The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (87 page)

… The flames immediately crackle and flare up high, so high that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and seems to seize on this too. Terrified, the men and women press to the extreme foreground… The entire stage appears to be completely filled with flame… leaving… a cloud of smoke which drifts towards the background and lies on the horizon like a dark pall of cloud… Through the cloud bank that lies on the horizon breaks an increasingly bright red glow… From the ruins of the palace, which has collapsed, the men and women, in the utmost apprehension, watch the growing firelight in the sky… Bright flames seem to set fire to the hall of the gods. As the gods become completely hidden from view by the flames, the curtain falls.

Wagner, stage direction for
Götterdämmerung

After tea we went back to Berlin… to see Hitler’s dugout… A sordid and unromantic spot. Absolute chaos outside of concrete mixers, iron reinforcing bars, timber, broken furniture, shell holes, clothes etc. etc. Down below even worse chaos… We also had a look at the Air Ministry and a drive round Berlin. The more one sees of it the more one realizes how completely destroyed it is.

General Alan Brooke, Diary, July 19, 1945

In the final climactic scene of Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
– ‘Twilight of the Gods’ – the heroine Brünnhilde restores the stolen ring of power to the River Rhine and hurls herself onto her dead lover Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Her act of sublime self-sacrifice unleashes a fiery conflagration that topples the stronghold of the gods, Valhalla, in an almost un-stageable apocalypse. Hitler’s lifelong obsession with Wagner’s music had made it something like the official soundtrack of the Third Reich; indeed, Albert Speer was attending a concert performance of the finale of
Götterdämmerung
(the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance under the Third Reich) when the news of Roosevelt’s death reached Berlin. ‘The war isn’t lost, Roosevelt is dead!’ exclaimed Hitler. In reality, however, the year 1945 was to see the twilight of the devils. According to one intercepted Axis communication from a Japanese diplomat in Berlin, Hitler was planning ‘to embark alone in a plane carrying bombs and blow himself up in the air somewhere over the Baltic’. The intention was that ‘the one million fervent admirers of the Führer among the German people… would believe that he had become a god and was dwelling in heaven.’ It was to be Brünnhilde’s immolation, in a Messerschmitt.

In
Mein Kampf,
Hitler had bitterly recalled the trauma of 1918, when political discussions among new conscripts – ‘the poison of the hinterland’ – had undermined the morale of the army. Twenty years later, when Goebbels concluded a speech at the Sportpalast with the words ‘a November 1918 will never be repeated’, Hitler ‘looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes… leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes… brought his right hand, after a great sweep, pounding down on the table and yelled… “Ja!”’. ‘Aslong as I am alive,’ he told Halder in August 1939, ‘there will be no talk of capitulation.’ Not surrendering, it appears, mattered more to Hitler than victory. Perhaps from as early as November 1941, as his forces ground to a halt outside Moscow, and certainly after the failure of his second offensive in the East, a drive for the Caucasus oilfields in spring 1942, he began to suspect that it would be impossible to defeat the Soviet Union. Yet honourable defeat, which for Hitler meant
nothing less than a Wagnerian finale, was in itself desirable, perhaps even preferable to victory. This was the lesson Hitler took from Clausewitz’s
Confessions
, as well as from Siegfried’s death in
The Ring
: that a heroic death (
Heldentod
) had a redemptive quality which might sow the seeds of a future regeneration of Germany. Only those races ‘who keep their courage to fight to the death even without hope have any prospect of surviving and achieving a new flowering’, he declared; ‘Out of the sacrifice of our soldiers and out of my own close ties with them unto death, the seed will one day germinate… and give rise to a glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement, and this to the realization of a true
Volks geme in schaft
.’ Hitler’s last official proclamation of February 24, 1945, called for a last-ditch war of resistance on German soil, while the so-called ‘Nero Orders’ of March 1945 envisaged a scorched earth policy that implied the complete destruction of the country’s infrastructure. ‘No German blade shall feed the enemy,’ the
Völkische Beobachter
had declared in September 1944; ‘no German mouth shall impart information; no German hand shall offer help. The enemy should find every little bridge destroyed, every road blocked – nothing but death, destruction and hate will await him.’ Hitler got his funeral pyre. By the time he put a bullet through his own head the entire German Reich had become one.

