The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  By early November, the Germans held nine tenths of Stalingrad. On November 9, Hitler was in Munich, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of party leaders on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. His topic was the epic struggle in Stalingrad. “I wanted to get to the Volga, to a certain point, near a certain town. As it happens, its name is that of Stalin himself. But please don’t think I marched there for that reason—it could be called something quite different.” It was an important place. There followed his usual impressive recitation of statistics—how many tons of wheat, of manganese, of oil pass through there. For that reason he wanted to take it, and, “you know,” he confided smugly, “we are being modest, for we have got it! There are only a few very small places left not captured.”

  Ten days later, the Russians unleashed an offensive against the Romanian troops northwest and southeast of the city. In yet another intelligence failure, the German High Command was caught off guard. The Romanians quickly buckled, and on November 3 the two Russian spearheads linked up forty-five miles west of Stalingrad, encircling the entire Sixth Army. General Paulus asked Hitler’s permission to break out of the devastated city, but Hitler refused. Göring promised that the Luftwaffe could supply the German forces in Stalingrad by air drop, but that proved impossible. Instead, Hitler ordered General Manstein to break the encirclement and rescue the trapped Sixth Army. To stiffen Paulus’s resolve, Hitler promoted him to the rank of field marshal, a not so subtle reminder that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Paulus should draw inspiration by this action. The field marshal’s baton was parachuted into the city. The troops couldn’t receive adequate food or ammunition, but a field marshal’s baton would have to serve to strengthen their will to resist. They were to fight to the last man, to the last bullet. The whole issue was rendered moot by a second Russian offensive on December 16, pressing from the Don toward Rostov, with the intention of cutting off all German forces to the south. A rescue of the troops in Stalingrad was now out of the question. Hopelessly surrounded, out of food and ammunition, the Sixth Army held out in the blustery bitter cold until February 2, 1943, when Paulus at last surrendered.

  It was a catastrophe of colossal proportions. The Germans and their Axis allies suffered 500,000 dead as well as the 91,000 taken prisoner, including twenty-two German generals. The Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army had been destroyed, along with four Axis armies; the Luftwaffe suffered grievous losses in bombers, fighters, and Stuka dive-bombers as well as almost 500 transport planes that had attempted to deliver supplies to surrounded troops in the cauldron of Stalingrad. That Stalingrad was a turning point in the Nazi war against the Soviet Union was obvious to all. In Germany, the news of the calamity was not broadcast immediately. When it came a few days later, the announcement was accompanied by the first strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It was a funeral dirge for Hitler’s ambitions in the East.

  In an effort to rally German morale after the shattering defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels took a new tack in the regime’s propaganda. For some time the propaganda minister had worried that the public had fallen into a comfortable optimism about the war in the East, that the steady stream of good news from Otto Dietrich’s press office had lulled the people into an unwarranted overconfidence. Victory would ultimately come, he believed, but the price was going to be high, and the public should be prepared for it. He had begun to introduce a more realistic depiction of the situation even before the disaster at Stalingrad; now he had the nation’s attention. On February 18, in what would be his most famous speech, he addressed a packed Sportpalast and a national radio audience. Speaking beneath a gigantic banner that read “Total War, Shortest War,” Goebbels addressed a screaming crowd of carefully selected party members, dignitaries, and wounded veterans. Germany, indeed, Western civilization, he told them, now faced an immediate danger, and that danger was not just the Red Army but International Jewry. Once again Jewry had revealed itself “as the incarnation of evil, as the plastic demon of decay and the bearer of an international culture-destroying chaos.” It was a threat to every nation. “Jewry is a contagious infection,” and Germany would not bow before this threat, “but rather intends to take the most radical measures, if necessary, in good time.” In a remarkable passage, he described the onrushing Russian forces in a way that was a near-perfect description of German operations in the East. “Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them, terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy.”

