Armageddon (34 page)
Every domestic radio set manufactured in Germany during the war bore a notice warning, “DO NOT TUNE TO FOREIGN STATIONS!,” but many people did. Fourteen-year-old Eggert Stolten’s mother was an ardent Nazi. She did not try to stop her son listening to the BBC and Radio Switzerland, but instead maintained a withering commentary on the statistics given by the British for the distances the Allies had supposedly advanced, and the prisoners they had captured. “It’s lies, all lies!” said Frau Stolten. “Our numbers are the right ones!” She was immensely proud of having become a Party member before 1933. “We wanted to change things,” she told her son. Eggert Stolten said: “Nobody’s morale was broken by bombing. Everybody just thought: ‘Those murdering bastards!’ ” Nonetheless, in their local shelter in Düsseldorf during the raids, when people were thinking rather more about God than about their Führer, some people objected to the big poster of Adolf Hitler on the wall, observing uneasily: “We don’t like seeing him down here.” One of the first big RAF raids on the Ruhr destroyed the Stoltens’ new house and obliged them to go and live deep in the countryside of Thuringia. Yet being “de-housed”—as that apostle of area bombing Lord Cherwell categorized the German family’s experience—did nothing to diminish Frau Stolten’s unshakeable faith in victory.
What seems noteworthy is not how many people found the war terrible, but how many—especially at the humbler end of the social spectrum—still found life tolerable, almost until the end. Regina Krakowick lost everything when her Berlin flat was bombed in 1943, but she and her husband retained an impressive capacity to enjoy themselves. Johannes was a tailor, whom a bone-marrow deficiency rendered unfit for military service. The couple thought this a wonderful piece of good fortune, though because Johannes was tall and handsome and apparently healthy he incurred spiteful comment from people who did not know his medical history. The couple were regular play- and movie-goers as long as the theatres stayed open. They continued to entertain enthusiastically almost to the end. They saved up rations for weeks for their parties, at which Johannes’s sister Louise played the accordion and the hosts produced their hoarded quota of schnapps. Until the first weeks of 1945, there always seemed to be just enough to eat, with some help from a family vegetable plot on the edge of the city. “We knew nothing about politics,” said Regina, who was twenty-five, “but we went on hoping for final victory, because we could not conceive of what would happen to Germany if she lost the war.”
Shortages of all kinds were endemic. There was no shoe polish, little to read. Clothes were scarce, both for civilians and soldiers. Over 300,000 volunteers worked in 60,000 collection centres around the country, receiving donations of clothing for soldiers and refugees. “The ‘people’s sacrifice’ demands of us that we hand over everything we do not use every day,” an official circular exhorted. “It is not enough to give up old clothing, or a few rags.” Yet, even after Goebbels banned publication of almost all books as an economy measure, a torrent of Nazi propaganda material continued to flow. Men of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division were bemused to find in a German house a new children’s book entitled
Mama, Tell Me About Hitler,
which dwelt enthusiastically upon the SS “and that beautiful black uniform which we love so well.” “Faithful to the Führer, loyal to the death,” Germans were urged to sing, “He will lead us one day, out of this distress.” The record of Germany’s churchmen throughout the Nazi era was indifferent, to say the least. Yet it seems remarkable that a priest of any kind could be found to deliver the German Army’s prayer, that mockery of Christianity:
Your hand, O God, rules over all empires and nations on this earth
In your goodness and strength bless our German nation
And infuse in our hearts love of our Fatherland.
May we be a generation of heroes . . .
Especially bless our Führer and commander-in-chief in all the tasks which are laid upon him.
