Peter Fritzsche,An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler

Reviewed by: Martijn Lak, Erasmus University Rotterdam/The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands

What was it like to live under the Nazi occupation during the Second World War? Countless books, articles and other studies and movies have been published and screenplayed about how the Third Reich organized the occupation of the territories it so swiftly conquered between 1939 and 1941. Or, better still: how Nazi Germany in fact failed to properly organize the administration of the occupied territories, for example in the realm of the economic exploitation of these. In fact, the Germans never made a clear choice: in the East, most economies were plundered, whereas in the West the occupied economies were more or less integrated into the German war economy, with differing levels of success. Racial considerations played an important role here, although not in all cases, as Bohemia was, for example, treated relatively well, as important industries were located here that could serve the German war machine.

In general, however, there was a huge difference between the Western and Eastern part of the European continent. Whereas in Western Europe fighting basically ended after the rapid – and to contemporaries – utterly shocking defeat of France, Eastern Europe was the scene of constant warfare, both at the frontline and behind it. It was also in the ‘Wild East’, to paraphrase Ben Shepherd, that the Holocaust took place. This distinctly different wartime experience still plays an important role in how contemporary Eastern European countries, as well as Russia, see questions like security and foreign policy, for example.

Recently, a number of authors have emphasized this dichotomy. In his most recent and impressive book, An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, acclaimed historian Peter Fritzsche uses the same contradiction, mainly by making a comparison between, generally speaking, occupied France and Poland. What stands out in Fritzsche’s book and analysis, is his exhaustive use of eyewitness accounts, novels, diaries and memoirs. This really ensures that the topic becomes vividly and often shockingly alive, for example in the description(s) of the fate of the Jews.

Fritzsche, who earlier wrote a well-received book on life and death in the Third Reich, as well as a study which questioned why ordinary Germans voted for Hitler, in one of his chapters uses the railway station waiting room as an oppressing metaphor:

[It] was a place for talk, but it also was a way station for millions of Europeans who found themselves on the move during the war, displaced from home, separated from family, and often unable to return to the places they had come from. War made the extraordinary scale of dislocation plain to see. (5)

In the rest of his captivating book, Fritzsche succeeds very well in making clear this feeling of being lost, of ordinary lives completely turned upside down because of wartime experiences; although, it has to be admitted, in many countries, especially in the first years of the German occupation, life basically went on by and large as it had prior to the Second World War, at least in Western Europe. As the historians Hein Klemann and Sergei Kudryashov have observed:

[F]rom the summer of 1940 until at least 1942, but for many until 1944, it wasn’t the war that determined daily life, but the same things as before and after the war. People did their work and their business, married, had children and went to school, to church, to the cinema and on holiday; they ate, drank, made love, quarrelled, were ill and in due course died, mostly in their beds. (Klemann with Kudryashov 2012: 64–5)

Fritzsche seems to focus more on the changes rather than on the continuities.

That being said, Fritzsche is clear on how far-reaching the occupation could be in the lives of ordinary citizens, especially in the East: ‘In Europe’s East, the war never ended; there was to be no peace, no armistice, no collaboration [in fact, there was], no Pétain or Vichy, only the terrifying and quite imaginable prospect of complete German victory’ (116). Fritzsche is correct in pointing out the immense barbarity of the war and occupation in the East, and why the Germans acted in the brutal way they did, especially towards the Jews. Chapter 8 contains horrifying descriptions of the suffering in the Łódź Ghetto, how hunger turned people into animals and how social positions or access to certain ‘luxuries’ caused deep dividing lines. The author also makes clear that with hindsight it is obvious what the Germans had in mind for the Jews, but at the time, although there were ample rumours of Jews being killed by the hundreds of thousands (the illegal press even wrote about gas chambers), this was less clear. In Fritzsche’s words:

In retrospect, historians write about the noose tightening around the ghettos in 1941 and 1942, but at the time the danger was not always clearly seen. Understanding German actions was refracted through commonsense assumptions about Germany’s need for labor or was mitigated by the local nature of the atrocities. (189)

What the ordinary Germans knew about what was done to the Jews is a question which has raised enormous debate, although it seems clear that the Germans were aware of what was happening. As Timothy Snyder has ably put it, Germans could indeed say ‘wir haben es nicht gewußt’ when it was about Auschwitz or other death factories, but not when it came to the general persecution, which was, as Fritzsche also emphasizes, plain for everyone to see. According to Fritzsche, the Nazis’ greatest ‘success’ was

to get more and more Germans to adhere to the fundamental premises of the Nazi account of history: … the belief that the Third Reich attained a measure of real ‘freedom’ in the years since the Nazi seizure of power …, and the fear that this freedom was imperiled by the new war, a war that demanded and justified harsh methods to ensure German victory. (240)

In the East, and to some extent in the West, it would be an understatement to say the Germans acted harshly. As Fritzsche claims, ‘the Germans killed one in every five hundred people on the planet over the course of the summer and fall of 1941’ (150). His book is full of these sharp observations. Despite the horrific topic and descriptions, the book is highly accessible and a welcome addition to the existing literature. The closing lines do justice to the book as a whole:

There are too many graves for an encompassing narrative of World War II, yet there are too many graves not to read with care the narratives that survive, the arrangements they made and the order they sought to impose, and the broken words over which they stumbled. (313).

Reference

Klemann, H. with Kudryashov, S. (2012) Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939–1945. London: Berg.