The German War (21 page)

At the outset organisation was haphazard, with children sleeping on loose straw while bunks were being built in their dormitories, but there was no shortage of enthusiastic improvisation. On 28 January 1941, Anneliese A. wrote home from Silesia to tell her parents that she had arrived safely at a convent, where the nuns catered for them. They had been busy preparing their beds but her parents needed to send her extra bed linen. Two days later, she wrote that she was skiing to school and settling in well, sharing a dormitory with two of her best friends. Ten-year-old Gisela Henn left Cologne for an East Prussian farm in September 1940. It was her first time away from home and she had to adjust quickly. By the time she was sent on another six-month placement in Saxony the following April, she was expected to feed the ducks and help out with the summer harvest. It was a success and her mother remained in contact with the Saxon farmer’s wife. A third and happy placement in a KLV home was organised through Gisela’s school.
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Social workers from the National Socialist People’s Welfare supervised the placements and did their best to move children who were unhappy to other families, while the Hitler Youth organised group activities, such as the evening programme of group discussions and singalongs, team sports and route marches. This sense of collective belonging may have helped combat homesickness and isolation, but it also exacerbated clashes between different classes, regions and cultures. Ruhr boys who jeered at the ‘cultural trash of the east’ made themselves thoroughly unpopular in the villages of Pomerania and East Prussia. In the countryside, these new arrivals from from the industrial cities stood out and were automatically blamed for any acts of theft or vandalism.
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More popular than the insular world of the Prussian eastern marches, with their flat expanses of
Junker
great estates, were southern Germany and the Czech lands, where the evacuation programme re-stimulated a tourist infrastructure that had been stagnating since 1939. Even in the more convivial world of south-west German family farms, however, first impressions could be jarring. When a group of boys from the Ruhr arrived in Megesheim in February 1941, they were lined up in front of the village school while the farmers’ wives inspected them. Ten-year-old Rudolf Lenz, the last to be picked, described the whole episode as a ‘slave market’. The city boys looked puny, and he learned later that the local farmers had been promised strong and healthy boys to fill the shortfall of agricultural labour. Brought up as a Protestant in a fairly secular area, he had never encountered anything like the Catholicism of a Swabian village, where his foster mother knelt down in the fields when the church bell rang for midday and evening prayers. But at 10, he adjusted easily, enjoyed helping with the harvest, and his parents had trouble understanding his strong Swabian accent when they saw him at the end of the summer.
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Another special train left Essen on 27 April 1941, taking teenage girls to the Moravian town of Kremsier. Welcomed at the station by local members of the League of German Girls and the Hitler Youth, they marched to the requisitioned convent that became their new home. Some of the nuns had been kept on to cater for the girls. It was the kind of set-up that Schirach and his team set out to create. The new intake quickly learned the communal routines of bed-making, tidying their lockers and dormitories, as well as appearing on time and correctly dressed for the morning assembly, when the flag was raised. It was like a boarding school without corporal punishment. True to their motto that ‘Youth leads youth’, order was maintained by the BDM leader, and to foster a sense of comradeship, penalties were meted out to the whole group – holding back the post for three days, and, on the worst occasion, an 8-kilometre march, executed in utter silence. But the BDM leader, an older teenager herself, let the girls tease her and also borrow her radio so that they could dance on every birthday.
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One of the older girls from Essen, 15-year-old Ilse Pfofe, found their ‘propaganda marches’ especially empowering; she felt that they were helping to stamp a German and secular culture on the predominantly Czech and Catholic town. They marched on Palm Sunday to disrupt the church procession and again for a sports festival on 29 June, where they were led by a military band. Afterwards, Ilse noted happily that the ‘Czechs are bursting with rage’. Left to their own devices, the girls started sunbathing in their gym slips and swimming costumes and doing exercises in the French park, where they could be admired by the young men in the German garrison. At the end of one such summer day, Ilse reckoned she had been photographed forty times. However innocent their cinema dates, she already felt far more grown up than when she had left Essen.
