The German War (15 page)

The Nazi police state had more than enough power to maintain the dictatorship. As soon as Germany mobilised for war, the list of forbidden activities lengthened, from telling jokes that undermined the morale of the armed forces to failing to work on Sundays: soon over forty offences were punishable by death. German society was full of people who broke Nazi regulations in small ways and upheld them in large ones, thereby helping to shape a ‘national community’ constructed on violence, merit and exclusion. It proved impossible to silence critical voices when it came to inequities in rationing, but people generally silenced themselves when it came to the principal targets of Nazi repression. This was both a complex, conflictual society and one where nationalism had already seeped into the pre-political practices of everyday life, shaping what people observed and felt worthy of note.

The problem for the regime was not its control over the means of coercion but, rather, how selectively to deploy them. It had used mass terror in 1933 to destroy the old labour movement and again, in June 1934, against the leadership of the storm troopers. After that, the regime had deliberately scaled back the concentration camps, and when they began to grow again in 1938 they were filled with Jews, and later Czechs and Poles. For the social majority, terror had become something directed at others, at foreigners or ‘asocial outsiders’ such as communists and male homosexuals.
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By the end of January 1940, Franz Gürtner, the Minister of Justice, counted eighteen extrajudicial executions by the Gestapo since the war began and complained that the civil courts were being bypassed. In fact, this relatively small number of interventions often stemmed directly from Hitler’s reading of the sensationalist crime reporting in the
Völkischer Beobachter.
In October 1939, he was outraged to learn about a petty thief in Munich who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing a woman’s purse during the evening blackout. Even though the purse only contained a few marks and no violence had been used, Hitler demanded that the man be executed to set an example. This sent a clear signal back to German judges. A few weeks later, the Berlin Special Court sentenced another man to death who had taken advantage of the blackout to steal a woman’s purse in order to demonstrate ‘that the solid wall of the inner front cannot be worn down by sub-humanity’. What made petty crime seem so abhorrent was its apparently ineradicable character. Repeat offenders soon found themselves being sent to concentration camps like Mauthausen, where they were treated far worse than serious and violent criminals. Just as the SS’s execution of the Jehovah’s Witness August Dickmann potentially threatened the jurisdiction of the military courts, so civilian judges were quick to defend their domain from encroachment by the arbitrary actions of the police: such turf wars themselves encouraged different agencies to compete in enacting harsher sentences.
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On the eve of war, the Gestapo re-arrested former Social Democratic parliamentarians and other political suspects. Despite this ratcheting up of violence in autumn 1939, the Gestapo was very careful to maintain a two-speed police state. It was one thing to strike against identified ‘enemies’, such as Communists, Freemasons, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who could expect to be sent before a special court or straight to a concentration camp if they were denounced for telling ‘defeatist’ jokes or trading on the black market. But relatively few people were punished for telling political jokes about the regime’s leaders. For ordinary ‘national comrades’ a warning was usually enough. Unlike Stalin’s regime, which was willing to wage war on the majority of its population in order to push through its social revolution, Hitler’s dictatorship continued to calibrate its violence so that the majority of Germans did not feel it. Pragmatism as well as ideology drove this distinction: the Gestapo had never had a large staff and depended to a large extent on public compliance and denunciations to assist it in spotting transgressors. The war quickly reduced their manpower further: in Cologne, the Gestapo went from ninety-nine officers in 1939 to sixty-nine by 1942; it was a similar story elsewhere.
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One of the most contentious of the new prohibitions was listening to enemy radio. Labels pasted on all new sets warned that listening to foreign broadcasts was a ‘crime against national security’, but the ban was unenforceable. Despite its obsession with propaganda and image, the Nazi dictatorship enjoyed far less control over information than had Imperial Germany. Whereas newsprint could be censored and border controls enforced so that, as late as the summer of 1918, the German home front had remained ignorant of the military catastrophe unfolding on the western front, nothing could prevent people from changing wavebands. As long as they took due precautions, what people chose to listen to in private remained – in practice – their own concern. For the most part, they took care to preserve appearances, keeping the volume low, changing the dial back again to German stations afterwards, perhaps listening to neutral rather than enemy broadcasts – Swiss or Swedish radio rather than the BBC – even getting one of the children to look out for neighbours hovering on the landing outside the front door. In Prague, the SD had heard, the Czechs had started using headphones so that their neighbours could not overhear and denounce them. The ban proved predictably unpopular in Germany, where it was described as ‘infantilising’ and an ‘insult and humiliation’. The SD reported a strong strain of ‘loyal criticism’, with people complaining noisily that ‘a good National Socialist can hear these [foreign] broadcasts with equanimity, for they really can’t affect him; on the contrary they only strengthen his hostility and commitment to the struggles against the enemy powers’. Many people were confused: did it cover all foreign broadcasters or were they still allowed to tune in to neutral stations, such as the jazz programmes of Radio Luxembourg, ever popular with the young? As usual when confronted by a truly unpopular measure, numerous people were overheard expressing disbelief that the Führer could have permitted such a thing.
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In a tacit admission of how things stood, German radio regularly offered its own commentaries to mock and refute the claims of the British or French broadcasts. With their thirst for information, people also picked up the millions of leaflets which the RAF dropped that winter, although they did not necessarily believe what they read. In Essen, Carola Reissner was outraged. ‘They are apparently trying to inflame the population,’ she wrote to her relatives, adding forcefully, ‘these are obviously Jewish ploys.’ The suspicion came naturally, for she had heard for years how the Jews had manipulated and tricked their way to power and influence in Germany. German radio nicknamed Churchill ‘the Lord of Lies’, when not simply rubbishing him as ‘W.C.’ Playing the popular First World War song ‘For We Are Marching Against Eng-e-land’ at the end of news bulletins proved so successful that it became one of the signature tunes of German broadcasting.
