The Third Reich at War (2 page)

At the heart of German history in the war years lies the mass murder of millions of Jews in what the Nazis called ‘the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. This book provides a full narrative of the development and implementation of this policy of genocide, while also setting it in the broader context of Nazi racial policies towards the Slavs, and towards minorities such as Gypsies, homosexuals, petty criminals and ‘asocials’. I have tried to combine the testimony of some of those it affected - both those who survived, and those who did not - with that of some of the men who implemented it, including the commandants of major death camps. The deportation and murder of Jews from Western European countries is covered in the chapter dealing with the Nazi empire, while the reactions of ordinary Germans at home, and the extent to which they knew about the genocide, are covered in a later chapter on the Home Front. The fact that the mass murder of the Jews is discussed in almost every part of the book, from the narrative of the foundation of the ghettos in Poland in the opening chapter right up to the coverage of the ‘death marches’ of 1945 in the final chapter, reflects its centrality to so many aspects of the history of the Third Reich at war. Wherever one looks, even for example in the history of music and literature, dealt with in Chapter 6, it is an inescapable part of the story. Nevertheless, it is important to reiterate that this book is a history of Nazi Germany in all its aspects; it is not in the first place a history of the extermination of the Jews, any more than it is a history of the Second World War, though both play an essential role in it.

The book opens where
The Third Reich in Power
left off, with the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Chapter 1 discusses the Germans’ occupation of Poland and in particular their ill-treatment, exploitation and murder of many thousands of Poles and Polish Jews from this point to the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. For the Nazis, and indeed for many Germans, Poles and ‘Eastern Jews’ were less than human, and this attitude applied, though with significant differences, to the mentally ill and handicapped in Germany itself, whose mass murder in the course of the ‘euthanasia’ action steered from Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin forms the subject of the last part of the chapter. The second chapter is largely devoted to the progress of the war, from the conquest of Western Europe in 1940 through to the Russian campaign of 1941. That campaign forms the essential backdrop to the events narrated in Chapter 3, which deals with the launching and implementation of what the Nazis called ‘the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. Chapter 4 turns to the war economy, and looks at how the Third Reich ruled the countries it occupied in Europe, drafting in millions of forced labourers to man its arms factories and pushing ahead with the arrest, deportation and murder of the Jews who lived within the boundaries of the Nazi empire. That empire began to fall apart with the momentous German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad early in 1943, which is narrated in the concluding part of the chapter. It was followed the same year by reversals in many spheres of the war, from the devastation of Germany’s towns and cities by the Allied strategic bombing offensive to the defeat of Rommel’s armies in North Africa and the collapse of the Third Reich’s main European ally, the Fascist state of Mussolini’s Italy. These events form the principal focus of Chapter 5, which goes on to examine the way they affected the armed forces, and the impact they had on the conduct of the war at home. Chapter 6 is largely devoted to the ‘Home Front’, and looks at how religious, social, cultural and scientific life interacted with the war. It concludes with an account of the emergence of resistance to Nazism, particularly within the Third Reich itself. Chapter 7 begins with an account of the ‘wonder-weapons’ which Hitler promised would reverse Germany’s military collapse, before going on to tell the story of how the Reich was finally defeated, and to examine briefly what happened afterwards. Each chapter interweaves thematic aspects with an ongoing narrative of military events, so that Chapter 1 deals with military action in 1939, Chapter 2 covers 1940 and 1941, Chapter 3 discusses further military events in 1941, Chapter 4 takes the story on through 1942, Chapter 5 narrates the war on land, in the air and at sea in 1943, Chapter 6 moves the narrative on through 1944, and the final chapter gives an account of the closing months of the war, from January to May 1945.

