The German War (93 page)

Since midnight the weapons on all fronts are now silent. On the orders of the Grand Admiral, the Wehrmacht has given up the fight which has become hopeless. Thus the heroic struggle which lasted nearly six years has come to an end . . .

The German soldier, true to his oath and with the greatest dedication, has performed deeds which never will be forgotten. The home front supported him to the last with all its powers and suffering the greatest sacrifices.

The unique achievement of the front and home front will find its ultimate appreciation in a future just verdict of history.

This time the home front had stood the test: there had been no repeat of November 1918. Out on the farm on the Lüneburg heath, Agnes Seidel had spent the day sorting out and repairing her worst clothes to donate to a compulsory collection for ‘foreigners, Jews and inmates of concentration camps’. As she helped with the collection, she was surprised at the quantity and quality of what others gave. She was not ready to spare a thought in her diary about the intended recipients. Since the beginning of the British occupation, the farm had seen a kind of uneasy peace between the twenty-two Poles and the thirty Germans, twenty of whom were children. The former forced labourers were increasingly unwilling to work, and, by late April, Agnes was outraged that she was having to butter bread for them. But nothing had occurred here to compare with the reports of armed attacks and robberies coming in from neighbouring farmsteads. As elsewhere, the Germans quickly turned to their conquerors as guarantors of their safety. On 8 May, Agnes Seidel took her children on a hike for the first time since the occupation had begun and the British soldiers showered them with gifts of chocolate and sweets. On 14 May, the old Nazi schoolteacher borrowed some English textbooks to start learning the language of Germany’s enemies.
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When 14-year-old Leonie Bauditz and her mother heard that all the women on their work brigade were about to be sent from Silesia to Russia, they managed to escape, thanks to the help of one of their Russian guards. They returned to Breslau, walking through streets, comprehensively destroyed by the twelve weeks of fighting, until they reached their old apartment block. Not only was the house still standing, but the store of textiles and wool that Leonie’s father had laid by against hard times was still intact. Despite her terrible experiences the teenager soon struck up a friendship with a young Soviet officer who wanted to learn German. They sat together on a bench in the sunshine or, if it rained, on the staircase; but he was only allowed to enter the apartment itself if Leonie’s mother was present.
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Berliners were surprised by the speed with which the Soviet military authorities restored the food supply and set about clearing the streets, repairing the tram and underground lines and restarting the gas, electricity and water supplies. On 3 May, Anneliese H. saw that the Russians had already begun distributing ‘flour, potatoes, bread and goulash’ to ‘long queues’. The writer and war correspondent Vasily Grossman arrived to find women already sweeping the pavements of Berlin and clearing the rubble, and noticed that a girl’s dismembered legs, clad in shoes and stockings, were still lying in the road. The theatre director Gustaf Gründgens and the musician Karla Höcker helped dismantle street barricades which forced labourers had erected weeks earlier. In the quiet and sunshine of early May, Höcker noted ‘the crassness of the situation: we the musicians, artists, bourgeois . . . are clearing away the barricades as pointless traffic obstacles . . . And Asia triumphs!’ By mid-May, Hertha von Gebhardt no longer felt afraid to go out on to the street alone during the day and the nightly break-ins by Soviet soldiers had abated. Now her block of flats would only be robbed by her own ‘national comrades’, as Germans faced a new wave of crime perpetrated by their fellow countrymen. Gebhardt had the impression that every Russian who wanted a girlfriend had now found one, noting that ‘many are wandering along arm in arm . . . Overall, everyone is delighted. Russians are so nice,’ she wrote with a trace of irony as well as surprise.
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Her status as a writer secured for Gebhardt privileges on the new scale of rationing instituted by the Soviet Command in Berlin, and through her network of German acquaintances she found an empty flat in a former artists’ colony. Having rescued most of their possessions from the old Geroldstrasse flat and cellar – only their violin had been stolen – Hertha and Renate carried their two wicker chairs, many suitcases, a hundredweight of brickettes, firewood, manuscripts and a small library to the new flat – only to have it broken into and plundered by Germans. Mother and daughter had learned to step around the dead horse in the Heidelberger Platz and the corpses of Soviet and German soldiers still lying in the streets. They noticed the many improvised graves in the gardens. The mains were still not connected to the houses, and at the water pump a new ordinance permitted Jews and foreigners to go to the head of the queue. ‘Vox pop,’ Gebhardt noted on 12 May. ‘That is only right! The poor Jews! All of a sudden everyone had always sympathised. All of a sudden no one was a Nazi!’
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On 18 May, the Klemperers finally left Unterbernbach, armed with Victor’s yellow star, Jewish identity card and a paper from the local American administration attesting that he was a famous and persecuted professor. They cadged a lift to the outskirts of Munich, where they found that everything was more chaotic than six weeks earlier. Against the grey thundery sky of a Saturday afternoon, the white ruins of the city looked to Victor like a scene from the Last Judgement. The roaring of the American trucks and jeeps ‘made the picture of hell complete; they are the angels of judgement,’ he noted. Smothered by the dust of the rubble churned up by the motor vehicles, sweating in the summer heat and burdened by their suitcases and heavy winter clothes, the Klemperers trudged along, looking for shelter, food and permits to cross the new border into the Soviet zone of occupation. They hoped that they could reclaim their home outside Dresden, and Victor his professorial chair. Against the odds, they would succeed, but for now, dimly aware of his own residual nationalism, Victor reflected bitterly on how much liberation felt like defeat: ‘Curious conflict within me: I rejoice in God’s vengeance on the Henchmen of the Third Reich . . . and yet I find it dreadful now to see the victors and avengers racing through the city which they have so hellishly wrecked.’
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On 9 May 1945, Germans awoke to defeat. The stillness was remarkable. No shell bursts, no bombs, no blackout. It was neither the peace which had been so longed for, nor the annihilation which had been so dreaded. For 16-year-old Wilhelm Körner it was so hard to grasp that he wrote nothing in his diary for another week. When he picked it up again it was to vent his anguish:

The 9th of May will definitely count amongst the blackest days of German history. Capitulation! We youths of today had struck the word from our vocabulary, and now we have had to experience how our German people after an almost six-year encirclement has had to lay down its arms. And how bravely has our people borne all hardships and sacrifices.

‘Now it is up to us not to give up the spirit which has been planted in us and to remember that we are Germans,’ he continued. ‘If we forget that, then we are also betraying the dead who fell for a better Fatherland.’ The son of a headmaster in Bremen who had gone through the Hitler Youth, the flak and finally the Volkssturm, Wilhelm was young enough to believe he could hold on to his wartime patriotism beyond the reality of complete defeat.
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In its final report on morale at the end of March 1945, the SD had broached the question of defeatism, the spreading certainty that nothing could rescue the war effort any more. Far from the revolutionary response the Nazis had always feared, they found ‘deep-seated disappointment at misplaced trust, a feeling of grief, despondency, bitterness and growing rage, above all amongst those who have known nothing in this war other than sacrifice and work’. The first response was not rebellion so much as a rush of self-pity, with people quoted as saying, ‘We did not deserve to be led into such a catastrophe.’ Such sentiments were more self-righteous than anti-Nazi, as people of all classes ‘excused themselves of any guilt for the course the war had taken’, insisting ‘that it was not they who had had responsibility for war leadership and politics’. For now the question of ‘guilt’ revolved around the agents of Germany’s greatest disaster. And for those who remembered Goebbels’s weekly articles in
Das Reich
in which he called on the German people to trust the Nazi leadership through all of the crises of the war, it was clear where responsibility for the nation’s defeat lay.
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Listening to conversations on the streets of the eastern suburb of Friedrichshagen in late April, while the battle for the centre of Berlin was still raging, Liselotte Günzel was appalled by the speed with which people changed political allegiance, now ‘cursing Hitler’. ‘From one day to the next. First they are all Nazis and suddenly Communists. Out of the brown skin into the red one,’ the 17-year-old noted in her diary, resolving that ‘I will keep clear of the whole infatuation with the Party. At the most a Social Democrat like my parents.’ As news of the suicide of Hitler and Goebbels spread, people’s sense of rage at having been abandoned by their leaders rapidly grew; so too did the feeling that having lived under a dictatorship absolved one of personal responsibility for all that had happened.
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It was their first encounters with their victors which exposed Germans to a different kind of guilt. While the battle for Aachen was still raging in mid-October 1944, a US Army psychological warfare unit filed one of the first reports from German territory. It found ‘a latent and possibly deep-seated sense of guilt, owing to the brutalities committed by the German armies in Europe, particularly in the east and against the Jews’, adding that: ‘Germans have resigned themselves to the idea of retribution and only hope that the Americans would moderate the rage of those who will punish them. But the idea of punishment they do accept.’
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One of the stranger elements of personal encounters between Allied victors and vanquished Germans in the early summer of 1945 were the sporadic attempts to instigate a moral reckoning. The writer and publisher Hermann Kasack described one such meeting, which took place in June 1945 at his villa in Potsdam. Here a Soviet officer began to tell of his sister:

