The German War (22 page)

If the Luftwaffe’s bombing led to ‘eight million going mad’ in London, Hitler mused on 14 September, it would force Britain out of the war and make an invasion unnecessary. Two days later, Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to focus on night-time bombing, and on the 17th Hitler shelved his plans for the invasion indefinitely. The public was not told. Instead, on 18 September, the radio commentator Hans Fritzsche warned in his ‘front reports’ that London had to choose ‘between the fate of Warsaw and Paris’ – between being blasted from the skies or declaring itself an ‘open’ city and surrendering. By this point, publication of neutral Swedish and American eyewitness accounts of the Blitz helped to boost the morale of the German air crews and home front alike. When Goebbels read them, he was elated by their ‘really apocalyptic’ descriptions, and other readers too hoped they proved that the onslaught was working. At the same time, after a month of bombing, the SD picked up a new, grudging admiration at the ‘toughness of the English and especially the residents of London’: no one else had withstood the Luftwaffe this long.
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Through October and November the air raids increased in scale, and by late November the Propaganda Minister wondered in his diary, ‘When will Churchill capitulate?’ Within a fortnight, the SD reported widespread rumours that Britain was on the brink of revolution. The longer the British held out, however, the more it impressed German opinion. By mid-January 1941, reports of bleak social conditions in Britain were ‘meeting with a critical reaction’. The SD surveyed Germans’ growing disillusion with their own propaganda, noting typical comments such as ‘the people of Britain surely did not feel that they were languishing under a plutocratic regime’. Increasingly, people shrugged off tales of British inequality with the comment, ‘Well, it’s no different here.’ Neither capitulation nor revolution looked likely across the North Sea.
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By early May 1941, Göring was trying to reassure German bomber squadrons that they had inflicted ‘enormous damage to the point of complete destruction’ on British armaments production. British wartime surveys exaggerated in the other direction, speaking of a 5 per cent fall in output, but failing to take account of the huge shift in resources to civil defence. By the time the air offensive ended in June 1941, some 700,000 British men and women were employed full-time and a further 1.5 million part-time in air and civil defence; and the British civilian death toll had reached 43,384. On the German side, the continual sorties took their toll on air crews. In November 1940, German neurologists had found their first real evidence of the kind of ‘war neuroses’ they had been looking for since the beginning of the war, and recommended that air crews should be given spells of leave at home, in winter sports spas or in Paris and Brussels to relieve the stress. Psychiatric cases were treated at a hotel on the Breton coast.

On 10 May, exactly a year after the start of the campaign in the west, 505 planes raided London, dropping 718 tonnes of high explosive and damaging the Houses of Parliament. It was the last major night raid. By now, the operational strength of the Luftwaffe’s bombing arm was down to 70 per cent of its capacity in May 1940. As the bombing of Britain tailed off, the media switched its attention to the U-boats’ war on the Atlantic convoys. Propagandists toned down their taunts about ‘English cowardice’, lying, ‘Jewish’ influence and ‘plutocracy’. There was no point in reminding the German public of their confident expectations of the previous autumn.
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On 27 September 1940, Paulheinz Wantzen counted the hundredth alarm in Münster. The main effect of the air raids was cumulative tiredness. For the whole of 1940, the city listed just eight fatalities. Hamburg reported nineteen and Wilhelmshaven four. Carola Reissner reported in November 1940 that the bombing had not caused enough damage to put a single plant in Essen out of commission. The national count at the end of 1940 was 975 dead. Neither side made its death statistics public.
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Germans quietly adjusted. By end of 1940 bomb damage in Berlin had become a tourist attraction, to be photographed before it disappeared. Liselotte Purper was on a night train to the Netherlands, dreaming that she was back at school, when the sirens went. She did not even wake up till the all-clear sounded. Carola Reissner also stopped getting out of bed for air raid alarms in Essen. As the Christmas holidays passed uneventfully in Münster, Paulheinz Wantzen thought that ‘in general people are reckoning with a long war, without being particularly worried or bothered about it. In its current phase the war is hardly noticeable.’
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5

