Thus on March 6, 1943, Goebbels gave orders for the release of the Rosenstrasse Jews. He justified this as a temporary concession during a crucial time—a reference to the recent disaster at Stalingrad. He had every intention of including intermarried Jews and Mischlinge in future roundups, when progress on the front might make it less imperative to retain the goodwill of working women at home. Of course that time never came, and as early as March 18, 1943, the SS issued an order not to deport any more intermarried Jews pending clarification from Hitler regarding the proper treatment of such cases. This clarification also never came, with the result that the “privileged Jews” of the Rosenstrasse escaped the fate of the unprivileged Jews who died in the camps.
The Rosenstrasse incident illustrates what positive good could come from a courageous stance against a brutal regime, but its significance should not be overstated. To a large degree, this protest was successful because it focused on a relatively narrow issue that did not strike at the core of the system. As one woman admitted later: “We want[ed] our husbands. But only that. We didn’t call out for anything else.” Moreover, this example did not inspire larger protests on a broader front. As the war dragged on, the Nazi home front was full of malaise, not least in Berlin, but it held up more or less intact until the Allied armies crushed the Wehrmacht and overran the Nazi state.
Total War
March 1, 1943, the date on which Allied bombs almost claimed the Rosenstrasse center, was the annual “Day of the Luftwaffe.” On this date each year Germans were ordered by the Hitler regime to honor the accomplishments of the Nazi air force. By staging a large-scale raid on that day, the enemy intended to help the Germans celebrate. The March raid was part of a bombing campaign against Berlin that was much more extensive and deadly than the raids of 1940/41, which, from the British point of view, had been disappointing. The city was so spread out (900 square miles), and contained so many open spaces, that the bombers had difficulty hitting specific targets or wiping out large contiguous areas. In fact, the early raids had achieved so little by the end of 1941 that the British suspended attacks on Berlin for about a year to concentrate on easier targets and to develop technical improvements that would, they hoped, make it easier to hit the German capital.
As of early 1942 the British Bomber Command was under the leadership of Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, who believed that “area bombing” of large cities and industrial centers could bring an enemy to its knees without the need for a ground invasion. His strategy harmonized with a decision reached at the Anglo-American Casablanca Conference (January 1943) to “wage the heaviest possible bomber campaign against the German war effort,” although neither Churchill nor Roosevelt expected bombing alone to win the war. American bombers joined the crusade against Berlin shortly after Casablanca, hitting the city for the first time on January 27, 1943. Interestingly enough, they had practiced for this operation by bombing mock-ups of Berlin apartment houses designed by the modernist architect Erich Mendelssohn, who had gone into exile in the United States. The Combined Bomber Command was now able to deliver a one-two punch, the British (still) flying by night, the Americans by day. Although Allied losses were extensive, the bombers began to do serious damage to the city. In March 1943 alone over 700 Berliners died in raids. There were casualties also at the Berlin zoo, whose terrified animals, along with the city’s children, were surely the most innocent victims of a war that had now truly “come home” to the German capital.
The war was coming home more viciously on the battlefront as well, in terms of increased losses of soldiers who hailed from Berlin. During the first year of the war, Berlin had sacrificed its native sons at the rate of 361 per month. In the second year the number went up to 467 per month, and in the third year to 661. Then, in the six-month period between October 1942 and April 1943, soldiers from Berlin died at an average of 1,565 a month.
Some of the losses occurred at the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged from September 1942 to the end of January 1943. The Nazi government predicted a glorious victory in this crucial battle, but on February 1, 1943, the German forces surrendered, marking the Reich’s greatest defeat to date. The disaster was so immense that Goebbels’s propaganda machine could not ignore it or disguise it as a strategic redeployment. The propaganda minister ordered a three-day period of mourning. At the same time, however, the defeat gave impetus to an initiative that Goebbels had been trying to sell to Hitler for some time: mobilization for “total war” on the home front. Heretofore, the minister insisted, Germany had been fighting with one hand tied behind its back because it had not demanded enough sacrifices from the folks at home. With Hitler’s permission, Goebbels staged a huge rally at the Sport-palast on February 18, invoking the “great tocsin of fate” at Stalingrad to call for a new kind of war, one “more total and radical than we can even imagine today.” No longer would the Nazi regime be hindered by “bourgeois squeamishness.” Every German, high and low, must be made to sacrifice for the common cause. “Now people, arise, and storm, break loose!” he shouted.
In the wake of Goebbels’s jeremiad, the regime began closing down businesses not vital to the war effort. All women between seventeen and forty-five were required to register for possible conscription into the labor force. To ensure that the capital was in the vanguard of the new commitment, Goebbels shifted 300 men from his own ministry to the Wehrmacht and replaced them with women. He shut down a number of luxury shops and restaurants, including Horcher’s, which had been serving gourmet meals to bigwigs without demanding ration cards. (The Gauleiter took special pleasure in closing Horcher’s, because it was Göring’s favorite eatery.) Berlin’s theaters and cinemas were also ordered closed, but with soldiers coming home on furlough it made sense to maintain some distractions, so these venues were reopened after a few days.
Even as he was demanding greater sacrifices from the populace, Goebbels continued to live high off the hog himself, entertaining his actress friends at the sumptuous villa he had expropriated from a Jewish banker on the Wannsee island of Schwanenwerder, and driving around town in a new armor-plated Mercedes, a Christmas gift from Hitler, who worried that some malcontent might blow up Goebbels in Berlin just as anti-Nazi partisans had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.
In the event, no one came close to killing Goebbels (a would-be assassin trying to lay a mine at Schwanenwerder was immediately apprehended and executed), but morale in Berlin was badly shaken by the grim news from Stalingrad and the resumption of Allied bombing. The SD, which kept its finger on the pulse of popular opinion, reported increasing signs of defeatism. The myth of Hitler’s invincibility was now increasingly “on the defensive.” Ursula von Kardorff wrote bitterly in her diary on January 31, 1943: “How gloriously our Führer has saved us from collapse, the Jews, and Bolshevism. In actuality we have Stalingrad, Wornesch, Ladogasee, Illmensee, Rshew [German defeats in Russia], the fleeing Army of the Caucuses. The Jewish deportations. Can one still pray? I cannot do so anymore.”
Yet there was worse to come, much worse. In late August and early September 1943 the Allies launched the largest air attacks to date against Berlin. This was the opening phase of the attempt to bomb the Reich into submission. On the night of August 23/24, 1943, the RAF dispatched 719 aircraft to Berlin. The British suffered grievous losses, due mainly to a highly effective fighter defense mounted by the Luftwaffe, but they managed nonetheless to drop 1,706 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. As a result, every government office building in the Wilhelmstrasse was at least partially damaged, as were an officer cadet school at Köpenick and the barracks of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in Lichterfelde. A total of 854 people were killed, many of them because they had neglected to seek shelter, a fact that infuriated Goebbels, who threatened to shoot people who did not abide by the air-raid regulations.