An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler
In this deeply insightful work, noted historian Peter Fritzsche (Univ. of Illinois) explores "how people in World War II struggled to make sense of the murderous events occurring around them" (ix) Focusing on Nazi occupied Europe, he demonstrates that, "Some people collaborated, others resisted, but most wavered in a moral no man's land between the two positions" (xiii) Because the brutal German conquests "erased whole horizons of empathy," people found it easy to ignore the suffering of their neighbors and retreat into a preoccupation with self preservation. Fritzsche's careful reading of numerous wartime letters and diaries as well as later memoirs and novels makes his book at once impressionistic and analytical. Chapter 1, "Talk in Wartime," employs the metaphor of a railway station, where the people of occupied Europe endure endless waiting for news of loved ones, scarce rationed goods, and the Second Front, while engaging in ceaseless conversation. Rumor, often fueled by wishful thinking, substitutes for knowledge, because the facts are unavailable or too horrible to contemplate. Chapter 2, "Hitler Means War!" surveys the radically different expectations of what Adolf Hitler's rise to power might mean for the future. For many Germans, the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) signaled a much desired rebirth and resurgence of the fatherland: "less than twenty years after the start of World War I, the country looked like August 1914 again, more disciplined, perhaps, but just as ready for military engagement" (25) Clearly, the war weariness many had felt in 1918 had faded, as signaled by the suppression of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) The reaction was much different for Frenchmen and many Britons. Even before the advent of the Third Reich, people dreaded the terrors they imagined any future war would entail. "The fear of ferociously destructive air raids sat as deeply in the bones of Europeans in the 1930s as the fear of nuclear attack would during the Cold War a generation later" (39) Parisians and Londoners worried that the new Germany was bent on war, but that apprehension moved more of them toward pacifism and appeasement than anti fascism and resistance. And many overlooked "the centrality of racial thinking to Germany's great power ambitions" (46) Chapter 3, "A New Authoritarian Age?" explores disorientation from the unsettling imposition of German summer time on western Europe to the endless lines of refugees and their abandoned vehicles and belongings along the roads. Many feared France might forsake its republican traditions for Vichy style authoritarianism. Had Hitler's inauguration of the Nazis' "ThousandYear Reich" ended the era of European liberalism? Was civilization itself in peril? Even the Swiss agonized over how much to "adapt" to or "resist" the New Order. However, an enduring belief in their exceptionalism combined with the changing fortunes of war to preserve the "porcupine" federation. Outside Switzerland,