The German War (2 page)

Red Army prisoners at Mauthausen 1944
(Bundesarchiv Bild 192-208).

Destroyed bridge over the Dniepr at Kiev, 1941
(Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin).

Rebuilt Dniepr bridge, 1941
(Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin).

Germans promenade through the ruins of Kiev, 1942
(Deutsches Historisches Museum, Orgel-Köhne 6183/2).

Soldiers witnessing execution at Orel, winter 1941–2
(Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-287-0872-28A).

Winter retreat, 1941–2: dead Soviet soldiers and horse
(estate of Irene and Ernst Guicking, reproduced courtesy of Bernhild Breithaupt).

Summer advance, 1942
(estate of Wilhelm Moldenhauer, reproduced courtesy of Heide Moldenhauer).

Deportation of Jews from Kitzingen, 24 March 1942
(Staatsarchiv Würzburg).

Marianne Strauss’ wartime postal pass
(University of Southampton, Special Collections).

Germans bid for Jewish property at auction in Hanau
(Medienzentrum Hanau, sign. MZHU0110_C3).

Liselotte Purper setting up her photo shoot at Lwów airbase
(estate of Liselotte Orgel-Purper).

A medical orderly made up as a wounded soldier being unloaded from a Ju-52
(Bildagentur der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 30028369).

Queuing for cinema tickets, Berlin
(Bildagentur der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 30021415).

Off-duty anti-aircraft personnel playing duets in the bunker of the Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin (
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Orgel-Köhne 4055/1
).

Zarah Leander in
The Great Love,
1942
(Deutsche Kinemathek).

Wedding of Liselotte Purper and Kurt Orgel, September 1943
(estate of Liselotte Orgel-Purper).

Rescuing possessions from destroyed house in Cologne, 1943
(NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln, Bilddatei Bp7607).

Hamburg firestorm: in the Reeperbahn bunker, July 1943
(Staatsarchiv Hamburg).

Hamburg firestorm: concentration camp prisoner gathering up remains, August 1943
(Bildagentur der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 30011911).

Bidding farewell at Hagen railway station, July 1943
(courtesy of Gerhard Sollbach).

Girls from Hagen on the Baltic coast
(courtesy of Gerhard Sollbach).

Female anti-aircraft personnel repairing a search light
(Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-674-7798-04).

Commemorating the dead of the Hamburg firestorm
(Staatsarchiv Hamburg).

Flight from East Prussia across the Frische Nehrung, January/February 1945
(Bildagentur der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 00012112).

Dead concentration camp prisoners on a train, April 1945
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 06531).

Teenage soldiers surrender at Veckerhagen
(Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1971-053-21).

Eva and Victor Klemperer outside their home in Dölzschen in Saxony, c.1940 (DDP
Images).

Red Army Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand and Berlin girlfriend
(courtesy of Vitaly Gelfand).

Berliners swimming near the remains of the Zoo bunker, 1945
(Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1982-028-14).

Black market in Berlin
(Deutsches Historisches Museum, GG 72/20).

Missing children poster
(Bildagentur der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 30008096).

Cellar dwelling in Hamburg, July 1947
(reproduced from Victor Gollancz,
In Darkest Germany, 1947).

Rehabilitation of a war amputee
(Deutsches Historisches Museum, Orgel-Köhne 11269/4).

Preface

This book completes a period of just over twenty years in which I have tried to understand the experience of those who lived in Germany and under German occupation during the Second World War. It is also a book I did not originally intend to write. In 2005, I promised myself and anyone else who would listen that having just completed
Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis,
I would not be writing anything more on children, the Holocaust or Nazi Germany. This book began as a short essay about what Germans were fighting for, as something that I felt needed to be said before I could move on, and started to take shape as something far bigger during a sabbatical year spent at the Free University in Berlin in 2006–7.

