in his left leg. By 1944 he was shuffling rather than walking, and the symptoms of a mild but generally worsening case of Parkinson’s disease were becoming clear for all medically informed observers to note.

Goebbels became increasingly critical of Hitler’s preoccupation with military affairs to the evident neglect of domestic politics. His absence from Berlin was creating a ‘leadership crisis’, he complained. ‘I can’t influence him politically. I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann.’186 The shadowy Bormann’s power became even greater when, on 12 April 1943, he was given the title of ‘Secretary of the Leader’. Goebbels began to feel that Hitler had largely lost his grip on domestic affairs.187

The Third Reich was clearly becoming increasingly leaderless on the home front. Yet somehow the machinery of government continued to function. The civil administration, staffed largely by traditional, conscientious and hard-working bureaucrats, carried on business on its own right up to the end of the war, ministers and state secretaries implemented policies the broad lines of which had been laid down by Hitler before the war, and responded to changes initiated by him when they came.

Even after 1943, more Germans were held in state prisons than in concentration camps. But conditions in the latter deteriorated too. From the mid-1930s, the camps had begun to function mainly as centres of detention for ‘asocials’ and other minorities, after most of the political opponents of the regime for whom they had originally been intended had been released on good behaviour. As soon as the war began, however, the camps began to resume their earlier function as centres of detention and deterrence for the wider German civilian population, above all former Communists and Social Democrats.

The Nazi regime’s espousal of population growth, extending even to encouraging racially suitable women to bear children outside wedlock, led it to issue popular manuals on how to achieve a happy sex life. One such tract was written by Dr Johannes Schultz; his 1940 book Sex-Love-Marriage gave detailed instructions to both men and women on, among other things, how best to achieve orgasm during intercourse. At the same time, Schultz’s gung-ho attitude to heterosexual sex had a grim obverse side, as he endorsed the extermination of the handicapped in the T-4 Action and staged ‘examinations’ at the Göring Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy during which men accused of homosexuality were forced to have sex with a female prostitute, and were sent to a concentration camp if they failed to perform satisfactorily.

In 1939 95 per cent of Germans described themselves either as Catholics or as Protestants; 3.5 per cent were ‘Deists’ (gottgläubig), and 1.5 per cent atheists: most people in these latter categories were convinced Nazis who had left their Church at the behest of the Party, which had been trying since the mid-1930s to reduce the influence of Christianity in society.20 Especially in rural areas and amongst older generations, the overwhelming predominance of Christianity encouraged conservative attitudes towards sexual morality, reinforced by the preaching of pastors and priests. This was not welcome to the Nazi hierarchy.

Hitler’s hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war. It was a frequent theme of his mealtime monologues. After the war was over and victory assured, he said in 1942, the Concordat he had signed with the Catholic Church in 1933 would be formally abrogated and the Church would be dealt with like any other non-Nazi voluntary association.

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition.

As the war went on, Pius XII came to regard the German Reich as Europe’s only defence against Communism, especially after the overthrow of Mussolini and in view of the growing strength of Communist partisan groups in northern and central Italy, and he privately condemned the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. He directed his efforts at using the internationally neutral status of the Vatican to work for a compromise peace that would leave an anti-Communist Germany intact. In pursuit of this goal, he considered it best not to raise his voice against the extermination of the Jews, for fear of compromising the Vatican’s neutrality. Yet this did not prevent him from issuing a series of sharp condemnations of the ‘euthanasia’ programme in letters sent to his bishops in Germany; nor did it stop him from issuing in May and June 1943 public statements of his sympathy with the sufferings of the Polish people, as he had already done in December 1939.41

responsible for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.81 The Allies concluded that the best way to stop the genocide was to concentrate everything on winning the war as quickly as possible. Bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz and other camps would only have achieved a temporary respite for the Jews, and distracted attention and resources from the larger purpose of overthrowing the regime that was killing them.82 What the Allies did do, however, was to direct a massive propaganda campaign against the Nazi regime. Beginning in December 1942, British and other Allied propaganda media bombarded German citizens with broadcast and written information about the genocide, promising retribution.83 In Berlin, faced with these accusations, Nazi propagandists did not even trouble any more to issue a denial. In terms of counter-propaganda, Goebbels said,

The Wild West novels of Karl May – widely known to be Hitler’s own favourite author – enjoyed a revival, prompting in some military readers the reflection that they had taught them a lot about how to fight Soviet partisans behind the Eastern Front.

