The German War (62 page)

The bishops were a generation older than the political elite of Nazi Germany. They were men in late middle age who had been scarred by the struggle against liberal secularisation, and their version of ultra-conservative Catholic nationalism was out of step with the current generation and, increasingly, with the present war. The cracks that had begun to appear in the ranks of the lower clergy in 1942 now widened, threatening to split the younger, more activist wing of the Church from the ageing prelates set above them. The parish of Fronleichnam in Aachen was ministered to by two chaplains at loggerheads with each other. Chaplain Sparbrodt toed the episcopal line, asking his confirmation classes, ‘And what is the use of sermons of hate?’ after the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. Gestapo informers reported that Sparbrodt was abusing the confessional to sow doubt in soldiers’ minds by asking them testing questions such as ‘Is it permitted to perform military service for a Godless state?’ By contrast, Chaplain Hilmer preached revenge on the ‘criminals from across the Channel’ for the raid on Cologne. Greeting his parishioners in the same church with the Hitler salute, Hilmer told them that ‘the psalms calling down curses need to be brought out again and fire has to be called down from the heavens on the island whose inhabitants are capable of such cruelties’. Hilmer admonished his flock to be ‘hard as a diamond, faithful as a mother, not to believe foreign rumours, to be silent in the shops, not to spread unrest and to believe in the day when all would be avenged’. By June 1943, the chaplain was openly criticising ‘the silence in Catholic circles about the destruction of the churches’, going so far as to insist that the ‘impression had to be avoided that this barbarism [the bombing] did not matter to German Catholics, especially to leading clergy’. For once, the Gestapo watchers could only applaud, as they reported on the ‘extraordinary response’ of Hilmer’s congregation to his preaching.
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In other parishes, divisions were less overt than in Fronleichnam, but the Gestapo picked them up all the same. Some clergy wanted to see the Church’s rights defended more robustly and others demanded stronger endorsements of the German war effort. In some churches, the parish priests did not even read out their bishops’ pastoral letters at all. In an effort to avoid internal splits, in April 1943 Archbishop Frings encouraged Catholics to remain active members of the Nazi Party and its organisations as a way of securing the Church’s place in society. After the confrontations between Party and Church in mid-1941, this move to embrace compromise was widely welcomed by both laity and clergy.
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There were clergymen like Dr Nattermann, the influential General Secretary of the International Kolping Society, who represented a proud nineteenth-century tradition of social action and charitable work and who now pushed for a more positive commitment to the ‘national community’ as part of a kind of ‘reform’ Catholicism. These clerics stood for a
völkisch
rejuvenation of the Church and their proposals were endorsed by a conference of lower clergy in Berensberg in June 1942. But while Protestant identities were often established at the parish level, with congregations following the lead of their pastors, over whom bishops exercised relatively weak control, it was fairly easy for the Catholic hierarchy to prevent the younger generation pushing their reform agenda any further.
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The price of maintaining episcopal control was a gradual erosion of influence, as the once formidably cohesive Catholic milieu fractured under the pressure of war. There was dissent from both younger clergy and laity, who could not understand why the Cologne and Paderborn archbishoprics were sending out pastoral letters in February 1943 about the immorality of extramarital sex, topics that now seemed trivial compared to the bombing. The ageing prelates, schooled in Aristotelian semantics, seemed to be speaking a language which was too abstract, whose message of forbearance was too passive and was underpinned by a vision of Christian Germany which was too aristocratic and conservative. In Aachen, Catholics complained about the clergy’s comfortable accommodation, income and exemption from war work. The following month’s pastoral letter fared no better: ‘If they were as tired as we are, then they’d have no time to preach about morality’ was one response, and, ‘So you see how out of touch the bishops are that they still have time for such rubbish’. The bishops’ rejection of retaliation against Britain eroded their influence further. Local Gestapo agents reported that ‘the people hate the enemy and his terror methods, while the clergy defend him’. Those who had been bombed out in Essen were particularly bitter. The repudiation of the Church’s position only deepened over the coming months, growing into a national phenomenon.
