Category Archives: military

by | 5 October 2026 · 5:47 am

1940 Olympics & 1937 Kamikaze

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 80-83:

The China War cost Japan the chance to recover the international respectability it had lost with its incursion into Manchuria. In July 1936, exactly one year before the outbreak of the war, Tokyo had won its bid to host the Olympic Games in 1940. The Japanese had lobbied tirelessly for the honor. It was to be one of the most important national projects for modern Japan, the first non-Western country to host the games. Construction of stadiums began swiftly. By 1938, though, international pressure on Japan to give up the games had been mounting. Some countries, including the United States, hinted at a boycott. With no end to the China War in sight, the military, worried about its resource requirements, suggested that only lumber and stone be used for projects related to the games. Major newspapers that had been the biggest cheerleaders for the Tokyo Olympics became conspicuously silent on the issue. In late June 1938, Konoe’s cabinet placed quotas on the use of industrial materials meant for projects other than war. This effectively put an end to Japan’s Olympic dream. Tokyo would have to wait another two dozen years for its moment of Olympic glory.

Ironically, the hardening of international opinion against Japan took place just as the country was experiencing a surge in self-confidence apart from its military might. At the 1937 Paris Exposition, the thirty-six-year-old architect Sakakura Junzo, a disciple of Le Corbusier, won the top prize for his Japanese Pavilion. In August, Tokyo proudly hosted the World Federation of Education Associations’ seventh biennial conference, the first to be held in Asia, which was attended by three thousand participants from forty-eight countries. And then there was the flight of the Kamikaze. When the two-seater left Tokyo on April 6, 1937, nobody in Europe seemed to have taken any notice of the great challenge that its twenty-four-year-old pilot, Iinuma Masaaki, and thirty-six-year-old flight engineer, Tsukagoshi Kenji, had undertaken. Japan was a completely unknown quantity in the glamorous but highly dangerous world of record-setting long-distance air races dominated by European and North American pilots. The Japanese flight was ostensibly planned to celebrate the coronation of King George VI, to be held on May 12, and to make goodwill visits to various European capitals. It was, in fact, a great publicity stunt for the Asahi, which followed in the footsteps of European newspapers by employing its own pilots to promote itself (and to gather news, of course).

The Kamikaze vogue became much more than a corporate advertisement as the whole nation became engrossed in the exploits of the two fliers. The aircraft, a test plane manufactured by Mitsubishi in Nagoya for military reconnaissance, was touted as “purely” Japanese-made, adding to the patriotic fervor. (Actually, the metals to construct it had come from somewhere else, as did the gasoline to fly it. And Tsukagoshi was half English.) The name of the plane was chosen from approximately five hundred thousand entries from Asahi readers. The naming ceremony on April 1 was presided over by Imperial Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, the emperor’s uncle by marriage, making the flight’s success all the more a matter of national pride.

The Western media, indifferent at first, became enthralled. By the time the plane left Karachi and entered Mediterranean airspace on April 8, Europe began to hold its breath. On April 9, the plane appeared in the sky over the southern London neighborhood of Croydon. The aircraft circled around a few times, as if to please the cheering crowd of four thousand, including three hundred Japanese filled with joy and pride. The plane made an impeccable landing at half past three. The two aviators had established a long-distance world record, flying between Tokyo and London in fifty-one hours, nineteen minutes, and twenty-three seconds, with an average speed of 185.9 miles (299.2 kilometers) per hour. The Times of London reported: “As the airmen struggled to the ground from Divine Wind, they were greeted with cheers and cries of ‘Banzai’ (‘live forever’), were decked with garlands of flowers and were submitted to an ordeal of handshaking and congratulation.” The two continued to receive an enthusiastic welcome, winning great accolades, including the Legion of Honor accorded by the French government. In Brussels, on April 16, they were presented with flowers by Suwa Nejiko, a former child prodigy about to launch her career as a concert violinist in Europe, along with the family of the Japanese ambassador to Belgium, Kurusu Saburo.

