The German War (7 page)

On 1 September 1939, there were no patriotic marches and no mass rallies like those of August 1914. Instead, the streets remained eerily quiet. Reservists reported to their call-up points; civilians remained businesslike and subdued. The
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
felt compelled to comment that everyone was preoccupied with ‘what will happen in the coming hours and days’. In his Nikolassee suburb, Jochen Klepper read the article and wondered, ‘how can a people cope with a war without any enthusiasm whatever, so downcast?!’ The population seemed to be collectively holding its breath, waiting for the British and French response to the German ‘counter-attack’ on Poland. Many reasoned – in much the same way as Hitler did himself – that the Western powers were not likely to go to war over Danzig, having given way over the Sudetenland. Nevertheless, the fear that the disasters of the First World War were about to be repeated was palpable.
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Towards the end of that day, the air raid sirens sounded in Berlin, where the young press photographer Liselotte Purper was nailing blackout paper to the window frames of her flat. Banging their windows and doors shut, she and her neighbours rushed downstairs to the cellar of their apartment block, a dank hole which smelled of potatoes. They waited together, many with tear-stained faces, a young mother holding her three-week-old baby. Liselotte was frightened by the sirens, she wrote to her boyfriend Kurt, their wail ‘arousing deep-seated childhood terrors’. Her Spanish neighbour, impeccably attired in his elegant coat and hat, staggered slightly, his nose and mouth completely covered with a wet towel in case of a gas attack. Soon after, the all-clear sounded. Liselotte later heard that Polish planes had penetrated 15 kilometres into German airspace. As the whole apartment block prepared for air raids in earnest, she reflected on how her life had changed in so few days: all the men she knew had been called up for front-line service. The 27-year-old decided to volunteer for the Red Cross.
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Out in the suburbs, Jochen Klepper had heard the air raid alarm too, and went to bed expecting the bombers to come during the night, but he slept soundly, exhausted by fears for Johanna’s and Renate’s safety. He thought his wife ‘once more looks as bad as in November’ after the pogrom. As they clung to each other for support and waited to be separated, his stepdaughter Renate was being ‘particularly gentle’. In Dresden, the scholar of eighteenth-century French literature Victor Klemperer knew that he would not be called up: he was already 58, and the 1935 race laws also excluded the First World War veteran from this duty of citizenship. As a Jew, he expected in the first week of the war to be shot or sent to a concentration camp. Instead, he noted with surprise that the rash of ‘Jew-baiting’ in the press quickly subsided. When two friendly policemen came to search the apartment, they asked the Klemperers solicitously, ‘And why aren’t you abroad yet?’
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After travelling for a week from Flensburg, the 26th Infantry Regiment finally crossed the German–Polish border at 5 a.m. on 3 September. By early afternoon they passed through the first abandoned villages, saw the many mined bridges and struggled through the dry, yellow sand. Trucks became bogged down, horses tired from hauling the carts, and Gerhard M. had to carry his bike for long stretches. Cycle messenger was an accidentally appropriate job for the 25-year-old fireman whose parents ran a bike shop in Flensburg. It was the first Sunday of the war.
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Gerhard M. and his Flensburg comrades crossed the old, pre-1914, German–Russian border in Poland on 5 September and Gerhard experienced a strong sense of entering a different, un-German world. He was struck by the poverty and misery of the Polish civilians fleeing towards them, their bedding, bicycles and small children all piled on the small farm-carts pulled by a single horse, the ubiquitous
Panjewagen.
On the outskirts of Kalisz, they came under fire for the first time, took cover, and returned it with rifles and a machine gun. It took their artillery piece to knock out the Polish machine gun in an old factory and set the whole building alight. Gerhard saw German soldiers herd a dozen Polish civilians out of a house – ‘damned snipers’, he noted in his diary. He did not see what happened to them, as he turned his full attention to levering the boards off the door of an abandoned chocolate shop. Gerhard chortled in his diary how they ‘cleared the shop on credit’, before marching on into the night.
