THE GERMAN WAR by Nicholas Stargardt (non-fic)

Subtitled: A Nation Under Arms 1939-1945

As the author states in his introduction, this book is about how the German people experienced and sustained the Second World War until the bitter end.  It is a brilliantly written account of how life carries on in war; about the ordinary everyday things that happen in the midst of severe bombing and loss of life.  It shows people going to the store, standing in bread lines, attending school, going to the cinema. And most of all it shows how the German people bought into and fed on the propaganda lies perpetrated by Hitler and Goebbles which became more fantastical as the war years went on.  The reader begins to understand how easy it was, and is, to drift under the power of a demagogue, and how quickly people believe what they want to believe ignoring what they see in front of them, whether it was lines of Jews being deported to concentration camps, or young boys fighting on the front in the waning days of the war.

Beside providing in depth analysis of the key battles of the war, Stargardt tells us of the story of the war years through the letters and diaries of the German people some of whom lived to the tragic ending and many who died either on the front or in the destruction of German cities, and this includes Christians and Jews.  We learn what ordinary soldiers were thinking, how people viewed military deployment.  We read in these letters and diaries how seemingly intelligent people swallow Hitler's grandiose new order to make Germany as great as it was before WWI, how they came to embrace the idea of victory or annihilation.  Letters show us how some believed it necessary to persecute Jews and how some put their lives in danger to to help Jews.  We read of youth, those with hope and those in despair.

A tragedy often overlooked was the blatant murder of psychiatric patients in institutions and the handicapped who did not fit into Hitler's new order.  The number euthanized rose to 216,400 before the war ended.  Along with this was the treatment of the Polish people and the shocking number who were killed or sent to labor camps, along with other Slavic people.  Another deplorable situation we don't hear much about is the large number of young children and teens who were put in detention centers in deplorable conditions under the label "morally depraved" if they showed any resistance or opposition to the government.  Organized religion, notably the Catholic Church, also bears the shame of remaining largely silent despite being fully aware of the atrocities around them.

We all know the tragic outcome of Hitler's refusing to admit defeat and insisting to fight on two fronts to the bitter end.  Because of this policy, millions of Germans died unnecessarily, Central Europe was devastated and in the end Germany was left divided between East and West until the late 1980s.  The German people suffered more casualties than all of western Europe and most died in the last months of the war.  In 1945 within a matter of weeks, 450,000 people died, more than the United States lost in all its wars in the 20th century.

Stargardt has given us a well-written account of the horrible tragedy of WW2 on the German people and the perils of blindly following a drug-addled dictator.  I highly recommend this book as an account of the war from the standpoint of the common German citizens.