Nicholas Stargardt

A major new history of the Third Reich that explores the German psyche

A Nation Under Arms, 1939Ð1945

The German War

Andrew John Kinney

I chose this book hoping to get a better understanding of why the German people went to war and fought so desperately hard, right to the end, for what many of them thought at the time was a bad cause, or at least a cause unlikely to succeed. I learned a bit of the answer, but certainly not as much as I was hoping to. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980's, and a very close friend's wife is German; I have dealt with Germans on an ongoing basis for work for the last 25 years, so I think I understand them a bit. There is a quote from Goethe: "I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality." Germans really do fit the stereotype of being reliable, punctual, hard-working, and so on, or they did in my experience. And they are rule-followers. Hitler knew this, and he used it to wreck Europe, Germany included, but this does not absolve the Germans of responsibility for the war, and the book reveals this in the words of the people who lived through 1939-45.

Stargardt starts his account in 1939 with the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, but anyone wanting to learn the context must go back to the militarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and finally the negotiated acquisition by Hitler of the Sudetenland, followed by the occupation of the rump Czech lands. Fortunately, I recently finished a history of the Habsburg Empire, which helped me understand the pre-WW1 antecedents, e.g., why there were German “colonies” in the Sudetenland, Poland, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere. Hitler leveraged the presence of these ethnic Germans to fabricate claims in the east, but generally Hitler was fairly direct about his desire for Lebensraum, and he forthrightly declared that might makes right, and that he would eradicate Poles, and later, Russians, to create new German states. 

The author uses excerpts from hundreds of letters from ordinary Germans to show what they were thinking at the time, and he weaves in data from German government polls and surveys conducted during the war to illustrate the national mood. With few exceptions, Stargardt does not cover battles in detail, but he gives the flow of events context through the letters. One thing it is easy to forget is that in 1939, the Great Depression was still had Germany firmly in its grip, and countries’ poverty increased the further east one went. So while Germans were astounded by the bounty they found in France (“real butter, real coffee!”) they were equally appalled by the conditions in which they found Russians living. The letters reveal what historians have pointed out: Stalin had so mistreated his people that Germans were often greeted as liberators – until the SS showed up to deal with rear area security. There were at least two ways in which Hitler threw away any chance of victory in Russia: first he started his invasion at least a month too late, so that the Russian winter stopped the Wehrmacht before it could get to Moscow, and second, the harsh treatment (murder) of the Russians in the territories occupied by German forces meant the Wehrmacht was always hamstrung by the need to secure its rear areas against partisan attacks. A third way he ensured defeat, is that Hitler’s Armies were in no way prepared for the Russian winter, or for the logistical challenges of supplying themselves over the thousand-mile distances from the Reich to the front lines.

At times, one feels for the average German who perhaps did not even support Hitler (and it is a fact that the majority of Germans did not vote for him for Chancellor in 1933), but felt duty-bound to answer his call-up notice and report for service in the Army. But then a comment will emerge from a page of a letter about “the necessity to deal with the Jews (or Poles, or Russians)”, or even something more explicitly worded about killing the "lesser races", and that sympathy collapses. As the war went on, Germans began to feel, perhaps rightly, that having mounted the tiger, it was best to remain in the saddle than to try to get off. But a few disagreed. I chuckled at the story of a German veteran of the invasion of Poland and the Battle of France, a grizzled sergeant, who was sent to the Russian front. As his unit made its way east, this NCO talked to more and more German soldiers returning from the front who explained how bad it was. Finally, the sergeant said to himself, “this is just too stupid”, and he slipped away from his unit and headed west, using his gruff, laconic veteran NCO exterior to bluff his way all the way back to Germany. He then boarded a train whose route came close to the Swiss border, where he jumped the train, crossed into Switzerland, and turned himself in. His answer to the Swiss interrogators as to why he deserted, was simple, “I saw no reason to die in Russia”. He lived out the war in Switzerland and then returned to his farm in Austria, where he lived and farmed for another sixty years, unrepentant for deserting. In the general population, however, a significant drop-off in support for the Nazi Party did not come until 1945, when it was becoming clear that the war was lost.

Despite a handful of resistors, like The White Rose group, and the July 20th plotters, the majority followed orders even when the orders included shooting civilians - including children. Feelings of shame for their actions finally began to emerge as the war ground on in the letters soldiers sent home to wives and sweethearts. In fairness, one must remember how the Nazis dealt with backsliders; in the US, conscientious objectors during WW2 had the option to become medics; in Germany, they were executed. In the US Army in WW2, one (1) soldier was shot for desertion; in Germany, at least 50,000 deserters were shot, and it is likely the number was higher. So if one chose to follow one’s conscience, death was likely to attend your steps, as they say. Germans also fought because they felt they were protecting their country from "the Asiatic hordes", and they had seen enough of how Stalin treated his own people to know how he would treat Germans. But the reason the German Army survived the winter of 1941-42 in Russia was the inherent grit and sense of duty of common German soldiers, even in the face of inadequate food, clothing, and equipment. After the failure to take Moscow, and with the entry of the US into the war in December 1941, the war was effectively over (as Charles de Gaulle declared on the day he learned that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor), but Germany would not let it be over for three and a half more years. Some Germans were disgusted enough by the wanton killing of prisoners, Jews, and other marginalized groups to say so in their letters, but a vanishingly small number were willing to act. And even if the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler had succeeded, it is likely that Himmler or Bormann would have taken charge, quashed the plotters, and the war would have gone on.

