The German War (65 page)

Recycling Jewish goods played a role in the relief operation too. When the Jews were deported from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1942–43, their furniture was seized and redistributed under ‘Aktion-M’ (for
Möbel
), under the auspices of the ‘Western Office’ of the Eastern Ministry and the SS. From Bamberg to Frankfurt am Main, the authorities reported that people were calling for the warehouses holding Jewish goods to be opened up to help the bombed-out. The fabled prosperity of the Jews convinced many that ‘this furniture is sufficient to re-equip all those who have suffered loss through bombing’, and they argued that leaving them in storage ran the risk that the whole lot would be bombed. By 1944, 18,665 wagons of Jewish goods had been shipped to cities particularly affected by the bombing, 2,699 of them to Hamburg. Instead of being grateful, the beneficiaries were often aggrieved at what they received. In late September 1943, reports were reaching Berlin from Münster and Frankfurt on the Oder, about how ‘disappointed the population was with the used furniture reaching them from the occupied territories, especially the Jewish furniture’. Either the pieces came from large villas and would not fit into small flats, or they were infested with vermin, smashed in transit, or simply too old and shabby to be suitable for Germans: it seemed that the Jews had either been too rich or too poor.
⁵⁶

Across the Reich, disappointed covetousness turned quickly to envy and anger. From an iron foundry in Kitzingen, the SD reported that Nazi officials were accused of ‘laying their arses in the Jewish beds after they have exterminated the Jews’; there were rumours that ‘they carried off the valuable carpets, furniture and silver from the Jewish flats by night and fog’, redeploying an older idiom which the Nazis had borrowed. In Hitler’s adopted home town of Linz the local Party leader was forced to beat a hasty retreat from a condolence visit in the face of a torrent of abuse: the cause of his outrage, the bereaved father claimed, was not his son’s death, but the fact that the Nazi Party had recently prevented his sister from buying ‘a Jew’s house’. If thwarted greed provoked rage, guilt crept up on those who had got what they craved. People frequently told themselves that if the Jews won the war, then they would want their homes back.
⁵⁷

*

On 6 August 1943, Goebbels caused panic in Berlin by ordering an immediate, partial evacuation of the capital. Instead of preaching the usual sangfroid of heroic defiance and ‘strong hearts’, the newspapers astonished their readers by warning that Berlin was about to suffer the same fate as Hamburg. ‘Acts of hysteria, flight, panic. Concrete terms: complete hospitals and private clinics have been evacuated from Berlin along with the most ill patients, staff and doctors,’ noted the publisher Hermann Kasack. All the schools were declared closed. Branches of firms and ministerial departments were relocated. As train after special train pulled out of Berlin, those, like Kasack, who chose to stay distributed furniture, wardrobes, cooking pots and bedding around their friends and relatives to spread the risk. They arranged to spend the nights in the suburbs, even if it meant sleeping in the stations at the ends of the underground lines. Striking a balance, it was, Kasack thought, a ‘still organised panic’. Those areas which had already been inundated with refugees from the Ruhr, Rhineland and Hamburg now had to take in yet more evacuees arriving from cities like Berlin and Munich which had so far been spared heavy raids.

Berlin women brought the news to Frankfurt am Main that lime pits had been dug in advance to serve as mass graves. Soon there were rumours that soldiers were being sent from Frankfurt in order to deal with the expected unrest in the capital. It was what many people across the Reich thought had already happened in Hamburg. From as far afield as Innsbruck, Königsberg, Weimar and Würzburg, as well as Braunschweig and Berlin, it was reported that the Allies had issued an ultimatum that unless the government resigned by 15 August, Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and other major cities would be ‘erased’ just like Hamburg. The threat Hitler had made against Britain in September 1940 was well remembered by Germans now. There was some truth to these tales: by the end of the month, the Allies were dropping leaflets threatening other cities with the fate of Hamburg, mocking the regime’s own heroic slogans: ‘The choice is: capitulation or destruction. Tunis – or Stalingrad. Palermo – or Hamburg. Life or death.’
⁵⁸