In the summer of 1940, while all of Germany rejoiced over the Wehrmacht’s triumph in the west, Robert Schmuhl pined in East Prussia. Sent to the other end of the country, he missed the busy routine of his Hamburg bakery and the comradeship he had enjoyed during his military training. The farmer he was billeted on was unfriendly and made it quite clear that he did not need Robert to guard the twenty-five French prisoners working for him. Robert might be safe, but if this was all his war amounted to, then he would cut a sorry figure after it was all over, with no tales of battle to tell. He could at least write to his wife, Mia, but it was such a new habit that she took to correcting his grammar and spelling. Perhaps just because he was so untutored, he quickly discovered a rare intimacy in letters. ‘Dearest mouse,’ he wrote a few weeks into his posting,

I’ve got a proposal for you: from now on we’ll write in each letter about one of the many nice love experiences we’ve shared. I think that’d be nice wouldn’t it? What do you think? I am looking forward to the first love story from you. Then I’ll answer straight away and write about one of the many love experiences too. So dearest mouse, you start and make me happy.

Realising his wife might be reluctant to begin, in his next letter Robert decided to set an example himself. He recalled a trip they had taken to the North Sea coast where they had stayed in a little hotel seven years earlier. ‘Snuggling up very close together, full of hot love,’ he went on,

quite soon the little giver of joy was standing before his favourite door, but we had to be very careful, because of the sound of steps in the corridor and we didn’t want to draw attention to it. After I had stroked the clit of the little pussy a couple of times with my giver of joy, someone came along the corridor again. In the meantime our excitement had reached boiling point and I carefully stuck the little one in the pussy. When we had rocked back and forth quite carefully a couple of times making the bed creak, I again heard steps in the corridor, but I kept the little one in the pussy and at the same instant noticed that my little mouse was shaking with joy. And at the same time the little pussy twitched around me, the wonderful feeling of the spasm bringing me to a peak of excitement and we both came together. Full of happiness over this wonderful feeling we looked into each other’s shining eyes and pressed our bodies together.

