The German War (5 page)

On the eve of war most Germans belonged to both an established Christian denomination and a Nazi Party organisation; far more of them – 94 per cent – remained members of a Catholic or Protestant church than the two-thirds who belonged to Nazi organisations. The churches were the most important independent civic institutions in Germany, and a number of obdurate priests and pastors were sent to concentration camps for criticising Nazi actions from the pulpit. In July 1937, the most outspoken pastor in Berlin, Martin Niemöller, was arrested by the Gestapo. He would spend the rest of the Third Reich in the camps. In April 1945, the young Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Both men would become powerful symbols of civil courage in the face of Nazi oppression, but this was a much later development: Bonhoeffer represented a liberal, humanitarian theology which had been sidelined and gone into exile with Paul Tillich. Neither the ideas nor Bonhoeffer as a symbolic figure would re-emerge in post-war West Germany until the late 1950s and early 1960s. Niemöller was altogether different. He was not a liberal democrat but an anti-Semitic, conservative nationalist, a submarine captain in the First World War who had served in the
Freikorps
in 1919–20 before retraining as a clergyman. He had also actively supported Hitler at elections from 1924 to 1933. When war broke out in 1939, Niemöller would write from Sachsenhausen to Admiral Raeder, the Commander of the Navy, volunteering to serve his country again. Niemöller’s dissent in the 1930s was more religious than political and the type of Christianity he stood for was struggling for its place within German Protestantism.
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Having enthusiastically supported the Nazis’ ‘national revolution’ in 1933, Protestants soon split in three directions. Many pastors joined the German Christian Movement, which wanted to deepen the spiritual renewal into a liturgical and theological one – banning the Old Testament and expurgating the New of Jewish influence, and excluding Jewish converts from Protestant ministry. Traditionalists who wanted to safeguard their scripture and liturgy and defend the Church from state interference formed themselves first into the Pastors’ Emergency League and then, in May 1934, into the Confessing Church. This split has been widely misunderstood and misrepresented as one waged between liberals and Nazis for the soul of the Church. It was not: although Karl Barth, the main author of the Barmen Confession, remained critical of the dictatorship and returned to Switzerland, he was not widely read even by pastors who belonged to the Confessing Church; Barth was not a Lutheran, like most German Protestants, but a Calvinist. Many pastors on both sides of this divide – including Niemöller – subscribed to the same key nationalist, authoritarian and socially unifying political values, and this gave scope for a third group of non-aligned Lutheran theologians around Paul Althaus to wield huge influence. He did not join the Nazi Party, but he did greet Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship as a ‘miracle and gift of God’. Although Althaus never participated in ritual burning of books by banned authors, he justified them. In the wake of the November 1938 pogrom against Germany’s Jews he pointed out that, since God guided history, their recent sufferings testified to the Jews’ guilt.
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The world of German Catholicism was divided too, but by generation. Catholic bishops were men aged 60–80, a generation older than the major Protestant theologians and the Nazi leaders. Most bishops had been ordained in the decades before the First World War and trained in a fiercely conservative neo-Aristotelian theology, consistent in its logic and abstract in its choice of language. They blamed ‘modernity’ for the ills of liberalism, socialism, communism and atheism. The gulf between the elderly bishops and younger clergy and laity also made for tensions within the Church, both over the form of communication and the substance of policy. Where the bishops tended to take a very insular, conservative view of social reform, many younger Catholics saw the ‘national revolution’ of 1933 as an opportunity to become more engaged in helping to shape German society. The war would amplify this generational divide between conservatives and reformers.
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The Nazis exerted pressure too, banning the Catholic youth movement, trying to secularise education further and seeking to bring the Caritas network of psychiatric asylums into line with the new law on compulsory sterilisation. In 1938, Nazi activists removed crucifixes from schools in Bavaria during the summer holidays, thoroughly antagonising rural and small-town Bavarians who blamed known radicals like the SS, the local Gauleiter and the Party’s ideologist-in-chief, Alfred Rosenberg. But Catholics did not tar the whole movement with the same brush and many remained active members of Nazi organisations, looking for support from other more sympathetic leaders such as Hermann Göring. Hitler himself censored his own views on religion so successfully that the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Faulhaber, and the primate of the German Church, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, both remained convinced that the Führer was a deeply religious man. Their shared national commitments would bring the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime into what recent historians have called an uneasy ‘antagonistic co-operation’ during the war.
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Deprived of clear spiritual leadership, individual Catholics and Protestants were left to resolve their problems of conscience in the privacy of diaries and letters, in the process providing the historian with an invaluable moral register for some of the more liberal and humane members of the ‘national community’.
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When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet there was no great soul-searching about why it had occurred. Whereas in Britain and France it was self-evident that Hitler was waging a war of conquest by launching an unprovoked attack on Poland, it was equally obvious to most Germans that they were caught up in a war of national defence, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression. Such views have for so long been banished from serious historical research, eking out a fringe existence in websites pandering to neo-Nazi opinions, that it seems strange to a contemporary audience that they should have been earnestly and honestly held at the time by so many Germans who were not dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. How could they confuse a deliberate and brutal war of colonial conquest with a war of national defence? How could they see themselves as beleaguered patriots, rather than as warriors for Hitler’s master race?

