Berlin at War (53 page)

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berlin at war

My dear son gave his young life

for his Führer and Fatherland

Josef Schreiber

Lieutenant in a cavalry regiment

Fell on 8 September on the Narew

Johanne Schreiber, and her children

18 September 193916

The SS newspaper
Das Schwarze Korps
, meanwhile, followed a rather

different tack. While early SS death notices tended to be short,

containing little more than the name and rank of the soldier, as the

war went on they became more effusive and ideologically loaded. One

such notice carried the ‘Nordic’ runes for birth and death, and was

posted by a grieving family from the Berlin suburb of Britz in the

autumn of 1942:

For the Führer and the Reich,

our dearest only son, fell, in the East,

at the head of his platoon,

in the struggle against Bolshevism

Unterscharführer in Sturm 3/75

Hans Niebauer

Lieutenant

Platoon commander in a motorcycle infantry battalion

Recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, the Tank Close Combat Badge,

the Tank Combat Badge in Bronze and other awards

^ | 7. 12. 1916

|

^ 12. 9. 1942

In the name of those left behind 17

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255

Whatever their circumstances, such notices could be heart-rending.

One particularly poignant example was posted in August 1941 by the

family of the renowned photographer Theodor von Lüpke, from

Zehlendorf in south-western Berlin. That summer, Lüpke’s third-eldest

son, Burkhard – a lieutenant in an infantry regiment – had died of

wounds sustained in the attack on the Soviet Union. The notice, however,

also commemorated Burkhard’s two brothers, Hans von Lüpke, a pilot

who had been killed the previous August during the Battle of Britain,

and Günther von Lüpke, a private, who had fallen in the opening days

of the Battle for France.18

Given the prevalence of death notices, the system was open to

abuse, potentially exposing grieving families to the attentions of

fraudsters and criminals. In one such case, a man named Max Wilke

defrauded a woman from the Berlin suburb of Köpenick, who had

lost her only son in the Polish campaign. After reading the son’s death

notice in the newspaper, Wilke had presented himself at the woman’s

home claiming to have served with the man and even to have fought

alongside him in the action that had cost him his life. He had come,

he told the woman, with the sad task of bringing her son’s last greet-

ings. Over time, Wilke made numerous visits to the house and

succeeded not only in appropriating the dead man’s belongings, but

also in stealing cigarettes and money.

At his trial, the state prosecutor took a very dim view of Wilke’s

actions, describing the case as ‘the most repellent crime that a man

could commit’. Given the ‘especially base exploitation of the war’

exhibited by Wilke, he requested that the defendant should face the

additional charge of ‘defiling the race’, which carried the death penalty.

Found guilty, Wilke was sentenced to death and executed.19

More seriously for the regime, however, death notices quickly

became extremely politicised, an arena in which loyalties could be

covertly expressed and subtle criticisms aired. At the most basic level,

the Nazi regime feared that the publication of large numbers of death

notices might adversely affect public morale and so decreed that the

placing of numerous notices for the same individual – from family,

business and professional organisations – would be forbidden. To the

same end, Goebbels also announced, early on in the war, that each

newspaper could only print a maximum of ten death notices per day.20

Neither order, it seems, was followed very scrupulously.

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berlin at war

The regime’s concerns about death notices went much deeper. The

SD security service, for instance, was much exercised by those notices

that stressed the personal pain of the bereaved, rather than concen-

trating on the wider issue of the sacrifice given for the German people.

Complaints were also raised about the ‘tastelessness’ of some of the

verses that accompanied the notices. An SD report from 1940 quoted

the following example:

Now we stand with a sorry look,

and know our Otto will never come back.

Rest, oh dear departed one,

you have freedom, we have pain.21

In time, it would not be the stylistic merit that agitated the SD,

however, but the growing lack of loyalty to the regime that the death

notices appeared to betray. In the early months and years of the war,

the standard formula was that death notices would contain the phrase

‘
für Führer und Vaterland
’ – ‘for Führer and Fatherland’ – which was

itself a variation of the traditional ‘
für König und Vaterland
’, ‘for King and Country’. Some of the bereaved, meanwhile, expressed their enthusiasm for National Socialism and for Hitler with more personalised

wording, such as ‘
Er fiel für seinen Führer
’ – ‘He died for his Führer’.

