The German War (10 page)

The Lutheran churches expressed the prevalent sense of Prusso-German nationalism. In an official exchange of greetings with the Evangelical Consistory in Poland, the Protestant Church of the Old Prussian Union welcomed its co-religionists back into the national fold, acknowledging that ‘The events of these weeks legitimise the twenty-year struggle in which the Evangelical Consistory of the now liberated parishes of Poland and West Prussia has waged.’ Whatever had happened during and after the short military campaign was more than justified. As the text that the churches’
Gazette
carried for Harvest Festivals of Thanksgiving read, ‘We thank Him that age-old German territory was permitted to return to the Fatherland and that our German brothers are free once more . . . We thank Him that decades of injustice have been broken through the gift of His mercy and the way opened for a new ordering of the nations, for a peace of honour and justice.’
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Poland itself rapidly became a non-topic in Germany. By mid-October 1939, a mere two weeks after Hitler had reviewed his victorious troops in Warsaw and only a week after the church bells had stopped ringing in celebration, an undercover reporter for the exiled German Social Democrats could find ‘hardly a single person who still spoke of the “victory” over Poland’. Now that the dispute over Poland had been settled with the country’s dismemberment, hopes revived that peaceful relations with the Western powers could be restored.
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On 6 October, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. The CBS reporter in Berlin, William Shirer, noticed that it was ‘a lovely fall day, cold and sunny, which seemed to contribute to everybody’s good feelings’. Underscoring his pacific intentions, Hitler insisted again that he had no territorial claims on Britain and France and once more offered to make peace with the Western powers. He even offered to create a rump Polish state. As usual, Hitler blamed ‘a certain international Jewish capitalism and journalism’ for the warmongering, leaving it to the good sense of the British to avoid the death and destruction which would follow if they chose to continue the war. In any event, he insisted, Germany would never surrender: ‘A November 1918 will never be repeated in German history.’
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Seated with the rest of the press in the gallery of the former opera house, Shirer had a sense of déjà vu. Hitler’s words, he noted,

were almost identical with those I’ve heard him offer from the same rostrum after every conquest he has made since the march into the Rhineland in 1936 . . . And though they were the fifth at least, and just like the others and just as sincerely spoken, most Germans I’ve talked to since seem aghast if you suggest that perhaps the outside world will put no more trust in them than they have learned by bitter experience to put in the others.

