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Tag Archives: Nazism

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Adolf Hitler, air raids, anti-Semitism, attitudes, delusions, Germany, Holocaust, home front, Jews, Nazism, Nicholas Stargardt, propaganda, SD, World War I, World War II

Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Johnny on the Spot: Jack 1939

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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appeasement, Francine Mathews, historical fiction, John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Kennedy mystique, Nazism, Reinhard Heydrich, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Jack 1939, by Francine Mathews
Riverhead, 2012. 361 pp. $27

Read solely as a thriller, this improbable page-turner obeys all the conventions. It has a sexy, daring hero, who gets into hair-raising scrapes not even a genie could possibly escape, yet of course, he manages. He beds the most beautiful, passionate woman in Europe, though she’s older, married, and infinitely more worldly than he. And–most importantly–he saves the world to the extent anybody can in the spring and summer of 1939, besting none other than the sociopath Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo (and future architect of the Final Solution).

Aaron Shikler's posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain)

Aaron Shikler’s posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain).

In other words, you could read Jack 1939 and say, “Tell me another.” Or you could lay it down and wonder why you wasted your time on yet another spy novel embodying the clichés that both bedevil and drive the genre.

But you could also read this novel as a fictional biography of John F. Kennedy as a callow, idealistic youth, and as a meticulously researched historical tale of a world destroying itself, with delicious portraits of FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, Churchill, and other leaders thrown in. To the degree that Jack 1939 surpasses the clichés, it does so because the author has thought deeply about her protagonist and drawn a coherent, fascinating portrait of a charming, tortured, sickly, underachieving young man, humiliated by his parents, especially his loathsome father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who never tires of telling him he’ll amount to nothing.

It’s Joe P. who creates the key problem of this novel for FDR, the president who appointed him ambassador to Britain. Kennedy’s an appeaser, an isolationist determined to keep the United States out of any European war. So when Roosevelt wants a fresh pair of eyes to report from Europe, unbeholden to the State Department (or anyone else) he taps young Jack, whose cover is that he plans to interview European politicians for his senior thesis at Harvard. What Jack doesn’t know, at first, is how far his father has gone to deal with the Germans, or how far he’s willing to go, a secret that will shake him to the roots. So Jack faces dangers not only from political enemies but from the worst place of all, his own tortured psyche. It’s a great setup, and in case you needed further trouble, there’s Jack’s undiagnosed Addison’s disease, which has most people figuring he won’t live to see thirty.

But FDR senses that young Kennedy has much more to him than anyone suspects.

Jack might be sick and his record might be checkered, but he was one of those rare souls completely at home in the world. It didn’t matter that he was Irish or Catholic or that his father was regarded as an unprincipled cad; Jack slouched into the most breathless of WASP bastions in his careless clothes and threw his legs over armchairs like he’d owned them from birth. His ease was admired and slavishly imitated; his quips and sarcasm circulated like a kissing disease.

However, once in Europe, Jack quickly learns that his charm and social gifts will get him only so far. They’re particularly useless when it comes to repelling Heydrich’s assassins or rescuing a valuable list of names for which many people have already died or a piece of military hardware that everyone wants. So he must live by his wits and luck, both of which are considerable. But he makes many mistakes, not least for his terrible temper, hooked up like a lightning rod to his sense of injury. I love that stroke, which seems psychologically astute, portraying Jack as oversensitive to slight, just what you’d expect from the child of emotionally abusive parents.

His skirt-chasing doesn’t really satisfy him, because he hates being touched, physically or emotionally. Mathews supposes that he was no great shakes as a Harvard Lothario, “deflowering Radcliffe virgins,” until he meets the gorgeous, brave woman I mentioned above. Nevertheless, Jack’s affectionate and loving with his favorite sibling, his sister, Kathleen (known as Kick for her natural vivacity), and those scenes leave the impression of a very lonely young man dying for the real connection he could never seem to find.

What I find least believable, though, is that FDR would keep a secret radio transmitter by which he and Jack communicate. I’m also none too sure whether Jack’s apple fell that far from his father’s tree. I remember JFK as president, and I’ll never forget the day he was murdered. But I’ve come to reexamine the myths in which I used to believe, including his supposed brilliance at foreign affairs, of which Cuba and Vietnam furnish prime counterexamples.

Nevertheless, Jack 1939 takes place before all that, and it’s intriguing, sometimes poignant, to see the future president struggle with the world as he saw it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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