Not unlike the Kamikaze aviators, the violinist Suwa had known something of the weight of enormous national expectations. Her success on the international stage had been a great source of Japanese pride for most of her young life. Still, she was like any other awestruck seventeen-year-old when she met the pilots. “How dreamy they are, both of them! Mr. Iinuma particularly is so very handsome … and I could just stare and admire him as much as I liked! Such a happy day it’s been!” she recorded in her diary. This brief encounter in a Brussels airport presented a snapshot of the youthful beauty and exuberance that would soon elude Japan, like an ever-fleeting mirage. It was an image of Japan that could have been.

To celebrate the success of the Kamikaze flight, the proud sponsor published a message to the British nation in the pages of The Times on April 10, 1937. The flight, it said, would foster “an atmosphere of peace and cordiality in the midst of the storms and thunder which rage over international relations today and threaten the world peace of tomorrow.” If only that had been true. Alas, Konoe’s leadership did not live up to the feats of the Kamikaze.

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by | 4 October 2026 · 6:05 am

Tojo’s Pessimism, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 29-30, 35:

Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision. True, Tojo is famous for having said, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu,” and these words, referencing a Buddhist temple in Kyoto known for a veranda that juts out over a cliff, are often cited as a sign of his rash adventurism. But even Tojo, vilified as a military dictator who blindly pushed Japan into war, felt torn, especially in the two months preceding the attack. Throughout the course of the government’s final discussions over going to war, Tojo was acutely aware of the small possibility of Japanese victory. As a result, at the last minute, he tried to conciliate those who argued for immediate war. When he became prime minister on October 18, 1941, the first task he set himself was to attempt to resurrect diplomatic options with the United States.

Some leaders were misguidedly hopeful, but none were confident of Japan’s eventual victory. Tojo’s predecessor, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a civilian politician, was prime minister on and off for nearly three of the four years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor. His flirtations with a totalitarian style of leadership did incalculable damage to Japan’s international standing and helped to maximize the military voice in the government. But at the same time, Konoe was unmistakably against a war with the West. According to his aide and son-in-law, Hosokawa Morisada, upon hearing the news of Japan’s entry into war, Konoe barely managed to say, “What on earth! I really feel a miserable defeat coming. This [favorable situation for Japan] will only last two or three months.”

…

One should not, of course, underestimate the enormous pressure these leaders faced on the eve of Pearl Harbor. They felt they had to choose between waging a reckless war and giving up all of Japan’s imperialistic conquests of many years in order to stave off war. They tended to ignore that such extreme choices grew directly out of their own recent decisions and actions. As they made more diplomatic missteps and committed themselves to an impracticable war, claiming all the while to be more prepared than they ever were, their range of policy options both at home and with the outside world narrowed considerably. It was as if Tokyo had gotten stuck in the thin end of a funnel. The war option, it must have seemed to those leaders, provided the quickest and surest way of breaking free of that constricting situation. That they didn’t think about what would happen afterward was a tragic act of negligence.

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Filed under Japan, military, nationalism, Pacific, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by | 3 October 2026 · 5:11 am

Japan’s Diplomacy Fails, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 47-48:

With the German military successes in Europe since the spring of 1940, the call for solidifying Japan’s ties with Germany resurfaced. Still believing that a fascist alliance would be a mistake, Navy Minister Yoshida Zengo, in the autumn of 1940, opposed the signing of an Axis pact with such vehemence that a heart condition (but some also speculate a failed suicide attempt) landed him in the hospital, forcing him to resign right before the German negotiators arrived in Tokyo. Without Yoshida, and with more and more admirers of Germany in their midst (owing in no small part to the initial blitzkrieg successes), the navy agreed to support the pact, as long as it was explicit that Japan would not automatically be required to participate in a German war with the United States. (For falling in line with the government and army preferences, the navy was promised a bigger budget.) A new era of Japanese diplomacy had begun.

