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In the Shadow of War
By Richard Overy
THE CURRENT fashion for seeing disaster .all around us in the Western world, from climate change to “global” terrorism, needs to be tempered by some solid understanding of just what
disaster is really like. The current fears reflect the fact that for more than half a century the West has been sheltered from the violence and hardships of many of the less fortunate areas of the world. An age of unprecedented
economic growth and personal security, the absence of major wars among the great powers, the current concern with rights and enablement, all these have contributed to an exaggerated sensitivity to risk.
It is timely to
recall that the violence and economic deprivation of the generation or so after 1914 overshadows everything we worry about today. The two devastating world wars are remembered as symbolic reference points in support of national
myths of triumph or victimhood; the suffering is memorialized or commercialized. Children visiting museums are invited to enjoy the “blitz experience” or the “trench experience” (though neither is in fact experienced at all).
But the raw reality of what happened in Europe and in Asia almost defies the modern imagination. How would the modern world cope now with the World War II death toll of 55 million (or more) and the tens of millions of
displaced, disabled, psychologically damaged and homeless people who stood among the ruins of their cities in 1945?
The publication of Richard Bessel’s harrowing and intelligent account of the end of World War II in
Europe , Germany 1945, is an important corrective to the self-indulgent panic of the present day. The portrait he paints of a Germany in the very depths of an abyss of violence and social disaster is a necessary curative to the
often-passive way in which defeated Germans are portrayed in triumphalist military histories of Allied victory. Germans were people too, and the terrible things that happened in their country in the final months of defeat and
the years of slow readjustment to peace exposes the shallowness of the view, widely held among the Allied populations, that Germany just had to be brought to his knees to make the world a better place. The suffering experienced
by ordinary Germans was a very human suffering, visible since 1945 in a hundred other civil wars and wars of liberation where the civilian population has been abused, bombed, deported or forced to flee.
BESSEL’S ACCOUNT
is not an attempt to revisit the theme of “Germans as victims” in which victimhood is shared irrespective of the historical circumstances that produce it. The mass murder of millions of Jewish and non-Jewish Europeans is
victimization of a quite-different kind. It cannot be thought of in the same terms as the messy consequences of defeat experienced by the society that generated the mass murder in the first place. What Bessel does is simply
record what a society facing exceptional violence and social crisis is like. The situation in Germany was unique. No other state in World War II fought to the very end. No other state turned its own territory into the site of
battle and its own population into the object of terrible violence. Italy and Japan both surrendered before that happened (although half of Italy was made a German battlefield between 1943 and 1945 and both societies were
heavily bombed). Millions of German soldiers died in defense of their homeland in battles in the eastern part of the country and the storming of Berlin ; German civilian casualties were twenty times as high as those of Italy
and six times those of Japan . But, the German armed forces and German society continued to function and fight until the very day that the Wehrmacht unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945. The experience was unparalleled in
another sense too. Not since the wars of Napoleon, and perhaps not even then, was defeat so complete.
The seismic nature of the German defeat, a social earthquake unprecedented in modern times, can be expressed in
statistical form. Bessel observes that German casualties among soldiers and civilians reached a hideous crescendo in the last year of the war. In January 1945, four hundred fifty thousand German servicemen died; in the few
months of war in 1945, over one-quarter of all German military losses were recorded, most of them on German soil. In the last year of war, the Allies dropped more bombs on Germany than during the whole of the rest of the
conflict. In Dresden alone, in February 1945, twenty-five to thirty thousand people died in a single attack. Millions were rendered homeless, while millions more fled westward in front of the Soviet army. Almost 9 million were
evacuated from the cities. Germany was a country of bodies, bombed buildings and people on the move; those who lacked the opportunity or will to flee stayed where they were, apathetic, hungry and fearful. When the Red Army
arrived, hundreds of thousands of German women of all ages were gang-raped and in some cases murdered in the process (though Red Army soldiers did not stop short in raping Germans, but also Poles, Hungarians, Yugoslavs and so
on). Germany by the end of the war was a grim science-fiction landscape of human and material destruction.
Bessel does not forget that this was also a society bent on victimizing others to the final day of the war. The
seven hundred thousand in the camps were subject to murderous work assignments, then to “death marches” where those who could not continue died by the roadside or were finished off with a shot to the head. An estimated three
hundred fifty thousand prisoners never made it through to the end of the war. In some cases, more important political prisoners, who might once have had some value for the regime alive, were killed in the last weeks of conflict.
