The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  Hans von Herwarth first learnt about the mass executions in the summer of 1942, when an officer who had personally witnessed the atrocities reported them to him. When he realized what was happening, he made a decision: ‘We must get rid of Hitler. It confirmed my view that he was a devil of a person and that he had to be destroyed.’ He met von Stauffenberg a year or so later: ‘I met him when he was in hospital in Munich, and there was a burning fire, you know, a holy fire in this man. He said, “Well, I have to recover, I have something to do.”’ As von Herwarth says, ‘There were quite a lot of people who were willing to kill Hitler, but there was no possibility to bring them into contact with him.’ Von Stauffenberg, however, had both the opportunity and the will, being a staff officer at the Wolf’s Lair.

  On the morning of 20 July 1944 Karl Boehm-Tettelbach woke late in his bedroom at the Führer’s headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. After working through the night he felt too groggy to attend the situation briefing with Hitler at midday. At 12.45, as he walked into his own office, there was the sound of a distant explosion. One of his colleagues rushed up and said, ‘Did you hear that big boom?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Boehm-Tettelbach, ‘it’s probably one of the deer.’ The area around the Wolf’s Lair was heavily mined and four or five times every night deer or rabbits in the forest would set off an explosion. This time, however, it was not a mine in the forest that had detonated, but a bomb in Hitler’s own briefing room.

  In the most famous act of resistance in the history of the Third Reich, a bomb placed by Count von Stauffenberg had exploded in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. Had the conference been held, as usual, in Hitler’s command bunker with its concrete walls, instead of in the wooden hut to which it had been rescheduled, Hitler would probably have died in the explosion. As it was, the wooden walls of the hut exploded outwards and dissipated the force of the blast, allowing Hitler to escape with minor wounds.

  Countless books have been written about the incident. Many, especially those written in the immediate post-war years, point to the 20 July plot as a glorious, albeit doomed, episode in German history. But that was not how it was perceived at the time. A study of letters sent back from frontline troops in the weeks immediately after the bomb plot shows a very different reaction. The censor’s report, based on an examination of 45,000 letters, concludes: ‘The treachery of the conspiratorial clique is rejected by all as the greatest crime against the German people.’1 Obviously, knowing that letters were to be censored, it would have been foolhardy for any soldier to record anti-Hitler sentiments in his correspondence, but equally there was no obligation to condemn the bomb plot either. The letters point to an overwhelming feeling of betrayal. After all, the German officers who had conspired against Hitler had broken their oath.

  Hans von Herwarth has little sympathy for those officers who accuse him of breaking his oath to Hitler and who used this as a reason not to join in the bomb plot: ‘That’s a very cheap excuse,’ he says. ‘Hitler broke his oath twenty times, fifty times, he broke his oath to Germany.’

  I asked Karl Boehm-Tettelbach what he would have said to von Stauffenberg had he been approached. ‘I would have said, “I am going to report to Hitler that you want to kill him.”’ More than fifty years later he still appears angry about von Stauffenberg’s actions. ‘I don’t approve,’ he says simply. He objects to the 20 July bomb for a variety of reasons: von Stauffenberg broke his oath of allegiance to Hitler (‘Nobody approached me’, he says, ‘because they knew that I wouldn’t break my oath’); simply killing Hitler would have accomplished little (‘Himmler must be replaced, Göring must be replaced and many, many other people, because just blowing up Hitler is nuts’); and, crucially, von Stauffenberg did not sacrifice himself in order to ensure that Hitler was killed (‘That’s what the Palestinians do now’).

  After the bomb went off and failed to kill Hitler, the Nazi revenge was swift and brutal. Some seven thousand people were arrested and by April 1945 five thousand of them had been executed. Anyone who had even been approached to take part in the conspiracy was executed; it was no defence to say that one had refused to take part. At breakfast, the day after the bomb exploded, Karl Boehm-Tettelbach witnessed the Nazis’ revenge as he sat next to a shaking army colonel. ‘He was so nervous, I said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re so nervous!” His hand was trembling and coffee was spilling and he said, “I just don’t, I can’t say.” And at that moment, during breakfast at 9 o’clock, two SS men came and said, “Colonel, please come along.” And by that night he was dead, because he did not participate but he was approached by von Stauffenberg.’ Hans von Herwarth was lucky. Even under torture, those who knew he had supported the bomb plot did not give his name. As he says today, ‘I owe my life to them.’

  We know that knowledge of atrocities in the east played a part in motivating the bomb plotters. Equally, we know from recent academic research that soldiers on the Eastern Front generally knew of the atrocities. What is less certain is how much the ordinary population of Germany knew in the final years of the war.

