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

For most, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, apart from the nagging worry that the ill-deeds perpetrated by German overlords might well come back to haunt them in defeat and occupation. This concern was present in two ways, both more subliminal than overt. As the reported comments from Stuttgart, referred to earlier, indicate, there was a gathering sense that Germany was now reaping what it had sown, that the misery its population was undergoing amounted to retribution for what had been done to the Jews and others. And another sentiment not infrequently encountered in this period was that the Jews would return with the occupying forces to take their revenge. The sentiment, commonplace enough, was directly expressed in one letter home from the front in August 1944. ‘You know that the Jew will exact his bloody revenge, mainly on Party people. Unfortunately, I was one of those who wore the Party uniform. I’ve already regretted it. I urge you to get rid of the uniform, it doesn’t matter where, even if you have to burn the lot.’¹⁰⁷ Not a few, especially no doubt among hardened Nazi believers, felt that the bombing and destruction of German towns and cities itself amounted to that revenge. Incessant Nazi propaganda about the power of world Jewry had made a lasting mark.¹⁰⁸

For the few Jews remaining within the Reich, living as pariahs, keen to keep a low profile, with almost no contact with non-Jews, it was a shadowy world, a completely uncertain, highly precarious, anxiety-ridden existence—though in ways that contrasted with the anxieties and uncertainties of the mass of the population. The academic Victor Klemperer, an intelligent observer living in Dresden whose marriage to a non-Jew had enabled him to avoid deportation, was full of apprehension simply at the late return of his wife from a rare and brief absence from their home. She was carrying parts of the secret diary he was keeping to be hidden by a friend in Pirna, not far away. If it should fall into the hands of the authorities it would spell death not just for himself, but for his wife and for friends he had mentioned by name.¹⁰⁹ He and his wife did share with the mass of the population the fear of bombing. However, here too there were major differences. Bombing for Nazism’s victims was a sign of Germany’s impending defeat and personal liberation from a terroristic regime.¹¹⁰ But Klemperer’s existential fear was that he would survive a raid, be evacuated, separated from his wife and sent somewhere to be gassed.¹¹¹ There was anxiety, too, shared with friends, about surviving another winter of war with provisions of food and fuel scarcely sufficient to keep a person alive. ‘Another winter is a horrible prospect,’ he wrote.¹¹² Another acquaintance looked grimly into the future, foreseeing malnutrition, shortage of medicines, spread of epidemic diseases, no end to the war and eventually death for all remaining bearers of the yellow star. Klemperer was aware, if without detail, of the fate of the Jews of eastern Europe. In these very days he was given another report by a soldier on leave of ‘gruesome murders of Jews in the east’.¹¹³

His reaction to the events in East Prussia also contrasted with that of the non-Jewish population. While they had their fears of Bolshevism confirmed, his own worry was what the implications were for Jews. He remarked on the new agitation against Jews unleashed by Martin Mutschmann, the Gauleiter of Saxony, then added: ‘and the Bolshevik atrocities in East Prussia, about which the people probably believed, could be turned against us’.¹¹⁴

For the countless other victims of the regime—Jews, hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, more than 7 million foreign workers and prisoners of war,¹¹⁵ and further millions of former political opponents of the Nazis—the end of the war was a moment they yearned for. In autumn 1944, however, that end was still not in sight. Their misery was set to go on.

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