The German War (66 page)

The public conversations reported to the Nazi leadership in the summer of 1943 were not a direct commentary on the ‘final solution’. It was no longer a contemporary event; the ‘measures carried out against the Jews’, as the report writers euphemistically called them, already lay in the past and could not be reversed. The real point of such talk was to express the fear that Allied bombing was both vengeful and possibly even exterminatory in intent. It was their own predicament, not that of the Jews, which remained of primary concern. As people felt impelled to express a sense of culpability and regret, their admissions of guilt were also irretrievably entwined with an overwhelming sense of their own vulnerability and victimhood.

The popular search for literal and moral equivalence was helped by the absence of hard facts about the numbers of dead either from bombing or the murder of the Jews. The SS’s own statistical count of April 1943 was top secret; yet people were aware that only a tiny number of Jews still remained in Germany. The authorities, on the other hand, did not divulge the police count of the numbers killed in air raids or publish photographs of the dead for fear of destroying civilian morale. Rumour filled the vacuum, inevitably exaggerating the numbers. Informal estimates by well-connected and well-informed witnesses set the number of dead from the raids on Dortmund at 15,000; on Düsseldorf at 17,000; on the dams between 12,000 and 30,000; on Wuppertal at 27,000; on Cologne at 28,000; and on Hamburg at between 100,000 and 350,000. In each case the police’s official counts were much lower, but were not released. In the information vacuum these inflated figures acquired wide currency, adding to the conviction that all prior moral boundaries had been crossed.
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Goebbels did not have an answer to the raft of public criticism. Depicting the bombing with various shadings as Jewish terror, revenge or retaliation was not the difficulty. That was axiomatic to all his media messages. Rather, it was the gloss put on it. The sentiment – ‘if only we had not treated the Jews so badly’ – expressed an impossible wish. By searching for a way back through a cycle of escalation which could not be reversed, Germans were acknowledging precisely the bind that Goebbels had wanted to place them in. ‘Above all in the Jewish question, we have gone so far that for us there’s no escape. And that is just as well,’ Goebbels had consoled himself back in March. ‘Experience tells that a movement and a people, which has broken the bridges behind itself, fights much more unreservedly than those which still possess the possibility of retreating.’ But it did not seem to be working out like this. The SD reports on the public desire for a separate peace, change of regime and regret about the murder of the Jews all spoke of retreat.
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Since the spring, Goebbels and Hitler had been making propaganda with what they most fervently believed, allowing the media to speak ever more openly about the war against the Jews, even if Goebbels still took care to prevent specific details from being mentioned. For German society at large, the murder of the Jews did not fulfil the role Goebbels imagined when he spoke of breaking the bridges. It did not herald a new sense of purpose, galvanising Germans to wage ‘total war’: rather these conversations on market squares conveyed a sense of doom, a sense of impending defeat and crisis. Even loyal supporters who sent in their own suggestions to Goebbels on how propaganda could be improved started criticising the anti-Semitic campaign. Some of them also pointed out that the Germans were now being punished for what they had done to the Jews.
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From the Nazi point of view, talk about ‘Jewish retaliation’ during the crisis after Hamburg marked German failure. It was both a military failure and denoted a crisis of legitimacy, as the regime was found wanting according to its own core values. Goebbels had deliberately played with popular knowledge of the genocide, encouraging a ‘knowing but not knowing’ kind of collusion. Yet, the price of successfully embedding the ‘Jewish enemy’ within the common sense of everyday life was to lose control over how people made use of the notion. Goebbels could neither confirm nor deny what had happened to the Jews, any more than he could answer the wish to undo their murder. All he could do was hope that this tide of depressing comment would cease.
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Throughout August, the Nazi regime stepped back. The Gestapo did not swoop in to arrest people for saying the things the SD was reporting, even when they called for regime change. Then, in early September, the propaganda machine began to answer back. On 3 September 1943, the Gau paper in Baden,
Der Führer,
chided its readers: ‘It is said, if National Socialist Germany had not solved the Jewish Question so radically, international World Jewry would not be fighting us today.’ Only a ‘senile fool’ could believe such stuff, the paper jeered, pointing out that the Jews had caused both world wars, with the present one ‘no more than a continuation of the first’. This was a risky tactic, which could have sanctioned a semi-open debate about the ‘final solution’. Instead, Goebbels stepped in with an article in
Das Reich
on 26 September, in which he explained the virtues of ‘silence’ on certain key questions. ‘Only a few people know the secrets of the war,’ he told his million-odd readers:

It is therefore extremely unfair and damaging to the general good to try, by spreading rumours, to force the government to make public statements about a question of importance, or indeed of decisive significance, for the outcome of the war. They would be useful to the enemy and cause the gravest harm to our own people.

The new Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, went on the radio in early October, threatening that ‘Defeatists must die in expiation of their actions’ and ‘as a warning to others’. A flurry of exemplary sentences soon followed to underline exactly what he meant. A middle-aged Munich woman was sentenced to three years in prison for derogatory remarks about Hitler and for having said: ‘Do you think then that nobody listens to the foreign broadcasts? They have loaded Jewish women and children into a wagon, driven out of town, and annihilated them with gas.’ An accountant from Brackwede was convicted by the Special Court in Bielefeld for allegedly saying that ‘What happened with the Jews is being avenged now.’ He had heard from soldiers at the front ‘that the Jews were murdered in their thousands’. On 6 October 1943, Himmler took the unprecedented step of addressing the wider Nazi leadership gathered in Posen, telling them how he had dealt with ‘the problem of defeatism’ through a small number of exemplary executions of those talking out of turn:

We will never catch every winger and neither do we want to do so . . . Those who are caught have to pay the price – that is after all the point of any law – and by their death serve as a lesson and a warning to thousands of others, so that they don’t unwisely do the same.

The small, selective wave of terror against individuals accused of spreading the same ‘defeatist rumours’ which the SD continued to report from all across Germany was meant to demonstrate where the limits of public speech lay. In the same address at Posen, Himmler made the first explicit announcement about the extermination of the Jews. This was hardly news to his audience, but it was different for the Reich leaders and Gauleiters to be told officially and bound to secrecy. Himmler told them, ‘I believe it is better, we – we collectively – have done this for our people, have taken the responsibility on ourselves – the responsibility for a deed not just for an idea – and we then carry the secret with us to our graves.’
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The regime could demand silence from the German people, but it could not alter the fact that the shared secret of the murder of the Jews had been broached openly across Germany and that such talk did not strengthen support for the regime. But it did not provoke real action either: dissent never progressed beyond idle talk of regime change and a separate peace. Meanwhile, that autumn the Swiss consul in Cologne observed that the knowledge ‘that the evacuated Jews had been murdered in their totality’ was ‘seeping through ever more’. The more it informed the common stock of knowledge, the more it fed the bleakest of expectations about how genocidal the war would become.

What Germans wanted above all was a solution to the war in the west, which would strengthen their position to fight the war in the east through to a conclusion. The crisis of August 1943 was unprecedented. And yet it proved to be a brief interlude. Events in Italy brought the German crisis to a close. Marshal Badoglio’s moment of popularity in August 1943 grew from rekindled hope in peace. On 8 September 1943, the associations with his name changed unalterably, when news came through that he had signed an armistice with the Allies. Many Germans would have liked to do so too, but for their closest Axis ally to do so was pure ‘treachery’. The Wehrmacht’s response was swift, decisive and a real boost to morale at home, as twenty divisions completed the German occupation of the Italian peninsula, engaging the Allies at Salerno.
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The lightning military response did not resolve the moral quandary about the meaning of ‘Jewish retaliation’ but it did end the domestic crisis by showing that Germany was not as helpless as it had appeared a month earlier. A million Italian soldiers were equally swiftly ‘interned’ by their former German allies, and 710,000 of them sent to the Reich. There they found themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of foreign workers: like Red Army prisoners, they were denied Prisoner of War status under the Geneva Conventions. Their appalling treatment was accompanied by a new German nickname for traitors: ‘Badoglios’. Universally reviled as old prejudices were let loose on former allies, the Italians were punished, above all, for the failure of German hopes.
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12

