The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Of more immediate interest to the Allies after the war than artists and composers were the scientists and engineers who had worked so expertly, and to such little effect, on wonder-weapons like the V-1 and V-2. Special teams were put together by the Soviet and American authorities to locate and take key military technological equipment back home for further development. The inventors of the nerve gases Sarin and Tabun were arrested and interrogated; jet engines, advanced submarines, rocket planes and much more besides were dismantled and taken away for study. The Soviets removed several thousand scientists and engineers to work on updating their military technology and equipment, while the British and Americans turned their attention to the V-2 rocket team, Together with Wernher von Braun and some of his staff, they oversaw the launch of three V-2 missiles from the German North Sea coast in October 1945. 120 of the rocket programme staff, including von Braun, were taken off to a new base near El Paso, in Texas, to work on rocket development; they were not made available for the trial of those responsible for the crimes committed at Camp Dora. By 1950 the programme had been relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, where it became the leading missile development centre in the USA, eclipsing previous institutions like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Ten years later, building on the experience of the V-2, von Braun and the Huntsville team constructed the mighty Saturn rocket, which was used to launch men into space and within a decade to send them to the moon. Not only the Americans but also the Soviets, the British and the French used the expertise of members of the Peenemünde team wherever they could find them, in developing and building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, rendered infinitely more dangerous than their German predecessor by the invention of the atomic bomb.270

  Other scientists, notably the pioneers of atom bomb research Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, remained in Germany and resumed their careers. Hahn took over the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1946, unsuccessfully opposing its renaming as the Max Planck Society at the behest of the British occupation authorities in the wake of the great scientist’s death in 1947. What Hahn did succeed in doing, however, was to distance the Society successfully from its close involvement in Nazi research, a topic that remained undiscussed until almost the very end of the twentieth century. Hahn went to Stockholm to get his Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, and died in G̈ttingen in 1968. Werner Heisenberg became director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and rejoined the international scientific community, dying in 1971. His rivals, the champions of ‘German Physics’, did not prosper. Heisenberg had the pleasure of testifying against Johannes Stark at the latter’s trial in 1947. Stark’s sentence of four years’ imprisonment was in the end not implemented, and he died, largely forgotten, in 1957. Ten years before, his mentor Philipp Lenard had died at the age of 85. Other, more minor figures in the German Physics movement were systematically shut out of academic life when it resumed again after the war.271

  V

  The ordinary, unassuming citizens whose voluminous and conscientiously kept diaries form such a vital record of everyday life under the Nazis suffered a variety of fates after the war. Dr Zygmunt Klukowski published a five-volume work on German war crimes and the underground resistance in the Zamos’c’ area. This led to his being called as a witness in one of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Klukowski soon found himself living under another dictatorship, however, as the Soviet occupying power suppressed the Polish nationalist movement and installed a Communist regime in power. Klukowski now helped the Polish underground resistance to the Communists and kept a diary of the Communist terror, just as he had done of the Nazi. He was arrested by the Soviet political police twice, and, though he was not imprisoned, he was demoted from his long-held post of head of hospital to the status of a humble ward physician. In 1952 he was arrested again, while trying - unsuccessfully - to prevent his son Tadeusz from being executed for resistance activities, and spent four years in Wronki prison. In the thaw of 1956 he was pardoned and rehabilitated, and moved to Lublin, where he published his war diaries two years later. These made him famous: the book was quickly reprinted, and won a major literary prize, to go along with numerous other Polish national awards. By this time, however, Klukoswki was already suffering from cancer. He died on 23 November 1959, and was buried in Szczebrzeszyn, along with other soldiers of the Home Army: in 1986 the town erected a monument to him in the main square. His diaries reached a wider readership with their publication in English in 1993 on the initiative of his surviving son and grandson and remain the most vivid and detailed record we have of life in Poland under German occupation.272

  Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva moved back into the house in the Dresden suburb of D̈lzschen from which they had been evicted in 1939, and gradually put it back in order. At sixty-three, he had no intention of sinking into a quiet retirement. His ex-colleagues from the Technical University at Dresden, who had avoided him during the Nazi period because he was Jewish, now spoke to him again as if nothing had happened in the intervening years. Former friends and neighbours, acquaintances and even complete strangers approached him for support in their claim that they were innocent of the Third Reich’s crimes. Klemperer enjoyed his new-found status as one of the persecuted of the Third Reich. He was restored to his Professorship at the University, though he did not return to teach there, and then was appointed in rapid succession to more prestigious chairs at Greifswald, Halle and Berlin. He retrieved his manuscripts from his non-Jewish friend Annemarie K̈hler, and published his study of Nazi language, LTI, which was immediately recognized as a classic. He resumed work on his study of eighteenth-century French literature, and this was published too. Dresden lay in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, and after some hesitation Klemperer joined the Communist Party, which he saw as the only convincing vehicle of retribution and reconstruction; for him, nothing else could give any assurance that the break with Nazism was complete. His membership opened up a wide range of cultural and educational work for him, and after the German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949 he became a deputy in the country’s parliament, a position for which he was no more obliged to campaign or stand against an opponent than any other member was. The growing Stalinization of East Germany made him more sceptical; he ran into political criticism of his work, and he privately concluded that at bottom he was a liberal after all.273

  In 1951 Klemperer’s wife Eva, whose steadfast love had kept him alive during the Third Reich, died of a heart attack in her sleep shortly before her sixty-ninth birthday. ‘I am quite alone,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘everything is valueless for me now.’274 Initially, he took solace in work, but within a few months he began a relationship with the twenty-five-year-old Hadwig Kirchner, one of his students; despite feeling that he might be making a fool of himself, he fell in love, his sentiments were reciprocated, and the couple were married on 23 May 1952. He continued to teach French literature well into his seventies. In 1959 he fell seriously ill, and died on 11 February 1960 at the age of seventy-eight. There could be no question of publishing his voluminous diaries under the East German dictatorship, given their complete failure to follow the Communist Party line on either the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich or the postwar era; but after the fall of the Berlin Wall his widow made them available for publication, and they appeared in instalments through the 1990s, immediately establishing themselves as the most meticulous, vivid and honest account of the life of a Jew in Germany during the first six decades of the twentieth century.275

  Luise Solmitz and her Jewish husband Friedrich also survived the war unscathed. They lived in quiet retirement in Hamburg. Luise continued to keep a daily record of her life, as she had done ever since 1905, filling one 700-page notebook with closely spaced lines of tiny, crabbed handwriting every year. In December 1953 she donated her diaries to the Hamburg State Archive as a historical record, but a year later, she found that she could not bear to be without them and retrieved them for her private use. She donated
them again in 1967, but took them back home once more three months later, keeping them until her death in 1973 at the age of eighty-four. In the 1960s the Research Centre for the History of National Socialism in Hamburg secured her agreement to come in every day and dictate from the diaries for 1918-45 to a shorthand typist. As she went through them, she occasionally wondered at the views she had expressed in the early 1930s, views that had changed so radically by 1945. Coming across her description from January 1933 of Nazis singing about Jewish blood spurting from the knife, she added a comment: ‘Who took that seriously then?’276

  VI

  Luise Solmitz’s failure in the 1930s to recognize the violence that lay at the heart of Nazism was shared by many. As late as 1939 the great majority of Germans were hoping against hope that there would not be a general European war; and a large part of the euphoria that swept the country in the wake of the victory over France the following year expressed the relief that the traditional enemy had been defeated, and the humiliation of the 1919 Peace Settlement avenged, with what seemed to be a minimum of bloodshed. Yet Nazism was from the very beginning a creed based on violence and hatred, born of bitterness and despair. The depth and radicalism of the political, social and economic crises that assailed Germany under the Weimar Republic spawned a correspondingly deep and radical response. Germany’s enemies within and without were to be utterly destroyed in order that Germany should rise again, this time to unprecedented heights of power and domination. Even the promises of economic reconstruction and social cohesion that won over so many Germans to the Nazi cause in the 1930s were subordinated in the end to the drive to war. In seeking to re-create the atmosphere of August 1914 - or what the Nazis imagined it to have been - internal conflict was to be banished and social and political divisions subsumed in the all-encompassing myth of the organic national and racial community of all Germans. The subversion that had supposedly led to the German army being stabbed in the back by Jewish revolutionaries feeding on domestic discontent in 1918 was to be prevented by ensuring that the Jews were removed from Germany by any means possible and that Germans themselves were well fed, racially pure and politically committed. These were aims that could only be achieved by the application of violence at its most ruthless and extreme.

  The war that began in September 1939 unleashed it with a force that had so far only been apparent on specific occasions such as the maltreatment of the Jews of Vienna after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, or the nationwide pogrom of the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ the following November. The policies that unfolded in Poland in the opening months of the war set the tone for the Nazi occupation of other parts of Eastern Europe from the middle of 1941 onwards: expropriation, forcible deportation, imprisonment, mass shootings, murder on a hitherto unimaginable scale. These policies were applied to all the people who lived in the region apart from ethnic Germans, but they were applied with particular venom to the Jews, who were subjected to sadistic and systematic humiliation and torture, ghettoization and extermination by poison gas in facilities specially built for the purpose. Other groups, mainly though in many cases not exclusively German, were also killed in large numbers: the mentally ill and handicapped, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘asocials’, petty criminals, the politically refractory and the socially marginal. Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in their millions, and people of many nationalities were taken forcibly to Germany and made to work and live under conditions that proved fatal for a large number of them. Some people who belonged to these other groups were, like many Jews, gassed to death; but only the Jews were singled out as the ‘world enemy’, a global threat to Germany’s existence that had to be exterminated wherever it was found.

  These policies were put into action to one degree or another by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans, who were committed to the Nazi cause, or who - especially if they belonged to the younger generation - had been indoctrinated since 1933 with the belief that Slavs were subhuman, Jews were evil, Gypsies, criminals, the marginal and the deviant were at best a nuisance, at worst a threat. Nazism’s encouragement of murderous violence, theft, looting and wanton destruction was not without its effect on the behaviour of German troops in Poland, the Soviet Union, Serbia and other parts of Europe. Only a very few, mostly impelled by a strong Christian conscience, raised their voices in criticism. Yet the majority of Germans felt uneasy at the mass murder of Jews and Slavs, and guilty that they were too afraid to do anything to stop it. In the case of the mentally ill and handicapped, who belonged in many cases to their own families and communities, they were upset enough to protest, at first indirectly and then, channelling their anger and despair through the Christian Churches, openly and to some effect.

  In launching a war to be fought on a European scale with the goal of world domination as the long-term aim, Hitler and the Nazis were living out the fantasies that had impelled them into politics in the first place: fantasies of a great and resurgent Germany, expunging the stain of defeat in 1918 by establishing an imperial domination on a scale the world had never seen before. These fantasies were shared to a significant degree by key parts of the German Establishment, including the civil service, the professions and the top generals in the army. Despite their doubts, they all went along with it in the end. But Germany’s economic resources were never adequate to turn these fantasies into reality, not even when the resources of a large part of the rest of Europe were added to them. No amount of ‘mobilization for total war’, no degree of economic rationalization, could alter this fundamental fact of life. Initially, the German armed forces managed to score a series of quick victories using tactics that defeated their enemies as much by surprise as by anything else. But they were unable to defeat Britain in 1940, and a stalemate ensued. This was the first major turning-point of the war.

  The invasion of the Soviet Union the following year was in part an attempt to break this stalemate. But it was also the accelerated implementation of a desire long held by Hitler and the leading Nazis: the conquest of Eastern Europe, the acquisition of its notionally vast natural resources, and the racial subjugation and extermination of a large proportion of its inhabitants in order to make way for a new and permanent German hegemony. Operation Barbarossa inaugurated a war of attrition that the Third Reich could not win. The drive across North Africa to secure the prize of Middle Eastern oil could not succeed, for all Rommel’s brilliance; the attempt to cut off the supplies sent to Britain and the Soviet Union in growing quantities from the United States failed because there were not enough U-boats to sustain it. A second turning-point in the war came at the end of 1941, when the German armies failed to take Moscow, and the United States brought their immense resources into the conflict on the Allied side. A third turning-point came a year later, in the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad.

  Increasingly, the war came home to Germany, as Allied bombing fleets gained domination of the skies and brought devastation to Germany’s cities. Until things began to go badly wrong in the war, the Nazis managed to pull the great mass of the German people along with them. German nationalism, belief in the greatness of Germany and resentment at the Peace Settlement of 1919 were present in every part of the population. They were behind the mass and undoubtedly genuine euphoria that greeted Germany’s stunning military successes in 1939-40 and in a grimmer mood they sustained a large part of the German resistance to the Soviet invasion in 1944-5. Until the summer of 1944 cultural institutions and the mass media continued to offer a mixture of morale-boosting encouragement and soul-soothing escapism to the Germans at home, while food supplies and the basics of everyday life were sustained almost to the end. But the mass destruction of Germany’s towns and cities that began in earnest in 1943 turned people against the Nazi regime even more than the realization after Stalingrad that the war was lost. The Nazi regime responded to disillusion at home and the decline of morale in the armed forces by intensifying the repression and terror that had always been a central part of its
rule. The element of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in Nazi ideology was intensified too. Small numbers of Germans began to resist, but the only group capable of overthrowing Hitler, the military resistance, failed in the attempt in July 1944, inaugurating a further intensification of terror and destruction that ended in the downfall of the Third Reich just over nine months later.

  The violence at the core of Nazism had in the end been turned back on Germany itself. As the German people - above all, German women - cleared away the last of the rubble, they began to experience something like a return to normality, reflected in the political and social atmosphere of the 1950s, with its emphasis on family values, material prosperity, social order, political stability and selective amnesia about the Nazi past. For many middle-aged and older Germans, there had been no real normality since before the First World War. Military conflict and material privation had been succeeded by revolution, hyperinflation, political violence, economic depression, dictatorship and war all over again. But the normality of the 1950s was also a new kind of normality. The Third Reich and the war it unleashed had changed many things. Nazism’s promise of social equality was implemented, in ways it had not foreseen, during and after the war: the ferocious attack it launched on the German aristocracy after 20 July 1944, coupled with the breakup of the larger landed estates by the Allies after 1945 and the suppression of the Prussian military tradition at the same time, broke what remained of the social and political power of the titled nobility.