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In Solingen, Dr August Töpperwien was dozing in his back garden on the afternoon of 3 September when the subdued voices of his wife and a neighbour roused him. The British government had declared war. At 5 p.m., the French government followed suit. A senior high-school teacher with the pensionable rank of a civil servant, Töpperwien was conscious of his civic responsibilities and rushed to the local military offices to volunteer, only to be sent home again. To German Protestants like him, a new war immediately evoked memories of the national calamity of 1918. There was more than politics at stake. Germans had needed to be redeemed from the sin of revolution and self-inflicted defeat. Casting around for something to say to his first religious studies class of the war, Töpperwien turned for inspiration to the writings of the theologian Emanuel Hirsch and chose as his theme the words embossed on German soldiers’ brass belt buckles: ‘Gott mit uns’ – ‘With God on our side’.
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The official gazette of the Protestant Church immediately rallied: ‘So we unite in this hour with our people in our plea for the Führer and the Reich, for the entire Wehrmacht and for all who perform their duty for the Fatherland at home.’ The Bishop of Hanover offered a prayer to God: ‘Bless the Führer. Strengthen all those who stand in the service of our people, in the Wehrmacht, on land, water and in the air, and in all tasks which the Fatherland sets.’ Bishop Meiser, who had endured house arrest in 1934 for rejecting Nazi attempts to dragoon Bavarian Protestants into a single Reich Church, reminded pastors in Bavaria that the war gave them the opportunity to work for the German nation’s spiritual renewal, for ‘a new encounter between our people and its God so that the hidden blessing of this time for our people is not lost’.
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The response of Catholic bishops was less enthusiastic than in 1914. Then the Archbishop of Cologne had asked God to ‘Bless the German armed forces. Lead us to victory’, and spoken the same language of spiritual renewal of the nation as his Protestant colleagues. Now, the Archbishopric of Cologne published administrative instructions to its parishes and a series of prayers for wartime. A few bishops went further, like the ‘brown’ Bishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, and the conservative aristocrat Clemens August von Galen of Münster, who called on the lower clergy to join the war effort not just as priests but also ‘as German men’. But their voices were rare. Catholic prelates were generally wary of attaching the great hopes for spiritual rebirth to this war which they had invested in its predecessor. Instead, they interpreted the war as a punishment for the secular materialism of modern society. As irreconcilable foes of godless Bolshevism, the Catholic Church was also dismayed by the pact with Stalin, fearing it would spark a new church–state conflict at home.
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Ernst Guicking was part of the skeleton army sent to guard Germany’s western border from the French, while the bulk of the Wehrmacht’s combat divisions were fighting in Poland. On 5 September he wrote his first letter to Irene since being deployed. After the flurry of activity, he had time to notice how ripe the grapes were on the vines – ‘Otherwise there’s not much to report.’ Irene’s first letter was already on its way to him, written as soon as the postal embargo, imposed while the troops were moving to the front, was lifted. ‘Let’s hope you all return home again healthy and happy as victorious soldiers,’ she told Ernst. Admitting that ‘I think so often of the horrors of a war’, the young florist rallied them both: ‘Let’s not invite trouble . . . when your head is bursting, then let’s both think of the happy hours and that it will be still more lovely when you can remain with me for ever.’ The young lovers remained focused on two families, her work in the greenhouses and his life in his military unit, but that did nothing to lessen their sense of foreboding. War had come; and, like many others, Irene concluded that the British ‘would have it so’. The 3rd of September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, entered all German calendars and diaries printed during the next six years as the start of the war. As for 1 September, it featured as no more than a ‘counter-attack’ on Poland.
