Second World War

The Second World War is the novel’s governing historical pressure: a conflict first discussed by its German perpetrators as a manageable contest of territory, resources, and production, then experienced as a widening catastrophe whose military defeat does not halt mass murder. Through Angelus Thomsen’s retrospective perspective, the war’s changing fortunes expose the distance between official optimism and material reality. Battles, labour demands, industrial ambition, extermination policy, polluted landscapes, and private reckonings form one connected history rather than separate fronts.

Victory, resources, and the war economy

Early in the war’s eastern campaign, Paul Doll treats German advances as a sequence of foregone conclusions. He ticks off Sevastopol, Voronezh, Kharkov, and Rostov, and tells the industrial officers that the Caucasus oilfields will make their fuel unnecessary. The boast converts military conquest into an argument about supply: victory is imagined as access to resources that will free the Reich from present constraints. Uhl similarly assumes that Stalingrad, already heavily bombed, is nearly theirs, while dismissing the future effect of American economic power.

That confidence is challenged by the practical requirements of a prolonged war. Frithuric Burckl recalls the strength of the American economy in the First World War, and Thomsen points to an armaments conference in Berlin, chaired by Fritz Todt, that was already addressing economic restructuring and preparation for a long conflict. He insists that even an apparently irresistible army must be equipped and supplied. Burckl gives the human measure of this demand: Germany lost one hundred thousand men in the campaigns of 1940, he says, and is losing thirty thousand a month in the east; Thomsen counters that the real figure is sixty thousand. As factories are emptied to put more men in uniform, the war’s manpower losses become an industrial problem as well as a military one.

The Buna-Werke embodies the regime’s answer to that problem. Planned on a city-sized scale and expected, once fully operational, to consume more electricity than Berlin, it promises synthetic rubber, synthetic fuel, and above all autarky. Reich leaders invest in the idea that economic self-sufficiency will decide the war. Yet the same industrial landscape makes the cost of that ambition visible. At the plant, prisoners are driven through lines under the shouting of Kapos, SS noncommissioned officers, and company foremen, while designers and engineers from IG Farben step carefully past the wounded, unconscious, and dead with notebooks and measuring tapes. Production planning proceeds beside the bodies on which the system depends.

Contradictions within the regime

The war is also presented as a collision between institutions whose aims are mutually destructive. In his private reflections, Thomsen describes pressure from the Economic Administration Head Office to increase the labour force for munitions industries, opposed by the Reich Central Security Department’s demand to dispose of as many evacuees as possible. He objects to a proposal that able-bodied mothers be worked to exhaustion in a boot factory at Chełmek, pointing out the practical impossibility of separating them from their children. The passage does not make him an opponent of the regime: he describes the people targeted as a security threat and remains inside the machinery of administration. Instead, it shows how a labour system and a policy of removal compete over the same people, while each is framed in bureaucratic language.

The consequences reach beyond official decisions and factory gates. Thomsen describes an Old Town water supply whose breached water table has left the water undrinkable and its contents fermenting. Later, while driving benzene tanks back, he repeatedly pulls over to smell the worsening air. The novel gives environmental damage a recurring, material presence: contaminated water and unbearable odour are not detached scenery but consequences of the camp-industrial order. Its most terrible formulation comes in Doll’s questions about the flies, vermin, disease, drunkenness, and brown snow. The altered snow becomes an image of violence made physically inescapable, staining even the landscape through which its perpetrators move.

Invasion, defeat, and delayed recognition

The novel makes the invasion of Russia a turning point in how characters understand the war. In a private conversation, Boris Eltz calls it a foolish decision and admits that he had supported it after the rapid victory in France. His retrospective account links that confidence to the belief that Adolf Hitler could not be refused, and to the regime’s intention to pursue its antisemitic project alongside military conquest. Boris then sets out the strategic impossibility he believes the leadership ignored: Germany is fighting the Soviet Union while also facing the United States and the British Empire. In his argument, killing millions and occupying enormous territory cannot erase the population that remains, or make Siberia governable.

Boris’s recognition is an intimate reversal of the earlier language of certainty. He tells Thomsen that Germany has lost, while Thomsen initially reaches for the absence of a second front, possible divisions among the Allies, and German wonder weapons as reasons to resist that conclusion. The conversation makes defeat something that can be understood before it can be openly acknowledged. Elsewhere, Thomsen describes defeat as palpable in Berlin. He also notes that the war is expected to be prosecuted, and perhaps completed, amid defeat: recognition of impending failure does not mean that destructive policies will cease.

Mass murder and the changing meaning of the war

A later discussion with Professor Entress places the course of the war beside the development of mass murder. Thomsen identifies 31 July 1941 as a decisive moment: a letter drafted by Eichmann and Heydrich, sent to Göring and returned with his signature, conveyed Adolf Hitler’s wish for a total solution and authorized action. The account preserves a process of escalation rather than presenting the policy as a single completed decision. An initial vision of deporting Jews to a barren region beyond the Urals or into the Arctic recedes as military victory becomes less certain and officials in occupied Poland press that they cannot manage the numbers. Thomsen describes the moral threshold as the extension of killing from men to women and children.

Entress stresses that the gas chambers and crematoria were methods of accelerating and economizing murder, and of sparing the killers’ nerves, not the source of the will to kill. He points to the Einsatzgruppen’s mass shootings and argues that bullets and pyres could have served the same murderous purpose. Industrial modernity is therefore neither an alternative explanation for the crime nor its necessary precondition. The war supplies changing circumstances and administrative pressures, but the killing rests on decisions and intention. When Thomsen asks how defeat will affect the policy, Entress answers that it may be prosecuted and perhaps completed in defeat’s final convulsions.

The war comes home

The conflict’s movement toward German defeat becomes concrete in the bombing of Berlin. After earlier raids had tapered off and 1942 brought no attacks, the first multi-squadron bombardment arrives on the night of March 1–2, following the Day of the Luftwaffe. Sirens wake Thomsen, who goes to a drinks party in the Eden wine cellars. For ninety minutes, the party continues beneath the threat; then the sound seems to become a giant stumbling through the city before veering away to the east. The aftermath is counted in hundreds dead, thousands injured, perhaps a hundred thousand homeless, and a million shocked faces. The Wilhelmstrasse, associated with the regime’s seat of power, is no longer insulated from the war it began.

The defeat that Boris foresaw also has a personal cost within Thomsen’s circle. On July 12, the climactic day of the German defeat at Kursk, Boris is killed in his Panther after driving it into two Russian T-34 tanks. The battle’s scale is rendered through thirteen thousand tanks across a battlefield compared to the size of Wales; Boris’s posthumous award cannot reverse the outcome. His death binds the abstract argument about invasion and defeat to the loss of the friend who had finally spoken the truth plainly.

The novel’s account of the Second World War thus refuses to treat military collapse as a clean moral conclusion. The same period contains claims of economic self-sufficiency, mounting resource and manpower pressures, the widening of mass murder, and destruction that returns to Berlin. Its recurrent contrast is between systems that claim to organize life and the bodies, landscapes, and relationships they ruin. Defeat changes what can be admitted; it does not undo what has been done.