The German War (40 page)

The German women have stood up to be counted and sent such a hot wave of love and gentleness to their soldiers in the east that it must be easy for you to fight for such women and mothers. If victory can be wrung through love and sacrifice, then ours is certain. It is a holy, yes, the holiest love which has been sent to you by all of Germany’s women.

Gushing with romantic idealism for such ‘love donations’, Liselotte also got a sense of what it must be like at the front during the cold snap in the second half of January in Berlin. As domestic coal supplies were curtailed and the thermometer plunged to −22 °C, she pulled on all her jumpers and worked on in her studio with freezing face and hands: ‘For sure, no comparison to your chill, but it’s enough.’
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The men at the front were astonished by the home front’s generosity. Wilhelm Moldenhauer travelled 20 kilometres with three sledges to collect his unit’s share of the fur collection and immediately replaced his worn-out mittens with an excellent pair of fur-lined leather gloves. The men marvelled at the range of items, including a ‘black overcoat with velvet collar, a bright blue jacket with gold buttons and gold fastenings’. If German troops had begun to look like the Russian peasants and prisoners whose clothes they had taken, now ‘the
Landser
can put on the finest masquerade’. Helmut Paulus was similarly astonished by the bales of knitwear that arrived in early February, ‘a mass of knitted vests, socks and gloves’, and was grateful to replace his socks with a good pair which had only been darned once. He was even happier to be given ‘a pair of brand-new, hand-knitted woollen gloves, worked like mittens but with the index finger free to shoot and work the machine gun. That’s really practical because I haven’t had any finger gloves till now and always got cold hands when shooting.’
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The Red Army’s counter-offensive finally petered out in March 1942. It had failed to exploit its stunning breakthroughs and encircle the different elements of Army Group Centre, mainly because of Stalin’s insistence that it attack along the entire line of the front. With the dissipation of the Red Army’s forces, the Germans were able to cling on to what for over two months had looked like hopeless positions. But every German commander knew just how very near they had come to sharing the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 1812, a parallel Hitler himself drew a number of times.
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True to his own Social Darwinist views of war, Hitler told the Danish Foreign Minister on 27 November that ‘If the German people are no longer strong enough and ready to sacrifice their own blood for their existence, then they should perish and be wiped out by another, stronger power. They are no longer worthy of the place they have won for themselves.’ On 27 January 1942, over lunch with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler settled into a lengthy monologue about German national character, at the end of which he repeated this assessment: ‘Faith moves mountains. In that respect I see things with the coldest objectivity. If the German people has lost its faith, if the German people were no longer inclined to give itself body and soul in order to survive – then the German people would have nothing to do but disappear!’ First articulated in response to the great crisis of 1941, it would become one of Hitler’s
idées fixes
and it would appear again in his gloomiest reactions to the final phase of the war in 1945. Hitler was careful never to voice this view in public.
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As Heroes Memorial Day on 15 March approached, the Catholic Church threw itself into affirming the meaning of patriotic sacrifice. Conrad Gröber, the Nazi Archbishop of Freiburg, penned a sermon explaining how Germans should acknowledge that their war dead

were heroes who believed that they were risking their lives and dying for a better German future, for a new and more just order of nations and for a potentially lasting peace on earth . . . They brought a true sacrifice, a sacrifice for all others . . . They were prepared to shed their blood so that the nation weakened with age and other ills would be rejuvenated, healthy and flourishing. They wanted to conquer Bolshevism with the battle-cry, ‘God wills it’, just as the liberator of Spain Franco declared . . . They died for Europe, in order to stem the red tide and to build a protective wall for the entire Western world.

Bishop Galen of Münster took over the sermon word for word.
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Heroes Memorial Day itself was commemorated in the Courtyard of Honour in the Berlin Arsenal. Paying tribute to the German war dead, Hitler spoke of ‘the hardest winter for 140 years’ which ‘was also the sole hope of the power-holders in the Kremlin, to visit on the German Wehrmacht the fate suffered by Napoleon in 1812’. For those who felt that these references to the ‘fallen’ were too fleeting – and the SD picked up many such complaints from bereaved relatives – there was an important coda. After the speech, the radio broadcast the Führer in conversation with wounded veterans. People were impressed by his ‘warm conversational tone’, his knowledge of every place and battle on the eastern front and his ‘inner connection with each and every soldier’. It was indeed a surprising gesture from a dictator who generally avoided direct contact with the soldiers and later on the civilians who bore the scars of his war. Hitler had immured himself all winter far from both the front and Berlin, in the windowless room of his field headquarters in the woodland outside Rastenburg in East Prussia, drinking herbal tea to relieve his stress and insomnia. Now, on the radio, in his conversations with the wounded, Hitler came across as a ‘man and a comrade’.
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In his speech, he remained a ‘statesman and soldier’ and the sentence that triggered the most enthusiastic response was the one which rallied German hopes in coming victory: ‘But one thing we know today: the Bolshevik hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming summer!’ Across Germany the mood of crisis, impending defeat and distrust of the media which had been so strong in January was receding, but there were still some who remembered the unfulfilled promises of victory of the previous autumn, or wondered aloud about the ‘incalculable scale of Soviet strength’. Listeners picked over another pregnant phrase in the speech where Hitler declared ‘that the Bolshevik colossus will find its final borders far away from Europe’s pleasant pastures’. Did he mean that the Soviets could not be completely defeated, only pushed back and penned in behind some kind of ‘East Wall’? people asked each other.