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Like most of their fellow countrymen, Irene Reitz and Ernst Guicking, August Töpperwien and Jochen Klepper, Liselotte Purper and Wilm Hosenfeld wished that war could be avoided. Irene and Ernst had no overt political opinions. Klepper, Hosenfeld and Töpperwien were repelled by elements within the Nazi movement, especially its anti-religious wing. Most Germans may have believed as they did that the invasion of Poland was justified, but few felt it was worth war with Britain and France. One report from Upper Franconia had offered a pithy precis of opinion during the summer: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’
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Such views would not have surprised Hitler, who knew that his own bellicose instincts far outstripped those of the nation he ruled. In a moment of euphoric candour, he had told an audience of leading German journalists that he knew that the five-month Sudeten crisis had terrified their ‘chicken-hearted nation’. He even confided that ‘circumstances have compelled me to speak for decades almost solely of peace’, adding that ‘only through continued emphasis on the German desire for peace and intentions for peace was it possible for me . . . to provide the German people with the armaments which were always necessary as the basis for the next step’. That had been in November 1938. In July 1939, the annual Nuremberg Party rally had been announced for 2–11 September as the ‘Reich Party Rally of Peace’. In late August, following German mobilisation, it was abruptly cancelled, as the Nazi leader had intended it would be. Sending Ambassador Henderson off to London in a last-minute masquerade of shuttle diplomacy was the final piece in the choreography of Hitler’s performance as a frustrated peacemaker. This may no longer have convinced many abroad, but it did carry domestic opinion. In early September, when Wilm Hosenfeld, August Töpperwien, Irene Reitz and Jochen Klepper concluded that ‘The English would have it so’, they were indicting the British not just for failing to force Poland to accept Germany’s ‘reasonable’ terms, but also for maintaining the ‘encirclement’ which aimed to keep their nation in its post-1918 thrall. As Germans closed ranks, they convinced themselves that war had been forced upon them.
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The 30th Infantry Division, including the 26th Infantry Regiment from Flensburg, reached the river Warthe on 7 September, crossing over the bailey bridge the German engineers had built, and passing through the abandoned Polish fortifications. They met armed resistance first from villagers, defending their homes. Gerhard M. watched his comrades leading off twenty young men, who he believed were ‘cowardly snipers’. ‘Burning houses, weeping women, howling children. A picture of despair. But,’ Gerhard reminded himself in his diary, ‘the Polish people didn’t want it better.’ From a primitive peasant hut, a woman fired a machine gun. Gerhard’s unit surrounded the house and set it alight. When she tried to escape, ‘We prevented her, hard as it was . . . Her cries rang in my ears for a long time.’ The Germans had to walk down the middle of the street, so great was the heat of the houses burning along both sides. As night fell, they saw that the eastern horizon was red with the blaze of other villages. Gerhard’s chief concern was staying on his bike. Its wheels kept sinking into the sandy soil of the path, pitching him on to his face in the darkness. But the young fireman from Flensburg was also aware that he had become an arsonist.
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On the night of 9 September, the 30th Infantry Division was attacked by Polish cavalry. Gerhard M.’s company was still in the rear of the division when panic rippled through the ranks. Over the next two days, the 8th Army, under General Johannes Blaskowitz, was pushed back 20 kilometres to the south, off its direct line of march on Warsaw. As they retreated, they set fire to houses from which they believed shots had come. ‘Soon burning houses lined our path, and from the flames resounded the cries of those who had hidden inside and were no longer able to save themselves,’ Gerhard M. noted. ‘The cattle lowed in fear, a dog howled till it was burned up, but the worst was the screaming of the people. It was cruel. But they shot and so deserved death.’ He admitted that both officers and men were extremely ‘nervous’.
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The next day he found himself in his first regular battle, part of a thin line of German infantry lying on their stomachs in shallow holes they had hastily scooped out of the ground. Shielding an artillery position behind them, they waited for the brown dots of the Polish infantry to inch closer. Increasingly nervous, they were told to hold their fire until the enemy was only 300 metres away. Aiming, firing and reloading his rifle, Gerhard M. described his movements as ‘mechanical as on the barracks’ square’. Still the Germans were forced back, taking heavy casualties. Of the 140 men in his company, only Gerhard M. and six others rejoined the rest of their battalion in a wood. The next day they were relieved, the 30th Infantry Division’s shattered line shored up by two others and a slow-moving column of tanks.
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Gerhard M. had taken part in the major battle of the campaign. When the Germans invaded on 1 September, the Wehrmacht found the Polish Army still in the midst of mobilisation. It was committed to defending the country’s borders – an impossible task, given that the Germans were attacking from three sides: from East Prussia in the north, across Slovakian territory in the south, and along a broad front in the west stretching from Silesia to Pomerania. Taking Hitler’s demands at face value, the Poles had believed that the Wehrmacht was trying to recapture the old Prussian–Polish borderlands between East and West Prussia. In fact, the German attack largely bypassed them and concentrated on two major thrusts, from the north and south, towards Warsaw. Advancing from Breslau, units of the 8th Army had occupied the major textile city of Łód
on 7 September. The next day, the 4th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of Warsaw.
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