This book is written to be read from start to finish, as a single, if complex, narrative, interspersed with description and analysis; I hope that the ways in which the different parts of the story interact with one another will become apparent to readers as the narrative proceeds. The chapter headings are intended more to provoke reflection on the contents than to provide precise descriptions of what each chapter contains; in some cases they are intentionally ambiguous or ironical. Anyone who wishes to use the book simply as a work of reference is recommended to turn to the index, where the location of the book’s principal themes, characters and events is laid out in detail. The bibliography lists works cited in the notes; it is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to the vast literature on the topics dealt with in the book.

Much of this book deals with countries in Central and Eastern Europe where towns and cities have a variety of names and spellings in different languages. The Polish city of Lvov, for example, is spelt L’vov in Russian and L’viv in Ukrainian, while the Germans called it something different altogether, namely Lemberg; there are similar variations in the spelling of Kaunas in Lithuanian and Kovno in Polish, Theresienstadt in German and Terez’n in Czech, or Reval in German and Tallinn in Estonian. The Nazi authorities also renamed L’d’ as Litzmannstadt in an attempt to obliterate all aspects of its Polish identity altogether and used German names for a variety of other sites, such as Kulmhof for Chelmno, or Auschwitz for Oswiecim. In this situation it is impossible to be consistent, and I have chosen to use the name current at the time about which I am writing, or on occasion simply the name with which English and American readers will be most familiar, while alerting them to the existence of alternatives. I have also simplified the use of accents and diacriticals in place-names and proper names - dropping the Polish character Ł, for instance - to remove what to my mind are distractions for the English-language reader.

In the preparation of this book I have enjoyed the huge advantage of access to the superb collections of Cambridge University Library, as well as to those of the Wiener Library and the German Historical Institute in London. The University of Melbourne kindly appointed me to a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in 2007, and I was able to use the excellent research collection on modern German history purchased for the University Library from the bequest of the late, and much-missed, John Foster. The Staatsarchiv der Freien- und Hansestadt Hamburg and the Forschungsstelle f̈r Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg kindly permitted consultation of the unpublished diaries of Luise Solmitz. The encouragement of many readers, especially in the United States, has been crucial in spurring me on to complete the book, though it has taken longer to do so than I originally intended. The advice and support of many friends and colleagues has been crucial. My agent Andrew Wylie and my editor at Penguin, Simon Winder, and their teams have been enormously helpful. Chris Clark, Christian Goeschel, Victoria Harris, Sir Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Kristin Semmens, Astrid Swenson, Hester Vaizey and Nikolaus Wachsmann read early drafts and made many useful suggestions. Victoria Harris, Stefan Ihrig, Alois Maderspacher, David Motadel, Tom Neuhaus and Hester Vaizey checked through the notes and saved me from many errors. Andr’s Berezn’y provided maps that are a model of clarity and accuracy; working on them with him was extremely instructive. The expertise of David Watson in copy-editing was invaluable, and it was a pleasure to work with Cecilia Mackay on the illustrations. Christine L. Corton applied her practised eye to the proofs, and provided essential support in too many ways to mention. Our sons, Matthew and Nicholas, to whom this final volume, like the previous two, is dedicated, have cheered me up on innumerable occasions during the writing of a book the subject matter of which was sometimes shocking and depressing almost beyond belief. I am profoundly grateful to them all.

Richard J. Evans
Cambridge, May 2008

1

‘BEASTS IN HUMAN FORM’

LIGHTNING VICTORY

I

On 1 September 1939 the first of a grand total of sixty divisions of German troops crossed the Third Reich’s border with Poland. Numbering nearly one and a half million men, they paused only to allow newsreel cameramen from Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry to film the ceremonial raising of the customs barriers by grinning soldiers of the vanguard. The advance was spearheaded by tanks from the German army’s five armoured divisions, with around 300 tanks apiece, accompanied by four fully motorized infantry divisions. Behind them marched the bulk of the infantry, their artillery and equipment pulled mainly by horses - roughly 5,000 of them for each division, making at least 300,000 animals altogether. As impressive as this was, the decisive technology deployed by the Germans was not on the ground, but in the air. The ban imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on German military planes meant that aircraft construction had been forced to start almost from scratch when Hitler repudiated the relevant clauses of the Treaty only four years before the outbreak of the war. The German planes were not only modern in construction, but had been tried and tested in the Spanish Civil War by the German Condor Legion, many of the veterans of which piloted the 897 bombers, 426 fighters and various reconnaissance and transport planes that now took to the skies over Poland.
¹

