It was from Poland that the most determined attempts to inform the world of the extermination programme came. Members of the resistance sent information about the gassings at Treblinka to the exiled Polish government in London almost as soon as they began. On 17 September 1942 the Polish government in exile approved a public protest against the crimes the Germans were committing against the Jews, but it undertook no concrete action, encouraging neither Poles to give shelter to the Jews, nor Jews to seek refuge with Poles. Drawing too much attention to the Jews would in the exiled Polish government’s view distract world opinion from the sufferings of the Poles, undermining the government’s attempt to fight Stalin’s policy of getting the Allies to recognize the Nazi-Soviet border agreed before the partition of Poland in September 1939. Some politicians in the exiled government believed that Jewish influence stood behind not only Stalin but also Churchill and Roosevelt. It might be exerted in favour of the recognition of the Curzon Line. 79 The situation only changed when, in 1942, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, was commissioned by the resistance to go to the west and report on Poland’s plight. The murder of the Jews was fairly low on the list of priorities he was given. Hearing of his mission, however, two members of a Jewish underground group persuaded him to visit the Warsaw ghetto and most probably also the camp at Belzec. Karski reported what he had seen when he eventually reached London.80
His report had a dramatic effect. On 29 October 1942 the Archbishop of Canterbury chaired a large public protest meeting at the Albert Hall in London, with representatives of the Jewish and Polish communities in attendance. On 27 November 1942 the Polish government-in-exile in London finally gave official recognition to the fact that Jews from Poland and other parts of Europe were being murdered on the territory it claimed for its own. Representatives of the government informed Churchill, and on 14 December 1942 Foreign Secretary Eden delivered an official report on the genocide to the British Cabinet. Three days later, the Allied governments issued a joint declaration promising retribution to those responsible for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.81 The Allies concluded that the best way to stop the genocide was to concentrate everything on winning the war as quickly as possible. Bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz and other camps would only have achieved a temporary respite for the Jews, and distracted attention and resources from the larger purpose of overthrowing the regime that was killing them.82 What the Allies did do, however, was to direct a massive propaganda campaign against the Nazi regime. Beginning in December 1942, British and other Allied propaganda media bombarded German citizens with broadcast and written information about the genocide, promising retribution.83 In Berlin, faced with these accusations, Nazi propagandists did not even trouble any more to issue a denial. In terms of counter-propaganda, Goebbels said,
there is no question of a complete or partial refutation of the Jewish atrocity claims but simply a German action that will concern itself with English and American acts of violence in the whole world . . . It must be so, that every party accuses every party of committing atrocities. This general clamour will in the end lead to this topic being removed from the programme.84
The mass murder of the Jews thus became a kind of open secret in Germany from the end of 1942 at the very latest, and Goebbels knew that it would be futile to deny it.
The evidence does not, therefore, support the claim made by many Germans immediately after the war that they had known nothing about the extermination of the Jews. Nor does it, however, support the argument that Germans as a whole were enthusiastic supporters of the regime’s murderous antisemitism or the claim that hatred of the Jews was a significant force in holding the ‘people’s community’ together either before or during the war.85 Strikingly, the voluminous surveillance reports of the SS Security Service had relatively little to say on the subject. There were good reasons for this. As the clandestine reporting service of the Social Democratic Party noted in March 1940:
The comprehensive terror compels ‘national comrades’ to conceal their real mood, to hold back from expressing their real opinions, and instead to feign optimism and approval. Indeed, it is obviously forcing ever more people to conform to the demands of the regime even in their thinking; they no longer dare to bring themselves to account. The outer shell of loyalty that forms in this way can last a long time yet.86
Open discussion of the persecution and murder of the Jews was thus relatively rare, and seldom reported even by the Security Service of the SS.87 Nevertheless, the available evidence suggests that, on the whole, ordinary Germans did not approve. Goebbels’s propaganda campaigns carried out in the second half of 1941 and again in 1943 had failed to convert them. But if people could not be made to approve of the murder of the Jews, then perhaps their evident knowledge of it could be used to persuade them to carry on fighting for fear of what the Jews might do to them in revenge, particularly if, as Nazi propaganda claimed, the Jews were in charge of Germany’s enemies: Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.88
The last two years of the war were filled with atrocity propaganda emanating from Goebbels’s mass media: the Red Army in particular was portrayed, not entirely inaccurately, as hell-bent on raping and killing Germans as it advanced. Yet the effects of this were not what Goebbels intended. Far from leading to a strengthening of resolve amongst ordinary Germans, this propaganda only served to reveal deep-seated feelings of guilt that they had done nothing to prevent the Jews being killed. Such a feeling was an unexpected by-product of the continuing Christian convictions of the great majority of German citizens. In June 1943, for example, ‘clerical groups’ in Bavaria were reported to be reacting in this way to Goebbels’s propaganda campaign centred on the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn’. The Party Chancellery in Munich reported them as saying:
The SS used similar methods of butchery in its fight against the Jews in the east. The dreadful and inhumane treatment of the Jews by the SS virtually demands the punishment of our people by the Lord God. If these murders are not avenged upon us, then there is no longer any Divine justice! The German people has taken such a blood-guilt upon itself that it cannot count on any pity or forgiveness. Everything is bitterly avenged here on Earth. Because of these barbaric methods there is no more possibility of a humane conduct of the war on the part of our enemies.89
When Cologne cathedral was bombed the following month, people said this was in retribution for the burning of synagogues in 1938.90 On 3 August 1943 an SS Security Service agent reported that people in Bavaria were saying ‘that Würzburg was not attacked by enemy airmen because no synagogue was burned down in Würzburg. Others again said that the airmen were now coming to Würzburg as well because the last Jew left Würzburg a short while ago.’ On 20 December 1943 the Protestant Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, wrote to Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the long-time civil servant heading up Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, reporting that in many cases the German people regarded
the sufferings that they have had to endure from enemy air attacks as retribution for what has been done to the Jews. The burning of houses and churches, the crashing and splintering on bombing nights, the flight with a few meagre possessions from houses that have been destroyed, the perplexity in searching for somewhere to take refuge, all this reminds the population in the most painful way of what the Jews had to suffer on earlier occasions.91
Just over a year later, on 6 November 1944, the Security Service of the SS reported from Stuttgart that Goebbels’s propaganda graphically portraying the lootings, killings and rapes carried out by Red Army troops in Nemmersdorf, in East Prussia,
in many cases achieved the opposite of what was intended. Compatriots say it is shameless to make so much of them in the German press . . . ‘What does the leadership intend by the publication of such pictures as those in the National Socialist Courier on Saturday? They should realise that the sight of these victims will remind every thinking person of the atrocities we have committed in enemy territory, even in Germany i
tself. Have we not murdered thousands of Jews? Don’t soldiers again and again report that Jews in Poland have had to dig their own graves? And how did we treat the Jews in the concentration camp in Alsace? Jews are human beings too. By doing all this we have shown the enemy what they can do to us if they win.’ (The opinion of numerous people from all classes of the population.)92
‘The Jews alone will repay us for the crimes we have committed against them,’ predicted one anonymous letter to the head of news at the Propaganda Ministry on 4 July 1944.93 Fear and guilt were driving the great mass of Germans to dread the retribution of the Allies. From 1943 onwards, they were mentally preparing themselves to deflect this retribution as far as they were able, by denying all knowledge of the genocide once the war was lost.
CULTURES OF DESTRUCTION
I
During the Second World War, as before it, Nazi propaganda could seem all-pervasive and inescapable, corralling a supine nation into unthinking adulation of Hitler, unconditional enthusiasm for Nazi ideology, and unquestioning support for the military conquest and racial supremacy that were the primary aims of the German war effort. This at least was the impression that Goebbels liked to give. Yet it was a false one.94 To begin with, propaganda was far from all-pervasive. Even Goebbels realized that it had to have its limits. Entertainment and relaxation also had a role to play. ‘It’s important for the war to keep our people in a good mood,’ he noted in his diary on 26 February 1942. ‘We failed to do that during the [First] World War, and we had to pay for it with a terrible catastrophe. This example must under no circumstances be repeated.’95 In taking this view, Goebbels was among other things learning from experience, as popular distaste for the over-politicized media and a constant diet of speeches and exhortations had already led to widespread indifference to Nazi propaganda before the war.96 By 1939, therefore, the Nazi Propaganda Minister knew very well that his initial ambition to achieve a total spiritual and emotional mobilization of the German people could not be fulfilled. The purpose of Nazi propaganda during the war was thus more modest: it was to keep people fighting and make sure they conformed, even if only outwardly, to the demands the regime made on them.97
As Propaganda Minister, Goebbels had huge power over the arts, culture and the media, but he did not have it all his own way. He had a major rival in Otto Dietrich, whom Hitler had appointed head of the Reich Press Office of the Nazi Party in 1931. In 1938 Hitler also made him President of the Reich Press Chamber. Unlike Goebbels, Dietrich worked in Hitler’s office and was therefore in a position to receive the Leader’s direct orders virtually on a daily basis. It was one of Dietrich’s tasks to give Hitler a digest of the international news media every morning. From 1938 onwards Dietrich and his staff also gave daily noontime press conferences at which they issued directives to the editors of the German papers. In order to try to circumvent Dietrich’s growing influence, Goebbels timed his own daily Minister’s Conference for 11 a.m. This only made matters worse. In 1940 Dietrich began to outflank Goebbels by issuing ‘Daily Slogans of the Reich Press Chief’ from Hitler’s headquarters. Relations between the two men deteriorated still further. On one occasion, as they sat round Hitler’s lunch table, Dietrich said: ‘My Leader, this morning, while I was taking a bath, I thought of a good idea.’ Quick as a flash, Goebbels interrupted him: ‘Mr Dietrich, you should take more baths.’98
