Prevail until the Bitter End

Germans in the Waning Years of World War II

Alexandra Lohse

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501759406
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'Allemagne

In Prevail until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises. But even in retreat, the militarized national community unleashed ferocious energies, staving off defeat for over two years and continuing a systematic murder campaign against European Jews and others. Was its faith in the Führer never shaken by the prospect of ultimate defeat?

Lohse uncovers how Germans experienced life and death, investigates how mounting emergency conditions affected their understanding of the nature and purpose of the conflagration, and shows how these factors influenced the people's relationship with the Nazi regime. She draws on Nazi morale and censorship reports, features citizens' private letters and diaries, and incorporates a large body of Allied intelligence, including several thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German prisoners of war in Western Allied captivity.

Lohse's historical reconstruction helps us understand how ordinary Germans interpreted their experiences as both the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence. We are immersively drawn into their desolate landscape: walking through bombed-out streets, scrounging for food, burning furniture, listening furtively to Allied broadcasts, unsure where the truth lies. Prevail until the Bitter End is about the stories that Germans told themselves to make sense of this world in crisis.

Chapter 1

STALINGRAD

The Right to Believe in Victory

January 30, 1943, marked the ten-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany. Always an important date in the Nazi calendar, that Saturday would have seen all the pomp and circumstance the regime’s propaganda apparatus could conjure to celebrate a decade since the Nazis’ “seizure of power.” But in the fourth year of the war, with the eastern campaign stalled yet again, the public mood was somber. The country anxiously awaited news from Stalingrad, where the Sixth Army was engaged in what a recent Wehrmacht communiqué had termed “defensive” battles. As hope for a “miracle at the Volga” dwindled, so did hope for a short war, and the Nazi propaganda ministry instructed that official festivities sound a calm and reassuring note. Party speakers were urged to emphasize that the German nation had faced countless challenges over the past ten years, many seemingly insurmountable until Hitler had found a way. He would do so again.¹

For the first time since 1933, Hitler made no public appearance to mark the occasion. Instead, the main address that day was given by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, who indicated in a speech broadcast live on all domestic and military radio stations that the Sixth Army had suffered defeat. Unable to deny or explain away a loss of such magnitude, he declared the men of the encircled army group dead and immortal. Göring did not acknowledge the one hundred thousand German troops about to surrender, some of whom famously listened in on the broadcast of their own “funeral oration” as he praised their ultimate sacrifice. Instead, he cast a mythical veil over a catastrophic loss.² Conjuring Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans who had died defending the pass at Thermopylae against invading “Persian hordes,” he claimed that the German soldiers at Stalingrad, too, had chosen deliberate self-annihilation for the protection of their nation: “In the history of our own days it will be said: When you come to Germany, tell them that you have seen us fighting at Stalingrad, as the law, the law for the security of our people, commanded us.” According to Göring, Hitler’s leadership would ensure that their sacrifices were not in vain. A German victory, he claimed, was preordained:

There is a certain logic in world history. Do you believe, my comrades, that destiny—I mean Providence, the Almighty—lets an unknown man rise up, a man without a name and without wealth, a simple fighter from the World War, then guides him through endless confusion, lets him become greater and greater, and, all of a sudden, all this should be senseless? That Providence sent the German Volk a man of such greatness in the Führer … and that he managed to fashion the strongest nation in the world out of the German Volk, which once was fragmented and impotent, then these are the guarantees which give us the right to believe in victory.³

Four days later, on February 3, 1943, German radio broadcasts officially confirmed the end of the battle at the Volga River and announced a three-day mourning period. A German victory had never seemed further out of reach, and morale monitors reported that news of the defeat caused grave distress and uncertainty “in the whole German community.”⁴ Thus began the Nazi campaign for total mobilization. At a crisis point in the war and with popular morale at an all-time low, Göring’s speech had sounded the battle cry for the regime’s proverbial “flight ahead” (Flucht nach vorn). And although not with blind determination, the German people followed. They did so at a time when the regime’s successes dwindled and a string of military setbacks suggested that Germany had lost its momentum in this war, perhaps irretrievably. In the East, the Germans suffered a slow but sustained withdrawal and “front reduction” as the Red Army’s counteroffensives drove them out of Rostov-on-Don, Kursk, Orel, Belgorod, Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk, Kiev, and Kalinin by the following winter. In the South, Germany lost Tunisia as well as a quarter million soldiers, whom the Allies took as prisoners when the remaining Afrika Korps and Italian troops surrendered in late spring. The Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy over the course of the summer forced the Germans to mount a partial occupation on behalf of Benito Mussolini’s regime, now unmasked as impotent. In the North and West, Germans anxiously awaited an Allied invasion that failed to materialize. But the war came from above, as enemy bombers wreaked destruction and caused mass displacement and massive civilian casualties in Berlin, Hamburg, Kassel, Kiel, Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, the industrial centers of the Ruhr, and beyond.

A year marked by such tangible setbacks fundamentally transformed German experiences and perceptions of the war. As Allied successes mounted in the face of broader German mobilization, the war encroached on life at the home front in ways it had never done before, becoming a greater nuisance and menace at once. The events of 1943 also had a profound impact on people’s relationship with the Nazi regime and, for the first time, even with Hitler, whose fallibility stood revealed after Stalingrad. Members of the military and civilian populations voiced anger over their ineffectual military and political leaders, whose obfuscations compounded the mounting burdens of war. As Germans struggled to make sense of the events of 1943, they frequently rejected official interpretations and forged their own accounts of the unfolding crisis, with important implications for the rest of the war. And yet, if the trying conditions of 1943 tested the bonds between people and leadership, they did not break them. Instead, many Germans emerged more disaffected with the Nazi regime and yet more determined than ever to fight its war. This chapter traces the origins of this new but enduring dynamic to the contentious aftermath of “the debacle in Russia.”⁵ It examines how members of the German civilian and military populations experienced news of the defeat and responded to official attempts to mythologize the fallen soldiers of Stalingrad. It also explores how the shock of defeat caused many Germans to reexamine some of the events of the preceding war years, and, most importantly, how the experience had a decisive and enduring impact on popular responses to mounting mobilization efforts and subsequent military setbacks.

Stalingrad had held a powerful grip on the German popular imagination throughout the summer and fall of 1942, when the rapid German advances in the East had been accompanied by a stream of celebratory propaganda and triumphant proclamations about the future course of the war. At the height of German military might, no promise seemed too fantastical and no goal out of reach. SD reports from the fall of 1942 repeatedly stated that large segments of the population believed a victorious end of the eastern campaign was imminent. Indeed, many Germans even hoped that a “final victory” and an end to the war were close.⁶ Compounding military with propaganda miscalculations, Hitler himself repeatedly announced the impending fall of Stalingrad, a battle he had imbued with disproportionate significance. His public displays of unfettered optimism alarmed his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who worried about “illusionistic contemplations about the continued course of the war.”⁷ On October 2, 1942, when Hitler yet again promised the coming victory in a widely broadcast speech, Victor Klemperer took note in his diary. A German linguistics scholar of Jewish descent and an astute observer of the Nazi regime, Klemperer noted the gist of the “same old song, mercilessly exaggerated” that had accompanied the military campaigns of 1942: “The stupendous German successes, German morality, German certainty of victory—things are going ever better for us; we can hold out for many years yet.”⁸ Klemperer’s quiet despair was drowned out by the many voices rejoicing at the prospect of a German victory in the East. Albert Neuhaus, a soldier at Stalingrad, wrote to his wife the following day that “the Leader’s great speech has only strengthened our belief in [ultimate victory] by another 100%.”⁹