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No one knew how or when retaliation would come. The absence of real information about the secret weapon was quickly made good by rumour and speculation, with talk of massive rockets and a great gun with a 16-metre barrel being set up on the Channel coast which would half destroy London. Even after the anniversary of the thousand-bomber raid had passed, the level of tension in Cologne kept rising. On 22 June, the Swiss consul reported that the promise of ‘the top-secret weapon’ was played like a ‘trump card’ there, as the hope placed in ‘retaliation’ helped to subdue the terror of sitting on a ‘powder keg’. The following night, Mülheim was so severely hit that even cyclists could not get in or out of the town. And then on the night of 28–29 June, a month after it had been expected, the raid on Cologne came.
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Thousands staggered to the first aid stations located in the city’s schools, escaping from collapsing buildings and wandering through billowing smoke, falling sparks and cinders as fires burned out of control. In Immendorf, the school’s chronicler was lost for words: you would need to have seen ‘the refugees, their eyes soaked, even blinded by the clouds of phosphorus to have any sense of the horrors of the night’. Unlike the thousand-bomber raid the previous year, this attack was followed by two more. Over the three nights of 28–29 June and 3–4 and 8–9 July, a greater tonnage of bombs fell on Cologne than in the whole of the war till then. The first raid hit the city centre, the second the eastern bank of the Rhine and the third the north-western and south-western suburbs. In 1942, it had been the unbelievable number of planes which had overawed the people of Cologne. Now it was the number of dead.
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The day after the first raid, the well-connected Swiss consul guessed that at least 25,000 had been killed. A few days later, thanks to a ‘highly official’ source, he corrected it to 28,000. Eventually the official count would be revised down to 4,500 killed and 10,000 wounded in the first raid, with a further 1,100 killed in the two that followed. It was not surprising that even well-briefed estimates set the losses at five times this level: they accorded with the scale of physical destruction. Nearly two-thirds of the population of the city, between 350,000 and 400,000 people, lost their homes. Anneliese Hastenplug, who had just celebrated her twentieth birthday before the first raid, wrote to her fiancé Adi in France, ‘How does it look here? I can only say, 31 May last year was child’s play compared to this.’ There was not a single house left intact in the inner city. The theatres and cinemas were gone. Her sister Adele returned home ‘completely done in’ after seeing so many dead bodies in the streets: ‘Now fear prevents her from taking a single step in the evening on her own,’ Anneliese wrote.
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As refugees streamed out of the city, they took what they could on carts, bicycles and handcarts, loading themselves down with furniture, suitcases, bedding and cooking pots. To Anna Schmitz, who lived in Dünnwald between Cologne and Leverkusen, it looked like ‘a mass migration’. The floodgates had opened after the second raid, with refugees camping in the woodland. As Anneliese Hastenplug discovered, the authorities had veered between encouraging all efforts at evacuation and ordering the police to stop those working in Cologne from leaving the city.
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Local Party leaders were authorised to take all measures they deemed necessary and the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls and the People’s Welfare set up food kitchens and provided temporary shelter. They tried to manage the chaos, helping the bombed-out rescue their belongings and assisting the emergency services. Prisoners from the concentration camp which the SS had established in 1942 next to the grounds of the trade fair were sent in to clear the most dangerous sites, salvage food supplies from bombed warehouses and excavate unexploded bombs. Pulling down unstable buildings without safety equipment, they salvaged tiles, metal fittings and timbers to be reused. Four days after the third raid nearly a thousand camp inmates were at work, with more prisoners arriving from Buchenwald. Dressed in their striped clothes and working under armed police and SS supervision, for the next three months they became a familiar sight in the ruins, digging out the corpses of the 4,500 dead from the rubble and laying them out in coffins knocked together in the concentration camp joinery workshop.
