The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  When we land against the enemy… we will show him no mercy… If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and, when you get within two hundred yards of him, and he wishes to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die! You must kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick it in. He can do no good then. Stick them in the liver.

  Major-General Raymond Hufft ordered his troops to ‘take no prisoners’ when he led them across the Rhine. And, as in the Pacific, American troops were encouraged to regard their foes as subhuman. One American interrogator described an eighteen-year-old parachutist captured after the Ardennes counter offensive as a ‘fanatical Hitler youth’, a ‘totally dehumanized Nazi’ and a ‘carefully formed killing machine’:

  I wondered why the M[ilitary] P[olice] had not fulfilled his wish [to die in battle], particularly after he had killed one of their comrades. They had merely knocked him out cold. Hard-eyed and rigid of face, he was arrogant with an inner, unbending arrogance. He aroused in me an urge which I hope never to experience again, an urge to kill. I could have killed him in cold blood, without any doubt or second thought, as I would a cockroach. It was a terrible feeling to have, because it was without passion. I could not think of him as a human being.

  Countless memoirs testify to the desperate but lethal quality of the German defence in the final months of the war. Since the Axis powers appeared to fight more doggedly the more their strategic situation worsened, the question became: how on earth could they be defeated at a tolerable human cost? The obvious answer was simply to try to persuade German and Japanese soldiers that, contrary to their own expectation, it was safe to lay down their weapons. Accordingly, the many leaflets fired or dropped onto German positions, as well as radio broadcasts and loudspeaker addresses, emphasized not only the hopelessness of Germany’s military position but also the lack of risk involved in surrendering. Key themes of ‘Sykewar’ were the good treatment of PoWs – in particular, the fact that German PoWs were given the same rations as American GIs, including cigarettes – and Allied observance of the Geneva Convention. Typical was the leaflet which began simply:

  ONE MINUTE, which can save your life.

  TWO WORDS, which have saved 850,000 lives.

  THREE WAYS, to get home.

  SIX WAYS, to get yourself killed.

  The words which had saved 850,000 lives were of course ‘I surrender’ – or rather ‘Ei Ssörender’, spelt out phonetically.

  Though it is not easy to assess its effectiveness – PoW question naires revealed persistent trust in Hitler and belief in the possibility of victory until as late as January 1945 – it seems likely that ‘Sykewar’ did something to encourage already disaffected individuals to surrender. Once the crucial bonds of group solidarity began to break down in the Wehrmacht in the last months of the war, Allied propaganda began to be effective; indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the line of causation went the other way. Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of such psychological warfare was the evident preference of German troops to surrender to American units. ‘God preserve us!’ one German soldier wrote in his diary on April 29, 1944. ‘If we have to go to prison, then let’s hope it’s with the Americans.’ That was a widespread sentiment. Until the third quarter of 1944 more than half of all German prisoners were held in the East. But there after the share captured by the Western powers rose rapidly, as Figure 15.2 shows. This was not just a function of the increased contact with British and American forces after D-Day. It is clear that many German units

  Figure 15.2 German Prisoners of War, 1st quarter 1941–1st quarter 1945

  sought to surrender to the Americans in preference to other Allied forces, and particularly the Red Army. With the benefit of hindsight, they might have done better to look for British captors, since the British treated German prisoners better than the Americans and were also less willing to hand them over to the Soviets. But psychological warfare led the Germans to expect the kindest treatment from US forces.