In early 1941, rumors of war began to circulate within Tokyo’s diplomatic community. The deteriorating relations with Japan prompted the United States to start bringing back home family members of the U.S. embassy personnel stationed in Japan. An American school in Tokyo was forced to announce its closure in February, just as a major publisher released a book predicting and analyzing a hypothetical Japanese-American war (won by Japan, naturally), which sold fifty-three thousand copies in one month.

Japan’s relations with Britain, too, had been strained of late. Traditionally, the British attitude toward Japan had been one of pragmatism and conciliation. In July 1939, the two countries had reached the Arita-Craigie Agreement, signed by Foreign Minister Arita Hachiro and British ambassador Sir Robert Craigie: Britain had agreed to neither actively resist nor legally recognize Japanese conduct in China. One year after that agreement, in July 1940, Britain conceded to Japan’s request to close the Burma Road, a vital supply route for the transportation of materials to Chiang Kai-shek. But Japan’s occupation of northern Indochina finally prompted Britain to abandon its appeasement policy. In December 1940, Britain agreed to lend £10 million to the Guomindang and to reopen the Burma Road. And in the north, one shouldn’t forget, lurked the Soviet Union, with its threat of Bolshevism. Japan started 1941 facing more enemies than it was ever prepared to handle.

For the Japanese people, 1941 was a year of less and less food and fuel. The struggling epicurean Kafu, who had developed an overwhelmingly carnivorous appetite during his long stays in the United States and France, was always ready to pay a good price for a good meal. But even he had tremendous problems. “Compared to half a year ago,” he complained that spring, “the quality of meat and vegetables has declined drastically.” This was only the beginning. Within a few months, he would write: “I have not seen any vegetables or fruit for the past few days. Tofu isn’t sold, either. People are feeling distressed.” Even a gourmet grocer in the fashionable Ginza district, famous for its pampered fruits (the shiniest apples wrapped in delicate washi paper, fragrant melons sold in individual wooden boxes, and the like), did not have anything to sell, except for a few measly peaches. As for the meat that Kafu so craved: “No beef to be seen anywhere.” And for cooking and heating, citizens had to make do with charcoal, since petroleum and coal were reserved for military use. Public buses ran on charcoal, and those resources were beginning to get scarce.

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by | 2 October 2026 · 4:47 am

Japan Celebrates, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 20-21, 24:

In the early-morning hours of a frosty day, December 8, 1941, the Japanese nation woke to astonishing news. It was announced, shortly after seven, that Japan had “entered into a situation of war with the United States and Britain in the Western Pacific before dawn.” Though no specifics were given, by then the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, had been successfully attacked—the first wave of planes was dispatched at 1:30 a.m., Japanese time, and the surprise operation was completed by 5:30 a.m. When news of the attack arrived at 11:30 a.m., the nation was electrified. This was soon followed by Japan’s formal declaration of war on the Allies and the report of its further military successes in British Malaya and Hong Kong. (The Malayan operation actually preceded the Pacific offensive by almost two hours.) Throughout the day, the public broadcasting network, NHK, aired twelve special news reports in addition to six regularly scheduled ones for the millions of Japanese glued to their radios. On what, because of the time difference, had been December 7 in Hawaii, the air force division of the Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk or damaged numerous ships, aircraft, and military facilities. About twenty-four hundred people were killed in the raid or died shortly afterward from their injuries. The devastating attack was carried out without a formal termination of diplomatic relations by Japan, let alone a declaration of war, a heavy, infamous legacy for the nation. But such tactical details did not interest ordinary Japanese citizens on December 8. The immediate public reaction was one of celebration.

