The German War (28 page)

With that the hour has come in which it is necessary to go into action against this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and Jewish power-holders of the Bolshevik Centre in Moscow . . .

The task of this front [from Arctic Finland to the Black Sea] is thus no longer the defence of individual countries but the security of Europe and so the salvation of all. I have today decided to place the fate and future of the German Reich and of our people once more in the hands of our soldiers.

May the Lord God help us in this struggle!

In a café in the centre of Dresden, Victor and Eva Klemperer were trying to assess the local mood when a woman handed them the special edition of the paper with the words, ‘Our Führer! He has had to bear it all alone, so as not to trouble his people!’ Their waiter, who had been a prisoner in Russia in the previous war, was confident, pronouncing, ‘The war will come to an end quickly now.’ Another couple and a drunk commercial traveller at their table joined in, the traveller telling anti-Nazi jokes that greatly alarmed Klemperer but, as he noted sadly that evening, ‘it was all told in high spirits and full of confidence in victory’. At the Toll House there was dancing. The next day, the former professor of Romance Languages would begin an eight-day spell in police prison for having left a corner of his study window without blackout material four months earlier.
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On holiday in Bad Reichenhall, Helmut Paulus’s mother Erna came down from her hotel room to hear Goebbels on the radio. ‘It was like being hit on the head,’ she wrote to her son. ‘We had heard for a long time about the troop build-ups in the east and yet were surprised by the fact . . . My first thought was of you, of course.’ As a mother, she was not enthusiastic, but there was no panic. She and Helmut’s sister Irmgard stayed on for the remaining four days of their holiday in the pretty spa town at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. Irmgard had hired a bike to ride to nearby Berchtesgaden and, evading the barbed-wire security fence, had managed to see the guest house, though not Hitler’s residence. A month later, Helmut’s father persisted in taking the other children on a trip to Italy, for which the family had saved for ages. While they travelled from the Brenner Pass down to Mount Vesuvius and back, Helmut’s mother oversaw the renovation of her husband’s medical surgery in their house in Pforzheim. However grave their anxieties for their elder son, they slotted the war into their existing summer plans.
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On Monday 23 June, the Security Service noted how ‘complete surprise’ had been the first reaction everywhere. No one had expected war with Stalin to break out at this particular time. Indeed, there had been widespread rumours of a new agreement between the two powers and even of a forthcoming visit by Stalin to Berlin. But, remarkably swiftly, people adjusted to the reality. By the first afternoon and evening the conviction was being expressed in many reports that the ‘Reich government could not have done otherwise than to answer Russia’s “treacherous conduct” with military force’. Some raised the spectre of a longer war, pointing out that the campaign in the east could help buy Britain time and might also herald America’s entry into the war. Women, in particular, worried aloud about the cost in German lives and about the subjection of prisoners of war to the Soviets’ ‘Asiatic methods’. However, Finland’s remarkable success against Soviet troops in the recent Winter War encouraged expectations that victory should be won within three months. The more people talked, the more relieved they were that ‘the Führer had recognised the true intentions of Russia and also of England’. Indeed, like the woman who passed the paper to Victor Klemperer in the Dresden café, people expressed their ‘sympathy for the Führer, for having to remain silent to his people for so long’. The Münster newspaperman Paulheinz Wantzen heard that many women wept, not because they feared failure, but at the price of victory measured in the lengthy separations that military operations and subsequent occupation would impose on families. Faced with the prospect of finally taking on Germany’s real enemy, Wantzen wished he could fight. The most widespread anxiety was that German rations would be cut, in order to feed the huge numbers of Russian prisoners of war bound to fall into German hands as the Bolshevik colossus crumbled.
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It had not been possible to assemble armies of 3.5 million men totally in secret. The build-up had prompted speculation about mounting tensions between the two allies, with conflicting stories circulating in Münster of a peace conference in Berlin, a Soviet invasion of Germany, a German invasion of Russia and enormous concessions by Stalin. Paulheinz Wantzen was well placed to notice the small but significant transfers of personnel eastwards, most notably the local head of the SD, Karl Jäger, who was sent on an
Einsatzkommando
course to train with sub-machine guns before heading out to Danzig. Since the Pact with the Soviet Union remained in place until 22 June, there had been no matching propaganda build-up. Thirty million leaflets and 200,000 pamphlets intended for the eastern front were printed and stored in the Propaganda Ministry, but to maintain absolute security, the printers and packers were locked in with them until the invasion was under way.
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Despite the lack of psychological preparation, Hitler’s announcement of a ‘preventive war’ sparked an enormous response.