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On 8 July, ceremonies to lay the dead to rest were held simultaneously across six cemeteries, with representatives of the civic authorities, emergency services, the Wehrmacht and the Party in attendance beside the mass graves that concentration camp prisoners had dug. The
Westdeutscher Beobachter
set the tone: ‘Strong hearts! The struggle demands of us’ and ‘From their sacrifice the bright future will come’. Such use of the language of military sacrifice for civilians broke a taboo. As recently as 1942, Bormann’s office had reminded Party branches not to ‘misapply the term “
Opfer
”! It is undesirable that the recognition as
Opfer
should be accorded for the efforts required by the war of the homeland . . . Only the front-line soldier bears the sacrifice in the true sense of the word.’ With its double meaning of involuntary victim and active (self-)sacrifice,
Opfer
lay at the centre of the nationalist, as well as National Socialist, cult of Germany’s military dead. By spring 1943 it was no longer possible to restrict the cult of ‘the fallen’ to them. Now military medals were awarded to civilians for their efforts in air raids and armaments production, and their dead were buried with quasi-military honours.
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Whatever temporary impression the mass committal of the dead made was wiped out the following night. The third raid, though by far the smallest, was also the most demoralising. As the SD discovered, the population was just beginning to put the ‘horrors of the first two raids behind them, to complete the initial clearance work and get supplies moving again’ when this raid ‘completely disrupted the normalisation of life’. Alfons Schaller, one of the city’s district Party leaders, called for his fellow citizens to join him on the Heumarkt on 10 July to demonstrate ‘in the midst of the ruins of our violated city the bond between the living and the dead’. The tolling of the remaining church bells and salvoes fired by the flak guns announced the start of a minute’s silence, observed across the whole city. Those who gathered on the Heumarkt found themselves listening to a speech by Gauleiter Grohé. ‘Power of resistance’, ‘fanatical will to fight’, ‘out of the brains of the most worthless of all creatures . . . the Jews’, ‘the end of Jewry’ – the tried and tired phrases floated across the square, their staccato bravura losing itself in the mountains of rubble.
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Inevitably, Nazi leaders were criticised for all the failures of civil defence and propagandists for not telling the rest of Germany about the plight of the local population. Given his well-known anti-clericalism, Goebbels in particular was accused of hypocrisy for focusing so much on the damage to Cologne’s cathedral. But the message of defiance itself was not altogether unpopular and was occasionally echoed in private letters and diaries. Bernd Dünnwald wrote to the front to try to describe the destruction to his son Günter. From their home he could look across the burnt-out ruins as far as the town hall. He was struck by the sculpture of the sturdy medieval peasant-burgher, armed with sword, shield, keys to the city and threshing flail, still intact and clearly visible through the ruined walls of the town hall. The potent symbolism of this ‘Kölsche Boor’ moved him deeply and two weeks later he wrote to his son again, quoting the words of the nationalist song: ‘We are keeping watch on the Rhine’. No Nazi, but a Catholic conservative and First World War veteran, Dünnwald was moved by civic patriotism, writing of the ‘artworks and countless treasures’ which the ‘filthy Tommy’ had ‘violated and destroyed’ in his ‘cowardly madness of destruction’. Despite much damage, the twin towers of the cathedral still stood, drawing the refugees back to their ‘shadow through homesickness’, whilst ‘pointing in warning for all eternity’ at the crime that had been perpetrated. Shaken by the detonations rocking the city as unstable buildings were brought down by the clean-up squads, Dünnwald refused to be downhearted, vowing to stand and fight: ‘The day is coming!’
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As psychological shock waves followed the physical ones, few people were ready for such intransigent rhetoric. The Swiss consul, Franz-Rudolf von Weiss, observed the homeless sitting listlessly on their suitcases near the soup kitchens. He described the general mood as one of ‘deep apathy, general indifference and the wish for peace’. He had been bombed out too and moved to the small town of Bad Godesberg. The young and newly divorced Christa Lehmacher described to her brother at the front how she and their mother had lost everything and how she had obtained a dress from the War Reparations Office, which also paid the bills for her emergency accommodation in the Hotel Excelsior next to the cathedral. She could not help jumping at the slightest noise or when minor debris fell on her head. After the first raid, she had put all her energy into repairing the flat. Now she just wanted to look for the few belongings she had left in the cellar but was frightened that the remaining walls would collapse. Instead, she focused on getting her mother and 3-year-old daughter evacuated to the safety of Füssen in Bavaria.
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