The Nazis- a Warning From History Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1 HELPED INTO POWER

  Chapter 2 CHAOS AND CONSENT

  Chapter 3 THE WRONG WAR

  Chapter 4 THE WILD EAST

  Chapter 5 HIGH HOPES

  Chapter 6 A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR

  Chapter 7 THE TIDE TURNS

  Chapter 8 THE ROAD TO TREBLINKA

  Chapter 9 REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

  PICTURE SECTION

  NOTES

  NOTES ON EYEWITNESSES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PICTURE CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  Following the success of Rees’ bestselling Auschwitz, this substantially revised and updated edition of The Nazis – A Warning from History tells the powerfully gripping story of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

  During a 16-year period, acclaimed author and documentary-maker Laurence Rees met and interviewed a large number of former Nazis, and his unique insights into the Nazi psyche and the Second World War received enormous praise.

  At the heart of the book lies compelling eyewitness accounts of life under Adolf Hitler, spoken through the words of those who experienced the Nazi regime at every level of society. An extensive new section on the Nazi/Soviet war (previously published in Rees’ War of the Century) provides a chilling insight into Nazi mentality during the most bloody conflict in history.

  Described as one of the greatest documentary series of all times The Nazis – A Warning from History won a host of awards, including a BAFTA and an International Documentary Award.

  About the Author

  Laurence Rees is the writer and producer of the major BBC television documentary series World War II: Behind Closed Doors, War of the Century, Horror in the East and Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’. He won the British Book Award for History Book of the Year in 2006 for his international bestseller Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’.

  Rees’ career as a writer and filmmaker, focusing on the Nazis and World War II, stretched back nearly 20 years. His body of work has won him several awards, including a BAFTA and a Grierson Award. Rees was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University and is the former Creative Director of BBC TV History programmes.

  The Nazis

  A Warning from History

  Laurence Rees

  For Oliver, Camilla and Benedict

  If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Jenseits von Gut und Böse

  INTRODUCTION

  IT’S ONLY BY looking back that life takes on a pattern. That’s as true of our own individual lives as it is of the great events of history. I never thought, for example, when I embarked on Nazis: A Warning from History in the early 1990s that it would be the start of such a long journey. For it was only whilst making Warning from History that I fully realised the wealth of new historical material that the fall of the Berlin Wall had just made available in Eastern Europe. It was that, plus the growing realization that it was almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of the Hitler/Stalin war in any attempt to understand the mentality of the Nazis, that led me to move straight onto another project. I spent several more years writing, producing and directing War of the Century about the epic struggle between Nazism and Communism.

  The pattern of all this work seems clear to me only now, in a way that it never was at the time, which is why I’m so grateful to BBC Books for reissuing here, not just the original Nazis: A Warning from History, but for allowing me to incorporate within it the majority of the War of the Century book. For I think the material in War of the Century – particularly the chapter ‘A Different Kind of War’ – vividly demonstrates the practical consequences of Nazism. Certainly travelling around Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, and hearing stories about the Nazi occupation, allowed me personally to gain a greater insight into the essential nature of Hitler’s world view: a bleak landscape where pity is outlawed and life is reduced to a Darwinian struggle in which the weak deserve to suffer because it is their destiny.

  Of course there are potential problems in slotting one book inside another. Some are easy to rectify – the danger of repetition, for example – and I’ve done my best to re-edit the text to avoid going over the same ground twice. I’ve also updated the content in places where my thinking has changed since writing the original words – that’s particularly the case with the section on the origins of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’. But there remains the real danger that, by focusing chiefly on the War in the East and hearing the extensive stories of Russian veterans, an impression is created that somehow the war in the West ‘didn’t matter’. So I need to emphasize here that nothing could be further from my own belief. I grew up on the heroic stories of the sacrifice of British and American servicemen during World War II. My father flew in the RAF and my uncle was torpedoed and killed whilst serving on the Atlantic convoys. It was because I wanted to see the full story of the Western Allies’ fight against Nazism told to the widest possible audience that I devised television series such as Battle of the Atlantic and D-Day to Berlin, and then editorially oversaw their construction.

  But the book you are holding in your hand is about something different. What I have tried to do here is to penetrate as deeply as I can the essential nature of Nazism. It’s not a history of World War II or an account of all the significant military decisions of the conflict, but an attempt to see how far it is possible to understand why the Germans and their allies did what they did. It is in pursuit of that aim – and that aim alone – that I thought it important to include the material from War of the Century.

  As I look back on this work now, I also see another aspect of it that I didn’t fully recognize at the time. These books, and the television series that went with them, were based on approximately 100 unique interviews – many with former members of the Nazi Party. I had the chance to meet and question people who adored Hitler, worked for Himmler, fought on the Eastern Front and committed atrocities whilst members of the SS. This is now an opportunity that is no longer available to anyone else who comes after me – for the simple reason that most of the people we interviewed have since died. In the heat of the production process, focused as I was on a forthcoming transmission or publication date, it didn’t really occur to me that we were making something of value for future generations.

  Of course, as the number of survivors diminishes, attitudes to Nazism and World War II will also change. For my generation the only way of understanding the world we grew up in was to know what happened during World War II: a divided Germany, the Cold War, the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe – the consequences of the conflict were all around us. But for today’s schoolchildren it is all very different. I remember the daughter of a friend asking me, when she was seven years old: ‘What came first, Adolf Hitler or the Battle of Hastings?’ To her generation Nazism is just another bit of history, part of an enormous jigsaw that has to be fitted in along with the Romans, the Normans and Henry VIII.

  You won’t be surprised to hear, I guess, that I don’t think that the Third Reich is ‘just another bit of history’. I believe that a study of Nazism still offers us a level of insight into the human condition that is different from the benefits of understanding some other periods of the past. To start with, obviously, the Nazis walked the earth not so very long ago. They came from a civilized country at a time when, in the wake of World War I, a whole series of positive values a
nd beliefs about democracy and human rights were prevalent in Europe. They smashed all that away, having gained power as a result of a series of elections that demonstrated that a majority of Germans – in voting for either the Communists or the Nazis – had chosen to vote out democracy. Given that today there are so many fledgling democracies in the world, it’s a stark warning.

  Then there’s something even more significant that I think we ought to take from this history. I’d expected when I embarked upon this task all these years ago to meet countless former Nazis who would say, ‘I only committed war crimes because I was acting under orders.’ However, when a former Nazi perpetrator was pressed on why he did what he did, his most likely response was: ‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.’ It was a much more terrifying answer than the trite and self-serving one I’d been expecting. These former Nazis believed that their support of Hitler had essentially been a rational response to the situation around them. They told of how they had felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, and then had to endure the revolutions and hyper-inflation of the immediate post-war years, followed by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the early 1930s. They craved a ‘strong man’ who would restore national pride and defeat the growing threat of Communism.

  As the years went by and I met more and more former Nazis, I came also to believe that there was another dimension to their support for the Third Reich that wasn’t ‘rational’ at all. Instead, it was emotional and based on faith. The quasi-religious dimension to Nazism is obvious, of course, and I discuss this at greater length in the first chapter of the book. But we also have to recognize that Hitler as an individual provided something for these Germans that other political leaders didn’t. Hitler scarcely ever mentioned anything so dull as ‘policies’. Instead he offered a leadership couched in visions and dreams. In doing so he touched something deep within the human psyche. As George Orwell put it in his famous review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades’. Many people also, Orwell might have added, like being told they are ‘superior’ to others merely by virtue of their birth, and that recent catastrophic events in their country’s history were nothing to do with them, but the result of some shady ‘international conspiracy’.

  I think in many ways I was naïve about human motivation before I started on this project. I used to think that people made important decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual criteria. Instead, the decision to follow Hitler and support him through bad times as well as good was to a large extent an emotional one. And we mustn’t think of this as some kind of uniquely ‘German’ trait. Look at your own life and ask yourself how many of the decisions you make in your life are actually ‘rational’. Was it a ‘rational’ decision you made to buy the house or car you did? Do you like certain people and dislike others for ‘rational’ reasons or ‘emotional’ ones?

  And despite all of the work conducted over recent years by structuralist historians who seek to emphasize the circumstances that created Nazism, we still have to face the uncomfortable fact that Adolf Hitler was an extraordinary person who successfully played on the emotions of the German people. Of course you already had to be predisposed to believe in what he was saying to be affected by him – many testimonies contained in this book make that clear – and it needed an economic crisis over which he had no control to catapult him from obscurity to power. But the essential truth remains that for a number of people, even in the early years, meeting Hitler was a life-changing event. Albert Speer memorably said that after meeting Hitler he felt like he was living his life on ‘high voltage’, and he was not the only highly intelligent individual who felt compelled to subordinate himself to the will of the Austrian corporal. Charisma is, we learn from this history, a quality that we should treat with suspicion. More worryingly still, we also learn that we should harbour similar scepticism about those who follow political leaders out of ‘faith’.

  Ultimately, there is one overarching reason why I think this history remains of worth. As I wrote at the end of the short introduction to War of the Century nearly six years ago: ‘This is not a happy story and it offers little comfort. But it should be taught in our schools and remembered. For this is what human beings were capable of in the twentieth century.’

