The German War (82 page)

This was a massacre similar to those which many of the German investigators had themselves carried out in Soviet territory. One of the many high-ranking German visitors claimed in his diary to have seen women and children nailed to barn doors. Though the military police did not record any such evidence, stories of crucified women and children furnished the material for the blanket coverage in the German media. The journalists covering the story were so short on detail that Goebbels urged them to make it up in order to convey ‘poetic truth’. For the first but not the last time East Prussia furnished evidence which made the ceaseless invocation of the Soviet threat ring true to German ears. And, as with Katyn, the normal embargo on showing footage of atrocities was lifted and both the papers and newsreels carried photographs of the twenty-six bodies. The
Völkische Beobachter
put the murdered children on its front page, as Nemmersdorf became synonymous with the deeds of ‘Asiatic hordes’ whipped into a frenzy by ‘Jewish commissars’.
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In East Prussia itself, both the reality of the Soviet incursion in October and the successful German counter-attack left a profound mark. The commander of the reconstituted Army Group Centre, Colonel-General Reinhardt, wrote to his wife of the ‘rage, the hatred which fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen’. Elsewhere in the Reich, the impact of the Nemmersdorf story was more varied. So many people doubted whether the news was real that Goebbels admitted in his diary that ‘the reports from Nemmersdorf have only convinced a part of the population’. People also blamed the Nazi Party for not evacuating civilians from the area in time. Then there were those in other, more distant regions of the Reich who asked why they should worry about the Russians just ‘because they killed a couple of people in East Prussia’.
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To the population of Stuttgart, on Germany’s western border, the Gumbinnen district was as remote as it had been possible to travel within the pre-war Reich, and here traditional Swabian hostility to everything Prussian had become stronger as the war dragged on. Above all, Stuttgarters were still reeling from the fire-bombing of 12 September, and were profoundly sceptical of all propaganda messages. According to the vox populi relayed by Stuttgart’s particularly downbeat SD office, the leadership

should realise that the sight of these victims will remind every thinking person of the atrocities we have committed in enemy territory, even in Germany itself. Have we not murdered thousands of Jews? Don’t soldiers again and again report that Jews in Poland have had to dig their own graves? And how did we treat the Jews in the [Natzweiler] concentration camp in Alsace? Jews are human beings too. By doing all this we have shown the enemy what they can do to us if they win.

