One Sunday morning, Renate’s mother shook her awake. She never usually came into her room to wake her. Half-asleep, Renate heard her say they were at war with Russia. She looked up through the skylight at a blue oblong of clear summer sky. ‘Mum’s standing in front of me. She looks even graver than usual and a little helpless. I suddenly realise that it’s war for real.’
As they sat at the wireless, dread gripped them. The tinny voice coming from the radio spoke of the million-strong ‘red hordes’ and of the chain of German soldiers reaching from Finland to the Black Sea—the iron chain against Bolshevik Russia they’d heard so much about. Renate’s father was optimistic, reassured by the victories against Poland and France. Her mother remained grave. Renate Finkh had the impression that what had gone before had been no more than a prelude to real war.
• • •
In all the diaries and memoirs of the time, the beginning of the Russian campaign on 22 June 1941 is like a thick, black dividing line. At dawn, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union on a broad front. Later, everyone would remember the moment of shock—where they were, how they heard, what they felt. It marked a deep caesura. Everything that had come before paled into insignificance. No one would be left untouched. It wasn’t so much the surprise that made for such a violent shock; after all, rumours had been circulating for some time. It was the fear of the suddenly gaping abyss. This war would be different. It would determine Germany’s fate.
‘That moment on the morning of 22 June 1941 was the only time until 1945 when I seriously wondered whether Hitler had acted wisely and responsibly,’ Melita Maschmann said. In Lindau, on the shores of Lake Constance, where she was on leave with her parents, she heard snatches of a loudspeaker broadcast from a cafe garden. A few holidaymakers were gathered round a radio set. She recognised Hitler’s voice, announcing the invasion of the Soviet Union. It all flashed through her mind at once: the demoralising two-front war twenty years before, the terrifying vastness of the Soviet Union, the ghastly Bolsheviks, Napoleon’s retreat in that icy winter. No one in the cafe garden said a word.
The people around me had gloomy faces. We avoided one another’s eyes and stared out across the lake. The opposite shore was hidden by grey cloud. There was something cheerless in the air on that dull summer’s morning. Before the broadcast was over, it had started to rain.
Melita walked dispiritedly along the shores of the lake, the water lapping listlessly against the quay wall. She was exhausted after spending the night on the train and felt very small. She knew what this new campaign meant. The war would go on for many more years. It would claim an incalculable number of victims.
• • •
Only in January, Hermann-Friedrich Cordes had quoted to his mother the Führer’s prophecy that 1941 would bring ultimate victory to the Germans. On 21 June he wrote to his parents from the Soviet border region where his infantry regiment had been posted.
My dears, by the time you get this letter, you too will have heard what we already know. This morning we learnt for certain that the attack on the USSR will begin tomorrow. Strange feeling, knowing twenty-four hours in advance.
Over the next four weeks, Ilse Cordes received regular letters from her son telling her about Russia’s boundless expanses, the exertion of the march, the encounter with the enemy and what he planned to do after the victory. On 8 July he sent her a fond birthday letter. ‘I’d like to embrace you with all my heart and thank you for what you’ve done for your little rascal of a son, and for the big rascal. Keep well and happy and don’t let the sun of your heart go down on your Reich!’
It was his second-to-last letter. On 18 July he died at Karoly, in an insignificant battle that got no mention in any report. The account Ilse Cordes wrote of her son’s brief life includes two photographs. In one, a boy in uniform is laughing, his face turned shyly from the camera. The other shows a cluster of roughly hewn birch crosses in front of a group of trees. Somewhere in a Russian copse, Ilse Cordes lost her only child.
‘Despite the hard blows that fate deals him and his parents, he is always smiling as he walks his short path through this world to his premature end.’ On the twenty-two closely written pages of her little book, Ilse Cordes struggles repeatedly to wrest some sense out of Hermann-Friedrich’s death. She writes of his faith in Germany, of his willing devotion to the great cause, the crowning of his life, the ultimate sacrifice, of God, eternity and her son’s last deed. She explains everything with reference to his end. ‘He didn’t give his life in a rush of fleeting enthusiasm or in the heat of youthful passion. He gave it in all clarity, in the calm consciousness of higher things.’