And so then, the Holocaust. This is the hardest thing to understand. I must find a book to explain anti-semitism to me, because I don’t understand it. A major finding in the contemporary letters, by Stargardt and others, is that Germans did know what was happening to the Jews; perhaps not in detail, but they knew they were being killed, exterminated, not "re-settled" as the Nazis claimed initially. The letters reveal this knowledge over and over in lesser or greater detail, and it was most clear in the last year of the war, when many letters expressed the belief that Germany was being punished "for what we did to the Jews". It was not until years after the war, in Richard von Weisacker’s famous speech of 1985 that a high official of Germany accepted full responsibility for what happened to the Jews, whereas in the ten to twenty years following the war, there were concerted efforts to conceal the extent of the collaboration of the people with their leaders in the Final Solution. There were a small number of Germans during the war who refused to believe that “such things are really being done”, but that was willful ignorance. They knew.

As the war entered its last year, the German Army finally felt the massive resources of the Allies begin to crush them. There has been a lot of nonsense written about German “miracle weapons” like the V2, and jet fighters, and Tiger tanks. Did the Germans have some very high-quality weapons? Yes, but such weapons are useless without the fuel to run them, the pilots to fly them, or ability to manufacture them in significant numbers. Exempli gratia: the Germans built 2,000 Tiger Tanks in WW2; but the Russians built 64,000 T-34 tanks, and the US built 50,000 Sherman tanks. The German fighters were handily outclassed by American P-51 fighters in both quality and numbers. Virtually every U-boat which left harbor after 1943 was destroyed because Germany had lost its surface navy, and the sheer numbers of Allied vessels made each U-boat sortie a suicide mission. As one German arms ministry director said, by January 1945 the German effort against the Allies was not really a war, it was an imitation of a war. The Germans never developed an arms industry equal to the task that Hitler had set the nation to perform.

By the way, in a truly impartial post-war court, not only would Nazis have gone to the gallows, but Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and Churchill would have been convicted of war crimes for at least the bombing of Dresden, if not many other cities. In the case of Dresden, they knew, knew for certain that there was no military reason for destroying that city. Even Churchill called it a "terror bombing". 
Nothing justifies the incineration of children, not even when the parents of those children may have incinerated Jews or others. If killing children is not a crime, then nothing is a crime. It is a sad fact that more than 50% of all civilian deaths from bombing in Germany occurred in the last six months of the war, when everyone knew that Germany was already defeated.

One of the things that resonated with me is the degree to which many educated German soldiers fell back on literature and poetry as a key spiritual support to get them through whatever horrendous experience they found themselves in. Many, many soldiers remembered poetry from Holderlin, quotes from Goethe, arias from Mozart to help them cope. Sadly, this love of culture did not seem to increase their compassion or empathy, or at least, not enough.

So why did the Germans fight for six long years? In the beginning, because Hitler told them to, and most people initially had confidence in Hitler, who, up until 1941 had always been a successful gambler. Later they fought because they knew they had to defeat Russia to prevent the destruction of Germany via retribution. And in some ways they fought because it became a habit after years of war. Such a sad vicious circle and such disgusting ringmasters in the form of the Nazi leadership. The only analog in American history is the Civil War, in which the South fought for a cause which was demonstrably wrong and equally unlikely to succeed – perhaps that is a starting point for Americans trying to understand the German point of view.

Andrew Reeves

Derek Barlas

A groundbreaking history of what drove the Germans to fight -- and keep fighting -- for a lost cause in World War II In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence -- to explore how the German people experienced the Second World War. When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet without the active participation and commitment of the German people, it could not have continued for almost six years. What, then, was the war the Germans thought they were fighting? How did the changing course of the conflict -- the victories of the Blitzkrieg, the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities -- alter their views and expectations? And when did Germans first realize they were fighting a genocidal war? Told from the perspective of those who lived through it -- soldiers, schoolteachers, and housewives; Nazis, Christians, and Jews -- this masterful historical narrative sheds fresh and disturbing light on the beliefs and fears of a people who embarked on and fought to the end a brutal war of conquest and genocide.

The German War A Nation Under Arms, 1939Ð1945

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