Essay, 18 May 2005

Sixty years after the end of the war, the flood of books and documentaries about the Second World War is greater than ever. This interest is hardly driven by a thirst for knowledge or compassion alone.

The Russian entry into Berlin in 1945. Aufbau-Verlag.

If, like me, you were born in the 1950s and grew up with the idea that the Second World War and Nazism belonged to history, you cannot help being surprised at how swiftly and on such a massive scale the subject has, in recent years, become front-page material and the stuff of bestsellers. This makes you increasingly sceptical about all the books and films being produced, not least those dealing with the various sides of Adolf Hitler.

One might think that, after Alan Bullock’s classic Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), and above all Joachim Fest’s groundbreaking Hitler biography in the 1970s, there would not be much more to say. Yet sixty years after the collapse of the Nazi thousand-year Reich, which lasted only twelve intense years, the Second World War is more present than at any other time in the post-war period. If new facts had emerged that shed fresh light on the subject, this would be understandable, but that happens only exceptionally. There must be something else that brings the figureheads of the war, and especially of the Third Reich, such attention on every round-number anniversary and on various television channels—and increasingly in full colour.

One reason may be that, after the end of the Cold War, a new generation is looking at contemporary European history through its own eyes. Another is that the generation with personal experience of the seizure of power and the Second World War is disappearing. At the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, ten years ago, all the major media scoured the field for people to interview who had once been in Hitler’s bunker or had personal memories of life at the Wolf’s Lair or the Obersalzberg. When the sixtieth anniversary came around the other week, several of them—including Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge—had already died.

Those who remain are past their sell-by date, which has not stopped the major media from compiling files on a little over a hundred so-called contemporary witnesses who, despite old age and illness, are willing, as required, to speak about wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—that is, what it was really like to attend school in the Weimar era, take part in Hitler Youth camps, serve in the German Volkssturm in East Prussia, cook for Rudolf Hess’s family or collect stones for the rebuilding of Berlin.

Before me lie a little over half a dozen books in Swedish, but also in German and English, which have in common that they appeared to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1945 and, from different starting points, recount its final months. Almost all base parts of their narratives on this kind of testimony. I was reluctant to tackle this flood of books, particularly as I know they are only the foam on the surface. When all is said and done, perhaps they do not primarily satisfy a genuine historical interest, but touch much deeper needs in the collective unconscious.

It is a historical fact that more than fifty million people, civilians and soldiers alike, died during the Second World War. But compassion for the victims can hardly be what lies behind the German historian Guido Knopp’s enormous popular success with television series on everything from Hitler’s doctors and women to expulsion and liberation. Nor is it a thirst for knowledge that has kept people in more than forty countries glued to their screens when Knopp stages Reinhard Heydrich’s evil like a Wagner opera. I will not deny that I myself have often switched on these documentaries about Nazi women, German flagships and the Führer’s henchmen shortly before midnight. When Knopp’s series about the bestial SS doctors ended, it was followed by a series about man-eating sharks, which says something about the genre.

Naturally, there are historians who envy Knopp. With some justification, he has been criticised for pandering to audiences, and his team has been called “history pornographers” who make a living entertaining evening-weary Germans with Nazi kitsch and misery rather than enlightening them. Yet nobody can deny that Guido Knopp’s documentaries have set a style. His strength—and weakness—is precisely his ability to bring to life things that have often become utterly lifeless in the hands of other historians. Within an enormous body of archival material, he manages to find the right scene and the right eyewitness, and he always has the support of a large production operation that knows how to create suspense with dramatic music and rapid cuts.

The method can be studied in his book Liberation, an expanded text version of the television series of the same name. Each chapter begins in a present tense that sets the tone. “Grey clouds hung heavily in the sky,” reads the first chapter on the Normandy landings, while the next says: “There was something threatening in the air,” and later: “It was a misty morning.” Then an eyewitness is inserted who “remembers” or “recalls” something, usually briefly and in order to create a temporal distance from the event itself, which we have not yet been told about or which has merely been hinted at: “No one yet knows what is going to happen.”

Then hell breaks loose—or whatever one chooses to call all the military battles and strategic manoeuvres that followed the Allied landings in Normandy in the summer of 1944. Rather like a film—but divided into five chapters—Knopp alternates flashbacks with snapshots of the Western Front and the battle for Paris, as well as the southern sectors where the Wehrmacht established a position beside the mountain and monastery of Monte Cassino.