The German press made the most of it, the banner headlines of the Party’s daily paper, the
Völkischer Beobachter,
screaming, ‘GERMANY’S WILL FOR PEACE – NO WAR AIMS AGAINST FRANCE AND ENGLAND – NO MORE REVISION CLAIMS EXCEPT FOR COLONIES – REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS – CO-OPERATION WITH ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE – PROPOSAL FOR A CONFERENCE’. Perhaps, Shirer remarked wearily, ‘If the Nazis were sincere they might have spoken this sweet language before the “counter-attack” was launched.’
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On Monday 9 October, troops returning to Vienna from Poland were greeted with the news that the British government had resigned and the war was over. The next morning excited civilians shouted the wonderful news to the troop trains as they passed through the outskirts of Berlin: ‘You can go home, the war’s over!’ As the news spread in the capital, people ran out into the streets and squares to celebrate. Students rushed from the lecture halls and held spontaneous meetings. At the weekly farmers’ market in the Berlin neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, new customers refused to add their names to the official lists, convinced that rationing would soon cease. On the stock exchange, the news drove up the price of government bonds. The rumour spread nationwide, questioned and reconfirmed by officials at the German telephone and telegraph exchanges, down the line in Bratislava (Pressburg), Reichenberg, Rumburg, Idar-Oberstein, Baden-Baden and Graz, as late as 10.30 a.m. on 10 October. So great was the popular desire for peace that it took a radio announcement to bring the speculation to an end.
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Britain and France immediately rejected the German ‘peace offer’, prompting German children to sing a new ditty in the street: ‘Oh Chamberlain, oh Chamberlain, whatever will become of you?’ to the tune of the Christmas carol, ‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum’. A parody of the Lord’s Prayer also spread across the country, which gave voice to the sense of national frustration – and disappointment: ‘Father Chamberlain, who is in London / May your name be cursed / May your kingdom vanish.’ The main achievement of Hitler’s initiative was to continue the pretence of speaking peace in order to usher the German people further down the path of war. Yet the rumours of an armistice revealed, according to the SD, ‘how strong is the general public’s
wish for peace’.
Soothsayers and fortune tellers continued to do a brisk trade. In Bavaria, it was said that the popular stigmatic Therese Neumann from Konnersreuth had prophesied an early end to the war.
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Despite the victory over Poland, the real war had not yet begun. By pinning all the responsibility on the British, the Nazi regime was reminding its population that they faced a tough opponent in the British. Morever, the French Army was still larger and better equipped than the German forces, and the line of French fortifications in the south had been turned into the formidable Maginot Line. No one could see how Germany could ever defeat France and Britain, and the failure of diplomatic overtures in late August and again in early October deepened the sense of national gloom. Convinced that Germany would not be ready to launch an offensive in the west for at least two years, on 17 September the Army High Command issued a directive to prepare for a static, defensive war. When Hitler abruptly reversed this order ten days later, telling his generals in a face-to-face meeting that Germany was to launch an offensive that very autumn, even the ultra-loyal Nazi General, Walther von Reichenau, considered his leader’s plans ‘nothing short of criminal’. Hermann Göring, effectively the second most powerful man in the Reich, redoubled his efforts to find a diplomatic solution at the same time as he was directing the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign against Polish cities. On 10 October, Hitler pressured his military leaders by advocating a campaign through Belgium. Confronted with such concrete proposals, the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, had little choice but to work them up into what even he later described as an ‘unimaginitive rehash of the Schlieffen Plan’ of 1914.
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In the atmosphere of despair, the head of military counter-intelligence, Admiral Canaris, and his deputy, Hans Oster, renewed their plotting to oust Hitler. In their search for a military figurehead they tried to recruit Halder and sounded out the commanders of the three army groups on the western front, Gerd von Rundstedt, Fedor von Bock and Ritter von Leeb. None believed that the attack plans through Belgium would work; but none saw any alternative to staying at their posts and doing their duty. While Canaris and Oster went on looking for a general willing to play politics, Hitler continued to control the military through the head of the Wehrmacht High Command office, General Wilhelm Keitel, the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, headed by Alfred Jodl and his deputy Walter Warlimont, and Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. But there was little appetite for the attack they were about to launch. To most commanders’ relief, on 7 November the German offensive was postponed because of bad weather, the first of twenty-nine cancellations that winter.

*

The run-up to Christmas was the peak of the theatre season, and on 9 December 1939 Gustaf Gründgens unveiled a new production at the State Theatre on the Gendarmenmarkt. With beautiful, night-time sets based on paintings and engravings of Paris during the French Revolution,
Danton’s Death
was a lavish production. The theatre’s new, revolving stage expedited its twenty-five scene changes, and it followed the theatre’s pre-Nazi tradition of combining the whole cast, lighting, sets and sounds into a single ensemble. The subject matter of revolutionary terror was so subversive that Georg Büchner’s play had waited until 1902 for its German premiere – sixty-seven years after it was written – and the last major production in Berlin had been directed by the now exiled Max Reinhardt in 1916. Gründgens ranked alongside Heinrich George at the Schiller Theatre and Heinz Hilpert at the German Theatre as one of the brilliant actor-managers Goebbels and Göring had hired to run the Berlin theatres, determined that the Reich capital should outshine Vienna. They frequently proved wayward in their choice of repertoire or production, but though Goebbels had his officials chivvy and chide, cajole and plead with them, in the end he let the actor-managers run their own theatres. The very subject of the play challenged Goebbels’s boast in 1933 that with the Nazi seizure of power ‘the year 1789 has been expunged from the records of history’. The Nazi Party paper,
Der Angriff,
was so appalled that it asked whether such a flawed play was ‘worth so much effort’.
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Gründgens avoided any propagandistic interpretation and directed the two principals, Danton and Robespierre, as tragic figures, the one rousing himself from melancholic passivity to rail against his enemies, the other quietly consumed by the fire of true belief burning within him. Danton, played by Gustav Knuth, brought the house down with his speech to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turning from defendant to accuser as he foretold dictatorship, terror and war – ‘You want bread and they throw you heads.’ But the production impressed the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’s
reviewer, Bruno Werner, above all for its almost lyrical restraint and for the quiet space it gave to the female roles, no more so than in the final scene in which an Ophelia-voiced Marianne Hoppe keened for her executed husband, Camille Desmoulins, rocking herself to and fro on the wooden steps to the guillotine behind her, singing:

Dear cradle, who lulled my Camille to sleep, smothering him beneath your roses

Death-bell, who sang him to his grave with your sweet tongue.

Hundreds of thousands are all

The uncounted who under the blade fall.

With the audience facing the spectacle of the guillotine and the impending slaughter of an entire generation in terror and revolutionary war, the final curtain fell. Before the standing ovations began, there was a long and shocked silence.
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2

In September 1939, August Töpperwien was impressed by the ‘machinelike precision’ with which the country went on to a war footing. In fact, many of the measures he marvelled at depended on a great deal of improvisation. Töpperwien’s wife Gretel went off to the Solingen shops to buy extra plates and spoons to help feed the evacuees from the Saarland. To clear the western border region with France of civilians, special trains were laid on for those without transport. They were met at the stations by teenage girls and boys from the League of German Girls (BDM), and Hitler Youth, served soup at makeshift railway canteens by the National Socialist People’s Welfare and accommodated in school buildings which had just served as military assembly points. The success of the operation depended on goodwill.
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Farmers trekked eastwards out of the Saar region. Their carts piled high with bedding and leading their horses and livestock, they brought chaos to the streets and prompted a spontaneous outpouring of solidarity. In the Hessian village of Altenburschla, Ernst Guicking’s father welcomed a mother and her four young children into their farmhouse. With Ernst himself stationed on the Saarland front, his family farm saw this as a direct kind of exchange: ‘We are happy to do everything we can, if only you can return to us soon. Let God grant that.’ But his tolerance, if not his patriotism, had clear limits. When the evacuees finally returned home two months later, it came none too soon for the old man: ‘In the long run we couldn’t have kept them here. Just think of how dreadful the beds looked. We couldn’t cope because they were very unclean.’ While the hosts were blaming the evacuees for infesting villages with lice, the Catholic Church was complaining that there was no place for devout Saarlanders to worship in Protestant Thuringia. By early November the Security Police estimated that up to 80 per cent of the evacuees were so unhappy with their reception that they had either tried to make their own arrangements or turned around and gone home again.
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Compared to the dislocations which were still to come, the Saarland evacuation was small-scale and, if not forgotten, at least soon overlaid by other experiences of war. Yet the dynamics at work were also a foretaste of what was to come. There was a genuine upsurge of patriotic goodwill, which helped mobilise teenage volunteers, like the BDM girls who turned out at railway stations in the night to provide hot drinks, and which enabled individual hosts to open their doors to bedraggled and needy strangers. This was exactly the kind of patriotism the Nazis had aimed to foster before the war through Hot Pot Sundays where middle-class professionals and managers ate from the same pot of stew along with their workers, or by taking youth groups to different parts of the Reich so as to overcome regional antagonisms and prejudices. Bolstered by references to the German ‘national community’ formed in the crucible of the previous war, such spontaneous national solidarity was seen as a kind of test of the nation’s ability to meet this new challenge through purposeful and united action.
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It was a test that German society never really passed. There was no lack of patriotic commitment or understanding of the justice of the German cause. The flaw lay in the very notion that a few ritual gestures could turn a highly differentiated and often conflictual modern society into a cosy pre-modern ‘community’ that had only ever existed in romantic imaginings of a lost ‘golden age’ before industrialisation. The longer the war lasted, the more the central state, the Party and its mass organisations, local authorities and the churches would have to do in order to offset this shortfall in national solidarity.