There are some clear continuities between the two books, most obviously my interest in exploring the subjective dimensions of social history, using the contemporary record to work out how people judged and understood events while they were unfolding around them and before they knew the eventual outcome. There are also some clear differences. In
Witnesses of War,
I wanted above all to treat children as social actors in their own right; I also set out to juxtapose the irreconcilable perspectives of children divided by war and racist persecution into victors and vanquished.
The German War
presents a different problem: how to uncover the fears and hopes of the society from which the victors and perpetrators came in order to understand how Germans justified this war to themselves. To focus on this question I have tried to develop both a sense of breadth and of depth: breadth by using ‘macro’ snapshots of opinion, drawing on what eavesdropping reporters for the regime picked up from public conversations or military censors from sampling the mail bags; depth by following a select cast of individuals, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, over a considerable period of time, exploring how their personal hopes and plans were entwined with their changing experience of the war. Doing this has made the voices of the victims less prominent than in
Witnesses of War
but they are never absent: without their contrasting perspective, we would not know how differently – and often solipsistically – Germans framed their understanding of the war.

One of the key ingredients of this book are the collections of letters between lovers, close friends, parents and children, and married couples. Many historians have used these kinds of sources, but often to different effect. For example, the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart has a famous collection of some 25,000 letters assembled by Reinhold Sterz. Unfortunately, the letters were catalogued by time and not by author, so that they provide a snap-shot of subjective opinions at particular moments of the war, without it being possible to test how firmly the letter writers held these opinions over any length of time. What guided my selection was the opposite principle: I wanted to read collections of letters in which both sides of the correspondence are preserved and which continued for several years at least, so that it would be possible to see how the personal relationships between the correspondents – their principal purpose in writing at all – developed and altered over the course of the war. This allows us to reconstruct more carefully the private prisms through which individuals viewed major events. It is the kind of research which historians of the First World War have been developing since the 1990s and I have learned a great deal from Christa Hämmerle about how to do this.

I was particularly fortunate in having access to the private archive assembled by Walter Kempowski while he was still alive, and well remember the generous welcome which Walter and Hildegard Kempowski gave me to their home in Natum: the archive itself is now held at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. At the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen, Gerhard Seitz was very helpful, as was Irina Renz at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart. In Berlin, Andreas Michaelis at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Veit Didczuneit and Thomas Jander at the Feldpostarchiv of the Museum für Kommunikation and the Bundesarchiv all provided invaluable source materials, as did Christiane Botzet at the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg. Klaus Baum and Konrad Schulz from the archive of the Jehovas Zeugen in Deutschland at Selters-Taunus provided copies of the last letters which Jehovah’s Witnesses wrote before their execution for refusing to perform military service, and Alexander von Plato at the Institut für Geschichte und Biographie in Lüdenscheid introduced me to the large collection from the early 1950s of schoolchildren’s recollections of the war in the Wilhelm Roessler-Archiv. I am grateful too to Li Gerhalter and Günter Müller for mat-erial from the Dokumentation lebensgeschichtliche Aufzeichungen and the Sammlung Frauennachlässe, both at the University of Vienna. I owe a special debt to Jacques Schuhmacher for his indefatigible willingness to help in every way he could at many stages of this research. It was supported financially by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust and I am grateful to both.

The intellectual debts I have accumulated over such a long period are too large and numerous to do justice to. During the year 2006–7 in Berlin, Jürgen Kocka was a wonderful host and many other people made my time in Germany memorable and fruitful. Many friends and colleagues have encouraged me along the way, shared their ideas and findings, giving me a very vivid sense of history as a collective endeavour. Among my wonderful colleagues in Oxford at the History Faculty and Magdalen College, I am particularly grateful to Paul Betts, Laurence Brockliss, Jane Caplan, Martin Conway, Robert Gildea, Ruth Harris, Matt Houlbrook, Jane Humphries, John Nightingale, Sian Pooley and Chris Wickham.

