Killing people in large numbers presents formidable logistical problems, as
any mass murderer can testify. Richard J Evans remarks of Hitler's slaughter
of the Jews that no other genocide in history has been conducted by
mechanical means - gassing - in purpose-built facilities. More recent
amateurs in Bosnia and Zimbabwe have had to make up their massacres as they
went along.
Nazis who found themselves obliged to dispose of some people without the aid
of German industry's gas experts were distressed by the difficulties. “I
always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out exterminations by shooting,
when I thought of the vast numbers concerned,” said SS officer Rudolf Höss.
“Many [of the killers], unable to endure wading through blood any longer,
had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most ... had to rely on
alcohol.”
Even Germany's civil prisons faced challenges, as executions for criminal
offences soared during the war years. It proved necessary to abandon
refinements such as the guillotine in favour of simple hangings. Death rows
became overcrowded. New executioners were hired, most recruited from the
butchery and slaughterhouse trade. One veteran later claimed that between
1924 and 1945 he had dispatched more than 2,800 alleged offenders.
If all this sounds tasteless, indeed repellent, it reflects the nature of
Hitler's Germany, in which murder was the principal activity. Its nuances
are among many bleak details in Evans's book, the third and concluding
volume of his history of the Third Reich. Evans has won deserved plaudits
for his narratives of the prewar period. However, as he acknowledges in his
preface, completing the story of the German experience between 1939 and 1945
presents a more difficult challenge.
For the sake of coherence and completeness, he feels obliged to provide a
narrative of the war, yet this involves familiar material. Evans is at his
least convincing writing about military matters. His book appears, moreover,
within six months of Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire, which tells pretty much
the same story of the Nazi administration of Europe. Evans draws heavily on
the monumental Potsdam Institute history of the war, of which the latest
volume on German wartime society has just been published in translation in
Britain.
Nonetheless, the author displays a masterly understanding of the politics and
sociology of the Third Reich. He shows the madness of the Nazis' conduct of
their empire, even within their own terms of reference. They killed captives
in millions, before perceiving the threat posed by their shortage of labour.
Such figures as Albert Speer, Fritz Sauckel and Alfred Rosenberg sought to
treat their slaves with minimal humanity, simply to exploit their services
for the Reich. But Heinrich Himmler and the SS were too brutal, incompetent
and corrupt to adapt policy to the requirements of reason.
The Nazis' vision for Europe was bound to fail, because, unlike successful
empires, they offered no fig leaf of benefit to subject peoples. They
understood economics as a zero-sum game and looted Europe for Germany's
advantage. They deemed it weakness to pretend to any higher objective. They
ignored the consequences of destroying a complex international trading
system. Their economic misjudgments, says Evans, contributed as much to
their undoing as their military ones. Germany was simply not strong enough
to fulfil Hitler's insane ambitions. The Nazis squandered resources on their
ethnic-cleansing programme in eastern Europe, heedless of the fact that they
were still fighting the war.
Evans's book contains much intriguing anecdotage, for instance the story of a
38-year-old Munich cabinet-maker named Georg Elser. On November 8, 1939,
Hitler addressed a Nazi meeting in a Munich beer cellar, then departed
without spending his usual hour talking to old party veterans. Soon after he
left the building a bomb exploded, which might well have killed Hitler had
he stuck to his schedule.
The Gestapo assumed a British secret-service plot, but discovered otherwise
when Elser was arrested attempting to cross the Swiss frontier. In his
effects, police found a sketch of the cellar and of a bomb. The Nazis found
it impossible to believe that Elser had acted alone. But after he
demonstrated his ability to assemble a bomb, and stuck to his story despite
repeated attentions from jackboots, including Himmler's own, they realised
that this maverick, a passionate hater of tyranny, had almost succeeded in
killing the Führer by his own efforts.
Elser departed for Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he played the
zither and practised cabinet-making until the last weeks of the war, when he
was remembered - and killed. The lesson of his near miss is that a host of
Germans might have attempted the same feat, had they possessed the will to
do so.
But they did not. The July 1944 army bomb plotters were bunglers with
delusions about preserving the greater Reich and making common cause with
the western allies against the Soviets. Only a few men such as the officer
Wilm Hosenfeld recoiled from Nazi cruelties as a matter of principle, and
sought to preserve some of its victims. Most resisters, by contrast, were
motivated by despair about their nation's military plight, rather than by
revulsion.
Many Germans remained hypnotised by Hitler to the end - and afterwards. They
succumbed to self-pity rather than a sense of guilt: this, despite the fact
that public knowledge of the concentration camps and even of the Holocaust
was widespread. Evans quotes a 45-year-old housewife, Charlotte L, who wrote
in April 1945 after the Americans had occupied Helmstedt, her home town: “I
believe firmly in our Leader & that Germany has a future that we Germans
deserve.” Even after the end of the war, she lamented in June: “The
newspapers are telling lies and screwing up their propaganda beyond measure.
Behind all this stands the Jew. Will the world never realise that the Jew is
the evil for us all?” Well into the 1950s, writes Evans, “a worryingly large
proportion of the population considered that Germany was better off without
the Jews”. They resented war-crimes trials and de-Nazification programmes,
believing they had already paid for the peccadilloes of the Nazis through
the destruction of their cities. Only the rise of a new generation, which
had escaped Nazi indoctrination, made possible the restoration of civilised
values in Germany.
It is an impossible task to produce new revelations about issues explored with
such distinction in recent years by Ian Kershaw, Mazower and the Potsdam
Institute authors. But, taken together, Evans's three volumes represent a
notable achievement. He concludes that the legacy of the Third Reich remains
relevant. This is not because there is any danger of a Nazi resurgence, but
because the Hitler experience “raises in the most acute form the
possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that
exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with
terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism
and authoritarianism”.
Hitler's great achievement was to convince one of the most educated societies
in Europe that those whom his regime imprisoned, starved and killed deserved
their fates. Today, even if Hitler is justly reviled, Vladimir Putin seeks
to rehabilitate the memory of Stalin, the 20th century's other great mass
murderer. A belief in the sanctity of human life can never be taken for
granted. This is why histories such as this one must continue to be written
and read.
The Third Reich at War by Richard J Evans
Allen Lane £30 pp926
Hastings describes the plotters of 1944 as bunglers. So what?
The middle class officers who as a kind of sport tried to flee from Colditz or Stalag Luft III could also be described as "bunglers" because nearly all of the plans where not realistic. Would he describe them as "bunglers"?
Claus Hoffmann, Goettingen, Germany