‘Long live war,’ he had told the Sudeten German leader, Henlein, in 1938, ‘even if it lasts from two to eight years.’ Hitler’s war lasted less than six. By the end it had cost the lives of at least 5.2 million German servicemen – three in every ten men mobilized – and more than 2.4 million German civilians. More German soldiers lost their lives in the last twelve months of fighting than in the whole of the rest of the war (see
Figure 16.1
). The crucial point is that to Hitler this monstrous toll meant nothing whatever – as little as the deaths of the many more people his troops killed.
*
‘Life is horrible,’ he once mused over dinner. ‘Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing. Everything that is born must later die.’ Humanity,

Figure 16.1
Wehrmacht deaths, 1939-1945

he declared on another occasion, was ‘a ridiculous cosmic bacterium’
(eine läcberlicbe Weltraumbakterie).

If they had been rational, the Axis leaders would have moderated their conduct in anticipation of a future peace, in the hope of somehow diminishing the victors’ appetite for retribution and minimizing the loss of life on their own side. It is true that there were attempts by some generals, diplomats and even leading Nazis to extend peace feelers to Britain or to the Soviet Union. At Bełżec the Nazis did seek to cover up at least some of the crimes they had committed. As early as the summer of 1943 they turfed over the site of the death camp, planting trees and even building a fake farmhouse. Yet elsewhere the killing was not merely continued; it was positively stepped up. The worse the war went for them, the more fanatically the Germans pursued their policies of violence to wards those unfortunates still in their power, as if willing the final cataclysm. Göring said to Goebbels, ‘On the Jewish question we are so committed that there is no escape for us at all.’ But to Goebbels that was good: ‘Experience shows that
a movement and a people that have burned their bridges fight more unconditionally than those who still have the chance of retreat.’ The worse the crimes they committed, the less the Nazis could conceive of surrendering themselves to the judgment of the Allies. As Goebbels put it in early 1945: ‘If we have to leave, we’ll close the door behind us with a slam that all the world will hear.’ ‘Everyone now has a chance to choose the part which he will play in the film of a hundred yearshence,’ Goebbels told his staff at the Propaganda Ministry on April 17, inspired by the Third Reich’s last cinematic feat,
Kolberg
, an epic depiction of that town’s last-ditch defence during the Napoleonic Wars. ‘I can assure you that it will be a fine and elevating picture… Hold out now, so that… the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.’ Thus was the Third Reich to go down: in an inglorious blaze.

The implications of this mentality became crystal clear to Victor Klemperer in Dresden as rumours spread of the conduct of German forces being driven back towards the borders of the Reich:

October 24th, 1944. On Sunday evening Konrad was here for a couple of minutes… He believes… that before the retreats everyone was murdered, that we shall see no one again, that six to seven million Jews (of the 15 million that had existed) have been slaughtered (more exactly: shot and gassed). He also considers that the prospects of the small Jewish remnant, left here in the clutches of the desperate beasts, remaining alive were also very slight.

Across the territory still controlled by the Nazis, the ‘final solution’ was pursued in a mood of hypertrophic fanaticism. Virtually all the 438,000 Jews of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz between April and July 1944; nearly all of them were murdered. Even as the Red Army neared Auschwitz, the Germans ordered those prisoners still capable of walking to march to the Austrian border – a distance of 90 miles. There would be no liberation for those spared the gas chambers; they must be marched until they dropped. Of 714,000 concentration camp inmates who still remained in January 1945, around 250,000 perished in these death marches, including 15,000 out of the 60,000 evacuated from Auschwitz. Nor were Jews the only
victims of the death throes of Nazism. In the last years of the regime there was a dramatic increase in capital punishment, as ordinary Germans who dared to express their disenchantment were summarily strung up for defeatism. Between 1942 and 1944 there were more than 14,000 death sentences passed by the German courts, nearly ten times the number during the first three years of the war. And these figures do not include the numerous extra-judicial executions carried out by the SS.