But, increasingly, the death notice presented an opportunity to make

a subtle criticism of the regime. This phenomenon was recognised by

the contemporary chronicler Victor Klemperer, who analysed the

linguistic peculiarities of the Third Reich: ‘If someone is not at all in

agreement with National Socialism’, he wrote,

if they want to vent their antipathy or perhaps even hatred without,

however, showing any demonstrable signs of opposition, because their

courage doesn’t quite stretch that far, then the appropriate formula-

tion [for a death notice] is ‘our only son died for the Fatherland’ without

any mention of the Führer . . . It appears to me that as the number of

victims increased, and the hope of victory diminished, the expressions

of devotion to the Führer became correspondingly less frequent.22

Klemperer’s suspicions were correct. Mention of Hitler in death notices

fell from a high of over 82 per cent in 1940, to 40 per cent in 1942, 25 per

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257

cent in 1943 and 16 per cent in 1944. Consequently, in September 1944,

the free choice of text was abolished. From then on, a single phrase was

to be used: ‘
Für Führer, Volk und Reich
’ – ‘For Führer, People and Reich’.23

In the vast majority of cases, however, even the scant comforts offered

by a memorial service or a death notice were denied to the bereaved.

As the intensity of the war escalated, and especially after the tide of

battle on the Eastern Front turned in 1943, it became increasingly diffi-

cult for casualties to be registered and retrieved for burial. Some of them

would be collected together by the Soviets to be interred, unmarked

and unremembered, in a mass grave. Many would simply lie where they

fell, only to be disturbed in later years by a farmer’s plough or by battle-

field archaeologists. Of the 3.1 million German soldiers thought to have

perished in the war against the USSR, only around 200,000 have a grave,

and about half of those are actually named.24

In many cases, therefore, families would simply be informed that

a loved one was
vermisst
, ‘missing in action’. The wording of the notice

– a pro forma with large spaces for the insertion of the soldier’s name

and unit – would give the last known location of the soldier with the

note that additional information on his whereabouts was unavailable.

The investigations into his fate, it promised, would be continued ‘with

the greatest possible urgency’. The sentence that followed betrayed a

note of desperation, however, for it requested that any information

received by the family from other sources on the whereabouts of the

soldier were to be passed on to the military authorities without delay.

The notice closed with the hope that further information would be

available soon.25

From 1944, the numbers of ‘missing’ easily exceeded those confirmed

as dead.26 While some families receiving word that a relative was missing

hung on to hope, others feared that it was little more than confirmation

of death. The poet Agnes Miegel sought to put the pained stoicism of

those waiting for news – many of whom had lost loved ones in the First

World War – into verse:

But then the heart aches and knows again the great, bitter word

and knows, he went as his father went before him!

And we are brave, just like we were then,

And ready again, to wait patiently for news.27

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berlin at war

Though it left open the possibility of capture, internment and an even-

tual return, the status of ‘missing’ also suggested the horror of receiving

no further word at all.

It was all rather different from the Nazi ‘ideal’. Hitler’s Germany had

a highly developed sense both of the blood sacrifice paid by German

soldiers and of the political martyrdom suffered by individual Nazis;

so highly developed, in fact, that some commentators have described

it as a ‘cult of death’.

At its most benign level, this commemoration of military dead

mirrored that witnessed elsewhere. In Berlin, the elegant
Neue Wache
on

Unter den Linden served as a national monument to the fallen of the

Great War, and every town and city across the Reich erected monuments

to commemorate the estimated two million German casualties of that

conflict.

In addition, the annual
Heldengedenktag
, or ‘Heroes Memorial Day’,

commemorations – traditionally held in March – gave expression to similar

sentiments. In its original form, the event was known as
Volkstrauertag
,

or ‘Day of National Mourning’, expressing dignified solemnity in the

same way as Remembrance Sunday in the UK or Memorial Day in

the United States. Yet, after Hitler came to power, that sombre character

was changed. Nazi ceremonial placed death much to the fore in public

life and the tone of the event now changed to emphasise national pride

in the soldier’s sacrifice and the glorification of military heroism. The

day itself was renamed accordingly.28

Beyond such traditional acts of commemoration, there were darker

aspects of Nazi Germany’s public ceremonial that hinted at a fascin a-

tion with death. In common with many of the fascist organisations of

the inter-war years, the Nazi ‘cult of death’ preached the constructive

value of martyrdom – the political and symbolic usefulness of a glorious

death for the cause. But it went far beyond any woolly sense of ‘
Dulce

et decorum est . . .
’. Death was not merely to be welcomed when it came, it was to be actively sought. According to the inter-war commentator

and pacifist Hermann Keyserling:

Death is a fundamental trait of the German nation . . . [a nation] in

love with death. . . . Only in this situation do the Germans feel entirely

German: they admire and desire death without a purpose, self-

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259

sacrifice. . . . The French or English want victory, the Germans always

only want to die.29

This may be overstated, but the concepts of death and martyrdom