At 17 years of age, she had . . . been tormented and abused by a German soldier; the soldier, as he put it, had ‘red hair and eyes like an ox’. We sat there in anguish as the Georgian officer exclaimed in anger that just thinking of it made him want to wring people’s necks. ‘But’, he added after a pause, ‘you – good, you – good.’ And he alluded to the fact that he knew how to behave, as we had to admit that he did. His rage at the suffering of his unfortunate sister kept boiling over again, and as so often in these days and weeks and in fact in all the Nazi years, we experienced again the shame of being Germans. After a time which felt unbelievably long to us but hardly lasted more than an hour and a half, he bade farewell, promising to return the next day, and departed . . . What a disgrace and what a humiliation to have to be born amongst the Germans.

What was remarkable in the summer of 1945 was the victors’ frequent need to start some kind of dialogue with the conquered enemy, to force individual Germans to understand what they had done. In Hertha von Gebhardt’s cellar, a Soviet soldier spent hours talking to his captive audience, frequently threatening to execute them. In another case, a 29-year-old nurse recorded how an officer, who had proved himself ‘always friendly and lovable’ to her children, came into her room, cradled the smallest in his arms and, gesturing at the other two, said, ‘“Pretty children! – I too wife and child, one year [old]! The Germans killed them both. Like so!” And he imitated slitting the stomach open!! “SS?” I asked. He nodded. (He was a Jew).’
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While the threat of violence forced Germans to see themselves as collectively guilty, it also created new barriers, deterring people from rethinking what their particular roles and responsibilities had been. On 12 April 1945, with the Americans and British across the Rhine and the Red Army on the Oder, Ursula von Kardorff was quite explicit about both her fear and her sense of guilt: ‘And when the others [Allies] come with their boundless hatred and gruesome accusations, we will have to keep quiet because they are true.’ But for many Germans it was an all-too-brief moment of openness, which did not endure beyond the immediate aftermath of defeat. By the time Hannah Arendt visited Germany in 1949, she was struck by her former fellow countrymen’s lack of emotional engagement and unwillingness to discuss what had happened. And when Ursula von Kardorff prepared her diary for publication in 1962, she quietly cut her acknowledgement of German guilt.
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Even in 1945, there were two quite different conversations about guilt in Germany. One concerned the lost war and who bore responsibility for the German ‘catastrophe’: this was the self-pitying conversation within the German ‘national community’ that the SD had picked up in the final weeks of the war. The other concerned German war crimes and involved a sense of moral reckoning, which Germans expected to be enforced upon them by the victorious Allies. As Göring had warned in October 1943,

Let no one be under any illusions and think he can come along later and say: I was always a good democrat under these dreadful Nazis. The Jew will give you the correct answer irrespective of whether you say you have been the greatest admirer of Jews or the greatest hater of Jews. He will treat the one like the other. For his thirst for vengeance encompasses the German nation.

This dissonant dualism of German guilt – the crimes committed against the Jews and the greater crime to have lost the war – became more, not less, entrenched in the post-war years. Despite the markedly different ideological approaches to ‘re-education’ pursued by the occupying powers, by the time the Third Reich’s three successor states had been founded in 1949 in all of them a sense of German victimhood came to overshadow any sense of shared responsibility for the suffering of Germany’s victims. Mass death, homelessness, expulsion and hunger rendered defeat and the first years of occupation far worse for many German civilians than their experience of the war itself. And there was now no greater national cause which could be invoked to justify or compensate for enduring such suffering.