More menacingly, the regime allowed a wave of state lawlessness to spread over society as the Gestapo, military police and local vigilantes murdered, often without any formal proceeding, all so-called defeatists or
alleged looters. Germany was full of over 7 million forced workers who proved a dangerous cohort of hostages by the end of the war. When peace came, forced workers took revenge on the local population, stealing from them,
raping German women and murdering their former tormentors. Among the ruined cities (more than 50 percent of the major urban areas were destroyed), there was played out an awful Hobbesian parody among the vanquished and
desperate population, the captive labor force, the surviving prisoners and the residues of the National Socialist state. Death in this cruel environment was arbitrary and immanent.
THE QUESTION that interests Bessel is
more universal than simply the defeat of Hitler’s Germany . How does any society which suffers this degree of destruction, dislocation and death find the material and psychological resources to function again? And not only to
function, but to become, as the western zones of Germany became, a model democracy and an economic superpower?
The background to this remarkable change was not propitious. The Allies took extensive reparations. The
Soviet side collected the largest share from its zone of occupation, both in machinery and technical equipment, but also the scientists necessary to the Soviet rocket program. There was a good deal of technical and material
gain for the Western allies too, particularly France, which got access once again to the coal and steel resources of the Saarland, as it did in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. The breakdown of the German state meant that
the population was dependent on what the Allies chose to give them. Somehow employment continued and production was got going again, but most Germans were underemployed and poor. Inflation destroyed what savings had been
amassed from the Third Reich; other wealth was looted by the occupiers or traded for desperately needed food. The biggest problem was feeding the German people, who were not at the top of the Allied list. In 1945–46 there was
widespread malnutrition, made worse by the collapse of medical services. Bessel cites the city of Trier , in western Germany , where in 1945 one-third of all infants died in their first year. Many Germans lived in rough huts or
the cellars of destroyed houses; women traded sex for food; children returned only slowly to school and quickly toward delinquency; and theft multiplied.
The psychological damage done by the final months of war and
defeat lingered on for years. One German psychotherapist, working with older Germans who remembered the bombing as children, has recently unearthed a great deal of hidden trauma which for decades went undiagnosed. The
experience of the end of the war may have been so distorting psychologically that it had to be repressed. Bessel observes how ordinary Germans for obvious reasons became obsessed with the details of daily survival in the years
after the war rather than engaging in political conflict or confrontation with the authorities. He also argues that the very harshness of the Allied occupation was key to stamping out any sense of resistance or argument from
the German population, forcing them to accept the reality of defeat. Bombing, for example, did not provoke cries of revenge but was seen as an opportunity to reconstruct cities in useful ways. In the last stages of the bombing
campaign there were German diarists who speculated that bombing was something the Germans deserved, and might be a way of expiating their own guilt. The sense that the violence was a necessary experience to rid Germany of its
demons and to pave the way for a new society was captured in the German term for the moment of defeat, “Zero Hour.” The violence in Germany was so traumatic and extensive that it created a powerful predisposition never to
experience it again.1
At the same time, the postwar years witnessed a strong sense of German victimhood, at the hands of both the Nazis and the Allies, which helped to ease the path away from any fond memories of the
Hitler regime or any fantasies of military revival. Revanchism in the interwar years had brought the crisis of 1945 in the first place; the people of Germany did not want to make the same mistake twice. The European world after
1945 was not disturbed again by German violence.
But above all, the Germans, trying to make sense of their lives in 1945, all shared one thing in common: they had survived. And survivors can remember, mourn, regret and
then move on. For ordinary Germans there was no other way out but to try to make something of their lives. Though this proved possible only because the Allies wanted a Germany that contributed something to the world economy and
that would also play a part in the Cold War once two separate states were created in 1949, it does not change the fact that Germans prospered. And part of the explanation for the continuous, uninterrupted move away from
violence is no doubt material as well as psychological. The two Germanies—even Communist East Germany—became economic success stories, and the hardships of the interwar and wartime years slowly disappeared.
By the 1950s,
it was possible to arm both German states once more without any sense of threat. The Federal Republic (and later a united Germany ) has been a model member of the society of democratic nations ever since. Inhabiting Germany in
the early twenty-first century, it is difficult to imagine that this was a society which only seventy years before could unleash such terrible violence and disorder, and have terrible violence and disorder inflicted upon it in
return.