When Japan sent planes to attack Pearl Harbor, it was mired in economic and political uncertainties. A sense of helplessness pervaded its population as the state took more and more control of public life. From the beginning of Japan’s war with China in mid-1937, its people were led to believe a swift, decisive victory was imminent. Despite all the announcements of Japanese victories in China, however, the Guomindang (a.k.a. Kuomintang, frequently referred to as the Nationalist Party) leader Chiang Kai-shek was not about to give up. Similar to Napoleon’s army in Russia, the Japanese forces were drawn far too deep into harsh, unfamiliar terrain to carry out an effective operation. The jingoistic tone of Japan’s media coverage continued regardless, but people were privately beginning to question why the war had not ended. Though largely ignorant of the true state of Japanese diplomacy, they had been told that Nomura Kichisaburo, a navy admiral and former foreign minister, had been dispatched to Washington, D.C., in early 1941 to negotiate a peaceful solution to Japan’s international isolation. But no good news was forthcoming, and its absence made people fearful. Many knew the United States was upset over recent Japanese initiatives—such as allying with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy and occupying first northern and then southern French Indochina—and seemed intent, unless a diplomatic settlement could be reached soon, on crippling Japan with economic sanctions.

…

But December 8, 1941, changed everything. The gloom of the national impasse that had arisen over the past couple of years turned almost instantly into euphoria as most Japanese cheered the successful attack. A man who was a second grader at the time of the attack, whose father owned a radio shop in Tokyo, recalled his surprise at the sight of a long line forming in front of his father’s store. People were waiting to get their radio sets repaired, in anticipation of more special government announcements. He never saw his father do so much business in one day before or after.

There was very little of the famous Japanese reserve. Strangers congratulated each other on the street. Others gathered at the public square outside the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo, falling to the ground and thanking the emperor for his divine guidance of their nation. Aboard an overcrowded train that evening, the diarist Kafu detachedly observed “a fellow making speeches in shrill voice,” apparently unable to contain his excitement over the day’s news. This outpouring of emotion stood in stark contrast to the many contrived victory celebrations orchestrated by the government over the previous few years in an effort to rouse support for its lingering war in China.

Men of letters were not immune to the Pearl Harbor spell. One of the most distinguished poets of twentieth-century Japan, Saito Mokichi, fifty-nine at the time, recorded in his diary: “The red blood of my old age is now bursting with life! … Hawaii has been attacked!” The thirty-six-year-old novelist Ito Sei wrote in his journal: “A fine deed. The Japanese tactic wonderfully resembles the one employed in the Russo-Japanese War.” Indeed, that war started with Japan’s surprise attack on Russian ships in Port Arthur on February 8, 1904, two days before Japan’s formal declaration of war. Japan won that war.

Even those Japanese who had previously disapproved of their country’s expansionism in Asia were excited by Japan’s war with the West. In an instant, the official claim, gradually adopted by the Japanese government over the preceding decade, of liberating Asia from Western encroachment gained legitimacy in their eyes. Until then, the innately self-contradictory nature of fighting an anti-imperialist war for Asia against fellow Asians in China had tormented them.

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Filed under China, economics, France, Germany, Hawai'i, Italy, Japan, military, nationalism, Southeast Asia, U.S., USSR, war

by | 27 September 2026 · 5:47 am

‘Casseroles’ vs. Red Army, April 1945

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 315-316:

When the Soviet Red Army finally launched its attack on the city with Stalin Organs, tanks, howitzers, and other artillery, it was faced by forty thousand Wehrmacht and SS troops, and about forty thousand Volkssturm men, assisted by Hitler Youths. Volkssturm and Hitler Youths were called “casseroles” by the veteran soldiers, a mixture of old meat and green vegetables. The casseroles were armed with little else than a Panzerfaust, the handheld anti-tank weapon. The trick was to get as close as possible to the enemy tank, preferably right beside the tracks, and launch the weapon from below. Hitler Youths were ordered to do some of the most odious and dangerous jobs. It was they who were told to fight the Soviets in the subway tunnels. And it was they who were ordered to shoot into any house that displayed a white flag of surrender. They were also less likely to desert than the older Volkssturm men, and more eager to demonstrate their willingness to fight to the death.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Spandau, which saw some of the heaviest fighting in Berlin, a boy in a brown shirt and shorts came up to Helmut and asked for a cigarette. Helmut wanted to know his age. Thirteen, the boy said. His story was far from unique. He had been snatched by the SS from his home in Oranienburg, together with a number of other boys, and made to fight in an SS platoon. These boys were not even Hitler Youths, but mere Pimpfs. When the leader of their small troop refused to lead the boys into yet another suicidal battle, he was hanged from a lamppost by SS and SA men. The boy told this story without a show of any emotion. He asked for another cigarette. Helmut gave him a packet.