  What we do know is that German society changed fundamentally during the war. Previously it had been a country whose government preached the values of racism: now it was a country that benefited from racism. As Professor Geyer says, ‘Within Germany about 30 per cent of the industrial and agricultural labour force was foreign – forced labour, POWs, or even concentration camp inmates that were parcelled out basically on the principle of expendable labour.’ And the disturbing conclusion historians such as Professor Geyer come to about the racist state Germany had become is that ‘the Germans not only experienced it but by and large liked it’. The arrival of a huge class of people in Germany who were by definition inferior to the lowest German was plainly of benefit. At the very least, it enabled Germans to feel that they were superior and that the Nazi propaganda was correct – they were a ‘master race’. The lowly German worker could become a foreman; the housewife could have servants. Society had changed in a profoundly racist way. This is the background against which one must judge the statements of Germans on the home front that they knew nothing of what was happening in the east. For not only did every German experience the racial propaganda of the Nazis, but almost all of them experienced the consequences of racism in the form of the ‘sub-human’ workers who were everywhere. How hard it must be in such an environment not to feel superior, not to think that these people are less than oneself. When Polish workers shuffled by in their rags, how could the Germans not feel superior? After 1945 it was hard for Germans to express openly such feelings of superiority, especially once detailed knowledge of the Holocaust became commonplace. The vocabulary of racism was denied to those on the home front, just as it was denied to the soldiers who had fought the enemy.

  It is not too fanciful to imagine that the same Germans who benefited from living in a racist state would fear what life would be like once the slaves regained their freedom. If Germany fell, surely the oppressed would seek revenge on their oppressors? Anyone who benefits from a crime seeks to avoid the moment of reckoning.

  If fear of eventual judgement for participating in a racist slave state played any part in the decision of ordinary Germans to follow the regime until the end, there remains a crucial question to answer – how many ordinary Germans knew during the war that the Jews were being exterminated? If one takes at face value the evidence from the many interviews we filmed with German civilians of the period, the answer is clear – none. When asked what she thought was happening to the Jews, Gabriele Winckler, a secretary, gave a typical reply: ‘People always told us they were going to Madagascar or somewhere, some barren country. God knows what rubbish they talked, and then I really didn’t think much more about it all.’ Alternatively, our interviewees would say that they thought the Jews were being deported east to work. Johannes Zahn, a financial expert, says, ‘I knew that the Jews were being put into work camps, but I didn’t know that they were being systematically killed. But I do have to say honestl
y that if I had known about it then, I wouldn’t have done anything about it . . . nobody in their right mind runs straight into the machine-guns.’

  Our interviewees often expressed great indignation at relatively minor injustices meted out by the Nazis, such as forcing German Jews to wear yellow stars prior to their deportation. ‘Terrible! Terrible!’ says Erna Kranz, then a young woman living in Munich. ‘In the street parallel to us we had a Baroness Brancka who was married to a baron, but was a Jewish shopkeeper’s daughter from Hamburg . . . and she had to wear the Jewish star. I was sorry about that, it was so terrible because this woman was such a nice woman, that’s what you felt. But really, just like today when you walk away from people in need, you can’t help everywhere, it was the same then. You said what can we do? You couldn’t do anything, could you? We were forced to do nothing and accept that a single person who wasn’t at fault could be persecuted.’ A lesson learned from such testimony is that the small injustice in front of one’s nose can have a greater impact than a much larger injustice that occurs out of sight – even if that larger injustice is suspected. Thus the Nazi plan to transport the Jews away from Germany was an inspired act of evil.

  The more we posed the question, ‘When did you know about the extermination camps?’ to our interviewees, the more it became clear that the question invited a black-and-white answer – either the interviewees knew during the war or they didn’t – when it seemed the true answer must be in shades of grey. Professor Geyer believes there were at least three levels of recognition among the ordinary German population concerning the fate of the Jews. The first level was the simple one of ‘visual’ knowledge. It was clear that the Jews were no longer there. ‘Neighbours were no longer neighbours,’ as Professor Geyer puts it. ‘They definitely knew and somehow acquiesced to the fact that their Jewish neighbours would no longer be present.’ Every German would have recognized the fate of the German Jews at this level. At the other extreme, specific knowledge of the extermination camps must have been confined to relatively few people. None of the extermination camps operated within the pre-war boundaries of Germany, and even among the higher levels of the Nazi hierarchy there existed a euphemistic language to describe what was actually taking place in them (the code word ‘evacuation’, for example, used in Eichmann’s memorandum of the Wannsee Conference). Those with the second level of recognition knew that something ‘bad’ was happening to the Jews. This is the most interesting level of knowledge and the one that is hardest to quantify. Once the Jews had disappeared from the towns and villages, it was possible for ordinary Germans not to think about what was happening to them. But if they did think about it, surely it must have been obvious that the Jews were going to a terrible fate? Jews had been public victims of Nazi persecution since the boycott of 1933. Hitler had announced in 1939 that a world war would mean the ‘annihilation’ of Jews in Europe. Knowledge of atrocities in the east, even if not specific knowledge of anti-Semitic actions, must have been widespread back on German soil if one accepts that the vast majority of German Army units were involved. The majority of Germans who thought about it even for a moment must have realized that, at the least, ‘something bad’ was happening to the Jews.