Hitler’s closing declamation was simultaneously disturbing and reassuring: ‘that, despite everything, the years of battle will be shorter than the time of that long and blessed peace which will be the result of the present struggle’. The admission, as the SD registered, that ‘even the Führer cannot predict the end of the war and that it lies in the incalculable distance’ made an enormous impression, because it buried all hope for a swift end to the war. At the same time, millions of German soldiers and civilians were already recalibrating their expectations to this, more difficult prospect. They promised themselves and their wives and fiancées that they would be compensate for all the time they had lost: ‘We’ll make up for it all next year, won’t we?’ one soldier put it. Erna Paulus reminded her son of his worry of 1940, as he had watched the triumphant campaign unfold in France, that he would miss out on the war: ‘You have certainly not been “born too late”; you came at the right time and stand where it is hardest. With loving greetings and wishing you all the best, your mother.’
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PART FOUR

STALEMATE

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If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived. Germany’s cities and the country’s infrastructure might have emerged virtually unscathed from the bombing; as in 1918, the battles had been fought beyond its own borders. There would have been tales of Nazi atrocities: of the gassing of German and Polish psychiatric patients, mass shootings of Poles and Jews, the burning of Russian and Ukrainian villages and towns and the starving to death of 2.5 million Red Army prisoners. This would already have taken Hitler’s war beyond any precedent, but far greater destruction was to come. At the beginning of 1942, most of Europe’s Jews were still alive; by the end of the year, the majority were not.
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The killing of Jews began in the east and there, principally, it stayed – a fact which fundamentally shaped both the events of the ‘final solution’ and the ways in which it was perceived by contemporaries. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941 there were many German eyewitnesses, and photographic evidence flooded back to Germany. Despite a formal directive not to take photos, spectators at mass executions routinely snapped pictures, including images of each other photographing the scene. They generally had to send the 35mm camera film home in small canisters to have it developed and printed, so that they would have been seen first in the photographic laboratories, then by family or friends who collected them, before being sent back to the eastern front. The Red Army found thousands of images of killing sites in the uniform pockets of German prisoners and dead, kept next to pictures of their fiancées, wives and children.
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How did people on the home front make sense of this upsurge of mass killing? When Charlotte Jarausch received letters from her husband Konrad, she would have gradually built up a picture of the murderous conditions in his transit camp for Soviet prisoners that November. He mentioned in passing the mass execution of civilians, ‘above all the Jews’, in the nearby forest, as ‘really the most merciful thing’ compared to letting them starve to death with ‘nothing but their shirts to wear in the frost’. What was happening to the Jews stood out even in the generally fatal conditions of her husband’s prisoner-of-war camp. It was not until the following spring that Hans Albring wrote to his friend Eugen Altrogge about the neatly stacked bodies of ‘the half a thousand Jews who were shot’ at one killing site. Such news had a paradoxical character. The closer these witnesses were to the events, the more fragmentary their perspective remained. Graphic and shocking as they were, the killings they witnessed might appear to be discrete or episodic, not part of an organised programme. There were many others, however, who did sense that their details were part of something more global from the outset. Already in August 1941, the reserve policeman Hermann Gieschen had placed his unit’s actions in a wider context for his wife back in Bremen, telling her that ‘150 Jews from this place were shot, men, women and children, all bumped off. The Jews are being completely exterminated. Dear H., please don’t think about it, that’s how it has to be.’ By the following February, Ernst Guicking had been transferred from France to the eastern front too, and wrote home to tell Irene that ‘the Jews are experiencing a fiasco, as we hear. They are all being rounded up and resettled.’
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In the autumn of 1941, knowledge grew rapidly under the twin impact of events and public rhetoric. In October, the killing squads moved westwards, back from Soviet territory and the Baltic states to the villages and towns of Galicia in the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands: they were now operating in territory which was incorporated into the rump Polish General Government ruled from Cracow by Hans Frank. On 12 October 1941, the 133rd Police Battalion executed 10,000–12,000 Jews in Stanislau, leading them in groups of five to the ditches dug across the Jewish cemetery where the killings were watched and photographed by railway workers, soldiers and other policemen. At the same time, the deportation of Jews from the Reich itself began. From 15 October to 9 November, the first twenty-five special trains transported Jews to the Łód
ghetto, each train carrying a thousand deportees: 5,000 came from Vienna, 5,000 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 10,000 from the ‘old’ Reich; there were also 5,000 Roma from the Burgenland. Although the crisis of transport on the eastern front that winter severely curtailed the scale of deportation, a second wave of thirty-four transport trains ran from 8 November to 6 February destined for Riga in Latvia, Kaunas in Lithuania and, briefly, Minsk in Belorussia. By late November, remarkably precise information was circulating as far afield as Minden in the Ruhr in western Germany, where, it was said, the local SD office reported

that all the Jews have been shipped to Russia, that their transport took place in passenger trains as far as Warsaw and from there in cattle trucks belonging to the German railways. The Führer is said to want to be informed by 15.1.1942 that not a single Jew remains within the borders of the German Reich. In Russia the Jews are said to have been put to work in former Soviet factories, while the elderly and sick Jews are to be shot.

The details were precise – though not strictly accurate – and they were publicly discussed. As people wondered aloud what happened to their Jewish neighbours after the trains left, they made use of what they knew or surmised, recycling what they had already learned about the massacres being conducted in the ‘east’. They were also quick to give the action a central logic and direction. People spoke, as if it were a fact, about the Führer wanting to see Germany cleared of Jews by 1 April 1942. These imagined dates were not so far off the mark: in discussion with his officials in Prague in early October, Reinhard Heydrich, the man detailed as head of the Reich Security Main Office with organising the deportations, told them that the Führer wanted ‘the Jews to be removed from German space if possible by the end of the year’. More important than such accurate second-guessing is the fact that people immediately grasped that a central decision had been made to deport the Jews: this was not a local initiative, like so many bans on using swimming pools or park benches.
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