Attitudes towards the war — and the need to fight it — were divided. In stark contrast with the views of this soldier, the wishes of a farming community in northern Franconia, according to the outspoken report of the local Landrat, could scarcely have been more distant from the ideological aims of the Nazi leadership. There was in his area, he wrote, ‘not the least understanding for the realization of plans for world domination… Overworked and exhausted men and women do not see why the war must be carried still further into Asia and Africa.’161 At the end of August, the same Landrat wrote: ‘I have only the one wish, that one of the officials in Berlin or Munich… should be in my office some time when, for example, a worn-out old peasant beseechingly requests allocation of labourers or other assistance, and as proof of his need shows two letters, in one of which the company commander of the elder son answers that leave for the harvest cannot be granted, and in the other of which the company commander of the younger son informs of his heroic death in an encounter near Propoiszk.’162
From the point of view of most ordinary Germans, the ‘good times’, as they remembered them from the 1930s, were over. Conditions of daily life were deteriorating sharply. The cause of this was, they saw, the war. What was needed was an end to war and return to ‘normality’, not yet another — unnecessary, as many people thought — extension of the conflict, and now against the most implacable and dangerous enemy. Daily concerns dominated the mood, alongside fears for loved ones at the front. Reports from cities highlighted the ‘catastrophic state of provisions’ and anger at food shortages and high prices. Industrial workers were becoming increasingly alienated by working conditions and wage levels. The ‘little man’ was again the stupid one, the SD from Stuttgart reported as a commonly held view. He was having to work hard at great sacrifice, as had always been the case, to benefit the ‘big noises (
On top of this came new worries. It was while the ferocious warfare was raging on the eastern front that, within the Reich, the Nazi regime’s renewed assault on Christianity, which had begun in early 1941, reached its climax. At the same time, the disturbing rumours — which over the previous year had spread like wildfire — about the killing of mentally sick patients taking place in asylums were causing intensified disquiet. Elimination of ‘life not worth living’ had an increasingly threatening ring to it, potentially for every family, as psychologically scarred as well as physically badly injured young soldiers in ever larger numbers were brought back from the front and housed in hospitals, sanatoria, and asylums throughout the Reich.
Despite Hitler’s own repeatedly expressed wish for calm in relations with the Churches as long as the war lasted — the reckoning with Christianity, in his view, had to wait for the final victory — a wave of anti-Church agitation, accompanied by an array of new measures, had taken place during the first half of 1941. The activism appears in the main to have come from below, as anti-Church radicals exploited wartime needs to try to break the vexing hold — strengthened by the anxieties of the war itself — which the Churches continued to have on the population. But it certainly had encouragement from above, particularly through Bormann and the Party Chancellery. In a confidential circular to all Gauleiter in June 1941, Bormann had expressly declared that Christianity and National Socialism were incompatible. The Party must struggle, therefore, to break the Church’s power and influence.165 Whether this represented Hitler’s wishes, given his essential stance on relations with the Churches during the war, is extremely doubtful. On the other hand, Bormann never acted directly contrary to what Hitler wanted. Most probably, he misinterpreted on this occasion Hitler’s repeated rantings about the malevolent influence of Christianity and sent the wrong signals to Party activists.166
