The German War (72 page)

As each tour of duty was ended by illness and wounds and periods of rehabilitation in Germany, Reese’s view of the war changed. After surviving his ‘Russian Passion’ during the winter of 1941, Reese chose to model himself on a harder, more cynical version of Jünger when he returned to the front in the summer of 1942. As the troop train brought them eastwards he took in the huge stockpiles of weaponry and munitions being shipped forward and grasped the gigantic scale of the war for the first time. This realisation brought him back to Jünger’s stark 1932 novel,
The Worker.
Challenging the Weimar vogue for seeing industrial society in terms of the Marxist notion of alienation, Jünger had celebrated the willing subjugation of worker-warriors to a totally mobilised machine age. Reese had no trouble transposing that description to the military build-up he now observed in the east. Reese and his comrades consciously play-acted Jünger. They called themselves ‘heroic nihilists’, made speeches about crusades and wore red roses in their buttonholes.
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By the next winter, none of that bravado was left. ‘Unshaven, lice-ridden, sick, spiritually destitute, no more than a sum of blood, guts and bones’, they were bound together by ‘forced dependence on one another . . . our humour . . . born of black humour, gallows humour, satire, obscenities, mordancy . . . a play with the dead, spattered brains, lice, pus and excrement, born of spiritual void . . . Our ideals were me, tobacco, food, sleep and France’s whores.’ As ‘dehumanised caricatures’, Reese and his comrades had ‘stupefied existences’. He had finally reached the state so many soldiers on the eastern front had described as ‘rough’ and ‘hard’. But even in this piercing self-description there was a strain of lyricism, mixed with self-pity.
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Reese also felt transfigured, more alive and at home than he had ever imagined in the world Jünger had depicted: ‘In the battle of materiel life proved stronger in a wild lust for being. War led us into a dream-like realm and some who were peaceable at heart’ – he was referring, presumably, to himself – ‘experienced a secret longing to suffer and do terrrible things. The primitive awoke in us. Instinct replaced mind and feeling and we were borne up by a transcendental vitality.’
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Saved from the front by a sniper’s bullet, Reese returned to Germany a second time. Despite being plagued by nightmares in which, he wrote, ‘again and again I relived the horrors of the winter war, heard the shells’ howl, the cries of the wounded, saw soldiers advancing and dying, and saw myself like a stranger in my fate on the edge of no-man’s-land’, Reese volunteered to return to the eastern front for a third time in the summer of 1943. He now believed only in the spiritual journey which the war afforded him: ‘I wanted to conquer fire with fire, the war with the war,’ he wrote. Returning to the front became ‘a crazy means to an inner homecoming’.
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By this point Reese had long outgrown Jünger’s illiberal values and narrow range of empathy. He was horrified and guilt-ridden by the war they were fighting. In 1942, he tossed off ‘Carneval’, one of the most extraordinary German poems written during the war. Reese chose a light, lilting rhythm to jar with the brutal directness of the words:

Murdered the Jews

Marched into Russia

As a roaring horde

Muzzled the people

Sabred in blood

Led by a clown

We are his envoys

Of the one everyone knows

And are wading in blood.

After surviving for so long, Reese had finally, hesitantly, found the cause he was fighting for. Writing home in a complete, uncensored confession of faith, he set out an anti-Nazi patriotism:

For that I want to live and fight for Germany, for the spiritual, secret Germany, which only after defeat, after the end of the Hitler-period, can exist again and will regain the place in the world which belongs to Germany. If I fight, then for my life; if I should fall, then because it was my destiny. And I want to sacrifice myself too for the future, free, spiritual Germany – but never for the Third Reich.

But he did not know how to square his war for a ‘free, spiritual Germany’ with the ‘mask of the laughing soldier’ in Wehrmacht uniform who joined his comrades in burning villages and assaulting Russian women. By the time Reese ended his manuscript in Duisburg in February 1944 to return for a fifth tour of duty, he closed his memoir with another affirmation of his vitality: ‘The war continued. Out once more I wandered. I loved life.’
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Part of the appeal of Ernst Jünger’s existentialist epic and Hölderlin’s classical ‘fate’ for literary-minded Germans was that they avoided questions of responsibility and causation: they turned war into an elemental force, a natural disaster, beyond human morality or power. Lisa de Boor, Ursula von Kardorff and Willy Reese each regarded themselves as anti-Nazi. But, unlike the Scholls or Stauffenbergs, they had not come to regard the war as a ‘Nazi war’ or feel that they had to make a political choice. They could not wish for Germany’s defeat, even as their sense of profound vulnerability grew.