The First World War served as a yardstick not only for measuring shortages and hardship on the home front. It also fundamentally conditioned how people understood the causes of this second war within a generation. On 3 September 1939, it was Britain and France that declared war on Germany, just as Russia had mobilised first in 1914 and then invaded East Prussia. In August 1914 war came after a long process of ‘encirclement’ by hostile foreign powers, purportedly orchestrated by Britain to safeguard its own world empire and cut Germany down to size. The same reasoning, expressed in many of the selfsame phrases, resurfaced in 1939, as Germans noted the progress of the Polish crisis in their diaries. Again, British imperialist ambitions were the root cause of everything and Britain’s bellicosity was underlined by its government’s brusque rejection of Hitler’s repeated peace offers after the conquest of Poland and again, in 1940, after the fall of France. The view that this was a defensive war was not simply spawned by Nazi propaganda. Many who remained critical of the Nazis regarded the war in this way too. Everyone in Germany saw the Second World War through the lens of the First, whether or not they had lived through it. At least Germans were initially spared the nightmare of the kind of two-front war they had faced in 1914, thanks to the last-minute non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. But by Christmas 1941, Germany was once more at war with Britain, Russia and America – just as it had been in 1917.

The cult of the ‘front generation’ and the literature of the First World War – whether critical like Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
or celebratory like Ernst Jünger’s
Storm of Steel
– shaped an impression that the generation of 1914–18 was unique. Above all, it had been cut off from the generation of their fathers, who had grown up knowing only peace. Whether or not it really was a conflict between fathers and sons, the First World War came to be seen as such. This was not true of the Second. The sense of being caught up in a terrible cycle of repeated wars fought over the same issues fostered a sense of fraternal ‘comradeship’ across the generations. When Helmut Paulus was sent to the eastern front in 1941, his father, a GP and reserve officer from the previous war, began writing to him as a ‘comrade’. As Helmut’s unit advanced through Romania and into southern Ukraine, they found themselves in the same locations as German troops had occupied in the previous war, and his parents were not slow to find neighbours and acquaintances back in Pforzheim who could describe the terrain or unfold old war maps to work out where their sons must be fighting. Men, proud to have withstood their ‘baptism of fire’ in the trenches, compared artillery barrages with the ten-month battle of Verdun in 1916, equating its legendary destructive force with the ultimate test. German commanders too cast their fears in terms of that war, haunted as they closed on Moscow in November 1941 by the danger of a repetition of the sudden, unexpected change in fortunes they had experienced at the Marne, when they were within reach of Paris, twenty-seven years earlier.