  Laurence Rees

  London, October 2005

  1

  HELPED INTO POWER

  NEAR WHAT WAS the east Prussian town of Rastenburg and is now the Polish town of Ketrzyn lies a tangled mass of reinforced concrete hidden in a forest. Today, in this remote part of eastern Poland near the border with Russia, it is hard to imagine a place more distant from the heart of power. But if you had stood on this spot in the autumn of 1941 you would have been inside the command centre of one of the most powerful men in history – Adolf Hitler. His soldiers stood on the beaches of Brittany and in the wheat-fields of Ukraine. More than 100 million Europeans, who only months previously had lived in sovereign states, were now under his rule. In Poland one of the most bestial ethnic rearrangements of all time was in full swing. And, transcending all of this in evil, Hitler was just about to conspire with Heinrich Himmler to order the elimination of an entire people – the Jews. The decisions Hitler took in this now-ruined concrete city touched all our lives and shaped the course of the second half of the twentieth century – all for the worse.

  How was it possible that a cultured nation at the heart of Europe ever allowed this man and the Nazi Party he led to come to power? Knowing as we do the suffering and destruction the Nazis were to bring to the world, the idea that Adolf Hitler could have become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 by constitutional means seems almost incomprehensible.

  One popular way of explaining the Nazis’ rise to power is through the character of Hitler. No human being’s personality has been more discussed; there are more than twice as many biographies of Hitler than of Churchill. The Nazis themselves pursued this biographical route to extremes in their own search for an explanation of their success. Hitler’s own disciples in the Nazi Party concluded that he was not a mere mortal but a superman. ‘Hitler is lonely. So is God. Hitler is like God,’1 said Hans Frank, Reich Minister of Justice, in 1936. Julius Streicher, a Nazi with a particular fondness for hyperbole, went further: ‘It is only on one or two exceptional points that Christ and Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big a man to be compared with one so petty.’2 A new prayer was read in German kindergartens in the 1930s: ‘Dear Führer, we love you like our fathers and mothers. Just as we belong to them so we belong to you. Take unto yourself our love and trust, O Führer!’3

  This is also the explanation of the Nazi rise to power that Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, wanted the whole world to have. (He himself asked of Hitler after reading Mein Kampf (My Struggle): ‘Who is this man? half plebeian, half god! Truly Christ, or only St John?’)4 In the Nazi version of history, Hitler, the man of destiny, came to power in Germany in much the same way as Christ came to save the world two thousand years ago. In both cases their careers were predetermined by their superhuman destiny. This reasoning, although seldom taken to this extreme, is still popular in some quarters today as an explanation of how the Nazis came to power. It fits with the desire many people have to understand the past simply in terms of the story of ‘great men’ who carve the world to their will regardless of the circumstances around them. There is just one problem with this as an answer to the question ‘How did the Nazis come to power?’ – it’s wrong.

  The Nazi Party took part in the German general election of May 1928. Hitler had then been leader of the party for nearly seven years. The German people had by now had ample opportunity to witness his superhuman qualities and to fall under his hypnotic spell. In that election the Nazi Party polled precisely 2.6 per cen
t of the popular vote. In a secret Reich report of 1927 there is, in the context of the time, a sensible judgement on the Nazis; the Nazi Party has, according to this document, ‘no noticeable influence on the great masses of the population’.5 Thus the idea of Hitler having hypnotic or quasi-divine influence on the Germans regardless of circumstance is nonsense. Of course, Hitler was an extraordinary individual and his impact on events should not be underestimated, but the content of his character is not a sufficient explanation either for how the Nazis came to exist or for how they went on to gain power. The reality is that Hitler and the Nazis were just as much trapped in the circumstances of their time as we all are. Regardless of who Hitler was, only with the collaboration, weakness, miscalculation and tolerance of others could the Nazis come to power. Indeed, without a crisis that shook the world, the Nazi Party would not even have been born in the first place.

  When Germany surrendered and World War I ended in November 1918, there were those in the German Army who couldn’t understand why this disaster had happened. ‘We did wonder,’ says German war veteran Herbert Richter, ‘because we didn’t feel beaten at all. The front-line troops didn’t feel themselves beaten, and we were wondering why the armistice was happening so quickly, and why we had to vacate all our positions in such a hurry, because we were still standing on enemy territory and we thought all this was strange.’ Herbert Richter’s memory of how he and his friends felt about the surrender is still vivid: ‘We were angry because we did not feel we had come to the end of our strength.’ This anger was to have dangerous consequences. Those who felt it quickly looked around to blame someone for the sudden and, to them, suspicious circumstances of the armistice. The myth of the ‘stab in the back’ grew – the idea that while German soldiers had been laying down their lives, others, behind the lines, back in the Fatherland, were betraying them. Who were these ‘others’? They were the politicians of the Left who had agreed to the humiliating armistice in November 1918 – the so-called ‘November criminals’. Germany had turned to democracy for the first time in its history at the end of 1918, and to the politicians it was obvious that continuing the war was pointless – Germany must lose. But many soldiers saw it differently; to them the circumstances of Germany’s defeat in November 1918 brought only shame and dishonour.