Death of a Nation Read online

  I studied history at the University of East Anglia under such notables as Professor Sir Richard J. Evans, now Regius Professor of History at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and one of the foremost authorities on the Third Reich, whose three-volume best-selling history of the Nazi era is, to date, the most comprehensively written book on the subject in the English language. I am fortunate to have studied alongside W.G. (Max) Sebald, the award-winning author of The Emigrants and On The Natural History Of Destruction, whose work helped to start the debate about the impact of the bombing of German cities upon the post-war psyche of the nation. I am also indebted to former tutors and great academic minds such as Dr John Biggart and Ian Farr, senior lecturers in Russian and East European history, and modern German history respectively. All of the above have helped to inspire this book in one way or another.

  I spent the tumultuous year of 1988/89 studying at the University of Berlin where I was fortunate to encounter a prolonged general strike on the part of students and professors alike, which gave me the opportunity to travel through Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe at the height of the demonstrations that soon swept away both communism and the inhuman death strip that had divided Berlin, Germany and the continent of Europe for two generations. I was lucky enough to witness and share in the joy of the demise of this inhuman division. I continued my academic studies at the University of Leuven (Louvain, established by Erasmus in 1425 in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium), taking a Masters Degree in European Studies, graduating Magna cum laude in 1991. I then took a teaching position at an international college where I taught English and history. In more recent years, as part of my research for this book, I have interviewed members of what the Germans call the ‘Erlebnisgeneration’ (the generation of survivors) and attended a variety of seminars and lectures on German history at the Akademie Mitteleuropa at the Heiligenhof in Bad Kissingen and the Hohenburg on the German/Czech border.

  My upbringing was influenced by my father, who was a navigator in the RAF and had a keen interest in German history, and my mother who had grown up in the post-war ruins of Frankfurt am Main in Western Germany. My mother lost friends who had stumbled upon unexploded ordnance while playing in the rubble. My German grandparents, when pressed, would recall vivid stories of the horror of war and the bombing in particular. These stories and influences ignited my interest in my mixed heritage, however the football games between England and Germany were so fraught with family tensions that they put me off the beautiful game for life!

  My German grandfather was extremely lucky. He escaped conscription into the German Wehrmacht (armed forces), and avoided the suicidal and desperate last-ditch defence by the Volkssturm (Dad’s Army) to defend Germany in the final months of the war. During the war he had worked at a large industrial combine in Frankfurt called the Adlerwerke. Before the war, and again afterwards, the Adlerwerke were known for making precision typewriters. However, during the Second World War, like all factories the company turned their production to armaments, particularly to the manufacture of aircraft. When I asked Opa (Grandad), ‘What did you do in the war?’ in an effort to cut short yet another conversation about the war my mother answered for him. She said, ‘He made typewriters.’ My father would joke, ‘Fat lot of use that would have been to the war effort. I can just see your father lobbing typewriters out of a window at the advancing Americans!’

  In reality, my German grandfather was a Feinmechaniker, a precision engineer who would make ever-larger scale models of specialist machinery, which were used to produce specialist armaments. Time after time he was called up but received a dispensation from his boss from being sent to the front mainly because his work was ‘vital to the war effort’. His brothers did not have such luck. My grandfather was a lifelong Social Democrat (a socialist), and always voted for a party that was anything but sympathetic towards the Nazis. The Social Democrats had been the largest political movement in Germany since before the First World War; together with the Communists, they were the fiercest opponents of the Nazis both in parliament and on the streets. Ironically, while my grandfather was no supporter of the Nazis he, like millions of other Germans, was conscripted to work in its armament factories, whilst many of his brothers were conscripted and sent to the front. That is the nature of a dictatorship. Refusal was not an option; it would have meant being held under arrest by the Gestapo and imprisonment at a concentration camp where he would have awaited certain death for sabotage. In Diary of a Man in Despair, published after the war, the Prussian aristocrat Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen gave a moving testimony to the all-pervasive and stifling power of the Nazi German police state and the tools it used to silence opposition. This should be compulsory reading for those who claim all Germans should have shown more moral courage in resisting Hitler. Malleczewen was imprisoned and beaten to death for simply keeping a diary that was critical of the regime.(2)

  My grandmother was born in November 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War. Her family, like millions across Europe, was marked by the ‘Great War’, her father came home crippled from a mustard gas attack and died of the consequences, leaving a widow with three young children. In later life my grandmother was plagued with osteoporosis due to the poor diet and famine she endured during the war years. For much of the 1930s my grandmother worked as a seamstress for a Jewish family business, which specialised in quality textiles and leatherwear goods with branches in London, New York and Johannesburg. She liked working there, and said the company had always looked after her. Her time at the firm came to an abrupt end on the 9th November 1938 when Joseph Goebbels goaded Nazi thugs to vandalise Jewish shops, their property and to attack Jewish citizens. In what became known as Reichskristallnacht — the night of broken glass — most of Germany’s synagogues were set ablaze. The following day, a group of Brown Shirts entered the shop floor, dragged the owner out of his office and kicked him down the stairs. He was never heard from again. The company was now under new ownership. My grandfather forbade my grandmother to return, and from that time on she worked from home, making clothes for friends and neighbours.

