The German War (63 page)

Christa herself stayed on, telling her brother, unperturbed at what the postal censor might read, ‘It’s best not to say “Heil Hitler!” here any more, or else you can expect in some situations to get a clip around the ear.’ Christa’s prosaic but tenacious ‘holding out’ bore little resemblance to the patriotic transfiguration Goebbels still hoped to inspire. She kept on updating her will and sent copies to her family, worried whether her daughter would be provided for if she died, and she went on working, rising to become business manager of her firm. In Christa Lehmacher’s war, optimism would be confined to the occasional luxury of relaxing in a long, hot bath with her sister, their books, coffee cups and liqueur glasses precariously balanced on a plank across the tub.
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In the cities of the Rhine and Ruhr, people still talked about Goebbels’s promise of massive retaliation, but without the same hope and expectation as in May and June. In Cologne at least, they no longer believed it would save them. The Gauleiter of North Westphalia, Alfred Meyer, might continue to invoke retaliation at public funeral services at the side of the mass graves, but in late June and early July, in towns like Dortmund, Bochum and Hagen, the level of anxiety about whether the promise of retaliation would be fulfilled in time reached such a pitch that the SD referred to it ominously ‘as a war of nerves of German propaganda against its own population’. The ever-sensitive Goebbels called on propagandists to exercise greater rhetorical restraint.
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As the Nazi authorities and the churches struggled to give the bombing meaning, some terms became axiomatic and others contested. Everyone could identify with Goebbels’s description of the RAF’s campaign as ‘terror bombing’: it both reflected the Allies’ declared objectives – to break the Germans’ will to resist – and fitted the sense of extreme helplessness experienced by so many people, praying and trembling in the dank cellars while their blocks of flats swayed, crumbled or burned above them. But just as the Catholic bishops found it difficult to discourage an obsession with revenge, so the Party struggled in vain to transform fear and helplessness into collective defiance. Funerary rites and military medals were not enough. At the same time Nazis could not – nor did they want to – turn civilians into combatants or shake the profound conviction that waging war on civilians in this way ruptured a fundamental moral boundary. All the discussions of 1940 about who had bombed civilians first now lay in the past. What mattered urgently was whether or not Germany had the power to respond. By early July, humorists were quipping that Zarah Leander had been requested to Hitler’s writing headquarters in order to sing her film hit ‘I Know There’ll Be a Miracle One Day’.
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For a regime that worshipped the right of might, ‘terror bombing’ raised the spectre of German weakness and demoralisation. Goebbels was anxious not to broadcast anything like the real toll on civilian life, and so the media stuck to reporting on the destruction of cultural monuments, painstakingly listing the number of churches desecrated and destroyed, and, in the case of Cologne, describing in detail the damage sustained by the cathedral. It fitted well with the Nazi message that Germany was defending European culture and heritage against Allied barbarism. In the bombed cities, some regarded such attention to cultural monuments as ‘trivialising the severe damage to housing and above all the human cost’. Instead of telling them about the cathedral, the SD noted, people wanted the rest of the country to know about day-to-day conditions, ‘about the necessity of walking to work over piles of debris and through clouds of dust, with no public transport running; about the impossibility of washing or cooking, because water, gas and electricity had failed, of the value that a single salvaged spoon or plate represented.’ As people fled the devastation, they frequently directed their fear and rage against the Nazis. Squashed into an overcrowded train which took nearly two days to travel from Cologne to Frankfurt, an observant master craftsman from Hamm noticed a crude drawing in chalk inside the compartment: ‘A gallows, on which a swastika hangs. Everyone sees it, but no one rubs it out.’
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Outside the bombed regions, the fundamental leap in scale of the Allied bombing was not obvious from the reports in the media: having grossly exaggerated the pinprick raids of 1940 and 1941 in order to bolster the moral case for bombing Britain, now the media was minimising their scale. Evacuees from the Rhineland and Ruhr were met with a mixture of sympathy and incredulity as they tried to tell other Germans about their ordeal. Some began to ask themselves whether the bombing had revealed a flaw in regional character. As one non-commissioned officer wrote home to Bremen, ‘I was in the Rhine-Westphalian industrial area, and there the mood of the population has sunk very low and is very anxious. In North Germany, in Bremen, I could not observe anything like that. I believe the North Germans can also put up with more than any other Germans.’ The flip side of appeals to ‘strong hearts’ and ‘nerves’ was to foment doubt and the divide between Germans who could and those who could not ‘take it’.
