The German War (3 page)

Instead of shrinking in significance with the gradual passing of the generations who lived through it, the Second World War has grown in the public imagination. Nowhere more so than in Germany, where the last fifteen years have seen a deluge of films, documentaries, exhibitions and books. Yet both scholarly and popular representations tend towards a fundamentally split view of the conflict, casting Germans as either victims or perpetrators. Over the last decade, the victim narrative has been most prominent, as interviewers have concentrated on unearthing the buried memories of civilians who experienced the fire-bombing of German cities by the RAF and the USAAF, the epic flight ahead of the Red Army and the killing and rape which so often followed. Many of the elderly Germans retelling their most painful memories simply wanted to be heard and to leave a record behind. The media turned the wartime suffering of German civilians into a present-day preoccupation, focusing on sleep deprivation, anxiety attacks and recurring nightmares. Groups of self-designated ‘war children’ formed and everywhere commentators reached for terms like ‘trauma’ and ‘collective trauma’, in a kind of catch-all formula to describe these experiences. Yet talking about trauma tends to emphasise the passivity and innocence of the victims, and it has a strong moral resonance: in the 1980s and 1990s the notion of ‘collective trauma’ was deployed to encompass the memories of Holocaust survivors, with the promise of ‘empowering’ the victims by according them political recognition.
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Only on the political margin occupied by the extreme Right, which marches each February to commemorate the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945 with banners proclaiming ‘Bombing-Holocaust’, does anyone equate the suffering of German civilians with that of the victims of Nazi extermination policies. And even this kind of provocative act is far removed from the unreconstructed nationalism sponsored in 1950s West Germany, where German soldiers were commemorated for the heroism of their ‘sacrifice’, while any German ‘atrocities’ were blamed on a handful of intransigent Nazis, in particular the SS. That convenient Cold War excuse of the ‘good’ Wehrmacht and the ‘bad’ SS – which helped underpin the rearmament of West Germany as a full member of NATO in the mid-1950s – became unsustainable by the mid-1990s, thanks in no small part to the travelling exhibition of ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’, which showed the photographs of public hangings and mass shootings taken by ordinary soldiers. The public display of private images that soldiers had carried in their uniform pockets alongside photos of their children and wives evoked powerful responses, especially in places such as Austria or former East Germany which had largely avoided open discussion of such issues until the 1990s. But there were counter-reactions too, and as the focus turned to German women and children as victims of British and American bombing or Soviet rape, some commentators feared a return to the kind of competition over national suffering which had been prevalent in the 1950s.
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Instead, the two emotionally powerful narratives of the war have maintained their parallel trajectories. Despite the shared moral awareness evident in the decision to place a massive Holocaust memorial at the centre of contemporary Berlin, a profound divide persists in talking about this period: Germans remain either victims or perpetrators. As I followed the public soul-searching in Germany which accompanied the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 2005, I realised that the contemporary need to draw the right didactic lessons from this past had led scholars as well as the media to neglect one of the essential tasks of historical enquiry – first and above all, to understand the past. Crucially historians have not been asking how Germans talked and thought about their roles at the time. To what extent, for example, did they discuss the fact that they were fighting for a regime that was committing genocide? And how did the conclusions they reached alter their view of the war as a whole?