In The Battle of Monte Cassino, the Englishman Matthew Parker devotes an entire book to what was perhaps the bloodiest and most pointless clash of the whole Second World War. When the medieval monastery was destroyed, there were no Germans there, only more than a thousand refugees, most of them children. In a similar way, Knopp provides sharp images of the fighting at the Arnhem bridge and the Germans’ desperate Ardennes offensive. This was the last battle outside Germany’s borders; what remained was a slow, painful and, above all, unnecessary road to destruction, a “sea of blood and tears”, as Knopp puts it.

His book about the people on both sides who experienced all this is both interesting and worth reading, but when I read the British historian Max Hastings’s monumental Armageddon, I realised that the stereotyped cutting technique does, after all, have its limitations. In religious terminology, Armageddon is the place of the Day of Judgement, the final battle. In his book, Max Hastings has gathered sources and interviews from both the Eastern and Western Fronts, among Russian Red Guards and German bombing victims, and has accomplished the almost impossible task of assembling all this into a convincing whole. Hastings both describes and analyses, incisively and without regard for what is politically correct. You feel you are in the hands of a humble and inquisitive navigator.

Slowly but surely, a picture emerges of the more than a hundred million people who, on different sides, were involved in the fighting, but also of countless civilians and entire cities that went up in smoke within a few hours. After the war, it was difficult for Germans to speak about everything that had been lost—not only people and whole regions, but also spiritual realms in which German culture had had its roots since the Middle Ages.

Here Hastings is as open and honest as his compatriot and colleague Antony Beevor. He recounts how serious crimes were committed by the Western Allies too. Above all, and drawing in part on new archival material, he describes what happened when the Russians marched into what were then Germany’s eastern provinces. The veritable orgy of bloodshed unleashed as, during their great “Patriotic War”, they mutilated and raped millions of German women and children defies all description. When Germany’s capitulation became a fact in May 1945, probably only the surviving prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps experienced a genuine liberation, perhaps also some of the Western Allies.

Hastings speaks of a clash of cultures between, on the one hand, the “normal” war fought by the Americans and British in the west and, on the other, the horrors experienced by Russians and Germans on the Eastern Front. For example, he mentions that almost thirty million Russians died in the struggle against Hitler’s Germany, whereas the Western Allies’ losses amounted to just under a million. You get the feeling that two different wars were being fought.

This was a circumstance that went unnoticed when the war’s victors and vanquished jointly celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its end in Moscow. When all is said and done, it was a performance for the gallery. In post-Soviet Moscow, there is no willingness to examine critically its own historical myths. Research in Russian archives on the “Patriotic War” has been conducted almost exclusively by foreigners.

But about a month ago, the first private diary by an officer of the Red Army was published in German, written by a Russian Jew who experienced at close quarters the entry into Berlin and the first year of occupation. It is not just the unusual perspective that makes Vladimir Gelfand’s posthumous Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–46 such a reading experience. The inner struggle, too—the moral and political struggle, however one chooses to describe the mixture of bloodlust and compassion that the Red Guardsman Gelfand experiences in his encounters with the defeated Germans—falls outside the usual framework.

Refugees and soldiers who have undergone amputations lie in the streets, alongside orphaned children and German women selling their bodies. Gelfand helps himself. He writes about all this and much else besides, including the fact that he contracts gonorrhoea. It is estimated that around two hundred thousand children came into the world in this way in the Russian zone alone.

It is harder to judge Gelfand’s literary talent. Apparently, he wanted to write a novel when he returned home, but there was not enough time and the subject was far too controversial. Gelfand fell out with his superiors and calls his fellow Red Guardsmen “drunken brawlers and anarchistic rabble”.

It is all the more welcome, then, that after a delay of sixty years his notes have become available, at least to a German-speaking readership. His perspective has been missing: for the first time, these notes give the victorious Red power a face that makes it possible to understand the Russian soldier’s world of thought. Putin and his post-Soviet gatekeepers are likely to find it difficult to lock this diary away in the poison cabinet reserved for anti-Russian propaganda.

Per Landin