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After the opening mass raid of 7 September 1940, London was bombed on 9, 11 and 14 September during the day and on every single one of the next fifty-seven nights. The head of German radio, Eugen Hadamovsky, wangled his way on to one of the first night raids, providing listeners with a first-hand account:

Beneath us, we saw the red blazing metropolis of England, the centre of plutocrats and slaveholders, the capital of World-Enemy No. 1. We saw the fires of destruction. Clouds of smoke and pillars of fire looked like the flow of lava from a titanic volcano . . . London is wrapped in flames . . . Unheard by us, without respite, the most dreadful scenes must be occurring down here, beneath our machines . . . Anti-aircraft shells explode around us. Suddenly a searchlight appears in our vicinity. Heavens! It has caught us, it keeps us. We are blinded and cannot see. A sudden move of the pilot, the machine rushes downwards, into the depths. Saved, and he has refound the darkness.

The Wehrmacht bulletins continued to present the raids on London and other ‘non-military’ objectives as retaliation for the ‘night pirates’ of the RAF. News bulletins often started with accounts of RAF bombing of churches, graveyards and schools in Germany, before turning to the Luftwaffe. Each day the radio brought news of the ‘worst’ attack, the ‘longest’ alarm, the ‘heaviest’ bombardment, the ‘heaviest attack of all times’. ‘Increasing’ was the word most often heard on German radio. ‘The air war over England increases day by day and hour by hour. It is like a howling crescendo.’
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The German public knew that this was a different kind of campaign from conquering enemy territory. National papers like the
Völkischer Beobachter
printed maps which illustrated the targets of the previous night’s raids, or, more rarely, aerial photos of the bombed airfields to satisfy demands for more detailed information. The local press could not satisfy the public’s thirst for this kind of information, and so readers turned increasingly to national titles. The newsreels relayed images of long-range guns firing across the Channel at Dover, squadrons flying over the English coast and action by Stukas and bombers, but without film it had to pad out its forty minutes with footage of circus performances, horse racing, football and, of course, the Führer.
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In this war of attrition, both sides lived by numbers. From July to September, Luftwaffe fighters claimed to have shot down 3,198 British planes, while the RAF asserted it had downed 2,698 German ones. From the outset, the British and German communiqués disputed each other’s figures, with German radio insisting on 15 August that since the reliability of the German news ‘has so far never disappointed, naturally the German, not the English, reports of recent air battles are believed in the world’. At the end of August, ordinary people trying to keep tally realised that German losses were higher than in the battle for France. Still, they seemed sustainable. By mid-September, however, doubt grew after a radio talk given by Air Force General Erich Quade, whose sober tone contrasted with the more upbeat reports of the war reporters embedded in the Luftwaffe. The SD noted that people were perturbed that the numbers Quade cited no longer matched their own running tallies: ‘If England only possessed the number of planes named by Quade at the start of the war, then, adding up all the numbers of hits, it can’t have a single plane left today, or else British aircraft production is achieving something quite extraordinary.’ They were surprised too to hear the general praise the Spitfire, having become accustomed to reports that it was no match for the Messerschmitt 109.
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In the absence of hard fact, rumours abounded. There was talk of French and Japanese declarations of war on Britain, and news of Italian air squadrons being brought to Berlin, all feeding the hope that the long-awaited invasion of England was imminent. While Germans continued to trust the eyewitness reports of the bombing of Britain, they increasingly questioned their media’s reporting from the home front. They queried whether the RAF deliberately targeted hospitals and schools, or had simply missed nearby military targets. Had the British really meant to bomb the US embassy in Berlin? As the weeks dragged on, people listened increasingly to foreign radio. As one wit put it, ‘They lie and we are lying also.’