But despite the high-flown protests and the patriotic words of comfort, Ilse Cordes’ despair shines through. The greatest loss of her life forced on her the implacable question of meaning. She couldn’t bear the thought that the sacrifice she and her son had made might be in vain. What remains is a broken mother’s stifled scream.
Hermann-Friedrich Cordes’ death in a nameless copse was lost in the ocean of death and suffering brought by the war of extermination in the east. An average of two thousand soldiers died every day on the German side; among the Red Army soldiers, the figure was five times higher, and the killing of civilians added to the death toll. Every day, several pages in the German newspapers were filled with the notices of men killed in action. The deeper the soldiers penetrated into enemy territory, the more lost their lives and the wider the repercussions at home. Until the summer of 1941, the war had barely touched daily life in Germany. The war in the east changed everything. The horror that gripped people in that first instant of shock was there to stay.
When Marie Dabs heard about the attack on Russia on 22 June as she breakfasted on a hotel terrace, she cut short her holiday in Eisenach and caught the sleeper back to Demmin. She was deeply shaken. The foundations on which she had laboriously built her life were crumbling, the walls cracking and caving in, one by one. Her husband, a soldier since the beginning of the war, had more or less vanished from her life. When the advance continued into the winter, she had to empty her fur shop. The coats and muffs she was so proud of were driven off to the front. One of her seamstresses had to be dismissed; her apprentice was called up. She, meanwhile, had to stand in the gym at the boys’ school with her sewing machine, repairing furs for the war effort. ‘We received quantities of furs, piles and piles, but did they ever reach our freezing soldiers who were in such bad need of them? I rather think not.’
The streets of her beloved hometown were changing. Shops closed down and didn’t reopen. Windows were black and sightless behind blackout blinds. Young and middle-aged men vanished. Their parents looked distraught. Marie Dabs saw women with mask-like faces, their make-up harsh against their pale skin. Her nephew Siegfried was missing in Russia; so was Wilhelm, her daughter’s heart-throb. Her youngest apprentice, Kurt, had to leave the Hitler Youth because of his Jewish roots. Then the labour exchange sent a letter, calling him away to do ‘labour service’. Marie Dabs, who was on good terms with the local group leader of the party, asked for Kurt to be allowed to stay on in her strategically important business, as he was her last remaining male employee. ‘By then, even we small-town people had worked out where the “labour service” would end up.’
Her children, Nanni and Otto, spent the summer doing harvest work, before being called to do ‘service in the east’. Marie Dabs’ salesgirl and the last of her seamstresses were also called east. ‘They all had to go off and shovel ditches to halt the Russians’ advance,’ she complained. ‘Nothing could stop the Russian steamroller.’ The shop and flat in Luisenstrasse stood empty. For the first time in her life, Marie Dabs felt abandoned. ‘It was horrible for me,’ she said. ‘I was suddenly all alone.’ Marie Dabs fell sick and had to close her shop. She spent her birthday in an empty flat, lonely and despondent.
When the blitzkrieg against the Soviets came to a standstill in late 1941, disillusionment with the Nazi regime began to set in. But it wasn’t a sudden loss of faith that gave people the strength and courage to resist; it was gradual, excruciatingly slow and passive.
In Augsburg, where Swiss notary René Juvet did his work in the factory and recorded his impressions of Germany, the mood had changed dramatically, but so had working life. The reality of fighting a war on two fronts came as an immense shock to the people of Augsburg. ‘The war had carved deep furrows in the face of the German nation. Even our little factory didn’t go untouched.’
More and more men were called to the front, and the empty factory was filled with forced labourers from abroad. The threat of receiving call-up papers loomed over the heads of the managers, who made no secret of envying Juvet the Swiss passport they’d so often teased him about. Waldmeyer was fierce and arrogant one moment, nervous and cagey the next. His optimism had dried up. Juvet noticed that he’d stopped wearing his party badge except at official events. Hofmann, the old-guard Nazi, was a broken man; something had changed in him since his son had fallen in the march on Moscow. None of them could mention the war to him.