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The sense of crisis after the Hamburg firestorm forced many Germans to talk about their own guilt for the murder of the Jews. But this was a political assessment, dependent on an external shock and sense of doom. What educated Germans were looking for in their literary and musical canon were answers unfettered by time and connected to their ‘inner’ moral certainties. German awareness of the external, ‘Jewish war’ did not abate, but it changed character. The murder of the Jews had become established, irreversible fact to be assimilated and understood, or, if that was impossible, to be put to one side.

Sent to work on the production line of a cardboard-box-making factory in Dresden, Victor Klemperer learned to overcome his conservative fears and middle-class disdain for the working class, finding many of his new ‘Aryan’ co-workers more critical, less Nazi and more generous towards him than his former academic colleagues. The foreman, an old-time trade union type, expressed his sympathies with Klemperer in March 1944 for having lost his academic job just because he was Jewish. A week later, this same man would turn to the idea of Jewish ‘billionaires’ as he cast about helplessly for a reason for the latest, senseless American bombing of Hamburg. For people like him, the abstract idea of a foreign ‘Jewish plutocracy’ offered an explanation which cut across their personal liking for individual German Jews. To make sense of the ferocity of the aerial onslaught on the civilian population, the ‘terror bombing’ required a conspiracy by an enemy who was filled with an implacable hatred of Germans and Germany.
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By spring 1944, comparisons of the bombing with the murder of the Jews had a different ring from the previous autumn. Gone was shock and panic after Hamburg, and those wishes to reverse the mutual escalation – as if the murder of the Jews could somehow be undone in order to stop the bombing. After twelve months of sustained mass raids on German cities, they had become a fact of life and the ‘Jewish’ character of the bombing had become axiomatic. Instead of blaming themselves, some people offered advice on how to turn the screw further. In May 1944, when the Wehrmacht occupied the Hungarian capital Budapest, the ghettoisation of the Jews sparked much comment, not for what it meant for the Jews, but solely for what it might mean for Germans. Workers in Würzburg greeted the news that Jews were being held very close to factory sites in Budapest with comments like ‘the Hungarians are ahead of us; they’re handling the issue the right way’. There were calls to hold Jews as human shields in German cities too. A string of letters to Goebbels survives from May and June 1944, advising the regime to inform ‘the British and American government [
sic
] after every terror attack in which civilians are killed that ten times as many Jews and Jewesses and their children have been shot’. And a number of letter-writers explicitly argued that such measures should have the effect on the British and Americans which the ‘new weapons’ and ‘retaliation’ had so far failed to deliver. Irma J., who called on Goebbels ‘on behalf of all German women and mothers and the families of those living here in the Reich’ to ‘have twenty Jews hanged for every German killed in the place where our defenceless and priceless German people have been cowardly and bestially murdered by the terror-flyers’, also confessed to her own feelings of helplessness: ‘because we have no other weapon available’. The underlying pessimism about German air defences was palpable, but so too was a strengthening commitment to resist.
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Listening to Hyperion’s ‘Song of Fate’ or reading Jünger provided a glimpse into the abyss and a retreat into reverie, a safe haven in which readers could surrender – momentarily – and marshal their own inner, moral reserves. Hiding the war behind a veil of lyrical abstractions, this literary canon helped ‘apolitical Germans’ to reinvent themselves, unwilling to be preached to by the Nazi hacks, but at the same time blocking out the possibility that the war might confront them with immediate moral and political choices. Instead, they ransacked their cultural heritage to help bear its burdens.

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At the end of May 1944, the Third Reich still controlled Europe from the Arctic north of Norway to south of Rome, from the Black Sea to the Channel ports. On 3 November 1943, Hitler had issued General Directive Number 51, requiring that the eastern front take care of itself while fresh troops and new supplies of weaponry were sent west. The Red Army had held the initiative since counter-attacking from the Kursk salient the previous summer, but this time all the German forces in the east pulled back much faster than they were being pushed, giving up huge areas of Ukraine in order to retreat behind the natural barrier of the river Dniepr. Hitler and his generals hoped that this new, fortified ‘Panther Line’ would hold the Red Army, while precious armoured and combat divisions were sent west to repel the Allied landing in Italy and to defend the coastlines of Greece and France. The Dniepr defensive line, Hitler told his generals in September 1943, was to be the last barrier against Bolshevism. The withdrawal began on 15 September.