A particularly serious clash occurred in October 1941, when Hitler sent Dietrich to Berlin to announce to an international press conference that the Soviet Union had been defeated. Although this reflected a widespread perception in the higher echelons of the Nazi leadership at the time, Goebbels was furious: such over-optimistic declarations were in his view hostages to fortune.99 He was right, as it turned out. By 23 August 1942 the tension between Goebbels and Dietrich was so acute that Hitler himself felt it necessary to order all press directives, including Goebbels’s, to be channelled through Dietrich’s office, ruling that Dietrich’s noontide press conferences were the only ones that legitimately represented the Leader’s opinions. Not long afterwards, Dietrich succeeded in getting one of his men appointed Deputy Reich Press Chief with an office in the Propaganda Ministry. Goebbels complained to Bormann, whose power was now considerable. This dangerous move prompted a threat to resign from Dietrich, turned down brusquely by Hitler. It was only towards the end of the war that Goebbels finally gained the upper hand, winning the power of veto over Dietrich’s daily press directives in June 1944 and finally persuading Hitler to sack the press chief on 30 March 1945, much too late to make any difference.100 By this time, the Propaganda Minister had also successfully sidelined other rivals as well. These ranged from the press division of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office to the ‘propaganda companies’ formed by the armed forces. The management of propaganda had always been riven by rivalries, but in the last two years of the war, Goebbels finally did achieve almost total control over it.101
While these quarrels were going on in the background, the Propaganda Ministry pumped out enormous amounts of material in every medium of communication as part of its effort to boost morale. An official Propaganda Ministry report noted that in the year beginning September 1939 it had produced nine slide shows that had been seen by 4.3 million people in evening entertainments organized by regional Party offices. Themes covered included ‘Germany’s Racial Policies’ and ‘World Pirate England’. In the first sixteen months of the war, the Party organized some 200,000 political meetings, mainly for morale-boosting purposes. Picture posters for pasting on walls were printed in huge numbers (a million for ‘Down with Germany’s Enemies’, for example); text-posters appeared in editions of up to half a million. The Ministry issued 32.5 million copies of the Nazi Party ‘Word of the Week’, and produced no fewer than 65 million leaflets on a wide variety of subjects. Not to be forgotten either, 700,000 photographs of Hitler had been distributed by the end of 1940. Journalists, Otto Dietrich told representatives of the press on 3 September 1939, were no longer just reporters but also ‘soldiers of the German people’.102 By 1944 the Nazi Party controlled almost the entirety of the German press. Here was a medium that was far more propaganda than entertainment. The need to ration paper supplies led the Reich Press Chamber to close down 500 newspapers in May 1941 and a further 950 two years later (including the formerly respectable Frankfurt Newspaper). Yet people were avid for news during the war, and the circulation of the major papers increased substantially as their number fell. The total circulation of daily papers rose from 20.5 to 26.5 million between 1939 and 1944. The flagship daily of the Party, the Racial Observer, was selling 1,192,500 copies by 1941; and it was joined by significant new weeklies, above all The Reich, founded by Goebbels in 1940 and printing 1.5 million copies of each edition three years later. The growing size and importance of the SS were reflected in the fact that its own weekly, The Black Corps, founded in 1935, was the second-biggest-selling weekly by this time with a circulation of 750,000 copies. Yet people did not just read the press for information or to hear the latest news of the Party or the SS. They also read it for entertainment and relaxation, and so sales of illustrated magazines and weeklies rose from 11.9 to 20.8 million between 1939 and 1944.103
The regime placed considerable emphasis on literature as a spur to patriotic commitment, reviving and marketing appropriate classics like Schiller’s William Tell with a new enthusiasm. 45,000 front-line libraries supplied reading matter to the troops in their idle moments, if they had any. Germans donated no fewer than 43 million books to stock them. 25,000 public libraries at home catered for the reading needs of civilians. What, then, did people read during the war? William L. Shirer reported in October 1939 that the best-selling novels in Germany at this time were Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin’s Fifty Years of Germany was attracting readers who sought reassurance that Germany was not wholly despised in the non-fascist world.104 This situation obviously could not last. The war offered the Rei
ch Chamber of Literature considerably increased opportunities to exercise control over writers and publishers. Censorship was tightened up in 1940, and the need to ration paper supplies provided an excuse for requiring publishers to give advance notice of new books and their authors for approval after this time. All books and periodicals from enemy states were banned, except for purely scientific ones, and those by authors who had died before 1904 (provided they were not Jewish). Living German authors still interested in publishing in the Third Reich faced an uncertain future unless they produced books with titles like We Fly Against England, the top item in the borrowing statistics of Hamburg libraries in 1940- 41. William L. Shirer reported that anti-Soviet books were still selling well in 1939-40, despite the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and detective stories were also very popular. Historical war-books were much sought after, including The Total War, a celebrated tract on the First World War by the now safely dead Erich Ludendorff, and propaganda accounts of England and Poland were also selling well. The biggest seller of all was still Hitler’s My Struggle, which had provided its author with the royalties from no fewer than 6 million copies by 1940.105
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