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The new ban on foreign radio could only be enforced selectively. On 18 November 1939, a young officer from the Koblenz Gestapo was sent out to investigate a complaint about illegal radio-listening in a small town on the western side of the Rhine. The accused, Arnulf V., was alleged to listen to the German service broadcast by Radio Strasbourg every evening. To make things worse, he had been a leading local Social Democrat in the Weimar years and was also said to have made disparaging comments about both the accuracy of German news and the Führer himself. Arnulf was arrested, brought to Koblenz and interrogated until he admitted that he had listened to the French station several times. He was held in Gestapo custody for three weeks while further investigations took place, including a search of his home which netted his radio and some old Social Democratic materials. The local Nazi Party organisation confirmed that like many former socialists he attended few Party functions and contributed little to their charitable drives. He also quarrelled frequently with his wife. On the other hand, his employers gave him a good reference and he was a decorated First World War veteran who had been wounded four times. These last two facts decided the case when it finally came to court ten months later, in September 1940, and the judges acquitted him on all counts. The other factor which eventually weighed in Arnulf V.’s favour was that he had been denounced by his brother-in-law out of personal spite following a major family row. The Gestapo was used to safeguarding itself from being made use of in this way and in a similar case it urged the special court to dismiss allegations lodged by a quarrelsome former business associate, even though the accused had once been a Communist. By 1943, a mere 3,450 people had been punished for listening to foreign radio.
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As Gestapo officers became bogged down in questioning neighbours, relatives and employers to ascertain whether a former Communist or Social Democrat was an ‘enemy’ who needed to be surgically removed from the ‘body of nation’ or really a decent ‘national comrade’ who had fallen into the wrong company in the 1920s, they were creating a coercive practice which was both arbitrary and strangely consistent: arbitrary, because very different penalties were imposed on different people for the same offences; consistent, because the civil and military judges and the Gestapo all tried to form a judgment based on the ‘character’ of the offender rather than simply on the offence itself. Changes to the Criminal Code introduced between December 1939 and February 1941 signalled a clear shift away from the crime to the criminal: it referred no longer to murder, sexual crime or recidivism but, rather, to ‘the murderer’, ‘the sexual offender’ and ‘the habitual criminal’.
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No one could accuse the Nazis of being soft on crime. When the German Reich went to war, the country had 108,000 prisoners in state institutions, and another 21,000 in concentration camps. By the end of the war, the prison population would double and the number of concentration camp inmates would rise to 714,211. Dire as these statistics are, at the outbreak of the war, Germany stood comparison with Switzerland, Finland and the United States in the proportion of prisoners in the population, occupying the punitive end of the international spectrum of law enforcement, with England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands locking away far fewer of their citizens. Compared to Nazi terror in Poland, with its methods of mass executions, collective reprisals and wholesale expulsions, Nazi policy at home remained selective and worked on the basis of individual case files. Until at least 1943, the ‘normal’ system of state prisons and state and charitable reformatories held more offenders than specifically Nazi agencies, such as the concentration camps run by the SS, the overwhelming majority of whose inmates came from Germany’s racial enemies, principally Polish and later Soviet prisoners.
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Within the Reich itself, the most radical and violent action prompted by the outbreak of the war occurred in a hidden backwater. This was the murder of psychiatric patients in Germany’s asylums. Like the execution of conscientious objectors, it began as soon as war broke out and would continue until the very end: by May 1945, it would claim at least 216,400 victims’ lives, outstripping even the number of German Jews who were killed by the regime. The principal actors were not specifically Nazi institutions like Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office, which had taken charge of racial policy in Poland. Instead, the operation was conducted by medical doctors and bureaucrats working in the normal health and provincial administrations.
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The so-called ‘euthanasia action’ began with the children. On 18 August 1939, the Reich Committee for the Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses made it compulsory for doctors to report all newborn children suffering from idiocy, Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, spastic paralysis or missing limbs. The registration forms were initially forwarded to three medical experts. As a result of this pilot study, about 5,000 children were killed, and soon thirty psychiatric asylums had established their own so-called ‘children’s units’ where they killed children through a mixture of drugs and starvation.
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A second, secret, centralised programme was established to comb through the files of adult patients in the asylums under the direction of Philipp Bouhler, head of the Chancellery of the Führer, and Hitler’s physician, Dr Karl Brandt. Code-named ‘T-4’ after the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin, the programme set out to find a quota of 70,000 patients deemed ‘unworthy of life’. The crucial test was whether the patients were ever likely to contribute to society through work. A positive medical judgement, registered by a ‘+’ sign, meant death; letting them live was registered as a negative, marked by a ‘–’ sign. As the programme got under way and grew in scale, more clinicians were needed to evaluate the case files. In early 1940, Friedrich Panse and Kurt Pohlisch, who were already advising the Wehrmacht about ‘war neuroses’, were invited to a confidential conference in Berlin, where they were inducted into this secret programme and asked to join its growing panel of medical experts. They both complied.
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Some evaluators were more squeamish than others. By the end of January 1941, Panse and Pohlisch would find themselves dropped as T-4 referees, probably because they had returned too few ‘positive’ recommendations. A number of other prominent psychiatrists continued to fulfil the dual role of military psychiatrist and expert referee for the medical killing programme on top of their academic and clinical day jobs, men like Carl Schneider, director of the Neurological Clinic at the Univeristy of Heidelberg, Friedrich Mauz, his peer at the University of Königsberg, or the illustrious child psychiatrist Werner Villinger, who had introduced psychotherapy into Hamburg’s youth welfare programme in the 1920s, only to become a convinced Nazi and firm advocate of forcibly sterilising juvenile delinquents.
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