Abstract
There is a vast literature devoted to the memory of the Holocaust in Germany since 1945, but relatively little work has been done on the ways in which Germans remembered the war, particularly the war on the Eastern Front. The subject has attracted some attention recently in relation to the emergence of the discourse of German victimhood following reunification. It has, however, a much more complex history, which spans the entire period since 1945 and was as complex and divided between East and West as memories of the Holocaust and many other aspects of the National Socialist era. Two important new books make a significant contribution to our understanding of the German experience of the Second World War and the long shadows that it has cast into the present.
David Stahel’s study of the battle of Kiev, which raged for four weeks from the end of August 1941, is a superb revisionist work that challenges key assumptions about the way the war on the Eastern Front unfolded. Many historians still believe that the Germans initially made impressive progress in the East and that until the end of 1941 Operation Barbarossa may be judged a success. The battle of Kiev plays a crucial role in such arguments. It was indeed a stunning German victory: virtually the entire Russian South-Western Front was encircled and some 450,000 men were captured; over 600,000 were killed and over 700,000 were wounded. Victory, moreover, had resulted from Hitler’s overruling his generals: it was his insistence on diverting the most powerful panzer group on the Eastern Front into the Ukraine that apparently won the day. German propaganda consequently presented the battle as Hitler’s greatest victory, as a demonstration of the superiority of the Wehrmacht and as one of the greatest battles in history. The Soviet view denied this from the outset and claimed that Kiev was but one episode in a long saga of Russian resistance that undermined Hitler’s strategy and paved the way for the German disaster at Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943. German wartime propaganda continued to shape the views of German commentators and scholars long after 1945.
Stahel suggests an alternative view. Following on from his previous book, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge, 2009), he argues that the German campaign in the East was a ‘spent exercise, incapable of achieving its central objective of ending Soviet resistance’ by late August 1941 (pp. 1−2). Though the German people were informed of an unbroken succession of triumphs, the reality was different. The Wehrmacht soon began to sustain regular serious losses: 25,000 men in the first nine days of the offensive in June 1941, 65,000 men in July. The material costs of the long summer advance and fighting were immense; panzer and motorized divisions suffered major mechanical failures which the German logistics and support systems could not remedy. Kiev itself, Stahel argues, was not all it seemed. Hitler’s ‘success’ owed much to Stalin’s obstinate refusal to give an inch. While German delusions about imminent final victory were fuelled by two further victories, the tide was already beginning to turn, for Germany was fatally overextended. Stalingrad was not a sudden breakdown, Stahel concludes, but the logical outcome of the German campaign from the outset.
Stahel’s main focus is his admirably lucid account of the wider context, prelude, course and consequences of the battle. He also, however, devotes some fascinating pages to the mythology that grew up around it and around the campaigns on the Eastern Front more generally. On the one hand, memoirs and early studies (often by men involved in the fighting) presented the war in the East as the struggle of honest and patriotic Germans who were ultimately the victims both of Soviet Russia and of their increasingly erratic Führer. These men, it was argued, had nothing to do with the Holocaust. On the other hand, an alternative view developed from the Soviet perspective and became the dominant narrative in the Eastern zone and the DDR: here too the ordinary soldiers were often presented as honest victims, forced by a tyrannical capitalist regime to resist the heroic and ultimately victorious struggle of the Soviet forces to vanquish fascism.
This mythology is the starting point of Christina Morina’s book on the ‘legacies of Stalingrad’: the evolution of the myths and the memories of the war in the East in German society after 1945, through the period of occupation and division, through Ostpolitik and détente to the new perspectives that have emerged since 1989−90.
The grim facts about the campaign in the East and the involvement of the Wehrmacht in aspects of the Holocaust and other atrocities became known soon after 1945 as a result of the trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere. Yet the period was characterized by the formation of myths which largely ignored them and which laid the foundations for the attitudes that took firm root in the Cold War.
In the Eastern zone, the war was viewed as the Red Army’s anti-fascist war of liberation that had been supported by local communists. Yet popular attitudes remained ambivalent, not least because of the experience of post-war atrocities perpetrated by the Russians, including the rape of up to two million women by Russian soldiers between 1945 and 1949. The SED and the Soviets worked hard to promote the new German−Soviet friendship. They sought to relativize the post-war atrocities by reference to the much greater crimes committed by the Nazi regime and to exonerate the German worker-soldiers from crimes perpetrated during the senseless war into which Hitler had forced them. Yet the combination of the legacy of National Socialist hate campaigns against the Soviets and post-war experiences proved to be insuperable obstacles to establishing the SED’s ideological legitimacy and moral credibility.
In the Western zones, by contrast, the Soviet threat and the Soviet Union’s retention of large numbers of German PoWs into the mid-1950s reinforced the legend of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’: patriots who had valiantly defended the German nation against Soviet barbarity and whose war had nothing to do with the war of extermination pursued by Hitler and his henchmen. Here the emphasis was on building democracy as a bulwark against communism as Erich von Manstein and other commanders of the Eastern Front escaped serious legal sanctions for their roles before 1945.
As the zones of occupation turned into two German states, these early reactions solidified and shaped policy. In the East, the injunction to remember Barbarossa reinforced a determination to secure frontiers and strengthen the foundations of a socialist society under the management of the SED; ultimately, that justified the Berlin Wall. In Adenauer’s Germany, remembering Barbarossa was an argument for rearmament and for vigilance in the face of what was perceived as a growing Soviet threat.
Attitudes in both East and West were underpinned by the very real memories of former combatants. The memoirs of Manstein and others in the West were matched by the ‘conversion narratives’ that emerged in the East. The Eastern Front commanders who opted for a socialist Germany routinely presented Stalingrad as their Road to Damascus. Morina’s account of the extensive memoir literature and of the activities of the various veterans’ organizations is wonderfully rich and nuanced. It provides the backdrop to two excellent chapters on the memory of the Eastern Front among the SED leadership from Ulbricht to Honecker, and on the ways such memories shaped the attitudes of West German leaders from Adenauer to Kohl.
Walter Ulbricht, Helmut Schmidt and presidents Helmut Scheel and Richard von Weizsäcker all personally experienced the war against the Soviet Union. Ulbricht transformed his personal memories into political memory and established an Eastern Front narrative that Honecker simply took over and reiterated to the end. The differing Eastern Front experiences of West German politicians fed into a more complex process of dealing with the past, from Cold War to Ostpolitik and détente.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Morina’s analysis is her recognition that Helmut Kohl (b. 1930), who famously declared he enjoyed the ‘mercy of late birth’, did more than any other politician to confront the history of the war in the East. Just a few days before his controversial visit with Ronald Reagan to the graves of former SS soldiers at Bitburg, he spoke at Bergen-Belsen of the crimes perpetrated by German soldiers against Russian PoWs. In doing so he anticipated President Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous speech on 8 May 1985, in which he declared that 8 May was a day of liberation. It was Kohl again who in the context of post-unification talks with the Soviet Union in 1991 delivered a speech on Soviet television which explicitly recognized for the first time the suffering that the German ‘war of extermination’ had inflicted on Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Christina Morina’s study of the memories of Stalingrad in Germany since 1945 is a major contribution to the literature on memory politics in Germany. It is notable for the way that she has explored the numerous ramifications of the ‘divided memory’ of the Germans before 1989−90 and for the way that she weaves together personal memory with political memory. In doing so she sheds light on some of the key features of the development of German society since 1945. Anyone who is interested in the ways in which Germans have come to terms with the legacy of the Second World War should read this fascinating and often moving book.