One of the many curiosities of Greece’s recent bailout battle with the EU was the ease with which old Nazi caricatures were thrown at the Germans. Surely the three postwar generations knew all there was to know about democratic values and behavioural systems? Surely, unlike some Japanese and Austrians, seemingly, and notwithstanding the odd far-right group (an affliction that pertains to many countries), Germany had truly learned from its past?
That certainly was the impression of my father, who came to visit me when I was a correspondent in Bonn in the mid-to-late 1980s, half a century after he and his immediate family fled Bratislava but many of his relatives perished in the camps. I had a German girlfriend at the time; her father had been a young motorbike messenger on the eastern front who recalled delivering an important missive to the Führer himself. We all got on. We had all, it seemed, moved on.
Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War comes therefore as something of a reality check, a shock to the system (or my system at least). A decade after Witnesses of War, his impressive deconstruction of the minds of children under the Nazis, Stargardt uses the diaries and letters from ordinary Germans to weave a narrative of their thoughts and actions from the eve of conflict to its denouement.
No detail is too small – from a spot of gardening, to getting the kids to school, to going to the movies even during the height of allied bombings. The day-to-day trivia of life makes the atrocities all the more harrowing. I will start with two (I could have chosen dozens of similar extracts).
In August 1939 (note the early date), the Reich made it compulsory for doctors to report all newborn children suffering from “idiocy” and assorted disabilities. Some 5,000 children were killed by a mix of drugs and starvation during the pilot study alone. In one asylum in Stetten, the director, Ludwig Schlaich, contacted the relatives, urging them to come before it was too late to save their loved ones. Of the 441 put on successive transport lists, only 16 were saved by their relatives. “Few families took the opportunity, even among those with sufficient means to care for someone with a disability at home,” Schlaich ruefully noted.
Eventually the programme was halted, as attention turned fully to the Jews. Stargardt chronicles, beyond doubt, the extent to which many ordinary citizens knew what was going on – not necessarily the detail, not the scale, but the killing of individuals right up to the last day of the war, even as the Americans, British and Russians were encircling them. The author notes from diary entries how, as soldiers of the 221st Security Division occupied Bialystok in June 1941, they indulged in drunken wanton violence. Hundreds of men were driven into the synagogue, which was then set alight. When one group threw themselves in front of an officer, begging for protection, the man “unbuttoned his trousers and urinated on them”. The commanding officer walked away and later awarded his troops decorations.
One survivor from Dresden, Victor Klemperer, gives a poignant insight from his diaries. “The mood of all Jewry here is without exception the same. The terrible end is imminent. They [the Nazis] will perish, but perhaps, probably, they will have time to annihilate us first.” There was no shortage of rumours about concentration camps, including that the corpses of Jews were being turned into fertiliser and soap. In Berlin this circulated as a joke: “Who are the greatest chemists of world history? Answer: Jesus, because he turned water into wine; Göring because he turned butter into cannons; and Himmler because he turned Jews into soap.” Stargardt notes that 15-year-olds “laughed at each other under the shower after their football games, joking about how many Jews they had scrubbed in the suds of green soap”.
For all the ghastliness, this is a beautifully written and, yes, sensitive and subtle portrayal of war. The author deftly weaves individual tales with surprising observation. Goebbels saw propaganda as much more than blunt political messages. “Whatever you do, do not broadcast tedium, do not present the desired attitude on a silver platter, do not think that one can best serve the national government by playing thunderous military marches every evening,” he enjoined radio executives. A twice-weekly musical request show became required listening, as did lighter concerts, variety shows and dance music.
Shakespeare was performed more during this period in Germany than in the UK. In April 1944, Goebbels persuaded star actors to come to Berlin from Vienna to perform The Winter’s Tale. One diarist recalls clambering over rubble “past blood-spattered people with green-tinged faces” to attend. Indeed Germans’ relationship with Britain was complex. In order to tackle anglophilia, “from February 1940, 6,000 student volunteers helped the propaganda ministry by combing the libraries and amassing data on British unemployment, health insurance, working-class slums and malnutrition among schoolchildren”.
Many of the social difficulties were common to all countries in war, and consistent with the customs of the time. Cases of child abuse were covered up; young women both hankered after occupying soldiers and suffered at their hands. Black American and French troops were insulted. Securing food and shelter, worrying after loved ones and coping with bombardment took precedence over politics.
Perhaps the most important contribution of this riveting study is the personal context it gives to Versailles. The great post-first world war “humiliation” underpins pretty much everything, serving as motivation for the actions not just of the Nazi regime but of millions of German individuals. It speaks volumes that there were so few conscientious objectors, and that the churches were so compliant. Even as the Americans and British were crossing the Rhine and the Russians were marching over the Oder in the spring of 1945, even with Hitler dead, Germans’ diaries and letters were still lamenting the existential threat posed by international Jewry. The author concludes: “While the next generation began to ask why Germans had unleashed such a calamity on the world, the older one was still locked into the calamity they had themselves suffered.”
John Kampfner is author of The Rich: A 2000-Year History, now out in paperback
The German War is published by The Bodley Head (£25). Click here to order it for £20