  Warming to his theme, he shrieked, “Total war is the demand of the hour. We must put an end to the bourgeois attitude that we have seen in this war: ‘Wash my back, but don’t get me wet’! The time has come,” he bellowed, “to remove the kid gloves and use our fists.” The frenzied crowd broke into howls of approval. He announced new measures that would express that austere situation. Luxury restaurants and spas would be closed; alcohol restricted; theaters closed, food rations cut. Women, whom Hitler had been reluctant to mobilize for industrial work, would be conscripted. “This is no time to entertain wistful dreams of peace. The German people can only rely on thoughts of war. This will not lead to a prolongation of this war, but rather an acceleration. The most radical war is also the shortest.”

  He closed the rousing two-hour speech by posing ten rhetorical questions to his audience, made up, he falsely claimed, of a cross section of the German people. To each question the hysterical crowd roared the appropriate response: “Are you ready to follow the Führer . . . and stand and fight with the Army and with wild determination through all turns of fate until the victory is in our hands? ‘JA!’ Do you want if necessary a war more total and radical than anything you ever could have imagined? ‘JA!’ The English claim that the German people are war weary—‘NEIN!’ ” Amid a crescendo of frenzied screaming, the speech ended with the question of the evening: “Do you want total war?” which his audience, on its feet, answered with a resounding “JA.” Then, with his voice rising to a thunderous cry, he bellowed the words of a Prussian poet from the days of the Napoleonic Wars: “Now people rise up, and storm burst forth!” Later Goebbels, with his unparalleled cynicism, remarked to his entourage that it had been “an hour of idiocy. . . . If I had asked these people to jump from the fourth floor of the Columbus House they would have done it.”

  Goebbels’s derisive condescension notwithstanding, he considered the speech a great success, as did Hitler, but the psychological shock of Stalingrad was not so easily overcome. Bombast and willpower could not conceal the magnitude of the defeat or slow the mounting desperation over Germany’s situation. The last months of 1942 and early months of 1943 saw the momentum of the war change dramatically. Catastrophe followed catastrophe, as Germany’s ability to set the pace and direction of events slipped ineluctably away. At home criticism mounted against not only the party but, for the first time, against the Führer himself. The criticism was muted and indirect, but it was clear from Gestapo reports that Hitler’s ability to insulate himself from the blunders and failures of the regime was ebbing away.

  The defeat at Stalingrad was not the end of the calamities. Anglo-American troops landed in French Morocco and Algiers in November (Operation Torch), and by late fall Rommel’s Afrika Korps was trapped between British general Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army pushing westward from Egypt and Anglo-American troops surging eastward toward Tunisia. In March Rommel traveled to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia to plead for reinforcements and supplies, or, if they were not forthcoming, for an evacuation of the Afrika Korps while there was still time. But Hitler, who had always viewed the desert war as a sideshow, brusquely refused. No surrender, no evacuation. Like the beleaguered troops at Stalingrad, the Afrika Korps should fight to the last man and die a hero’s death. During that same visit Rommel was relieved of his command and ordered to take sick leave in the Austrian Alps, but Hitler made sure that the popular “Desert Fox” was celebrated as a military hero. On May 13, 1943, the last Axis forces
in North Africa surrendered. The Wehrmacht had been driven from Africa, and 170,000 German soldiers were marched into captivity. In Germany the debacle was referred to as “Tunisgrad.” “Military Events in Africa,” the Gestapo reported, “have produced deep shock in the German public.” Within the span of three months, the Third Reich had suffered two disastrous defeats, and the people’s faith in the regime was badly shaken. Even within the High Command many were convinced that the war could no longer be won militarily.

