I have tried to illuminate the conflict’s significance for a host of ordinary people, both active and passive participants, though the distinction is often blurred. Was a Hamburg woman who ardently supported Hitler, but perished in the July 1943 firestorm generated by allied bombing, an accomplice to Nazi war guilt or the innocent victim of an atrocity ? So widespread is a modern Western perception that the war was fought about Jews, that it deserves to be emphasised this was not the case. Though Hitler and his followers chose to blame the Jews for the troubles of Europe and grievances of the Third Reich, Germany’s struggle with the allies was about power and hemispheric dominance.
The plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation loomed relatively small in the wartime perceptions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and less surprisingly in that of Stalin. About one-seventh of all fatal victims of Nazism, and almost a tenth of all wartime dead, ultimately proved to have been Jews. But at the time their persecution was viewed by the allies merely as one fragment of the collateral damage of Hitler, as indeed Russians still see the Holocaust today. It seems important to assess the Holocaust not in isolation, as it usually considered, but against the background of Hitler’s governance of his empire, which included- for instance- starving to death more than three million Russian prisoners in German hands.
One of the most moving and enlightened advocates of pursuing such context was a young Jewish girl named Ruth Maier. As a twenty-two year-old refugee in Oslo, barely a month before her own deportation and murder in Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary: ‘If you shut yourself away and look at this persecution and torture of Jews only from the viewpoint of a Jew, then you’ll develop some sort of complex which is bound to lead to a slow but certain psychological collapse. The only solution is to see the Jewish question from a broader perspective…within the framework of the oppressed Czechs and Norwegians, the oppressed workers…We’ll only be rich when we understand that it’s not just we who are a race of martyrs. That beside us there are countless others suffering, who will suffer like us until the end of time…if we don’t…if we don’t fight for a better…’. She broke off to express exasperation about the persistence of her own instinct to see the Jewish tragedy as unique, but her mental confusion does not diminish the nobility and unselfishness of this very young woman’s words from the threshold of the grave.
One of the most important truths about the war, as indeed about all human affairs, is that people can interpret what happens to them only in the context of their own circumstances. The fact that, objectively and statistically, the sufferings of some individuals were less terrible than those of others elsewhere in the world was meaningless to those concerned. It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, simply to thank their stars they were not starving to death in millions like the Russians or West Bengalis who were selling their daughters. The fact that the plight of other people was worse than one’s own did little to promote personal stoicism.
Some aspects of wartime experience were almost universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women obliged to endure new existences utterly remote from those of their choice, often under arms and at worst as slaves. A boom in prostitution was a tragic global phenomenon, which deserves a book of its own. The conflict provoked many mass migrations. Some of these were orderly: half the population of Britain moved home in the course of the war, and many Americans took new jobs in unfamiliar places. Elsewhere, however, millions were wrenched from their communities in dreadful circumstances, and faced ordeals which often killed them. An anonymous Berlin woman wrote in April 1945 in one of the great diaries of the war: ‘These are strange times, history experienced first hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen close up, history is much more troublesome- nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal’.
News of the violent and premature deaths of distant loved ones was a pervasive feature of wartime experience. Often, little was known of their fate, as J.R.Ackerley noted in a 1942 poem published in The Spectator: