The German War (4 page)

This capacity of wartime crises to transform or radicalise social values profoundly affects how we think about the relationship between the Nazi regime and German society. For the last thirty years, most historians have assumed that crises such as followed the Hamburg firestorm or occurred a few months earlier after the loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad tipped German society into irrevocable defeatism: increasingly alienated from all that the regime stood for, the majority of the population was only kept going by Nazi terror. In fact, there is no direct index during the middle of the war between falling consent and increasing repression: death sentences handed down by the courts jumped dramatically from 1,292 in 1941 to 4,457 in 1942 – well before the defeat at Stalingrad. German judges were responding not to mounting opposition and discontent from below but to pressure from above, especially from Hitler, to deal with repeat offenders, usually petty criminals, far more harshly. This was also a system of racial justice, in which Poles and Czechs forced to work in Germany accounted for a disporportionate number of those killed. It was not until the autumn of 1944, with the Allied armies on the German frontiers, that ‘ordinary Germans’ were subjected to a rising wave of repression, but by far the worst excesses of terror were confined to the final weeks of fighting in March, April and the first week of May 1945. Even during this last spasm of mass violence, terror did not atomise and silence German society: on the contrary, many German citizens continued to feel that as loyal patriots they were entitled to criticise Nazi failures in public. In their own minds, their commitment continued to count for a great deal until the very end of the war.
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The long-lasting consensus that Germans became defeatists rests on a piece of common sense: historians equate the regime’s successes with consent and its failures with criticism and opposition. This alignment almost certainly holds good in times of peace – but not for the conditions of a world war. It cannot explain what actually happened. How did Germans manage to continue fighting from 1943 until 1945, years during which they had to surmount rising devastation and losses on their side?
The German War
offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society. Terror undoubtedly played its part at particular moments, but it never provided the only – or the most important – reason for going on. Neither Nazism nor the war itself could be rejected, because Germans envisaged their own defeat in existential terms. The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became. Far from leading to collapse, successive crises acted as catalysts of radical transformation, as Germans tried to master the situation and rethink what they could expect. Major disasters like Stalingrad and Hamburg did indeed lead to a catastrophic fall in the regime’s popularity, but they did not in themselves call patriotic commitment into question. The strains of war showed in a whole range of resentments and conflicts within German society, many of which the regime was called upon to mediate and mitigate. However unpopular the war became, it still remained legitimate – more so than Nazism itself. Germany’s mid-war crises resulted not in defeatism but in a hardening of social attitudes. It is these more complex, dynamic and disturbing elements in German responses to war with which I am concerned in this book.

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When mobilisation orders were issued on 26 August 1939 Germans had no idea of what lay ahead. But that did not prevent most from taking a bleak view of war. They knew what lay behind them: 1.8 million military dead in the last war; the ‘turnip winter’ of 1917; the Spanish flu of 1918; and the faces of children famished because the Royal Navy maintained its blockade into 1919 in order to compel the new German government to sign a humiliating ‘dictated’ peace agreement. German politics of the 1920s and ’30s was dominated by attempts to escape the strictures of the Versailles treaty, but even Hitler’s greatest foreign policy triumphs such as at the Munich summit of 1938 were overshadowed by popular fear of war. The first lesson of 1914–18 was not to repeat it. When war and rationing came, both were greeted with profound gloom. In the first winter, city-dwellers compared shortages of food, clothing and, above all, heating coal with the winters of 1916 and 1917, grumbling about chronic shortages. It did not augur particularly well for Germans’ capacity to ‘hold out’, as the SD repeatedly warned the Nazi leadership in its weekly reports on the ‘public mood’.