On 22 July, Palermo had fallen to Allied troops without resistance and three days later, at the same time as the first raid on Hamburg, Mussolini had been voted out of power by the Fascist Grand Council and arrested. Predictably enough, Italian civilian workers in German cities broke into ‘tears of joy’ and held all-night celebrations. According to the secret police, ‘even Fascists declared that, for all his political achievements, the Duce had failed militarily’. In Breslau and other cities, French prisoners of war drank and sang late into the night and refused to turn up for work the next day. In Warsaw, the Polish Resistance began chalking up the slogan ‘October’ to warn that the November 1918 revolution would come a month earlier to Germany this time. Germans too were caught up by the events in Italy, scanning the news for information on the momentous regime change engulfing their closest ally. Many noted a minor item reporting the banning of the Fascist Party. If this could occur overnight after twenty years of Fascist rule, then, people were speculating quite openly, ‘National Socialism could be got rid of even more quickly after a ten-year rule’.
⁵⁹

Most ominously for a Security Service primed to prevent a repeat of the 1918 revolution, during the course of August 1943 it reported growing public dissent. When the Lord Mayor of Göttingen boarded a train from Hamburg, refugees spotted his golden Party badge and told him quietly that there would be a reckoning. A woman even held her sleeve up to his nose so that he could smell the stench of the smoke on her clothes. Party officials were so often abused and threatened in public, especially in cities which had recently been bombed, that in the late summer of 1943 many stopped wearing their uniforms and Party badges in public. A rash of new jokes ridiculed their fright, such as the mock classified ad: ‘Swap Golden Party badge for seven-league boots’. In Marburg, Lisa de Boor was thrilled: ‘Everywhere in the streets, in the shops, at the station, people are talking to one another saying that it can’t go on like this.’ Even among Germans in Warsaw, Wilm Hosenfeld picked up the undercurrent of hope in an Italian-style change of regime: a post-Nazi military dictatorship, like that taking shape under Marshal Badoglio in Italy, could then negotiate a separate peace with the British and Americans. According to the weekly confidential reports on ‘popular sentiment’ compiled by the SD, hope that a military dictatorship offered Germany ‘the best’, or possibly even ‘the last’, way of reaching a ‘separate peace’ with the Western Allies was gaining traction. The fact that Badoglio had already announced that the war would continue and confirmed the alliance with Germany also calmed popular anxieties about the danger of an Italian ‘betrayal’. In Braunschweig, two women at the weekly vegetable market were heard complaining noisily about the complete failure of German promises to retaliate against Britain for the bombing of German cities, when a group of railway workers standing nearby joined in, calling out loudly, ‘Of course there’s a way, our regime has got to go. We have to have a new government.’
⁶⁰

As Germans shrugged off the lessons of ten years of Gestapo repression and began to say such unheard-of things in public, its political leaders began to waver. Albert Speer, who had taken over armaments in the shadow of the crisis before Moscow and who had remained unshaken by the defeat at Stalingrad, warned Hitler now that armament production would come to ‘a total halt’ if six more cities were attacked on this scale. Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, considered that ‘Stalingrad was trifling’ by comparison to Hamburg. In mid-August, following the RAF’s precision strike against the centre for German rocket development at Peenemünde, he committed suicide. On 6 August Goebbels confessed that ‘the air war is a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads’ and that since the raids on Hamburg, ‘a large part of the Continent is gripped by a panic-struck terror of the English air force’. For once the Nazi leadership held back: despite all the rumours of counter-insurgency measures Himmler waited apprehensively on events.
⁶¹

But Germany was not Italy. For all their war-weariness and hopes for a compromise peace in the west, Germans did not talk about ending the war in the east. Instead, the crisis impelled them to bring their most powerful fears out into the open. The equation of Allied bombing with the murder of the Jews, which had first emerged in the spring, attained key importance now. On 15 August 1943, after returning from Hamburg to his translation work for the naval command in Berlin, the Far Eastern merchant Lothar de la Camp wrote a circular letter to his siblings, friends and acquaintances. He described what he knew of the fire-bombing of Hamburg, including an estimate of 200,000–240,000 dead, before turning to what people were saying about the raids:

Whatever the rage against the English and Americans for their inhuman way of waging war, one has to say quite objectively 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.