  Similar efforts were made to encourage Japanese soldiers to capitulate. ‘Surrender passes’ and translations of the Geneva Convention were dropped on Japanese positions, and concerted efforts were made to stamp out the practice of taking no prisoners. On May 14, 1944, MacArthur sent a telegram to the commander of the Alamo Force demanding an ‘investigation… of numerous reports reaching this headquarters that Japanese carrying surrender passes and attempting to surrender in Hollandia area have been killed by our troops’. The Psychological Warfare Branch representative at 10th Corps, Captain William R. Beard, complained that his efforts were being negated ‘by the front-line troops shooting [Japanese] when they made an attempt to surrender’. But gradually the message got through, especially to more experienced troops. ‘Don’t shoot the bastard!’ shouted one veteran when a Japanese soldier emerged from a foxhole waving a surrender leaflet. By the time the Americans took Luzon in the Philippines, 70 per cent of all prisoners made use of surrender passes or followed the instructions they contained. The Philippines had been deluged with over 55 million such leaflets, and it seems plausible to attribute to this propaganda effort the fall in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 by July 1945. Still, the Japanese soldier who emerged with six surrender leaflets – one in each hand, one in each ear, one in his mouth, and one tucked in a grass band tied around his waist – was wise to take no chances.

  As on the Western Front in the First World War, then, the crucial determinant of an army’s willingness to fight on or surrender was soldiers’ expectations of how they would be treated if they did lay down their arms. In regard to prisoner killing in the heat of battle, information about enemy conduct was relatively easy to obtain; eyewitness accounts of prisoner killings tended to circulate rapidly and widely among front-line troops, often becoming exaggerated in the telling. By contrast, news of the way prisoners were treated away from the battlefield was slower to spread, depending as it did on testimony from escaped PoWs or the letters from PoWs to their families relayed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. (It should be borne in mind that both of the latter channels were effectively closed between Germany and the Soviet Union because of the geographical distances between enemy camps and safe territory, and the refusal of the Germans to acknowledge Stalin’s belated subscription to the Geneva Convention.) Such information mattered, because treatment of prisoners varied so enormously between theatres and armies, as we have seen. A British prisoner in German hands had a reasonably good chance of surviving the war, as only one in twenty-nine died in captivity; but a Russian prisoner of the Germans was more likely to die than survive. A substantial proportion of the large number of German troops taken prisoner at the end of the war also died in captivity, though the numbers remain controversial. Barely one in ten of those who surrendered at Stalingrad survived their time in Soviet hands – indeed, half had died within a few months of laying down their arms – and perhaps as few as two-fifths of all those captured on the Eastern Front. The mortality rate for German PoWs in Soviet hands reached a peak of over 50 per cent in 1943. Germans who surrendered to the Western Allies were far luckier. Although it has been alleged that as many as 726,000 who fell into American hands died of starvation or disease, these calculations almost certainly exaggerate both the number of prisoners the Americans took and their mortality. The most that can be said is that those Germans who preferred to surrender to American rather than to British forces made a miscalculation, since the mortality rate for German PoWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for Germans who surrendered to the British (0.15 per cent to 0.03 per cent).

  Yet – and here is the twist in the tale – it was not always the paramount aim of Allied strategy to induce the Axis armies to surrender at the front line. As much if not more importance was attached, from an early stage in the war, to the idea that Germany and Japan could be bombed in
to submission. That, indeed, was the thrust of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee’s assessment in 1943. It was not, however, the Axis armies that were to be bombed. It was their civilian populations. The Axis powers had treated the civilians of countries they occupied with an astonishing brutality. In the eyes of the Allied leaders, this was ample justification for ‘payback’.

  16

  Kaputt

  … The flames immediately crackle and flare up high, so high that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and seems to seize on this too. Terrified, the men and women press to the extreme foreground… The entire stage appears to be completely filled with flame… leaving… a cloud of smoke which drifts towards the background and lies on the horizon like a dark pall of cloud… Through the cloud bank that lies on the horizon breaks an increasingly bright red glow… From the ruins of the palace, which has collapsed, the men and women, in the utmost apprehension, watch the growing firelight in the sky… Bright flames seem to set fire to the hall of the gods. As the gods become completely hidden from view by the flames, the curtain falls.