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People who had experienced the unprecedented scale of the aerial onslaught developed a kind of pride in what they had endured and objected to the dilution of the term ‘terror bombing’ by applying it to anything more minor. In May 1943, when the media automatically dubbed the breach of the Eder and Möhne dams ‘terror attacks’, Goebbels was surprised by the storm of criticism and incomprehension which greeted this coverage. ‘The population is of the opinion’, the Gauleiters reported back to Berlin in late May, ‘that of course dams, locks and installations count as important military targets.’ Despite the rumours that as many as 30,000 people were killed by the floodwaters, even in the Ruhr region people roundly rejected the term ‘Jewish terror’ for the ‘dambuster’ raid. To quell the rumours, a ‘final count’ of 1,579 dead was published, 1,026 of whom were foreign workers. But, as the Gauleiters noted, the point was that people saw that ‘the destruction of the dams is an extraordinary success of the English and the falsification of a legitimate attack on an important military target into a pure terror attack is not understood.’
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In their criticism of the media coverage, people were also showing that Goebbels’s propaganda meant something real to them. To most people, it was reportedly ‘incomprehensible to single out the role of a Jew’ in the attack on the dams, as the German media had done. ‘Jewish terror’ meant nothing less than mass attacks on cities – the burning, gassing and dismembering of German women and children. ‘Jewish terror’ conjured up violence without moral limit. It could be associated with Wuppertal, Dortmund and Cologne, not with a spectacular precision raid on the dams: however destructive, that had a clear and limited military-strategic purpose, which simply did not fit popular connotations of ‘Jewish terror’.
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Talk of the ‘Jewish’ character of the ‘terror attacks’ broke the tacit spiral of silence which had shrouded the Europe-wide deportation and murder of the Jews throughout 1942. In the middle of his ‘total war’ speech in February 1943, Goebbels made a verbal slip, telling his audience that ‘The aim of Bolshevism is the world revolution of the Jews . . . Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical extermi-[correcting himself] – elimination of Jewry.’ The slip was swiftly smoothed out in the printed versions of the speech, but millions of Germans listening to it on the live radio relay had heard the half-admission of the murder of the Jews. They heard too how the audience in the Sportpalast applauded, shouted, ‘Out with Jews,’ and laughed as Goebbels corrected himself. The slip was, perhaps, only half unintentional. It marked the beginning of a new emphasis on the centrality of the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish nature of the war which made it a life-and-death struggle for Germany – and for European culture.
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At the end of February 1943, a unit of the Secret Military Police came across a mass grave in the woods of Katyn, a small town to the west of Smolensk. The ground was frozen solid and no further investigation could be done till it thawed. Army Group Centre immediately turned to its principal expert in forensic medicine, Professor Gerhard Buhtz of Breslau University. Buhtz, who had further developed his expertise by carrying out autopsies on concentration camp prisoners at Buchenwald, began to examine the exhumed remains on 29 March. The corpses were those of Polish officers, who had been deported and shot by the Soviets after their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939.

A few days later Goebbels learned of the find from a visiting propagandist from Army Group Centre and immediately phoned Hitler to obtain permission to exploit the news story to the maximum. Aiming to split the Allies, Goebbels immediately authorised a delegation of foreign correspondents from Berlin and a Polish delegation from Warsaw and Cracow to visit Katyn, so that they could see for themselves that this was not a German fabrication. Then, on 13 April, German radio made its announcement: the corpses of 10,000 Polish officers had been found in a mass grave measuring 28 metres by 16 metres. Still in their uniforms, they had been ‘murdered’ by the Soviet secret police, all of them ‘with wounds to the back of the head resulting from pistol shots. The identification of the corpses poses no difficulties because the soil conditions have mummified them and the Russians left their identification documents on them.’ Other Polish and international delegations would follow, most importantly an international medical commission which, under Buhtz’s guidance, produced a credible forensic report.
