Birthe Kundrus

“This War Is the Great Racial War”: War and the Holocaust in Europe

Publisher: C.H.Beck; 1st edition (May 17, 2018)
Language: German
Paperback: 336 pages
ISBN-10: 3406675212
ISBN-13: 978-3406675218
Dimensions: 12.8 × 2 × 20.5 cm
Price: €18.00

About the author

Birthe Kundrus, born in 1963, is Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Hamburg. Her publications include “Modern Imperialists: The German Empire in the Mirror of Its Colonies” (2003) and “Realms of Imagination: Toward a Cultural History of German Colonialism” (2003).

eBook product information

ASIN: B0B8PG8CTT
Publisher: C.H.Beck; 1st edition (May 17, 2018)
Language: German
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“This war is the great racial war” — Hermann Göring’s martial words of October 1942 reflected the Nazi regime’s determination to drive the annihilation of Europe’s Jews forward without mercy, if necessary even to the point of its own destruction. Radical antisemitism and racial hatred, this striking overview shows, were the ideological driving forces behind the Third Reich’s war policy and led to an unprecedented escalation of violence. Beginning with Hitler’s declarations in “Mein Kampf,” Birthe Kundrus illustrates the devastating consequences of National Socialist expansionism and traces how, in the course of the Second World War, the regime abandoned every standard of humanity.

Subjects: 20th century · Adolf Hitler · antisemitism · Germany · Europe · expansion · history · Holocaust · war · military · monograph · politics · racism · Shoah · Soviet Union · war of annihilation · Second World War

Review note in Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 6, 2018

René Schlott reads historian Birthe Kundrus’s book on the Holocaust with great interest. For Schlott, its concept works: it is organized around the interaction between the course of the war and the radicalization of the murder of the Jews, seeks an integrated history of the Holocaust, and does not rely on overwhelming emotion. By contrast, Schlott finds the insertion of eyewitness reports from perpetrators, victims, and observers methodologically questionable when the intention is to turn an event-history into a history of experience. In any case, the comparatively slender and readable volume, he writes, impresses through an “admirable achievement of synthesis.”

The Germans and National Socialism

The seven volumes of the series edited by Norbert Frei offer a history of the experiences of German society under the Third Reich. They retell the history of those years close to the people and in a language that makes life under the swastika comprehensible for the era after the generation of eyewitnesses. Soon there will no longer be anyone among us who can speak from personal experience about the period of National Socialism. Therefore, if our image of that era is not to harden into empty formulas — the Third Reich as the embodiment of evil, yet seemingly wholly remote from our present — the lived reality of those years must be told anew. Otherwise it remains incomprehensible why so many Germans were enthusiastic about the regime and identified with it. How did Germans experience Hitler’s rule, and how did they change during twelve years of dictatorship? Why was the Third Reich so attractive to so many? And finally, what political, moral, social, and psychological consequences persisted beyond 1945?

Defenses

The euphoria at German headquarters did not last long. Over Christmas the weather improved; Allied aircraft intervened over snow-covered eastern Belgium and destroyed German supply lines. The Wehrmacht ran out of fuel, could no longer advance, and became bogged down. The fighting was bitter and a horrific pattern unfolded, with massacres on one side and prisoners being mown down on the other. German forces lost 90,000 soldiers. The military objective had failed: the Western powers had not really been weakened, merely delayed. What increasingly proved decisive was the Allies’ halting but seemingly inexhaustible flow of men and materiel. Hitler nevertheless continued along the path he had chosen.

In his New Year’s address on January 1, 1945, he no longer mentioned the offensive at all. Instead he threatened: “The world must know that this state will therefore never capitulate; that today’s German Reich, like all great states of the past, may suffer setbacks on its path, but that it will never leave that path. One must know that the present leadership of the state shares the cares and suffering of its people, but will never capitulate before cares or suffering.”[58] The regime was indifferent to the consequences of its ruthless conduct of the war for German society, as the Swiss consul general Zurlinden had already recognized in April 1943.[59] And in Thaya the priest knew that if the Nazis had to leave, then “nothing should be left!”[60]

Allied superiority and Germany’s self-destructive conduct of the war were particularly evident on the Eastern Front. On January 12 the Red Army opened its winter offensive. Some 6.7 million soldiers and thousands of tanks, aircraft, and guns stood along a line stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Stalin had waited until the Wehrmacht had shifted every available force westward. He hoped the Americans would remain under German fire there as long as possible while he rapidly conquered the Reich. Hitler, despite every warning from senior officers, dismissed the concentration of forces with the rather strange comparison that it was the “greatest bluff since Genghis Khan.”[61] But on January 20 Klemperer marveled: “Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź, Częstochowa have been taken; the Upper Silesian border has been reached.”[62] The Red Army wanted to reach the industrial region of Upper Silesia as quickly as the Americans wanted to reach its western counterpart, the Ruhr.

