Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945 — a Book Review

07 March 2017

Why read The German War?

Thoughtful readers of Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War will recognize that the rationalizations which justified the Holocaust and German military aggression during the World War II in German minds are similar to those (more subtly) motivating overblown American responses to terror and national security today.

The German War is an impressionist analysis of German World War II public opinion

Nicholas Stargardt based his book’s analysis on the experiences of 16 people, news archives and previously published histories. The result is a quantitatively loosely evidenced perspective that will persuade some, but not others. I found the book worthwhile, despite my below stated stylistic quibbles.

There is enough evidence scattered throughout The German War to tentatively conclude that the German public felt victimized by World War One and its aftermath. This feeling apparently was used to self-justify the Third Reich’s genocidal lash-back against Jewish people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communist Bolshevism, the mentally ill, Slavs, and virtually anyone else carrying un-Aryan racial impurities.

What the book does not make clear is how Germans so passively came to seize on Jewish people (especially) as the incarnation of anti-German evil.

If you wonder how this unlikely clump of alleged undesirables all got thrown into the same Nazi death pot, you are not alone

Insanity on such a hugely well-organized and murderous scale is difficult to grasp. The following extracts (from the book) suggest what an evil nuthouse Germany had become. These concern only Jewish people, but Stargardt provides numerous examples of other “categories” of exterminated people, as well:

[T]he German dictator’s strategic choices also fulfilled a long cherished desire to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and conquer colonial ‘living space’ in the east . . . .

Hitler opened the rhetorical floodgates himself on 2 October [1941], with his Proclamation to the soldiers on the eastern front to take Moscow, declaring that their key foes were ‘Jews and only Jews!”

On 8 November . . . Hitler lectured his audience about how he had ‘come to know these Jews as world arsonists’. The ‘entire intelligentsia’ of Russia ‘had been slaughtered and a mindless, forcibly proletarianised sub-humanity left behind over which an enormous organisation of Jewish commissars . . . rules. “This struggle is now . . . a struggle to be or not to be!”

[Goebbels] reminded them of the Fuhrer’s ‘prophecy’ of 1939 that the Jews would perish if they started another European war:

We are now witnessing the fulfilment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but it is more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of case in this case.

How this death-dealing craziness played out in the world of German public opinion — is the main subject of Stargardt’s book

He begins his inquiry this way:

[S]eventy years on . . . we still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end. This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war.

And he ends the book by stating that — in extracts:

The first response [after the war ended] was not rebellion [against the victors] so much as a rush of self-pity, with people quoted as saying, ‘We did not deserve to be led into such a catastrophe.’

Such sentiments were more self-righteous than anti-Nazi, as people of all classes ‘excused themselves of any guilt for the course the war had taken’, insisting ‘that it was not they who had had responsibility for war leadership and politics’. [at pages 545-546]

[A] US Army psychological warfare unit filed one of the first reports from German territory. It found ‘a latent and possibly deep-seated sense of guilt, owing to the brutalities committed by the German armies in Europe, particularly in the east and against the Jews’, adding that: ‘Germans have resigned themselves to the idea of retribution and only hope that the Americans would moderate the rage of those who will punish them. But the idea of punishment they do accept.’ [at page 546]

Even in 1945, there were two quite different conversations about guilt in Germany. One concerned the lost war and who bore responsibility for the German ‘catastrophe’: this was the self-pitying conversation . . . .The other concerned German war crimes and involved a sense of moral reckoning, which Germans expected to be enforced upon them by the victorious Allies. [at page 548]

This dissonant dualism of German guilt — the crimes committed against the Jews and the greater crime to have lost the war — became more, not less, entrenched in the post-war years. . . .

[B]y the time the Third Reich’s three successor states had been founded in 1949 in all of them a sense of German victimhood came to overshadow any sense of shared responsibility for the suffering of Germany’s victims. [at page 548]

When Martin Niemöller asked an audience of Erlangen students in January 1946 why no clergyman in Germany had preached about ‘the terrible suffering which we, we Germans caused other peoples, over what happened in Poland, over the depopulation of Russia and over the 5.6 million dead Jews’, he was shouted down. [at page 562]

Interviewers found that . . . . [h]ardly anybody thought that the German people as a whole were responsible for the suffering of the Jews, although 64 percent agreed that the persecution of the Jews had been decisive in making Germany lose the war.

Still . . . 37 percent . . . even in conditions of Allied occupation, were prepared to endorse the view that ‘the extermination of the Jews and the Poles and other non-Aryans’ had been necessary for ‘the security of the Germans’. It was clear that most Germans believed they had fought a legitimate war of national defence. [at page 564]

By the time Hannah Arendt [see here] visited Germany in 1949, she was struck by her former countrymen’s lack of emotional engagement and unwillingness to discuss what had happened. [at page 547]

Three nitpicks with an otherwise excellent work

First — the author never succinctly states a theme, which makes critiquing his implied conclusions about German (World War II) public opinion difficult

The German War amounts to a series of impressions about what a small group of Germans — supposedly representatively — thought about a wide variety of different things during the war. Because the Third Reich was a totalitarian state, with a very active propaganda arm, it is difficult to know what people thought privately, especially if they were smart enough not to write anything down.