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Goebbels predicted that the material was sensational enough that ‘We shall be able to live on it for a couple of weeks’. There had been reports of this kind in 1941, such as those of the NVKD massacres in the three prisons in Lwów, which caught the imagination of Germans for a time. But they had been rapidly superseded by the news of the Wehrmacht’s victorious advance. In the spring of 1943 there was no such distraction, but there were other considerations. At first, Goebbels planned to downplay the story at home, lest it heighten anxiety amongst the families of German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. He changed his mind when he saw the photographs of the exhumed corpses, deciding that the German public had to be told – and shown the pictures. The story ran for seven weeks, into early June, culminating with an eight-minute film,
The Katyn Forest.
To a moving, funereal soundtrack, it showed the excavation of the trenches and the identification of the corpses. Forensic experts demonstrated the entry and exit holes of the NKVD’s trademark ‘shot in the back of the neck’. Most importantly, the human dignity of the victims was asserted. Photos were dug out of uniform pockets and held up to the camera to reveal the officers’ waving wives and smiling children. Not only the foreign press but also former Polish soldiers, in uniform and, incongruously, wearing their steel helmets, were shown visiting the site where their comrades had been ‘liquidated by Stalin’s hangmen’. As the cellos playing the funeral elegy swelled, the film ended with a Polish Catholic bishop pronouncing a blessing over the open trenches.
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For Germans, the central message was simple and stark from the outset. ‘Mass Murder of Katyn: Work of Jewish Butchers’, read the
Völkischer Beobachter
’s headline. The fact that 700–900 of the Polish officers were Jews was of course suppressed. As the campaign continued, the formula of Germans’ ‘defence’ against Jewish plans to destroy them became ever more explicit. At the end of a long article for
Das Reich
on ‘The War and the Jews’ in early May, Goebbels reminded his readers of the Führer’s ‘prophetic word’ that

if World Jewry succeeded in provoking a Second World War, it would lead not to the destruction of Aryan humanity but to the extinction of the Jewish race. This process is of a world-historic significance and, given that it will probably entail unavoidable consequences, it also takes time. But it can no longer be halted.

This was, Goebbels told his readers, not a matter of
‘Ressentiment’
or ‘naïve plans of revenge’, but of a ‘world problem of the first rank’ in which ‘sentimental considerations are irrelevant’. When the Jews, Goebbels concluded, ‘laid their plan against the German people for their complete destruction, they signed their own death warrant. And here too world history will be a world court.’
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Katyn provided the centrepiece to a fresh anti-Semitic propaganda campaign which harnessed older themes, such as the Jews’ guilt for instigating the war, and newer ones, such as the fate awaiting Germany should the Jews ever take revenge. Increasingly, journalists assumed a more explicit knowledge amongst their readership about what had happened to the Jews than in 1942. The Badenese Gau paper,
Der Führer,
carried a commentary by the well-known journalist and sometime academic Johann von Leers in which he broached a point of popular criticism: ‘Yes, but the methods? Anyone talking about methods is always wrong. What matters is the result. For a doctor the result has to be the complete elimination of cholera, the result for our people the complete elimination of the Jews . . . Between us and the Jews the issue is who will survive whom.’ Victor Klemperer was so struck by Leers’s insistence that ‘If the Jews are victorious, our whole nation will be slaughtered like the Polish officers in the forest of Katyn’ that he excerpted a whole chunk of his rhetoric, making a note for his intended study of the ‘Language of the Third Reich’: ‘Every sentence, every expression of this lecture is important. The feigned objectivity, the obsessiveness, the populism, the reduction of everything to one denominator’. Leers was no exception. The respectable Berlin daily the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
carried an editorial on 29 May reminding its readers that ‘we have carried out our anti-Semitic campaign systematically’. Four days later, it printed an article by a reporter serving with an SS unit in the east, who explained that now was ‘not yet the time to open the reports which cover the operations of the Security Police and the SD. Much will certainly remain unsaid, since it is not always advisable to reveal one’s strategy.’ In May and June 1943, whether discussing the need to tackle the ‘gypsy question’ in south-eastern Europe in the same way as the ‘Jewish problem had been solved’ or commenting on the incompleteness of the Slovaks’ measures against their Jewish population, the German media was awash with allusions to the ‘final solution’. The uncomfortable silences of 1942 had been replaced with a semi-open affirmation of collective complicity.
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