At some point in the course of 1943, René Juvet decided to return to Switzerland to escape disaster. Everyone in the factory in Augsburg envied him his emergency exit route. Waldmeyer had often made spiteful remarks about his lowly home country and its political conscience, but his congratulations were sincere. Juvet had lived twenty years among the Germans, half of them under Hitler. He concludes his memoirs by relating a late-night encounter on a branch-line train journey to Augsburg.
The train stopped at a station and an SS man entered Juvet’s empty compartment. It was so dark that Juvet couldn’t make out the man’s face except as a shadowy blur, but he could see that he was drunk and keen to talk. The man, who was on leave, had to drink to endure his job and get to sleep at night. He was stationed at Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, in northern Austria. The inmates—Jews and Eastern Europeans—were whipped to make them work harder. Anyone the guards wanted rid of they drove into the high-voltage wire fences around the camp. Some inmates went of their own accord. ‘I have to go back to the camp tomorrow,’ the SS man told Juvet, ‘but maybe I’ll end up running into those wires myself one of these days. I can’t take it anymore. How’s all this going to end?’
The guard was Catholic. He spoke of God, who surely wouldn’t let such deeds go unpunished; of the gloves worn by those high-and-mighty gentlemen so they wouldn’t dirty their own fingers; of the murderer they’d made of him. The drink had plunged him into self-pity; he felt used and betrayed, a victim of the Führer. The only way out he could think of was to commit suicide—to anticipate the end, now that victory was no longer attainable. Juvet said nothing. ‘No aspect of the German psyche was more clearly brought out by the war than the tendency towards contradictions and extremes.’
• • •
The hype of victory had died down, drowned out by the news from Stalingrad, Africa, Italy and the western coast of France. The Germans’ belief in their military omnipotence vanished, along with their trust in their leaders, who had, they felt, misled them with their propaganda. With no new triumphs to announce, the Führer made fewer speeches, staying out of the public eye. The sun that had warmed the German people became a distant star, and their love for their leader cooled to respect.
Then, on 20 July 1944, a bomb was detonated at Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia. Though Hitler escaped virtually unscathed, many of those present were injured and several were killed. The attempted assassination and the coup d’état that was to follow had been planned by the German resistance, and among the conspirators were many powerful military and political figures. The Gestapo would eventually arrest thousands of people in connection with the conspiracy, and execute around two hundred of them.
News of this failed attempt on Hitler’s life reignited the German people’s love for him, and the regime made the most of it, fanning the flames of their fury. The security service’s secret reports recorded an outpouring of shock and anger: all over the country, furious people gathered in spontaneous demonstrations of loyalty to their leader. Grave men and weeping women and children offered up prayers of thanks for Hitler’s survival.
Listening to the news of the attempted assassination on their radio, the Radeins had felt a sense of doom. Twelve-year-old Johann was shocked, as were his parents—as was everyone in the village. No one showed any sign of relief. His friend’s mother said out loud what they were all thinking: ‘What’s to become of us all?’ The mute tension persisted when they heard that the Führer was still alive. Johann Radein felt as if the world were holding its breath.
This speechlessness revealed an even greater depth and complexity to our connection with the Führer—a wholly personal spiritual and emotional bond—and a profound empathy for him as the target of the attack. I felt it myself.
In the dining area, next to the dresser—and opposite the crucifix—hung the Führer’s portrait. Johann had often stood and looked at it, enjoying the strength of resolve and confidence it had given him. Now the aura of invulnerability seemed even stronger. The attempted assassination brought the Germans closer to their Führer again. Like Hitler himself, they saw his survival as confirmation that God was on their side. Johann clung to the idea that God would see Germany safely through.
The possibility of defeat was never mentioned, even in the final months. In the last winter days of 1945, Johann stood in his Hitler Youth uniform in a crowded, freezing hall. An injured war veteran had come to talk, an indomitable spirit in a broken body. He spoke of fighting and staying the course, his voice rising and falling imploringly. Johann Radein felt awe rise in him again, though he shuddered too.