One might assume that no such conversation could have taken place in a police state during wartime. In fact, in the summer and autumn of 1943, Germans began to talk openly in public about the murder of the Jews, equating it with the Allied bombing of German civilians. In Hamburg it was noted ‘that the common people, the middle classes, and the rest of the population make repeated remarks in intimate circles and also in larger gatherings that the attacks count as retaliation for our treatment of the Jews’. In Schweinfurt in Bavaria, people were saying exactly the same thing: ‘the terror attacks are a consequence of the measures carried out against the Jews’. After the USAAF’s second raid on the town in October 1943, people complained openly ‘that if we hadn’t treated the Jews so badly, we wouldn’t have to suffer so from the terror attacks’. By this point, such views were reported to the authorities in Berlin not just from all major German cities but even from quiet backwaters which had little or no direct experience of the bombing.
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When I first learned this, I was astonished. I already knew that Germans’ common post-war claim to have known and done nothing was a convenient subterfuge. Existing scholarship showed that plenty of information circulated in wartime Germany about the genocide. But, like other historians, I had assumed that most of this information was communicated discreetly to close friends and family, passing beyond the closed circles of intimacy only as anonymous rumour. How could the Holocaust have become a matter of public conversation? Moreover, these discussions were monitored and analysed by the same secret police authorities who had been organising the deportation and murder of the Jews for the previous two years. Even more bizarrely, a couple of months
after
these reports came in, the head of the police and SS, Heinrich Himmler, could still insist to the leaders of the Third Reich that extermination of European Jewry was a responsibility to be shared only with them and that ‘we will take the secret with us to our graves’. How then had this supposed secret been broached? For the last twenty-five years, the Holocaust has come to occupy a central position in how we think about the Nazi period and the Second World War. But that is still a relatively recent development, and does not tell us how Germans thought about their own role in it at the time.
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On 18 November 1943, Captain Dr August Töpperwien noted in his diary that he had ‘heard
dreadful,
apparently accurate details about how we have exterminated the Jews (from infants to the aged) in Lithuania!’ He had recorded rumours of massacres before, as early as 1939 and 1940, but not on this scale. This time, Töpperwien strove to put the terrible facts into some kind of moral order, asking himself who could legitimately be killed in war. He extended the list from enemy soldiers and partisans operating behind German lines to limited collective reprisals against the civilians who abetted them, but still he felt forced to admit that what was being done to the Jews was of an entirely different order: ‘We are not just destroying the Jews fighting against us, we literally want to exterminate this people as such!’
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A pious Protestant and conservative schoolmaster, August Töpperwien had harboured doubts from the outset about the sheer brutality of Hitler’s war. He appears to personify that state of moral and political alienation from Nazism which found its expression, not in any outward show of resistance, but in a degree of nonconformity and ‘inner’ withdrawal from the regime’s exhortations and demands. But did such a safe spiritual haven exist? Are all expressions of doubts in family letters and personal diaries signs of inner opposition, rather than merely airing the writer’s own uncertainties and dilemmas? In fact, August Töpperwien would continue to serve loyally until the last days of the war. Having made his momentous acknowledgement that ‘we literally want to exterminate this people as such’, he fell silent. He could not square this admission with his own belief in Germany’s civilising mission in the east and its defence of Europe against Bolshevism.

