In the last free election in Germany before the Nazis were levered into power, only one in four Germans voted for Hitler.ccxciv (8) To assume therefore that the majority of, let alone all, Germans supported the genocidal aims of the Führer is to have fallen prey to the propaganda of Dr Joseph Goebbels or to give too much credence to historians who loathe all things German, and who have made it their life’s work to perpetuate the myth that all Germans stood foursquare behind Hitler’s Holocaust and the Second World War.
There can be little doubt that Hitler’s popularity increased as he overcame unemployment, as people’s living standards improved and with his initial diplomatic and foreign policy successes. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the majority of the population were in favour of another war, quite the contrary: Goebbels’ diaries, Gestapo Security Service records of public opinion and the observations of foreign journalists like William Shirer denoted no enthusiasm at the outbreak of war. Their reports overwhelmingly denoted fear and concern, recalling bitter memories of the last war, only a generation earlier, that had scarred the majority of families in Germany and whose memory was still all too vivid.
The other key factor one has to take into consideration when attempting to understand the complex and constantly-shifting nature of German public opinon in the lead up to and during the Second World War, is the lack of any accurate opinion polling, reliable measures of which were not available until well after the war in Germany. Even in the US where accurate opinion polling was invented, the Literary Digest’s poll of over 2 million of its readers, with regard to their voting intentions in the 1936 election, predicted a win for the Republican candidate Alf Landon instead of the actual landslide victory achieved by F.D. Roosevelt. And all the major polling organisations including Gallup got the November 1948 US election badly wrong, predicting a landslide for Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, when the result was a win for the incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman. Top US opinion polling organisations like Gallup and Harris did not refine their methods or establish themselves in Europe until well after the war. And you certainly can’t make anything of plebiscites held by dictatorships which invariably show 90 per cent plus support for the regime. I am often amazed at the latitude leading lights in the historical establishment have allowed themselves in purporting to ascribe views to an entire nation. It should be written in extra-thick type into all history books that such assumptions are speculative at best. One of the first things historians are taught is to avoid making frequent reference to ‘the people supported this’ and ‘the people were enthusiastic about that’ — says who? Historians can be forgiven for trying to build a picture based on sources such as personal accounts, diaries (which are often written with a view to the future, or to show the author in the best possible light) and reports from leading figures (often written after the fact), as long as they don’t try to read too much into them in terms of representing the views of the general population. The other main source that has often been used to try and build a picture of that amorphous quantity ‘the national will’ has been the SOPADE (the Social Democratic Party of Germany — SPD — organisation in exile) reports of Germany’s Social Democrats crying in their beer in Prague and then Paris about why people did not volunteer to be slaughtered in greater numbers for the sake of their political comeback. What none of the above can provide is a basis for saying the majority of the German people supported the Holocaust or an equally genocidal world war.(8a)
The other issue that needs to be addressed is the inability of many people today, historians or otherwise, to put themselves into the shoes of people they have been taught to detest and with whom they can find no human empathy; namely Germans alive at the time of the Third Reich. However, in view of the large numbers of wars that have plagued the world since 1945 to this day, it should not be that difficult for us to make comparisons with what happens when nations go to war. It should not astonish anyone that once war breaks out the general public have an overwhelming tendency to support their troops, even in a war they either fail to understand, or which has been termed illegal. The most recent example in the UK was the second Iraq War, to which over 70 per cent of the general public were said to be opposed in the lead up to it (in an age when opinion polls are a more accurate measure of public opinion). And yet many of the same people who opposed the war supported the troops once hostilities began, not least because it was regarded as fundamentally unpatriotic not to do so, even in a war which the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had called ‘illegal’. Even fewer still seem capable of taking a step back to ask themselves what kind of history would have been written had the Allies lost. No doubt there would have been no shortage of historians ready to conjure up equally fantastic notions of the Anglo-Saxons’ own Sonderweg and of their collective guilt in having demonstrated such an insatiable lust to colonise the world, highlighting the role they played in enslaving and exterminating indigenous cultures across the parts of the globe they euphemistically termed the ‘New World’.
Wars always unleash a catalogue of unintended consequences but also bring out of the shadows and into the light some of the darkest and most radical desires of nationalist elites. The Second World War was no exception. Many of the acts of violence and destruction unleashed upon the German people and their cultural heritage in Central and Eastern Europe were not simply consequences of Hitler’s genocidal war, but war aims of the various nationalist leaders within the Alliance ranged against Nazi Germany. The idea of curtailing Germany physically as well as economically and demographically was nothing new; the Pan-Slav Congress had called for the expulsion of Germans as far west as the Oder river as early as 1848. Roman Dmowski’s Polish nationalists had laid claim to German territory up to the Oder and beyond since 1897.ccxcv Edvard Beneš (the Czechoslovak Prime Minister) put forward plans for the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland as early as 1919 and again in 1938; and once in exile, General Sikorski for the Poles and Edvard Beneš for the Czechs laid plans for the ethnic cleansing of the areas they hoped one day to annex from Germany, from January 1941 onwards.ccxcvi The war that was started by Nazi Germany gave them the opportunity to realise their wildest expansionist dreams.
The Holocaust and Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe are of course always held aloft to discourage any discussion of what the Allies did to and in Germany, to say the crimes of the regime were so heinous that no criticism of Allied policies can be tolerated. However, the Holocaust had nothing whatsoever to do with plans to bomb Germany,ccxcvii dismantle her economy, annex 25 per cent of her territory, ethnically cleanse tens of millions of her citizens from the east, or deport a million more as slave labourers. The true horrors of the Holocaust were not even known when many of these policies were under consideration or being decided upon. Only in retrospect has it been used as a further justification, along the lines that no punishment could have been harsh enough, helping to conceal the rationale behind the land grabs and their origins, as well as glossing over the rampant anti-Semitism of the Czech and Polish regimes, which hounded out and expelled many of their surviving Jewish citizens along with the Germans at the end of the war and in the years that followed. To that extent the destruction of Germany’s eastern territories and populations cannot solely be viewed as a consequence of the war, it must also be viewed as a war aim of the Poles, Czechs and Russians, and later also of the Anglo-Americans, who wrongly attributed the origin of the National Socialist Movement to Prussia.(12)
No one was brought to book for the genocidal crimes committed by Stalin’s Red Army and its political commissars in Eastern Europe. A veil was drawn, a half-century of silence was imposed, and the Kremlin still vehemently denies that any ‘misdeeds’ ever took place. In Germany, as well as in many other parts of Eastern Europe, Stalin was allowed to impose a Nazi-style solution to the ethnic ‘complexities’ of the East. In the same way that Stalin had ethnically ‘reordered’ the Soviet Union before the Second World War, his political commissars now murde
red, raped, enslaved and ethnically cleansed the new territories of the expanded Soviet Empire with total impunity.ccxcviii Those who fell on the ‘wrong’ side of the borders that Stalin had personally redrawn would have their history rewritten and the memory of their centuries-old homelands expunged; this was principally true for Germans but no less true for Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Ruthenians and many other smaller communities of the once colourful, multiethnic patchwork that had been Europe, east of the Oder and the Danube. At the end of the most costly war in human history, only Winston Churchill appeared to appreciate that the world had simply traded one genocidal tyranny for another. In the closing months of the war, Churchill had his generals draw up plans for ‘Operation Unthinkable’: war with the Soviet Union. However, the plans were discarded as militarily unfeasible, Churchill was soon out of office, and his visions of a new hot war gradually developed into a decades-long cold war. As a member of the British Foreign Office put it, ‘It was better to have the Soviets in Eastern Europe than the Nazis in Western Europe,’ and that was about the best shine that British foreign policy, in its old ‘balance of power’ mindset, could put on it.(13)
The history of the Second World War, its consequences, the settlements that shaped our modern world, and the manner in which they were imposed remain with us and reverberate powerfully right into the geopolitical conflicts of the modern era. In 2005, a Senior Lecturer in History at Cambridge University, Richard Drayton, set out just how the mistakes of the past, where they have remained largely unchallenged, continue to inform and misguide foreign policy decisions of today, all too often by political leaders who have not taken the trouble to read up on the complex histories of the places they seek to subdue and thereby use blunt instruments to try and shape the future, based on their belief in the myths of the past. To that effect he wrote:
In 1945… the victor powers spun the conflict’s history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife… Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army’s central role forgotten. This was, we believe, ‘a war for democracy’. Americans believe they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire… centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. We are marked forever as ‘the good guys’… but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The ‘good war’ against Hitler has underwritten sixty years of war making. It has become the ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism… (and) we least like to remember that our side also committed war crimes in the 1940s. The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women and children, the elderly and the wounded, with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by our bombers against civilian populations…
Edgar Jones, an ‘embedded’ Pacific war correspondent wrote in 1946, ‘We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make ornaments.’(14)
The First and Second World Wars were not the much-hoped-for ‘wars to end all wars’. Far from it, as they robbed humanity of the idea of the perfectibility of man and replaced it with ‘might is right’. Ironically, the victors now demand that Germany shoulder greater military responsibility in their modern day wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
An article in the International Herald Tribune on 14th June 2008 entitled ‘Big Power, Little Will’ echoed the calls of many as it summarised the post-war dilemma. It stated:
For forty years NATO Allies told the Germans their armed forces could do little abroad because of World War II. Over the past twenty years it has been the Germans who have been telling NATO that their armed forces can do little abroad — because of World War II… History continues to speak with a rasping eloquence in Germany like nowhere else. A narrative born of destruction is reinforced by a constitution the Allies helped to craft designed to prevent a strong political centre… the need for the German parliament to approve all and any deployments of the German Army effectively prevents the use of force… Germany’s refusal to spend more than 1.4% on defence not only diminishes its own capabilities but also provides the perfect alibi for smaller free riders… Is there an answer to the German question? It is a question the Germans need to answer?
Calls like these are growing louder. It is one of the greatest ironies of the post-war world, that while Churchill and Roosevelt would have hugged each other breathless at the prospect of such a pacifist Germany, the modern world remains baffled as to why the Germans don’t want to fight any more wars. If people knew more about what the Germans experienced as a result of the wars their country fought in the twentieth century, they might understand. Modern Western leaders seem to have no idea of the price Germany, and ordinary Germans, paid for the Nazi regime’s genocidal wars of conquest, and therefore don’t understand why Germans today regard all wars as crimes and are, by and large, a nation of pacifists.
The Anglo-American public has been largely shielded from the horrors committed in the name of democracy, while the Germans have been ceaselessly bombarded with the horrors that emanated from the genocidal nationalism of the Nazi regime. The sense of humiliation for what was done in Germany’s name and the nature of the crushing defeat that came after it, the total powerlessness to protect anything or defend anyone, has destroyed most Germans’ belief in the use of force to remedy conflicts. This is compounded by their sense of guilt, not least because for decades they were ‘re-educated’ by their occupiers and then by their own governments as to the German nation’s ‘collective guilt’. As one author put it, ‘The sense of collective guilt is useful in a specifically morbid way to her former enemies because it effectively seals off all mistreatment of Germans in 1945.’(17) There is a strange moral juxtaposition to the arguments that are made to this day, to justify Allied actions and condemn German ones. Had Germany won the war, her annexations in Poland, the ethnic cleansing of her Slavic population, the use of slave labour and the bombing of civilians would all still have been roundly condemned as immoral and barbaric. However, when the Allies employed all of these policies, they became justified consequences of war.
Complex, necessary and emotive films, such as Schindler’s List or The Pianist, serve to remind us of the horrors of Nazi crimes, but they often reinforce old hatreds for all things German and continue to blur the distinction between German and Nazi. The fact that both of these films convey the complexity of the war and human relations by showing good Germans is often lost on the audiences. The 2007 film, The Good German, appeared to suggest there was only one; however by the close of the film there were none!
In terms of those Germans who had supported Nazism, nothing did more to dispel their sense of superiority, or belief in the ‘ideals’ of National Socialism, than the humiliation of total defeat. The nation was in ruins, its people were starving, nearly a third of its citizens were refugees, its women were prostituting themselves to survive, and its surviving fighting men were dragged off to slavery in Siberia. The sheer scale of total defeat and the way in which the Nazi leadership had betrayed the German people — with Hitler setting out to destroy what remained of German infrastructure and forbidding the evacuation of German civilians from the East, thus issuing their death sentence — did much to shatter the belief in Nazism by all but the most fanatical die-hards. The cowardly and greedy behaviour of leading Nazis in the final stages of the war, many encouraging the German people to fight to the last or commit suicide whilst they themselves fled into the night with their mistresses and cases stuffed with riches, did more to destroy Nazism among the few remaining supporters in Germany than any efforts at punishment and denazification by the Allies after the war.
The consequences for the �
�good Germans’ are either glossed over or ignored. The films always end at the close of the war, at a time when the suffering of large sections of the German people only really began. Oskar Schindler’s family was ethnically cleansed from their home town in Moravia, and the German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved the pianist’s life, died in a Russian Gulag, both well after the war had ended. The 2009 otherwise worthy film about the life of John Rabe (City of War: The Story of John Rabe), who as the Head of Siemens China established an International Safety Zone in the Chinese city of Nanking, sheltering and thereby saving over 200,000 Chinese during the Japanese slaughter of Nanking, only mentions in the final credits that he died in abject poverty as a result of the Allies’ failure to denazify him. The Second World War has become a morality tale between ‘evil Germans’ and ‘good Allies’. There is still no distinction between Nazi and German. Hollywood has turned much of the history of the Second World War into an epic myth; we should not allow our schools and the media to do the same. During the post-war period, the overwhelming majority of Germans were at first not able, and later, not willing to stand up for themselves. The Allied notion of their ‘collective guilt’, reinforced through the policy of ‘re-education’ and ‘denazification’ after the war, has stuck, crippling the national psyche and inhibiting a more nuanced and complex view of Germans during the years of Nazi rule. The Germans have allowed themselves to become their own worst enemies. In the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all’ and the rightful commemoration of the crimes committed in Germany’s name at Auschwitz and beyond has caused at the very least national amnesia in Germany, if not outright brain damage in their inability to recollect anything else.
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