It was the last such event he was to attend. A few days later, as enemy forces advanced, his mother set him the task of getting Hitler out of the house.
Reluctantly I take the Führer’s portrait off the wall and wrap it in newspaper and a piece of roofing felt to protect it from damp. I bury the parcel in the garden. The picture leaves a pale oblong on the whitewashed kitchen wall.
Later, when Johann secretly tried to disinter the portrait, it had vanished from its grave.
• • •
When Renate Finkh heard on the morning of 21 July 1944 that the Führer was safe, she too believed it was divine intervention. She thought with chagrin of the doubts she’d had about the war, the sacrifice of human lives, the youth work she’d come to feel burdened by, and the temptation not to give a damn about any of it. ‘I was ashamed of my despondency and weariness. I knew I was now needed more than ever.’
Renate built a high wall inside herself to keep her thoughts at bay—to keep out the line of people with their stars of David, the Polish herd boy, the stinking turd in Fräulein Liebel’s shed; the ghosts she felt so defenceless against. She took refuge in the protective shadow of this wall. ‘In the chill of this shadow, my soul was frozen.’
It was in this state that she went through the events of the next months—her sudden release from school so she could go to Bavaria to do labour service, the bombing of her hometown, the rooting around in the pile of rubble where her father’s goldsmith’s shop had been, the Christmas party at the labour service camp—and the arrival of Allied troops on German soil. Renate saw all this with acute clarity, and yet she felt somehow detached from herself. ‘I could see that the end had come and that it would be a terrible, unthinkable end. But I wanted to stand by all I had said.’
• • •
Renate was dismissed from labour service and returned home to Ulm, thinking she’d report back to the Hitler Youth office there. Her father, who had never lost faith in the Führer and found hope even in the darkest situations, was in shock. Führer and Reich no longer existed for him. But Renate carried on regardless. She knew nothing else. ‘We’d got into a way of thinking that simply didn’t allow for collapse,’ she said. After all those years extolling duty and loyalty, she refused to believe that she might have been spouting empty words. In the almost deserted Hitler Youth office, she met the regional leader, who sent her home again. There was nothing left to do. ‘Everything I’d built my life on, my entire youth—it was all falling apart,’ Renate said.
When she returned to her childhood home, her father wasn’t welcoming. Something told Renate that he wasn’t sure whether to let her in. He, too, had lived for an illusion. His anger and shame at this made him brutal. He couldn’t share his despair with Renate. When the French arrived at the city limits, the two of them took flight on their bicycles. Renate’s father pedalled away like mad, without turning to look back at his daughter. The distance between them grew and grew.
• • •
The mythology surrounding Hitler had been revived after the assassination attempt in 1944, but it had lost the glow of hope and happiness associated with new beginnings. The Germans’ demigod became a grim god of hatred and revenge, a guard against Bolsheviks and ‘Anglo-Americans’, Jews and traitors. Many young people remembered the euphoria they had felt in the early years of the war; Hitler had lifted them above drab, everyday life and instilled values in them that had given their lives meaning. Now they looked to him to uphold those values; abandoning them was unthinkable. Any thought of what might come afterwards was terrifying. Adolf Hitler hadn’t allowed himself to contemplate armistice since the war had begun. After him there could be nothing. No Reich, no movement, no national community. He thought it only logical that he should take his people with him to his death.
Gerhard Starcke had seen the horrors of the eastern campaign and given a sketchy outline of them in his memoirs, but he’d kept them at arm’s length, not stopping to think too deeply about them, not questioning his own part in things. Starcke didn’t blame the Führer or the system; he blamed the traitors and sceptics. He had the regime to thank for his terraced house, and his position as company commander—and yet, despite all this, a small part of him remained vigilant, ready to sound the alarm.
In spring 1945, some days into the Battle of Berlin, Starcke found himself in a barracks lecture theatre with other propaganda officers, listening to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels prepare them for the final battle. Starcke had come across Goebbels several times over the course of the years, and always been bowled over by his rhetorical skill. ‘Even at this stage of the war, he remained an unrivalled rhetorician. A frightening fascination filled the room.’ Goebbels spoke once again of the necessity, the compulsion to emerge victorious, and of the fate of the German people, who could only win or go under. For that reason, he concluded, every one of them must stay at his post.
Starcke was all too familiar with the circular nature of this logic, but when the speech was over and he was about to leave, he was approached by Goebbels himself. Goebbels had recognised Starcke, and they fell to talking. If Starcke hadn’t heard the speech with his own ears, he wouldn’t have believed this was the same person. One on one, Goebbels was quite prepared to admit the possibility that the war was lost; he and his family would take the necessary steps and wouldn’t live to see the collapse of the Reich. Starcke was thunderstruck. Here was the Führer’s right-hand man and closest confidant, telling him that his own death, and that of his family, was as good as settled.
Those who had led the fight for Germany’s place in the sun had, in the end, only the darkness of death in their eyes, and dragged those who trusted them into the darkness with them.
Starcke knew now that there would be no final victory and resolved to think only of himself. To survive, he would have to forget everything else—Führer, fatherland, loyalty, betrayal, disappointment. Fate, in the form of Joseph Goebbels, had given him a glimpse of the truth which, like so much of reality, he had chosen to ignore. Gerhard Starcke managed to smuggle his family out of the city before the Soviets started their major offensive. On 3 May 1945, he surrendered to the Americans in Ratzeburg.
• • •
‘I was quite certain I wouldn’t survive the Third Reich. If it was doomed to go under, I would go with it.’ For twelve years, Melita Maschmann had been devoted to the Hitler Youth. Since being drafted to the Reich’s youth leadership in Berlin in 1943, she had been swallowed up by the bureaucratic apparatus. Her office had been repeatedly bombed out and relocated, and she had gone from one temporary office to the next, working with a kind of frantic compulsion on one project after another, only to see them thwarted by the war, meddled with by management, or dropped altogether. But, determined not to admit that anything was wrong, she and the others in her office continued to throw themselves into their work. Melita saw her offices as a termite mound pervaded by an unacknowledged sense of imminent collapse.
A swarming frenzy of activity filled every cell of the termite mound. We came up with plans and more plans, to keep ourselves from stopping and thinking, even for a moment—for then we’d have had to admit that all this industriousness was starting to look like the throes of a danse macabre.
Melita Maschmann kept up the frenzy—anything not to hear that voice inside her telling her there was no future. In September 1944, her parents were killed in the cellar of their house during an air raid. Melita, who was staying with them at the time, was the only one to escape alive. Hope died in her that morning, to be replaced by a grim fatalism. When she’d left home twelve years before to make Germany—and the world—a better, happier place, she’d been little more than a child. Now she was twenty-six, and as she stood contemplating the ruins of her parents’ house, she could no longer justify the sacrifice. After that, she was silent on the subject of Hitler and Germany. She didn’t rebel or ask questions, but from that day on, her support was no more than tacit.
During the Red Army’s offensive on Berlin, Melita accompanied Hitler Youth music groups into the trenches to entertain the soldiers. Later, she couldn’t recall a single conversation about impending defeat. She stared, as if hypnotised, into the abyss that was swallowing her up. She took to leaving the protection of the trench, ignoring the snipers and artillery fire—waiting for the bullet that would kill her.
I was filled with the hazy notion that ‘my world’ would be knocked out of its orbit like a star in a cosmic catastrophe and that I—a tiny speck of dust—would be swept away with it into the darkness. At times I must have felt a vague fear that I would miss my destined ‘downfall’ and end up surviving.
On 19 April 1945 she attended a ceremony in the domed hall of the Reich Sports Field in Berlin. The boom of Soviet artillery was already approaching from the east as the initiation of ten-year-old girls and boys into the Hitler Youth was celebrated one last time. The next day, Melita Maschmann left Berlin for southern Germany in a truck full of casualties. She moved as if through a thick fog. ‘I had no plans for the future.’