One of the most gruesome features of the hopeless Battle of Berlin was the cruelty inflicted by Germans on their compatriots. There was no consideration for civilians at all. Women and young girls were forced to fight too. SS men and soldiers commandeered soup kitchens and used their machine guns to prevent civilians from helping themselves to food. After clearing houses of their inhabitants, officers would rob what they could find and take off with the loot in military vehicles, often in the company of their wives and girlfriends. More than a hundred thousand civilians died in less than a month in an entirely futile battle that could not be stopped as long as the Führer was alive. Even as the city was being demolished street by street, house by house, by bombing and shelling and hand-to-hand fighting, propaganda stories still promised miracles. There was talk of a General Wenck coming to the rescue, even though his largely phantom army had already been decimated outside Berlin. Hitler was convinced of this fairy tale almost until the moment he killed himself. When he was told the truth, he flew into a rage against the generals who had “betrayed” him. Peace with the Anglo-American Allies was also said to be imminent.

…

Very quickly, the battle over Berlin turned into a massacre. Helmut describes the scene at the bridge over the Havel River in Spandau, where terrified civilians were trying to flee from the bombardment of rockets, flamethrowers, bombs, and tank shells: “Women carrying babies and holding on to their children, Hitler Youths, young girls, old men and women, are falling all over, dragging others down with them. Shot to pieces. Blood everywhere…Tanks crossing the bridge, rolling right over the people, crushing them into a pulp under their chains. A wide avenue of dead bodies and blood, of broken limbs and shredded corpses, stretches over the river that runs under the bridge.”

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by | 26 September 2026 · 5:32 am

Living Underground in Berlin, 1945

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 305-306:

Living underground was for many Berliners an oddly democratic experience; one had to sit, sleep, eat, and defecate together with people of all classes. Nazis threw away their uniforms, burned their documents, and shared underground spaces with people who had always despised them. Germans shared spaces with foreigners, and sometimes even with Jews. “I no longer hid from the neighbors,” Marie Jalowicz recalled. “We didn’t go to the bunker but lay in the slit trenches…. In a rather foolish way, I was annoyed to see the war ending in so tediously banal a way, and finding that I was not part of the turmoil of battle.”

The lack of water and toilets must have been a particular torment to fastidious Germans. The smell inside an almost airless bunker where people lingered for many days was foul. When they had a chance, the youngest girls, who could run fast, would dash out between bombing raids or street battles to a nearby pump to fill pails with water. Some made it back to the bunker, some never did. Boys were less keen to undertake such forays, lest they get forced by chain-dog [Kettenhunde, nickname for military police] patrols to join the suicide forces.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary on April 24, “Life in the cellar commences. We sit side by side without speaking, jammed in between piles of clothes and junk. The war goes on over our heads. The barrage of deadly fire is making a terrible racket. After eleven, the electricity is cut off. It is cold and dark. The contrast between the inferno outside and our own forced inactivity is increasingly unbearable…. Fabian winds up the phonograph and plays a song from ‘The Beggars’ Opera.’ The words ‘You gentlemen who think you have a mission to purge us of the seven deadly sins…’ echo tinnily off the basement walls. Then, ratatatat. The first machine guns. Our walls are lashed by bullets.”

Getting hold of food was an added problem. The economy had largely broken down, and much was now down to barter: cigarettes for cabbage, or a bar of chocolate, or clothes. There were still some mobile field kitchens operated by Wehrmacht soldiers, called “goulash cannon [Gulaschkanone],” where people could fill pots with soup. And as soon as there was a rumor about stores or factories that could be plundered, it was every man—or, more likely, woman—for him or herself. Order, so much a part of German life, collapsed. But sometimes the habit of discipline was so ingrained that women would stand in a queue at a goulash cannon, even as they were being strafed by enemy fire. Bodies crumpled; the line was held for a bowl of soup.

