‘Last great test of fate.’ At dawn on 1 September, Gerhard Starcke accompanied German forces over the border into Polish territory. As one of the Wehrmacht’s fifteen thousand ‘propaganda troops’, Starcke sent home accounts of the action from the very first day of the war. He heard Hitler’s speech on the radio. He’d been seven when the First World War broke out, and its aftermath had shaped his life. His reaction, too, was one of dread. ‘It was only now, hearing Adolf Hitler, that we knew war had begun!—So now, we thought to ourselves, we shall share the same fate as our fathers.’
There was no rebellion in this thought—only the humble faith of a man bowing to necessity. Over the years Starcke had got used to entrusting his life to a higher power—providence, or the sacred nature of things—everything the Führer stood for. Now that higher power was testing him and Starcke wasn’t going to question it.
The Germans followed their Führer into the detested war without protest, because they believed in his genius and in the justice of the cause. They may have feared him, but they had no qualms. As a part of the propaganda machine, Gerhard Starcke adjusted his political views in the reports he wrote. He saw the rapid advance of the troops greeted by cheers from the German population of Posen and West Prussia. ‘It didn’t occur to us for a moment that the confrontation with Poland wasn’t natural or necessary.’
• • •
The swift victory over Poland took Melita Maschmann east in the wake of the German army. The area around Posen inhabited by a German minority had been annexed and renamed ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’. Maschmann was asked to help set up the Hitler Youth there. The prospect of colonising the new eastern province caused her no misgivings.
I said to myself, if the Poles were fighting with all possible means not to lose the disputed eastern provinces that the German people claimed as ‘Lebensraum’, then they remained our enemies, and I saw it as my duty to suppress any private feelings that conflicted with political necessity.
When she arrived in Warthegau, she found plenty of reason to withhold her private feelings. The barefoot, hungry children she saw in the dark streets and stinking backyards of Posen pursued her even into her dreams. An old beggar man keeled over face-first onto the snow in front of her and didn’t get up again, but lay there, stiff as a board. She remonstrated with a German guard who wanted to beat an eight-year-old girl for stealing cabbage. Maschmann’s young driver horsewhipped a deaf old farmer. She realised she would have to close her eyes to all this if she wanted to get on with her work. ‘I developed the fateful ability to suppress the spontaneous sympathy I felt for the troubled people of that foreign nation.’
Thanks to this ability, Maschmann found that she enjoyed her work. She was twenty-one. Her job in the occupied zone made her a conqueror and a pioneer. There was no bureaucracy, no old guard, and plenty of scope for courage and initiative, encouraging Melita’s belief in herself. The young ethnic Germans in Wartheland had never met anyone from Germany before; for them, her stories from the Reich sounded like fairytales. She developed the arrogance of a missionary.
Our life in those days seemed like a big adventure. We were all the happier because it wasn’t an adventure we had sought out ourselves to satisfy some private quest for action. We felt called to a fine and difficult duty.
It was only when Melita returned east after being home on leave that her feelings were more ambivalent. She was frightened at the thought of having to slip back into that cold, hard shell she had learnt to hide within. But the fascination of her work was stronger. The war opened up worlds.
• • •
The invasion of Poland gave many a thrill of power and adventure. Destruction held a new and strange appeal. For boys, fighting offered the chance of personal fulfilment, outside the grey tedium of everyday life and the hardship they had grown up in. At the start of the Polish campaign, Hermann-Friedrich Cordes volunteered with Infantry Regiment 111, the historic unit in which his father had served in the First World War. Cordes was eighteen and hoped to be able to slough off his childhood in the war. Behind him lay years of grim deprivation. The drama of his parents’ marriage had left him quiet and introverted. Life had taught him to avoid getting involved with anyone, so that no one could land him in trouble. His mother sensed his relief when he marched off to fight. A love of Germany had been the one passion she and her son had in common, and to see that love as a calling was perhaps the most important lesson that Ilse Cordes had passed on to Hermann-Friedrich.