Along the entire line of their retreat, the Germans set everything alight, using precious time and munitions to destroy as much as possible. Guarding the German retreat, Willy Reese felt ‘torn apart by guilt’, appalled by a ‘scorched earth’ policy far worse than the Germans’ first efforts of 1941–42. He drank as he watched the villages and towns turned into a ‘depopulated, smoking, burning desert covered in ruins’. At the same time, he wrote, the line of burning villages at night ‘created magical images and so, with my old delight in paradoxes, I called the war an aesthetic problem’. Looting the villages for food and the German warehouses for alcohol, tobacco and new uniforms, the men turned the great retreat into an orgy of feasting, making ‘grotesque speeches about war and peace’, becoming melancholy and confiding their homesickness and love worries. As they drank and danced in the cattle trucks carrying them westwards towards Gomel, they found a woman prisoner and stripped her naked to dance for them, smearing her breasts with boot fat and making her ‘as drunk’, Reese wrote, ‘as we were’.
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Through that autumn and winter, the new Dniepr defensive position held, as Gotthard Heinrici deployed his scant forces with remarkable skill in the face of massive frontal assaults on the centre of the German line. The experience encouraged Wehrmacht commanders to believe that the seemingly inexhaustible reserves of the Soviets were finally running out and that their generals had learned little. Entrenched beyond Vitebsk, Mogilev and Pinsk, the Wehrmacht still occupied much of Belorussia and Ukraine, preparing for the inevitable attack once the summer had dried out the boggy ground. In the east, Hitler’s directive acknowledged, the Germans could afford to sacrifice, ‘if worst came to worst, even large losses of space without deadly danger to German survival’. In the west, they could not.
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Some of Germany’s crack armoured units were kept in readiness in France. Huge quantities of steel, concrete and labour were devoted to fortifying the French and Belgian coast, which the German commanders in the west, Rommel and Rundstedt, toured to the cameras of the
Wochenschau.
Newsreels, radio and press repeated the mantra that the Atlantic Wall was ‘untakeable’ – some witty Viennese began to quip that so was their synthetic coffee – and the image of ‘Fortress Europe’ sheltering behind the sea bastions from the British and American air and sea ‘pirates’ convinced even sceptical German observers. The extraordinary reputations of Rommel and Rundstedt – neither a Nazi – in themselves inspired trust.
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In the relative quiet of spring 1944, for the first time in over a year, bombing gradually ceased to be the centre of conversations about the war; instead, complaints dwelled on the seasonal shortage of potatoes and fresh vegetables. The expected invasion in the west supplanted it. The Allies would choose the time and place, but hopes ran high that if they could be driven back into the sea, then it was unlikely that they would be able to launch another invasion in 1944, if at all. An Allied invasion appeared to offer Germans the most tangible prospect of regaining the initiative and turning the tables on their adversaries: if only they could be ‘lured’ on to the European continent, the British and Americans would be decisively defeated on the same ground as the French and British in 1940. It would be a fitting response to the destruction of German cities. The overriding anxiety in the spring of 1944 was that the Allies would not take the bait, preferring the greater safety of continuing their long war of attrition. Behind the expectant optimism about the coming confrontation on the Channel coast lay an uneasy pessimism about the Reich’s ability to withstand an air war of unlimited duration.
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On the home front, the SD’s anxieties about social revolution had been superseded by new worries about sexual unrest; so much so that in April 1944 it filed a special report on the ‘Immoral behaviour of German women’. The problem stemmed, its authors in the Reich Security Main Office opined, ‘from the length of the war’ and the fact ‘that a large number of women and girls are ever more inclined to live it up sexually’. The wives of serving soldiers apparently led the way, with every town boasting well-known pubs where they went to meet men. Unmarried young women and teenagers were following their example: the SD pointed to rising rates of teenage pregnancy and sexual disease amongst 14- to 18-year-olds. These were classic grounds for sending girls to reformatories, and the SD confirmed that this was just what the Youth Welfare Boards in some cities were doing. The SD continued to worry too that German women were engaging in sex with foreign men, a slur on national honour even in those cases when it did not enfringe race laws. And they also worried about how children, neglected and left to ‘run wild’ themselves, were affected by their mothers making love to passing Germans in cramped cellar quarters with only the flimsiest of screens, sometimes no more than an umbrella. The SD was concerned about how news of their wives’ infidelities would impact on the morale of husbands serving in the armed forces.
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