Stargardt does an outstanding job of giving us substantive glimpses of Nazi propaganda, and how it changed over time. But that trend is only spottily reflected in his 16 protagonists’ written take on the situation. This makes it difficult to infer what they actually thought in detail — rather than parroted — much less what millions and millions of other Germans concluded in the privacy of their skulls.

My next caveat expands on this one.

Second and third — Stargardt’s flat anecdotal style can be (a) boring and (b) seemingly unrelated to the book’s inferred main purpose regarding German public opinion

Recall that Stargardt told us that, “This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war.” Yet, in almost immediate contradiction to this statement is the author’s illuminating traipse off into the subject of German opinion regarding Nazi war aims and military reverses from 1939 through 1945.

His reasons for focusing on public opinion and morale are clear at the outset. He wants to explain the pig-headed lunacy that kept Germans fighting and killing the helpless, even long after the war had clearly been lost.

Indeed, one of this book’s many strengths is its unrelenting portrayal of how the Third Reich's determination nihilistically escalated into the mythology of “heroic” self-destruction.

The German War is, I conclude, not so broadly aimed as Stargardt seems to say in his introduction to it. His narrower than stated public opinion aim leads to three mild reader interest problems:

His 16 non-fictional protagonists are mostly dislikeable people.

The 16 also seemed to have a penchant for writing unclearly and sometimes pointlessly.

Worse, the author summarizes, rather than quotes, most of what they have to say.

Which means that we are getting their information through two filters. The first filter is defined by the Stargardt’s skill or lack thereof in accurately recounting their thoughts. And the second filter arguably pollutes the “reporting” flow with his focus on German public opinion, which is something that the 16 were almost certainly not primarily addressing in whatever they had written or said for another purpose.

Stylistically — as compared to Michal Jones’ The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat, which uses the same kinds of personal German sources — Startgardt’s summaries and quotes are curiously and disappointingly flat.

They often slop over into reading as if a non-involved journalist were trying to become a historian by winnowing most of the personality and specificity out of them. Where Jones displays an arguably engaging genius — both as to selecting directly on-point and well-written quotations, as well as to inserting those where they belong in a specific narrative — Stargardt is only workmanlike on both counts.

Here is one example of Mr. Startgardt’s somewhat disengaged anecdotal style:

By the second half of August, Helmut Paulus’s [no relationship to Stalingrad’s Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus] infantry unit had left the seemingly endless monoty of the steppes far behind them. As they climbed the foothills of the Caucasus, he began to feel more at home.

On 20 August, and artillery duel gave Helmut time to stop and take in the beauty of this surroundings, the oak forest and mountains rising behind them. He felt he ‘could almost imagine being back at home. The place resembles the edge of the Black Forest so much.’ that afternoon a Cherkassian forester offered to guide them along forest tracks deep into the Soviet rear.

That night, while the company halted on its third peak, Helmut’s platoon was sent down into the valley to spy out the military road which would lead them up the high mountain passes. They lay the entire night in the bushes beside the road, watching Red Army trucks, artillery, marching columns and baggage trains pass along this one major route through the mountains to the oil-rich territory to the south.

At daybreak, instead of returning to the rest of their unit, they opened fire. The Soviets quickly recovered from their surprise at being attacked so far to their rear and used the woods to outflank the small group of German scouts, pinning them down in the bed of a little stream in the valley. Helmut was hit by one of the first shots.

This section continues with Helmut’s retreat to safety. In a battle book, this anecdote would have an obvious purpose. In this one, it arguably has little or none. Additionally, the Helmut selection is embedded in a chapter with other marginally “so what” summaries of a few of the other 16’s doings.

More specifically, Helmut’s blurb contributes virtually nothing to the author’s theme about how Germans thought of their national purpose and predicament. Especially so because Stargardt does an understandably poor job of recounting anything that has to do with the military engagements of the war. I say “understandable” because The German War is not really about the specifics of combat except insofar as they influenced public opinion.

In sum, Stargardt cannot seem to decide whether this is a book about The Adventures of 16 or one about German Public Opinion during World War II.

He could have avoided this confusion by clearly stating a thesis at the outset. His formula — “This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war” — is too broadly unconstrained to give him thematic direction. The formula’s unthematic airiness also explains the book’s ponderously unnecessary length. I sometimes skimmed a dozen pages at a time just to get back to the (for me) relevant public opinion sections of the narrative.

The moral? — Despite these small criticisms, this is an admirable work of scholarship

Certainly one can argue with Stargardt’s conclusions about Germans’ sense of purpose and righteousness during the war. But doing so successfully would mean coming up with documented contradictory material. That in itself poses a worthy challenge which would not exist without Nicholas Stargardt’s book.

Even those uninspired by the volume’s content or writing should be impressed by its superb footnotes and exacting documentation.

Despite my quibbles, The German War is worthy and interesting scholarship. Highly recommended to the comparatively few who (a) are still interested in World War II and/or (b) those now concerned about the arguably loosely parallel fascist thinking that is currently growing in the United States.

PeteFree.com

Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945 — a Book Review