In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  More than 100,000 homes were demolished in London, almost 30,000 men, women and children were killed. Yet the Germans were never able to hit one of the major targets: the Cabinet War Rooms. Today the secret cellar space where the British government supervised the war is in almost the same state it was at two minutes to five on 16 August, 1945, when the lights were turned out. For decades only insiders knew of its existence, today the rooms are open to all. You can even rent them for an afternoon or an evening, to throw a party.

  This nexus, where all lines came together during the war, is no larger than a newspaper editorial office, and that is what it resembles most: wooden desks, maps, metal lamps, red, green and black telephones, drawing pins, lengths of twine. Churchill's office had been reduced in size to allow for the flow of visitors, Lady Churchill's has actually disappeared altogether. His private room is full of maps as well, although when important visitors showed up, a curtain was drawn discreetly across the one showing the deployment of the British coastal defences.

  Even more mysterious were the sealed yellow boxes which arrived here each day, and which only Churchill was allowed to open. They contained a selection of all the intercepted German radio orders for army, navy and air force. The German high command had encrypted them ingeniously with the use of the Enigma coding machine, a device that made the secret texts completely unintelligible to outsiders. The Germans had enormous faith in their encrypting device. And they did not have the slightest clue that the Poles had laid their hands on one as early as 1928, that they had cracked the code after six years of diligent study, and that they had been sharing their knowledge with their French and British allies since summer 1939. The British perfected the decoding system with one of the first computer-like machines, the top-secret Colossus. From summer 1940 onwards, almost all of the Germans’ plans and troop movements were – within days, sometimes even hours – an open book to Churchill and a few of his confidants.

  It was only on 1 May, 1941, however, that the first complete Enigma machine fell into British hands, when three warships succeeded in driving a German U-boat to the surface with the use of depth charges. The German commander thought the valves of his submarine had been opened and that the vessel would sink to the bottom, rendering it unnecessary to destroy his Enigma and the code books. Two British seamen who had climbed into the U-boat discovered a machine which looked like a typewriter but exhibited some rather strange behaviour. Suspecting it to be a coding machine they took it back to their ship, not realising that their find would change the course of the war. Within a week after the ship arrived home the British had access to all kinds of information concerning the German submarine fleet: its targets, its location, even its fuel supplies.

  This gave the British an enormous head start. Thanks to Operation Enigma they knew, for example, all about the German decision to cancel the planned invasion of England, about the airborne landings on Crete, about the German scenarios for the Soviet Union (and their failure) and about Germany's plans for Italy and Greece. In this way, the Allies were better able to concentrate on the real dangers, and could reserve fewer troops for ‘just in case’.

  One of the most bizarre spots in the Cabinet War Rooms is the little alcove behind a toilet door. This was not Churchill's personal WC, but the terminus of the top secret telephone line with which Churchill and President Roosevelt could – with the aid of incredibly advanced scramblers and more than seventy radio frequencies – consult directly. Here, from this cubicle that everyone thought was Churchill's private loo, the world was governed between 1943–5.

  There was no element of the war into which Churchill put more energy than his relationship with Roosevelt, and with the United States in general. The need was mutual. In early 1941 Roosevelt had sent his friend and close advisor Harry Hopkins to England, to find out what kind of man this whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking British prime minister really was. It was an auspicious move: real fondness arose right away between the two men, a friendship that expanded to include the personal relationship between Churchill and the American president. ‘I am most grateful to you for sending so remarkable an envoy who enjoys so high a measure of your intimacy and confidence,’ Churchill wrote to Roosevelt. Hopkins was deeply impressed by Churchill's statesmanship, and the composure with which the British underwent the constant bombardments. Churchill, he wrote to Roosevelt, was not only the prime minister but ‘the guiding force behind the strategy and course of the war in all essential points. He has an amazing grip on the British people, of all ranks and classes.’

  Hopkins remained in Great Britain for more than a month, twice as long as originally planned. He and Churchill spent a great deal of time together, stayed up all night on several occasions, talking and listening to the new American dance records Hopkins had brought with him. Churchill sometimes stood up and shuffled along to the music. ‘It was a turning point in Anglo-American relations,’ wrote Jean Monnet, who knew both men well. ‘The two countries’ destinies were now linked at the highest level of responsibility.’ Just before he left, at a dinner in Glasgow, Hopkins cited a verse from the Bible: ‘Whither thou goest I will go, and where though lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’ And he added calmly: ‘Even to the end.’ Churchill was in tears.

  Despite these personal ties, however, major differences remained between the British and the Americans. Churchill, in that grand, compelling way so characteristic of him, dreamed of a future union of all English-speaking democracies, unstoppable, victorious and majestic ‘as the Mississippi’. Most Americans, however, were not particularly keen to come to Europe's rescue again. Until late 1941, the mood in Congress was downright isolationist. In September 1940, sixty-seven per cent of the American people believed the country was headed for war, but eighty-three per cent of them were actually against it. President Roosevelt had to manoeuvre very carefully, therefore, not to put at risk his re-election in November 1940.

  The British had come out of the First World War impoverished, and could not in fact afford a long war at all. That, in part, was the background to the policy of appeasement. Chamberlain and his people feared that a second war would mean the financial ruin of the British Empire, and that fear proved justified. Roosevelt saved the situation with the Lend-Lease system, whereby American military goods could be bought on instalment. As Roosevelt put it: when your neighbour's house is on fire you don't haggle first over the price of your fire hose, you lend it to him, and later you may discuss the costs. After 1945, that discussion was explicitly carried on.

  The relations between the two allies were vaguely reminiscent of those between the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. The Lend-Lease Act was Britain's salvation, but at the same time it rendered the country, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘a poor relation, not an equal partner’. There was nothing like the consolidation of resources. On the contrary, the British were mercilessly robbed of their last dollars and gold reserves. Churchill's vision was based on an America that was unanimously pro-British. In fact, the Americans helped him in order to beat Hitler, and not to preserve Britain's world empire. Great Britain, Taylor wrote, ‘sacrificed her post-war future for the sake of the war’.

  Chapter THIRTY

  Berlin

  WHEN THE WAR BROKE OUT, HIS MOTHER SIGHED IN RELIEF: ‘Fortunately, our Wolf is too young for that!’ He was thirteen and had just entered gymnasium. But his father growled: ‘Oh, he'll have his fill of it yet.’

  I am sitting in the garden of the retired publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler (b.1926), in Berlin's old, exclusive residential district of Dahlem. Siedler still lives in the house in which he grew up, and that is plain to see: the countless prints and paintings, the books, the warm seclusion of the rooms, the restrained luxury, the quiet garden. Dahlem was once the neighbour-hood of Walter Rathenau, of the Jewish businessmen and industrialists, and of the Nazi elite, some of whom moved into abandoned Jewish mansions. Himmler, Dönitz, Ribbentrop, half the Nazi government lived here
during the war, on a street where birds sang and no bomb would ever fall.

  Siedler talks about how excited everyone was in May 1940. ‘Lots of the boys at school thought it would be just like the First World War. Trenches, long waits, and a battle every now and again. An old friend of the family told my father: ‘This Hitler, he has everyone mesmerised. The generals stare at him like rabbits at a snake.’ I can still hear those words, they stopped all conversation, until dinner was served. Later that same month, reports began coming in of one victory after another. Everyone cheered. Verdun was taken, Sedan, war veterans hugged each other in the streets.’

  Most people in Berlin lived through summer 1940 in a state of ecstasy. There was singing and dancing in the streets with every victory in France. When the great triumphal parade came goose-stepping by on 18 July, the cheering crowd stood twenty deep along the streets, people climbed into trees and on lamp posts, women ran out and hugged the soldiers, flowers and confetti rained down. ‘We, the boys of Berlin, thought the English were fantastic as well. The Battle of Britain was, in our eyes, a jousting match. People talked about the ‘campaign against France’ and the ‘campaign against Holland’. War, no, that wasn't a word we used.’

  The first booty began pouring in: furs from Norway, art, tobacco and Bols gin from Holland, wines and perfumes from France, glass from Bohemia, vodka from Poland. In the occupied areas, Sonderkommandos began combing the libraries and museums in search of the best European art for the big Berlin museums, and for Hitler's planned Führer Museum and Göring's Karin-Halle.

  ‘An English bomb would fall now and then,’ Siedler says, ‘but that was mostly exciting to us. We would even cycle over to a house that had been hit, we wanted to see it with our own eyes. And at school we collected shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. We traded it back and forth.’

  Around Christmas 1940, the city encountered its first shortage of coffee and chocolate. Women were no longer allowed to buy cigarettes. More and more families began raising rabbits, ‘balcony pigs’, for their own consumption. But the striptease shows went on unabated, the restaurants served oysters, lobster and the best wines, and the citizens of Berlin lived well. The weekly ration consisted of a pound of meat, a quarter-pound of butter and three pounds of bread.

  In the new year, talk began of another ‘campaign’, this time against Russia. It was to be a matter of out and back again in a few months. Loudspeakers were set up all over the city to broadcast marches. Music, then a crackly voice: ‘From the Führer's headquarters’, followed by an announcement of the fall of Riga, or Minsk, or Kiev, or Odessa.

  It was only in autumn 1941, when the soldiers still had not returned and winter was fast approaching, that the city grew uneasy. The loudspeakers stopped reporting victories. The shop windows were full of empty biscuit boxes and wine bottles filled with water. The enormous map of Russia in front of the Wertheim deparment store, where the progress of the German troops had been charted each day, was taken down. Gloves, wool caps and fur coats were collected for the front. By the end, at least 100,000 German soldiers literally froze to death there.

  Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Berlin to work in the factories, some 300,000 in all. Before the eyes of the townspeople, they were treated like animals. Half of them died of hunger or perished in the bombardments.

  Unnoticed, the city developed into a new kind of nerve centre: Berlin became the administrative heart of the German extermination industry. At the ministry of agriculture and food supply, careful calculations were made of the number of calories to be allotted to each concentration camp, taking into account the projected ‘cancellations’ due to illness and the gas chambers. At the offices of the Reichsbahn, the state railway, civil servants wrote thousands of invoices for the Jewish rail transports, all of them at the price of a single ticket.

  Wolf Siedler was sent to boarding school, first in Weimar, then to the northern coastal island of Spiekeroog. Of the group of fourteenand fifteen-year-old boys in his class, four did not live to be eighteen. His mother had been mistaken: they were not too young for this war. Just before Siedler left for the front, in summer 1944, the family sat together in the garden of the Dahlem villa for the last time. There was homemade pie and – a rarity by then – real coffee. Suddenly it began snowing, ashes from the burning inner city floated down on the table, everyone rushed inside, poisonous yellow clouds came drifting in.

  Today, on this warm July afternoon, the cafés along the shores of the Wannsee are full and the water is covered in pretty sailboats. I ask the bus driver about the monument.‘What monument?’‘For the Wannsee meeting.’ ‘What meeting?’ He drops me off at Biergarten Sanssouci, where the Detlev Becker Trio is playing this weekend – a spectacle he says I must not miss.

  Am Grossen Wannsee 56/58: it was in this villa, with its civilised Prussian arches and its tranquil view of the water, that a meeting of top government officials seemingly like any other was held on 20 January, 1942; one of those informal brainstorming sessions to be followed, as the invitation has it, by a light dinner. The conference room is now a museum, and the most important documents of that meeting are displayed on its walls. Visitors file quietly by, everything is neat and tidy, no scream is heard, no tear is shed.

  The topic of the meeting was the ‘Jewish question’. Some historians have claimed that the mass murder of the Jews was part of Hitler's master plan from the very start, that it was part of a clear and conscious strategy. In reality, the road that ultimately led to the Holocaust was far more circuitous than that.

  ‘The essence of Europe is not geographical,’ Hitler once said, ‘but racial.’ In other words: the Nazis did not think in terms of nations, but of peoples, and Europe was to be reorganised according to that principle. Legal borders, international agreements concerning minorities, the equality of states, the League of Nations, none of that mattered to them: nation and people had to coincide.

  While, for example, the French, English, Belgian, Dutch and Scandinavian concepts of the state were based on the will of every citizen, the German concept of state was based on blood, descent, race. ‘Blood is stronger than any passport’ was the core of their ideology. The German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine and elsewhere were ‘the racial friends’ of the Third Reich, badly in need of ‘liberation’ by their ‘fellow people’.

  At the same time, the importance of racial doctrine among the Nazis was reinforced by a notion of ‘purity’ with which all European culture had been imbued since 1900. Bacteria as the source of countless ills, the importance of hygiene, freshness and purity; all these new discoveries had left their mark on the thinking of innumerable intellectuals since the turn of the century. Yet the notion of purity had an impact that went much further than medical science alone. No citizen of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries would ever had raised ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, ‘healthy’ or ‘ill’ to the status of creeds applicable to the whole of social life. But in many circles during the first half of the twentieth century this contradistinction became the hub around which all the rest revolved. ‘Purity’ evolved into a concept that dominated discussions everywhere, not only among rabid racists, but among anthroposophists, politicians and artists as well. Half of Europe suddenly seemed afflicted with a morbid dread of sickness. It is almost impossible to find a cultural essay from the 1930s in which terms such as ‘pure’ and ‘healthy’ do not appear. It was the leitmotif of the modern age.

  For the Nazis, this notion of purity meant they had to make their empire ‘healthy’ by, among other things, ‘cleansing’ it of ‘non-national’ taints. Hence their attempts to reorganise nations, to ‘entjuden’ the occupied territories, and to herd millions of Untermenschen into the part of Poland which became known as the General Government, and other outlying areas of their empire. These hinausgesauberten Jews, Poles and Gypsies could then serve as a ‘reservoir’ of cheap labour.

  This was, in rough outline, the system the Nazis had in mind until 1940. At first they h
ad hoped to send the Jews to Palestine. In the 1930s that was still an isolated area, economically unimportant, run by the British and far from Europe. In summer 1933, they even signed an agreement with the German Zionist Federation. Approximately 60,000 Jews took advantage of it, until the British put a stop to all Jewish immigration.

  After 1939, the Nazis ran the General Government of Poland as a reserve for the Jews, until it quickly proved too small. Then the SS commander Heinrich Himmler proposed a solution to the ‘Jewish question’ in the form of ‘mass emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere’. The French colony of Madagascar seemed particularly interesting to him. In his policy paper ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Foreign Peoples in the East’ (May 1940), he touched upon the idea of ‘physical extermination’, only to reject it immediately.

  Meanwhile the deportations continued. The General Government became overpopulated with the huge influx of Poles and Jews, the economies of the surrounding towns and villages were destroyed and huge problems arose with regard to the region's food supply, making the settlement of new German colonists almost impossible. Within the Nazi command, conflicts were soon raging between the ‘ideologists’ and the ‘technologists’. Himmler's Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) routine, after all, was turning the General Government into a kind of ethnic storehouse, while Göring and governor general Hans Frank hoped to make of it a well organised slave state.

  In autumn 1941, however, it became obvious that the quick conquest of the east was not going according to plan. There are clear indications that, as early as October 1941, Hitler, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst and later Reich governor of Bohemia and Moravia, had arrived at the conclusion that none of the deportation schemes were working, and that mass extermination was the only answer. The first experiments with poison gas date from this period. Himmler, who had personally attended a mass execution by Einsatzgruppe B in Minsk, felt that the shootings by roaming Eastern European commandos – in which hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed in 1940 and 1941 – were far too time-consuming. They also generated too much emotion, an undesirable side effect. He went looking for a faster and better alternative. Equipment and personnel from the T-4 euthanasia programme were quickly sent east. On 3 September, 1941, at Auschwitz, Zyklon B was first tried out on 600 Soviet prisoners of war. Soon afterwards, the experimental process was speeded up on a large scale with two mobile gas chambers – converted trucks, one for thirty persons, the other for sixty.