In the wake of the army’s bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, treachery real or suspected had become an obsession within the Third Reich. Most Germans, whether on the battlefield or at home, perceived no possibility of escaping their fate. But German diplomats stationed in neutral countries, often with their families, possessed exceptional opportunities to vote with their feet. In November 1944, Himmler sent a scornful memorandum to the foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, about “negative tendencies” within his ministry: “We are getting more and more reports of betrayals of the state.” There was Dr. Zechlin of the Madrid embassy, a known anti-Nazi who had refused repeated orders for his recall, and was now apparently ensconced in a Spanish monastery. Germany’s Madrid ambassador, Dr. von Deberlein, was married to a Spaniard and defiantly declined to return to Berlin. Consul Schwinner in Lausanne was reported as having declared publicly that the Soviet Union was a peaceful country, invaded by Germany. Schwinner had since vanished. Dr. Krauel, consul in Geneva, likewise acknowledged in a letter home that “he had no intention of returning to the lion’s den.” Krauel was summoned back to Berlin, but instead settled down at a Swiss sanatorium. Himmler quoted complaints from the Propaganda Ministry that Germany’s foreign policy “seems moribund.”
In the rhetoric of the Nazis that winter, it is striking to notice how often “fanatical”—a pejorative word in the eyes of Americans or Englishmen—was used as a term of approbation by everyone from Hitler downwards. “I have never before seen such a wholesale use of ‘fanatical’ and ‘fanaticism’ . . . the word is repeated in every article,” noted Victor Klemperer as he read his Sunday paper in Dresden that October. A local gauleiter issued a proclamation to the people of one city threatened with imminent allied occupation:
When the enemy reaches the German positions in the West, let him be met with our fanatical resistance . . . The eyes of our children, who want to see a future, plead for us to resist to the last breath . . . The voices of hundreds of thousands who have died on the battlefield for the honour and freedom of the Fatherland, or lost their lives through enemy terror attacks from the air, cry out to us. The spirit of fighters for freedom throughout our glorious history implore us not to weaken or to show cowardice at this decisive moment in our struggle for survival.
The order was given for every available man between sixteen and sixty to report for duty digging defences, while the remainder of the city’s population was to be evacuated.
In addition to nightly air-raid duties, millions of boys and elderly men were now spending six hours a week training with their local Volkssturm home defence units, usually in icy huts or warehouses. They practised judging distances, deployment in open order and simple infantry tactics. All of this seemed worthless, however, when arms were chronically short. “What is lacking is familiarity with weapons,” a disgruntled Volkssturm father wrote to his son at the front. This was a deficiency that would never be fully remedied. Among the elderly, there was no eagerness to die in the futile defence of one’s town or village. The dangerous people were the children, whose entire conscious lives had been spent under Nazism. Goebbels had succeeded all too well with a generation of young Germans. A dreadful number were now ready to sacrifice themselves, ancient rifle or Panzerfaust in hand, in a rite of passage which they embraced with awful enthusiasm.
Helmut Fromm, who was serving as a teenage telephonist with a flak battery outside Heidelberg, once went to the cinema with some fellow gunners. They were in the midst of watching a movie entitled
Der Katzenstag
when the manager appeared at the end of their row, and ordered them out. “This film is not for young people,” he said sternly. Back at the battery, the boys pinned up a notice beside their 88mm gun proclaiming “This is not for young people.” Fromm, who had already been wounded by a near-miss from a British bomb, observed that it was typical of the Nazis to allow you to die for the fatherland at sixteen, but not to watch adult movies until you were eighteen. A friend of his old headmaster, a major on the General Staff, said to Fromm crossly: “You should be doing your exams, not going to the front.” Yet the bespectacled boy soon afterwards found himself posted to an infantry regiment in Poland.
For the average German family, the cost of living had risen by some 13 per cent since 1939. Rural people seldom went hungry, but city-dwellers found it difficult to buy an increasing range of commodities, on or off ration. The bread allowance did not much diminish throughout the war, until April 1945. But a weekly allocation of 400 grams of meat in June 1941 had fallen to 362 grams in 1944, and would descend to 156 grams in February 1945. The fats ration, 269 grams a week in June 1941, fell to 156 grams by January 1945. “Well, my dear Hans,” Julius Legmann of Zittau in Saxony wrote in October to an NCO friend at the front, “we were very glad to learn from your letter that you are well and fit, and also that all you good fellows in the army are well fed and not getting such dreary food as we do in the homeland . . . Here it’s a case of a lot of work and not much to eat . . . We should like something with some fat in it for once in a way, instead of just potatoes with nothing to go with them.”
