[ed. I just finished reading Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, a novel with a similar theme - the average French and German's reaction to, and ultimately, participation in the Second World War. It made me think again about the issue of free will vs. determinism and how a person's moral perspective and/or character could be subsumed (or elevated) by the momentum of larger forces - forces that determine one's fate long before they are felt.]
Most Germans did not want war in 1939. When it came, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there was no euphoria and flag-waving, as there had been in 1914, but dejection; the people were downcast, one diarist noted. The mood soon lifted, as the Third Reich overran its neighbours, but most Germans still hoped for a quick conclusion. As Nicholas Stargardt points out in his outstanding history of Germany during the second world war, the Nazi regime was most popular “when it promised peace, prosperity and easy victories”. And yet, German troops continued to fight an ever more protracted battle, with ever more brutality, while the home front held tight. Even when it was clear that all was lost, there was no collapse or uprising, as in 1918. Why?
There are two easy answers. After the war, many Germans claimed to have been cowed by an omnipotent terror apparatus. More recently, some historians have argued the opposite: the Nazi regime was buoyed by fervent support, with ordinary Germans backing Hitler to the end. Stargardt dismisses both answers convincingly. Domestic terror alone, though ever-present, did not ensure the war’s continuation. Neither did popular enthusiasm for nazism. Of course there was significant support for Hitler’s regime, at least as long as the campaign went well. “God couldn’t have sent us a better war,” one soldier wrote to his wife in summer 1940, as the Wehrmacht routed France. But opinion was fickle, fluctuating with the fortunes of war.
Grumbling about rationing and shortages began within weeks, and never ceased, even as the regime alleviated hardships at home through the ruthless exploitation of occupied Europe (midway through the war, almost 30% of Germany’s meat came from abroad). There was plenty of resentment, too, about the privileges of the Nazi elite, which gorged itself on delicacies as ordinary Germans chewed “cutlets” made from cabbage. As a popular joke had it: “When will the war end?” “When Göring fits into Goebbels’s trousers”. Resentment of the regime grew as allied bombs rained on Germany, displacing millions and killing more than 400,000. German civilians criticised their leaders for the porous air defences, and they also turned on each other. Evacuees from the cities complained about the “simple and stupid” peasants who hosted them, while the farmers accused the new arrivals of laziness and loose morals. Back in the urban centres, locals were relieved when they were spared because a different German city was hit instead. The supposedly unified Nazi “national community” was just a fiction.
Despite this lack of national cohesion and the growing war fatigue, Germans kept fighting. Most important, Stargardt suggests, were their feelings of “patriotic defiance”, arising less from fanatical nazism than familial bonds. They had to win the war at any cost, soldiers believed, to protect their loved ones and to make Germany impregnable. “Your father is away,” one soldier lectured his teenage son in 1942, “and is helping to prepare a better future for you, so that you don’t have to do it later yourselves.” Even Germans appalled by the genocidal war waged in their name rallied around their country. Their determination was fuelled by Nazi propaganda, which insisted that this was a defensive war, provoked by Germany’s enemies, and warned that defeat would mean the annihilation of the fatherland. This campaign, based on “strength through fear” (as a British commentator quipped), hit home. As another soldier wrote to his wife just weeks before the final surrender: “If we go to the dogs, then everything goes to the dogs.”
Propaganda and popular opinion are just two key themes in Stargardt’s sweeping history, which takes in almost everything, from battles to religion and entertainment. And although the focus is on wartime Germany, we also see the suffering the war brought to the rest of Europe: pulverised cities, ravaged countryside, countless victims. Crucially, the death and destruction wrought by the German conquerors was not hidden from the population back home. Germans knew that the regime relied on pillage and plunder, bolstering the war effort with raw materials and slave labour from across Europe. And they knew that huge numbers of Jews were murdered in the east.
Historians have long debunked the postwar myth of German ignorance about the Holocaust, and Stargardt presents further evidence that the genocide was an open secret. News spread via German soldiers and officials who witnessed massacres, or participated in them. “The Jews are being completely exterminated,” a policeman wrote in August 1941 to his wife in Bremen. Nazi propaganda also dropped heavy hints, creating a sense of societal complicity: in autumn 1941, for instance, the Nazi party displayed posters across the country, emblazoned with Hitler’s threat that a world war would lead to the “destruction of the Jewish race in Europe”. Ordinary Germans watched the deportations of their Jewish neighbours and purchased their abandoned property at bargain prices. Later on, the authorities distributed the belongings of Jews among bombed-out Germans, though this triggered new complaints about Nazi bigwigs grabbing the best bits and “laying their Aryan arses in the Jewish beds after they have exterminated the Jews”, as one employee in a Bavarian factory exclaimed. There was some popular unease about the genocide, and it came into the open during the intense allied bombing, in a rather twisted manner: many ordinary Germans bought into the Nazi propaganda picture of Jews pulling the strings in Britain and the USA, and understood the air raids as payback for the antisemitic pogroms and mass murders. In this way, writes Stargardt, the Germans “mixed anxieties about their culpability with a sense of their own victimhood”.
