Seventy years on – despite whole libraries of books about the war’s origins, course and atrocities – we still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end. This book is about how the German people experienced and sustained this war.... both scholarly and popular representations tend towards a fundamentally split view of the conflict, casting Germans as either victims or perpetrators.

Nicholas Stargardt attempts what seems to be impossible, cutting through myth-making, polemics and foregone conclusions to investigate what, exactly, in the hell Germany thought it was doing. In the introduction, he claims to have spent 15 years researching primary sources, SD reports, letters, diaries, speeches, photographs... and it completely shows in this masterful work. By juxtaposing the intents and actions of the Nazi leadership with the diaries and personal letters of ordinary citizens, the cause and effect of both the war and the propaganda.

Stargardt focuses mainly on the regular German citizen and soldier. Generals rarely make an appearance, with battles barely mentioned except when in context of one of the soldiers he follows. Hitler's inner circle is only mentioned in context of propaganda and wartime manufacturing, the things which affected normal German citizenry rather than the war at large. The result is a remarkable look into the average German's mindset at the start of the war and through it. With few exceptions, Stargardt never gets lost in the weeds of minutiae or goes too wide in perspective. One or two cases presented a sort of "exception to the rule" regarding citizens and soldiers, which could have used a little prefacing in order to avoid confusion. He answers questions such as How much of a role did propaganda play? How much did they know about the extermination of Jews? Were they willing participants? Dupes? Why did they support such a catastrophic undertaking? Were they all Nazis? Where was the church in all this? as well as any other question one might have. As he asks early on:

How could they confuse a deliberate and brutal war of colonial conquest with a war of national defence? How could they see themselves as beleaguered patriots, rather than as warriors for Hitler’s master race?

I began this book hoping to gain insight into my own country, observing the rise of a strongman and his unwavering support, and how we can avoid falling into such calamitous circumstances. Since then, Russia invaded Ukraine with what appears to be the full-throated support of the Russian populace. Why? The answers are quite uncomfortable. Generally following a couple dozen people from 1939 through Germany's collapse in 1945, Stargardt manages to let the Germans do their own talking, and thus damns them or absolves with their own words. Damning is the more common result. In short, while it was terrible and atrocity filled, what happened to Germany was it's own making.


What fueled the sense of crisis in the summer of 1943 was a widespread fear that Germans could not escape the consequences of a ruthless racial war of their own making. In overcoming that moment of crisis, people not only had to scrap their earlier expectations and prognoses about the course of the war: they also shed traditional moral inhibitions, overstepping existing notions of decency and shame. Germans did not have to be Nazis to fight for Hitler, but they would discover that it was impossible to remain untouched by the ruthlessness of the war and the apocalyptic mentality it created... However unpopular the war became, it still remained legitimate – more so than Nazism itself. Germany’s mid-war crises resulted not in defeatism but in a hardening of social attitudes.

The beauty in this book, however, is not the conclusions one draws from it. It is the understanding of how Germany, despite all evidence to the contrary, truly believed it was fighting a defensive war. A justified "preemptive strike" against "World Jewry." The propaganda played a role, to be sure, but Goebbels was quick to pivot and recast messages in ways palatable to Germans. To tell them things they wanted to hear, in ways they wanted to hear it. I felt completely enlightened as to how Germany saw itself in the context of it's rise from the ashes of WWI, in which it was cast low and shamed into feeling like victims. How they convinced themselves of the enemy within and outside the Reich.

Very early on, we see that the German populace were not duped into accepting government run mass-murder. They were just not told enough so they could look the other way. I found myself enraged upon learning the atrocities I had no idea about, in addition to the Holocaust and rampant executions of "conscientious objectors" and "defeatists."

The so-called ‘euthanasia action’ began with the children. On 18 August 1939, the Reich Committee for the Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses made it compulsory for doctors to report all newborn children suffering from idiocy, Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, spastic paralysis or missing limbs. The registration forms were initially forwarded to three medical experts. As a result of this pilot study, about 5,000 children were killed, and soon thirty psychiatric asylums had established their own so-called ‘children’s units’ where they killed children through a mixture of drugs and starvation.... In September 1940, pastor Ludwig Schlaich, the director of the asylum at Stetten, received notice that another 150 patients would be collected from his asylum... Schlaich took the unprecedented step of contacting the relatives of his patients, telling them to come to the asylum before it was too late to save their loved ones: many came to say heart-rending farewells, leaving highly agitated patients behind. Of the 441 patients at Stetten who were put on successive transport lists, a mere 16 were saved by their relatives. Few families took this opportunity, even, Schlaich ruefully noted, amongst those with sufficient means to care for someone with a disability at home... The civic courage displayed by Schlaich remained highly unusual.

Imagine being told that your sick loved one is going to get carted away and murdered, and your response is to maybe stop by and say goodbye before the deed it done. It gets worse and worse, and as German citizens were made aware of the atrocities committed on their behalf, their response is not to try and stop it but to continue supporting the war in order to not be punished for it. Stargardt expertly shows how normal citizens justify to themselves the actions of their government.

As the war progresses and ultimately ends, there is no mistake about the trajectory of German thinking, a major credit to Stargardt's writing and organization. The finale is a sad, quickly explained transition from aggressor to victim. The German people recast themselves as victims, and the myth stuck for generations.

I could go on and on about this book, and the effect it had on me, but this review is disjointed and rambling enough. I would say if you know very little about WWII, this is not the place to start. But if you want to learn about the ways in which a populace can justify it's own barbaric conduct, perhaps to avoid repeating it or at least recognize it as it occurs, then it's a must-read. I will leave you with one of the most haunting passages I have ever read in my life, and that's saying something.

In June 1942, Erna Petri arrived with her 3-year-old son in Lwów. They had left their farm in order to join her SS husband, and they took over the former manor house of a Polish noble outside the city. With its white-pillared portico and wide meadows, it looked more like the dwelling of a plantation owner than the modest family farm she had left in Thuringia. True to the precept that the Germans should assert themselves physically over the natives, within two days of her arrival she witnessed her husband flogging his farm labourers. Soon, Erna too was beating the workers. As she served coffee and cake to her husband’s SS and police colleagues on the villa’s balcony overlooking the gardens, talk inevitably turned to the mass shootings of Jews. In the summer of 1943, she was returning from shopping in Lwów when she saw a group of nearly naked children crouching by the side of the road. She stopped the carriage, calmed the six frightened children and took them home, where she gave them some food and waited for her husband to return. When he did not turn up, she took matters into her own hands. Pocketing an old service revolver which her father had given her as a parting gift, Erna Petri led the children through the woods to a pit where she knew other Jews had been shot and buried. There she lined them up in front of the ditch and went along the line firing into the back of each child’s neck. She remembered that after the first two, the others ‘began to cry’, but ‘not loudly, they whimpered’.