  Wagner, stage direction for Götterdämmerung

  After tea we went back to Berlin… to see Hitler’s dugout… A sordid and unromantic spot. Absolute chaos outside of concrete mixers, iron reinforcing bars, timber, broken furniture, shell holes, clothes etc. etc. Down below even worse chaos… We also had a look at the Air Ministry and a drive round Berlin. The more one sees of it the more one realizes how completely destroyed it is.

  General Alan Brooke, Diary, July 19, 1945

  TWILIGHT OF THE DEVILS

  In the final climactic scene of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung – ‘Twilight of the Gods’ – the heroine Brünnhilde restores the stolen ring of power to the River Rhine and hurls herself onto her dead lover Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Her act of sublime self-sacrifice unleashes a fiery conflagration that topples the stronghold of the gods, Valhalla, in an almost un-stageable apocalypse. Hitler’s lifelong obsession with Wagner’s music had made it something like the official soundtrack of the Third Reich; indeed, Albert Speer was attending a concert performance of the finale of Götterdämmerung (the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance under the Third Reich) when the news of Roosevelt’s death reached Berlin. ‘The war isn’t lost, Roosevelt is dead!’ exclaimed Hitler. In reality, however, the year 1945 was to see the twilight of the devils. According to one intercepted Axis communication from a Japanese diplomat in Berlin, Hitler was planning ‘to embark alone in a plane carrying bombs and blow himself up in the air somewhere over the Baltic’. The intention was that ‘the one million fervent admirers of the Führer among the German people… would believe that he had become a god and was dwelling in heaven.’ It was to be Brünnhilde’s immolation, in a Messerschmitt.

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler had bitterly recalled the trauma of 1918, when political discussions among new conscripts – ‘the poison of the hinterland’ – had undermined the morale of the army. Twenty years later, when Goebbels concluded a speech at the Sportpalast with the words ‘a November 1918 will never be repeated’, Hitler ‘looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes… leaped to his feet and with a fanatical fire in his eyes… brought his right hand, after a great sweep, pounding down on the table and yelled… “Ja!”’. ‘Aslong as I am alive,’ he told Halder in August 1939, ‘there will be no talk of capitulation.’ Not surrendering, it appears, mattered more to Hitler than victory. Perhaps from as early as November 1941, as his forces ground to a halt outside Moscow, and certainly after the failure of his second offensive in the East, a drive for the Caucasus oilfields in spring 1942, he began to suspect that it would be impossible to defeat the Soviet Union. Yet honourable defeat, which for Hitler meant nothing less than a Wagnerian finale, was in itself desirable, perhaps even preferable to victory. This was the lesson Hitler took from Clausewitz’s Confessions, as well as from Siegfried’s death in The Ring: that a heroic death (Heldentod) had a redemptive quality which might sow the seeds of a future regeneration of Germany. Only those races ‘who keep their courage to fight to the death even without hope have any prospect of surviving and achieving a new flowering’, he declared; ‘Out of the sacrifice of our soldiers and out of my own close ties with them unto death, the seed will one day germinate… and give rise to a glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement, and this to the realization of a true Volks geme in schaft.’ Hitler’s last official proclamation of February 24, 1945, called for a last-ditch war of resistance on German soil, while the so-called ‘Nero Orders’ of March 1945 envisaged a scorched earth policy that implied the complete destruction of the country’s infrastructure. ‘No German blade shall feed the enemy,’ the Völkische Beobachter had declared in September 1944; ‘no German mouth shall impart information; no German hand shall offer help. The enemy should find every little bridge destroyed, every road blocked – nothing but death, destruction and hate will await him.’ Hitler got his funeral pyre. By the time he put a bullet through his own head the entire German Reich had become one.

