The Burden of German History 1919-45

Essays for the Goethe Institute

Michael Laffan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367336752
• eBook ISBN: 9781000357202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1988, The Burden of German History 1919-45 examines the vast literature surrounding Weimar years and the National Socialist tragedy, daunting even for the specialist historian or political scientist. The essays included in this volume provide an invaluable guide to research of the time and provides a stimulating review of a wide range of topics in modern German cultural, political, economic and military history. The essays are based on a series of lectures given by German and Irish scholars to a conference on the theme 'Weimar Germany and National Socialism', which was held in March 1986 in University College, Dublin, under the auspices of the Goethe Institute, Dublin. This book offers a significant commentary on a period of German history which included the exciting and ambivalent freedom of the Weimar society and the repressive, murderous uniformity of National Socialism.

TWELVE

The War, German Society and Internal Resistance

PETER HOFFMANN

Hitler wanted war from the moment of his appointment as chancellor in January 1933. He announced his intention to go to war just four days after his appointment, in an address to senior armed-forces officers in the Armed Forces Ministry in Berlin.¹ In November 1937 he ordered the army to be ready for war against Czechoslovakia on 1 October 1938.² Feverish diplomatic activity and British and French military preparations against Germany forced him to settle for the minimal demand of occupation of the Sudeten region; but he occupied Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939, and Slovakia became a client state.³ Believing his agreement with the Soviet Union on the fourth partition of Poland gave him a free hand, and an alliance strong enough to keep the Western Powers out of the war, Hitler misread, or chose to ignore, the British reaction, thereby provoking a new world war.⁴

The campaign against Poland began on 1 September 1939.⁵ It was successful, though flawed by supply problems, but it was characterized by the policy which Hitler had announced in his address to senior commanders on 22 August 1939:

Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of states. As to what the weak Western European civilisation asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so for the present only in the East I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?⁶

These threats were carried out in Poland, and protests from highly placed commanders, such as General Blaskowitz and Admiral Canaris, were without effect.⁷

Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, and Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada followed.⁸ They could not save Poland, nor was this the principal object of their intervention. This was the defeat of Germany. Soon it became apparent that Hitler and Stalin had agreed on more than the partition of Poland. The Red Army occupied Eastern Poland after the German victory, and the Soviet Union concluded ‘assistance’ treaties with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had been relinquished in the Hitler-Stalin Pact to the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. Finland refused to accept Russian conditions and was attacked by the Soviet Union on 30 November 1939.

Hitler ordered the German armed forces to prepare an attack against France, since neither France nor Britain seemed inclined to accept his ‘peace offers’, in which he proposed to keep what he had and let bygones be bygones. They refused to give him a free hand for more conquests. Weather conditions and insufficient preparations forced a series of postponements of the attack in the West. As Britain appeared ready to move to assist Finland, and to try to prevent German ships from using Norwegian territorial waters as a sea lane for iron-ore shipments from Sweden, Hitler began to feel ill-at-ease about his northern flank and about iron-ore supplies from Sweden. He ordered the occupation of Denmark and Norway to begin on 9 April 1940.

On 10 May 1940 the German armies crossed the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, advancing from stunning attacks to devastating victory. The Netherlands and Belgium capitulated in May, and an armistice was concluded between Germany and France on 22 June; a British force of some 200,000 was semi-encircled at Dunkirk but escaped across the Channel.

Hitler then attempted to drive Britain out of the war both by threatening and half-heartedly preparing for an invasion, and by a major air offensive, but these efforts failed and were abandoned. A German submarine offensive against Britain inflicted serious losses, but on the whole it was frustrated by the British fleet and by American naval support. German-Italian efforts to dominate the Mediterranean Sea and North Africa were similarly unsuccessful.

Even before the 1940 air offensive against Britain had reached its greatest intensity, Hitler had ordered the preparation of an attack on the Soviet Union. While German preparations were proceeding, Hitler had sent his foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, to negotiate with the Russian foreign minister, Molotov, about a further division of spheres of influence in South-Eastern Europe.⁹ Political developments in Yugoslavia and an Italian invasion of Albania and Greece caused Germany’s southern flank to weaken, drawing her into a Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941 which delayed the attack against the Soviet Union.

This attack began on 22 June 1941. It was accompanied by genocidal measures on a vast scale against the political infrastructure of the Soviet Union, against the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners-of-war (of whom 3.3 million lost their lives) and against the Jews in Russia and in Eastern Europe, of whom at least 5.1 million were murdered. These measures had long been in preparation.

Numerous scholars have for years been locked in dispute over the question of whether a central will (Hitler’s) had planned, directed and guided the extermination programme from the beginning of Nazi rule, or whether it was the result of a gradual accumulation of spontaneous bureaucratic and individual actions. There is general agreement on two aspects: one, that the extermination policy was impossible without Hitler as a central factor; the other, that there was a large degree of co-operation on the part of individuals and agencies who became involved, in almost all cases involuntarily, with the process.¹⁰ Hitler’s central role, however, could be denied only if substantial evidence of his personal decisions at crucial junctures were ignored. The events of 1938 in particular signalled his re-entry into the decision-making process.