Of all the mass media used by the Propaganda Ministry, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the theatre to which it devoted the most money, steering towards it more than 26 per cent of the subsidies it issued to the arts, in comparison, for example, to under 12 per cent for the cinema.

In 1940 The Rothschilds’ Shares in Waterloo pilloried the imaginary financial manipulations of a Jewish bank during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (which it showed, of course, as being won by the Prussians, under General Blücher). The film was a failure with the public, since it was not clear whether it was intended to be anti-British or antisemitic, and it was withdrawn in 1940 and re-edited.

The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler under Goebbels’s personal supervision, was a feature-length documentary that also purported to show how Jews really were. Pictures of Jews on the streets of Polish towns were intercut with film sequences of ‘rats, which,’ the synopsis said, ‘are the parasites and bacillus-carriers among animals, just as the Jews occupy the same position among mankind’. Film of kosher butchering, taken in Poland shortly after the invasion of 1939, was edited to suggest the brutality of the Jews, while mock-up sets of Jewish homes showed dirt, neglect and infestation with vermin. Just like rats, Jews had migrated across the world, and everywhere, the film claimed, citing a whole series of invented statistics, the Jews committed crimes, spread revolution and subversion, and undermined cultural values and standards.

In a graphic illustration of the priority he attached to propaganda, Goebbels requisitioned 4,000 sailors and 187,000 soldiers from the army to play the battle scenes, at a time when they were badly needed at the front.

As before, Goebbels insisted that propaganda was far from being the only or even the principal function of German radio. In 1944, for instance, out of 190 hours of broadcasts a week, 71 were devoted to popular music, 55 to general entertainment, and 24 to classical music, leaving 32 hours a week for political broadcasts, 5 hours for a mixture of words and music, and 3 hours a week for ‘culture’. Some listeners took the view that popular music should not be broadcast in such difficult times, and, in the countryside in particular, the ‘modern offerings’ of crooners and dance-music were widely frowned on.

By August 1944 the BBC reckoned that up to 15 million Germans were listening in to it on a daily basis.133

Nobody forced medical scientists to do this work; on the contrary, they took part in it willingly or even asked to do so. That this was so should not be surprising: for some years, doctors had been among the most committed supporters of the Nazi cause.206 From their point of view, the inmates of concentration camps were all either racially inferior subhumans or vicious criminals or traitors to the German cause or more than one of these at the same time. Whatever they were, they seemed to Nazi doctors – two-thirds of the medical profession in the Third Reich – to have no right to life or well-being, and were thus obvious subjects for medical experimentation that could, indeed in many cases quite clearly would, cause pain, suffering, illness and death.

With the German navy effectively out of action, the German air force seriously weakened by losses in the preceding months and German forces dispersed over other areas and lacking the crack divisions concentrated on the Eastern Front, resistance was weaker than expected.

plutocrats

The ‘V’ stood for Vergeltung, retribution, an appellation that already betrayed an unspoken assumption that their moral purpose was greater than their military effectiveness could ever

Crucially, however, von Braun managed to convince Albert Speer of the importance of the project.

Eventually, 20,000 of the 60,000 men forced to work at the V-2 production plant and live in Dora or one of no fewer than thirty sub-camps dotted around the site died of disease, starvation and maltreatment.51

Even when conditions at Dora were improved by the provision of barracks and various amenities, the murderously brutal treatment of the prisoners by guards and overseers continued unabated, and there is no evidence that either Dornberger or von Braun, or for that matter Speer, ever did anything to try to improve the situation.

The V-2 was thus, as its historian Michael Neufeld has remarked, ‘a unique weapon: more people died producing it than died from being hit by it’.

In any case, even if the money, the men and the materials had been available, time was not. Germany lacked the resources that the United States devoted to the creation of the atomic bomb; and even there, it took until 1945 before the Manhattan Project, with its billions of dollars, huge numbers of scientists and limitless supply of materials, came up with a usable weapon.60

But none of these came to anything. The regime’s inability to prioritize, based partly on in-fighting between different agencies, partly on a general overestimation of its ability to finance and construct such programmes, partly on a general underestimation of the time and resources needed to get from research and development to production, doomed them to failure.

over a third of all German troops killed during the war died in its last four and a half months.