Albert Speer, as armaments minister, was still accomplishing monthly miracles. In October 1944, Germany built more than five tanks and assault guns for each one that had been manufactured in January 1942. Production even increased towards the end of the year, as winter weather hampered Allied bombing. Yet after the war, amid Speer’s orgy of self-abasement, he acknowledged the recklessness of his forecasts, especially those concerning future aircraft production. He perceived “something grotesque” about his efforts in the last months of the war to convince subordinates that new industrial exertions might yet arrest the Allied tide. As factories were destroyed by bombing and sources of raw materials were overrun by the Russians, production would inexorably shrink. It was one of the paradoxes of the Second World War that, while Speer directed industry to tremendous effect, Germany’s war economy was incomparably less efficient than those of the Allies, including Russia’s. The efforts of some brilliant managers and industrialists, the dogged achievements of their workforces, were set at naught by massive policy failures. Speer’s performance was less remarkable in overcoming difficulties created by Allied bombing and raw-material shortages than in surmounting the follies of Hitler, Himmler and Göring. Contrary to widely accepted myth, the German war economy was a shambles. It is frightening to contemplate the consequences had it been otherwise.
The Greater German Reich created by Hitler embraced a population of 116 million people and an area of 344,000 square miles including much of Poland and Czechoslovakia, together with Alsace-Lorraine. Yet German industry had become heavily dependent upon foreign labour: 28.6 million German factory workers—14.1 million men, 14.5 million women—now required the support of 7.8 million foreigners, and still there were never enough hands at the lathes and assembly lines (not surprising, one might think, when to sustain morale the Nazis encouraged Germans to retain their domestic servants, of whom almost a million and a half were still butlering and maiding to the very end). Some of the foreign workers were volunteers, who had come to Germany in search of higher wages than they could hope to earn in their own occupied countries. Most, however, were forced labourers, rounded up in tens of thousands by German troops in France, Poland, Russia and every other nation under Nazi domination, for shipment under guard to Germany. The failure to exploit their individual skills, the policy of treating them merely as working animals—sending the biggest and fittest to the mines, for instance—was one of the most serious mistakes of Hitler’s war economy.
Though all the labourers suffered hunger, the intensity of their sufferings varied immensely. The west Europeans were treated far better than the peoples from the east, whose plight will be examined below. In addition, German industry and agriculture were bolstered by 1.8 million prisoners of war. By 1945 imported workers of one kind or another made up a fifth of Germany’s entire civilian labour force. Almost every community and farm in Germany possessed its quota of enemy aliens, some resigned to their lot, many treated as neither more nor less than slaves. Without them the German war economy would have collapsed long before it did. Since the Germans troubled themselves little about protecting PoWs and foreign workers from air raids, allied bombing killed thousands of such Nazi captives. A statistical breakdown of 8,000 victims of the catastrophic RAF raid on Darmstadt in September 1944 showed that 936 were military personnel; 1,766 were male civilians, 2,742 female; 2,129 children; 368 prisoners of war; and 492 foreign labourers. These proportions were approximately replicated in every German city which suffered bombardment. The RAF’s legendary Dambusters’ raid in 1943 killed 147 Germans, together with 712 prisoners of war and foreign labourers, 493 of these Ukrainian women. Among 720 victims of a typical RAF raid on Berlin, 249 were slave labourers permitted no access to shelters.
Above all, Germany faced a desperate shortage of fuel. The loss of eastern oilfields to the Soviets, together with American bombing, had imposed upon Hitler’s empire a crisis that was strangling the training of pilots, the deployment of armies, even the movement of tanks on the battlefield. Charcoal-driven cars, trucks and buses, together with horses and carts, had replaced petrol-fuelled transport throughout Germany, for everyone save the armed forces and the Nazi bureaucracy. Allied assaults on communications imposed chronic delay on all train journeys. Astonishingly, however, so dense was the rail net that until the spring of 1945 it remained possible to travel by train across the country for anyone willing to endure interruptions, diversions and sometimes Allied strafing. German soldiers continued to receive rations and mail in the most desperate circumstances. “It was fantastic how well the logistical arrangements worked, almost to the end,” observed Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder.