The German War (19 page)

The younger generation was even more frustrated. In the third month of his military training in Brünn, Helmut Paulus realised that he and his comrades had been born ‘too late after all’. Despite having tried to volunteer back in August 1939, he had missed the war. Certain that Britain would give up, his months of training now seemed a waste. Restless for some kind of war-related service, teenagers besieged the offices of the Reich Labour Service to find out when they would be called up to serve in it. By now the Armaments Inspectorates reported that even workers in sought-after occupations exempt from conscription were impatient to join up.
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Shortly after the fall of Paris, another newsreel astonished audiences with its depiction of the battle for Dunkirk shot from from the cockpit of a Stuka. Audiences dived with the plane towards the British transport ships below. It was a cinematic technique already used in the coverage of the Polish campaign, but when the dive-bombers’ vertiginous speed was set to a soundtrack of their engines with rising background music it became gut-wrenchingly involving. Night-time shots of burning oil tanks and railway junctions bombed by day provided images of precision bombing. Since the start of the war, Goebbels had struggled to convince the Germans that the English were cowardly and treacherous: Dunkirk now provided a welcome opportunity to make the accusations stick. The ‘Tommies’, who had danced in nightclubs behind the lines in France, the Netherlands and Belgium, had simply abandoned their allies at the first sign of attack. While distraught-looking French prisoners testified to the true impact of German arms, the calm, self-satisfied expressions of British prisoners suggested that they had given up all too easily.
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Across Germany, audiences recoiled in horror and disgust from the French West African troops they saw on screen: ‘The French and English let such animals loose on us – the Devil take them!’ and ‘That’s an infamy for a civilised nation which debases England and France for ever!’ were typical exclamations. In Reichenberg, women confessed they felt paralysed with fear by the ‘coloured’ faces, and could breathe again only when German soldiers reappeared on screen. In many cinemas, according to the SD, audiences shouted: ‘Shoot these black beasts immediately after taking them prisoner.’ Fritz Probst agreed, warning his wife that ‘no one would have survived if this rabble had reached Germany’. What went unreported, except in private letters such as Hans Albring’s, was that several thousand Senegalese soldiers were butchered as they tried to surrender or when already in captivity. In Poland, acts of mutilation and sniping from trees had been attributed both to Polish civilians and soldiers. In France, only black troops were singled out in this way, and were maltreated, tortured and killed. Alongside acts of reprisal, the Germans were compensating too for the much-cultivated memory of French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, in which the sexual exploitation of German women by black colonial troops featured prominently. Even in this generally ‘clean’ campaign in the west, the German Army thus committed racial atrocities.
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On 22 June, the French surrendered. Hitler insisted on an exact replay of the armistice of November 1918, and the next newsreel culminated with the acceptance of German terms in the same railway carriage in the forest clearing at Compiègne. Afterwards, in a classic compensatory gesture, the carriage was brought to Berlin and exhibited at the foot of the steps to the Museum of Antiquities. There could be no clearer symbol that the outcome of the previous war had finally been reversed. As the extent of the victory became clear, people rushed out into the streets and squares to hold impromptu celebrations, though air raid warnings forced many inside again, where they listened to the radio announcements in their cellars. When Hitler ordered bells to be rung for a week and flags to be flown for ten days, the SD had no trouble describing how, after the ‘stormy excitement of the last weeks’, the national mood ‘gave way to a celebratory mood of quiet, proud joy and thanksgiving for the Führer and the Wehrmacht’.
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Throughout the 1920s, German schoolchildren had been taught to see France as ‘the hereditary enemy’. Now, like a mythological monster, it lay vanquished. All the luck and improvisation that had gone into the victory were swiftly corralled into a doctrine of invincible mobile warfare, with Wilhelm Keitel leading the praise for Hitler as ‘the greatest warlord of all time’. To every cinema the
Wochenschau
news brought the images of the perfectly dressed ranks of soldiers marching out from the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe into the bright sunlight. But it was Hitler who stole the show, his appearance greeted across the Reich by thunderous applause and shouts of ‘Heil!’ Then, in reverential silence, the audiences settled down to watch him sit down with his generals. People worried about his personal safety, as they saw him driving past columns of prisoners near the front line. But when he got into his car and smiled, audiences collectively released their breath. Forgetting that Britain was not yet defeated and forgetting – briefly – their normal gripes about shortages and the venality of the ‘big shots’, their euphoria focused on
him.
Even the proverbially dour Swabians acknowledged ‘wholly, joyfully, and thankfully the superhuman greatness of the Führer and his work’. After conquering Poland, few Germans had felt like celebrating. But now clamour for new photos of the Führer was accompanied by doting discussion of his expressions. Tough, working-class districts which had seen much street fighting between Nazi storm troopers and communists in the early 1930s finally succumbed.
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Still waiting to be called up from his high school in Solingen, August Töpperwien had greeted the campaign in the west with the assumption that ‘We all have to recognise that real historical decisions are being made here, executed by Adolf Hitler! Here it is not “good” and “evil” but “historically powerful” and “historically powerless” that count.’ If this vogue for reading Nietzsche as a philosopher of power placed the war ‘beyond good and evil’, Töpperwien discounted his own moral qualms at the terrible air power unleashed against French civilians by telling himself that a ‘nation can only consent to our destructive aerial warfare which has brought forth a
Nietzsche’
(his emphasis). Addressing the conference of Bavarian Protestant pastors, Bishop Meiser declared that