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His reference to border incursions may have been a simple replay of the pretexts used against Poland in 1939, but it also spoke to deeper German fears and memories. In 1914, Russian mobilisation had been enough to persuade even the anti-militarist German Social Democratic Party to vote for war credits and declare a ‘social truce’ for the war’s duration. When Russian armies invaded East Prussia, lurid tales of ‘semi-barbarians, who scorch, murder, loot, who shoot Samaritans, who vandalise medical stations, and spare neither women nor the injured’ had filled all the German papers, including the main Social Democratic daily,
Vorwärts.
When the Russian 2nd Army was totally defeated on 29 August 1914 near Tannenberg, the German commander, the elderly and relatively untalented Paul von Hindenburg, became an instant and enduring hero. In 1941, the Red Army had mobilised too, but made no provisions to launch an attack. Instead, its divisions remained on the defensive, strung along the frontier, easy prey for German encirclement. Despite the lack of any evidence of Soviet plans to attack Germany, it was a claim that found ready credence on the German home front.
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In mobilising the deep-seated fear of ‘Bolshevism’, the Nazis were appealing to the same broad coalition of German public opinion as had come together to repel ‘Russian barbarism’ in 1914. From former Social Democratic voters to conservative nationalists, this was a matter of profound – and axiomatic – importance. In 1939, many Catholic bishops had given a low-key endorsement of the war against Britain and France, fearing that the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact might herald an upsurge in anti-clericalism at home. That had not happened until the summer of 1941. Now, despite their ongoing domestic conflict with radical Nazis, the bishops gave full-blooded support to the attack on the Soviet Union, blessing it as a ‘crusade’ against ‘Godless Bolshevism’. For Bishop Galen of Münster, it was German Catholics who represented the true patriots standing by the Führer, and he went on to emphasise – to the rage of the Security Service – that their struggle against Nazi materialism and atheism at home – ‘behind the backs of our victorious soldiers’ – was the same as the German crusade against Bolshevism abroad. The new war would prevent ‘Moscow’s attempt to impose its Bolshevik false teaching and rule by force over Germany and Europe’. Now, he and the other bishops could lead prayers, calling on God to lead their soldiers to victory. By the end of the summer, the conflict with the Party had died down and the Bishop of Münster issued a powerful pastoral letter on 14 September, endorsing the war against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. Quoting Hitler directly, Galen insisted that the war was defensive in character and that ‘for decades the Jewish-Bolshevik rulers from Moscow have been trying to set not just Germany but the whole of Europe in flames’. Among ‘national comrades’, no political camp had a monopoly on good Nazi-speak that summer, as the mutually suspicious claimants to the soul of the German ‘national community’ learned to co-operate once more. Anti-Bolshevism encompassed them all.
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On 28 June 1941, the first images of the war were disseminated in a rapidly compiled and oddly edited newsreel. It began with the German football cup final between Schalke and Rapid Vienna, followed by several minor diplomatic events, before turning to images of Stukas and heavy artillery attacking British positions in North Africa. Then audiences sat in dead silence while Goebbels read Hitler’s declaration, breaking into stormy applause as he ended and German troops took a frontier post. Tension mounted as viewers waited to see their first images of the enemy. When a ragged column of prisoners finally marched across the screen, people shouted, ‘Savages’, ‘Sub-humans’, ‘Convicts’. Outraged women complained that their menfolk had to ‘fight against such “animals”’.
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On 30 June, German war crimes investigators converged on Lwów, or Lemberg, the old Habsburg name that Germans used. Accompanied by a military doctor, two military judges toured the Soviet prisons, as did a separate unit of the Secret Field Police. As in Poland, they were seeking to document atrocities committed against German prisoners of war. Though it was not part of their brief, they also compiled evidence of mass executions and torture carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on its own citizens. In the city prison they found one corpse lying in a courtyard, four more in one cellar room with a further twenty to thirty piled on top of each other in another room. In the NKVD prison, one of the judges noted three mass graves covered with sand in a courtyard and a further pile of corpses inside the building: one woman had had her breast cut off. In the military prison three photographers from the Reich Propaganda Ministry took pictures of piles of bodies reaching to the ceiling. Most had died from a shot through the back of the neck, a form of execution regarded as the hallmark of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik terror’. On this first day in the city, the investigators found no German victims, but they did discover a number of Jews, whose murder they ascribed to their being Zionists, political enemies of the Jewish-Communist regime.
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That same day, a German soldier wrote home to his wife from Lwów:

Here we have really come as liberators from an unbearable yoke. I have seen images in the GPU [former NKVD] cellars which I cannot and will not describe to you in your condition. 3,000 to 5,000 lie in the prisons, butchered in the most bestial fashion . . . How I have sometimes thought the depictions of Bolshevik Russia or at that time Red Spain were exaggerated, a primitive appeal to sensationalism. Today I know better . . . They wanted to let these Jewish-Asiatic hordes loose on our old land of culture.

Goebbels lost no time in sending in twenty journalists and radio reporters to cover the Soviet atrocities. By 5 July the
Völkischer Beobachter
was proclaiming Lemberg the epitome of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ rule. By 8 July, it could announce that ‘the German soldier brings back the human rights that Moscow sought to suffocate in blood’. Not to be outdone, the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
reminded its readers about Jewish ritual murder. Although the victims were not German, the cruelty of the NKVD proved, as Robert Ley, leader of the German Labour Front, put it in a banner headline, that ‘Germany was meant to be exterminated’. Ley was also the first to remind Germans of Hitler’s warning of 30 January 1939, when he had prophesied that a new world war would lead, not to the destruction of the Germans, but to the destruction of the Jews.
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In Lwów itself, German soldiers photographed the atrocity sites themselves and also the lynch-justice that followed, as lines of local Jews were forced to run the gauntlet of local Ukrainian nationalists through the prison gates and were beaten, as one of them noted in his diary, with ‘whips, planks, fists’. The second newsreel from the Soviet campaign included a fleeting scene of Jews beaten to death in Riga by Latvians with clubs. According to the SD, German cinema audiences greeted this popular revenge on the Jews with ‘encouraging exclamations’. Just as the German media had dropped all mention of Polish border incursions in 1939 once it had evidence of Polish atrocities at Bromberg, so Hitler’s flimsy claim that Soviet troops had violated German territory was quietly shelved now, in favour of the graphic evidence from Lwów.
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His teeth chattering in a chilly and damp log cabin in early July, Hans Albring fondly remembered the cultural treasures of France. He had no doubt that he had been sent to a barbaric land where ‘Europe ends’. Writing to his friend Eugen Altrogge, now posted to Paris, Albring contrasted the cultured ‘Occident’ with the impenetrable ‘natural world’ he could see from his signals van: ‘pine forests stretching into the distance and few huts. Nature.’ The young Catholic was also appalled by the crassness of the Marxist pamphlets discovered in a Communist Party building, and he fumed against Bolshevik atheism, the destruction of the Catholic churches and vandalisation of the Orthodox ones. He recalled the putrefying stench in the Soviet prison and the photos they had found of those murdered there. As for the Jewish women who peeled their potatoes, he wrote to Eugen, ‘a caricature couldn’t add much’.
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He also found much to admire – the peasant women in their bright dresses and white headscarves, who welcomed him at the door of their wooden churches and gave him bunches of wild flowers. Fascinated by the old icons that now came out of their hiding places, he was impressed too by the priests with their flowing white beards and the chanting of the Orthodox rite. When the Germans held a service of their own, the peasants came along, bringing their icons and weeping openly at their liberation. As Albring wrote to his friend, ‘here everyone knew what this simple military holy communion meant to each Russian after twenty-four years of suffering’. By contrast, as they marched through the first villages where ‘Hebraic German’ was spoken, Albring recoiled from such ‘nests’, using the term the Nazis had coined for the breeding grounds of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. However much he might distrust what Nazi propaganda said about the Catholic Church at home, he did not question its view of the Soviet Union. Like his bishop in Münster, Albring was fully committed to the crusade against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’.
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