Though not mentioned in the text or index, Daniel Goldhagen’s thesis that ordinary Germans were the Holocaust’s “willing executioners” casts a shadow over Nicholas Stargardt’s new book, The German War: A Nation Under Arms 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015).
Stargardt’s book is perhaps the most convincing portrait of Germany’s World War II home front. It shows how Germans—taught prewar not only by their own teachers but by non-German historians, intellectuals, and politicians to minimize or even deny their nation’s responsibility for World War I—found it easy to embrace World War II, whatever their initial hesitations, as a holy crusade for national survival. Unlike late in World War I, crowds never took to the streets, partly because they never were enraged by hunger pangs.
Timothy Snyder, in his new book, Black Earth, argues that Hitler was always obsessed by the fear that Germans without ruthless expansion eastward would not be able to feed themselves. That proved true—a self-fulfilling prophecy—but not until the post-1945 economic collapse ushered in by total defeat.
According to Stargardt, Jew hatred was far more popular than the Nazi Party. As the facts about the Holocaust ceased being a well-kept secret, ordinary Germans rationalized it as just deserts inflicted on Jewish warmongers for Allied “terror bombings” of their cities. Among popular jokes among Berliners: “Who are the greatest chemists of world history? Answer: Jesus, because he turned water into wine; Göring because he turned butter into cannons; and Himmler because he turned Jews into soap.”
As defeat loomed, they felt, not guilt for genocide, but fear of postwar punishment for it. Remarkably, even when Germany was losing 10,000 soldiers a day in the last stages of the war, national morale did not crack. Confiscated Jewish assets helped feed the wartime German welfare state that continued to operate almost to the end.
Amidst the slaughter, the Nazi regime’s Mephisto, Joseph Goebbels, gave the masses circuses to go with the bread. Goebbels’ formula for fun amidst horror: “Whatever you do, do not broadcast tedium, do not present the desired attitude on a silver platter, do not think that one can best serve the national government by playing thunderous military marches every evening.”
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