The German War (13 page)

The Sunday radio programme the
Voice of the Front
exhorted civilians to be worthy of the men defending them: ‘The nation must draw together in the struggle and form a community of fate, which is tied together for life and for death . . . Look at the soldier, how firmly he grasps his rifle, how sternly he looks across the trench . . . the same attitude should be that of every man and woman at home.’ The counterpoint to such idealised images of Germans at war was to be found in the deceit and immorality, injustice and cruelty of Germany’s enemies, led by Jewish warmongers – in England by the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, in France by Léon Blum and Georges Mandel – who put their Jewish bellicosity above their own nation’s peaceful interests. As the sharp-eyed émigrés who monitored the daily output of German radio for the BBC put it, ‘Total war becomes a struggle between total morality and total immorality. The result is that the German radio is one of the most moralistic systems of communication in the world.’ By stressing sacrifice on the home front and educating the German people in hatred, in the very first months of the war German radio worked up the themes that would inform its reporting through the weary years to come.
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The emotional counterpoint to such morally demanding broadcasts was light entertainment. One of Goebbels’s first injunctions to the German radio executives, back in 1933, had been: ‘The primary rule is: just don’t be boring. I prioritize this above
everything
else. Whatever you do, do not broadcast tedium, do not present the desired attitude on a silver platter, do not think that one can best serve the national government by playing thunderous military marches every evening.’ If the real danger facing a modern dictatorship was that it would quickly lose touch with ‘modern sensibilities’, then the director of radio programming, Eugen Hadamovsky, broke with the cultural elitism of Weimar to pave the way for lighter populist fare. In March 1936, serious ‘opus music’ lost its prime evening slot of 8–10 p.m., in favour of a catch-all schedule of lighter concerts, variety shows and dance music. A 1939 survey of listeners’ preferences showed that the new
variété
format worked across all the different sections of German society; even professionals and intellectuals preferred this popular fare to classical concerts.
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On 1 October 1939 a new prime-time radio show was launched, the
Request Concert for the Wehrmacht,
which rapidly established itself as
the
programme. In the first broadcast, the actor Gustaf Gründgens promised German soldiers that they would feel ‘the homeland’s loyalty’ across space and time. It was equally effective on the home front. As Irene Reitz wrote eagerly to Ernst Guicking, ‘Each time when a request concert is announced, I’m there of course . . . I don’t think I missed anything. I sit so close to the loudspeaker, as if I wanted to crawl inside it . . . I’m longing for the next concert. But it may take a little bit longer because the dear wireless has just mountains of mail to answer.’
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They did indeed: 23,117 requests poured in for the second show and the mailbags were soon too big for the number of individual letters to be counted. Presented by Heinz Goedecke – who like many other popular radio personalities had made his name as a sports commentator – it combined light music and personal requests with dedications, using a format which mixed marching music and popular
Schlager,
love ballads, classical overtures, operatic arias and children’s lullabies, short readings and poems, all performed in front of a live studio audience. The programme began with a bugle fanfare and Hitler’s favourite march, the
Badenweiler
; it closed with a list of the day’s contributors – all of whom performed gratis. Over the years, Goebbels flattered or bullied many major stars of stage and screen into contributing, including Hans Albers, Willy Birgel, Zarah Leander, Gustav Gründgens, Werner Krauss, Katharina Söderbaum, Jenny Jugo, Hans Söhnker, Grethe Weiser, Paul Hörbiger, Willy Fritsch, Heinz Rühmann and Marika Rökk. The
Request Concert
was allotted three hours on Wednesday evenings in addition to its prime Sunday slot.
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The dedications brought together couples separated by war in a shared moment of public intimacy. Irene Reitz tried to describe to Ernst Guicking the emotions coursing through her as she listened:

My eyes filled with tears. Especially when the Request Concert starts and you hear [the letter being read out] that Daddy should come back, should come soon, very soon . . . And for every greeting two marks have to be donated to the Winter Relief Fund. Who doesn’t give gladly now? I haven’t ever sacrificed so much before as now. You finally really know what you’re giving for.

On 29 October 1939, Irene Reitz snatched a moment midway through the broadcast to write quickly and tell Ernst that she was listening, still hoping to catch a dedication from him. She had a particular reason to feel close. That Sunday she had finally told her parents that she and Ernst wanted to become engaged. It had all gone far more smoothly than she had dared to expect. ‘My parents have already been thinking about it much earlier than us. Now I could box my own ears,’ she told him, thinking back over the weeks of stomach aches, procrastination and forceful letters from Ernst urging her to act. ‘Why didn’t I speak earlier? Why did I have these damned inhibitions? I could have had such an easy time of it.’ Irene and Ernst wanted to get engaged during the Christmas holiday. It was the time he was most likely to be granted leave, even if the war had not ended yet. Ernst kept pushing and the engagement party soon turned into the wedding itself. Irene’s mother reminded them that she and Irene’s father had married in the First World War, and advised them to wait and have children once the hardships of war were past. She knew what she was talking about: like Ernst himself, Irene had been born in wartime.
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The only objection to the couple’s plans for a modern, secular wedding in the registry office came from Ernst’s sister, Anna, who penned a gentle plea to Irene pointing out that a church wedding was ‘the norm for us in the village’. But even on the family farm in Protestant Altenburschla, with its solid black-and-white half-timbered houses, she left it up to ‘each person to follow his free will’. Rather than make do with the new wartime, stainless-steel wedding rings on offer, Ernst found a jeweller in the Saarland where he was stationed who could still supply a gold ring for Irene. They were married on Saturday, 23 December 1939, just before everything closed for Christmas. Two weeks later, Ernst returned to his unit.
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After all the excitement, the newly-weds settled back into their routine of letter-writing, sharing her parents’ worries as they fretted about the time it was taking for the marriage certificate to arrive: without it, they could not begin to plan their future home, because the local authorities would not issue chits for household linen. Both wished for an early end to the war, looked forward to Ernst’s next leave, and Irene went back to listening to the
Request Concert.

Later that year, art would imitate art in the first blockbuster feature film of the war. Entitled simply
The Request Concert,
it had the show’s compère, Heinz Goedecke, play himself, with the programme serving to reunite two lovers brought together in Berlin by the 1936 Olympics and separated soon afterwards by the hero’s military duty. As an air force pilot, he has to leave on a secret mission with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War without a word of farewell. On his return, he discovers that his beloved, Inge, has moved and he cannot find her. Eventually, by now serving in the present war, he sends a message to the
Request Concert
asking that the Olympic anthem be played for her. Hearing it, Inge writes back, her love for him undiminished by the long silence, separation, or indeed by the advances of another suitor.
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Between 20 and 25 million people went to see the film, the highest box office for any German movie until then. The radio show was even more successful. Up to half the country tuned in to listen. By the time the programme was dropped in May 1941, after some seventy-five concerts, the names of 52,797 soldiers and units had been read out, 9,297 fathers had been told of the births of their children, and 15,477,374.62 marks collected for the Winter Relief Fund. Even the downbeat SD was thrilled, enthusing in April 1940 that the programme had ‘awakened the experience of the National Community in thousands’.
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This was the lodestone the Nazis sought: a single moment of emotional unity in which all individual egotism dissolved into all-powerful national feeling. But in its focus on the private threads of intimate relationships held together by the airwaves, the radio show and the
Request Concert
film recognised that the personal relationships of love and family were central to patriotic loyalty. In mobilising love, the Nazis were going for the most powerful but also most unpredictable of human emotions.
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By early October 1939, Fritz Probst had resigned himself to a longer war. A convinced Nazi, the Thuringian cabinetmaker was no militarist. Rather, he shared in the general view that the war had been forced upon Germany by the machinations of the Western powers. ‘It’s better to clear the decks now,’ he wrote to his wife Hildegard; ‘then it’s to be hoped we won’t have to be involved in a war again.’
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There was no room here for the bellicose tradition of 1914 which had lauded the manly, character-building benefits of war as a positive virtue. Such ideas might still inform Hitler’s private view of war but he did not say so in public, and they found little expression in the letters of the middle-aged family men in 1939. However convinced they were of the war’s necessity, for them it was simply lost time. ‘Hopefully the time will come, sooner or later, when I am with you again,’ Probst wrote to his wife. ‘Then you will be recompensed for all that you have to bear, then it will be springtime in our happy marriage once more.’ Like others in 1939, Probst was painfully aware that the failure of the previous generation was being visited on this one. Above all, he drew inspiration from the prospect of what would happen were that failure to be repeated and were the cycle of war to be handed on to the next generation. As he wrote home, ‘for what we sacrifice now our children will not need to do when they grow up’. The sense of quiet familial resolve to see it through was palpable. In the same letter in which this rather diffident man confessed to his wife from his chilly billet in the Saarland that it would be ‘nice if I could come to you in the warm bed’, he also affirmed, ‘I believe in Adolf Hitler and a victory of the German people.’
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At 6.10 a.m. on 24 October 1939, Karl Kühnel was led from his cell in Berlin-Plötzensee prison into a large, bright room, strapped to a plank and guillotined. ‘When this letter reaches you,’ he had written to his wife Rose the previous day, ‘I am a prisoner no longer. Instead, my earthly life is already finished. I already said farewell to you once . . . Do not lose heart, and harbour no rancour against anyone. It doesn’t help. Now forge your own good fortune.’ The 42-year-old carpenter from the Erzgebirge had already served in the previous war, suffering from the thought that his machine gun might ‘tear a father from his children who had done me no harm. I tried,’ he explained, ‘to kill my conscience with counter-arguments and gradually succeeded to some extent.’ He had volunteered this personal explanation in a letter to his local recruiting office on 1 January 1937: ‘It is not possible to act against my conscience and so not possible to take up a weapon against a person and do him harm.’ It was a step from which Kühnel would not retreat.
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On 14 December 1939 Josef Rimpl wrote to his wife and children on the eve of his execution, reminding them that no one was without fault but: ‘I can claim with a good conscience that I am no criminal and not a murderer and robber. It is better, if it is the will of the Lord, to suffer for good than for evil.’ Rupert Sauseng, a 43-year-old worker from Eisenach, prayed that his wife would ‘trust in Him, who alone can give comfort and strength and mercy, that you and [our] child can withstand the heaviest trial through His strength’. Karl Endstrasser wrote to his wife in Graz telling her to sell his tools and quoting from 1 Corinthians: ‘for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men’. Like Kühnel, all three men were beheaded just after 6 a.m. the next day. They were all Jehovah’s Witnesses and refused to swear oaths to Hitler or perform military service.
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As soon as military conscription had been reintroduced in Germany in 1935, the sporadic persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses became more serious and systematic. Some were picked up and interrogated for stuffing letterboxes with anti-Nazi leaflets. The SD set up a special desk to deal with them, just as it had done for Freemasons. In the concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were unique amongst religious prisoners for being separated out from the ‘politicals’ and given their own marker, a purple triangle. Uniquely too amongst camp prisoners, many had the power to reverse their fate: all they had to do was to accept their call-up papers and enter the Wehrmacht.

August Dickmann was the first Jehovah’s Witness in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to be sent his draft papers – forwarded by his wife from home. He was summoned to the political department of the camp and given his military pass to sign. He refused, was beaten and put in solitary confinement while the camp commandant asked Himmler for permission to make an example of him. On 15 September 1939, all 8,500 prisoners were kept back after evening roll call in order to watch the firing squad do its work. The final
coup de grâce
was performed by Rudolf Höss, the future commandant of Auschwitz. As a final exemplary measure, four Jehovah’s Witnesses were kept back from the rest of the prisoners and ordered to lay Dickmann out in his coffin, while they were warned what lay in store for them. August Dickmann’s brother, Heinrich, was made to nail down the lid. The next day, a small item appeared in the German press, announcing Dickmann’s execution ‘for refusal to fulfil his duty as a soldier’. Dickmann, it was announced, ‘was a “Jehovah’s Witness”; he was a fanatical follower of the international sect of the Earnest Bible Students’. He was the first conscientious objector to be executed, and the sentence was publicised, as so often in Nazi Germany, because it served an educative, exemplary purpose.
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