  ‘Long live war,’ he had told the Sudeten German leader, Henlein, in 1938, ‘even if it lasts from two to eight years.’ Hitler’s war lasted less than six. By the end it had cost the lives of at least 5.2 million German servicemen – three in every ten men mobilized – and more than 2.4 million German civilians. More German soldiers lost their lives in the last twelve months of fighting than in the whole of the rest of the war (see Figure 16.1). The crucial point is that to Hitler this monstrous toll meant nothing whatever – as little as the deaths of the many more people his troops killed.* ‘Life is horrible,’ he once mused over dinner. ‘Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing. Everything that is born must later die.’ Humanity,

  Figure 16.1 Wehrmacht deaths, 1939-1945

  he declared on another occasion, was ‘a ridiculous cosmic bacterium’ (eine läcberlicbe Weltraumbakterie).

  If they had been rational, the Axis leaders would have moderated their conduct in anticipation of a future peace, in the hope of somehow diminishing the victors’ appetite for retribution and minimizing the loss of life on their own side. It is true that there were attempts by some generals, diplomats and even leading Nazis to extend peace feelers to Britain or to the Soviet Union. At Bełżec the Nazis did seek to cover up at least some of the crimes they had committed. As early as the summer of 1943 they turfed over the site of the death camp, planting trees and even building a fake farmhouse. Yet elsewhere the killing was not merely continued; it was positively stepped up. The worse the war went for them, the more fanatically the Germans pursued their policies of violence to wards those unfortunates still in their power, as if willing the final cataclysm. Göring said to Goebbels, ‘On the Jewish question we are so committed that there is no escape for us at all.’ But to Goebbels that was good: ‘Experience shows that a movement and a people that have burned their bridges fight more unconditionally than those who still have the chance of retreat.’ The worse the crimes they committed, the less the Nazis could conceive of surrendering themselves to the judgment of the Allies. As Goebbels put it in early 1945: ‘If we have to leave, we’ll close the door behind us with a slam that all the world will hear.’ ‘Everyone now has a chance to choose the part which he will play in the film of a hundred yearshence,’ Goebbels told his staff at the Propaganda Ministry on April 17, inspired by the Third Reich’s last cinematic feat, Kolberg, an epic depiction of that town’s last-ditch defence during the Napoleonic Wars. ‘I can assure you that it will be a fine and elevating picture… Hold out now, so that… the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.’ Thus was the Third Reich to go down: in an inglorious blaze.

  The implications of this mentality became crystal clear to Victor Klemperer in Dresden as rumours spread of the conduct of German forces being driven back towards the borders of the Reich:

  October 24th, 1944. On Sunday evening Konrad was here for a couple of minutes… He believes… that befor
e the retreats everyone was murdered, that we shall see no one again, that six to seven million Jews (of the 15 million that had existed) have been slaughtered (more exactly: shot and gassed). He also considers that the prospects of the small Jewish remnant, left here in the clutches of the desperate beasts, remaining alive were also very slight.

  Across the territory still controlled by the Nazis, the ‘final solution’ was pursued in a mood of hypertrophic fanaticism. Virtually all the 438,000 Jews of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz between April and July 1944; nearly all of them were murdered. Even as the Red Army neared Auschwitz, the Germans ordered those prisoners still capable of walking to march to the Austrian border – a distance of 90 miles. There would be no liberation for those spared the gas chambers; they must be marched until they dropped. Of 714,000 concentration camp inmates who still remained in January 1945, around 250,000 perished in these death marches, including 15,000 out of the 60,000 evacuated from Auschwitz. Nor were Jews the only victims of the death throes of Nazism. In the last years of the regime there was a dramatic increase in capital punishment, as ordinary Germans who dared to express their disenchantment were summarily strung up for defeatism. Between 1942 and 1944 there were more than 14,000 death sentences passed by the German courts, nearly ten times the number during the first three years of the war. And these figures do not include the numerous extra-judicial executions carried out by the SS.

  Yet Hitler was not alone in wanting to turn Germany into one vast charnel house. For their part, the Allied leaders laid their plans for victory in ways that more or less ensured that, as twilight fell on the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, the devils would take the maximum possible number of human souls down with them.

  PAYBACK