  The war, which to my grandparents had previously seemed a distant affair, arrived with a vengeance in the autumn of 1942. First my grandmother received a letter stating that her oldest brother had been killed in Russia. A month later, her mother died as a result of a bombing raid, and then my grandfather was arrested, beaten, and held by the Gestapo for making ‘defeatist statements’ regarding the bombing. Nearly a year to the day of my great-grandmother’s death, my grandparents were bombed out and only narrowly escaped asphyxiation in their cellar, due to the bravery of a young fireman who risked the flames to get them and their neighbours out of their shelter. My grandparents were forced to spend much of the rest of the war apart, as my grandfather was moved from one location to another, as the factory had to keep moving production. My grandmother was bombed out a further four times during the course of the war, until she was evacuated out of a completely devastated Frankfurt to the countryside. She waited out the remainder of the war there, until the Americans arrived and requisitioned the farmhouse of the family that had taken her in.

  My mother was born on 16th May 1947. Had she been born six months earlier, her chances of survival in the hunger winter of 1946–47 would have been severely curtailed. Medication, food and heating fuel were in such short supply that infant mortality rates reached 90 per cent in many of Germany’s bombed-out cities. In later years, my mother learned perfect English and French, and could get by in Spanish and Italian. She was part of a generation that grew up in the ruins of war and looked to the future to rebuild; the first generation of the ‘Great Rapprochement’ between France and Germany that Adenauer and De Gaulle launched in order to bring peace between Germany and her Erbfeind (inherited enemy). She was one of the first students to be sent to France on a language exchange. Her father took her to the border where the French family collected her. During the drive to their home, they stopped for refreshments at a restaur
ant where the waiter, upon hearing my mother’s accent, spat at her and said he refused to serve Germans. She was only sixteen. A similar incident happened in the town where the family lived, and a brawl ensued. This French family were going against the grain at the time; most French people had anything but rapprochement in mind. The Franco-German alliance was still far from a reality. My mother subsequently never made much of her German origins. She worked on improving her accent and looked forward to a more international and less prejudiced future. For much of my mother’s generation, being proud to be German was anathema. The last thing her schoolteacher had said to her class on the day they graduated was, ‘Keep your heads down when you go abroad.’ My mother came to love France, her first long-term relationship was with an American, and she eventually married an Englishman. This did not endear her to my grandmother who said she’d ‘only left out the Russians’, and that she had married the man who had bombed her out of her flat. My grandmother felt the war had robbed her of those closest to her, had darkened the best years of her life, left her with an uncertain future and an enduring sense that the world beyond her immediate horizons was a dark and foreboding place. Nevertheless, what I loved about my German grandparents, in stark contrast to my own generation, was that they were comfortable in their own skin. Their ability to recall a united, free and democratic Germany no doubt greatly contributed to that sense of rootedness in the culture in which they had grown up. The notion that Germany was only the twelve years of National Socialism would have seemed as irrational to them as it was insulting. The war created an enormous generation gap. Post-war West Germans sought refuge in internationalism, particularly in the supranationalism of the European Union. The Germans have become staunch supporters of the UN, the EU, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords, global initiatives on climate change, and many other supranational organisations and causes. If it has an international prefix, the Germans are all for it. Post-war Germans have indulged in what one German journalist has called ‘a kind of self-righteous hate and loathing of their own nationality’ and have all too gladly traded in their national identity for a more comfortable European one. Nevertheless, there are no shortages of commentators, not least in Eastern Europe and to a lesser extent also in Britain, who want to keep the spectre of a dangerously resurgent Germany alive. Charles Roy wrote of an interview with a Polish politician who said, ‘The Germans have not changed, they are just resting.’(3) Whereas Matthias Mattussek, the Der Spiegel journalist and brother of the former German Ambassador to Britain, who gave the British tabloids a field day when he told them to stop going on about the war, has written that post-war Germans have become ‘illiterates in the vocabulary of nationalism’.(4)

  When I set out to write a history of Germany and contextualise the nature of Germany’s losses during and after the Second World War, there was no shortage of former tutors and history professors who urged me not to write another chapter on ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. I was told, ‘It’s still too early to write about the horrors inflicted on Germany at the end of the war.’ An American historian told me, ‘You’ve got a hell of a job on your hands trying to get people to feel sympathetic towards the Germans.’ A historian from New Zealand simply said, ‘Who gives a shit about what happened to the Germans?’ While a Czech doctor said to me quite openly, ‘I know what happened to the Germans, and what people did to them at the end of the war, and I don’t care. It was the best thing we ever did, to be rid of them one way or another.’

