The German War (39 page)

The huge differences between life at the front and at home did not undermine the emotional bonds between them. On the contrary, home, with all its privileges and seemingly trivial problems, made conditions at the front seem more bearable. Helmut’s mother had to manage without a housemaid for much of that winter. When it all felt too much, she wrote to her son, ‘then I think of you in Russia and how much a person can bear if he has to, and I think I am pretty privileged in my nice, warm house’. When her nephew Reinhard skated on thin ice and fell through, she thought of how often Helmut and his comrades ‘are drenched and have no heating to warm yourselves on!’ Writing to Helmut about the incident, or about the mess that Reinhard and her younger son Rudolf had made of the chemistry lab Helmut had set up in the upstairs kitchen, maintained the ties to hearth and home more strongly than any overt patriotic appeal. Helmut Paulus did not need to be told what he was fighting for.
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A week before the Red Army counter-attacked, on 29 November 1941, Fritz Todt went to see Hitler to tell him that ‘this war can no longer be won by military means’. The advice was not offered lightly. As Minister for Armaments, Todt knew better than anyone the state of German materiel. He had done his best to inject new urgency into the armaments effort, but having looked at the balance of German resources and production, he concluded that Germany could not withstand a prolonged war of attrition against the Soviet Union. Others, like Friedrich Fromm, the head of the army’s armaments section and commander of the training army, were telling Franz Halder the same thing.

Todt’s advice to end the war did not entirely surprise Hitler. He had toyed with the same thought back in August, when he mused aloud to Goebbels as to whether the Soviet Union and Germany could ever defeat each other. Fritz Todt was one of Hitler’s most effective old comrades: the architect of the autobahns and the west defences against France and, most critically, as the man in charge of boosting ammunition production ahead of the attack on France. He had the standing to deliver this bleakest of messages, and, uncharacteristically, Hitler calmly heard him out. At the end, he asked simply, ‘How then shall I end the war?’ Todt replied, ‘It can only be ended politically’, warning of the dire consequences should the United States move from supplying Britain and policing the Atlantic convoys to becoming a direct participant in the conflict.
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Far from heeding this sound advice, within the fortnight Hitler declared war on the United States. On 11 December, the Nazi leader announced his decision before a specially convened Reichstag, laying the blame on President Roosevelt and his Jewish lobby for ‘this historical confrontation, a confrontation that will decisively shape not only the history of Germany but that of Europe, actually that of the entire world, for the next 500 or 1,000 years’. It was the Jews ‘who, with Old Testament fanaticism, believe that the United States can be the instrument for preparing another Purim of the European nations that are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. It was the Jew, in his full satanic vileness, who rallied around this man, and to whom this man also reached out.’ The next day, Hitler spoke again, this time behind closed doors to a gathering of Nazi Gau and Reich leaders, offering them a general survey of the state of the war. According to Goebbels’s summary notes of the speech, the Führer also reminded them of the ‘prophecy’ he had made to the Jews, in his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, ‘that if they once more caused a world war, they would experience their extermination. This was not rhetoric. The world war is there, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’ With his characteristic turn of phrase when referring to mass killing, Hitler added, ‘This question is to be handled without any sentimentality.’ After hearing his leader, Hans Frank went to consult with Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office to obtain confirmation of what was actually planned. He returned to Cracow to tell his officials in the General Government on 16 December:

One way or another – this I want to tell you quite openly – an end must be made with the Jews . . . We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we cannot poison them, but we will find ways of somehow succeeding in destroying them in conjunction with the great measures being discussed in the Reich.

As usual, what Hitler decided about the Jews also highlighted his view of the war as a whole. In 1939, when many people had expected him to sanction a new pogrom, he held back, still hoping to reach an accommodation with Britain and France. Once the Reich was at war with the United States, the die was cast and the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ rapidly took on a new form. By New Year, Hitler was no longer prepared to listen to Todt or anyone else proposing peace, unequivocally rejecting Ribbentrop’s suggestion that he should start negotiations with Moscow. Instead, he insisted, ‘In the east . . . only a clear decision could be considered’. Fritz Todt visited Hitler’s field headquarters once again on 7 February 1942, but on his return flight to Berlin the next morning, the plane crashed on take-off, killing Todt instantly. He was replaced by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, a court favourite who would soon prove himself an effective technocrat, prepared to push up armaments production by the most ruthless means.