Hans Frank had fled Wawel Castle on January 17, though not before transporting stolen paintings and other valuables to his new home in Bavaria. After three days of fierce fighting, the General Government was history. Lindgren was pleased that Soviet forces were advancing “at a storming pace.”[63]

And so it continued. On January 26, the twenty-one-year-old Red Army soldier Wladimir Gelfand wrote in his diary: “Today we will be in Germany.”[64] What filled one side with pride was sheer horror for the other. The arrival of Stalin’s troops in the old Reich triggered a mass flight by civilians. It merged with the flight of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and with hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who had left their homeland voluntarily or involuntarily in the wake of the Wehrmacht. Anything was preferable to falling into the hands of the Red Army. Huge refugee columns, constantly swelling — six million people between 1944 and the spring of 1945 — made their way westward in freezing winter temperatures along completely clogged roads. Many carried their house keys, hoping for an early return.

In accordance with the order to hold positions, local Nazi Party leaders and military commands ordered towns and villages evacuated far too late. When it mattered, many party officials allowed themselves, in Martin Bormann’s words, to be “influenced by fear of the Russians.”[65] They were the first to run to their packed cars and drive away. Thus the chief Germanizer of Poznań, Arthur Greiser, fled on January 20 even though Soviet units were still 130 kilometers away. Officially he had proclaimed that the city must be held to the last drop of blood. Goebbels commented: “horrible failure.”[66]

In Berlin at the end of January 1945, journalist Ursula von Kardorff did not know whether to believe the reports coming in: “Willy Beer’s wife has not returned from Silesia. Every day dreadful reports about atrocities against the population left behind lie on his desk: children beaten to death, women raped, farms set on fire, farmers shot. Goebbels’s propaganda brain is evidently working feverishly again. Or could all this actually be true? I believe nothing anymore until I have seen it myself.”[67] Yet the reports were largely accurate. What they omitted was that, once the flight was under way, Wehrmacht vehicles ruthlessly pushed refugees off the roads in order to move ahead themselves. Hundreds of thousands were therefore overtaken by Soviet forces and genuinely faced rape, deportation, or death.

Several tens of thousands of Germans would die in the course of the Soviet advance. Red Army soldier Gelfand wrote in his diary that they deserved it: “Death for death, blood for blood. I feel no pity for these haters of mankind, these beasts.”[68] The Ukrainian was also disturbed by the Germans’ comfortable lives, their well-kept houses and beautiful furnishings: “The wealth and refinement of these things are overwhelming. Our Slavs will stare!”[69] For a long time Stalin did not stop the unrestrained violence. On the one hand, he calculated that this brutality would drive the entire German population out of Eastern Europe. On the other, he knew that looting and rape compensated soldiers for the extreme violence they had experienced not only in combat with the enemy but also within their own army. Gelfand, at any rate, noted: “Nobody forbids us to take from the Germans and destroy what they previously looted from us. I am extremely satisfied.”[70]

Panic also spread among the SS at Auschwitz,[71] as prisoners scribbled on a note. The camp was evacuated in haste. The decision to deport prisoners amid the chaotic conditions of retreat produced indescribable odysseys. While the camp staff, increased to almost 4,500 men, feverishly destroyed files and other evidence of mass murder — a prisoner had only just been transferred from Mauthausen — Himmler had 58,000 prisoners from the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and the Upper Silesian satellite camps marched to camps farther west. Anyone who could no longer keep up, fell, tried to rest, or attempted to escape was shot by the escort units: the overriding aim was to keep moving west, away from Red Army vengeance. Other victims froze or starved on the way; probably 15,000 prisoners died on these death marches. The abandoned Auschwitz complex was liberated by the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front on the afternoon of January 27, 1945. The soldiers found 8,200 prisoners, including 650 children and adolescents whom the departing camp SS had left behind as too weak — the last survivors among 1.1 million murdered people, including 900,000 Jews, 140,000 non-Jewish Poles, and 21,000 Sinti and Roma. The same day Soviet troops took Katowice, placing the economic center of Upper Silesia in Stalin’s hands.