In the war crisis of 1938 anti-Jewish violence was intensified in a government-ordered pogrom such as the cities of Germany had not seen since the Middle Ages. At the same time the spectre of the war which Hitler was planning brought to the dictator’s lips public threats, on 30 January 1939, against the Jews of all Europe.¹¹ The start of the war in September 1939 was coupled with the so-called euthanasia programme, which turned out to be a preparatory stage for the mass-murder of Jews in concentration camps. Impatience accelerated events; the German troops who invaded Poland were followed immediately by special SS and police units who conducted large-scale shootings of intellectuals, priests, partisans and Jews – just as Hitler had threatened to do in his speech before senior military commanders on 22 August 1939.¹²

At the end of the Polish campaign, and in the face of interventions and protests by army commanders,¹³ the killings had to be scaled down and conducted in a more ‘regular’ manner, under acceptable pretexts such as sabotage or espionage. The campaign against the Soviet Union, however, opened up new possibilities, and this time the preparations for mass killings, particularly of Jews, were much more elaborate. They were written and introduced in a fashion designed to avoid or to mute protests from the regular army, not entirely successfully. The commanders of Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos (mobile killing squads) encountered few difficulties with German military authorities; frequently they may have been surprised at the amount of co-operation they received. The crucial orders for what became known as the Holocaust were given by Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Heydrich in the months immediately preceding the attack on Russia to August/September 1941.¹⁴ Hundreds of thousands were shot, and the military commanders, engaged in fierce battle in a vast foreign land, against an ever-more-formidable enemy, did not see how they could stop the killings. The huge Russian hinterland was thinly controlled by German forces, while vast territories had been traversed but not occupied. The military commanders’ concern was more to ensure that these areas were controlled so that supply trains were not blown off the tracks than with what the SS and police and local militia were doing.

The majority of the more than 5 million Jews who were killed died in six special death camps in Poland and in the Ukraine: at Chelmno, from December 1941 to March 1943, 150,000 Jews; at Belzec, from the winter of 1941 to the spring of 1943, an estimated 550,000; at Sobibor, from April/May to June 1942 and from March to August 1943, 200,000; at Treblinka, from July 1942 to October 1943, 750,000; at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) from September 1941 to 28 November 1944, 1,000,000; at Majdanek, 200,000 people, 50,000 of them Jews. Cautious estimates of the numbers of Jews killed by mobile death squads and in other open-air shootings run to 1.3 million. At least 800,000 were killed through ghettoization and general privation, and another 250,000 in camps with smaller killing operations and in some Romanian and Croatian camps where local militias carried out large-scale massacres.¹⁵

German advance units reached the outskirts of Moscow, but by December 1941 the German invasion had collapsed in early rains, snow and frost. On 6 December, Hitler knew the war was lost.¹⁶ Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, resigned, and Hitler took direct command of the army.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and Hitler declared war on the United States four days later, for reasons which are still obscure. The United States had been involved in the European war, to all intents and purposes for some time. Hitler formalized this state of affairs, thereby permitting the United States to develop her full force against both Japan and Germany. Hitler seems to have hoped for a victory over the Soviet Union while the Americans were heavily committed in the Pacific Ocean. But he failed in the East, and the United States had resources for serious commitment in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.¹⁷ The year 1942 ended with the disaster of Stalingrad, where the entire German 6th Army was annihilated and close to 100,000 soldiers taken prisoner; it ended also with a contracting and in the long-term untenable position of the Afrika Korps (which went into captivity in May 1943); and it ended with the failure of German efforts to prevent the United States from sending supplies to Britain across the Atlantic.

In spite of the enormous efforts of the German military and home fronts, and in spite of constant increases in arms production, German forces were fighting on too many fronts and had not the strength to force a decision at any of them. A new offensive in Russia in the summer of 1943 (Zitadelle, 5–13 July) failed at Kursk¹⁸, and by 12 July 1944 the German Army Group Centre in Russia was smashed, with 350,000 men lost, and the Red Army units had come within a few miles of the German border.¹⁹ The submarine offensive did not stop American supplies and troops from crossing the Atlantic, and the American and British forces built up a growing superiority on the seas and in the air. Germany’s only major ally in Europe, Italy, fell into disorder with the coup d’état against Mussolini in July 1943; in September Italy changed sides, and Germany had another front to defend.

The Western allies mounted their long-awaited invasion of France in June 1944, broke out of their bridgehead, occupied Paris in August and reached the Rhine in the autumn. During the desperate last nine months of the war there was no diminution of the scale of fighting and slaughter. Hitler’s last gamble, the Ardennes offensive of December 1944-January 1945 could not, however, succeed against the overwhelming military forces and material might that were thrown against Germany.

Hitler hoped for nothing short of a miracle. He ended his life as a gambler, in total disregard for ‘his’ nation and for the lives he destroyed and continued to destroy in senseless prolongation of the war, and he pursued to the end his obsession that he must destroy the Jews. Finally, when most of Germany was in enemy hands, and the Red Army was closing in on the Reich chancellery bunker in the centre of Berlin, Hitler took his own life.

Society’s responses to war present a paradox. Initially, President Roosevelt and Chancellor Hitler experienced t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• ONE Weimar Culture
• TWO The Culture of Weimar: Models of Decline
• THREE Blut und Boden Fiction and the Tradition of Popular Reading Culture in Germany
• FOUR The Predicament of the Weimar Republic
• FIVE The Weimar Republic between the Second and the Third Reich: Continuity and Discontinuity in the German Question, 1919–33
• SIX Weimar and Versailles: German Foreign Policy, 1919–33
• SEVEN The Breakthrough of the National Socialists as a Mass Movement in the Late Weimar Republic
• EIGHT The Failure of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of Hitler
• NINE Policy and Performance in the German Economy, 1925–35: a Comment on the Borchardt Thesis
• TEN Images of Fascism: Visualization and Aestheticization in the Third Reich
• ELEVEN Germany’s Way into the Second World War
• TWELVE The War, German Society and Internal Resistance