Remembrance Sunday fell on 21 November 1943, a Lutheran memorial introduced to Prussia at the end of the Napoleonic wars. For Hamburg, nearly four months after the raids, it served as the first collective act of commemoration and the pastor of St Peter’s invited all the city’s churches to join him in a communion service to unite the scarred parishes with those that had been spared. Exceptionally, given its central location between the Alster and the Zollkanal, St Peter’s, with its iconic fourteenth-century bronze lionhead door handles, had survived relatively intact. The service attracted just ninety-one people.
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Despite the religious significance of the day, the churches could not compete with the Party-led ritual which unfolded at the same time in front of the burnt-out shell of the town hall on Adolf Hitler Square. Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann led the mourning and remembrance in a choreography which fused the secular and sacred, the Party and the city. In front of a huge crowd, state and city officials, the Party and its organisations and all three branches of the military were marshalled in serried ranks, their flagpoles pointing at the ground, while across the city flags flew at half mast. A bass-voiced actor intoned the words of the Nazi poet Gerhard Schumann’s ‘Immortality’:

Birth wants death, to die is to give birth.

You may mourn now, but do not despair.

When Kaufmann took the podium, the standard-bearers on the square swung their banners aloft, the flags on the buildings were hoisted to full mast, and the tone shifted from remembrance to resilience. The Gauleiter promised that Hamburg’s citizens would remain worthy through all the demands of the war. Echoing the religious liturgy, he claimed that they had withstood ‘the great hour of trial’ during the nights of July. He pledged that Hamburg would be rebuilt, reminding his audience that much of the city – including both the town hall and St Peter’s – had been destroyed in the great fire of 1842:

The city has a difficult history behind it, but also one that binds us. It has borne many sacrifices in war, destruction, struggle and hardship, and it has always arisen again in more radiant beauty and increased greatness. These ruins around us and the dead are an everlasting covenant for our mission.

Afterwards, people gathered in their thousands at the Ohlsdorf cemetery for the official wreath-laying. Here the city architect Konstanty Gutschow had created an enormous cruciform grave – measuring 280 metres from north to south and 240 metres east to west – to hold the 34,000 victims. It had been dug at great speed to avert the risk of epidemics in the summer heat, with the dead delivered by the truckload. The workforce was kept supplied with cigarettes and alcohol to offset the ‘very bad taste in your mouth’ produced by decomposing corpses. ‘We have had the best luck with rum,’ a local administrator reported. In Hamburg, as in other cities, most of the burial squads were made up of prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. When their work was complete, along its length wide oak boards were positioned at intervals across the grave, carved with the names of the destroyed quarters of the city: HAMMERBROOK, ROTHENBURGSORT, HAMM, BARMBECK. Creating this aesthetic had meant clearing away the many private memorials relatives had erected in the meantime, decorated with the names and photographs of the deceased.

In this collective act of commemoration, perhaps the most important element was time. Göring had held his ‘Thermopylae’ speech while remnants of the 6th Army were still surrendering at Stalingrad, profoundly shocking a public emotionally unprepared for the military disaster and the loss of a whole army. Whereas Göring and Goebbels had wanted to enact the rites over Stalingrad immediately, in order to use the shared moment to create a collective experience of heroism, the scale of the crisis after the Hamburg bombing enforced a delay of months and gave time for the initial shock to pass. It allowed the bereaved to embrace the joint mourning which local Nazi leaders in Hamburg now offered the whole community: by promising reconstruction, resilience and rebirth, they also steered away from the overblown martyrology expended on Stalingrad. The mass pilgrimage to the Ohlsdorf cemetery was repeated on 25 July 1944, the first anniversary of the attack, and has been every year since, the ritual’s success evident in the fact that its Nazi origins would be gradually forgotten.
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