For much of 1942, many German POWs in Western captivity shared the confidence that a German victory in the East was within reach. But as the year drew to a close, some worried about the implications of an unexpectedly protracted eastern campaign. Two German submariners discussed the situation in early December 1942, quibbling over when, not if, Germany would defeat Russia. One of them argued, “This war will go on for a good three years more. Say we finish off Russia next year—by that time they will have been bled white. Then the year after that we shall go for England—with lulls in the fighting and preparations that will certainly take two years.” His cellmate cautioned, “Oh I don’t know about that … I believe the Russian campaign alone will take another two years. Just think how long this Stalingrad business has been going on.”¹⁰ Late in the year, with no news of a German breakthrough in the East, some POWs began to feel equally apprehensive. On December 2, 1942, another group of sailors discussed how recent setbacks had begun to undermine morale among their peers:

The mood at our base has changed dramatically. Before [the eastern campaign stalled], the strong conviction prevailed that everything will turn out alright, that we almost certainly would not lose the war, and that it was merely a matter of time [until victory]. But now the mood was completely different. Personally, I also think the situation is critical. First of all, things are going wrong in Russia; furthermore, I don’t believe that the Italians will hold out much longer. And if the Americans are ready to land that many troops, tanks, airplanes, and stuff in North Africa, we’ll probably get kicked out of North Africa.¹¹

As fall turned to winter and the military situation in the East deteriorated, Goebbels finally tempered official Nazi rhetoric to bridge the gulf between people’s expectations and the grim reality on the ground. With the Soviet encirclement at Stalingrad tightening, fewer and fewer letters from the battlefield reached the home front, and by December 1942, Goebbels purged any mentions of Stalingrad from all official reports. But the news blackout only transfixed people’s attention on the outcome of a battle they believed indicative of the future course of the war. Some Germans turned to foreign propaganda and war reporting for information, though many distrusted foreign accounts as a source of deliberate misinformation. A submarine telegraphist, for instance, recalled, “We’ve sometimes heard news on the wireless—you heard a good, clear voice but it wasn’t Germany, it was London. They told us all sorts of fairy tales about Russian counter-offensives and so on.”¹² As late as December 1942, he still reflexively dismissed reports of Russian advances as “fairy tales.”

In mid-January 1943, an official Wehrmacht report publicly referred to “defensive” fighting at Stalingrad for the first time. This stunning but oblique reference did not provide sufficient information about the actual turn of events at the Volga and thus merely stoked popular anxiety to new heights. Two weeks later, Göring’s speech dissolved this state of suspended animation with its preposterous mythologizing of the defeat. As Klemperer reflected after the war, “Ammunition for future acts of heroism was to be beaten out of defeat by claiming that many had loyally stuck it out until the bitter end.”¹³ In return for the Sixth Army’s alleged self-sacrifice, Göring had demanded the nation’s willingness to follow suit, as the foundation of the war effort going forward. Like the soldiers at Stalingrad or the Spartans at Thermopylae before them, all Germans were expected to play their assigned role in the unfolding epic struggle. By submitting themselves body and soul to the cause of the German nation, they would achieve immortality, either in victory or in defeat.¹⁴

Nazi morale monitors reported immediately that Göring’s speech had missed his mark. Only a small minority of regime loyalists, the most “militant characters” among the national comrades, understood “Stalingrad as an obligation to the full use of all resources at the front and at home,” as Göring had intended.¹⁵ SD informants lauded the intransigence of the steadfast few who retained their faith in leadership and victory even in this darkest hour of the war. As a morale report from late March 1943 put it, “A part of the population refuses to be swayed by common concerns.” The report continued, “In regard to the future, [this faction] trusts in the Führer, in the Wehrmacht, and in the resources of the nation and does not want to ponder the details of the future course of the war.” According to SD agents, loyalists rejected “discussions about this [matter] on the grounds that the individual with his small horizon is incapable of comprehending all factors and arriving at a correct estimate of future prospects.”¹⁶ At the same time, the reports acknowledged that the regime loyalists refused to be drawn into discussions of “common concern,” which meant that they ma...

Índice

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Stalingrad
• 2. Mobilizing the National Community
• 3. Genocide and Mass Atrocities
• 4. Enemies Within and Without
• 5. Dissolution
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index