Yet Hitler was not alone in wanting to turn Germany into one vast charnel house. For their part, the Allied leaders laid their plans for victory in ways that more or less ensured that, as twilight fell on the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, the devils would take the maximum possible number of human souls down with them.

The idea that a country could be bombed into submission long predated the Second World War. H. G. Wells’s aliens were on the point of unleashing flying machines on London when they succumbed to earth’s fatal microbes. Shortly before the First World War, Kipling had imagined (in his short story ‘As Easy as ABC’) a world brought to heel by a single International Air Force. Air raids on civilian targets by the Germans between 1914 and 1918 had, admittedly, been of negligible military value. As for their impact on civilian morale, they almost certainly aroused more vengefulness than panic. The main role of air forces proved to be reconnaissance rather than bombing. Nevertheless, the idea of flattening cities from the air had captured the public imagination and it remained fashionable throughout the inter-war years. As Secretary of State for War and Air, Churchill used air power without compunction to help quell the Iraqi revolt of 1920. The world was more shocked when the Germans used bombers against Guernica; Mesopotamian villages were seen as fair game, European cities not so. Japanese air strikes against China after 1937 only seemed to confirm the adage that ‘the bomber would always get through’, and with devastating results.

As we have seen, British strategy in the 1930swas to invest not in
defensive but in offensive air power, in the hope of deterring a German attack from the air rather than repulsing it. This was an irrational response to the threat posed by the Luftwaffe. But it did mean that by 1940 Britain had the beginnings of a strategic bombing capability. This early investment was important given the time it took – more than two years – to train pilots and navigators. On the other hand, the 488 bombers that Britain had ready in September 1939 were far from equal to the task of conducting air raids on Germany. Nevertheless, within less than a week of becoming Prime Minister, Churchill – true to form – ordered the RAF to do just that. Indeed, in this regard, Churchill may be said to have pre-empted Hitler, whose Blitz against London was seen in Germany as an act of retaliation following the British raids on Berlin. Hitler later declared: ‘It was the British who started air attacks’ – though it had scarcely been ‘moral scruples’ that had dictated German strategy. Yet Churchill could cite the German bombing of Rotterdam, to say nothing of the use of dive bombers against Polish civilians, as a perfectly good precedent.

But what exactly should the targets of British air raids be? Since German fighting forces were quite widely dispersed for much of the war, the obvious targets were economic – the factories that were supplying Hitler’s forces with weapons and the infrastructure that allowed these to be transported to the various fronts. However, most of these economic targets were, by their very nature, located in densely populated areas like the Ruhr. Moreover, British bombers were very far from accurate. In October 1940 the British ruled that, in conditions of poor visibility, their airmen could drop their bombs in the vicinity of targets, in so-called ‘free fire zones’. This made it more likely that German civilians would be hit – a necessity which Churchill sought to make into a virtue. Ashe put it on October 30, ‘The civilian population around the target areas must be made to feel the weight of war.’ Throughout 1941 Churchill repeatedly emphasized the need for Bomber Command to target the morale of ordinary Germans. The strategy of ‘area bombing’ – the aim of which was in fact to incinerate urban centres – was in place even before Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris took over Bomber Command. Nine days before Harris’s appointment, on St Valentine’s Day, 1942, Air Vice-Marshal N. H. Bottomley, Deputy of the Air Staff, wrote to Bomber Command to
convey the decision ‘that the primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers’, and that these operations should take the form of ‘concentrated incendiary attacks’. The letter was accompanied by a list of ‘selected area targets’, at the top of which was Essen. By attacking it first, ‘the maximum benefit should be derived from the element of surprise’. Like the other prime targets, Duisberg, Düsseldorf and Cologne, Essen was without question an industrial city. Yet the criteria listed for calculating the ‘estimated weight of attack for decisive damage’ were the size and population of the built-up area. Attack son factories and submarine building yards were to be considered ‘diversionary’, and were to be undertaken preferably ‘without missing good opportunities of bombing your primary targets’.