In fact, the word “democratic” goes only so far in these circumstances. Not all shelters were the same. A certain pecking order still remained intact. It was no doubt far more comfortable sheltering in Albert Speer’s huge bunker in central Berlin, originally built for railway employees, but later accessible to other people too, than to be exposed to bombs, Katyusha rockets, and howitzer shells in an open trench for foreign workers or POWs. There was room for three thousand people in the Reichsbahn bunker. Water still ran from the taps. Speer himself would sometimes put in an appearance and acknowledge the crowd with a friendly “Heil Hitler!” Ursula von Kardorff spent some time there before leaving the capital. She recalled Speer as an amiable fellow, with none of the mannerisms of the officious party boss. Soon, many more than three thousand people found their way in.

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by | 25 September 2026 · 4:45 am

Berlin’s Full Mobilization, 1944

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 279-280:

But [Heinrich] George did not have to worry. He was one of the very few to be put on a special list of national geniuses (Gottbegnadetenliste), along with Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Heinz Rühmann, who were exempt from wartime mobilization.

Women, too, were ordered to take on the jobs of absent men. Sabine Alenfeld, whose Jewish husband, Erich, was becoming a nervous wreck, worked from 6:45 p.m. till 4:45 in the morning, sewing military uniforms. She was terrified that things would get worse. She heard rumors that parents in mixed marriages would be separated from their children and put into camps. This didn’t happen. Mischlinge and Jewish husbands were forced instead to labor in the most dangerous construction jobs, or clear out the rubble after bombings. Sixty hours a week was the norm. Sabine wrote to her sister on November 13, “Our lives are turning more and more into a race, a race against…well, what. A race against death, of course, but also against the possibility of living.”

The words fanatisch, used in an entirely positive sense, and Volksgemeinschaft dominated the newspaper headlines. Such words were uttered, often without making any sense. The Völkischer Beobachter on September 25: “Fanatically we will stand together. Leadership that is harder than fate will always win in the end.” On October 16, Hitler announced that all able-bodied men between sixteen and sixty in every province (Gau) of the Great German Reich had to join the people’s militia (Volkssturm). Sabine Alenfeld was terrified that her frail husband would be called up. But Mischlinge and Jews were exempted. They were given a “certificate of exclusion.” How could they possibly be included in this great fanatical enterprise?

The Volkssturm army would “defend the Heimat soil with every suitable weapon.” Many of the men were not able-bodied, but fragile and sometimes even invalids. Since suitable weapons for fighting a modern war were now in short supply, the old men and young boys, some in ragged civilian clothes, some in Hitler Youth uniforms, and some in their everyday clothes, were handed primitive weapons, occasionally dating to the last war, and given minimal instruction how to use them. The main weapon was the Panzerfaust, a portable grenade launcher to fire at tanks at close range. Many of the instructors were elderly veterans, whose knowledge of modern warfare was limited. But that didn’t matter. It was the fighting spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft that would surely be enough to defeat Germany’s enemies.

Goebbels wrote in his diary how pleased he was with the enthusiasm of Berliners who signed up willingly: “I will pay special attention to the Volkssturm and make sure that in this respect, too, Berlin will outdo every other Gau.” The hope was to raise an army of millions. The papers reported that long lines of men waited patiently to file into the recruiting centers, decorated with swastikas and busts of Hitler, their eyes shining with the requisite fanaticism.

That many people were perhaps less than keen might be gathered from a joke that did the rounds at the time: “Why is the Volkssturm Germany’s most precious resource? Because its members have silver in their hair, gold in their mouths, and lead in their bones.”