the hot breath of history strikes us in the face. Without doubt we cannot measure the greatness of the world event of today . . . a new world is arising out of the primal depths of being. Our German people stands at the centre of this event. It is the core strength from which a new, transfiguring will spreads over the whole earth.

Victory was sweet because it seemed astonishingly easy. Arriving at the Loire, a Swabian soldier was amazed. ‘Where is the enemy?’ he asked. ‘On the right a couple of men disappeared into the bushes. But of the enemy nothing is to be seen. Where are the poilus?’ The Wehrmacht published this private letter in a commemorative volume, helping to embed the experience in popular memory. Hitler had delivered the German people from a conflict on the scale of the world war that had cost Germany nearly two million military dead. In Berlin, by 1917, the military death toll had been overtaken by the civilian one, as hunger, cold and illness wrought havoc on the city. Unlike the ‘phoney war’ in Britain and the ‘
drôle de guerre
’ in France, Germans experienced the seven long months of foreboding from September till mid-May not as a
Sitzkrieg
so much as, in the words of the SD, ‘a war of nerves’. When the dreaded battles in the west finally began, the first news of bulletins had confirmed a universal sense of replay of the battles in Flanders and of impending carnage. Instead, at the end of June 1940 Ernst Guicking found himself in Toulon, eating

first pork leg, then roast calf, sausage with vegetables and to finish a wonderful dessert. Apricots with cherries. To go with it two bottles of red wine. And the whole lot cost the impossible price of nine francs. That’s 75 German pfennig. Yes, yes, you’re right. We’re living like ‘God in France’.

In the summer of 1940, the Wehrmacht reported 26,500 dead in the French campaign. The statistics were a slight underestimate and would be revised upwards, but even so there was no comparison with the 2,055,000 killed in the last war: the country had lost 61,500 men in the conquest of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The final newsreel of the campaign in the west showed Hitler paying silent homage in front of a small group of German war graves before accepting the French surrender at Compiègne. Now it was time to end the conflict with Britain too and restore the peace the whole population craved.
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On 18 July 1940, the 218th Infantry Division returned home to Berlin. Crowds up to twenty rows deep lined the new East–West Axis, with enterprising onlookers clambering on to trees, lamp posts and statues along the route to get a better view. The crowds threw confetti and flowers at the troops, while the military bands played. After marching through the Brandenburg Gate to the Pariser Platz, the division was welcomed by the city’s Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels. He reminded the holiday crowd that the last time troops had marched through the Gate was on 16 December 1918, when the returning Prussian Guard regiments were met by ‘gangsters and strikers’: ‘Not this time!’ he shouted.
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The following evening, Hitler addressed the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House. Wreaths were laid on six seats for the deputies who had been killed in action. The American journalist William Shirer, sitting once again in the gallery, had never seen so much gold braid and military uniforms. The press wondered if Hitler would announce ‘a new
Blitzkrieg
– this time against Britain – or an offer of peace’. After Hermann Göring heaved himself into the Speaker’s chair and the audience hushed, Hitler spoke for over two hours about the course of the war and the military campaign. With an outstretched salute, he promoted twelve generals to the rank of field marshal; they sprang to attention and saluted back. Since Göring already held that title, Hitler created the new rank of ‘Reich Marshal’ for him. Shirer considered this speech to be one of Hitler’s most outstanding performances. There was no note of hysteria, the American journalist observed; indeed the Führer’s voice was pitched slightly deeper than usual, the movement of his hands and body almost as expressive as his words. ‘The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight’, Shirer noted down a few hours later, ‘was the conqueror, and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top.’

