The German War (42 page)

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Goebbels had persuaded Hitler to introduce the yellow star in the hope that it would brand the Jews in public and fan the flames of popular anti-Semitism in the same way that such measures had in Poland. It was an expectation shared by many Jews. In September 1941, Victor Klemperer could not bear to venture on to the streets of Dresden, and handed over the shopping entirely to his ‘Aryan’ wife, Eva. Others were so afraid that they killed themselves. There were 87 suicides in three weeks in Vienna and 243 in Berlin during the last quarter of 1941. In fact, in the first weeks Goebbels was seriously disappointed with the impact, especially in his own Gau of Berlin, which had not quite lost its secular, left-wing pre-1933 traditions and where 70,000 of Germany’s population of 150,000 Jews now lived. The yellow star, the Propaganda Minister complained to Albert Speer, ‘had the opposite effect from what we intended . . . People everywhere are showing sympathy for them [the Jews]. This nation is simply not yet mature; it is full of all kinds of idiotic sentimentality.’ The problem, Goebbels was beginning to realise, was that society was simply not sufficiently National Socialist in outlook.
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To remedy this deficit, the regime’s first resort was to educate by intimidation: on 24 October 1941, a decree was published banning public displays of sympathy towards the Jews, threatening Germans who did so with three months in a concentration camp. ‘Anyone who continues to uphold personal contacts with him [the Jew]’, Goebbels warned in his article in
Das Reich
on 16 November, ‘is taking his side and must be regarded and treated as a Jew.’ Having drawn a hard line, he chided his readership to grow out of any ‘false sentimentalism’: ‘If Herr Bramsig and Frau Knöterich feel a stir of pity at the sight of an old woman wearing the yellow star, please do not let them forget that the Jews planned the war and started it.’ And so Goebbels’s celebrated article ‘The Jews are guilty’ went on, up to its matter-of-fact confirmation that Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about the extermination of the Jews was now being fulfilled.
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Goebbels was not the only Nazi leader who came close to stating bluntly that the regime’s policy was to kill the Jews. Two days later, Alfred Rosenberg blurted out at a briefing of officials of his new ‘Eastern Ministry’ that the Jewish ‘question can only be solved by a biological eradication of entire Jewry in Europe . . . That is the task which Fate has set us.’ Hitler himself repeated his ‘prophecy’ in his public speeches no less than four times in 1942, now using the unmistakable ‘
Ausrottung
’ – ‘extermination’. The
Völkische Beobachter
followed its master’s voice on 27 February 1942, screaming, ‘The Jew will be exterminated!’ Other Nazi leaders, like the Gauleiter of Munich, Adolf Wagner, and the head of the Labour Front, Robert Ley, followed suit. As Germans weathered the existential crisis of the eastern front in early 1942, these threats reverberated across the rhetorical landscape.
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To hard-line ideologues like the head of the Party apparatus, Martin Bormann, it was clear that the German people should be made to realise that they were now locked in a genocidal global conflict, which could end only with their victory or destruction. Despite the torrent of anti-Semitic arguments, the deportation of the Jews had not made the news, with no details being published in the German media about the deportees’ destination, fate or the purpose of the measure. As a result, local and regional Party officials asked for guidance on how to field questions about the ‘extremely harsh measures’ taken against the Jews. Bormann’s response was to issue them with a directive telling them that he was quite happy for them to go on the offensive and justify these actions. It is, he explained, the ‘nature of the issue that these partly very difficult problems can only be solved in the interest of the final security of our people with ruthless hardness’. Instead of denying the rumours, Party officials were told to embrace ‘the present opportunity for cleansing . . . the entire problem has to be solved by today’s generation’.
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There was much to comment on, for it was during this period that the deportations reached a pan-European scale and all pretence that the Jews were being ‘resettled’ was dropped. Starting on 11 May 1942, seventeen transports to Minsk no longer went to the ghetto. Instead, they stopped near the estate of Maly Trostinets, where the deportees were shot or killed in mobile gas vans. From June, transports from Theresienstadt, Berlin and Vienna were sent straight to an extermination camp at Sobibor. At the same time, the scope of deportation broadened: in March the first deportation trains left Slovakia, with selections for forced labour. In June, trains with Slovakian Jews were running directly to the Sobibor killing facility and, a month later, to Auschwitz. Six transports of Jews from France had already arrived in Auschwitz between March and July; between 19 July and 7 August, a further 125,000 people were sent there from Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Meanwhile, by far the biggest operations were more local: from 22 July, during a two-month ‘action’, 300,000 Jews were sent from Warsaw to Treblinka, destroying Europe’s largest Jewish community. In parts of Ukraine, the ‘sweeps’ by the mobile squads, the
Einsatzgruppen,
went on without interruption until all the Jewish villages and towns had been wiped out. In the summer of 1942, the remaining Jewish ghettos in the Soviet territories were eliminated.