  * * *

  More disturbing, the public had always drawn a distinction between the party and the Führer, attributing every misstep, every outrage, to the party and its functionaries. But in the wake of Stalingrad the aura of infallibility that had clung to Hitler for so long had begun to dissolve. Gestapo reports from all over the Reich indicated that for the first time criticism of Hitler, though often muted and indirect, was widespread. Some criticism was leveled against the generals who had presumably misled him or Göring’s Luftwaffe that had failed him, but Stalingrad marked a turning point in what historian Ian Kershaw has called “the Hitler Myth.” That myth was not punctured suddenly or in response to a specific event but slowly and steadily deflated as the promised victory seemed to be slipping away. The gap between the wildly inflated image drawn by Nazi propaganda and the dark reality Germany was experiencing was unmistakably widening, and the Führer who towered above the crassness, corruption, pettiness, and the raging fanaticism of the party was at last laid open to criticism. Without new victories to trumpet, Hitler withdrew gradually from view, rarely appearing in public or even addressing the nation via the radio. Little by little the bond between the Führer and his people began to loosen.

  Most debilitating for German morale in 1943 was the relentless Allied bombing, which grew in intensity and scale as the year progressed. In March the Royal Air Force devastated the industrial city of Essen, leaving it smoldering in ruins, but that was only a grisly prelude to the RAF’s horrifying attacks on Hamburg in July. Aptly named Operation Gomorrah, the raid on the night of July 27–28 was only one in a ten-day joint Allied assault on the city, but its effects were horrific. Over seven hundred aircraft dropped 2,236 tons of incendiaries in an hour’s time, turning Germany’s fourth largest city into a raging inferno. Cyclones of fire swept through the city; temperature at ground level reached an unbelievable 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit; asphalt bubbled and burned; people were swept into the flames or suffocated in their cellars or on the street as the uncontrollable fire created a vacuum that sucked the oxygen from the air itself. A pillar of scalding wind carrying bodies and debris rose more than ten thousand feet above the stricken city. Forty thousand people lost their lives in the raid, a nightmarish figure that boggled the imagination. In the following days the streets were littered with shrunken, carbonized corpses, and the air was yellow with sulfur. Scenes of unspeakable horror were everywhere. Rats and flies swarmed through the streets. One woman, climbing into a truck for evacuation, tripped and her suitcase fell open. Out toppled an assortment of toys and the shrunken, blackened corpse of her child.

  The military effectiveness of the air raids was uncertain, but their psychological impact was unmistakable. As news of the Hamburg attack spread across the Reich, it triggered a surge of fear that bordered on panic. It was spoken of simply as “die Katastrophe.” Albert Speer, since February Hitler’s new armaments chief, wrote, “Hamburg put the fear of God into me.” To Hitler he warned that “a series of attacks of this sort, extended to six more major cities, would bring Germany’s armaments production to a total halt.” Unfazed, the Führer, who never visited even one of the bomb-ravaged cities, merely remarked, “You’ll straighten all that out again.” Hamburg was the most appallingly destructive air raid of the war in Europe, a frightful portent of things to come, and Speer could never “straighten all that out again.”

  Despite the cascade of disasters on the battle fronts and in German cities, the Nazi war against the Jews did not slacken but moved into a new, more sinister phase. The early actions of Operation Reinhard had systematically decimated the Jewish population of Poland, but now began a new wave of deportations from Western Europe. The Gestapo, often aided by local police forces, undertook sweeps of Holland, Belgium, and France, rounding up Jews to be transported east. Their destination was not the camps of Operation Reinhard but the rapidly expanding camp at Auschwitz.

  Auschwitz was the centerpiece of this new phase of Nazi policy. Located thirty-seven miles west of Cracow in Upper Silesia, Auschwitz had been in operation since 1940, housing primarily Polish political prisoners and Soviet POWs. Until summer 1942, it had played a relatively small part in the “Final Solution.” It was not part of Operation Reinhard but, like Majdanek, was controlled by the SS Economic and Administrative Central Office in Berlin. Himmler appointed SS-Obersturmbahnführer Rudolf Höss, an official at Sachsenhausen, to take charge of the new camp, and in June 1941 he ordered Höss to Berlin for an important meeting. There Himmler explained that Auschwitz, which at the time held roughly ten thousand mostly Polish prisoners, was to be transformed into a major concentration camp. As Höss testified after the war, Himmler told him at that time that “the Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question and we—the SS have to carry out that order.” Adolf Eichmann of the RSHA would provide further details. Höss was to “maintain the strictest silence concerning this order,” even vis-à-vis his superiors. “The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. Every Jew we can lay our hands on must be exterminated during the war without exception. If we now fail to destroy the biological basis of Jewry then one day the Jews will destroy the German people.”