At the very end, Hitler ‘stretched out his hand’ to offer peace: ‘In this hour I feel it my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense. I can see no reason why this war must go on.’ The auditorium remained tense and expectant as Hitler struck a tone more of sorrow than of anger. ‘I am grieved to think of the sacrifices it will claim. I should like to avert them, also for my own people.’ He reminded his audience of his peace offer the previous October and regretted that ‘in spite of all my efforts I have not succeeded in becoming friends with England’. The BBC broadcast Halifax’s official rejection of Hitler’s new peace initiative three days later.
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The Führer may have misjudged the British government, but not the mood in Germany. With the magnanimity of the true conqueror, Hitler had given Britain the chance to end the conflict – and all the responsibility for prolonging it. Even before the British government’s formal rejection, some German people wondered whether their government’s offer to the ‘real warmonger and guilty party in this war’ had been too generous. It was not just the unpolitical Irene and Ernst Guicking who expected the Führer ‘not to be merciful’. Even Wilm Hosenfeld set his religious compassion to one side when he wrote to his wife, ‘The war can now only be decided with brutal force. The English want it so.’ This man, who had felt so ashamed of the violence he witnessed in Poland, was certain now: ‘No, one doesn’t need to feel sorry for them. Hitler offered them the hand of peace often enough.’
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Five days before Hitler’s Reichstag speech, on 14 July, Churchill had pledged to the world that Britain would fight on alone. On 3 July, the Royal Navy had sunk the French fleet anchored off the Tunisian coast, to prevent it falling into German hands, an act Churchill described as a ‘sad duty’. To the new government at Vichy, whose control over the French Navy was assured by the terms of the Armistice, the unprovoked assault amounted to a treacherous attack by its recent ally. This was also the image of Britain which German propaganda had been cultivating all summer: on 4 July, the German News Bureau released excerpts of captured documents detailing Allied plans to bomb Soviet oilfields from the Middle East, an operation intended to disrupt the Soviet supply of oil to Germany, but which the News Bureau could portray as a deceitful Allied attempt to widen the war.
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On 1 September 1939, the American President Roosevelt had appealed to all European powers to undertake not to conduct air raids against civilians or ‘open’ cities. Hitler and Chamberlain assented on the same day, with the British and French governments issuing a joint declaration that they would not be the first to resort to such action. The British could now point to the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam as the fundamental breach, while German propaganda claimed that these cities had been militarily defended: until they were surrendered as ‘open’ cities like Paris, they remained legitimate military targets. For the German public, however, the ‘Children’s murder at Freiburg’ of 10 May 1940 marked the point when the British had unilaterally broken the undertaking to spare civilian population centres. As Hitler told his dinner guests two years later, ‘It was the English who started air attacks . . . The German is always restrained by moral scruples, which mean nothing to the English; to the latter such an attitude is merely a sign of weakness and stupidity.’ This ‘fact’ was kept alive in the court of international public opinion, figuring prominently in a 1943 publication of the Foreign Ministry addressed to the neutral countries, its
8th White-Book: Documents on England’s Sole Guilt for the Bombing War against the Civilian Population
.
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