The World at War (7 page)

SIGMUND WELTLINGER

I did not recognise the danger from one day to the next but all the same, on the day of the
Nuremberg Race Laws, that was 15th September 1935 as far as I can remember, then I said it was getting very serious. And I fully realised the danger when I was taken off to the concentration camp after the
Kristallnacht.
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Then of course I saw that it was a great danger but I was still convinced that the words of the late Reichspresident Hindenburg were valid, that Front Soldiers would be protected, and I was a Front Soldier.

KONRAD MORGEN

The
anti-Semitic programme and the attitude of the Party itself was only too obvious, and it was in fact one of the points in the programme which was generally found repellent and against which, to a greater or lesser extent, one put up some opposition. But, one said, there hasn't been a party which came to power and then carried out their programme one hundred per cent. In other words, lots of otherwise iron principles get filed down and smoothed out and everything isn't eaten as hot as it's cooked. The National Socialists were also very clever and understood how to play down their earlier slogans. I can remember that in
Simplicissimus –
that was one of their great satirical magazines, like
Punch
in England – they published a cartoon with a caption 'Heads will roll!' and there was a long train and lots of fat, well-fed Jews were looking out of it. And they were travelling towards Switzerland, they were rolling off to Switzerland very happily. Those who were making them roll were the National Socialists but not with the guillotine, they were making sure that they went somewhere else with their money. And then, of course, nobody had anything against that if it was all going on so peaceably.

EMMY BONHOEFFER

Sister-in-law of German Resistance martyr Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I remember that the husband of my sister Lena, when he went in the morning after the day of the Kristallnacht, he went by train to his office downtown and he saw that the synagogue was burning and he murmured, 'That is an insult for cultured people, an insult to culture.' Well, right away a gentleman in front of him turned and showed his Party badge and took out his papers. He was a man of the
Gestapo and my brother-in-law had to show his papers, to give his address and he was ordered to come to the Party office next morning at nine o'clock. When my brother-in-law came home in the evening he told my sister what had happened and she said, 'Couldn't you keep your mouth? What will happen now? They will take you in a concentration camp.' I don't know how he talked himself out of it but his punishment was that he had to arrange and to distribute the ration cards for the area each beginning of each month for years, until the end of the war.

HUGH GREENE

I was in Berlin at that time and saw some pretty revolting sights – the destruction of Jewish shops, Jews being arrested and led away, the police standing by while the gangs destroyed the shops and even groups of well-dressed women cheering. Maybe those women had a hangover next morning, as they were intoxicated all right when this was taking place. I found it, you know, really utterly revolting. In fact to a
German journalist who saw me on that day and asked me what I was doing there, I remember I just said very coldly, 'I'm studying German culture.'

J B PRIESTLEY

English author and broadcaster

There was this period before the war when I think a great many ordinary people in England thought all of this was very unreal. You know –
burning books and baiting Jews and so on – that this was some eccentricity that would pass away.

EMMY BONHOEFFER

Standing in the line for vegetables or something like that I told my neighbours standing next to me that now they start to kill Jews in the concentration camps and they even make soap out of them. And they said, 'Frau Bonhoeffer, if you don't stop telling such horror stories you will end up in a concentration camp too and nobody of us can help you. It's not true what you're telling, you shouldn't believe these things, you have them from the foreign broadcasts and they tell those things to make enemies for us.' Going home I told that to my husband and he was not at all applauding to me and the very contrary he said, 'My dear, sorry to say but you are absolutely idiotic what you are doing. Please understand the dictatorship is like a snake. If you put a foot on its tail, as you do, it will bite you. You have to strike the head and you can't do that, neither you nor I can do that. The only and single way is to convince the military who have the arms to do it, to convince them that they have to act, that they have to make a coup d'état'.

SIGMUND WELTLINGER

I did not leave because in my life I have seldom gone out of my way to avoid danger, because I was deeply rooted in Germany – I had grown up in the sphere of German culture and found no obstacles, I had friendships with all and did not believe that there was any threat to me personally for my body and life. And I thought, I shall get through this – I did not run away from it.

ALBERT SPEER

It shouldn't be forgotten that to be in the middle of a powerful group, a very powerful man admired by people, is so tempting that it's very difficult to get away. Thinking back to my time when I was at the height of planning those huge buildings, of course it was a chance to be one of the well known, even in the history of arts, and this was a chance no young man would willingly destroy. And afterwards when I was a minister, the sweetness of power also was tasting very good to me. Certainly all
power corrupts and certainly in Hitler's circle the power was [of an] extraordinary scale, so the corruption was much larger than [it] is normally.

SS LIEUTENANT SCHULZE-KOSSENS

Very often when we were sitting in the so-called
table talks he told us we will hear some music, but he liked very much serious or classic music and sometimes opera. He was an Austrian but he didn't like dancing music or the popular music we like as young people. One day I was sitting in my little office when I was Adjutant on duty, I was sitting in my room and was just writing something and hearing on the radio popular music and the door was opened and someone entered the room. I thought it was a servant of Hitler or somebody else and I was writing and tapping with my foot to the rhythm and suddenly I hear his voice behind me say, 'What terrible music, Adjutant.' And he laughed about me and so I closed the music and we talked together.