Some 170 kilometers farther west in Lower Silesia, Breslau had been under attack since January 23. Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who had declared the city a fortress, cared nothing for its inhabitants. What mattered was only that “the Russians” should not get the easternmost major city of the German Reich. While the battle for Breslau raged, Soviet formations also advanced farther north. The first issue of the U.S.-Army-licensed Aachener Nachrichten headlined on January 24, 1945: “Bydgoszcz captured. East Prussia overrun, 270 km from Berlin.” The now landless “brown tsar” of Ukraine and still Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, was also responsible for this failure. He forced civilians to remain while his wife left for Bavaria and he himself sat in a bunker at Pillau, directly on the Vistula Lagoon, with an aircraft ready for his foreseeable escape.

At the end of January Soviet formations sealed off East Prussia. About two million people, trapped and panicking, tried to escape through Baltic ports that were still open. Klemperer repeated rumors: “The fisherman sells places for jewelry (not money), three and four times over; whoever arrives first is taken, the others are cheated.”[72] Many died in Soviet submarine attacks and air strikes. On January 24, 1945 Friedrich Hoßbach, now commander of the 4th Army in East Prussia, coldly told his generals that the civilian population “must remain behind.” It “sounds cruel, but cannot be changed”;[73] the military forces had to be brought home first. Naval authorities ignored these orders. Alongside 350,000 wounded soldiers, they managed to rescue some 900,000 people on merchant and naval vessels.

By early February, in just three weeks, the Red Army had conquered the General Government, the annexed Polish territories, and large parts of eastern Germany. Its soldiers stood on the Oder, seventy kilometers from Berlin, formed up for a frontal assault and establishing bridgeheads on the western bank. Heinrici wrote to his family, astonished and dismayed, that none of them had believed matters could “assume such proportions.”[74]

Defeats in the East and West, like the air raids, produced disillusionment among soldiers. “Why should I fight?” asked a Wehrmacht soldier from Hamburg. It was, he continued, “only about the existence of the Nazis. Our enemy’s superiority is so great that it is pointless to fight against it.”

If the men no longer wanted to continue, only two options remained: go over to the enemy or desert. Increasing numbers of Wehrmacht soldiers tried to fall into captivity during the next phase of the war. Yet even surrender to the Western Allies was not without danger, as the fighting in the Ardennes had just shown. Hardly anyone wanted to go over to the brutally operating Red Army, even though it treated German prisoners better than the Germans treated Soviet prisoners and German death rates in captivity had fallen during the final two years. Desertion was no attractive escape either if one wanted to stay alive. Desertion carried the death penalty, and military judges used it extensively, not least in newly created flying courts-martial and before the eyes of the public. During the First World War only 150 men had been sentenced to death and 48 executed; now military courts issued about 22,000 death sentences, of which 15,000 were carried out. German soldiers therefore continued fighting, desperate and fatalistic. “If only this idiotic war would end,”[75] the Hamburg soldier put their reluctance into words.

A minority of soldiers nevertheless continued to see themselves as executors of an ideology. These men indulged in bloody fantasies of revenge against Russians and also Americans. American bombing and the Morgenthau Plan — briefly discussed in the United States and spread by Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus as a plan to reduce Germany to an agrarian country — intensified resentment. “The snow must turn red with American blood,” one lieutenant wrote of the “arrogant, big-mouthed apes from the New World.”[76] Those who did not desert but no longer fought for Hitler or for Germany’s continued existence fought for themselves, for survival, and for the chance to return to their families. Lindgren quoted in her diary a letter, intercepted by censorship, from a German soldier on the Eastern Front to his pregnant Swedish wife: “The days come and go, and we suffer from heat and sleeplessness. Every day the same deafening noise of battle. […] Will I ever be allowed to see my child? […] All day long I have not been able to leave my trench for a single moment. But one says to oneself again and again: You have to make it!”[77] He did not make it.

