re: #396 Nojay UK

During WW1 the average German citizen didn’t know much about what was happening on the Western Front, no bombs fell on German cities, there was no “Berlin Gun” bombarding German soil. “All Quiet on the Western Front” was a regular strapline for German newspapers when nothing much happened far from their quiet streets while the death and destruction continued in Belgium and France. For that reason the idea of the Dolchstosslegende was easy to propagate after the war — how did we lose, why did we surrender when we were so obviously winning? It must have been the Jews and Bolsheviks, we were stabbed in the back! Combine that with toothless enforcement of the Versailles Treaty throughout the 1930s and the result was over forty million Soviet dead, German forces on the outskirts of Moscow and concentration and extermination camps established in Poland and elsewhere to deal with ‘undesirables’.

After the Red Army treated the Germans to Total War: Berlin Boogaloo they sat down and shut up and obeyed their masters and they haven’t started another war since. I’ve seen it said that, between the time of the Roman Empire and 1945, the longest period between armies crossing the Rhine to fight wars was sixty years. After the Soviet destruction of the Nazis and the associated atrocities in German/Axis territories, bupkis.

Much the same happened in the early years of WWII, which was a large part of why Hitler remained popular to the German people and tolerable to the military. Before 1943, there simply wasn’t any real threat to Germany proper: The RAF and USAAF took time to build their numbers and get enough long-range fighters to stage regular raids, while the beginning of the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad was years away. Meanwhile, the wealth of Germany’s conquests was flowing into her coffers and onto the plates of her citizens, such that the average Berliner’s view of the war was the propaganda outlets telling them about their inevitable victory.

There’s stories from German soldiers who survived the war who, when they’d go home from the front lines for leave or due to injuries, they’d be totally shocked by what they found back home. They were freezing in fox holes on the Eastern Front, forced to forage or hunt for food, and counting every bullet as though it might be their last, and then they’d get home and everybody acted as though the good times were never going to end. How could they be losing the war when there was meat on the table, cream and sugar in their coffee, and their wives had all the nylons they could afford?