by Nikolaus Wachsmann, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Popperfoto/Getty Images
Most Germans did not want war in 1939. When it came, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there was no euphoria and flag-waving, as there had been in 1914, but dejection; the people were downcast, one diarist noted. The mood soon lifted, as the Third Reich overran its neighbours, but most Germans still hoped for a quick conclusion. As Nicholas Stargardt points out in his outstanding history of Germany during the second world war, the Nazi regime was most popular “when it promised peace, prosperity and easy victories”. And yet, German troops continued to fight an ever more protracted battle, with ever more brutality, while the home front held tight. Even when it was clear that all was lost, there was no collapse or uprising, as in 1918. Why?There are two easy answers. After the war, many Germans claimed to have been cowed by an omnipotent terror apparatus. More recently, some historians have argued the opposite: the Nazi regime was buoyed by fervent support, with ordinary Germans backing Hitler to the end. Stargardt dismisses both answers convincingly. Domestic terror alone, though ever-present, did not ensure the war’s continuation. Neither did popular enthusiasm for nazism. Of course there was significant support for Hitler’s regime, at least as long as the campaign went well. “God couldn’t have sent us a better war,” one soldier wrote to his wife in summer 1940, as the Wehrmacht routed France. But opinion was fickle, fluctuating with the fortunes of war.
Grumbling about rationing and shortages began within weeks, and never ceased, even as the regime alleviated hardships at home through the ruthless exploitation of occupied Europe (midway through the war, almost 30% of Germany’s meat came from abroad). There was plenty of resentment, too, about the privileges of the Nazi elite, which gorged itself on delicacies as ordinary Germans chewed “cutlets” made from cabbage. As a popular joke had it: “When will the war end?” “When Göring fits into Goebbels’s trousers”. Resentment of the regime grew as allied bombs rained on Germany, displacing millions and killing more than 400,000. German civilians criticised their leaders for the porous air defences, and they also turned on each other. Evacuees from the cities complained about the “simple and stupid” peasants who hosted them, while the farmers accused the new arrivals of laziness and loose morals. Back in the urban centres, locals were relieved when they were spared because a different German city was hit instead. The supposedly unified Nazi “national community” was just a fiction.
Despite this lack of national cohesion and the growing war fatigue, Germans kept fighting. Most important, Stargardt suggests, were their feelings of “patriotic defiance”, arising less from fanatical nazism than familial bonds. They had to win the war at any cost, soldiers believed, to protect their loved ones and to make Germany impregnable. “Your father is away,” one soldier lectured his teenage son in 1942, “and is helping to prepare a better future for you, so that you don’t have to do it later yourselves.” Even Germans appalled by the genocidal war waged in their name rallied around their country. Their determination was fuelled by Nazi propaganda, which insisted that this was a defensive war, provoked by Germany’s enemies, and warned that defeat would mean the annihilation of the fatherland. This campaign, based on “strength through fear” (as a British commentator quipped), hit home. As another soldier wrote to his wife just weeks before the final surrender: “If we go to the dogs, then everything goes to the dogs.”
Propaganda and popular opinion are just two key themes in Stargardt’s sweeping history, which takes in almost everything, from battles to religion and entertainment. And although the focus is on wartime Germany, we also see the suffering the war brought to the rest of Europe: pulverised cities, ravaged countryside, countless victims. Crucially, the death and destruction wrought by the German conquerors was not hidden from the population back home. Germans knew that the regime relied on pillage and plunder, bolstering the war effort with raw materials and slave labour from across Europe. And they knew that huge numbers of Jews were murdered in the east.
Historians have long debunked the postwar myth of German ignorance about the Holocaust, and Stargardt presents further evidence that the genocide was an open secret. News spread via German soldiers and officials who witnessed massacres, or participated in them. “The Jews are being completely exterminated,” a policeman wrote in August 1941 to his wife in Bremen. Nazi propaganda also dropped heavy hints, creating a sense of societal complicity: in autumn 1941, for instance, the Nazi party displayed posters across the country, emblazoned with Hitler’s threat that a world war would lead to the “destruction of the Jewish race in Europe”. Ordinary Germans watched the deportations of their Jewish neighbours and purchased their abandoned property at bargain prices. Later on, the authorities distributed the belongings of Jews among bombed-out Germans, though this triggered new complaints about Nazi bigwigs grabbing the best bits and “laying their Aryan arses in the Jewish beds after they have exterminated the Jews”, as one employee in a Bavarian factory exclaimed. There was some popular unease about the genocide, and it came into the open during the intense allied bombing, in a rather twisted manner: many ordinary Germans bought into the Nazi propaganda picture of Jews pulling the strings in Britain and the USA, and understood the air raids as payback for the antisemitic pogroms and mass murders. In this way, writes Stargardt, the Germans “mixed anxieties about their culpability with a sense of their own victimhood”.
by Nikolaus Wachsmann, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Popperfoto/Getty Images