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Within Germany’s ruling elites, where information travelled fastest, the mood remained bleak. The winter retreat took its toll on them, with a trail of heart attacks, strokes, suicides and sackings. Ernst Udet, head of Luftwaffe procurement, shot himself on 17 November 1941; in January, a key industrialist, Walter Borbet, followed suit. Among the top brass, Bock and Brauchitsch both had heart problems and were relieved of their commands. Rundstedt, far older than any of them, was ‘retired’ in November, only to be hastily recalled in January, when his successor Reichenau suffered a stroke and died on his way to hospital, in another air accident. Two of the most feted panzer commanders, Hoepner and Guderian, were peremptorily sacked for insubordination. When Goebbels and Hitler discussed the crisis on 20 January 1942, the Propaganda Minister and inveterate diarist noted, ‘Defeatist mood in the OKW and OKH [Wehrmacht and Army High Commands] . . . General defeatism in Berlin government circles.’
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As news of the military debacle trickled back, a delayed sense of the crisis gripped the German home front. By mid-January 1942, mood reports were warning that the German media was no longer believed. By August, it had become clear to most people that Russia was an ‘exceptionally tough opponent’, in contrast to the propaganda images of defeatist masses forced into battle by Bolshevik commissars. But the Soviet counter-attack, coming just when the home front expected to hear a special announcement of the fall of Moscow, took everyone by surprise. It took German society some time to grasp the scale of the crisis. Only after Hitler issued his ‘Halt Order’ on 16 December, forbidding any further retreat, did people begin to ask what had gone wrong. By January, it was clear to many that the High Command had failed. In old heartlands of working-class anti-militarism, the retirement of Prussian generals on grounds of ‘ill health’ was greeted as a defeat for the forces of ‘reaction’ within the regime. Elsewhere, it was taken simply as a sign of military failure and incompetence. The public reappearance of the so recently disgraced Field Marshal von Rundstedt as Hitler’s representative at the state funeral of Reichenau completed the sense of confusion. For the first time, the SD noted, civilians were abandoning official sources of information altogether. They were turning instead to ‘rumours, stories of soldiers and people with “political connections”, military post and the like, to construct “their picture”, into which the most baseless rumours are often incorporated with astonishing lack of critical control.’
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With its antennae tuned to pick up the first signs of defeatism and revolution, the Nazi regime reacted anxiously to the flood of complaints from the front during the winter of 1941. Where military officials had once lauded soldiers’ letters as a ‘kind of spiritual vitamin’ for the home front that strengthened its ‘attitude and nerves’, Goebbels now lamented that ‘the impact of letters from the front, which had been regarded as extraordinarily important, has to be considered more than harmful today . . . Soldiers are pretty blunt when they describe the great problems they are fighting under, the lack of winter gear . . . insufficient food and ammunition.’ Goebbels urged the military High Command to issue guidelines to the troops but accepted that in the face of such a tidal wave of complaint, the regime was ‘powerless’. Events would prove him right. The official
Instructions to the Troops
issued in March 1942 urged men to act as propagandists to the home front and keep their worst experiences to themselves, warning them that ‘whoever complains and makes accusations isn’t a real soldier’. Selectively censoring the military mail only established that nothing would stop the men from writing home about such things.
