Armageddon - Max Hastings [119]
The first time Melany Borck, a sixteen-year-old evacuee in Schleswig-Holstein, saw British bombers’ pyrotechnic markers drift down through the night sky towards Hamburg fifteen miles away, she merely watched curiously, without great emotion. When a burning British aircraft plunged into the sea nearby, she and her parents, watching, felt a shock of revulsion untinged by partisan satisfaction. “We simply said: ‘Oh, my God.’ ” Yet with each month, their own circumstances worsened. They found that the experience of war made everyone abandon thought for the future. Like Frontsoldaten, they occupied themselves solely with demands of the moment: how to find food for the next meal, bandages for the next trainload of wounded arriving at the local hospital, electricity to cook with, space to sleep in a house crammed with twenty-two evacuees and refugees. As the horrors increased, everyone in Melany’s small world became imbued, like the rest of Germany, with the same desperate yearning: “Please God, let it be over.” There was one significant variation of this sentiment: some Germans yearned for peace on any terms; others still craved victory, and believed that this might be attained.
Every domestic radio set manufactured in Germany during the war bore a notice warning, “DO NOT TUNE TO FOREIGN STATIONS!,” but many people did. Fourteen-year-old Eggert Stolten’s mother was an ardent Nazi. She did not try to stop her son listening to the BBC and Radio Switzerland, but instead maintained a withering commentary on the statistics given by the British for the distances the Allies had supposedly advanced, and the prisoners they had captured. “It’s lies, all lies!” said Frau Stolten. “Our numbers are the right ones!” She was immensely proud of having become a Party member before 1933. “We wanted to change things,” she told her son. Eggert Stolten said: “Nobody’s morale was broken by bombing. Everybody just thought: ‘Those murdering bastards!’ ” Nonetheless, in their local shelter in Düsseldorf during the raids, when people were thinking rather more about God than about their Führer, some people objected to the big poster of Adolf Hitler on the wall, observing uneasily: “We don’t like seeing him down here.” One of the first big RAF raids on the Ruhr destroyed the Stoltens’ new house and obliged them to go and live deep in the countryside of Thuringia. Yet being “de-housed”—as that apostle of area bombing Lord Cherwell categorized the German family’s experience—did nothing to diminish Frau Stolten’s unshakeable faith in victory.
What seems noteworthy is not how many people found the war terrible, but how many—especially at the humbler end of the social spectrum—still found life tolerable, almost until the end. Regina Krakowick lost everything when her Berlin flat was bombed in 1943, but she and her husband retained an impressive capacity to enjoy themselves. Johannes was a tailor, whom a bone-marrow deficiency rendered unfit for military service. The couple thought this a wonderful piece of good fortune, though because Johannes was tall and handsome and apparently healthy he incurred spiteful comment from people who did not know his medical history. The couple were regular play- and movie-goers as long as the theatres stayed open. They continued to entertain enthusiastically almost to the end. They saved up rations for weeks for their parties, at which Johannes’s sister Louise played the accordion and the hosts produced their hoarded quota of schnapps. Until the first weeks of 1945, there always seemed to be just enough to eat, with some help from a family vegetable plot on the edge of the city. “We knew nothing about politics,” said Regina, who was twenty-five, “but we went on hoping for final victory, because we could not conceive of what would happen to Germany if she lost the war.”
Shortages of all kinds were endemic. There was no shoe polish, little to