At the Bodley Head I have been privileged to work with Jörg Hensgen, Will Sulkin and, following Will’s retirement, Stuart Williams. With her extraordinary energy and acuity, Lara Heimert brought me into the world of Basic Books. Their commitment to publishing books they believe in is incredibly affirming and, time and again, has provided just the kind of assurance I needed. Lara and Jörg acted as twin editors, without ever stepping on each other’s toes or mine, with Jörg’s taking on the painstaking task of editing page by page. They have been wonderful to work with and I am deeply grateful to all four of them. Clare Alexander and Sally Riley at Aitken-Alexander have remained a pair of fairy godmothers sharing their wisdom and encouraging me throughout. I have been very fortunate.

Without the great intellectual generosity and support of many friends, there probably would have been no book at all. Paul Betts, Tom Brodie, Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann, Ian Kershaw, Mark Roseman, Jacques Schuhmacher, Jon Waterlow and Bernd Weisbrod all interrupted their own work to read the whole manuscript for me. I am grateful to each of them for making invaluable suggestions, sharing their own research and saving me from making, at least some, historical howlers. Ruth Harris and Lyndal Roper read the whole thing twice and so have both left an indelible imprint on it. At every stage of this project, Lyndal has discussed the key ideas as I was trying to formulate them. I cannot thank her enough.

Nicholas Stargardt

Oxford, 3 June 2015

Dramatis Personae

(in order of appearance)

Ernst Guicking,
farmer’s son from Hesse, professional soldier, infantryman; and
Irene Reitz,
a florist from Lauterbach, Hesse; they marry during the war.

Wilm Hosenfeld,
Catholic, First World War veteran and village schoolteacher in Thalau in Hesse, serves in the German garrison in Warsaw; and his wife
Annemie,
a trained singer and Protestant convert to Catholicism; they have five children.

Jochen Klepper,
a writer from Nikolassee, Berlin; married to Johanna, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, with two step-daughters.

Liselotte Purper,
photo-journalist from Berlin; and
Kurt Orgel,
jurist from Hamburg, artillery officer; they marry during the war.

Victor Klemperer,
Jewish convert to Protestantism, First World War veteran and academic; and his wife
Eva,
a former concert pianist.

August Töpperwien,
First World War veteran and Gymnasium teacher from Solingen, officer in charge of prisoners of war; and his wife
Margarete.

Fritz Probst,
a carpenter from Thuringia, building battalion; and his wife
Hildegard;
they have three young children.

Helmut Paulus,
doctor’s son from Pforzheim and eldest of four teenage children, infantryman.

Hans Albring
and
Eugen Altrogge,
from Gelsenkirchen-Buer near Münster, friends and members of Catholic youth movement, signals and infantryman.

Wilhelm Moldenhauer,
shopkeeper from Nordstemmen near Hanover, radio operator.

Marianne Strauss,
Jewish kindergarten teacher from Essen.

Ursula von Kardorff,
journalist from Berlin.

Peter Stölten
from Zehlendorf in Berlin, despatch rider and tank commander.

Lisa de Boor,
journalist from Marburg; married to Wolf, with three grown-up children: Monika, Anton and Hans.

Willy Reese,
trainee bank clerk from Duisburg, infantryman.

Maria Kundera,
railway worker at Michelbeuern near Vienna; and
Hans H.,
railwayman’s son, paratrooper.

Introduction

The Second World War was a German war like no other. The Nazi regime turned the conflict which it had started into the most horrific war in European history, resorting to genocidal methods well before building the first gas chambers in occupied Poland. The Third Reich was also unique in enacting its own ‘total defeat’ in 1945, in the process expending and exhausting all the moral and physical reserves of German society. Even the Japanese did not fight to the gates of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo as the Germans fought for the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. To wage a war on this scale the Nazis had to harness levels of social mobilisation and personal commitment which went far deeper than anything they had tried to achieve in the pre-war period. Yet, seventy years on – despite whole libraries of books about the war’s origins, course and atrocities – we still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end. This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war.
¹