After the 1940 campaign against France, which Hermann-Friedrich Cordes spent on the front line with his regiment, he could at last feel victorious. It was in part a personal victory over his former life, and the feeling was as powerful as a drug. His letters home are full of pride and satisfaction and happiness. In spring 1941 he told his parents he’d been put in charge of a small infantry squad. ‘My dears, remember this date! Rejoice with me! Jump for joy! I’ve made it!’ At last he could show his mettle. He had known only bleak privation, but war brought him recognition, respect.
It is a proud feeling, to be allowed to think for others and educate them and take responsibility for them—i.e., for everything they do. But through all this I have remained my silent old self, reserved and detached.
In his New Year’s letter to his mother in 1941, Cordes tells her that it is his dearest wish to feel again the elation of battle—to charge once more against the enemy and sweep the field clear.
• • •
The lightning victories of 1939 to 1941 brought new heights of euphoria. Once again, Hitler’s onwards-ever-onwards principle proved effective. The reports of success from battleground after battleground—Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Africa and the Balkans—threw the German people into a frenzy of joy, happiness, satisfaction and triumph, a blend of emotions which left them susceptible to that particular sense of superiority that the Nazi ideologues had been inculcating in them for years.
‘Isn’t it terrific?’ Lore Walb wrote during the French campaign of May 1940. ‘No sooner has one event sunk in than the next one’s upon you.’ She had grown used to victory by then. Decades later, she would recall the day war broke out. It was a late summer’s morning and she was sitting in the kitchen with her mother, stoning cherries. From the radio, Hitler’s voice boomed on about retaliating against Poland, bomb for bomb. ‘The words and cadences, forever retrievable, are closely tied to the feelings spreading inside me: trepidation—“so it is going to happen, after all”—and apprehensive sorrow. I am twenty years old. I weep…’
Yet there is no sign of sorrow in the diary written by Lore’s twenty-year-old self. Page after page is filled with explanation and justification: the reasons for the invasion are set out in detail, written in the style of a war correspondent, as if Lore had adapted her voice to fit the occasion. She traces the course of events in clipped sentences, listing prisoners’ names and charting frontline movements, so that her diary reads like a military dispatch. The act of writing allowed her to savour the feeling of being a victor all over again. ‘World history has never known such a campaign—the opponent eliminated in a bare four weeks. It is just wonderful to be German.’ The newspapers ran death notices for men killed in action, but these seemed somehow unreal. The phrase ‘For Führer, people and fatherland’ evoked a sacrificial ritual. Occasionally, though, a personal connection to one the millions of prisoners, the many thousands of fallen soldiers, would penetrate this unreality. The deaths of Lore’s dancing-class partner, Klaus, and her slender blond schoolmate, Gerhard, receive only a brief mention, but such moments of chill reality stand out starkly against a general mood of intoxication, almost delirium, at Germany’s victories.
When victory over France came in June 1940, half of Europe was under German control, but more importantly, the humiliation of defeat was wiped out. United as never before, the Germans hailed Adolf Hitler as their idol. A breathless Lore Walb did her best to keep pace with events, flitting from one news item to the next.
It’s strange to think that these are moments of historic significance and that we ourselves are getting to see something of them. I don’t believe we’ve fully grasped what great times we are living in.
She dreamt of peace, believing after each victory that the happy ending was in sight. But the war showed no signs of stopping; instead it began to gnaw its way into day-to-day life. When Lore went to Munich to study, she saw young men with amputated arms and legs and battle-scarred faces, sometimes only a few seats away from her in the lecture theatre. Victors could also be losers.
The war went on, but after a while no further headway was made. People weren’t used to that. Lore Walb may have been politically naive, but she was good at gauging the general mood. When she sat down to write in her diary on 3 October 1940, she had no progress to report—no victory, no turning point. Even so, she sensed that something had happened. ‘For the first time since war broke out, my perpetual optimism is shaken. We’re not getting anywhere with England. It looks as if there’s something wrong.’