Hitler himself withdrew into the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery house and garden after American bombers destroyed his living quarters during the air raid on Berlin on February 3. He sent orders to every division to hold out. Nothing other than fighting to the last and “never, never”[78] capitulating — as he had already drilled into his generals during the Ardennes battle — would be heard from the “Führer” in the weeks to come. He refused to redirect into the Reich the more than one million soldiers stationed outside Germany in Norway, Hungary, and Italy or holding the encircled Courland pocket. Unlike his military commanders, who were thinking about defending the Reich, Hitler would believe only in the offensive — or in realizing total but heroic destruction. The “Führer” remained fixated on salvation through annihilation, and, in defeat, on the heroic self-destruction of his warring Reich.

The next Allied summit in early February 1945 dealt with Hitler’s downfall and with everything that was to follow. Roosevelt had just been elected president for a fourth term. At Stalin’s request they met at Yalta. The Crimean city was symbolically charged: only a year earlier it had still been in German hands. The conference indeed became a home game for Uncle Joe. The Western Allies had opened their second front too late; the Red Army stood deep in eastern Germany, controlled large parts of Central and Southeastern Europe, had installed governments favorable to Moscow there, and had begun expulsions. The right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they wished to live, proclaimed in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, had become waste paper. The dictator was establishing his security cordon around the Soviet Union. The gravely ill Roosevelt could not stop Stalin, and in any case it was too late for a change of course.

Yet the delegations of the Big Three still had matters to settle concerning Germany’s future. Their common objective after unconditional surrender was to break the power of the German Reich. They agreed on the “four Ds”: demilitarization, denazification, decartelization, and dismantling of German industry. Occupation zones, one of which would go to France, would replace territorial unity, and Berlin likewise would be divided into four sectors. Economically, however, British experts in particular objected that such fragmentation made little sense. How was a dismembered Germany to meet Stalin’s demand for high reparations? Churchill’s officials also doubted whether German power would really be neutralized by political fragmentation or whether the Germans would truly remain quiet. Essential questions therefore remained open.

While the conference was still in session, the Western Allies launched their attack on the old Reich on February 8, 1945. The setbacks at Arnhem and the German winter offensive led them to increase the intensity of air attacks once again, in the belief that Germany had to be bombed into surrender. Churchill in particular also wanted the massive raids to demonstrate Western air power to his unloved partner in Moscow. Between January and May 1945, a thousand people a day would die. The German Reich recorded about 420,000 deaths from the air war in total, including soldiers, forced laborers, and prisoners of war; more than half died in the final year alone. Area bombing played into the hands of Nazi propaganda.

This was especially true of the great incendiary attack on Dresden, crowded with refugees and until then largely spared, between February 13 and 15. The Foreign Office instructed its missions abroad to speak of as many as 200,000 dead; it simply added a zero to the original SS report. In fact, about 23,000 people died. The message was clear: the Allies supposedly had no military aims but wanted to annihilate the Germans. The regime thus projected its own policy of annihilation onto its wartime enemies.

Yet the regime had long since been driving its own citizens to fulfill their duty to the bitter end not only with propaganda but with terror. Hitler’s decision in response to defend Berlin “with claws and teeth”[79] and to mobilize four SS divisions made Ruth Andreas-Friedrich shudder in the capital. The bombing of Dresden, by contrast, brought salvation for Klemperer. As a “bearer of bad news,”[80] he had just had to deliver deportation notices to people of mixed ancestry and spouses in mixed marriages. Desperate that they themselves would soon appear on the lists, the couple used the chaos of the burning city to disappear. With “a tiny pocketknife,”[81] Eva Klemperer cut the accursed star from her husband’s coat. Victor Klemperer became an “Aryan” refugee — like millions of others.

The number of people moving through the ever smaller “Fortress Germany,” increasingly transformed into a battlefield, was further swollen by foreign forced laborers. Air raids had separated these men and women from their guards or left them homeless amid the general chaos, and they were now seeking shelter and food. Earlier fears of “foreign-worker disorder” and assertive forced laborers were repeatedly fed when newspapers reported “Eastern-worker gangs” that stole or killed their former bosses.

Across Europe underground movements increased the pressure on the remaining German occupiers. On February 22 Luise Solmitz read in the newspaper that in Norway there had been “serious bombing attacks, murders, attacks on railways, garages, filling stations, factories, businesses, members of the Norwegian police,” and that more than thirty “terrorists”[82] had been executed.