As evacuees from northern and western Germany brought tales of horror they had endured to the unscathed south and east of the country, everywhere ‘terror bombing’ was ascribed to ‘the Jewish retaliation’. Nazi propaganda had played its part in preparing this response by insisting that the Jewish lobby in London and Washington was behind the bombing in an attempt to exterminate the German nation. But the tenor of popular reasoning was now different: it was what the Germans had done to the Jews that had provoked them to use their power to bomb German cities. Often this sense of acute vulnerability was given a local twist. People in the small Bavarian town of Bad Brückenau, for instance, were deeply affected by the tales told by the evacuees from Frankfurt (to their west) and in ‘their mood of deep pessimism and growing fatalistic apathy’ they saw the bombing of Frankfurt as ‘retaliation to the nth degree for the Jewish action of 1938’. Under the immediate impact of the Hamburg raids, the inhabitants of Ochsenfurt wondered whether neighbouring Würzburg would be next. While some claimed it was being spared because ‘in Würzburg no synagogues were burned’, others warned ‘that now the airmen would come to Würzburg too, given that the last Jew recently left Würzburg’. For good measure, he was even reported to have ‘declared before his deportation that now Würzburg would also receive air raids’.
⁶³

Such rumours reflected a particular sense of helplessness, a far cry from the kind of hatred and resistance Goebbels had hoped his anti-Semitic campaign would instil. In the cities this popular state of mind manifested itself in urban myths that greatly exaggerated the accuracy of Allied targeting. At a time when British bomber crews were having great difficulties delivering their payloads within the prescribed 5-kilometre radius of their targets, Berliners imagined that they were deliberately targeting particular streets and neighbourhoods which they wished to punish. The same sense of naked vulnerability animated the rumours about what specific Jews had said before their deportation or whether particular cities had burned or spared their synagogues.

Time and again, people linked the bombing to the pogrom of November 1938, a connection which might seem strange in a society awash with rumours about the mass killing of Jews in the east. But 1938 had been the last anti-Semitic action which many people had witnessed and actively participated in throughout Germany: in its aftermath, most of the Jews who remained in the Reich had moved to larger cities. In some places there was also a direct connection to the bombing war: in Wetzlar, Braunschweig, Solingen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Siegen, Cologne, Emden and Hamburg, massive concrete bunker towers had been erected on vacant sites where synagogues had stood until November 1938. In Cologne and Aachen, people connected the burnt synagogues with the churches destroyed in the air raids, evoking a sense of divine retribution. As a clerical informer summarised such views for the local Gestapo: ‘Yes, it’s deserved . . . everything avenges itself on earth.’ Thus, many people saw 1938 as the
start
of the German war against the Jews, which set in motion the chain of escalating mutual retaliation. By the late summer and autumn such hitherto rare admissions of German responsibility and guilt had spread to parts of Germany which had not been bombed at all.
⁶⁴

In early June, Goebbels had rallied the beleaguered cities with promises of ‘retaliation’ against Britain. The burning of Hamburg turned those hopes upside down: it was clear that the power to ‘retaliate’ was in the hands of the Jews and the Allies. This catastrophic military failure inverted the popular hope placed in German retaliation a month earlier, transforming it into the fear of ‘Jewish retaliation’. As they spoke about this throughout the Reich, people inadvertently disclosed something which had previously been half concealed – their own knowledge that all the abstract Nazi rhetoric about exterminating the Jews had been literally accomplished. In 1941 and 1942, when the deportations were at their height; when many people had bid at auctions in Hamburg and other cities for Jewish furniture and fittings; when many witnesses had returned with details of the mass graves and mass shootings in the east; and when, above all, any widespread German opposition to the killing might have saved Jewish lives, people had spoken about the unfolding genocide differently: piecemeal, behind closed doors, through rumours and in relation to specific killings. Now in the third quarter of 1943, all this lay in the past: ‘what we did to the Jews’ provided the public acknowledgement that had been withheld at the time.