Broken Lives

by Konrad H Jarausch

  Even the last-ditch attempt to stop the Allied advance with a people’s militia, called Volkssturm in propaganda terms, proved ineffective. As commander of the Reserve Army, SS leader Heinrich Himmler instituted a draft of all sixteen-to-sixty-year-old males and ordered them to fight “until the last man” to defend Germany. But in practice, the militia looked pathetic and had little military value. The Volkssturm lacked weapons other than antiquated rifles and a few antitank bazookas. It did not have uniforms other than armbands to indicate its combatant status. Moreover, it was commanded by veterans who were no longer fit for combat and hardly trained for its tasks. To stop enemy armor, they dug antitank ditches, erected cobblestone barriers, and placed explosives under bridges. But in actual fighting, these inexperienced boys and grandfathers accomplished little: the fanatics among them were killed and the skeptics sneaked home.87 If they resisted, they only hastened the destruction of their home towns.

  During the apocalypse of the Reich, many soldiers began to distance themselves from the fighting and think of their own survival in defeat. Horst Johannsen remembered, “In many cases order, obedience, and authority began to dissolve, allowing more and more scope for individual survival measures.” After Erich Helmer’s brother died, a humane superior ordered him “to go home on furlough, since the war is lost anyway.” When a nineteen-year-old turned up with “a self-inflicted rifle wound in his left hand,” a kind officer merely dressed him down and assigned him to rear-line duty rather than having him shot. A few days later, Krapf stumbled upon a captain who held a pistol in his hand, “about to shoot himself” and take the honorable way out in defeat. Though he stopped the suicide, he was unable to prevent the disintegration of his own unit. With discipline rapidly eroding and Russians attackers on their heels, soldiers fled frantically. “Now it was everyone for himself!”88

  On the Western Front, some still-intact Wehrmacht forces put up tough resistance, while other crumbling units were ready to surrender. In stopping the “Operation Market Garden” fighting in the Hürtgen Forest or attacking in the Battle of the Bulge, the German Army fiercely sought to defend its fatherland. When Robert Neumaier led an inexperienced group of boys aged fifteen to seventeen in Holland, ten of the dozen were immediately killed. Once US advance units had managed to cross the half-destroyed bridge at Remagen and British forces had gotten across the Rhine River further north, the western defenses were breached. On April 1, 1945, Eva Peters witnessed how “two American armies … closed the ring around Army Group B in the Ruhr Basin.” Once the industrial heart had fallen, its commander, Field Marshal Walter Model, committed suicide. More and more towns ignored Himmler’s order and hung white sheets in their windows as a sign of surrender.89 As a result, the Western Allies advanced to the Elbe River more rapidly than expected.

  In the East, combat was even more ferocious, for the Red Army was paying back with interest the atrocities the Wehrmacht had committed in Russia. Due to Hitler’s refusal to withdraw, large German forces remained stranded in shrinking bridgeheads in Courland and East Prussia along the Baltic coast. In Silesia, Gerhardt Thamm was drafted to unload ambulance trains carrying “young men with horrible wounds, with holes ripped into their bodies, with limbs shot away,” while the roads were clogged by endless columns of refugees. Bypassing the “fortress cities” and overrunning the “walking encirclements” behind the Vistula, the Red Army rapidly advanced to the Oder River. “Now all hope for the fatherland was lost!” Ragtag defenders were able neither to stop the crossing in April nor the encirclement of Berlin in the battle of the Seelow Heights. On April 30, the radio announced that the Führer “has fallen in his command post in the chancellery.” Herrmann Debus noted, “I cannot recall that this news triggered any special grief or dismay.”90

