In Europe (51 page)

‘That's why, when they accused my father later in Nuremberg of having helped prepare a war of aggression, nothing could have been further from the truth. He and a few of his colleagues had actually done everything they could to prevent a war.

‘So why did he go on working for years for the Nazi regime? Well … you know, one never stops widening one's awareness. So much has been written about that since. My father was a top official, and he must have been privy to a great deal. Even though his own information and his imagination could not fathom a thing like the Holocaust, when you read the documents he saw and signed back then you can only conclude that he must have known enough to draw conclusions for himself. He saved – and this has been proven – a great many people, and he must have known about the crimes against the Jews. But when the whole, terrible truth about Auschwitz became known in 1945, he was just as horrified by it as I was, as a young soldier. He wasn't really aware of the full scope of the Holocaust, I am convinced of that.

‘The only reason why he stayed put, I believe, was the hope that at a certain point he could exert a positive influence on Germany's foreign
policies. At first he believed he might be able to prevent the outbreak of war, later he thought he could stop the attack on the Soviet Union. Most historians agreed about that later on: one of them even wrote that my father tried ‘with appropriate determination and cunning’ to prevent the war.

‘I've read a great deal about that period, but one never finds out everything. There is one thing, however, of which I am sure: I knew my father well, the way he really was. And I also know that an injustice was done to the essence of that man, there in Nuremberg.

‘I myself went to Potsdam in 1938 to enter military service. I was eighteen at the time. Things there were run – I was assigned to a machine-gunners’ company in the 9th Infantry Regiment – according to the old-fashioned Prussian model, not according to the National Socialist one. The Nazis were a very different brand of people. Just as in the diplomatic corps, great tensions arose between the
Wehrmacht
and the Nazis. Most of the officers were pleased that a strong Germany army was being created again, but they thought the Nazis were pathological parvenus.

‘By then my brother Heinrich had been promoted to lieutenant in the same regiment. What he had really hoped to do was study medieval history. But the Nazis had already politicised the curriculum, so he was having none of it. For him the regiment was a kind of intellectual island, you could call it a form of internal emigration. And there were more people for whom the
Wehrmacht
, strangely enough, served as a kind of refuge.

‘Did we have doubts about what we were doing? Some talking did go on within the
Wehrmacht
, but that wasn't very common. As a young soldier, I never talked to my comrades in the barracks about the things I heard at home. There was some serious criticism of the brutal actions of the SA and SS, though. Constitutional law was a part of Prussia. But you must understand: we were very young, in those years our lives were a mixture of light-heartedness and deadly earnest. It only dawned on us quite gradually that, ethically speaking as well, we now found ourselves on a battlefield, in the midst of a moral dilemma we could hardly deal with. In 1941, for example, the army leaders ordered us to advance so far in the direction of Moscow that, by mid-December, we finally broke down and froze where we were. We received orders from on high to defend positions that anyone in their right mind could see were indefensible. Could we actually pass along such orders to people for whom
we were responsible? And even though we didn't know much about the crimes that had been committed, one thing was clear by then: by performing our duty, we ourselves had become an instrument of evil. That is the situation in which we finally found ourselves.

‘Later, in October 1942, my friend Axel von dem Bussche saw with his own eyes how defenceless Jews were shot and killed, far behind the lines of battle. When he rejoined the regiment, he told me about it. He gradually arrived at the decision to make an attempt on Hitler's life, and to offer up his own life if need be. Through other friends of ours we established contact with Count Claus von Stauffenberg. It was his idea that a perfect opportunity would present itself in December 1943, during the presentation of the new
Wehrmacht
uniforms in Berlin. As a young, heavily decorated officer, Axel Bussche would present Hitler with the new uniforms, and would then blow himself up along with the Führer. I arranged the travel documents and the contact with Count Stauffenberg. But, twenty-four hours before the ceremony was to take place, the British carried out an air raid and the whole thing was cancelled. To be honest, it was a miracle that the Gestapo never got wind of that first planned assassination attempt by the Stauffenberg group.

‘But, anyway, in 1939 things had not yet reached that point. Right before the war started, I was at home recovering from an operation. Suddenly I received a summons from my unit, I was to report for duty right away. Three days before it all began, Heinrich and I marched together from the barracks to the railway station. The mood was completely different from all the stories you hear about the outbreak of the First World War. There wasn't a trace of popular enthusiasm. It all went quite secretively, in low spirits, quite literally by
Nacht und Nebel
, Night and Fog. We were put off the train close to Poland, and early in the morning of 1 September, 1939, they sent us across the border.

‘I knew almost nothing about the country I was entering. In the papers I had read about ethnic tensions, and that there was disagreement concerning the status of Danzig. That was it. Later on in my life, as politician and president of West Germany, my major political theme – besides continuing concern about the DDR, of course – was the restoration of good relations between Germany and Poland. But, as a soldier, it didn't mean much to me.

‘I don't remember passing a border post or anything. I do remember
the quiet, oppressive atmosphere. That mood only changed on the evening of the second day, when I heard the loud crack of rifle fire and we ran up against our first Polish troops. It was close to the railway embankment at Klonowo, in the woods around Tuchel Heath. Heinrich was a few hundred metres from where I stood. He was the first officer in our regiment to be killed.

‘We buried him the next morning, along with the others, at the edge of those woods. That whole night I held watch beside him, beside my beloved brother.

‘My mother wrote: “Can God allow one man to call down this whole catastrophe on Germany and the whole of Europe? And our sons? I am not prepared to sacrifice one of them for this war. Our family circle, the endless luxury of having children, all our pride – from the last war, I still know what that means: all gone. Then life continues and what was ours never, never comes back. New people come along who never knew the ones we were so proud of.”

