Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942-1945

Preface

Preface Early in 1946, I traveled by train from Bavaria to Bremerhaven to return home to the United States. As the train passed by the great cities along the Rhine and through northern Germany, I saw for the first time the full extent of the bombing war against Germany-the endless line of skeletonized buildings rising grimly across the skyline of an entire city. The questions that arose in my mind were haunting ones: "How did the Germans survive this kind of devastation , live amid these endless blocks of shattered homes, and emerge themselves unshattered by the terror and dread which this kind of war must have occasioned?" And accompanying this question, a more unpleasant one: "Could Americans survive this kind of challenge , this kind of devastation of our cities?" This book, completed forty years later, seeks to answer the first question. The second one will, I hope, continue to remain only a subject for speculation. The search for materials upon which this book could be based was a frustrating one. The number of wartime diaries detailing the personal experiences and thoughts of those who lived under the bombs was relatively small. This was not surprising. Keeping diaries in the Nazi period was dangerous. One could neither write nor speak one's intimate feelings without danger of persecution and punishment . Postwar accountings of wartime experiences by Germans have also remained relatively scarce. Recent efforts to add to these through personal interviews had only modest beginnings. And x Preface recollections set forth forty years later are likely to be distorted by the postwar experiences. But the Nazi regime itself kept myriads of reports on the feelings and thoughts of the people. The Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the dreaded SS, had agents all over Germany. They were responsible for providing detailed reports of the passing comments of the inhabitants of the cities and towns where they were stationed -comments not only about the regime itself, but about food supplies, work problems, entertainment, propaganda success or failure, and so on. Strangely enough, some of these agents seem to have found some pleasure in retelling the critical comments they heard. Other government agents, local and regional officials, school officials, agents of the regular police, labor leaders, and court officials were responsible for providing similar reports. Some of these found their way into the party archives or the ministries in Berlin. Others remained in local or regional archives. Those in the central archives of the party and in the Berlin Document Center are available in the rich microfilmed records in our National Archives. I am grateful to the Strozier Library for having purchased through the years an extensive section of these materials. I was able to supplement these through the reports of the regional court presidents available in the federal archives of the Federal Republic of Germany in Koblenz. Some records of the party not available to me at home I found in the collections of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Also helpful there was a large collection of books that are no longer widely available. The publication of the local and regional records of Bavaria by the institute provides a rich storehouse of primary materials available to scholars. Recent publications dealing with Wiirttemberg, Munich, Augsburg, Essen, and Duisburg have also been helpful. I am grateful to the history department at Florida State University for granting me the necessary time for research. I am also grateful to the Federal Republic of Germany, which provided the rich opportunity of a "study trip" in 1981, which I extended for research purposes. The officials at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich were capable and helpful in every way. I also met with a friendly reception and excellent working conditions at the Institute for Newspaper Research in Dortmund. I recommend its resources to students examining the Weimar or Nazi periods. What I have written remains an impressionistic view of the Preface xi course of events during the years concerned. I have sought to tell a story, not to provide an analysis of those events. In a book dealing with such complex and varied matters, definitive conclusions are not possible. I have sought to provide for Americans who have never really experienced a war in their own homeland some feeling for what it was really like to be "under the bombs." ...