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By Root 1226 0

read. Clothes were scarce, both for civilians and soldiers. Over 300,000 volunteers worked in 60,000 collection centres around the country, receiving donations of clothing for soldiers and refugees. “The ‘people’s sacrifice’ demands of us that we hand over everything we do not use every day,” an official circular exhorted. “It is not enough to give up old clothing, or a few rags.” Yet, even after Goebbels banned publication of almost all books as an economy measure, a torrent of Nazi propaganda material continued to flow. Men of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division were bemused to find in a German house a new children’s book entitled Mama, Tell Me About Hitler, which dwelt enthusiastically upon the SS “and that beautiful black uniform which we love so well.” “Faithful to the Führer, loyal to the death,” Germans were urged to sing, “He will lead us one day, out of this distress.” The record of Germany’s churchmen throughout the Nazi era was indifferent, to say the least. Yet it seems remarkable that a priest of any kind could be found to deliver the German Army’s prayer, that mockery of Christianity:

Your hand, O God, rules over all empires and nations on this earth

In your goodness and strength bless our German nation

And infuse in our hearts love of our Fatherland.

May we be a generation of heroes . . .

Especially bless our Führer and commander-in-chief in all the tasks which are laid upon him.

In the wake of the army’s bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, treachery real or suspected had become an obsession within the Third Reich. Most Germans, whether on the battlefield or at home, perceived no possibility of escaping their fate. But German diplomats stationed in neutral countries, often with their families, possessed exceptional opportunities to vote with their feet. In November 1944, Himmler sent a scornful memorandum to the foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, about “negative tendencies” within his ministry: “We are getting more and more reports of betrayals of the state.” There was Dr. Zechlin of the Madrid embassy, a known anti-Nazi who had refused repeated orders for his recall, and was now apparently ensconced in a Spanish monastery. Germany’s Madrid ambassador, Dr. von Deberlein, was married to a Spaniard and defiantly declined to return to Berlin. Consul Schwinner in Lausanne was reported as having declared publicly that the Soviet Union was a peaceful country, invaded by Germany. Schwinner had since vanished. Dr. Krauel, consul in Geneva, likewise acknowledged in a letter home that “he had no intention of returning to the lion’s den.” Krauel was summoned back to Berlin, but instead settled down at a Swiss sanatorium. Himmler quoted complaints from the Propaganda Ministry that Germany’s foreign policy “seems moribund.”

In the rhetoric of the Nazis that winter, it is striking to notice how often “fanatical”—a pejorative word in the eyes of Americans or Englishmen—was used as a term of approbation by everyone from Hitler downwards. “I have never before seen such a wholesale use of ‘fanatical’ and ‘fanaticism’ . . . the word is repeated in every article,” noted Victor Klemperer as he read his Sunday paper in Dresden that October. A local gauleiter issued a proclamation to the people of one city threatened with imminent allied occupation:

When the enemy reaches the German positions in the West, let him be met with our fanatical resistance . . . The eyes of our children, who want to see a future, plead for us to resist to the last breath . . . The voices of hundreds of thousands who have died on the battlefield for the honour and freedom of the Fatherland, or lost their lives through enemy terror attacks from the air, cry out to us. The spirit of fighters for freedom throughout our glorious history implore us not to weaken or to show cowardice at this decisive moment in our struggle for survival.

The order was given for every available man between sixteen and sixty to report for duty digging defences, while the remainder of the city’s population was to be evacuated.

In addition to nightly air-raid