The wounded who returned from battle told stories different from those in the press—tales of monstrous losses, savage carnage and opponents who fought with more conviction than the Germans. In April 1942, Weinmann, the senior accountant, returned from the Eastern front on leave. Juvet found him robbed of all hope.
Germany, he said, could only bleed to death hopelessly in this lunatic enterprise. The Russians’ power was completely unbroken and he didn’t see the point of this war.
In the face of joyless reality, the Nazis’ propaganda made frequent and determined efforts to rekindle the Germans’ hatred for the enemy and a belief in purpose and victory. War reporter Gerhard Starcke, who had been allocated to the army in the east, was convinced that there was no option other than National Socialist rule or a Bolshevik reign of terror. He never gave anyone cause to doubt his faith in the party line, but it didn’t escape his notice that the German military used methods identical to those he reported on daily in the land of the Soviet beast. He would write of ‘Bolshevik looting’ as his countrymen looted and murdered right in front of him. He would condemn ‘Bolshevik exploitation’, knowing that the Germans were preparing to enslave populations in the east on an unprecedented scale. The Russian campaign brought home to him more than ever the lying, deceitful nature of German propaganda. Little of what he read and wrote tallied with what he saw.
Back at home, the news of the inexorable forward march of the Germans and their liberation of enslaved eastern peoples formed part of a set ritual. The ‘travelling cinema’ brought weekly newsreels to villages like Siefersheim, where Johann Radein lived. He and his friends from the junior branch of the Hitler Youth sat next to each other in the semi-darkness of an improvised projection room, thrilling at the triumphal fanfare with which each reel began. The speakers’ voices were charged with tension. They bombarded the audience with figures that surpassed the limits of imagination—numbers of prisoners, numbers of dead, quantities of looted material. As Johann Radein watched the endless winding columns of Soviet POWs pour over the horizon on their way to German captivity, they seemed to him like alien beings.
His child’s mind could make no sense of the excesses. ‘I was often overwhelmed by a stifling fear, too immense to express or describe. I went around feeling a faint, numb inner tension at the monstrousness of what was happening.’ But he wanted to be a soldier all the same—to risk his life for his country. Almost all the boys from Siefersheim dreamt of dying heroes’ deaths at the front. It was only next door at the Espenschieds’ that the swastika flag never waved. When Ernst Espenschied was called up soon after his elder brother Philipp, the Radeins heard the boys’ father cursing loudly. Johann’s mother sometimes sent him round to ask if he could do anything for the neighbours. Frau Espenschied always received him with undisguised grief, showing him mementos of her sons, as if she’d already lost them. The twelve-year-old boy stood there, mute and helpless, hoping she wouldn’t notice the tears in his eyes.
Fear, pain and grief catch up with Frau Espenschied at every turn, as she talks of her sons and waits daily for post from them. On one occasion she’s so distraught that I turn away from her and set to work because I can’t bear to see her grief.
Death and violence put down roots in family life. Grief and fear on the one hand, hatred and ruthlessness on the other, had German society in their grip—and as the war went on, and family after family was affected by it in some way, their hold only strengthened.
On the way to the funeral of her sister-in-law, who had died in childbirth, Renate Finkh felt the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the dark clothes she and her parents were wearing. But they were not, she realised, the only ones; the streets were filled with people dressed in black. She was suddenly aware of the grief all around her. So far, the boys in her family had remained unscathed. Her brother-in-law Werner had recently been wounded again, narrowly escaping the disaster of Stalingrad. Rainer, who was home on convalescent leave, refused to speak of the front. ‘He turned up on the doorstep one day and I didn’t recognise him,’ Renate said. ‘The slender, rather soft boy had hardened into an aloof stranger.’ She noticed others around her who seemed similarly afflicted by grief. ‘Grey, stony women’s faces. Weeping mothers. Eyes full of uncertainty. But towards me they remained cool.’
Renate Finkh continued her work for the Hitler Youth, which was doing its best to rouse Germany’s weary youths into action with sports and cultural activities. She went along with it all, though she was starting to feel drained, and was so pale and tired that she fell asleep at her school desk. ‘The days ticked on like clockwork and I was driven along, with no way of stopping.’