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by | 24 September 2026 · 5:08 am

Berlin After Stalingrad, 1943

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 202-205:

An even worse damper on the public morale than the bombings was the news from the eastern front, where the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad. On February 2, amid the stench of rotting corpses, blood, and human waste, only about ninety thousand exhausted, hungry, freezing German soldiers were still alive to be taken prisoner. Hitler was furious. He had demanded a battle to the last man. As martyrs, he declared, the German soldiers would have earned “national immortality.” The Wehrmacht took up to a million casualties in the battles around Stalingrad. The victorious Red Army lost even more.

…

Propaganda in the Nazi press had swung from triumphalism to the need to bring Opfer [sacrifice], of course, but also to dark warnings over what the barbaric Russians might do to the Germans in their thirst for revenge. Some conscience-stricken Germans already assumed that the British bombing raids were not only a payback for London and Coventry, but a just punishment for what the Germans had done to the Jews. In the words of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, “Hardly anyone understands that what is happening now was caused by what happened before; caused by Coventry, by Dunkirk, by atrocities against the Jews, by the destruction of cities and by concentration camps.” Perhaps more people might have sensed this than Ruth assumed. The absolute need for German victory was no longer presented just as a way to rule the new Europe, but to save the German people from their unforgiving enemies.

The annual commemoration of the war dead on March 21 was initiated in 1922 to remember the soldiers who died in World War I. Once they were in power, the Nazis turned what had been a solemn commemoration into a ritual of hero worship, and renamed it Heldengedenktag, “Day of Commemoration of Heroes.” But in 1943 it was more like a state funeral, with Hitler, looking subdued and much older than his fifty-four years, greeting wounded veterans who raised their bandaged arms in the Hitler salute.

…

Hitler might well have died on this occasion, for an officer named Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff had concealed a bomb in his pocket, timed to go off while Hitler was inspecting captured Russian weapons at the Armory. Unfortunately, Hitler, apparently bored by looking at Russian guns, left much earlier than anticipated, and the bomb had to be defused in a nearby lavatory. Hitler, quite unaware of what had occurred, emerged from the Armory to be met by Paul von Hase, the commanding officer of the Berlin garrison, which snapped to attention. One year later, Hase would be hanged for taking part in the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. (Gersdorff, who also took part in the attempt on the Führer’s life, was one of the very few plotters to survive the war, because his friends refused to name him under torture.)

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by | 22 September 2026 · 5:44 am

German ‘Workforce Turnover’, 1942

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 155-57, 181, 191:

If things were bad in Berlin, they were far worse on the eastern front, where many soldiers were freezing to death. The people back home caught glimpses of the Russian campaign on the Wochenschau [weekly newsreels]: horse-drawn carriages and tanks bogged down in knee-high snow; soldiers in white camouflage outfits, rather like hooded bathrobes, skiing or plowing their way through the ruins of Russian villages that were “utterly destroyed by the mighty arms of our heroic shock troops”; German planes dropping food parcels for the soldiers marching in the glacial steppes. Letters home spoke of frostbite and amputated limbs. There were images of “Bolshevik corpses” littered around the icy Russian plains, but never of German soldiers, for that would be too upsetting.

One of the main items on the Wochenschau in January celebrated a domestic campaign that had been ordered by the Führer in December 1941: to donate socks, pullovers, scarves, ski boots, furs, fleeces, blankets, or anything else to keep the troops warm on the front lines….

What was not reported on the Wochenschau, or anywhere else, was an event that occurred at much the same time, on the western shore of the Wannsee, in a grand Italianate villa that once belonged to a rich industrialist and now served as a guesthouse and conference center for SS officers. Houses around the lovely Wannsee were sought after by the wealthiest Berliners. Before 1933, Jews lived in some of the finest homes. After the Nazis came to power, these were confiscated by senior figures in the regime. Goebbels owned a house on the lake, at Schwanenwerder. Walther Funk, the minister of economics, resided in a grand house that had once belonged to a Jewish family, now decorated with swastika tiles. Albert Speer lived nearby, as did Heinz Rühmann, the movie star.