ALBERT SPEER

Hitler was warlord in many directions. What for others would have been discussions for weeks and weeks, for him was a
decision of just a fraction of a minute. I tried to counteract this by bringing Hitler a lot of experts, sometimes we were ten or fifteen experts because I knew from my time as an architect he is respecting the opinion of experts, and for a while we succeeded quite well. He listened to them and his decisions were more or less reasonable concerning the technical parts. But of course there was a change too, one can't ever say that a man is always the same person and Hitler changed a lot from 1942 to 1943.

ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ

Commander U-boat arm, later C-in-C Kriegsmarine

Hitler was a soldier of the Army and his thoughts were influenced by continental experience and continental thinking. It was difficult for him to see the chances of sea power and see the ways in which a sea power could go and clear the way.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT

Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations

Hitler's leadership was always distrusted by me until nothing was left any more of the belief in Hitler as a soldier, or as a man. As to his character I have made very bad experiences already in the first days, weeks and months of the war. The first was when he, at the end of August 1939, was informed that Mussolini would go to war at the same time as Germany and he almost broke down and postponed the beginning of war against Poland for a few days. The second time was on the 3rd of September 1939 when the Western Powers declared war on Germany. Hitler didn't want to take back troops but he thought of halting on the lines that had been reached up to that time. And worst of all his manner when the British landed at the north of Norway when I just came to Reichschancellery and saw him sunk in a chair and entirely despairing about the future of this country. So his character did not come up to the demands of
military leadership.

ALBERT SPEER

Of course thinking back Hitler is still to me a human being, he's not an object for historians which don't see blood and life with him and his humanity was one of my main objects in spite of everything he did, the crimes he committed and the consequences he brought about for our world. But it's necessary to know that he was a human being, that he could be charming, that he could treat those around him nicely and so on, because if there is one day somebody else showing up who is dangerous for the world and you have this picture of Hitler who is just a lifeless monster, then everybody would say, well, this new man is not Hitler, he is charming with children, he has good manners.

HUGH GREENE

Hitler's great strength was instinct and
insight. Although he had never been outside Germany except in the trenches in France in the First World War, and later a visit to Italy, he seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the weakness of the French and British governments of that time. He knew much better than his generals or his civil servants that in spite of all appearance of strength they were weak. And he had patience, he had cunning, he had coolness. In spite of all the ranting, behind the ranting was a cool, calculating brain. I think Hitler at his best or worst, however you prefer to look at it, was one of the great men of history in his thoroughly evil way.

LIEUTENANT OTTO-ERNST REMER

Nazi and Army officer

I believe that the revolution of 1933 was really a genuine revolution. The truth was that it meant the continuation of the French Revolution, except that the French Revolution led to unrestrained liberalism and class differences. To overcome those was Adolf Hitler's aim, that is why he said, 'Common interest before self interest'. The 'I' became a genuine 'we'. I believe that the true causes of the last war were that Hitler has said, 'Work is capital' and 'Gold is nothing to me, gold is dirt.' A world, however, which clings to gold cannot tolerate such a state of affairs and must oppose such a revolutionary element, just as the world took sides against the French Revolution, against Napoleon. Napoleon, just as Hitler, won everywhere in the world, but the world in the end proves stronger than the revolutionary, and it follows that after such revolutions wars are always lost. I am nevertheless of the opinion that the good of this National Socialist Revolution will eventually come in the following centuries, just as the ideas of the French Revolution survived.

ALBERT SPEER

Dr Theodor Morell tried to bridge those gaps of overwork by stimulation, stimulating medical drugs and vitamins and sugar and so on and so on. And he used them in an odd scale and he used things which were obviously not already tried out in sufficient way, in hospitals or so, and the other doctors were quite afraid of this system. I think it affected Hitler but it wasn't the main cause, because the main cause was the life Hitler was leading. A man with such a load and such responsibility he needs sometimes he rests, he can't go on for ever and ever, and for every day and night. A few of the former followers of Hitler would like to say that for many things which happened in the last period of the war were to a mistreatment by Morell. I am not of this opinion – I think Hitler stayed generally what he always was.
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CHAPTER 2
JAPAN'S MILITARISM

Following successful wars against China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05), Japan had annexed Korea and exerted
de facto
hegemony over Manchuria, and her participation in the First World War on the Allied side brought her a string of Pacific islands that had once been part of the German Empire. The Japanese judged that Western racism had caused them to receive less than their due from the treaties following these wars and that a double standard was applied to their imperialism. In the China of the late 1920s a nationalist reaction against warlordism, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, threatened Japan's privileged trading status with its huge neighbour, which, combined with the effects of the Great Depression led the Japanese Army to provoke the 'Manchurian Incident' in September 1931.

The ensuing, undeclared war led to Japan's condemnation by, and withdrawal from, the League of Nations in 1933. Japanese politics became dominated by assassinations carried out by nationalist societies and the field armies increasingly ignored not only the civilian government but also their own High Command. The 'Manchurian Incident' became a formal war in July 1937 and led to an undeclared border war with the Soviet Union, which ended with the crushing defeat of the Japanese at Khalkhyn Gol on the eve of the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. Faced with an expensive stalemate in China, Japan was also hit by a series of economic sanctions imposed by the USA, joined by the British and the Dutch government in exile whose hopes for victory in Europe now depended entirely on US support. The government of Prince Fumimaro Konoye was unable to negotiate a compromise acceptable to the Japanese military and in October 1941 General Hideki Tojo was appointed Prime Minister, principally to restore respect for hierarchy in the armed forces. In November an
ultimatum delivered by US Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded withdrawal from China on pain of the total embargo of the oil (from the Dutch East Indies) and steel without which the Japanese war economy would collapse.