In summer 1943, the obligatory ‘service in the east’ jolted Renate out of her apathy. She, too, was sent to Wartheland to help Germans who had been settled on the farms of displaced Poles. In Posen she was met by a pretty, bubbly representative of the League of German Girls, eager to whip up support for her mission. This girl talked of the Poles: there was no need to be shy or polite in the presence of these creatures; they mustn’t be allowed to forget that the Germans were members of the master race. Listening to her, Renate remembered a conversation she’d heard at home, soon after the 1939 invasion of Poland, about settling the new territory. You could just throw the rich Poles out of their flats, someone had said. Get out, pigs. Easy as that. ‘I remember shivering at the feeling of power that crept through me when I heard that. I was thirteen. It gave me the chills.’ Four years had passed since then, and Renate was no longer a child, though not yet a woman, when she arrived in the remote village on the eastern border. By then most of the Polish inhabitants had been driven out.
Renate was sent to the only German family who had been living there all along. She was horrified at the dirt and mess, and at the superstitions of these people—Germans, like her, and representatives of their shared culture—but she gritted her teeth as she’d been taught and wiped and swept her way through the filth, looked after the sick peasant woman and taught her the basics of hygiene. On one occasion, a local Nazi leader called in to check on her work. Greedy-eyed, he began to grope Renate, holding her arms tight, while the peasant woman watched from her bed, laughing. With some effort, Renate wriggled free of his grasp. She swallowed her shock and her shame, and wrote not a word on the matter in her enthusiastic reports on her time in the east; she was ashamed of her fellow Germans.
Towards the end of Renate’s stay in Wartheland, the peasant woman sent her out to the cow pasture to give the Polish herd boy a beating. If she didn’t, he’d let the cows run away, the woman said. You had to beat Polacks or they disobeyed. Renate went hot and cold. ‘A German girl can do anything,’ said a voice in her head. ‘A German girl must be able to do everything!’ Slowly she walked onto the pasture, clutching the stick the woman had given her. Her legs were like jelly; fear pounded in her throat. The boy—her height, skinny and ragged—was far out in the fields. He only grinned and shrugged when she drew near and addressed him. She summoned all her courage and hit him on the leg with the stick—brushed him with it, really, rather than hitting him, but she’d done it. She saw his wild eyes flash with anger and hatred. He raised his hand. She stood there as if rooted to the spot. Then he dropped it again and walked off. ‘His hate-filled eyes haunted me day and night,’ Renate said. ‘I only had to look at myself to learn that completely ordinary people can become tacit supporters and thugs. Why not murderers, too?’ This was another episode that she left out of her report on her adventures in Wartheland. She didn’t want anyone to know.
The service camp that Melita Maschmann was in charge of during her time in the east was in the middle of nowhere, forty kilometres from the railway. Apart from a handful of German officials, there were only Poles living in the village. A few days after Melita’s arrival, she heard a siren and, coming out of the camp into the village, saw columns of smoke over the thatched roofs. ‘That day, I met the evil in myself, without realising.’
People came pouring out of their houses, running into each other, all shouting at once. Some of them pulled their animals out of the sheds or dragged furniture onto the road. Melita pressed herself up against the wall of a house. A woman with tangled hair and torn clothes clung to her, but Melita pulled herself free and pushed the woman away as hard as she could. She ordered the villagers about, chivvying them as they put out the flames. With nothing to lose in the fire herself, she felt remote, superior.
What was evil was the chilliness with which I moved about among those unfortunate people. I saw their fear and plight as if in a film: none of it touched me. I remember having particularly acute powers of observation. I wanted to know exactly how people act in such a desperate situation.
The villagers who lost their houses and livestock to the fire were her enemies. A few weeks later Melita Maschmann stood alongside a truncheon-wielding SS officer, helping him to expel Polish farmers from their farms as part of a resettlement drive. She felt their disgust, but they feared her too. She felt like a soldier at the front, fighting an enemy nation.