…

Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), invited fourteen senior figures in the Nazi regime to a secret meeting followed by breakfast on January 20 at the SS guest house on the Wannsee. They included top bureaucrats from various ministries, as well as Roland Freisler, the notorious judge on the People’s Court who sentenced more than five thousand people to death between 1942 and 1945. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for managing Jewish deportations, was asked to take the minutes. What needed to be discussed on that chilly morning, alleviated by a steady supply of fine brandy, were some practical aspects of the extermination of the Jews.

That the Jews were to be eradicated was no longer a matter of dispute. Just one week before the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no sentimental squeamishness about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them.” Mass killings had already been taking place in Poland since 1939. Jews who were not murdered on the spot were to be worked to death. But two questions still needed to be cleared up. How to administer the genocide in an orderly and efficient manner? And how to define who was Jewish? Should Mischlinge be included in the killing program? Heydrich believed that they should. Others wanted to postpone the decision until after the war. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Heydrich settled for that. The logistical issues were cleared up pretty quickly to everyone’s satisfaction, so the gentlemen could enjoy a leisurely glass of cognac in front of the fireplace.

…

The first sign that deportations were imminent was a questionnaire sent through the mail to be filled out meticulously: financial assets, family history, personal details, and so forth. After some days, or sometimes weeks, the Gestapo would come beating on the door. There was no way back after that. In 1942, sixteen transports, each with loads of roughly one thousand people, left the Berlin railway stations. The trains carrying their human freight were mostly bound for the ghettos of Warsaw or Riga, or the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, where those not deemed fit to be worked to death were immediately gassed. In the summer of 1942, the killing of Jews had reached a bloody peak. Millions had already been shot or murdered by other means before the gas chambers of Auschwitz were employed day and night. The General Gouvernment had become a giant killing field, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank.

…

There were now more than three million foreign workers in Germany. Many were French POWs. A number of men from occupied countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Scandinavian countries, had volunteered for work. Then there were male and female workers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Some had come willingly, many had not. The Russians and Eastern Europeans, called Ostarbeiter, often mere teenagers, were treated appallingly. Cooped up in dismal work camps, they were so underfed that many died, or had to be shipped home in horrible conditions. One description of these transports: “There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick from tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown onto the embankment.” Treatment of Jewish slave workers in concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, was of course even worse.

And yet, a semblance of normalcy for most Berliners continued despite the griping, the bad news from different battlefronts, the horrors endemic in a murderous police state, and “Berlin pessimism.” The soccer competition carried on as always. BSB from Berlin Mitte beat Minerva from Schmargendorf. Tasmania was too strong for Tennis Borussia. And FC Wacker from Reinickendorf lost to Blau-Weiss 90.

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by | 20 September 2026 · 5:52 am

Soldiers On Leave in Berlin, 1941

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 133:

Perhaps Moltke was not just thinking of German victims, but it was difficult to disguise the toll the war was taking on German soldiers. Death notices of men who had “fallen for the Volk and Führer” increased in the newspapers. And bitter strains began to be felt between the men who had to do the fighting and the people at home. The Wunschkonzert for the Wehrmacht had been stopped already in May, for reasons that are not quite clear. By midsummer, German soldiers on the eastern front might no longer have had time for such distractions.

In December, a curious letter of complaint was sent by a soldier to officers in the high command, who forwarded it to the Nazi Party authorities. On leave in the capital of the Reich, this soldier had been shocked by the behavior of Berliners. While men on the front were dying for their country, or losing their limbs, or freezing to death, he remarked, Berliners, many of them men under thirty-five years old, who had managed to be excused from military duty, were carousing in the packed bars and restaurants. Women, often without male company, used ration coupons belonging to soldiers on leave to gorge themselves. He was deeply offended by the cynicism he encountered. “The morals of Berlin are beneath contempt,” he wrote. “When it comes to eating, pushing black market goods, and fraudulence, 80 percent of the population has no conscience. And what about those Judeo-Bolshevik jokes that endanger state security in the worst way? If Berlin were Germany, we would have lost this war long ago.”

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