Battleship Bismarck (71 page)

On the morning of 23 November, we traveled by truck to the main railway station in the city of Hanover, the point of departure for everyone discharged in the British zone. Jump down, grab the baggage, and keep going—God in heaven, what didn’t I have in all that stuff: suitcase, duffel bag, packet of books, violin, an almost incredible mass, to haul through the crowded station, up the long line to the ticket window, across a platform black with people, and into a train, already filled to the seams, for Nienburg. Alone, I would never manage
it—but helping hands presented themselves, some inspiring confidence and others that appeared less so. Especially imploring was the look of a young disabled man; with his crutch, he hardly seemed able to last through the job, but his, “I’d really like to help you, I can do it, believe me,” was welcome. Up on the platform, I could write off any attempt to get into a compartment together with all my baggage. So give up on this train and wait for the next one? Wait, wasn’t that an empty brakeman’s cabin at the end of one car? It was. “Hey!” I shouted to my companion over the hubbub, “Up here!” Hurriedly we shoved piece after piece up the small stairs. In the cramped space above, half crushed by my things, I fumbled for my cigarettes, threw twenty to my helper: Thanks, thanks, and good luck! And already the train was rolling out of the station, my friend below vanished from sight—it was really a close shave!

It was five and a half years, almost to the day, since the last time I had left Germany, on board the powerful battleship
Bismarck
from Gotenhafen in May 1941. At that time there had been no bomb damage in the eastern Reich and the night raids I had experienced in Hamburg in the winter of 1940–41 had hardly scarred the Hanseatic City. Now for the first time I saw the awful effects of the air war with my own eyes. I felt a morbid curiosity mixed with deep anguish as my train rolled past the destruction on the horizon, a literal fulfillment of Daladier’s words in the late summer of 1939—“Destruction and barbarism will most certainly triumph”—ruins to the right, ruins to the left. The depressing sight of them dredged up that sentence from the historical ruins of the last twelve years: “Give me four years and you will not recognize Germany!” Four years!—He had received them three times over, the great “Führer.” And he had paid for them with 50 million dead, the loss of the German East, ruins everywhere, and the flight from any responsibility. Even from that which rhetorically he had worn out, “before history.”

*
Henry Faulk,
Group Captives
, pp. 178–79.

†
Faulk, p. 179.

*
The German revolution of November 1918 was sparked by a mutiny in the heavy surface units of the High Seas Fleet.

†
Mis-Leader

‡
Term used contemptuously for the period of the Weimar Republic by its enemies of the political right.

*
Terence Prittie, “Herbert Sulzbach: A Memoir,” in Herbert Sulzbach,
With the German Guns
, trans. Richard Thonger, p. 13.

†
“Two Living Walls,” for whose English translation see the preceding note.

*
Reich Chief Security Office

*
West German Radio, “Stärker als Stacheldraht,” transcript of a broadcast, 1963.

45    End of a nightmare

For a German damned by his perceptions to recognize the creeping poison of so-called National Socialism (which seemed to me neither nationally oriented nor socialistic), the years under Hitler had to appear a veritable nightmare, a purgatory for insightful patriots. Such a German could not fail to perceive the reality of the years 1933–39 as a period in which, after the murderous elimination of effective opposition, Germany was irresistibly transformed into an intellectual, moral, and cultural wasteland, a collecting ground for warlike aggression; and the years 1939–45 as a period of naked assertion of physical force, of painful realization that the enemy in front of the guns was only technically the enemy—that in reality Germany’s enemy was the man in the Reich Chancellery.

To be sure, on 8 May 1945 such a German felt no less than any other German the deepest grief at the abrupt fall of his country into seeming nothingness. But one great consolation was granted him: that Germany’s liberation from Hitler and his clique at last gave his people the opportunity to turn away from the political aberration of the past twelve years, the shame of a millenium. And he may have had the feeling that Germany couldn’t sink any lower; it could only rise.

From now on, I knew, that everything I do in my walk of life will, after all, have a sense of civic purpose and contribute to a rational community. For the first time since 1933! It was an indescribable sensation!

A great hope, perhaps too great? Since after all, we had not freed
ourselves from Hitler by our own exertions, but owed our freedom wholly to the victors of the Second World War? And after years of observing that National Socialism was anything but an “historical accident,” but that to the contrary it seemed to be written all over the Germans—with its cunning appeal to the instincts and habits ingrained in German subjects by centuries of German authorities: order and discipline, authoritarian rule, and the subordination of the individual to the state, to the “whole,” now formulated into a pithy slogan (“You are nothing, your Folk is everything”)! And had not such claims upon the quasi-hierarchial structure of the people also exerted a special attraction on military circles and the navy? The mobilization of mystical feelings slumbering in the people, dark, muddled beliefs, books like those of the English racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s still worse
Myth of the Twentieth Century
—all had made their contribution to confusing the mind of a people who needed clarity and rationality more than anything else in politics.

A diabolical state stage-production showed the Germans a future under Hitler in a radiant light. The never-ending parades, wild victory celebrations, tributes to the dead—above all the glorification of death itself—were the inducement of the accentuation of the emotional, the irrational, the sensual, the delirious.

It was really no wonder that in place of a dispassionate analysis of national policy there emerged a blind faith in the “Führer” and his “teachings”—a faith, and this was the most dreadful thing, that held itself to be “enlightenment.” “Führer, command—we obey,” became its everyday currency in political discourse, the attestation of a nation’s intellectual abdication. And it was equally understandable that the mass of people was taken in or lacked the antennae to pick up what was going on in the background. Anyone who saw acts of “spontaneous vengeance” taking place in public, as on the day of the Jewish pogrom of 9 November 1938, no longer perceived the even worse horrors that must be raging in subterranean secrecy!