Robert’s letter did the trick. Mia rewarded him for ‘much, much happiness’ and wrote back about a trip to the beach where ‘we enjoyed the happiness of love again and again’. Though she was still too bashful to regale him with the details, as they continued to write to each other two to three times a week during these months of enforced separation, Mia’s confidence grew. She began to adopt Robert’s private language for sex and overcame her own inhibitions about writing it down. By 1 October, she was reminding him of a quiet Sunday afternoon when they had gone to bed after lunch, ‘and you quite carefully pulled my pants down and stroked the little one first with your finger and drove it crazy with your b.[ringer of] j.[oy].’ As both their confidence and frustration grew, Robert broached another taboo: ‘Sometimes, my dearest mouse, I just can’t hold out any longer. I miss you so much. Then I imagine one of our beautiful love moments and sometimes succeed in relieving myself.’ It took longer to overcome Mia’s inhibitions this time and Robert wrote again a few weeks later, gently inducting his wife into the art of female masturbation. ‘It can’t make so much difference,’ he suggested, ‘if you stroke the little clit gently with your finger as I have so often and made you come, or is it a big difference?’
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By encouraging each other to finding a way of articulating their feelings and desires, by taking out their own sexual memories and intimate names and placing them on the page, Robert and Mia discovered a directness and candour which was highly unusual in wartime Germany. There was of course a tradition of both pornography and moral campaigns against it in Germany, but the way their letters developed suggests that they had to find their own private language, with Mia taking over the words that Robert had used. All couples faced the same problem of reassuring themselves and each other that the loss of sex had changed nothing between them. Sexual longing was universal. But most bundled their desires into conventional packaging, sending each other hugs and kisses, and imagining holding hands.
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Many of the letters travelling between ‘home’ and ‘front’ were anodyne and conveyed little sense of what husbands and wives were living through, but that was often the point: to show that everything was still intact, that nothing had changed. Sex was most visible as a photographic negative – as anxious jealousies conjured up by absence. Men and women were too constrained to write about sex but they wrote often and without restraint about their terror of sexual infidelity. Dieter D. was only too typical in suspecting his wife as soon as the stream of letters dried up: ‘Are you cross with me or do you have something against me, Herta? Or aren’t you well enough to write to me? You haven’t forgotten me, or do you now have another lover? . . . Do I have to hear again that you’re hanging around in the evening with other men?’ Every gap in the mail was put down, not to problems with the military postal service, but to infidelity.
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In March 1941, to his great relief, Robert was transferred from East Prussia to northern France. At last, after the months of isolation, he was among comrades. Instead of his useless guard duties, he was busy baking bread for the troops. Robert’s euphoria was palpable. He began to write to Mia about the ‘comradely get-togethers’, visits to the bars, and, under her suspicious questioning, admitted to having accompanied others to the brothels in Lille, but – he insisted – only to look at what went on there. Despite his protests that ‘love isn’t a business’, Mia was left in some uncertainty about what had actually transpired. Robert had already told her that virtually all the men who did not have French girlfriends ‘help themselves out. You should just hear the conversations here the day before leaving for Paris: it’s all about one particular thing.’
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Robert and Mia were exceptional in discussing this most ubiquitous of German soldiers’ activities. Brothels tracked the march of the conquerors across Europe. When German troops arrived in Nantes in 1940, they were filmed waving at the children on the Place Royale and then headed straight for the brothels, shooting down the doors. The Wehrmacht moved to establish separate brothels for their troops and their officers. This was one of the many areas of agreement between the German and French authorities, as they concurred in managing a nineteenth-century system of licensed, controlled prostitution, with ‘closed houses’ and compulsory medical checks in order to mitigate the danger of sexually transmitted diseases. For the conservative Vichy authorities, the real danger was unregulated prostitution, and the police carried out periodic sweeps of their towns. Sanctions against covert prostitution became harsher, and from autumn 1941 women were liable to incarceration in the camps at La Lande and Jargeau. French officials had difficulty separating prostitution from women drinking, flirting in bars and receiving gifts. The complex culture of casual sex that developed both around the German bases and in towns where they lodged privately would have been hard to police, even if the French authorities had had the powers to arrest German soldiers. Although the German Field Command also wanted to control the risk of disease from ‘debauched’ French women, it reacted badly to any French efforts to check its own men’s sexual adventures with housemaids, cleaners, laundry women, waitresses, bar staff, hairdressers, landladies, bathhouse attendants, shorthand secretaries, shopkeepers and other acquaintances.
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In the Catholic and largely conservative Loire region, the thriving port districts of Nantes and St-Nazaire provided a drinking and partying Mecca. In Nantes, the young of all classes flocked to the small cafés on the Quai de la Fosse where musicians played. On Saturday and Sunday evenings, as the drink flowed and the men circled the women, the freewheeling atmosphere could easily flip into drunken brawls. One particularly bad night in September 1941 left two German soldiers wounded, prompting investigations by both the German and French police. The incident may have been more serious than usual, but the French police commissioner concluded philosophically, ‘Incidents often happen in these places because of the mingling of males and females and above all because of the abuse of alcohol.’ ‘Cohabitation’ of occupiers and occupied remained largely peaceable.
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The German occupiers were young, generous and newly wealthy – ‘They were the best-looking men I have ever seen,’ avowed one woman from Touraine. And they were settling down in a country from which 1.5 million Frenchmen had just been removed. In August 1940, a waitress at the Hôtel des Bains in Morlaix on Brittany’s Finistère coast noticed a new arrival. Like many of the other Germans who came to eat in the restaurant, Walter was quartered in the hotel. Gradually, their chance conversations grew longer, with the help of his dictionary, and they fell in love. It was Aline’s first love affair, and, as she told a French historian sixty-three years later, she could not pass the building where the hotel had been without remembering that time: ‘There at the Hôtel des Bains is where I lost my virginity.’ The relationship lasted. For her 23rd birthday, in January 1942, a florist delivered twenty-three red roses from Walter. Aline could scarcely believe it. Since she lived with her parents, it was also his way of announcing that his intentions were honourable. When they went out in public, Walter took care to dress in civilian suits rather than his uniform – a respectable couple, who looked stouter and older than their years. Interviewed at the age of 84, Aline insisted, ‘I didn’t do it because he was a German but because I loved him. Full stop. There is no frontier to love.’
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