Up to 10,000 people were summarily executed in this final phase of terror and repression.115 They included a significant number of the 190,000 or so criminal offenders who now crowded Germany’s state prisons and penitentiaries, many of them put there by political repression

In November, however, Himmler ordered all the gas chambers in every camp to be closed down and dismantled. At Auschwitz, the trenches used to incinerate corpses were levelled out, mass burial areas were filled up with earth and turfed over, the ovens and crematoria were dismantled, and the gas chambers destroyed or converted into air-raid bunkers.126

The losses continued unabated right to the end of the war; indeed, more tanks were lost every day in the final battle for Berlin than had been lost even in the Battle of Kursk. Stalin sought victory at any price, and the price his men paid was astronomically high. Red Army officers and troops were told to obey orders without question and to avoid undertaking anything on their own initiative. Instead of mounting tactically sophisticated attacks, they often stormed the enemy lines in frontal assaults, incurring losses so heavy that it took time even with the vast resources at the Red Army’s disposal to replace them. The result was that the war on the Eastern Front took far longer to win than it would have done with more intelligent and less profligate military leadership.

The raging violence was undiscriminating. Often, especially in Berlin, women were deliberately raped in the presence of their menfolk, to underline the humiliation. The men were usually killed if they tried to intervene. In East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia it is thought that around 1,400,000 women were raped, a good number of them several times. Gang-rapes were the norm rather than the exception. The two largest Berlin hospitals estimated that at least 100,000 women had been raped in the German capital. Many caught a sexually transmitted disease, and not a few fell pregnant; the vast majority of the latter obtained an abortion, or, if they did give birth, abandoned their baby in hospital. The sexual violence went on for many weeks, even after the war formally came to an end.

She noted with a certain satisfaction that the Russian soldiers tended to prefer plump and well-fed women as their victims after the initial fury was over, and that these, unsurprisingly, were usually the wives of Nazi Party functionaries.

Some, like the Chief of the Army General Staff Heinz Guderian, advocated surrendering in the west and throwing all Germany’s troops and resources into the defence of Berlin against the Red Army, in the hope that this would persuade Britain and America to join a new struggle against the Soviet domination of Central Europe. But Hitler would not hear of any kind of surrender, not even a partial one, and accused Guderian of committing high treason.

Hitler had not survived the attempt to kill him on 20 July 1944 entirely unscathed. Although the blast temporarily cured his Parkinsonian tremor, most easily visible in the shaking of his left hand and lower arm, it was back by the middle of September 1944, and to it was added dizziness, an inability to stand for long periods, and a serious ear injury that took many weeks to overcome. On 23 September 1944 he had developed severe stomach cramps, and four days later symptoms of jaundice. He had become exhausted, developed a high temperature and taken to his bed. Only on 2 October 1944 had he begun to recover; by this time he had lost 16 pounds in weight.

Hitler’s resolve was strengthened when he learned of the fate that had overtaken Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. The pair were picked up by partisans on 27 April 1945 in a column of cars, trucks and armoured vehicles full of German troops and Italian Fascists on its way to Italy’s northern border, near Lake Como. An armed detachment led by the Communist partisan ‘Colonel Valerio’, who had spent five years in prison in the 1930s for anti-Fascist activities, put them up against a wall and shot them with a sub-machine gun in an act of ‘Italian people’s justice’. After executing fifteen more prisoners in the small town of Dongo, Valerio and his squad took all the bodies to Milan, where they dumped them on the Piazzale Loreto. A crowd gathered and desecrated the corpses in every possible way, spitting and urinating on them and shouting insults. Eventually Mussolini, Petacci and some of the others were hung upside-down from the gantry of a petrol station, where they were exposed to further insults.203 If anything were needed to confirm Hitler’s decision to kill himself, this was surely it.

Altogether, 8 out of 41 Regional Leaders, 7 out of 47 Higher SS and Police Leaders, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 out of 98 air force generals and 11 out of 53 admirals killed themselves.