  These comments, along with those of Tony Judt, Daniel Goldhagen and many others, which continually attempt to saddle all Germans with an eternal sense of ‘collective guilt’, are the primary motivations behind my desire to write this book. No nation possesses a collective soul, and one cannot ascribe to an entire people the attributes of intention and knowledge that can morally and legally only be ascribed to an individual. Not all Germans were guilty, either then or now, any more than all Americans are responsible for the deaths of innocents in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, or all Brits are responsible for the death of 3 million African slaves, or all Spaniards for multiple genocides inflicted in the ‘New World’. As the British historian of the Holocaust and the Second World War, Laurence Rees, states, ‘We mustn’t cherry-pick history for what makes us feel morally superior.’(5)

  Historiography

  In his excellent book, Germany: A New History, Hagen Schulze never fails to set German history in its broader context, avoids the dry academic thematic approach and reminds readers by means of an empathetic wide-ranging narrative of just how much views on Germany’s history have changed over time. I was particularly taken by this wonderful summary of the way many Germans once saw their own history and what they make of it today:

  Earlier generations of Germans were in no doubt about what their history was. It began with Hermann of the Cherusci, who defeated the legions of Quinctilius Varus in battle in the Teutoburg Forest in the year AD 9… From Hermann and his battle, German history swept in a great, clearly defined arc down to their day. There was Theoderic, king of the Goths, then came Charlemagne — Karl der Große — who became Roman emperor and transformed the Romans’ empire into a German one. There followed the Staufen emperor Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II… Next came Martin Luther, the ‘German nightingale’, and Emperor Charles V, on whose dominions the sun never set; Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa, who battled one another when disunity among the German tribes reached its tragic climax; Baron vom Stein and Blücher, nicknamed ‘Marshal Forward’, and finally Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, who forged the new German Reich, a direct descendant of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It made for an imposing gallery of ancestral portraits, in which Germans took pride. But then came what the historian Friedrich Meinecke called the ‘German catastrophe’, Hitler’s Reich and the Second World War, which left the German nation state shamed, occupied and divided… The shining legend of the unbroken ascent of Germany from empire to empire was replaced by the black legend of evil and its ruinous divergent path (Sonderweg), in which the only true Germany consisted of the Third Reich and its crimes, except when some declared it was pointless to write national history at all… (6)

  Schulze’s summary describes the period until the Second World War based on the national historical narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were common among all the great European nations. The historiography of Germany for much of the first four decades after the Second World War, on the other hand, played its part in firmly establishing the notion that the German historical train wreck was an inevitable outcome of its history, and that all German history was merely a prelude to the Third Reich.

  For over a millennium, the Roman view of history dominated, with the emphasis on the ‘Great Men of History’. The nineteenth-century historian, Thomas Carlyle, wrote: ‘The history of the world is the history of great men.’ Termed the ‘heroic view of history’, this predominated the thinking of many of the great German philosophers of the nineteenth century, from Hegel to Nietzsche and this became the favoured form of history that was taught in schools throughout Europe. As a result, these ‘Great Men of History’ remained on their pedestals and survived well into the twentieth century, where they heavily influenced such publications as the Encyclopedia Britannica, until they rapidly began to fall out of favour shortly after the Second World War.

  The Marxist school of historiography and the French Annales School were perhaps responsible for the greatest changes in the study of history during the twentieth century; favouring social scientific methods, they moved away from the study of political and diplomatic history. Members of the school, such as Fernand Braudel, essentially adapted the study of history into less subjective and more scientific methods that were based on the study of more quantitative evidence and the use of socio-economic data. From the 1960s onwards, the ideas of the Annales School inspired much of the historical establishment to study ever more narrow parcels of history i
n an attempt to cover more topics in greater depth, including the role of class, confessionalism, industrialisation, education, feminism and sexuality, among many others. Post Braudel, the school also played its part in increasing the focus on regionalism, a trend that went to extreme lengths in the 1980s. A facetious example of this being the study of what the villagers of Kosel in Upper Silesia had for breakfast between 1920–33, and how this affected their bowel movements and voting habits! Suffice to say these commendable efforts to deepen our understanding of history by focusing on a wider array of specialised aspects may have resulted in us losing sight of the wood for the trees. Regrettably, during this same period, the value and achievements of the individual have virtually been painted out of history altogether. The historical establishment went from one extreme to another.

  The study of German history in particular has long been at the core of the debate about how history should be studied. No other nation’s history has been pored over in more detail or undergone such rigid scrutiny. At the heart of this debate exists the notion of the German Sonderweg (special path or ‘Third Way’) between the more liberal traditions of Western democracy and the tsarist autocracy in Russia. The term Sonderweg was first coined in the nineteenth century and was used with pride by German historians at the time, when they advocated that the German Third Way had helped to avoid revolution from below — via the practice of enlightened absolutism and authoritarian democracy from above — preserving ‘German values’ from the ‘decadence of the West’ and the ‘backward servitude of the East’. But the First World War, and then the Nazi era reshaped this view of a special German Third Way. Some German historians, including Sebastian Haffner, attempted to pin the blame on Hitler as an aberration, whereas Anglo-Saxon commentators such as the British diplomat and author of Black Record: Germans Past and Present, Robert Vansittart, began to forcefully argue that Nazism was yet the latest manifestation of ‘German difference’ in a long succession since the barbarian Germanic tribes were at the gates of Rome.(7) These views dovetailed neatly into wartime propaganda and were given additional longevity with the horrifying discovery of the Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war.