Review: Stargardt, The German War (2017)

[truepenny]

The German War: A Nation Under Arms by Nicholas Stargardt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent and thought-provoking book about how the German people understood their part in World War II and the Holocaust. Obviously, there are going to be exceptions to everything Stargardt says, but he's quite good at tracking those down and presenting a spectrum of opinions, from Victor Klemperer to Joseph Goebbels. The most surprising thing about what he finds (for me) is that the Germans believed Hitler's lie about Poland attacking first. It's such an obvious. clumsy, amateurish lie---but the Germans believed from the beginning that they were fighting a *defensive* war, and then, when they'd conquered all of their immediate neighbors, that it was *England*'s fault, for rejecting Hitler's generous offers of peace. And an astonishing number, including people who were fervently anti-Nazi, believed that the bombing of German cities was retaliation demanded by "world Jewry" for "what we did to the Jews." (Never mind "what we did" to the Poles and the Ukrainians and the rest of the untermenschen.) Stargardt is particularly good at showing the way Goebbels' propaganda machine fostered a culture of complicity without ever admitting that anybody knew what was happening. It was all rumor and half-truths and knowing nods. Between the bombing and the horror of the Russian invasion at the end of the war, Germans in general believed that their suffering was equal to the Jews, and that somehow this should let them off the hook. (I don't want to get into ranking atrocities, but being the victim of one atrocity does not cancel out perpetration of another.) Germany's collective narrative of victimhood proved horribly resilient and resulted ultimately in the failure of the Allies' de-Nazification efforts. (The Nazi leaders who weren't executed immediately and didn't fall into Russian hands were mostly back in German society, being judges, mayors, etc., just like they were before the war, by the 1950s. Because Germany's indelible belief was that they didn't do anything fundamentally wrong. Not unlike Trump saying there are "fine people" on both sides. In fact, the parallels between the failure of Reconstruction and the failure of de-Nazification are striking and bone-chilling.)

Stargardt is an excellent writer who presents his complicated and diverse evidence clearly and effectively.



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