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The air war put German propaganda to the test. Goebbels himself believed that the superiority of British propaganda in the previous war had significantly contributed to the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918. Anglophilia had been widespread in the 1920s and ’30s, encouraged by, amongst others, the Nazis themselves. A barrage of films, books, newspaper articles and radio features now set out to correct such views, lambasting the British class system and the evils it had inflicted on the Boers, the Irish and the English working class. From February 1940, 6,000 student volunteers helped the Propaganda Ministry by combing the libraries and amassing data on British unemployment, health insurance, working-class slums and malnutrition amongst schoolchildren. The BBC would eventually enlist George Orwell for its wartime broadcasts to India, but German propaganda immediately reprinted his damning indictment of working-class poverty. A glossy coffee-table publication like
The Doomed Island
juxtaposed the two Englands, contrasting photos of the East End and the Jarrow hunger marchers with shots of toffs at Royal Ascot and Henley Royal Regatta. The Nazi regime claimed it was fighting the same ‘plutocracy’ that had ruined Weimar Germany and was stifling social progress in Britain. Against the ‘empty’ formal freedoms of liberal Britain, Germany had guaranteed the greatest freedom of all: social freedom from want. It had overcome the poverty and hunger of the Depression years, solved unemployment and abolished free-market capitalism. England still needed to be liberated from a decadent, aristocratic class system, into which the Jewish city huckster had insinuated himself. There were frequent calls for the bombing not to spare the ‘plutocratic neighbourhoods’ of London’s West End. Germany’s ‘blood brothers’ across the North Sea needed to be helped to liberate themselves – from poverty, hunger, injustice and domination by an alien race.
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Despite German outrage at British intransigence and its ‘cowardly’, ‘terroristic’ way of waging war, a powerful strain of Anglophilia remained. The idea of a Jewish ‘plutocracy’ at work in London allowed the Nazi regime to maintain a clear distinction between fighting the British government and hating the British people. In Münster the journalist Paulheinz Wantzen noted that ‘Our policy aims at dividing people and government’. This very Anglophile Anglophobia emphasised things that Germans already believed, without undermining their admiration of British ‘character-building’ and other achievements. Above all, the student researchers provided ready quotations of eminent ‘British authors criticising Britain’ – from Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells to George Orwell and, above all, George Bernard Shaw. Jonathan Swift’s
A Modest Proposal
was reprinted and cited to underline the callousness of the English ruling class in the face of famine in Ireland. Anglophone critics of domestic and colonial injustice served to unmask the altruism of Britain’s imperial ‘burden’, as Shaw had done with ironic wit in his preface to
The Man of Destiny.
By relying on British critics, Goebbels’s propagandists claimed a degree of objectivity as well as the high moral ground, while allowing Germans to go on admiring and assimilating British culture.

In 1940, personnel of one Berlin flak battery divided their time between watching out for RAF bombers while on duty and performing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
while off duty. During the 1930s Shakespeare had been performed more frequently in Germany than in Britain. Hitler, who once remarked that ‘in no other country is Shakespeare performed as badly as in England’, intervened personally to have the enemy dramatist unbanned after the outbreak of war. The director of the German Theatre in Berlin, Heinz Hilpert, responded to the bombing of Britain by planning to put on no fewer than three plays by Shaw and another three by Shakespeare in a single season.
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With its world empire, Britain remained the power that the Nazi leadership wanted Germany to become. Attacking the ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘cant’ of British claims to be defending ‘humanity’ generated a peculiar kind of Nazi anti-imperialism. It mobilised a righteous sense of outrage; nowhere more so than in the epic film
Ohm Krüger,
the story of the Boer War from the Afrikaner perspective. Released in April 1941, as the bombing of London and the British ports continued, the film was one of the greatest box office hits. Told in flashback by Paul Krüger who recalled the events of 1899, the film portrayed Cecil Rhodes’s merciless drive for gold and profit in southern Africa. It culminated in scenes in a British concentration camp that held Boer women and children. When one of their hunted husbands is caught speaking to his wife through the barbed wire, the brutal commandant – bearing a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill – forces all the women and children in the camp to watch the man being hanged, and responds to the mounting tumult by ordering his troops to open fire. It was the only massacre in a concentration camp ever to be shown in Nazi Germany. As they were meant to, viewers unhesitatingly identified with the Boer victims. In the final hush, audiences could hear the great actor Emil Jannings deliver Krüger’s plea: ‘But the day of retaliation will come. I don’t know when . . . We were only a small, weak nation. Greater and stronger nations . . . will smite England’s soil. God will be with him. Then the way will be free for a better life.’
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