Then, on March 7, the Western forces of the anti-Hitler coalition made the decisive leap. American units captured the only remaining bridge across the Rhine at Remagen. German attempts to demolish the bridge had failed; the direct route into the Reich was open. Hitler once again dismissed the recently reinstated Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, into retirement. His successor Albert Kesselring called Remagen a “disgrace”;[83] the major held responsible was sentenced to death, which Goebbels interpreted as a “signal”: “Only with such measures can we still save the Reich.”[84]

Now the enemy actually stood in Germany. Beyond all propaganda, the myth of a defensive war — whether people had previously believed it or not — had acquired real substance. Every Allied bomb and every Soviet assault reinforced the rhetoric of defending the homeland. Against the brown-shirted “bankrupts” threatening “downfall” and against many Germans’ fear that their country would be erased, Thomas Mann declared over the BBC: “That is nonsense!” Germany was not dying but was “in the process of assuming a new form.”[85] Precisely because of this refusal to accept a future, continuing the war was “a crime — committed against the German people by their leaders.”[86]

Senior Sergeant Peter B., however, would not accept that judgment. In early March he once again wrote himself into complete confidence in Hitler: “The Führer is no scoundrel and not so bad as to lie to an entire people and drive it to death. Until today the Führer has always given us his love, promised us freedom, and made all his plans come true. […] Only our faith makes us strong, and I build on the Führer’s words that German victory will stand at the end of all struggle.”[87] A mother in Kaarßen near Lüneburg hoped for the same, ending a letter to her son: “With all my heart, Heil Hitler, Mama.”[88]

In Hamburg, by contrast, mood reports registered a widespread longing for the war to end. Statements such as “No matter what comes, just put an end to it” showed that defeat was being accepted and confidence in the regime had fallen almost to zero. At the same time fear of a British occupation, considered the most likely outcome in the Hanseatic city, was slight. In bunkers, pubs, and trams people said: “Now Tommy should come and put an end to it, so that we can live a sensible and orderly life again.”[89]

That “sensible life,” however, was still a long way off. On March 22 Klemperer wrote that the Anglo-Americans and Russians were advancing step by step, “but it is going nerve-rackingly slowly, and the real final offensive, against the Ruhr and Berlin, still lies ahead.”[90] Meanwhile Hitler ignored quiet appeals from within his own ranks to acknowledge defeat and responded to Remagen with another escalation. On March 19, 1945, he issued the order on “destruction measures in Reich territory.” Even within Germany, and without regard for civilians, nothing but scorched earth was now to be left to the enemy.

Meanwhile the Western Allies had divided their directions of advance. Canadian-British units moved into the Netherlands. The population there was increasingly caught between the fronts — “strafing by English aircraft”[91] on the one hand and German “man-hunting”[92] for men to dig defenses on the other. Attacks by the resistance also multiplied. In March underground fighters attacked Higher SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter. In retaliation the German occupiers once again executed 263 political prisoners. In Amersfoort, Eberhard Gebensleben’s fifteen-year-old niece Hedda Kalshoven recorded in her diary on April 23 the tension hanging over all Europe and cursed: “That we are still not liberated, damn it.”[93]

While British troops turned north, American formations marched east and south and French forces toward the southwest. After the constant air raids, Germans inside the Reich now experienced ground war as well. Tanks rolled through the streets, artillery fire and low-flying aircraft dominated the scene, and the air smelled of charred bodies. “Germany is on the way to being leveled to the ground,”[94] Astrid Lindgren concluded from her daily reading of the press on March 23.

Melvin Lasky, twenty-five years old and attached to the U.S. Army as a military historian, was horrified on April 9 by the ruins of Darmstadt: there was “not a single intact house! All the buildings bombed out, whole blocks leveled to the ground. We drove for many kilometers and could not believe our eyes. An entire city had disappeared.”[95] In Frankfurt two days later he heard no sound; the “silence was overwhelming.” He saw “the charred, shrunken corpse of a great city.”[96] Only while traveling through German landscapes of rubble did Lasky recognize the scale of the catastrophe the war had brought to Germany. The devastation of the Eastern European theater, by contrast, remained unseen, and reports about it in the West were relatively rare.