For the Nazis, the first months of the war raised crucial questions about the stability of the rule they had established since coming to power in 1933. On the surface, they had enjoyed a runaway success in the pre-war years. Driven by a variety of motives, ranging from opportunism to conformity or conviction, Party membership rose from 850,000 at the end of 1932 to 5.5 million on the eve of war. By that time, the National Socialist Women’s League had 2.3 million members and the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls 8.7 million, and they all ran ideological training courses, from evening get-togethers to week-long summer camps. The successors of the working-class welfare and trade union organisations, the National Socialist People’s Welfare and the German Labour Front, boasted 14 and 22 million members respectively. Even more impressively, the majority of staff were volunteers. Overall by 1939, two-thirds of the population signed up to at least one of the Party’s mass organisations.
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This success had been built on a bitterly divisive legacy of coercion and consent. In 1933, the Nazis set out to complete the work of their street-fighting years and obliterate the political Left. With the active assistance of police, army, even fire brigades, SA and SS men sealed off ‘Red’ housing estates, conducted house-to-house searches, intimidating and beating the occupants, and they arrested local activists and functionaries. The formal banning of the left-wing parties followed in the wake of these repeated raids: the Communists in March, the trade unions in May and the Social Democrats finally in June 1933. In May, 50,000 oppositionists were already in concentration camps, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. By the summer of 1934, when terror against the Left had run its course, perhaps as many as 200,000 men and women had been churned through this new apparatus of Nazi terror. Public punishment in the camps, alongside a whole repertoire of humiliating, pointless drills, was designed to enforce conformity and break the prisoners’ will. The real success of this programme of ‘re-education’ came with the mass release of cowed and chastened prisoners back to their families and communities: by the summer of 1935, when fewer than 4,000 prisoners were still in the camps, the ‘other Germany’ which the Left had represented had been destroyed politically.
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When Germany mobilised in August 1939, the Gestapo took the precaution of re-arresting former Social Democratic politicians. What was harder to gauge was the regime’s success in eradicating the working-class subculture which had sustained left-wing politics since the 1860s. Certainly, pockets of it remained under the new aegis. Before 1933, football had been dominated by the workers’ sports clubs, which counted 700,000 members, and by the 240,000-strong Catholic clubs. Although the German Labour Front rapidly absorbed them and the Nazis reorganised the whole structure of the football leagues, making them far more competitive and exciting, they could not really control the fans. In November 1940, a friendly match in Vienna ended in a full-scale riot, with local fans storming the pitch after the final whistle and throwing stones at the visiting players before they could get away. The windows of their bus were smashed and even the car belonging to the Gauleiter of Vienna was wrecked. Although the Security Police saw this as primarily a political demonstration, they were almost certainly mistaken. In fact both clubs had a traditional, fiercely loyal and formerly ‘Red’, working-class base; and the match itself, billed as a ‘friendly’, was seen by all the supporters of Vienna’s local clubs as an opportunity to take revenge for Admira’s humiliating 9–0 loss to Schalke in the 1939 German cup final – a loss which fans inevitably credited not to the Ruhr team’s incredible string of successes but to biased refereeing in Berlin. The riot was as much about a set of male loyalties to neighbourhood and city as it was an Austrian protest against the influx of arrogant ‘Prussians’ into Vienna after the
Anschluss
of March 1938.
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Such residues of working-class identity had little potency. The world that Social Democrats had painstakingly built up through mutual aid, choral societies, gymnasts’ clubs, burial societies, kindergartens and cycling clubs had either been corralled into Nazi organisations or had been suppressed. In July 1936, the exiled Social Democrats bemoaned the collapse of the tradition of collective identity they represented, admitting that ‘the [workers’] interest in their fate as a class has to a large degree disappeared completely. It has been replaced by the most petty-minded individual and family egotism.’ When the Left re-formed after the war, its vote recovered quickly but it proved incapable of recreating the dense organisational subculture and sense of identity it had possessed before 1933. The SD and Gestapo could not of course know how successful their combination of coercion and inclusion had been when war broke out, and they would continue to monitor the threat of working-class action.