  Shortly after this meeting, Eichmann visited the camp. It was ideally suited for the sort of heavy activity that Himmler had in mind—good transportation connections, isolated area, and room to expand. Given the anticipated crush of new arrivals, a new camp was constructed at Birkenau about three kilometers from the main camp. At Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, where in 1943 most of the killing took place, two rustic cottages stood on the grounds, separated by a birch woods. At first glance they appeared innocent, well-tended peasant dwellings with thatched roofs, surrounded by fruit trees, but closer examination revealed that the cottages had no windows and an unusual number of heavy doors with rubber seals. The two cottages, one called “the little red house” because of its brick exterior, the other “the little white house” because of its plaster facade, were, in fact, bunkers with gas chambers and undressing rooms. In the camp they were referred to as Bunkers 1 and 2. With a capacity for 800 victims, Bunker 1 was dismantled in the fall of 1942, and Bunker 2, which contained four gas chambers, three undressing rooms, and a crematorium that could “accommodate” 1,200 people at a time, would continue operations until the camp was shut down in the fall of 1944. It is estimated that 1,140 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every twenty-four hours. Eventually Auschwitz-Birkenau would operate four more crematoria with attached gas chambers, where hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children would perish.

  Höss was told to expect transports from all over Europe. Between July 1942 and February 1943, 46,455 Jews arrived at the expanding camp at Auschwitz; by the end of the year 42,500 French Jews were transported there. On August 24, a transport left Drancy, a French concentration camp, bound for Auschwitz. It carried 1,000 Jews, of whom 553 were children under the age of seventeen, 465 were under twelve, 131 under six. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, 92 men, age twenty to forty-five, were selected for work; the rest were dispatched immediately to the gas chambers. In Belgium approximately 25,000 Jews were deported by war’s end, the largest number coming in 1943. In Norway the tiny Jewish community was hunted down and sent to their deaths; by February 1943 it had ceased to exist. In Germany, the last despairing remnants of the once proud Jewish community—some 18,000—were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. Even the ailing patients of Berlin’s Jewish hospital were sent to Theresienstadt. To make room for t
hem, 10,000 elderly prisoners already there were shipped to Treblinka, where they were gassed. In the summer of 1943 Treblinka operated three gas chambers; within three months, the SS had added an additional ten gas chambers to deal with the mushrooming number of “evacuees.” And, of course, the Nazis continued to empty the Polish ghettos, sending additional thousands to their death. The systematic mass murder of the Jews would not wait until the end of the war, as Heydrich had intimated at Wannsee. By the end of 1943, the “Final Solution” was a smoothly functioning European-wide industrial operation.

  The trains with their crammed boxcars would arrive at the camp night and day, sometimes pulling in one after the other. They carried thousands of victims. The exhausted, famished Jews would tumble out onto a platform, where “selections” were made.

  The unloading ramp was the site of unbearable heartbreak and chaos. “To start with,” an SS man testified after the war, “the men and women are separated. Mothers wave good-bye to their sons for the last time. The two columns stand in ranks of five several meters apart from one another on the ramp. Anyone who is overcome with grief and tries to rush over to embrace his or her loved one once more and give them words of comfort is hurled back by a blow from one of the SS men.” A survivor recalled that wrenching scene when as a child he arrived with his mother from the Lodz ghetto. “It was at night that we arrived at Auschwitz. We came in the minute the gates open up, we heard screams, barking of dogs, blows. . . . And then we got off the train. And everything went so fast: left, right, right, left. Men separated from women. Children torn from the arms of mothers. The elderly chased like cattle. The sick, the disabled were handled like packs of garbage. They were thrown [to the] side together with broken suitcases, with boxes. My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me, ‘Leibele, I’m not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother.’ ”