These massive forces confronted the Poles with overwhelming odds. Hoping that the invasion would be stopped by Anglo-French intervention, and anxious not to offend world opinion by seeming to provoke the Germans, the Polish government delayed mobilizing its armed forces until the last minute. Thus they were poorly prepared to resist the sudden, massive invasion of German troops. The Poles could muster 1.3 million men, but they possessed few tanks and little modern equipment. German armoured and motorized divisions outnumbered their Polish counterparts by a factor of 15 to 1 in the conflict. The Polish air force was able to deploy only 154 bombers and 159 fighters against the invading Germans. Most of the aircraft, particularly the fighters, were obsolete, while the Polish cavalry brigades had scarcely begun to abandon their horses in favour of machines. Stories of Polish cavalry squadrons quixotically charging German tank units were most probably apocryphal, but the disparity in resources and equipment was undeniable all the same. The Germans surrounded Poland on three sides, following their dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia earlier in the year. In the south, the German client state of Slovakia provided the most important jumping-off point for the invasion, and indeed the Slovak government actually sent some units to fight their way into Poland alongside the German troops, lured by the promise of a small amount of extra territory once Poland had been defeated. Other German divisions entered Poland across its northern border, from East Prussia, while still more marched in from the west, cutting through the Polish Corridor created by the Peace Settlement to give Poland access to the Baltic. Polish forces were stretched too thinly to defend all these frontiers effectively. While Stuka dive-bombers attacked the Polish armies strung out along the border from above, German tanks and artillery drove through their defences, cut them off from each other and broke their communications. Within a few days the Polish air force had been driven from the skies, and German bombers were destroying Polish arms factories, strafing the retreating troops and terrorizing the people of Warsaw, L’d’ and other cities.
²

On 16 September 1939 alone, 820 German aircraft dropped a total of 328,000 kilos of bombs on the defenceless Poles, who possessed a total of only 100 anti-aircraft guns for the whole of the country. So demoralizing were the air attacks that in some areas Polish troops threw down their arms, and German commanders on the ground asked for the bombing to stop. A typical action was witnessed by the American correspondent William L. Shirer, who managed to get permission to accompany German forces attacking the Polish Baltic port of Gdynia:

The Germans were using everything in the way of weapons, big guns, small guns, tanks, and airplanes. The Poles had nothing but machine-guns, rifles, and two anti-aircraft pieces which they were trying desperately to use as artillery against German machine-gun posts and German tanks. The Poles . . . had turned two large buildings, one an officers’ school, the other the Gdynia radio station, into fortresses and were firing machine-guns from several of the windows. After a half-hour a German shell struck the roof of the school and set it on fire. Then German infantry, supported - or through the glasses it looked as though they were
led
- by tanks, charged up the hill and surrounded the building . . . A German seaplane hovered over the ridge, spotting for the artillery. Later, a bombing plane joined it, and they dived low, machine-gunning the Polish lines. Finally a squadron of Nazi bombers arrived. It was a hopeless position for the Poles.
³

Similar actions were repeated all over the country as the German forces advanced. Within a week the Polish forces were in complete disarray, and their structure of command was shattered. On 17 September the Polish government fled to Romania, where its hapless ministers were promptly interned by the authorities. The country was now entirely leaderless. A government-in-exile, formed on 30 September 1939 on the initiative of Polish diplomats in Paris and London, was unable to do anything. A single, furious Polish counter-attack, at the Battle of Kutno on 9 September, only succeeded in delaying the encirclement of Warsaw by a few days at most.
⁴