• • •
The Germans’ incomprehensibly long resistance was not only a result of the regime’s coercive terror and propaganda. They were also driven by a fear of the void and by the loss of a sense of purpose in life. They wanted to postpone the inevitable.
The future they had been promised was evaporating before their eyes. The Führer had left them, and the Reich was collapsing, leaving behind it a gaping void. After twelve years imbibing Nazi ideology, those who had believed in it, identifying as part of the national community and subscribing to its moral and social norms, faced not just a collective loss of meaning but the threat of personal disintegration. The emptiness they felt was palpable. Many genuinely believed that the victorious Allied forces would wipe out the German nation, and the best they could hope for was a life of oppression. Unwilling to face this reality, they chose suicide as a final act of resistance, of renunciation.
• • •
Lore Walb, the student diarist from Alzey, had shed her mask of optimism. Fear was now the dominant note in her journal. It had already been present in her hysterical outpouring of 29 November 1942: ‘What fate is in store for us??? Must we bow down again? Can heaven allow us to be destroyed???’ It had started to seem that the destruction the Germans had wrought on others would now be turned against them—against Lore herself. For her, the name Stalingrad evoked a monstrous, hulking figure with a brutish face and shorn head, bent on revenge. She hoped that German soldiers taken prisoner by the Russians would have the strength to commit suicide.
The question of the meaning of life was a recurring theme in the young woman’s diary. She sensed that her longing for a normal life, for a family and children, was at odds with world events, which seemed to be growing closer and closer.
But we mustn’t lose the war—what horrors would face us then! It’s no good thinking beyond the present day—it’s not even possible. Who’d have thought that the future would one day be so veiled in grey. What’s in store for us—if, that is, we’re ever to see the end of the war?
In March 1945, Lore’s fear of destruction made it impossible for her to imagine life after the collapse of the regime. Her fear of the Americans was scarcely less acute than her fear of the Russians. It was terrible to have to admit that all those victims had died in vain. For Lore Walb, 8 May 1945 was a black day. Germany’s unconditional surrender brought her no relief—only grief and distress. Her usually neat handwriting is shaky, uncontrolled, a clear sign of her turmoil. ‘My mind alone can comprehend this end—my heart will never manage. Victory celebrations—what a relief for the others. Peace—only for the others, not for us—never again.’ She almost weeps the words.
• • •
Martin Sieg, the boy from Rastenburg in East Prussia, had once seen the words ‘Better dead than slaves’ written on a beam in a Hitler Youth training home, but his own desire to survive was strong. On 2 May 1945, he swam across the Elbe into American captivity. It was the first day for years that he had no duties to carry out, no orders to follow, no need to fear for his life. He wasn’t prepared for the questions that besieged him, though, when he had time to stop and think.
What possible reason could there be to carry on living? Wasn’t it best just to put an end to it all? A lot of people were wondering that. Sometimes, after a long stretch of despair, I too found myself overcome by such dark thoughts.
No one tried to help him find a way out of the emptiness and confusion. He was left to deal with the question of meaning alone, turning it over and over in his mind, filling reams of paper with his thoughts. Martin Sieg had yet to hear the fate of his mother, who had hanged herself in January 1945, when the Red Army invaded Rastenburg. She had taken her life in the attic, together with two other women. Martin wouldn’t find out until months later, in a letter from his grandfather:
Your mum said goodbye, crying and kissing us and thanking us for all the good things. She had your father’s picture with her, and little Ilse’s and yours too, kissed them all and tucked them away, the tears running down her face. She was afraid to lose all three of you, or that she might have lost you already.
Marie Dabs, the furrier’s wife from Demmin, had never had any doubts about the meaning of her life. Her robust nature had got her through economic crises, illnesses and wartime hardships. She had adapted herself to life in the Third Reich without losing heart or mind; the Nazis’ death cult was alien to her. But when, in the last days of April 1945, she was caught up in the wave of suicide that crashed over Demmin, the mood of doom almost got the better of her. If she’d had poison to hand, she would have killed herself and her children.