With Germany’s military situation rapidly deteriorating and its war economy collapsing by late 1944, the Nazi regime increasingly lacked the means to enforce its policies at home and abroad. As the world inhabited by Germans contracted and fractured at once, new spaces opened for popular apathy, disobedience, or even defiance, a full range of responses to escalating crisis conditions. This inquiry is based largely on sources that were generated in the newly created fissures of the German wartime society. These include more than two thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded discussions among German POWs in Western captivity.
These records were created by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, or CSDIC, a British intelligence collaborative founded in 1939 by the directors of intelligence for the army, air force, and navy in conjunction with members of the security services (MI5 and MI6). Conceived initially for the systematic interrogation of German POWs, the CSDIC soon shifted its focus to the surreptitious recording and transcription of discussions among prisoners in the presumed privacy of their detention cells (via hidden microphones). The first CSDIC facility was located in the Tower of London and featured cells equipped with hidden listening devices connected to recording equipment. The CSDIC employed the same methods when it moved to Trent Park, on the outskirts of London. In addition to the facilities of CSDIC (UK), consisting of surveillance camps at Trent Park, Latimer House, and Milton Park, the organization eventually operated mobile units under the auspices of CSDIC (Middle East) in North Africa and CSDIC (West) in France and later Germany.
The British Prisoner of War Department prescreened German and Italian prisoners in transition camps and transferred those believed to harbor valuable intelligence to a CSDIC facility or “cage” for interrogation and surveillance.22 High-ranking German prisoners were routinely taken to England for interrogation, and many of them spent the entire war there. By contrast, most rank-and-file prisoners were processed and later imprisoned outside of the United Kingdom. Initially, the organization prioritized technical and tactical information. However, in the later war years, at the urging of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it shifted its focus to a broader range of subjects. Most prisoners arrived at a CSDIC facility mere days or weeks after capture, undergoing during their stay several rounds of interrogations in which CSDIC officers often needled the detainees to elicit unguarded responses. Numerous CSDIC transcripts in which inmates complained to their cellmates about such provocations suggest this was a successful tactic. CSDIC officers also supplied inmates with propaganda and news materials and occasionally plied them with treats and even alcohol to stimulate discussions in the cells. German-language specialists monitored inmate conversations and recorded and transcribed those they deemed relevant.
The same is true for nearly all other theaters of war. Increasingly weary of official propaganda, German civilians considered their deployed soldiers, sailors, and airmen a most reliable source of information about the war and clamored for their accounts and impressions in letters and in conversations during home leave, which some were granted as late as 1944. Letters and home visits maintained strong bonds between military and civilian populations throughout the war, and disruptions to mail delivery or canceled home leave caused popular resentment and anger whenever they occurred. Around the same time, Frau M. Müller in Kirchberg voiced her grievance that the armed forces’ “ban on leave” (Urlaubssperre) was unevenly applied only to the rank and file of the field army, while members of the home army got to enjoy vacations even in late 1944. She wrote, “Today I came home from work, and I think I’ve been struck by lightning because Erich Weber is already back on home leave. And when one passes by them, they laugh and mock. Oh dear, soon I will burst with anger. One person keeps getting leave, and another person can merely look on. All you hear is proclamations of the ‘ban on leave,’ but those fine lords keep coming home.” Bitter complaints about the inequities of the burdens of war were increasingly common as the German war effort deteriorated. They were disseminated widely beyond people’s immediate circle of trusted family and friends and thus reverberated throughout wartime society. It was therefore no coincidence, for example, that stories about the slothful “young chaps” in western Europe circulated not only among eyewitnesses like Metzenthien but throughout Germany’s wartime society more broadly. As Frau Chr. Jansen from Niederbieber wrote in a letter from September 1944: “The attitude among the civilian population regarding the Western front soldier is not very good, and I too believe that if the Eastern front soldiers had stood in the West, there would not have been the [Anglo-US] breakthrough. Things would have turned out differently if the soldiers from the East had been deployed [in the] West.” Similar sentiments were echoed by Frau Maria Lakowsky from Koblenz who wrote in a scathing indictment: “Those guys spent three years lounging and luxuriating and resting in France, all the while sending heavy packages back home, and now they can’t even manage to hold the front. That is infuriating.” While not impossible, it is unlikely that either Jansen or Lakowsky had ever visited occupied France. But they certainly would have heard accounts about it from their deployed husbands, brothers, or sons. They may have heard stories and rumors from the wives or sisters of soldiers stationed in France, the envied beneficiaries of those parcels of plunder. Regardless of the precise origin of their information, that these women had not seen France with their own eyes did not stop them from opining strongly and in great detail on the events unfolding there.