What bound fathers and sons together was more than shared experience. It was a sense of intergenerational responsibility. The sons had to achieve what their fathers had failed to do. They had to break the cycle of repetition, which condemned each generation to fight in Russia. Whereas left-wing and liberal thinkers saw history in linear, progressive terms, many conservatives believed that it was circular and repetitive, like the life cycle. The dire predictions of the decline of Western culture, epitomised by Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West,
had been overturned by the ‘national rebirth’ in 1933, but the cyclical, naturalising metaphors had remained. The German war in the Soviet Union turned metaphor into reality, the abstract threat of destructive repetition into an immediate and existential struggle. The immense brutality of the German war in the east only heighted the sense that Germany finally had to break this cycle – or else it would be condemning the next generation to repeat the slaughter.

This had been a concern from the outset. When soldiers waited for the fighting to start in the west in autumn 1939, some reflected that ‘It’s better to clear the decks now, then it’s to be hoped we won’t have to be involved in a war again.’ German schoolchildren had been taught for generations that France was the ‘hereditary enemy’ but in a visceral, emotional sense it was Russia that really mattered. From 1890 even the oppositional Social Democrats had pledged that if ever Germany was attacked by Tsarist Russia, they would defend the country against the barbarians from the east. In August 1914, the Russian invasion of East Prussia triggered a wave of highly exaggerated horror stories in the German press and the little-known Prussian general who defeated them, Paul von Hindenburg, became an enduring national hero. In 1941, it was not difficult to persuade the population that the new war in Russia had to be fought to a finish so that the next generation would not have to go through it again. From the veterans of the eastern front from 1914–17 to young soldiers just out of school and teenagers still at home, families identified the war, not with the Nazi regime, but with their own intergenerational familial responsibilities. It was the strongest foundation for their patriotism.
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Such utter and complete commitment to serve was only thinkable because it was never unlimited and unbounded. It had a temporal dimension. As one soldier reassured his wife in February 1940, ‘Next year we’ll make up for everything, yes?’ Two years later, another was vowing ‘to catch up on everything later which we’re missing out on now’. Their dreams of a post-war life formed the focus of hope, the personal version of what victory – or, increasingly, simply avoiding defeat – meant to them. However justified and necessary, the war years were lost time; real time would only begin afterwards; one man spoke for many when he promised his wife, ‘Then our life will actually begin.’ Just before Christmas 1944, a young tank commander on the eastern front wrote to his fiancée in Berlin complaining about his thwarted ambitions to become an artist and expressing his fear that the war would not break the endless cycle of conflict: ‘After this war will soon come, perhaps in twenty years, another, which is already faintly discernible today’, he warned her, adding that ‘the life of this generation seems to me to be measured by catastrophes’.
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For families and individuals the war proved to be unutterably long. They were touched by the great events but the millions of family letters carried each day by the field post chronicled domestic stratagems to cope with the excessive demands of war and plotted the incremental, unconscious adjustments each side had to make. In their need to reassure each other, many couples concealed how difficult their relationships were becoming and how much they had changed was only revealed when they were reunited after the war. In the early post-war years, the divorce rate soared. This book is about the long war. It charts the transformations of German society and the subtle but often irreversible ways in which individuals adapted to a war they felt increasingly they could not control. It traces the changing expectations, oscillating hopes and fears of individuals through the events which shaped them. Their lives provide both an emotional measure of experience and a moral barometer for a society set on a self-destructive path.

PART ONE

DEFENDING THE ATTACK

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‘Don’t wait for me. There is no more leave,’ the young soldier scribbled in haste to his girlfriend. ‘I’ve got to go straight to the barracks and load vehicles. It’s the mobilisation alarm.’ He just had time to drop off his personal effects at the home of Irene’s aunt in the Liebigstrasse. But it was the weekend and the young florist had already left for her parents’ home. Unable to say goodbye to her, he managed to scrawl their address on the envelope, ‘To Fräulein Irene Reitz, Lauterbach, Bahnhofstrasse 105’. A young professional soldier, who had signed on as a corporal two years before, Ernst Guicking was one of the first men to be sent off, joining the 163rd Infantry Regiment in Eschwege.
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