On June 22, 1940, just six weeks after the fighting had erupted on the Western Front, the instrument of surrender between Germany and France was signed. Great crowds flooded the streets of Berlin to greet Hitler upon his return. Their losses had been minimal, and only Britain remained, barricaded behind a narrow strip of water. But the treatment of those within Germany’s borders was far from equal.
Even in Belgium, where the Germans had committed the well-known atrocities against civilians during the First World War, their attitudes toward the Belgian authorities were ones of institutional cooperation, not brutality. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the Jews, and only slightly above them, the Poles. On May 15, 1940, British Bomber Command authorized air attacks on industrial targets east of the Rhine, in response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam the day before. Strangely enough, in the early stages, the Nazi leadership insisted the evacuations were not caused by aerial bombardments, but rather a chance for children to get into healthier surroundings.
Everyone knew the real reason. But in the following years, most of Germany’s major cities would be flattened, and over 305,000 civilians would perish from the Allied bombing campaign. And then, there was the strange case of Rudolf Hess. His flight to Britain remains one of the war’s great mysteries.
Its pilot was not a member of the Luftwaffe, but instead the Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party. After the war, Hess maintained that his mission was to broker a peace between England and Germany, fearing that the Reich could not survive a war on multiple fronts. “May God aid us, especially in this fight. ”
In the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, many Germans, including soldiers, still clung to the illusion of a quick victory.
But then, many soldiers realized it would not be quick. Minus twenty, minus thirty degrees, without appropriate equipment. Grievances and complaints were then directed at the people under Hitler, not at Hitler himself. Germans differentiated between the Führer on the one hand and the Nazis on the other.
By charismatic leadership, we don’t just mean a leader who was a very good speaker or a propaganda brand. Hitler rarely visited the bombed-out cities. He never showed up the way Churchill did after a bombing. Yet the German people were puzzled, but most didn’t accept that Hitler didn’t appear for any reason of embarrassment.
He was simply too busy doing something else. Hitler’s waning health from partway through the war onwards was not particularly visible. He stopped making so many public appearances, but he was still talking regularly over the radio. His doctors, including the quack Theodor Morell, pumped him full of drugs.
Morphine, and other types. He was disliked by other doctors. As Nazi Germany lost its male workforce, instead of drawing in German women, the regime preferred to use cheap labor from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Between 1939 and 1944, the number of forced laborers within Germany rose from 300,000 to more than 5 million.
Regarding the treatment of these laborers, one has to distinguish between urban centers and factories on the one hand and the countryside on the other. In the countryside, laborers often ate at the table with the family. In the factories, they were treated brutally. Usually, they were shot dead if they couldn’t work anymore.
There was a lot of chatter in Germany about the fate of the Jews, and one has to wonder where all the information might come from if not from the soldiers reporting from the front. But then, behind their own closed doors, they must have given a very different picture. Many German soldiers died not only due to the fighting, but also because of the extreme cold, lack of food, and lack of provisions. Over 800,000 German soldiers and 1,100,000 Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded, or reported missing during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Of the 91,000 German soldiers captured in the city, only 5,000 survived. The defeat in Stalingrad was the first proper defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. It was a moment where Hitler’s authority and leadership, for the first time, came to be called into question. With the Americans in their vast manpower and the Soviets strong enough to win a major campaign, Germany really had no room for maneuver.
Before the war, German Jews had been persecuted, but not killed en masse. The turning point came with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads, followed the army and shot Jews, communists, and Roma in mass graves. These disabled people were the first to be murdered by poison gas in Nazi Germany.
They genuinely believed they were going to be resettled in the east. Instead, they were gassed in the euthanasia program. By 1944, more than two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were already dead. The camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka were very small component parts of the overall camp system.
There were actually, across German-occupied Europe, in excess of 40,000 individual camps. Even if one was not fully aware of the total dimensions of the Holocaust, it was quite obvious that Jews were being murdered. If not all of them, then many of them. The German diarist Victor Klemperer noted in his diary as early as 1942 that he was aware of a frightful concentration camp called Auschwitz, where the people sent there didn’t survive very long.
Some Germans feared reprisals. A common murmur was that the global Jewish conspiracy will show no mercy to us. Even German newspapers warned that with more than five million Jewish victims, we have to fear the revenge of the Russians, because the Russians are all Jews and Bolsheviks, so they will take revenge. Night after night, the air raids disrupted the sleep of the German population.
They didn’t lead to revolts. Any resistance was stamped on by the Gestapo. There was no chance of Germany winning the war, as some high-ranking officers clearly realized. But Hitler was still alive.
Hitler made a broadcast on New Year’s Day 1945, which, reading between the lines, was his swan song, his farewell. The suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945, led to very mixed reactions among the Germans. Some Nazi enthusiasts still believed in the last lie of the regime, that Hitler had died while fighting. The final instrument of surrender between Allied and German powers was signed on May 8, 1945, in Berlin by a delegation led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, supreme commander of the German armed forces.
All German territory east of the Oder-Neisse Line was redistributed between Poland and the Soviet Union. In just twelve short years, Germany was almost completely destroyed. Its economy was devastated, and its future placed in the hands of an unstable alliance. Most Germans, I think, were just relieved that the war was over, and that they would survive, in all probability.
In the years immediately after the war, the Allies embarked on a process of denazification. The Western Allies, in particular, forced local German civilians to visit concentration camps as a form of denazification. This created a memory that was not restricted to German victimhood. And this brings me to the third level of denazification.
Germany has the second highest rate of immigration in the world and is a leading member of the European Union. It has transformed itself from a nation of perpetrators into a nation of conscience, though the journey was long and painful.
