The German War: A Nation Under Arms

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (2015), a historical study by Nicholas Stargardt, a professor of history at Oxford University, examines the attitudes, beliefs, and actions of ordinary Germans during the years of World War II.

The book takes as its starting the point the question of why ordinary Germans continued vehemently to support the war effort, even as it became clear that the Allies were winning and that genocidal atrocities were being committed in their name. Stargardt suggests that German doggedness sprang from a mixture of patriotism, militaristic pride in the Wehrmacht, and a sense of victimhood. He also argues that it must be understood as something which evolved over time. The early elation of German military success, the creeping realization of what was happening in the camps, and the steady drip of Nazi propaganda gradually trapped ordinary Germans into a belief that surrender was not an option.

Stargardt proceeds to examine his thesis chronologically, drawing on the testimonies of hundreds of ordinary Germans. Beginning with the outbreak of war in September 1939, he demonstrates that, at least initially, Nazi propaganda efforts to present the war in Poland as a response to Polish aggression convinced ordinary Germans.



Already primed to see themselves as victims, most Germans felt oppressed by the terms of surrender imposed at the end of World War I. The Nazis had used this as the basis for a conspiracy theory, blaming the international forces of “Jewish-Bolshevism” for the German people’s oppression. Stargardt points out that, although by no means all German people fully accepted the Nazi position, even those Germans with no animosity to the Jews were prepared to accept that the other nations of the West were conspiring against Germany.

Early successes in Poland and France galvanized the German population. After the humiliation of World War I, ordinary Germans were thrilled by the Wehrmacht’s effortless victories. By 1941, German forces occupied the bulk of Western Europe. Stargardt captures the heady thrill of vindication felt by many ordinary Germans.

Meanwhile, the progress of the war had transformed their lives. Stargardt examines the many roles and experiences of ordinary Germans during this period. On the military side, he produces testimony from men in every branch and at every rank. Some fight in the desert, some at frozen Stalingrad. Others spend the war guarding Norwegian ports or running P.O.W. camps. Many commit or witness mass murder in the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe, and Stargardt points out that most of these men had moral qualms, albeit trumped by a patriotic sense of duty.



On the home front, the sources are even more varied. Stargardt tells the story of an obsessive athlete and trainer who hides Jews in his gym; of wives longing for husbands sent to the Front, never to return; of the “new women” who found in the War an opportunity for adventure denied to them in former times. He discusses a schizophrenic patient whose inner monologue is tormented by the language of Nazi propaganda. Some of Stargardt’s sources recur, such as Hans Albring, who we first encounter as a young man in France, where he feels guilty for his countrymen’s occupation. Later, we encounter Hans in Russia, where he witnesses Jewish mass graves and feels no guilt at all.

Stargardt also pays attention to the ways in which religious and regional identity shaped Germans’ responses to the war. Protestant Germans tried to accommodate Nazism in their theology, while Catholics refused to do so. In Protestant areas of Germany, captured Poles were executed in front of large crowds, but in the Catholic Rhineland region, more sympathetic to the Catholic Poles, the executions caused unrest and were immediately discontinued.

As the war ground on, ordinary Germans became increasingly aware of the genocide being committed in their name. Stargardt produces a wide range of evidence for this. German civilians received letters from the Front or spoke to returning soldiers. Photographs of the killing fields of Eastern Europe circulated. Stargardt proffers examples of German newspapers “hint[ing] at what people already knew.” This half-secret knowledge, Stargardt argues, created a sense of complicity among those Germans who were not directly exposed to mass murder. When Allied bombing raids began to destroy German cities, many Germans wondered if the ferocity of the attacks was a deliberate act of revenge for their treatment of the Jews.



Having shown that ordinary Germans knew what was happening, Stargardt attempts to unravel the processes by which they came to terms with this knowledge. He argues that Josef Goebbels’s propaganda machine was powerfully effective in maintaining the narrative that “World Jewry” had started the war and was determined to crush Germany. Goebbels also leaned heavily on ordinary Germans’ support for the troops, broadcasting weekly specials in which servicemen could request sentimental songs.

At the same time, educated Germans turned to high-cultural sources in an attempt to justify their experiences. Stargardt returns repeatedly to the poet Hölderlin, who enjoyed renewed popularity in Nazi Germany. Hölderlin’s idea of “Abgrund,” or abyss, represents for Stargardt a characteristic response of educated Germans to the knowledge of genocide, the retreat into an existential debate.

In the summer of 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and by September, senior Nazi officials were advising Hitler that his forces were overstretched. Hitler’s response was to declare war on the United States and devote yet more resources to the destruction of the Jews. This was the turning point of the war. As the overstretched German forces began to lose ground to the advancing Allies, German military casualties spiraled.



Stargardt argues that the desperate rear-guard action of the Wehrmacht inspired German civilians to remain loyal. He suggests that to the very end, for most Germans the war effort “remained legitimate—more so than Nazism itself.”

Nevertheless, support for the Nazi regime continued. Stargardt finds examples of civilians who believed that areas of cities spared bombing had been earmarked by “the Jews” for future habitation. He argues that Germans were generally appalled by the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.

Germany could not surrender. Instead, increased Germans died as the war went on. In one month in 1945, the Wehrmacht lost as many men as the US lost in both World Wars combined. Nearly a million German civilians were killed by bombs or in ethnic cleansing as they were expelled from occupied territories. And yet, until the very end of the war, young Germans continued to volunteer.