The German Experience of the Second World War

How the Germans Experienced World  War II

   I am reading a totally fascinating book and by now I am just at 37% per cent, since that’s the way Kindle measures one’s progress, rather than giving old-fashioned page numbers. The title is Germans at War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945  by Nicholas Stargardt; it gives an account of how the Germans experienced the second World War that had been started by Hitler with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Its distinctive procedure is to make copious use of diaries and letters of Germans in all corners of the Reich, many were combatants, but by no means only such. In brief but meaningful quotations they give accounts of their experiences and views, starting with letters sent home to their wives by soldiers who participated in the invasion of Poland.

   A very large number of subjects are covered, touching on all aspects of military and civilian life with very skillfully wrought—very smooth—transitions from one to another.

   When I’ve finished the book, I may report additional impressions of the book, but I won’t compete with the many reviews to be found on the internet, quite a few by experts in one or another related subject. But I do want to say a word about the author. Nicholas Stargardt was born in Melbourne in 1962 and received his higher education in Britain. He is a fellow of Magdalen College and teaches European history at Oxford. He is the son of a German Jewish father who emigrated to Australia. I surmise that the father is of my generation, with the difference that I came with my family to New York, while he wound up in Australia, marrying an Australian woman.

   I provide this small bio of the books author, because I believe that he may have been the ideal person to write this book. As a native German speaker, educated outside Germany, but trained as a historian of Germany he was a particularly favorable position to do this book. To look at it in another way, it might well have been very difficult if not impossible for a native German historian to keep out of the text a certain defensiveness, even when writing these many years later than the events recounted. On the one hand, Stargardt is in full command of the facts that he reports and on the other, he is able to refrain from making judgments about that huge range of events—from pronouncements by Hitler and Goebbels to reports about horrendous atrocities committed by so many Germans during this period.

   To point to a quite different German trait, I have both been impressed and amused by the evidence of German Gründlichkeit, thoroughness, of keeping records. “By 1943, a mere 3,450 people had been punished for listening to foreign radio. . . . between April and November 1942, 1,375,567 civilian workers went into the Reich from the occupied Soviet territories, a further 291,756 from the Polish General Government . . . compared to 357,940 from the Netherlands, Belgium and all but northern France” etc., etc.

   Stargardt is married to Lyndal Roper, a distinguished Oxford professor of history and a prolific author about witchcraft. Considering that the Germans stuck with Hitler to the war’s bitter—and ruinous—end, that Oxford household has been coping with a good deal of irrationality.