The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

The mood in eastern parts of Germany made a propaganda campaign on the revelations from Nemmersdorf timely. Reports from propaganda offices had acknowledged, before news of Nemmersdorf had broken, that ‘the gains of territory by the Bolsheviks in East Prussia had produced deepest consternation’, all the more so since Gauleiter Koch had declared in a speech only days earlier that no more land would be given up to the enemy. Bitter reproaches were also made against Koch by East Prussian refugees, arriving in Danzig in a pitiable state and saying that they had first been told by retreating soldiers that ‘the Bolsheviks were on their heels’.⁷² It was in this climate of wavering morale that Goebbels saw the propaganda value of the Red Army atrocities.

The sensationalized propaganda barrage was, however, less successful than Goebbels had expected. The first reactions indicated that there was some scepticism about reportage seen as a propaganda manufacture.⁷³ In this Goebbels was hoist with his own petard. Earlier in the month he had given directions to his propaganda specialists to portray ‘the conditions in the areas occupied by the Anglo-Americans exactly as dramatically and drastically as in those occupied by the Soviets’. This had been a response to accounts ‘that our people, should it come to it, would prefer to fall to Anglo-American rather than Soviet occupation’. Such a possibility could not be left open to the ordinary citizen—‘the little man’—because it would reduce the determination to fight. ‘On the contrary, he must know… that if the Reich is lost, to whichever enemy partner, there is no possibility of existence for him.’⁷⁴

In reality, the Nazi authorities were well aware that the people of those parts of the west that had already fallen to the Americans had been on the whole well enough treated and had often, indeed, welcomed the enemy and attuned rapidly to occupation.⁷⁵ Goebbels himself recognized that reports of atrocities committed by British and American troops were not believed, and that it was easy for people—apart from Party functionaries—to give themselves up to the British or Americans since they would be treated leniently. People thought the Americans especially were not as bad as they had been portrayed in the German press.⁷⁶ Propaganda reports were now telling Goebbels that evacuees from the west were spreading the feeling that ‘peace at any price’ would be preferable to the continuation of the war.⁷⁷ And, certainly in parts of the Reich far away from the travails of the east German population, people were inclined to see the accounts of refugees as exaggerated.⁷⁸

Propaganda backfired, too, in another way. One report commented ‘that the highlighting of Bolshevik atrocities in the East Prussian border areas’ was rejected ‘since the propaganda about Nemmersdorf signified in a certain sense a self-incrimination of the Reich because the population had not been evacuated on time’.⁷⁹ The allegations were countered only with weak (and false) arguments which claimed that the area directly behind the fighting zone had long been evacuated, that the surprise Soviet assault had overrun refugee treks but that the local population of Nemmersdorf had already left, that the numbers evacuated by the Party had been entirely satisfactory and proof of its energetic and successful work, and—with some contradiction—that people had had to work behind the lines as long as possible to bring in the harvest that was much needed for provisioning the rest of the Reich with food.⁸⁰ All in all, Goebbels himself was eventually forced to concede that ‘the atrocities reports are not bought from us any longer. In particular, the reports from Nemmersdorf have only convinced a part of the population.’⁸¹

Elsewhere, far away from the eastern borders of the Reich, another—extremely telling—reason was given for being unimpressed by the horror propaganda about Nemmersdorf. The SD office in Stuttgart reported in early November that people were calling the press stories ‘shameless’ and asking what the intention of the leadership might be in publishing pictures of the atrocities. Surely the Reich’s leaders must realize, the report went on,

that every thinking person, seeing these gory victims, will immediately contemplate the atrocities that we have perpetrated on enemy soil, and even in Germany. Have we not slaughtered Jews in their thousands? Don’t soldiers tell over and again that Jews in Poland had to dig their own graves? And what did we do with the Jews who were in the concentration camp [Natzweiler] in Alsace? The Jews are also human beings. By acting in this way, we have shown the enemy what they might do to us in the event of their victory…. We can’t accuse the Russians of behaving just as gruesomely towards other peoples as our own people have done against their own Germans.