  A Nazi report (by the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS run by Reinhard Heydrich) from Franconia in southern Germany, dated December 1942, demonstrates that the Nazis themselves were concerned about the effect on the population of knowledge about the killing of Jews in the east: ‘One of the strongest causes of unease among those attached to the Church and in the rural population is at the present time formed by news from Russia in which shooting and extermination of the Jews is spoken about. The news frequently leaves great anxiety, care and worry in those sections of the population. According to widely held opinion in the rural population, it is not at all certain that we will win the war, and if the Jews come again to Germany, they will exact dreadful revenge upon us.’2

  But there was only sporadic resistance within Germany to Nazi persecution of the Jews. One of the most famous acts was conducted by Hans and Sophie Scholl, both students at the University of Munich, who produced leaflets during the war calling for German youth to ‘rise up immediately’ to build a ‘new, spiritual Europe’. They called the treatment of the Jews and the killing of the Polish intelligentsia ‘the most terrible crime against human dignity’. They were both denounced, tortured and then executed. Sophie Scholl confided to another prisoner that she thought her execution would be the sign for thousands of other Germans to question the actions of the Nazis. Significantly, on the day of her execution, 22 February 1943, the students of Munich University demonstrated their loyalty to the Nazi regime. As the historian Ian Kershaw argues, ‘Not only was resistance to Hitler carried out – inevitably one might say – without active support from the mass of the people, but even passive support was largely lacking for those risking everything to overthrow the system.’3

  The citizens of Germany had only to walk as far as their local cinema to see one more reason not to support brave individuals like Sophie and Hans Scholl and to keep on fighting. The Nazi newsreels showed in graphic terms how the country was fighting a life and death struggle against the Red Army – the enemy they all feared most. Fear at what would happen to Germany if the hated Bolsheviks triumphed was a powerful incentive to support the war and, in doing so, to support the Nazi leadership.

  ‘What did the German soldier fight for and, one has to ask, against what?’ says Graf von Kielmansegg, a German staff officer. ‘For me this is the decisive reason: all those who had been in Russia at least knew what Germany could expect if Bolshevism came to Germany . . . If it had only been England and France, we would have stopped earlier in a simplified manner. Not against Russia.’ As Hermann Teschemacher, who served on the Eastern Front, puts it: ‘We told ourselves that there’s a storm over Asia and it will come over Germany, and then brutal extermination, mistreatment and killings would follow, we knew that. So we defended ourselves to the end and remained loyal to the oath . . . The worst would have been if Bolshevism stormed over Germany – then the whole of Europe would be lost. But first and foremost we thought about ourselves and our families and that is why we defended ourselves to the end.’

  In the summer of 1944 in an attempt to prevent Bolshevism ‘storming over Germany’, Hitler would suffer his greatest military setback of the war, a defeat that would feed his nihilism still further. This defeat was not the successful Allied invasion of France on D-Day, 6 June 1944, but the less-publicized Soviet attack that began on 22 June against Hitler’s Army Group Centre in Belorussia. There is scarcely a greater measure of the extent to which the Eastern Front has been ignored in the consciousness of the general public in Britain and the USA than the comparison between Operation Overlord in France and Operation Bagration in the Soviet Union: the former is famous in Western popular culture, whilst knowledge of the latter is mostly confined to historians. Yet the Germans possessed just over 30 divisions in the West (excluding Italy) to meet the Allied invasion of Europe, whilst they fielded more than five times as many – 165 divisions – on the Eastern Front. And Operation Bagration would eliminate, on the German side, more than three times as many divisions as the Allies landed on D-Day. (It was Stalin who named the offensive Operation Bagration – after a military hero in the fight against Napoleon in 1812; like Stalin, Bagration was of Georgian origin.)

  ‘The Belorussian operation was a classic,’ says Makhmud Gareev, who as a young Red Army officer took part in the offensive. ‘Everything was well thought through.’ Stalin demonstrated how far he had come from the incompetent leader who had so catastrophically presided over the disasters of 1941 by the way he listened to the deeply held views of Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, about the tactics that should be adopted in the operation. Rokossovsky believed that the Red Army should attack Army Group Centre in two equally strong strikes, from the south and from the north. Stalin, aware of the accepted theory that dictated that forces
should not be split, told Rokossovsky to leave the room and ‘think it over’. When the military commander returned, he repeated his view that there should be two strikes. Eventually Stalin let him have his way – no doubt aware that Rokossovsky must be committed to his plan since he knew the fate he would suffer if he was wrong; as a junior officer, Rokossovsky had been imprisoned and tortured during the purges of the 1930s.

  The preparations for Operation Bagration also illustrated the extent to which the Red Army had developed the art of deceiving their enemy about their true intentions. The sophisticated Soviet deception (maskirovka) plan was evident from the highest level, where knowledge of the aims of the operation was restricted to a handful of senior officers, to the lowest, where individual units of the Red Army hid under camouflage during the day and moved only at night, observing the strictest radio silence. In other areas of the front line far from the designated point of attack (most notably the area of the 3rd Ukrainian Front to the south) Soviet forces would be moved into the area during the day in full view of German reconnaissance aircraft, and then secretly moved out again at night – only to be transported openly in again the next day. The Red Army intended to deceive the Germans both about the point of the intended attack and the size of the Soviet force.