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For Hitler and the Nazi leadership, these were uncharted waters and made them think about Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Primarily, November 1918 was seen as a failure of morale and nerve, when Allied – especially British – propaganda proved superior to German. But as they faced their own first great crisis of the war, the Nazi regime confused distress, anger and depression with defeatism: they miscalculated how much soldiers and their families would be able and willing to endure. The Nazi regime’s military censors and secret police reporters were predestined to make this mistake because they also grossly underestimated what German society had put up with in the previous war. For all the Nazi monopoly of propaganda, Hitler had admitted to a gathering of key media figures in November 1938 that he had no confidence that the ‘chicken-hearted’ German people would follow him through defeats. Whether or not his political authority and power really did depend on an unbroken string of successes, Hitler clearly went into the war believing this to be the case. Now, faced with an unresolved military crisis which made his own premature declaration of victory over Russia in October 1941 a serious embarrassment, he did his best to rally the nation.
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Between January and April 1942, Hitler addressed Germans four times over the radio, the greatest number of wartime speeches he made in so short a time. The first, on 30 January 1942, marked the 9th anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor. Addressing an audience at the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler admitted that even he did not know if the war could be won that year and simply asked his people to renew their trust in him. He repeated his by now famous ‘prophecy’ about the Jews; and for the first time, his language was less abstract. The Jews were threatened, no longer just with ‘destruction’ but with being ‘exterminated’. Despite the new emphasis, this was not the passage which his German audience discussed afterwards. What resonated most was Hitler’s exhortation to stay the course: ‘God give us the strength to maintain freedom for ourselves, for our people, our children and our children’s children, and not only for our people but also for the other peoples of Europe.’
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This echoed the propaganda of the previous war, when, in place of nineteenth-century romantic notions of heroic combat and knightly bravery, courage came to be seen as something more impassive, egalitarian and durable. In the First World War, the emphasis on ‘strong nerves’, ‘unshakeable calm’ and ‘determination’ created a new set of positive virtues, summed up by the slogan ‘Holding out’. ‘
Durchhalten
’ reflected the essentially defensive nature of much of the war, in which infantrymen held their trenches and endured artillery barrages and enemy attacks. Now, as
Blitzkrieg
failed in the winter of 1941–42 and the German Army in the East was forced into a static war of position, the dogged ethos of
Durchhalten
resurfaced. Without the self-sustaining highs produced by rapid advance, to ‘hold out’ would require a complete mobilisation of psychological and emotional commitment. In Pforzheim, Erna Paulus proudly pointed out to her son that the Führer had singled out the infantry for praise in his 30 January speech: ‘As a result, it is now clear to the whole people that you are carrying the main burden of the war, and that’s right and proper.’
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Helmut’s mother had already shown her patriotic dedication when she began sewing and knitting for her son. On 20 December 1941, armed with a proclamation from Hitler, Goebbels went on the radio to call for a major nationwide collection of winter clothing and kit for the troops as ‘a Christmas present from the German people to the eastern front’. Goebbels’s Winter Relief campaign to provide for the troops proved remarkably successful, though it drew on more than the dedication of the German people. Across occupied Europe, the authorities lost no time in requisitioning. In occupied Poland Jews were immediately forbidden to own furs and ordered to hand them in: this yielded 16,654 fur coats and fur-lined coats, 18,000 fur jackets, 8,300 muffs and 74,446 fur collars in Warsaw alone. The Polish underground resistance took heart from this first sign of vulnerability, putting up posters depicting a German soldier huddled in a woman’s fox-fur collar while he warmed his hands in her muff.
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There was a huge response on the German home front. By the middle of January 1942, 2 million volunteers had collected 67 million items across the Reich. Helmut Paulus’s family gave generously and his mother started sewing old furs into mittens for the troops, and silk dresses into chest warmers, just as she had previously done for her son. All the women she knew were sewing and knitting too. In Berlin, the young photographer Liselotte Purper waxed lyrical: ‘If only you could see the sewing rooms. From morning till late into the night, the women sit there . . . sewing camouflage jackets, caps, finger protectors, gloves, etc.’ The number of volunteers was so great that ‘they scarcely have elbow room’. When she wrote to her fiancé Kurt Orgel, stationed with the artillery laying siege to Leningrad, she assured him that her love for him was part of a much greater collective act: