The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  At the other end of the social scale, Nazism had destroyed the long-established traditions of the labour movement, already severely weakened by the Depression of 1929- 33. Older workers quickly reorganized themselves into unions, reformed the Communist and Social Democratic Parties and launched a series of strikes in 1947 with the demand for the socialization of the means of production; but they had little support from the younger generations of workers, who had never belonged to a union or a left-wing party, and only wanted social peace and material prosperity. The strikes failed, the Communist Party in West Germany lost virtually all its support and was eventually banned, the Social Democrats abandoned their Marxist heritage in 1959, and the decline of heavy industry and the rise of a consumer society completed the process. In East Germany the flight of millions of professionals to the west and the egalitarian policies of the Communist regime created the same effect, albeit at a lower level of material prosperity. The old-style class-conflict that Nazism had put such store by overcoming had finally vanished. Germany had become a levelled-down, middle-class society, differing in its nature from east to west, but sharing a common transcendence of traditional class structures.

  The power of nationalism had also been broken, so thoroughly that when elderly Germans came towards the end of the century to look back on the Third Reich and ask themselves why they had supported it, they could no longer remember that one of the main reasons had been because they had thought that it made Germany great again.277 Germany, as the public celebrations accompanying its reunification in 1989- 90 showed, may not have become a fully postnational society. The strong support of the vast majority of Germans for European integration may have been tempered by a continuing self-identification as Germans. But to be German in the second half of the twentieth century meant something very different from what it had meant in the first half: it meant, among other things, to be peace-loving, democratic, prosperous and stable, and it also meant having a critical attitude towards the German past, having a sense of responsibility for the death and destruction that Nazism caused, even feeling guilty about it.278

  These matters continued to be widely debated, of course, and some at least also regarded the Germans themselves as victims of the Second World War. Yet in the early twenty-first century, Germany’s capital city has a large public memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism at its very centre, German concentration camps have become public museums to Nazi atrocities, and on the streets of a growing number of German towns and cities brass plates have been put on to the pavements outside houses and shops that belonged to Jews before 1933, with the names of their former owners inscribed on them. German historians have exposed the long-denied involvement of many sectors of the German population in the crimes of the Third Reich, from the officers and men of the army to the doctors and scientists who staffed Germany’s hospitals and research institutes. Former slave labourers have launched successful actions to gain recognition and a small amount of compensation for their sufferings, and the businesses and companies that profited from the Nazi regime and its policies have opened their archives and admitted their complicity. Artworks and cultural objects expropriated from their Jewish owners under the Third Reich have been catalogued and galleries, museums and state authorities have opened the way for the restitution of those that have not yet been returned.

  Not only historical knowledge about the Third Reich, but also public consciousness of what it did, has increased with distance in time from the Nazi regime; yet that regime has not lost any of its power to excite moral debate, rather, if anything, the reverse. Not long after the Second World War was over, the English historian Alan Bullock ended his great biography of Hitler by quoting the words inscribed on the tomb of the architect Sir Christopher Wren in the church he built in London, St Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice - ‘If you need a memorial, look around.’279 In 1952, when Bullock published his book, the destruction wrought by the war was still to be seen in almost every part of Europe. More than half a century later, this is no longer the case. Bomb-sites have been cleared, battlefields levelled out, divisions healed, peace and prosperity restored to Europe. Most of those who lived through the Third Reich and fought in its wars are no longer with us. Within a few decades there will be no one left who remembers it at first hand. And yet its legacy is still alive in myriad ways. History does not repeat itself: there will be no Fourth Reich. Neo-Nazism still finds its supporters, but nowhere has it shown any signs of even coming close to achieving real political power. The legacy of the Third Reich is much wider. It extends far beyond Germany and Europe. The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history.

  Notes

  Chapter 1. ‘BEASTS IN HUMAN FORM’

  1 . Basic information from Paul Latawski, ‘Polish Campaign’, in Ian C. B. Dear (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford, 2005 [1995]), 705 - 8; and Ian C. B. Dear, ‘Animals’, in ibid., 28-9; detailed account in Horst Rohde, ‘Hitler’s First Blitzkrieg and Its Consequences for North-eastern Europe’, in Miliẗrgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Germany and the Second World War (10 vols., Oxford, 1990-; hereafter GSWW), II. 67-150 (table of German troop deployments at 92). For Hitler’s orders, see Walther Hubatsch (ed.), Hitlers Weisungen f̈r die Kriegf̈hrung 1939-1945. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), 17 - 19.

  2 . Latawski, ‘Polish Campaign’; Rohde, ‘Hitler’s First Blitzkrieg’, 101 - 18; brisk account in Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 2005 [1994]), 48-64; also J’zef Garlinski, Poland in the Second World War (London, 1985), 11 - 24; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, ‘Der Überfall auf Polen und der neue Charakter des Krieges’, in Christoph Klessmann (ed.), September 1939: Krieg, Besatzung, Widerstand in Polen: Acht Beitr̈ge (G̈ttingen, 1989), 16-37, at 19-20; for the alleged Polish cavalry charges, see Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London, 2000), 231 - 7.

  3 . William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary (London, 1970 [1941]), 167 - 8.

  4 . Contemporary details in Alcuin (pseud.), I Saw Poland Suffer, by a Polish Doctor Who Held an Official Position in Warsaw under German Occupation (London, 1941), 15; eyewitness reports in Dieter Bach and Wieslaw Lesiuk, Ich sah in das Gesicht eines Menschen: Deutsch-polnische Begegnungen vor und nach 1945 (Wuppertal, 1995), 81 - 104.

  5 . Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (London, 1966), 20 (28 September 1939); the same scenes were also recorded by Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom (New York, 1979 [1968]), 77 (28 September 1939).

  6 . Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-44 (Urbana, Ill., 1993 [1958]), vii - x, 16 - 17 (paragraphing dissolved).

  7 . Ibid., 17.

  8 . Ibid., 22.

  9 . Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933 - 1939 (London, 2005), 689 - 95.

  10 . Rohde, ‘Hitler’s First Blitzkrieg’, 118-26; Weinberg, A World at Arms, 60-63, details these border adjustments and the negotiations that preceded them.

  11 . Rohde, ‘Hitler’s First Blitzkrieg’, 122 - 6; Garlinski, Poland, 25.

  12 . Ian Kershaw, Hitler, II: 1936 - 1945: Nemesis (London, 2000), 235 - 9.

  13 . Shirer, Berlin Diary, 173.

  14 . Klaus Behnken (ed.), Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934 - 1
940 (7 vols., Frankfurt am Main, 1980), VI: 1939, 980 - 82.

  15 . Heinz Boberach (ed.), Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938-1945 (17 vols., Herrsching, 1984), II. 339 (Bericht zur innenpolitischen Lage (Nr. 2), 11 October 1939); Shirer, Berlin Diary, 182 - 4.

  16 . Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 46 - 8.

  17 . Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self (London, 1964), 58 - 60.

  18 . Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen: Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges 1938 - 1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985 [1981]), 267 n. 140; Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 51.

  19 . Kershaw, Hitler, II. 241-3; Wlodzimierz Jastrzebski, Der Bromberger Blutsonntag: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Poznan’, 1990); G̈nter Schubert, Das Unternehmen ‘Bromberger Blutsonntag’: Tod einer Legende (Cologne, 1989). The official German Foreign Office publication of alleged Polish atrocities gave a total of 5,437 murders of Germans by Poles: Ausẅrtiges Amt (ed.), Die polnischen Greueltaten an den Volksdeutschen in Polen (Berlin, 1940), 5.

  20 . See the material compiled by two Polish war crimes prosecutors, Tadeusz Cyprian and Jerzy Sawicki, Nazi Rule in Poland 1939 - 1945 (Warsaw, 1961), 11 - 70.

  21 . Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 614 - 15, 652 - 3, 678 - 88.

  22 . Günter Berndt and Reinhard Strecker (eds.), Polen - ein Schauermärchen oder Gehirnwäsche f̈r Generationen: Geschichtsschreibung und Schulb̈cher: Beitr̈ge zum Polenbild der Deutschen (Reinbek, 1971); Jacobmeyer, ‘Der ̈berfall’, 18. See also Antony Polonsky, ‘The German Occupation of Poland during the First and Second World Wars’, in Roy A. Prete and A. Hamish Ion (eds.), Armies of Occupation (Waterloo, Ontario, 1984), 97-142.

  23 . Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 9-13; Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 619, 689 - 92; Christoph Klessmann, Die Selbstbehauptung einer Nation: Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik und polnische Widerstandsbewegung im Generalgouvernement 1939 - 1945 (D̈sseldorf, 1971), 27 - 32.

  24 . Quoted in Jacobmeyer, ‘Der ̈berfall’, 16 - 17; see also Winfried Baumgart, ‘Zur Ansprache Hitlers vor den F̈hrern der Wehrmacht am 22. August 1939’, Vierteljahrshefte f̈r Zeitgeschichte (hereafter VfZ) 16 (1968), 120 - 49, and idem, and Hermann Boehm, ‘Zur Ansprache Hitlers vor den F̈hrern der Wehrmacht am 22. August 1939’, VfZ 19 (1971), 294 - 304.

  25 . Elke Fr̈hlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels I: Aufzeichnungen 1923-1941 (9 vols.); II: Diktate 1941 - 1945 (15 vols.) (Munich, 1993 - 2000), I/VII. 147 (10 October 1939).

  26 . Hans-Günter Seraphim (ed.), Das Politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs aus den Jahren 1934/35 und 1939/40 (Munich, 1964), 98-100; see more generally Tomasz Szarota, ‘Poland and Poles in German Eyes during World War II’, Polish Western Affairs, 19 (1978), 229-54, and Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 1 - 28.

  27 . Helmut Krausnick, ‘Hitler und die Morde in Polen: Ein Beitrag zum Konflikt zwischen Heer und SS um die Verwaltung der besetzten Gebiete (Dokumentation)’, VfZ 11 (1963), 196 - 209.

  28 . Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 13-37; for the administration of these areas, see ibid., 49-60; for the status of the General Government and the nature of its administration, ibid., 68 - 74; more detail in Czeslaw Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939 - 1945 (Cologne, 1988 [1970]), 18 - 29, 30 - 44; for Frank, see Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003), 179; Christoph Klessmann, ‘Der Generalgouverneur Hans Frank’, VfZ 19 (1971), 245-60; and Martyn Housden, Hans Frank: Lebensraum and the Holocaust (London, 2003), 1 - 76 (marred by gratuitous moralizing); for Forster, see Dieter Schenk, Hitlers Mann in Danzig: Gauleiter Forster und die NS-Verbrechen in Danzig-Westpreussen (Bonn, 2000). For a good recent account, see Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008), 63 - 77.

  29 . Jan T. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement 1939-1944 (Princeton, N.J., 1979), 45-53; Frank relayed these views on 21 October 1939: see Werner Pr̈g and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (eds.), Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939 -1945 (Stuttgart, 1975), 52- 3; see also the report in Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch (ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, 3 vols., Stuttgart, 1962 - 4), I. 107.

  30 . Christian Jansen and Arno Weckbecker, ‘Eine Miliz im “Weltanschauungskrieg”: Der “Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz” in Polen 1939/40’, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Analysen - Grundzüge - Forschungsbilanz (Munich, 1989), 482 - 500, at 490, cited in Kershaw, Hitler, II. 242 - 3.

  31 . Jansen and Weckbecker, ‘Eine Miliz’; more detail in the same authors’ Der ‘Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz’ in Polen 1939/40 (Munich, 1992); Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 60-62; and Hans Umbreit, Deutsche Miliẗrverwaltungen 1938/39: Die miliẗrische Besetzung der Tschechoslowakei und Polens (Stuttgart, 1977), 176 - 8.

  32 . Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das F̈hrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), 209-415; Saul Friedl̈nder, The Years of Extermination: The Third Reich and the Jews 1939 - 194 (New York, 2007), 679 - 81 n. 23.

  33 . Helmut Groscurth, Tageb̈cher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938-1940 (ed. Helmut Krausnick and Harold C. Deutsch, Stuttgart, 1970), 201 (8 September 1939).

  34 . Kershaw, Hitler, II. 243; Groscurth, Tageb̈cher, 202 (9 September 1939).

  35 . Halder, Kriegstagebuch, I. 79 (19 September 1939), 81 (20 September 1939), 107 (18 October 1939); Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 14-16; see also Heydrich’s later reference to Hitler’s order to exterminate the Polish intelligentsia in Krausnick, ‘Hitler und die Morde in Polen’.

  36 . Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 221 - 2.

  37 . Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, 13-25; Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 420-28; Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 656 - 61, 678 - 9, 685 for Austria and Czechoslovakia.

  38 . Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 274; idem, The Third Reich in Power, 44, 52, 116; Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 10 - 16.

  39 . Ibid., 29-57; see also Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite: Das F̈hrerkorps der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1936 - 1945 (Paderborn, 1998).

  40 . Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 29 - 57; for von Woyrsch, see Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 36.

  41 . Quoted in Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, 29; also Kurt P̈tzold (ed.), Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung: Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus 1933 bis 1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 234.

  42 . Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, 31-4; Umbreit, Deutsche Miliẗrverwaltungen, 162 - 73.

  43 . Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, 35-51; Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 59-74; Jastrzebski, Der Bromberger Blutsonntag.

  44 . Klukowski, Diary, 68.

  45 . Ibid., 90 - 99 (21 June 1940).

  46 . Alcuin (pseud.), I Saw Poland Suffer, 73.

  47 . Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 44.

  48 . Jon Evans, The Nazi New Order in Poland (London, 1941), 51; the same incident also in Francis Aldor, Germany’s ‘Death Space’: The Polish Tragedy (London, 1940), 187 - 92, based on accounts from Polish exiles in Paris.

  49 . Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, 87.

  50 . The obsession with franc-tireurs is a central theme in Jochen B̈hler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 54-168. For the terror more generally, see Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik, 186 - 215.

  51 . Quoted in Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, 271 n. 177.

  52 . Keith Sword, ‘Poland’, in Dear (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World War II, 696; also Szymon Datner, ‘Crimes Committed by the Wehrmacht during the September Campaign and the Period of Military Government (1 Sept. 1939-25 Oct. 1939)’, Polish Western Affairs, 3 (1962), 294 - 328; and Umbreit, Deutsche Miliẗrverwaltungen, 197 - 9.

  53 . Karl Malthes, in IR 309 marchiert an den Feind: Erlebnisberichte aus dem Polenfeldzuge 1939 (e
d. Oberst Dr Hoffmann, Berlin, 1940), 158.

  54 . Heinrich Breloer (ed.), Geheime Welten: Deutsche Tageb̈cher aus den Jahren 1939 bis 1947 (Cologne, 1999 [1984]), 27.

  55 . Ibid., 30.

  56 . Klukowski, Diary, 75, 77, 80-82; Evans, The Nazi New Order, 66-82; Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 102-10; Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), 361 - 2.

  57 . Klukowski, Diary, 86-7 (19 May 1940); Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Heimat und Exil: Die Anf̈nge der polnischen Untergrundbewegung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (September 1939 bis Mitte 1941) (Hamburg, 1973).

  58 . Housden, Hans Frank, 120 - 21; Gross, Polish Society, 87

  59 . Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1997 [1985]), 79 - 94; Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik , 102-17; Gross, Polish Society, 78-81; Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik, 216 - 32.

  60 . Klukowski, Diary, 31.

  61 . B̈hler, Auftakt, 181 - 5.

  62 . Breloer (ed.), Geheime Welten, 27.

  63 . Housden, Hans Frank, 84 - 6; Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik, 334 - 8.