Not only did the soldiers returning from the front paint a picture of war that in no way resembled a final drive for victory. Not only did they speak of unprecedentedly bloody battles, of hunger, cold and tedium. They also spoke of crimes committed against civilians in the name of the German people—crimes against men and women and children. Whenever Waldmeyer and the other party members were out of earshot, René Juvet and his colleagues heard about the things the soldiers had seen in the hinterland.
For reasons that were unclear, whole villages were wiped out. There was talk of unimaginable numbers of victims. Many of the soldiers present at the executions were left with lasting psychological damage.
A former colleague of Juvet told him about a colonel who had dispatched each of his men in turn to shoot civilians dead. He’d wanted to toughen the men up.
No German needed rely on third-party reports to know about the mass deportation of the Jewish people. In the 1930s, the regime had run several successive propaganda campaigns, preparing people for their removal, and when hostilities broke out in the east, the ‘race war’ against Jews and Bolsheviks was elevated to a life-and-death struggle. In September 1941, it became compulsory for Jewish people to wear yellow stars, so they could be distinguished at a glance. The Jews’ disappearance, too, was visible; they were removed in full public view.
Standing on a street corner where they’d arranged to meet, Renate Finkh and her friend Greta went quiet when they saw a long line of people pass. Cowering figures, their eyes fixed on the ground, the stars of David on their coats and jackets a bright, shining yellow. Men in uniform were herding them to the station. A friend of Greta’s mother happened to pass by at the same time and stopped to whisper something in Greta’s ear. When the two girls were alone again, Renate didn’t have to pester her friend for long. ‘Those people’—she jerked her head at the group of Jews, now only visible from behind—‘they’re going to Poland. They’ll all be killed there.’ Renate shuddered, but later said she didn’t know what she was afraid of. Soon after this monstrous secret was revealed to Renate, the street corner was full of everyday bustle again, as if the line of people had never existed. The memory of an old Jewish schoolmate pushed its way into Renate’s mind. But the image was blotted out by a shadow.
From then on, I knew. For the first time, I thought to myself: A lot of what happens shouldn’t be allowed to happen. But we young people were being called on to pit good against evil. I kept the evil I wanted to fight hidden in shadow.
Renate pushed a great deal of what she saw and heard into this shadow. It was like the silence that confronted her at every turn. The silence of her mother, who stifled her sympathy and told her they couldn’t afford to show compassion until after the war. The silence over afternoon coffee with Frau Cornelius, whose goddaughter had been committed to a psychiatric clinic. The girl had been sent home from her service in occupied Poland after six months, a physical and psychological wreck. ‘What did the Poles do to her?’ Renate asked in horror. The two women look at her and said nothing. Eventually Renate managed to worm out of them that it had nothing to do with the Poles.
She thought of her own service in the east, of the peasant woman and the Polish boy in the cow pasture. Immediately the shadow descended. She knew not to ask any more questions if she didn’t want to compromise her faith and loyalty. Soon afterwards, her brother-in-law Werner came home on leave from the Eastern front. He paced up and down in his room, holding his ears and shouting, to drown out the screams in his head. Renate was told only fragments of what he had seen. Her sister said curtly: ‘We have to win this war or it will be awful.’
• • •
Violence was so ubiquitous as to have become normal. Johann Radein, still a member of the Hitler Youth, felt sucked in by it; the violent acts condoned and even glorified by the grown-ups seemed to him inevitable, intrinsic to human nature. But this didn’t make them any less frightening. The cold tyranny of the law of the strongest left Johann feeling numb and scared and helpless.
On his way home from the neighbouring village of Wonsheim one evening, he and a schoolfriend saw a group of local SA men at a crossroads, haranguing some foreign labourers—Poles and Russians who’d been doing heavy farm work in the area for years; Johann knew most of them by sight. Suddenly, as if at a signal, the Brownshirts began to punch and club and kick them until, one after the other, they fell to the ground. Then they kicked them some more, ramming their boots into the men’s bellies and heads, with dull cracking sounds. Johann and his friend watched from a distance, struck dumb with horror. They crept away over the fields until all they could hear was men’s voices and laughter.
It was a long time before Johann’s pulse steadied. He and his friend trotted along next to each other in helpless silence, until suddenly one of them said into the quiet of the night: ‘If the Führer only knew.’
‘He can’t know everything,’ the other replied.
‘Maybe he knows more than we think.’
They couldn’t believe what they’d witnessed. The next day they heard that the Brownshirts had wanted to send a warning to forced labourers. The boys saw the injured and bandaged men around for some time to come. ‘That traumatic incident left its mark on my friend and me,’ Johann said.
Part of the reason that belief in final victory flickered up one last time towards the end of the war was people’s presentiment of their own guilt. That presentiment made Germany’s impending defeat a taboo subject. Instead, people told each other of their hope. Talk of providence and God’s support took on more urgent overtones. ‘But what will come after defeat?’ Johann Radein wondered. It seemed beyond the imaginative and intellectual powers even of the adults around him.
• • •
It wasn’t only the leading figures of the regime who burnt their bridges at the start of the war of extermination. Victory or downfall—the slogan captured the national mood. René Juvet noticed that, having heard about the crimes in the east, his colleagues were afraid of retribution. Hardly anyone denied these things in private. ‘We have to stay the course,’ they said. ‘There’s no knowing what form the Russians’ revenge will take if they win the war.’ This argument persisted, Juvet noted, because there was a certain logic to it.
Juvet’s factory colleagues were a good example of the paradox of German staying power: the worse the war was going—the crueller the executions and the more brutal the mass slaughter—the more frightened the German people became, and the more urgent their desire not to lose the war at any price. René Juvet often heard people say: ‘If Germany loses, every German will be killed.’
Fuelled by subliminal feelings of guilt, shame and complicity, reinforced by a long-fomented hatred of the enemy, the Germans’ fear of defeat fed a final, grand, collective delusion—that defeat could still be averted.