This sounded like the talk of the summer and autumn of 1943, which Goebbels and Himmler had silenced through a mixture of admonition and exemplary punishment. Now that the next crisis had hit, it emerged again. As the regime tried again to combat defeatism by using Nemmersdorf to stoke up fears of annihilatory ‘Jewish terror’, once more it encountered a wave of criticism of its own role in escalating the cycle of murder. In this febrile atmosphere, an argument over seats on a Berlin tram was enough to prompt some passengers to point out that ‘One has to remain humane, because we have already weighed ourselves down with enough guilt for our treatment of the Jews and Poles, which will yet be paid back to us.’ Moments such as this, where strangers argued in public over who was to blame for the ‘Jewish war’, marked the periodic lows of German morale. Unlike Katyn, the twenty-six corpses at Nemmersdorf were not a significant enough atrocity to garner international attention.
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On 24 July 1944, the Soviet 2nd Tank Army had liberated a camp on the outskirts of Lublin, where they found 1,500 Soviet prisoners of war whom the fleeing SS guards had left behind. They showed their liberators the commandant’s house and building materials depot; the barracks for SS guards and for prisoners; the three gas chambers, the crematorium and behind it the trenches for mass shootings; the piles of clothes, the heaps of shoes and the mounds of human hair. Majdanek had served mainly as a concentration camp for Poles and Soviet prisoners of war employed in Lublin’s factories, but it was also a death camp in which some 200,000 Poles, Slovaks, Jews, Roma and Red Army prisoners had been killed. The Soviet advance had been so rapid that the SS had had no time to destroy the camp. Majdanek was the first and – as events would show – the most intact of the death camps to be liberated. The Soviets immediately realised the significance of what they had found. Foreign journalists were invited in, and photographs and film footage of the site were transmitted around the world. Allied leaflet drops made sure that, from late August, the details of the gas chambers and crematoria at Majdanek reached Germany.
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For the soldiers of the Red Army, Majdanek became an emblem of how the Germans had treated their comrades, confirming that they had murdered people of many nationalities, but had singled out Soviet citizens. Alongside the exhortations penned by Ilya Ehrenburg and other writers, to revenge themselves on the Germans for the crimes of occupation, the images of Majdanek became seared into many an imagination. Yuri Uspensky, a young officer with the Soviet 5th Artillery Corps, added Majdanek to the horrors he had seen in the villages he had liberated in the Smolensk region; as his unit fought its way towards the borders of East Prussia he would not forget ‘the German cold-bloodedness in Majdanek’, which he found ‘a hundred times worse’ than the worst actions committed by his own side – which indeed appalled him too.
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That December, Ursula von Kardorff locked herself in the toilet of a friend’s flat and read her copy of the
Journal de Génève,
which detailed the gassing of thousands of women and children at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was based on a detailed report by two Slovak prisoners who had escaped from the camp in April. Even though Kardorff already knew that the mass murder of the Jews was a fact – and was herself helping Jews to hide in Berlin – the stark details were too much for her. ‘Is one to believe such a ghastly story?’ she asked herself in her diary. ‘It simply cannot be true. Surely even the most brutal fanatics could not be so absolutely bestial.’
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For many, disbelief was often the first step to acknowledging what had been done. Instead of fading away, news of death camps in which the victims were killed by mass electrocution or gassing grew during 1944, spreading throughout the Reich; it was even picked up by Allied observers of German prisoners of war in Italy. Curiosity drove people to broach the taboo subject of what actually happened in these secret locations. They spoke of pillars of corpses, probably without realising that they were formed by victims struggling in the darkness to reach the remaining oxygen near the ceiling of the gas chamber. As even correct details were misunderstood, the conversations disclosed how hard – and imaginatively – people were trying to join up the fragments into a coherent account. Like marked banknotes, tales of mass electrocution give a sense of how widely, yet partially, news of the death camps circulated.
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As Germans continued to equate Allied bombing with the murder of the Jews, they cast themselves as victims, seeing both as the cause of their own woes. In the harsh climate of police measures after the failed July bomb plot, Germans might have been expected to censor themselves. Ursula von Kardorff, who sympathised with the plotters, certainly feared arrest, and was careful what she said in public. But, as glimpses from Stuttgart and Berlin reveal, it did not take much prompting for people without conspiratorial connections to talk openly about the murder of the Jews. Whether they were impelled to do so by existential fear, or simply caught up in a public debate triggered by stories in the media which juxtaposed ‘Jewish terror’ and mass execution sites, this social response reveals one thing very clearly: this was not, or at least not yet, an ‘atomised’ society forced by dictatorial terror alone to continue the war. Many Germans felt entitled to air their views and, whatever their criticisms of the regime, they assumed that their own loyalty had not become suspect.

Then there were those who felt that the regime could benefit from their advice. By November and December 1944, well-intentioned citizens were writing in to the Propaganda Ministry tendering suggestions, even enclosing drafts for leaflets to be dropped over the Allied armies. ‘Englishmen, Americans, Russians, listen to our voice,’ ran the text proposed by the director of the engineering institute in Kaiserslautern:

Don’t sacrifice your lives any longer for the Jewish bloodsuckers who are only driving you to the butcher’s block so that they can enjoy ruling the whole world . . .

. . . help us found the

It was eye-catching enough for someone in the Propaganda Ministry to underline key turns of phrase. The text ended with an adaptation of Marx’s famous slogan: ‘Europeans of all countries unite!’ In place of the collective reprisals proposed back in May and early June 1944, Goebbels’s correspondents now believed in persuading British and American ‘workers and soldiers’ that they were being duped into fighting against their natural ally, Germany. But as an old doctor from Hamburg sadly lamented, there was always the danger that the English would not get the message: so, any leaflet would have to address them ‘in the style of someone who is slow on the uptake’ and even then it might all fail, because ‘We Germans are used to talking to educated nations . . . The English-speaking peoples do not come up to this level.’
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Across the Reich, those monitoring the public mood for the SD, the Propaganda Ministry, the Party Chancellery and the presidents of the higher provincial courts busied themselves with mapping the shifting balance of opinions of their increasingly distraught ‘national comrades’. Some, like the SD in Stuttgart, were distinctly and consistently pessimistic, cataloguing much criticism of the regime; some others, like their colleagues in Freiburg, wrote in Panglossian terms. In September, the Wehrmacht persuaded Goebbels to let it expand its own propaganda operation to monitor and to try also to steer public opinion. Goebbels’s willingness to tolerate this incursion into his domain was an acknowledgement that, despite the July plot, the Wehrmacht still enjoyed higher public standing than the Party. Military events continued to determine civilian morale. In the west, it recovered from the retreat from France slowly and hesitantly. In places where, in early September, people had openly declared that all was lost, they were still not listening to the news three weeks later; instead, they buckled down and ‘obediently did their duty’.