  In a scribbled note, Wilhelm Homeyer vividly described “the final hours” of the attempt to defend East Prussia. Worried about the looming battle, he pondered the absurdity of fighting against Russians who had “done nothing to him.” At 6:00 a.m. the German artillery roars. The earth shakes. The air burns. Rushing forward, Homeyer reaches “a trench, the enemy line is already broken.” A small “farm must become ours, that is the order.” All at once, “there is intense MG fire” and a Russian soldier pops up, but is killed. Now an enemy rocket launcher homes in, first shooting long, then short, and finally hitting his group: “Bursting grenades, cries … four men are an unrecognizable pool of blood.” Survivors now run back, propelled by “fear of the end … Everyone wants to live.” Suddenly, there is “a warm feeling on his leg. Hit. ‘Damn.’” Homeyer sprints for his life, but his limbs give out. Playing dead, he begs Russian scavengers to treat him as “comrade.” Shouting “dawai,” they order him to move, and he thinks “it is all over”—but he is only captured.91

  During April the Eastern Front collapsed and the Wehrmacht turned into a mass flight westward to escape captivity by the Red Army. Because “he had come to the sad conclusion that all was lost,” one sergeant demanded an immediate withdrawal “to reach Germany before the Russians did.” Gerhard Krapf noted rumors that “Grand Admiral Doenitz … had issued orders for all troops at the Eastern Front to retreat” in order to create “a common front [with the Americans] against the Soviets.” After Hitler’s death, one commander offered his troops “the personal option to request a discharge” or to go on fighting. “Thus began our race with fate, the outcome of which had already been decided, though we did not know it.” Some fanatical SS officers still tried to form new “fighting groups,” while MPs threatened “to shoot any bastards running away.” But nothing could stop the “huge, motley column” of desperate soldiers who had “thrown away their weapons and ripped off their insignia.” It was “a rout of truly Napoleonic dimensions.”92

  The ensuing surrender was somewhat anticlimactic because it happened successively at different fronts. In Italy, one battalion commander assembled his troops on the morning of May 7 to announce, “Our Führer Adolf Hitler is dead and the Italian front has capitulated. Every soldier is relieved of his duty.” In the West, the fighting fizzled out when individual units were overrun and the formal capitulation took place a day later. Joachim Fest remembered encountering a surprised American GI who pointed a submachine gun at him and commanded him to raise his hands in surrender. In the East, news that “the German Wehrmacht has capitulated to overwhelming forces” took a day or two longer to get to the dispirited troops. In most cases, retreating soldiers such as Gerhard Krapf or Horst Grothus simply ran into a Russian patrol, which yelled “Voina kaput! Urr yest?” (War is over. Do you have a watch?). Their superiors explained, “that means capitulation; we can do nothing more than wait.”93

  The end of the war triggered confused emotions, ranging from dejection at defeat all the way to joy over survival. Unable to bear the shame of the loss, some officers committed suicide rather than be captured. Many ordinary soldiers, such as Karl Härtel, were depressed, because “at the bitter end we lost the war and everything such as home, property, and the claim to justice before history.” By contrast, Hans Queiser “was neither dejected nor desperate,” because “no ‘Germany’ and certainly no Führer remained in his head. Only the will to get through what would now follow and then to go home.” Skeptical spirits such as Erich Helmer “were almost stunned” by the capitulation, wondering what sense all the previous sacrifices made now. “At the same time we felt the total vacuum which had opened before us. What will happen? What shall we do?” But a barmaid in a Western pub reassured the dejected youths, “Boys, the war is over, finished for all of us!” She urged the worried soldiers to drink to that: “Cheers, boys! You have survived!”94

  A fatal alliance between fanatical Nazis and patriotic Germans had allowed the war to continue, causing more deaths in the last six months than in the entire time before. In spite of the approaching end, fervent Hitler Youths and BdM girls were still willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Ignoring his own doubts, Horst Grothus wrote in his diary in March 1945, �
�We believe in our victory, believe our Führer who only a few days ago predicted a decisive turnabout for this year.” Others, such as Gerhardt Thamm, “had already lost all illusions of glamour and heroics depicted so cleverly in magazines and newsreels. There was nothing beautiful, nor was there anything good about war, only gut-tearing sorrow, seeing young men and women each in his or her private hell.”95 The willingness of most young soldiers to carry on the fight regardless of their beliefs trapped them in an existential struggle from which there was no escape. In the end, all too many paid for this misguided dedication to their country with their lives.