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The Nazis could be far more secure in their support from the middle classes – farmers, self-employed businessmen, skilled craftsmen, educated professionals and managers. Protestants welcomed the Nazis’ ‘national revolution’ with an enthusiasm and hope for spiritual revival comparable only to the fervour with which they had endorsed war in 1914. They united in rejecting the ‘godless’ modernism of Weimar, which they associated with the ‘ideas of 1789’, pacifism, democrats, Jews and those who embraced defeat. This was a broad alliance, which was already being forged by Protestant pastors and theologians in the 1920s and whose talk of creating a new ‘national community’ appealed powerfully across the political spectrum. Former Liberals, Conservatives, members of the Catholic Centre Party, even former Social Democratic voters, could all remember having espoused the idea of a ‘national community’ during the First World War and the Weimar years – before it became a key Nazi slogan. Even conservative Jewish nationalists, like the historians Hans Rothfels and Ernst Kantorowicz, wanted to embrace this ‘national revolution’ and found adjustment hard when they were forced into emigration because of their ‘non-Aryan’ origins.
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Such non-Nazis put national repentance for the failure of 1918 at the centre of what their fellow citizens had to accomplish on the road to ‘national salvation’. Many of the arguments which served the Nazis well were supplied by others, such as the young theologian and former military chaplain Paul Althaus. He had denounced pacifism as early as 1919 and argued that Germans needed to prove themselves worthy of God’s renewed trust by standing up against Versailles. Mixing the subtlety of theological argument with militant nationalism, Althaus became a formidable and increasingly central propagandist for conservative Lutheranism and for the view that the Germans were God’s chosen people. But they would have to redeem themselves if they were to prove worthy of His trust. More radical Nazis might try – unsuccessfully – to wean Germans off religion, but they enthusiastically endorsed such calls for the spiritual rebirth of their nation. Moreover, other – more universalist and pacifist – points of view, such as the ideas championed by Paul Tillich, had already been sidelined and denigrated by non-Nazi theologians such as Althaus.
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When they came to power, the Nazis decided against large-scale social engineering, aiming first at a revolution of feeling. After their takeover, they choreographed the popular theatre of paramilitary formations, flags, boots and uniforms, and torchlit mass parades. Nazi ambitions reached into the inner sanctum of bourgeois culture, the municipal theatre, where it challenged the nineteenth-century classical repertoire with agitprop plays about the
Freikorps
resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr in the 1920s. They reached beyond the physical confines of the theatre itself in 1933–34 by organising the
Thingspiele,
a new kind of morality play staged in the open air with huge
tableaux vivants
and massed casts of up to 17,000 participants which attracted audiences of up to 60,000. Many of these huge spectacles sought to make Germans relive and exorcise their defeat in the First World War. In Richard Euringer’s
German Passion,
the fallen soldiers of the First World War literally rose up to march in battalion strength across the stage, their white, ghostly faces gleaming under their steel helmets, and spoke to the longing for unity and regeneration.
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By 1935, the vogue for
Thingspiele
had run its course, as had the Nazi agitprop productions in the municipal theatres. Goebbels faced a rebellion of season-ticket holders who started cancelling their subscriptions. He promptly changed tack, sacked the new Nazi theatre directors and replaced them with competent traditionalists. What these overwhelmingly middle-class audiences wanted and got were the classics: in November 1933, the 10th anniversary of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch was celebrated with Nazi plays; ten years later, by Mozart operas. Despite this retreat on content, Goebbels continued to channel huge resources into theatres – more money in fact than he spent on propaganda itself.
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There was a risk that the Nazis’ very success in ending the dire poverty and insecurity of the Great Depression had provided powerful yet superficial reasons for supporting the Third Reich. Key Party and state agencies also worried that their success might prove to be relatively ephemeral: they had grave difficulties judging whether or not they were succeeding in inculcating core Nazi values and beliefs. Under the umbrella of the ‘national community’, there were debates over economic redistribution and social policy, about ‘life reform’ and pedagogy, and even about whether women could wear trousers rather than skirts. Hitler was careful never to make ‘papal’ pronouncements in public; and the Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, who did issue statements of dogma, was widely discredited for his virulent anti-Christian positions and clearly lacked political power within the new regime.
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