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The 1.9 million Jewish victims from the Soviet Union, let alone the 2.7 million from Poland, far outnumbered the Jews deported from Greater Germany – with 78,000 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 65,000 from Austria and 165,000 from the ‘old’ Reich. They also dwarfed the numbers of Jews who were transported from occupied western Europe: 76,000 from France, 102,000 from the Netherlands, 28,000 from Belgium, 1,200 from Luxembourg, 758 from Norway and 116 from Denmark. But it was the mass deportations from western Europe which spelled out that this was a centrally directed and pan-European programme, not just an extreme form of anti-partisan warfare on the eastern front. The deportations to the death camps also involved too many different authorities for them ever to have been kept secret. Whether they were soldiers observing the shootings, railwaymen running the deportation trains, or local government officials making sure that keys to apartments were handed over before their occupants left, all these people may have simultaneously hidden behind their functionally circumscribed roles yet passed their little nuggets of knowledge into the general circulation of information.
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In the course of 1942, Goebbels adopted a new and much more subtle approach to managing public opinion. Instead of cranking up the anti-Semitic campaign he had unleashed in the autumn of 1941, the Propaganda Minister de-escalated it. He worked hard to black out reports on specific measures from within the Reich, warning off the Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, from celebrating the deportation of the Viennese Jews in a public speech to a European youth congress, lest it offer ammunition for the international press ‘to jump down our throats’. Through these months when the deportation and murder of the Jews reached its height, central Nazi papers, such as the
Völkische Beobachter
and
Der Angriff,
carried no more than one or two anti-Semitic pieces a week. There was little on the Jews in the newsreels and nothing at all in the short documentaries screened before the main feature films. Why were the Nazis so concerned to conceal details, when the headlines of the main Party daily had not so long ago proclaimed that ‘The Jew will be exterminated’?
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The most obvious motive, which Goebbels freely admitted to Schirach, was that all specific facts would be seized on by Allied propaganda and turned against Germany, as indeed they were. But there was another reason, too. In the course of 1942, two different ways of influencing the German public were tried out. There was the direct, pedagogic method of exhortation and argument, intended to bring the German people as a whole into the National Socialist fold. This was the method which Goebbels had himself tried in his November 1941 article ‘The Jews are guilty’ and it continued to be pursued throughout 1942 in Hitler’s and Göring’s speeches, Martin Bormann’s instructions to the Party functionaries and, outside the Reich, in Hans Frank’s official newspaper for the General Government, which did publish detailed accounts of the implementation of the deportations across German-occupied Europe.

Alongside such direct exhortation, Goebbels developed a second, more discreet and subtle form of news management. Instead of persuading their readers to endorse ‘extermination’ as a political and racial necessity, the German press hinted at what people already knew, fostering a sense of collusive semi-secrecy. During 1942, the press charted the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ by Germany’s Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian and Slovakian allies, reporting on the registration of Jews for forced labour, the ghettos and, in the case of Slovakia, even their deportation. Journalists discussed whether the ‘Jewish question’ had been ‘completely solved’ in Slovakia, or commented on the demand to deal with the ‘gypsy question’ in south-eastern Europe along the same lines. The incomplete and often vague reference points connected with what people already knew through rumour and hearsay. But the press avoided explicit statements. Goebbels’s new tactic experimented with a tacit and collusive way of managing – and partially silencing – moral disquiet. Instead of waging an explicit propaganda campaign to win public support for the regime’s action, as he had originally hoped to do, he would let awareness of the actions seep in and foster a sense of complicity.