  WAR MEMORIES

  Written half a century or more after 1945, these German accounts of the Second World War have a particular narrative shape. The totality of the defeat generally prevents the heroic tone characteristic of victorious renditions of war experience. There is still pride in the recollections of the exciting initial victories, but they are overshadowed by the inexorability of the ultimate loss. Many renditions of the middle period of the war treat combat as an exciting adventure, a dirty and dangerous world demanding male toughness and daring exploits. The final phase of the struggle is usually described as a survival story, full of references to defensive bravery, fallen friends, and miraculous escapes. Typical of this perspective is Hans Queiser’s report of “New Year in the Realm of White Death.” In this gripping story of a downed airplane in Norway, two crewmen struggle in deep snow, realizing that they “have to fight for their lives.” Six days after the crash, the wounded sergeant is rescued by his comrade, who has gone for help.96

  These recollections picture war as a pervasive domain of male violence that centers on mass murder and mass death. They describe basic training as systematic initiation that provides the necessary weapon skills and silences moral qualms by instilling rigid discipline. Erich Helmer therefore calls the Iron Cross a cross of iron: “What is a basic taboo in peace—not to be allowed to kill—is made into a duty in war.” Many authors relate how this pent-up tension was released through a ferocious assault on “the enemy,” which made the Wehrmacht troops especially lethal during the first half of the war. They brush aside potential ethical worries according to the situational logic of “us or them” that required beating a foe to the draw. Finally, they admit that this destructive force would turn against its German initiators during the second half of the war with saturation bombing and tank attacks. In such an ideological war of annihilation, the initially focused violence eventually escaped all legal and instrumental bounds.97

  The authors of the autobiographies attribute their survival to a number of factors, ranging from “a lot of luck” to experience in staying out of harm’s way. With most fighting taking place at a distance, random chance played a large role; many people to the right or left were killed, while the writers escaped somehow. Unlike his comrades who were fresh recruits, Robert Neumaier considered familiarity with combat conditions important, since making smart use of available cover and not taking unnecessary risks would reduce the likelihood of death to some degree. Moreover, getting an assignment behind the front as assistant to a motor pool supervisor, as Paul Frenzel did, clearly improved the odds of coming out alive unless one was shot by partisans. Ironically, receiving a moderate wound as Fritz Klein did was also desirable: healing required a lengthy rehabilitation at home or exempted one from combat altogether. Nonetheless, surprisingly, many convalescents volunteered to go right back to the front.98

  These retrospectives make it clear that the impending defeat and the realization of German crimes gradually made soldiers question the purpose of Hitler’s war. When the fighting reached the Reich, Nazi propaganda lost the last shreds of credibility and “total fear and great desperation spread, halting daily life and activity.” Disturbing impressions of the exploitation of slave laborers, the bloody suppression of partisans, and the racist persecution of Jews could no longer be ignored and raised moral questions about the justification of German actions. Fritz Klein recalled that patriotic youths slowly realized that they were “willingly or reluctantly participating in a criminal war of incredible dimensions.” Hermann Debus remembered how “it gradually dawned upon me, that ‘our Führer’ had abused us. At any rate, we were no longer convinced of his infallibility.” While some fanatics continued to cling to their nationalist faith, many soldiers began to disassociate themselves from the “damned hoax” of a bankrupt regime.99