Resistance movements had indeed emerged to the German occupation of other European countries, but (with the exception of Yugoslavia) only after an initial period of two or three years when the vast majority of people were waiting to see which way the war would go, resigned to occupation at least for the time being. The same was the case in Germany. And finally, the Nazis had never won more than 37.4 per cent of the votes in a free national election. At times, notably following the victories of 1940, their popularity had been far greater. But popular opinion in Germany as elsewhere was commonly fickle and volatile, and by early 1945 support for the Nazis, as we have seen, had sunk to depths not plumbed since the middle of the 1920s.

Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent his last years as a solitary prisoner in Spandau jail and hanged himself in 1987 at the age of ninety-three, the last of the Nazi suicides.

Dr Josef Mengele, whose selections on the ramp at Auschwitz had sent so many to their deaths, left the camp before its dissolution, and worked briefly at Gross-Rosen, before joining an army unit headed by a former colleague. He was captured by the Americans but gave a false name and was released in July 1945, when he began working as a farmhand near Rosenheim in Bavaria. Fearing discovery, he obtained help from another former colleague to flee via Switzerland and northern Italy to Argentina, where he re-established himself, buying a half-share in a pharmaceutical company in 1955. In 1959 he moved to a German colony in Paraguay, but left for Brazil the following year. In the meantime he had divorced and remarried, both legal acts that drew attention for the first time to the fact that he was still alive. His flight and concealment owed a great deal to the help of clandestine networks of former Nazis. He continued to elude capture, and died in 1979 after suffering a heart attack while swimming. It was only in 1985 that his grave was located, and the body exhumed and identified from dental records.

From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the political climate of the Cold War militated against any major war crimes trials in West Germany. It was widely felt, both by the NATO Allies and by the West German government, that such trials would fuel East German charges that the country was rife with Nazi criminals, and perhaps also destabilize the Federal Republic’s fledgling democracy by alienating large numbers of ex-Nazis who feared that they too might be brought before a court. By 1958, however, there were signs that the situation was beginning to change.

In August 1965, seventeen of the defendants were given mostly lengthy prison sentences. The trial proved a crucial turning-point in bringing the attention of the younger generation of West Germans to the crimes of the Third Reich;

But those who had been too closely involved in Nazi propaganda were unable to resume their careers. In the film world, Emil Jannings was forced to retire to his farm in Austria, dying in 1950; Leni Riefenstahl found it impossible to make films any more, and devoted her time to photography, celebrating the life of Nubian tribes and filming underwater life on coral reefs; she died in 2003, aged 101. Riefenstahl always claimed that she had been entirely unpolitical, but few who had seen Triumph of the Will were able to believe her.

The former head of Goebbels’s Chamber of Music, composer Richard Strauss, was perhaps too eminent to be disturbed by denazification proceedings; living quietly in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he survived the war to produce a final sequence of limpid, Mozartian works that count among his best, from the Metamorphoses for string orchestra to the oboe concerto; he died in 1949 before he could hear the first performance of his final masterpiece, the Four Last Songs.266

120 of the rocket programme staff, including von Braun, were taken off to a new base near El Paso, in Texas, to work on rocket development; they were not made available for the trial of those responsible for the crimes committed at Camp Dora. By 1950 the programme had been relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, where it became the leading missile development centre in the USA, eclipsing previous institutions like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Ten years later, building on the experience of the V-2, von Braun and the Huntsville team constructed the mighty Saturn rocket, which was used to launch men into space and within a decade to send them to the moon.

Luise Solmitz’s failure in the 1930s to recognize the violence that lay at the heart of Nazism was shared by many. As late as 1939 the great majority of Germans were hoping against hope that there would not be a general European war; and a large part of the euphoria that swept the country in the wake of the victory over France the following year expressed the relief that the traditional enemy had been defeated, and the humiliation of the 1919 Peace Settlement avenged, with what seemed to be a minimum of bloodshed.

Nazism’s promise of social equality was implemented, in ways it had not foreseen, during and after the war: the ferocious attack it launched on the German aristocracy after 20 July 1944, coupled with the breakup of the larger landed estates by the Allies after 1945 and the suppression of the Prussian military tradition at the same time, broke what remained of the social and political power of the titled nobility.