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The issue of recovery from the damaging effects of war has a strong contemporary resonance. There were plenty of references to Hitler and appeasement in the run-up to the final decision to destroy
Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq . The resemblances were trite, superficial, but the rhetoric was instrumental in persuading at least a fraction of Western opinion that this was a just war like that of 1939. By implication, the
defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime was designed to clear the way for Iraq to enjoy Western-style democracy. This was an outcome that had not been thought through very effectively. For better or worse, the Iraqi people have
suffered something of what the German people suffered in 1945—shortages of food, medical supplies, effective schooling, clean water and economic opportunities. The Iraqi people were not supposed to be treated like the Germans
had been (and there has been a much-higher level of resistance and retaliatory violence in postwar Iraq than in postwar Germany ), but the net result has been to make a large proportion of the Iraqi people suffer for their
liberation from dictatorship.
Of course, in the end Germany did prosper and become an effective democracy, but it would be a mistake to imagine that this outcome can be easily exported to other conflicts. It would not be
out of place to suggest that Bessel’s book should be compulsory reading for politicians and officials who hope that war might provide an easy political dividend.
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BUT BESSEL’S work is also a remedy for the
exaggerated fears that plague the modern Western world. We are awash in anxiety-inducing scenarios: terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; computer viruses that will destroy the delicate web of modern communication;
global warming that in a century may create a methane explosion, obliterating life; and all the rest. And though cinemas are currently flooded with movies showing urban wastelands and terror-struck stars that could be mistaken
for images of war-torn Germany in 1945 (and many other parts of Europe as well), the fact remains that nothing the Western world currently faces carries more than a small percentage of the menace confronting the collapsed
international order of the 1930s and 1940s. We need to put the threats we do face into perspective.
The fear that even moderate dislocation (economic or otherwise) cannot easily be supported by democratic electorates has
created a paradox of capitalism shored up by the state, and of extensive (though often-trivial) levels of surveillance and coercion in the name of preserving the liberties these very policies undermine. Democratic populations
have to accept fingerprinting, bag searching, DNA sampling and police stop-and-search routines as if none of these infringed upon personal liberty more than the danger of a handful of fanatics. It has also resulted in a
long-drawn-out campaign in southern Afghanistan in which the casualties and destruction inflicted on Afghan society are seen as necessary conditions for the preservation of Western freedom. This is a line of argument which
might well have been understood in the aftermath of World War II, when Western notions of freedom had clearly been under threat, or in the Cold War, when nuclear confrontation brought the entire globe face-to-face with the
prospect of widespread obliteration. But in the context of a small army of guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan it makes almost no sense at all.
One of the evident lessons from the history of Germany
’s experience in 1945 is the extraordinary survivability of human societies under the most extreme stresses. This is certainly not to argue that the West ought to experience some real hardship in order to put popular public
fears into perspective, but it is important to recognize that even limited levels of damage do not unhinge the whole edifice. A sense of proportion and of acceptable risk is fast disappearing in a Western world that wishes to
exert control over its populations or to project power abroad. The dangers are greatly exaggerated, but the consequences of exaggeration might perhaps in the end be even more dangerous.
In place of fear there are plenty
of positive strategies that could be pursued, as there were in the efforts of German society to drag itself out of the ruins. Above all, the Western world needs to understand not only the limited nature of the threats it
confronts but also the extent to which societies are able to adjust to crisis rather than simply be overwhelmed by it. The aftermath of war is an acute example of that capacity to adapt; it imposes on those who suffer the
experience the need to evolve a complex series of adaptive strategies, both material and psychological. The damage is real enough and often long lasting, but the German example shows that a necessary amnesia makes it possible
to engage fully in the present without the otherwise-debilitating effects of vivid and unhappy recollection. It was possible for ordinary Germans to negotiate their way out of the moral and material morass of 1945 and move
on—so much so that it was possible for the Nuremberg City Council to plan to construct a monument to the German victims of air attacks out of the stones taken from the demolished Jewish synagogue without a twinge of conscience.2
Nothing on this scale afflicts Western society, and we would do well to acknowledge that fact more fully. The constant memorialization of World War II has created a misplaced sense that the war for civilization is still
being fought out today as it was seventy years ago. It is not. Moreover, as Bessel’s grim text reveals, civilization was capable of endorsing a great deal of barbarous activity in its own defense. The war created the
possibility of gross inhumanity and sustained its grim imperative even during the early months of peace. But the conditions that gave occasion to global war and the necessities that fueled its growing barbarization are part of
a past history. There is nothing to be gained from reviving the discourse of crisis that German defeat in 1945 brought to an end. The narrative of that earlier apocalyptic struggle and its savage aftermath should be seen as a
sobering corrective to the self-indulgent belief that our age has as great a measure of crisis as the age of total war.
Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter . He is the author
of numerous books on the Third Reich and the Second World War.
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