  Even before the carnage had ended, the abiding lesson that war was reprehensible was emerging in the minds of the soldiers who had caused and suffered so much grief. “Why are we still all going along?” Erich Helmer remembered asking himself. “Would it not be necessary to articulate the feeling of senselessness and cry out: ‘Stop this War!?’” Across political affiliations, thoughtful Germans drew the same conclusion from disastrous defeat and destruction. The terrible end to hostilities reinforced for Gerhard Krapf the “hard-won conviction that the notion of a ‘good war’ in the sense of St. Augustine [or] Thomas Aquinas is just as absurd as is Nietzsche’s” philosophical heroization of warfare. “War and the wages of war are evil, period.” It was therefore the shocking experience of the murderous and criminal war that turned most Germans into postwar pacifists. The Thousand-Year Reich “had been an exercise in arrogance, mediocrity and brutality. It was a welcome reprieve for mankind that it foundered.”100

   5

  FEMALE STRUGGLES

  On March 27, 1945, sirens wailed to warn the city of Paderborn that Allied bombing squadrons were approaching. Huddled in her air-raid shelter, twenty-year-old Eva Peters experienced “the eardrum-shattering roar and crash of exploding bombs …, the impenetrable darkness” after the lights went out, “the asphyxiating chalk dust in nose and lungs” and the “stone chunks falling on heads and shoulders.” The “entire cellar danced and shook like a ship in a hurricane.” She was less afraid of being buried alive than angry “at those pilots who from high above dropped their bombs in order to murder women and children who posed no military threat.” After the attack was over, her three-year-old brother asked, “Are we now all dead?” On the surface, a firestorm raged whose sky-high flames quickly consumed her home and most of the city. “Many hundreds of people, principally women and children, found a horrible death.”1 Shared thousands of times, this frightening exposure to bombing raids was typical of female experiences in the war.

  As a result of such horrors, many commentators initially considered women only as victims of the belligerent Third Reich. From antiquity on, women have been forced to endure male depredations during war, support fighters in combat, or serve as prizes of victory. Moreover, the Nazi movement itself was a product of male bonding in the trenches of World War I, as well as of the uniformed militias of the Weimar Republic, which gave the entire leadership from the Führer on down a misogynist tinge. Bristling at the cliché of women’s limitation to “children-kitchen-church,” feminists such as Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, and Alice Schwarzer therefore denounced the Nazi cult of motherhood as a patriarchal plot designed to keep them in an inferior place. According to historian Gisela Bock, “German women were the subjects of Nazi policy, not its agents.”2 This view conveniently conflates maternalism and natalism with National Socialism as chief enemies of emancipation, ironically absolving women of most of their responsibility.

  More recent research has rejected this image of female passivity and stressed that women played a rather more active role in the Nazi dictatorship. While they were underrepresented among the NSDAP members, they provided almost half the votes for the party. In some auxiliaries such as the People’s Welfare Organization, women took the lead as an extension of mothering from their homes to society at large. Nostalgic descriptions of “how much fun we had in the BdM” also demonstrate that the Hitler Youth was quite popular among adolescent girls, and service duties such as helping farmers during the Landjahr in the countryside were considered exciting because they allowed young women to escape from the controls of home.3 In an odd
form of subaltern emancipation, considerable numbers of adult women helped maintain the regime with their professional work. A hard core of female perpetrators among the military auxiliaries, concentration camp guards, and SS brides also committed shocking atrocities while participating in Nazi crimes.4

  Perhaps a gender perspective will help to resolve this ideological debate about women’s paradoxical role in the Third Reich. The new work on military violence has suggested the notion of “martial masculinity” to describe the image of an ideal male soldier forced upon men by the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht. Research on female experiences as army auxiliaries or laborers in munitions factories suggests the need for a comparable concept such as “volkish feminity” that would reconcile maternalist rhetoric with female agency in the Third Reich.5 Since the total war blurred the lines between civilians and combatants, women were the backbone of the home front and actively contributed through their completion of traditional domestic tasks and their involvement in economic mobilization.6 Therefore, they faced an increasing disparity between their role expectations as wives and mothers who were supposed to keep the home fires burning and their actual wartime duties in the service of their nation.