Töpperwien did not return to the murder of the Jews again until March 1945, when he finally began to grasp – for the first time – that Germany was facing complete and unavoidable defeat: ‘A mankind that wages war like this has become godless. The Russian barbarities in the German east – the terror attacks of the British and Americans – our struggle against the Jews (sterilisation of healthy women, shooting everyone from infants to old women, gassing of Jewish transport trains)!’ If Germany’s impending defeat appeared to him now a kind of divine punishment for what it had done to the Jews, then Töpperwien was also clear that this act was no worse than what the Allies were doing to Germans.
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Back in the summer and autumn of 1943 what impelled civilians on the home front, from Hamburg to Schweinfurt, to talk so openly about German responsibility for the murder of the Jews was a different kind of impending doom. Between 25 July and 2 August 1943, the city of Hamburg was bombed, unleashing a firestorm of huge proportions. Half the city was devastated and 34,000 people killed. To many Germans it felt like the Apocalypse. Because of the demonstrable threat to the major cities, the SS Security Service (the SD) reported, all ‘feeling of security’ had collapsed across Germany ‘with great suddenness’, replaced by ‘blind rage’. On the first day of the firestorm, 25 July, another event had occurred further afield. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was toppled, after twenty-one years in power, in a bloodless coup. Germans quickly linked the two events. For the next five weeks, people were reported to be talking openly in public about the possibility of following the Italian example and replacing the Nazi regime with a military dictatorship as offering ‘the best’, or possibly even ‘the last’, way of reaching a ‘separate peace’ with the Western Allies. For the Nazi leadership these reports seemed to point to the collapse of civilian morale and a replay of the capitulation and revolution of November 1918. In fact the moment of crisis was short-lived. By early September 1943 it was over, as the regime threw resources into civil defence and organised mass evacuation from the cities. The Wehrmacht’s military position also stabilised with the occupation of most of Italy, and the Gestapo finally imposed a selective crackdown on such ‘defeatist’ talk. As in Töpperwien’s private ruminations, so these public discussions of German responsibility for the murder of the Jews were prompted by feelings of profound moral and physical unease, as the unrelenting onslaught of the RAF’s Bomber Command spread a sense of vulnerability far beyond the bombed cities themselves. The significance of the temporary political crisis triggered by the bombing of Hamburg was that it brought these fears to the surface: future crises would evoke the same patterns of public discussion, in which Germans mixed anxieties about their culpability with a sense of their own victimhood.
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For German Jews the unfolding Holocaust inevitably shaped their understanding of the war. But other Germans perceived everything from the opposite direction: the war was their primary concern, against which they developed their understanding of the genocide. These were very different perspectives on the same events, conditioned by deep inequalities of power and choice and refracted in profoundly different hopes and fears. This problem has shaped the way I have approached writing the history of wartime Germany. Where other historians have highlighted the machinery of mass murder, and discussed why or how the Holocaust happened, I find myself more concerned with how German society received and assimilated this knowledge as accomplished fact. How did it affect Germans to gradually realise that they were fighting a genocidal war? Or to put it the other way around, how did the war shape their perception of genocide?

July and August 1943 were clearly a moment of profound crisis in wartime Germany, when people from Hamburg to Bavaria explained the unlimited Allied attacks on civilians as retaliation for ‘what we did to the Jews’. Such talk about Allied punishment or ‘Jewish retaliation’ confirmed that the endless Nazi propaganda – especially in the first six months of 1943 – which depicted the air raids as ‘Jewish terror bombing’ was generally accepted by the population. But these reflections entailed a strangely self-accusatory twist, which appalled Goebbels and other Nazi leaders. It seemed that people wished to undo this mutually destructive cycle, now that German cities were being obliterated. But the ‘measures carried out against the Jews’, as the SD reporters euphemistically called them, already lay in the past: the Europe-wide deportation of the Jews had taken place the previous year. The Hamburg firestorm confronted Germans with a new kind of absolute war as the threat of aerial destruction escaped all limits.

The Manichaean metaphors of ‘either/or’, ‘to be or not to be’, ‘everything or nothing’, ‘victory or destruction’ had a long rhetorical history in Germany. They had constituted Hitler’s central ideas since Germany’s defeat in 1918, and had been staples of First World War propaganda since the Kaiser made his ‘Declaration to the German People’ on 6 August 1914. But this apocalyptic outlook was not what made Hitler’s rule popular in the 1930s or even in the first years of war. What changed in the latter half of the Second World War was that German society became far more receptive to these ways of thinking. The turn in German fortunes changed extremist rhetoric into sound common sense. In the wake of Allied ‘terror bombing’, the fundamental existential threat, ‘To be or not to be’ acquired a disturbing literalness. What fuelled the sense of crisis in the summer of 1943 was a widespread fear that Germans could not escape the consequences of a ruthless racial war of their own making. In overcoming that moment of crisis, people not only had to scrap their earlier expectations and prognoses about the course of the war: they also shed traditional moral inhibitions, overstepping existing notions of decency and shame. Germans did not have to be Nazis to fight for Hitler, but they would discover that it was impossible to remain untouched by the ruthlessness of the war and the apocalyptic mentality it created.
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