In Britain a debate developed over whether bombing the Reich on this scale remained ethically defensible. Churchill yielded to criticism and on March 28 largely halted the air war over Germany. He did not forget to add, however, that otherwise the Allies would merely take control of a devastated country.

By this time about 250,000 Jews had been confined in concentration camps and other camps inside the Reich. As the fronts approached from East and West, these camps were dissolved with increasing haste. Together with roughly 500,000 non-Jewish prisoners, they were sent on death marches toward locations in the shrinking interior of the Reich. Because of widespread improvisation — roads were impassable and clogged by refugees and army vehicles — routes could change quickly. The rule still held that no prisoner should fall alive into enemy hands. Those considered capable of work, Himmler intended, were still to build supposedly impregnable fortresses or lay the foundations of a future SS economic empire. He also revived the idea of using Jews as political hostages to force the Western powers into a separate peace.

For the guards accompanying the transports, the most important thing was to reach their destination as quickly as possible; they feared Allied reprisals. Losses among the prisoners did not matter. Better a dead prisoner than an escaped one was the principle. Probably 80,000 Jews and 170,000 non-Jews died. German civilians watched the passing columns of weakened figures suspiciously. A few helped; many behaved with hostility toward the emaciated “criminals” and returning Jews. To some, the prisoners appeared as an omen of defeat and of their own complicity. Like the SS guards, local Nazi officials, Volkssturm men, police officers, mayors, and self-appointed guardians of order feverishly tried to get rid of them — which generally meant murder.

In the West Allied forces were now taking German cities every day. Reich defense collapsed, and the expected partisan war failed to materialize. Where they made the decision and were not prevented by flying courts-martial or suddenly appearing SS units, mayors and local notables raised white flags, fearing above all that their towns would be senselessly shot to pieces. Courageous people removed anti-tank barriers — and burned their party uniforms. Others removed portraits of Hitler from their homes; one visiting woman, as Klemperer recorded, put it this way: “I cremated him.”[97]

Himmler tried to halt these acts of supposed high treason with the familiar instrument of violence. In early April 1945, as commander of the Replacement Army, he ordered that every male resident of a house displaying a white flag be shot. He was supported by his “Nazi freedom movement,”[98] as Thomas Mann ironically called the Werewolf paramilitaries organized by Himmler, and once again by self-appointed avengers of the national community. As state order dissolved, killings of Germans by Germans became an everyday phenomenon.

But all the violence, threats, and slogans urging people to hold out achieved nothing: the Third Reich was defeated. Not only most civilians but Wehrmacht formations too were exhausted. By late March Lasky had already recognized: “Since the positions at the West Wall, the Germans have had nothing more to offer. They surrender by the hundreds and march practically unguarded to the collection points.”[99]

Böll’s last letter was dated April 3, 1945, written in Oberauel, a small place on the Rhine. Watching the Americans on the opposite bank, he briefly allowed himself the thought that “we” Germans could “really finish off” the Americans “with ease,” since they moved around “quite inexperienced and naive,” “if we had more and better weapons.” But then the patriot and opponent of Hitler managed not merely to look toward the end but to approve defeat as well: “it really cannot go on any longer. There is a limit to all human madness, and that limit has been reached.”[100]

The situation on the Eastern Front was different. There German soldiers fought Soviet troops “like mad”[101] over an insignificant railway station, as Stalin complained to Roosevelt in a letter of April 7, 1945, having grown suspicious of the unequal situation in West and East. His observation was essentially correct. Wehrmacht soldiers fought the Red Army desperately; fear for themselves and their families and the sense of having no alternative were much stronger than in the West. A staff corporal trapped in Courland warned his wife in Württemberg at the end of March not to flee. Unlike the “Ivan,” he said, he was “not afraid” of the American. He also indirectly suggested that he regarded the war as lost. Flight was pointless, he added, because “one day the enemy will come to you anyway.”[102]

Red Army soldier Gelfand, for his part, described these battles with the Wehrmacht as an indescribable “nightmare.” At least half the men in his sector of the front, seventy kilometers from Berlin, had fallen into the “clutches of death”[103] or had been wounded.

At the beginning of April the last Wehrmacht units had to withdraw from Hungary, and the country was completely occupied by the Soviet Union. On April 3 Stalin’s troops took Vienna. Here, as elsewhere, what had already occurred throughout their advance through villages and cities was repeated — on a scale that had no equivalent in the West: soldiery burned, looted, raped, and killed. Vienna was followed by Berlin.

