For soldiers, the divide between east and west was little different. Certainly, troops on the western front fought doggedly and resolutely. According to later reflections of a high-ranking officer under Model’s command, they had no great ideals any longer, though there was often still some flickering belief in Hitler and hopes in the promised miracle weapons. Most of all, they had nothing more to lose.100 Their fighting qualities were often grudgingly admired by the western Allies. But outright fanaticism was mainly to be found among units of the Waffen-SS. And, for most soldiers, the prospect of capture was not the end of the world. On the eastern front, fanaticism, though not omnipresent, was far more commonplace. The mere thought of falling into Soviet hands meant that holding out was an imperative. No quarter could be expected from the enemy. Nemmersdorf showed, it seemed, that fears of Soviet occupation were more than justified, that propaganda imagery of ‘Bolshevik bestiality’ was correct. The war in the east could not be given up. There could be no contemplation of surrender when what was in store was so unimaginably terrible.
V
Increasingly dreadful though the predicament was of the German population, bombed incessantly in the west and living in terror of Soviet invasion in the east, the fate of Nazism’s prime ideological target, the Jews, was infinitely worse.
Hitler had sought in the spring to harden fighting morale and commitment to Nazi principles of all-out racial struggle when he addressed a large gathering of generals and other officers about to head for the front. He told them how essential it had been to deal so ruthlessly with the Jews, whose victory in the war would bring the destruction of the German people. The entire bestiality of Bolshevism, he ranted, had been a product of the Jews. He pointed to the danger to Germany posed by Hungary, a state he depicted as completely under Jewish domination, but added that he had now intervened—through the occupation of the country that had taken place in March—and that the ‘problem’ would soon be solved there, too. The military commanders interrupted the speech on several occasions with rapturous applause.101 They were being made complicit through their knowledge of what had happened to the Jews in much of Europe and was now happening in Hungary.
In the summer of 1944, as the Red Army was smashing through Army Group Centre in Belorussia, trainloads of Jews were still being ferried from Hungary to their deaths in the massive extermination unit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Upper Silesia. By the time the deportations were stopped in early July by a Hungarian leadership responding to the mounting pressure from abroad, the Nazi assault on the largest remaining Jewish community in Europe had accounted for over 430,000 Jews.102 The crematoria in Auschwitz struggled to keep up with the numbers being gassed to death—more than 10,000 a day that summer.103 At the end of July, the Red Army, advancing through Poland, had liberated Majdanek near Lublin, and encountered for the first time the monstrosity of the death camps, publicizing the findings in the world’s press (though few in Germany had access to this).104 Auschwitz-Birkenau was, however, still carrying out its grisly work. With the closure of Belz˙ec, Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943, and a final burst of exterminatory work at Chełmno in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp, was the last in operation. Jews from the Łódz´ ghetto in Poland were gassed there in August; transports from Slovakia and the camp at Theresienstadt on what had once been Czech territory arrived in September and October. In November, satisfied that the ‘Jewish Question’ had, to all intents and purposes, been solved through the killing of millions and anxious at the growing proximity of the Red Army, Himmler ordered the gassing installations to be demolished.105
It is striking how little thought of what might be happening to Jews appears to have impinged upon the consciousness of Germans, wholly and not unnaturally preoccupied with their own suffering and anxieties. Propaganda continued to pour out its anti-Jewish vitriol, blaming Jews for the war, and linking them with Germany’s destruction.106 But these were by now weary platitudinous abstractions. Most ordinary citizens appear to have given no consideration to the actual fate of the Jews or to have pondered much about what might have happened to them. Relatively few people within Germany had first-hand, detailed knowledge of the murderous events that continued to unfold to the east; the ‘Final Solution’ was, of course, officially still preserved as a closely guarded state secret. But, in any case, overwhelmed by their own anxieties, few Germans were interested in what was happening, far away, to an unloved, where not thoroughly hated, minority.
For most, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, apart from the nagging worry that the ill-deeds perpetrated by German overlords might well come back to haunt them in defeat and occupation. This concern was present in two ways, both more subliminal than overt. As the reported comments from Stuttgart, referred to earlier, indicate, there was a gathering sense that Germany was now reaping what it had sown, that the misery its population was undergoing amounted to retribution for what had been done to the Jews and others. And another sentiment not infrequently encountered in this period was that the Jews would return with the occupying forces to take their revenge. The sentiment, commonplace enough, was directly expressed in one letter home from the front in August 1944. ‘You know that the Jew will exact his bloody revenge, mainly on Party people. Unfortunately, I was one of those who wore the Party uniform. I’ve already regretted it. I urge you to get rid of the uniform, it doesn’t matter where, even if you have to burn the lot.’107 Not a few, especially no doubt among hardened Nazi believers, felt that the bombing and destruction of German towns and cities itself amounted to that revenge. Incessant Nazi propaganda about the power of world Jewry had made a lasting mark.108
For the few Jews remaining within the Reich, living as pariahs, keen to keep a low profile, with almost no contact with non-Jews, it was a shadowy world, a completely uncertain, highly precarious, anxiety-ridden existence—though in ways that contrasted with the anxieties and uncertainties of the mass of the population. The academic Victor Klemperer, an intelligent observer living in Dresden whose marriage to a non-Jew had enabled him to avoid deportation, was full of apprehension simply at the late return of his wife from a rare and brief absence from their home. She was carrying parts of the secret diary he was keeping to be hidden by a friend in Pirna, not far away. If it should fall into the hands of the authorities it would spell death not just for himself, but for his wife and for friends he had mentioned by name.109 He and his wife did share with the mass of the population the fear of bombing. However, here too there were major differences. Bombing for Nazism’s victims was a sign of Germany’s impending defeat and personal liberation from a terroristic regime.110 But Klemperer’s existential fear was that he would survive a raid, be evacuated, separated from his wife and sent somewhere to be gassed.111 There was anxiety, too, shared with friends, about surviving another winter of war with provisions of food and fuel scarcely sufficient to keep a person alive. ‘Another winter is a horrible prospect,’ he wrote.112 Another acquaintance looked grimly into the future, foreseeing malnutrition, shortage of medicines, spread of epidemic diseases, no end to the war and eventually death for all remaining bearers of the yellow star. Klemperer was aware, if without detail, of the fate of the Jews of eastern Europe. In these very days he was given another report by a soldier on leave of ‘gruesome murders of Jews in the east’.113