Chapter 1
STALINGRAD
The Right to Believe in Victory
January 30, 1943, marked the ten-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany. Always an important date in the Nazi calendar, that Saturday would have seen all the pomp and circumstance the regime’s propaganda apparatus could conjure to celebrate a decade since the Nazis’ “seizure of power.” But in the fourth year of the war, with the eastern campaign stalled yet again, the public mood was somber. The country anxiously awaited news from Stalingrad, where the Sixth Army was engaged in what a recent Wehrmacht communiqué had termed “defensive” battles. As hope for a “miracle at the Volga” dwindled, so did hope for a short war, and the Nazi propaganda ministry instructed that official festivities sound a calm and reassuring note. Party speakers were urged to emphasize that the German nation had faced countless challenges over the past ten years, many seemingly insurmountable until Hitler had found a way. He would do so again.
For the first time since 1933, Hitler made no public appearance to mark the occasion. Instead, the main address that day was given by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, who indicated in a speech broadcast live on all domestic and military radio stations that the Sixth Army had suffered defeat. Unable to deny or explain away a loss of such magnitude, he declared the men of the encircled army group dead and immortal.
Göring did not acknowledge the one hundred thousand German troops about to surrender, some of whom famously listened in on the broadcast of their own “funeral oration” as he praised their ultimate sacrifice. Instead, he cast a mythical veil over a catastrophic loss.2 Conjuring Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans who had died defending the pass at Thermopylae against invading “Persian hordes,” he claimed that the German soldiers at Stalingrad, too, had chosen deliberate self-annihilation for the protection of their nation: “In the history of our own days it will be said: When you come to Germany, tell them that you have seen us fighting at Stalingrad, as the law, the law for the security of our people, commanded us.” According to Göring, Hitler’s leadership would ensure that their sacrifices were not in vain. A German victory, he claimed, was preordained:
"There is a certain logic in world history. Do you believe, my comrades, that destiny—I mean Providence, the Almighty—lets an unknown man rise up, a man without a name and without wealth, a simple fighter from the World War, then guides him through endless confusion, lets him become greater and greater, and, all of a sudden, all this should be senseless? That Providence sent the German Volk a man of such greatness in the Führer … and that he managed to fashion the strongest nation in the world out of the German Volk, which once was fragmented and impotent, then these are the guarantees which give us the right to believe in victory."
Four days later, on February 3, 1943, German radio broadcasts officially confirmed the end of the battle at the Volga River and announced a three-day mourning period. A German victory had never seemed further out of reach, and morale monitors reported that news of the defeat caused grave distress and uncertainty “in the whole German community.” Thus began the Nazi campaign for total mobilization. At a crisis point in the war and with popular morale at an all-time low, Göring’s speech had sounded the battle cry for the regime’s proverbial “flight ahead” (Flucht nach vorn). And although not with blind determination, the German people followed. They did so at a time when the regime’s successes dwindled and a string of military setbacks suggested that Germany had lost its momentum in this war, perhaps irretrievably. In the East, the Germans suffered a slow but sustained withdrawal and “front reduction” as the Red Army’s counteroffensives drove them out of Rostov-on-Don, Kursk, Orel, Belgorod, Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk, Kiev, and Kalinin by the following winter. In the South, Germany lost Tunisia as well as a quarter million soldiers, whom the Allies took as prisoners when the remaining Afrika Korps and Italian troops surrendered in late spring. The Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy over the course of the summer forced the Germans to mount a partial occupation on behalf of Benito Mussolini’s regime, now unmasked as impotent. In the North and West, Germans anxiously awaited an Allied invasion that failed to materialize. But the war came from above, as enemy bombers wreaked destruction and caused mass displacement and massive civilian casualties in Berlin, Hamburg, Kassel, Kiel, Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, the industrial centers of the Ruhr, and beyond.