Culture | The second world war

Fate and furies

How Germans perceived the second world war

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945. By Nicholas Stargardt. Bodley Head; 736 pages; £25. To be published in America by Basic Books in October; $35.

WHEN Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it started what the world has ever since seen self-evidently as a war of German aggression. But Germans had a very different view, as Nicholas Stargardt, a historian at Oxford University, convincingly shows in this depiction of how ordinary Germans experienced “their” war.

In 1939 there were no rallies or marches in Germany, as there had been in 1914. The atmosphere was instead one of muted worry. The Germans had accepted the Nazi propaganda that “they were caught up in a war of national defence, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression.” Their anxiety only turned into euphoria after the surprisingly easy victories in the early phase of the war, first in Poland then in France.

Embedded journalists accompanied the army and sent home newsreels depicting heroism and adventure. German boys worried that they were “born too late”; the war would surely be over before they saw action. When the war instead continued, Adolf Hitler again succeeded in persuading the Germans that the responsibility for prolonging it lay with the English “plutocrats and slaveholders”.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s devious propaganda chief, exploited the Anglo-American air war on German cities to deepen the German conviction that they were defending themselves. But as the war became more brutal, especially in the east, this sense of German victimhood became mixed up with German guilt. At home, the Germans observed how Jews were being persecuted. Abroad, soldiers witnessed atrocities against Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and others. “Execution tourists” in the army took photos of massacres and sometimes sent them home. Some had grave misgivings. One soldier wrote to his wife in 1941 that “the Jews are being completely exterminated,” and closed with a reminder not to tell their son.

Gradually, a new conviction spread: that this genocidal war “must never come home to Germany”. For, just as the Germans gave no mercy, so they could also expect none. Goebbels made sure that no details of the Holocaust were ever reported. Instead, Mr Stargardt argues, the German press “hinted at what people already knew, fostering a sense of collusive semi-secrecy.” The resulting “spiral of silence” led to a sense of quasi-complicity.

This is deeply psychological stuff. One of the questions that concerns Mr Stargardt is why the Germans fought on so obstinately to the bitter end, long after it was obvious that victory was impossible. The answer lies in this growing mixture of guilt and victimhood. Goebbels effectively portrayed the fire bombings of German cities as “Jewish terror”, with the implication that the Allies, manipulated by global Jewry, were exacting revenge for German crimes. Even those Germans who had had qualms about German atrocities earlier grew harder as the war worsened, accepting Hitler’s apocalyptic alternative of victory or annihilation.

Mr Stargardt has come close to writing a ground-breaking book. And yet he falls just short. His method of using letters and diaries of ordinary Germans yields unexpected insights, both into the Germans’ humanity and their turn to barbarism. Much of their daily energy was focused not on the fate of the Jews, but on matters of more immediate concern, such as food and sex. And yet Germany’s Holocaust and self-destruction are always the backdrop, if never quite forming an integral part of Aryan Germans’ experience.

The author seems to be suggesting that tacit mass collusion in history’s greatest crime turned Germans, through fear of their own looming retaliatory victimisation, into fanatics. But this grand hypothesis emerges only in fragmented form from these individual accounts. To get even this far, readers have to make great efforts to join the dots. Many will be left yearning for more help from the author.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Fate and furies"

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