I cannot claim that I myself, stemming from an archconservative family, was granted an early insight into the nature of the Hitler regime at its start. The standard by which I first judged Hitler was nothing more than his face, which I found repulsive. I could never read a sense of statesmanlike responsibility into him and even his rhetorical mimicry did not enable him to supply what I missed. To expect good things for Germany from the possessor of such a miserable face, the countenance of a psychopath?—instinctively, I never
could. Personally regarding Hitler’s accession to the office of chief of government with disgust, I lived through his decisive acts in the destruction of our legal and constitutional state in 1933–34 without—professional soldier and non-lawyer that I was—fully grasping their magnitude. However, I perceived an ominous signal, a terrible impulse to reflection, for the first time in the political murders instituted by Hitler on and after 30 June 1934. Not that I knew more about the bloody business than most people. But the public “justification” that Hitler offered afterwards seemed to me to leave much too much unclear, did not satisfy me. Too many dark things were obviously being skipped over. All it communicated to me was mistrust, a panicky mistrust ready to swell at any moment.

This was the impression that Herr Hitler, who was so warmly regarded by the conservatives on my mental horizons, had made on me up to 1934. Immediately upon the formation of the Weimar Republic an uncle of mine who mourned for the monarchy, a government lawyer and veteran of the 1914–18 war, not yet fifty years old, told the family that “I cannot serve this state” (but whose retirement pension he did not mind accepting). Towards the end of the twenties an aunt informed me, “Your grandparents are going to vote for Hitler from now on. I’ve persuaded them to. Only from him can Germany expect improvement.” Only with clenched teeth did the navy celebrate 11 August as Weimar’s Constitution Day until 1932—“disreputable things” were associated with it; one didn’t need to talk much about it, everyone understood one another on the subject of this miserable Weimar.

I had observed all of these standpoints in my early years, without really accepting them, but I also had not fully understood them. For politics then remained a far too distant field for me; as a boarding school student and then as a naval officer I had yet to develop a basic outlook on them. With the passage of time, I categorized Hitler politically as neither “right” nor “left,” but as a phenomenon to be understood only in its own terms—with, no doubt, a special allure to conversatives, who did not hesitate to flock to his camp. Had not one of the Nazis’ first public acts, the book burning in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, and Koenigsberg on 10 May 1933, raised one of the right’s own ideas to a new height? Had not a family friend once told me during my school days in the early twenties of the intellectual currents of the militant academic right? The friend had spoken rapturously, but at the age of sixteen I did not perceive the political background of his words. In 1923 one of the basic documents of the
antixepublican right had already prepared for the book pyres of 1933 by asserting:

We are fighting with every available means the bearers of the Jewish spirit, whose effects destroy German racial consciousness, sap German strength, contaminate German art, and stifle German idealism in the slime of materialism. We are fighting the most pernicious chimera of our era, self-emasculating pacifism, and, because of its ruinous effect on the strength of the Folk, branding it as high treason to our nation. We will ceaselessly expose the true nature of the so-called democracy. . . . We are making an assault on the un-German parliamentarianism that has done everything possible to shatter the German Reich and will never summon the strength needed for the rebuilding of the Reich.
*

The conservative novelist Ernst Jünger of 1930 even lent a hand, writing that “in the same measure . . . in which the German spirit gains focus and strength, for the Jew the faintest illusion of being able to be a German in Germany will become untenable and he will see himself confronted with his final alternative: in Germany either to be a Jew or not to be.”
†
What a parallel existed between the targets of the right and of the Nazis then gathering strength! I had a very different recollection of people of “leftist” political tendencies, a few teachers from my school days, rational critics distanced from all mass illusions. They had often spoken contemptuously of the hurrah-patriotism they had witnessed during the First World War—and this was only a decade before the new breed of
“Sieg heilers
” appeared in the forums of the Third Reich. A more discriminating patriotism was permitted on the left.

I myself, in continuous self-doubt and inner antipathy to the figure of Hitler, could simply not convince myself that Hitler’s “revolution” was a revolution at all. If from today’s perspective the decisive effects of his regime on Germany—the displacement of the old Prussian upper class and the necessity for its replacement by another, the dissolution of Prussia, the disappearance of the capital from Berlin, and the division of Germany—may appear as the result of a deliberately initiated revolutionary process, I could not discover a corresponding serious start in Hitler. A man like Otto Strasser may have
aimed at a truly socialistic reformation of German society, but Hitler? What did he do other than for tyrannical (only outwardly glorified as messianic) aims to collect all those dissatisfied with the republic into militant organizations in which, with the help of a mystical-racial ideology, to bind a narcoticized people to a pseudoreligious mass illusion and to transform Germany into a circus of fanatical frenzy and ruthless inquisition and the Germans into political St. Vitus’s dancers? Did not his public appearances and those of his rhetorical standins mask the fact that everything was undertaken only to keep Hitler and themselves at the levers of power, even at the cost of the nation’s welfare, that Hitler’s “revolution” was a revolution in disguise—one that was in fact an archaic, shameless, brutalizing reaction? Only the dynamic of his power, his “coordination” (
gleichschaltung
) which flattened out the social groups and classes into a “Community of the Folk” and of the war he unleashed could, in their totality, transmit the impression of a consciously contrived social revolution to his posterity.