Notes

58. Domarus, Hitler, vol. 4, part 2, p. 2182.
59. Quoted in Bajohr/Strupp, Fremde Blicke, p. 572, April 22, 1943.
60. Schweitzer, 50 Jahre danach, p. 89, September 11, 1944.
61. Quoted in Hildebrand, Reich, p. 811.
62. Klemperer, Zeugnis, vol. 2, p. 643.
63. Lindgren, Menschheit, p. 437, January 21, 1945.
64. Wladimir Gelfand: Deutschland-Tagebuch. Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten, selected and annotated by Elke Scherstjanoi, Berlin 2005, p. 27.
65. Quoted in Elisabeth Kohlhaas: 1945 – Krieg nach innen. NS-Verbrechen in Aschaffenburg und an Aschaffenburgern, Aschaffenburg 2005, p. 37, order of March 6, 1945.
66. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part II, vol. 15, p. 214, January 25, 1945.
67. Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen 1942–1945, p. 285, January 30, 1945.
68. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, p. 28, January 28, 1945.
69. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, p. 29, January 30, 1945.
70. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch.
71. Quoted in Nikolaus Wachsmann: KL. Die Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Munich 2016, p. 639.
72. Klemperer, Zeugnis, vol. 2, p. 649, January 29, 1945.
73. Quoted in Heinrich Schwendeman: Der deutsche Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45, in Bernd-A. Rusinek (ed.): Kriegsende 1945. Verbrechen, Katastrophen, Göttingen 2004, p. 137.
74. Quoted in Hürter, Notizen, p. 235, January 31, 1945.
75. Quoted in Ian Kershaw: Das Ende. Kampf bis in den Untergang, NS-Deutschland 1944/45, Munich 2011, p. 230, February 4, 1945.
76. Quoted ibid., p. 230, January 6, 1945.
77. Lindgren, Menschheit, pp. 430–431.
78. Quoted in Helmut Heiber (ed.): Hitlers Lagebesprechungen. Die Protokollfragmente seiner militärischen Konferenzen 1942–1945, Stuttgart 1962, p. 721, December 12, 1944.
79. Andreas-Friedrich, Schattenmann, p. 200, February 19, 1945.
80. Klemperer, Zeugnis, vol. 2, p. 661, February 22–24, 1945.
81. Ibid., p. 667, February 22–24, 1945.
82. FZH, 11/S13 Solmitz Tagebücher, p. 992.
83. Quoted in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 10, first half-volume, ed. by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Munich 2008, p. 316.
84. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part II, vol. 15, p. 504, March 14, 1945.
85. Mann, Hörer, p. 142, March 4, 1945.
86. Ibid., p. 143, March 20, 1945.
87. Quoted in Kershaw, Ende, pp. 366–367, March 9, 1945.
88. Quoted in Echternkamp, Kriegsschauplatz, p. 196, March 28, 1945.
89. Quoted in Joachim Szodrzynski: Die “Heimatfront” zwischen Stalingrad und Kriegsende, in Hamburg im “Dritten Reich”, ed. Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Göttingen 2005, p. 675.
90. Klemperer, Zeugnis, vol. 2, p. 706.
91. Kalshoven, Ich denk so viel an Euch, p. 439, January 4, 1945.
92. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part II, vol. 14, p. 314, December 2, 1944.
93. Kalshoven, Ich denk so viel an Euch, p. 444.
94. Lindgren, Menschheit, p. 439.
95. Melvin Lasky: Und alles war still. Deutsches Tagebuch 1945, ed. and with an afterword by Wolfgang Schuller, Berlin 2014, p. 141, April 9, 1945.
96. Ibid., p. 146, April 11, 1945.
97. Quoted in Klemperer, Zeugnis, vol. 2, p. 657, February 12, 1945.
98. Mann, Hörer, p. 147, April 5, 1945.
99. Lasky, Und alles war still, p. 106, March 25/26, 1945.
100. Böll, Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 1126–1127.
101. Briefwechsel Stalins mit Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt und Truman 1941–1945, ed. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Berlin 1961, p. 704.
102. Quoted in Echternkamp, Kriegsschauplatz, p. 167.
103. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, p. 31, February 6/7, 1945.

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