On 15 December, Irene Guicking wrote to Ernst with more news of the bombing of Giessen. Everyone who had sheltered in the cellar of the town hall had been killed. Irene had heard that 2,500 people had died and 30,000 had been made homeless by the raid. Their own home was not so badly hit as she had first thought. A bomb had landed in the courtyard just in front of the building and, although the house was uninhabitable, the contents were virtually unscathed. Only Ernst’s straw hat, a pre-war souvenir, had been sucked out by the blast. It had landed, fittingly, in the crater out in the street. Meanwhile, all their furniture had been safely stowed in her aunt’s home. Only the kitchen fittings, sofa and sideboard proved too heavy for them and remained in the bombed flat. In this reckoning of good and ill luck, the worst immediate inconvenience was having Irene’s aunt Johanna to stay: three days with her seemed far too long. By the time she left, on 17 December, Irene was cheered by other news. The papers were reprinting an article which had appeared in the Swiss press about 500 enemy planes downed by the new German fighters. Her spirits rose at the very thought that now – finally – they could be defended against attack from the air.
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The number of air raids on Germany had indeed fallen dramatically on 17 December, because the previous day the Wehrmacht launched a major counter-offensive in the west. In his proclamation on the eve of battle, Rundstedt exhorted: ‘Soldiers of the western front! Your great hour has struck. Strong attacking armies are marching today against the British and Americans. I don’t need to say any more. You all feel it: it’s all or nothing!’ Careful not to stoke public expectations prematurely, Goebbels held the press back. The first public announcement of the offensive was a short mention in the Wehrmacht radio bulletin on 18 December. Newspaper headlines did not follow until the next day. Even the
Völkischer Beobachter
dispensed with its usual bombast by simply announcing an ‘Offensive in the west’. People were delighted and amazed that the Wehrmacht was still capable of launching a major attack; many felt ‘released from an oppressive weight’. As Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS Panzer Army struck northwards and Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army broke the American lines and advanced on the town of Bastogne in the south, the reports to the Reich Propaganda Ministry described the public response as like news of ‘rainfall after a long drought’. In Berlin, almost the whole of the schnapps ration for the Christmas period was consumed in toasts to what many happily dubbed the ‘Führer’s Christmas present’.
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Cooped up with the remains of Army Group North in the Courland peninsula, Kurt Orgel reported that even the hardened old veterans were excitedly clamouring, ‘Man, I want to be there too!’ As they looked at the map to follow the progress of the offensive, Kurt realised that his battery had advanced along the same road through Luxembourg during the 1940 campaign. By 21 December he had heard that 20,000 Americans had been captured in the west. Ernst Guicking reported that the number of prisoners was 60,000. What was immediately evident to him was that the offensive had ended the harrying attacks on the Alsatian bridgehead he and his comrades were holding at Issenheim. As the joyful reports poured in, the Propaganda Ministry realised that the analogies being drawn with the rapid conquest of France in 1940 were highly dangerous. Goebbels immediately set about dampening expectations, using plain-clothes agents on the streets to prepare people for a more limited success. Yet, with their hopes suddenly rekindled, in Reichenberg, Brandenburg, Dessau, even in pessimistic Hamburg and Stuttgart, people wanted to imagine a swift strategic victory which could end the war in the west. It was the same hope that had been invested in the Atlantic Wall in May, or, with less confidence, in miracle weapons in the autumn. As it resurfaced again in mid-December, the strategic calculation remained much the same: if only the British and Americans could be forced to sue for peace, then the full resources of the Wehrmacht could be thrown on to the eastern front.
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