‘She wrote that two days before he was killed.’

A peaceful landscape becomes a battlefield, and after a while it is as though it never happened. I drive along the N43 from Sedan towards the sea, past gently rolling fields of yellow rape, through little villages, house after house tucked away behind deep, lush gardens. The chestnuts are in bloom, the cows are up to their bellies in buttercups. This road sprang up like a little stream somewhere close to Luxembourg, and now it meanders through fields and shy Inspector Maigret towns: an intersection, a
hôtel de ville
, a train station, three cafés, a hotel close to the station, a bakery. The houses all date from that hazy architectural period between 1880–1920. They are sooty and weathered, they have seen all of Europe passing by.

At 8 p.m. I stop at Longuyon. The streets are filled with puddles, the trees still dripping from the spring shower. Swallows buzz the rooftops, the pigeons coo between the houses, a church bell chimes clearly, once. A fisherman walks along the gravel on the riverside. The earth in the kitchen gardens smells rich, the beans are well on their way. From the café comes a roar of laughter.

Who would want to go to war on an evening like this? ‘Why die for Danzig?’ the French asked themselves in September 1939, and during the glorious spring days of 1940 their reluctance was even greater. They did not doubt the strength of their army, they were not resigned beforehand to defeat, but they were scared to death of seeing 1914–18 repeat itself. For more than two decades, their brothers, fathers and uncles had been talking about the trenches and the burning and thundering battlefields. Seven out of ten French soldiers had experienced Verdun first-hand.

La dernière des ders
was what the French called the First World War, the last of the last. In winter 1939, when the war was already raging on paper but not yet in real life, they were hoping for
la Marne Blanche
, a diplomatic and platonic replay of the last war, but this time without passion or bloodshed. In Longuyon a war memorial of the falling-soldier-with-flag type had been erected as early as 1919, bearing 500 names – the city numbered 7,000 – and no one wanted to see a single name added to that. In the end, there would be another 150 names.

Close to Longuyon lie the chilly corridors of Fort Fermont, thirty metres below ground. The fort was a vital link in the Maginot Line, the French wall that stretched from Basle all the way past Luxembourg to protect the country from the Huns to the east. Here you can see the dream of the 1916 foot soldier: a super-trench with bedrooms, canteens, workshops, an electric railway, secret trapdoors, sick bays, bakeries and even a cinema to help against the claustrophobia. Sealed off from the outside world, 700 men could stick it out here for months on end. On a shelf is a radio covered in mould, plastered in white flakes.

The whole structure is dominated by the thought of winning the previous war. The same could be said of France's leaders of that day: they, too, were men of yesterday and the day before. The French commander-in-chief, General Maurice Gamelin – sometimes referred to as ‘General Gagamelin’ – was sixty-seven. His successor, General Maxime Weygand, was well into his seventies, and Marshal Pétain, at the moment of his appointment as vice-premier, was eighty-four.

While the
Wehrmacht
's young staff members were busy developing all kinds of new weapons systems and tactics, nothing was happening in France. Around 1937, the Luftwaffe possessed more than a thousand
Messerschmitt fighter planes, faster than anything belonging to either France or Britain. In that same year, a report to the French senate's defence committee said: ‘The German air force is in a position to fly over France with complete impunity.’ The enormous opportunities provided by the tank, the unparalleled possibilities for the dive bomber on the field of battle; the French army staff could not be bothered. Tanks do not change the tenets of war, General Pétain said reassuringly in 1939. After Major Charles de Gaulle entered a plea for the development of a modern and mechanised army in his book
Vers l'armée de métier
, his promotion to the rank of colonel was postponed for three years. André Maginot's life's work proved to be a huge, useless war monument. The wall stopped abruptly at the Belgian border – building had been halted due to lack of funds – and the Germans had only to march around it.

The doors, valves, lights, levers and wheels at Fermont are still fully operational. Above the fort, amid the grazing cows, an iron trapdoor opens several times a day. The barrel of a cannon appears and revolves a few times. Everything about this mechanism and the fort has something tragic about it, like the clipper ship: the absolute cutting edge, yet nothing but a grave error in judgement, because the premise had already become a thing of the past.

And then one had the Germans. For ten whole months in 1916 they had tried fruitlessly to take Verdun. In 1940, it took them less than a day. How could that have been?

First there was the principle of ‘loser wins all’. The very fact that the German Army had been so greatly reduced by the Treaty of Versailles forced the generals to build up the most efficient army with the fewest possible troops. Every invention that might be of use was tried out. In this way, Germany, thanks to Versailles, had laid the foundation for an ultramodern air force as early as 1931.

Four years later, with the help of Wernher von Braun, the army launched the twentieth century's first rocket. It reached an altitude of two kilometres.

The Germans had also learned from their diplomatic mistakes. The danger of a new war on two fronts was, at least for the time being, skilfully ruled out. Out of the blue, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a pact in Moscow in August of 1939. Among Stalin's staff Ribbentrop had felt ‘as thoroughly at ease as among my own party members’.
The Soviets sent a few hundred Jewish and anti-fascist refugees back to Germany as a token of goodwill. In mid-November, Molotov and the members of his delegation were welcomed in turn at Berlin's Anhalter Bahnhof to the solemn strains of the ‘Internationale’. Under normal circumstances, simply playing that melody was enough to obtain a one-way ticket to Dachau, but now the entire Nazi elite stood to attention. Workers waved red handkerchiefs from the windows of a neighbouring factory.