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The result is perhaps best described as a ‘spiral of silence’. The term was coined much later, in 1974, by post-war West Germany’s most famous public opinion researcher, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. Although she was, of course, writing about post-war democracy, she remained deeply influenced by her own formation in 1941 and 1942, when as a young journalist she contributed articles to Goebbels’s
Das Reich
on the power of the Jewish press in the USA. The element of her thinking which can be transferred back to the Nazi dictatorship is her emphasis on how public opinion is subject to private, pre-political pressures. According to Noelle-Neumann, fear of isolation and social sanctions tends to silence individuals who feel that they are in the minority, reducing their potential number; meanwhile, press reporting of the ‘majority’ viewpoint augments and stabilises its moral position. Her argument also highlights an important intersection between the public and private spheres of society, with much of the pressure towards conformity exercised privately, within like-minded peer groups. Through embarrassment, even humiliation, the opinion-forming relationships of family and workplace effect silent shifts in moral positions. Contrasting it with the ‘bandwagon’ concept which focuses on public conformism, Noelle-Neumann drew attention to the psychological importance of private pressures in fomenting an individual’s fear of isolation.
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Karl Dürkefälden exemplifies how a general moral problem was turned into a private family affair and then buried in silence. A 40-year-old engineer with a machine-building firm in Celle, Dürkefälden was classified as ‘indispensable’ and spared military call-up. Coming from a working-class family with traditional Social Democratic affiliations, he had put himself through night school in the 1920s and then experienced long periods of unemployment during the Great Depression, finally achieving a family and stable working life with rearmament in the 1930s. By the summer of 1942, his firm was making oil-drilling equipment in anticipation of the conquest of the Soviet oilfields. Dürkefälden tuned in regularly to the BBC, and when he picked up a broadcast of a talk Thomas Mann had given on Voice of America about the gassing of 400 young Dutch Jews, he concluded that Hitler’s public threats were not idle talk. His brother-in-law, Walter Kassler, served on the eastern front and had written saying that there were no Jews left in Kiev. When he came home on leave in June 1942, Walter talked to Karl about the mass executions he had seen and about the gassing of French Jews he had heard about from another soldier. ‘Walter emphasised repeatedly,’ Dürkefälden confided in his diary, ‘“We can be happy that we are not Jews.”’ Realising that Karl was shocked, Walter tried to explain to him: ‘At first I didn’t understand, but now I know: it’s a matter of existence or non-existence.’ Kassler had taken over Hitler’s endlessly repeated mantra that the nation faced an apocalyptic choice: ‘To be or not to be’. When Karl insisted, ‘But that’s murder’, Walter’s reply again came straight from the media: ‘Certainly it has gone so far that they will do to us as we have done to them, if we should lose the war.’ Karl Dürkefälden knew that he had to let it rest. To contradict his brother-in-law would have meant risking an open breach within the family. It could, in the worst case, have ended in denunciation to the Gestapo; more likely, it would have led to strained relations and ostracism.

The staple media message prevailed, not because Karl believed it, but because he had to let Walter have the last word. The many steps by which the Nazis had first destroyed the old labour movement through terror and then tried to reshape working-class identities around promises of consumer affluence, stable employment, national pride and ethnic difference had all left their mark, before the war itself had changed the perception of ‘us’ and ‘them’ being argued out across the kitchen table. Karl Dürkefälden’s Social Democratic values had become old-fashioned, his humanitarian outlook embarrassing: he had become part of a beleaguered minority, silenced not by the Gestapo or by Party hacks but by the pressure to conform exerted within his own family.
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This version of a ‘spiral of silence’ worked in private because the media avoided inviting wide-ranging or open discussion of what was going on; yet at the same time, it provided a series of rhetorical justifications for extermination, and drip-fed innuendos which allowed people to connect the abstract threats of Goebbels and Hitler with the specific details of mass executions that circulated privately. What was being created was a sense of ‘knowing without knowing’, which did not invite any kind of public commitment, affirmation or feeling of moral responsibility; and it could work as long as no one broke the artificial limit on what could be said. The institution in the strongest position to do this was the Catholic Church. In September 1941, a month after Bishop Galen had thunderously denounced the killing of psychiatric patients from the pulpit of the Lamberti Church in Münster, he received an anonymous letter of praise for this courageous stand. The letter-writer reminded Galen of what was happening to German Jews, now that even highly patriotic ones like himself had to wear the yellow star, concluding: ‘Only the senseless wish, the mad hope, that somewhere a helper will stand up for us incited me to address this letter to you. May God bless you!’ There is no record of any reply. Nor did Galen utter a word in public or in private about the persecution of the Jews. Instead, he went on preaching sermons in which he depicted German Catholics as true patriots defending the Fatherland against the Bolshevik threat.
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