The title of Peter Fritzsche's new book draws from Stalingrad's World War II memorial, which is etched with the words “An iron wind beat into their faces but they all kept marching on” (xi). The part of the inscription that refers to “marching on” holds true for German-occupied Europe, the author notes, but it leaves out the war's most distinctive feature—its devastating impact on civilians—as well as the meanings that civilians tried to draw from their experiences and, in turn, how those experiences informed their actions. Not everyone marched or fought, Fritzsche points out, for “people were deported, enslaved, and massacred. Others crouched down to find shelter from the wind of war, or they turned to the wind to collaborate or somehow make do” (xi). Focusing on France, Poland, Germany, and Switzerland, and drawing on letters, contemporary fiction, diaries, and memoirs, Fritzsche argues that the Nazi regime's brutal occupation and unprecedented number of civilian casualties undermined social solidarity, as well as the normative moral precepts that shaped it.

Fritzsche opens with English writer Leonard Woolf's metaphor of waiting at a train station to describe the war's endlessness, which, for civilians, brought uncertainty, danger, the fear of neighbors and countrymen, and even displacement. Second, he contextualizes civilians’ bewilderment as a result not only of the harsh conditions that they faced but also of the inaccurate “lessons” they had learned from World War I. During the interwar period, contemporaries expected that bomber attacks in a future war would wreak catastrophe on Europe's cities. It is ironic that benign impressions of Germans persisted, reinforced by the less draconian foreign occupations of the first war and especially by the popularity of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), whose hero saw nationalism and war as having victimized French and Germans alike. The ruinous battles and huge casualties of World War I strengthened pacifism and, notably in Britain and France, the view that the postwar peace settlement had treated Germany unfairly. Whereas the left grew increasingly alarmed at German rearmament and advocated preparedness, the right overestimated German air power and preferred to appease Adolf Hitler, believing that Germany would provide a buffer against Bolshevism. Few grasped or took seriously the German dictator's murderous intentions and the scale of Nazi ambitions. Indeed, the deployment of air power would vastly exceed that of World War I and would produce numerous casualties. Yet, the length and nastiness of the German occupation in Europe affected civilians more comprehensively.

Fritzche uses France (particularly Paris), Poland (especially Warsaw), and Switzerland as case studies of occupied populations or populations threatened by German proximity. Despite the attractions of authoritarianism, Switzerland resisted the “new order” and remained neutral, but, in other respects, made peace with its neighbor. It turned aside pleas for asylum from desperate refugees, it manufactured products for Germany, and it sent nurses and doctors to the East to care for German wounded. Despite having escaped occupation, its fluid combination of resistance and adaptation broadly resembled that of France, where the Vichy regime was widely supported until after 1942 and where frequent, if uneasy, social interactions blurred the boundaries between occupiers and occupied. Such interactions were more difficult in Poland, however, given the viciousness of German anti-Slavism from the beginning. Collaboration, overt or otherwise, had little support there and a Polish underground emerged at the outset. The three cases nevertheless shared something in common—notably, the marginalization and/or exclusion of strangers and even neighbors, especially Jews. The Swiss turned Jewish refugees away at their borders, French citizens looked away from mass deportations, and although the Polish underground extensively documented the ghettos and deportations to death camps, an ethnically and religiously defined Polish nationalism triumphed over multiethnicity. Awareness of the scale of the Jewish genocide was widespread, but few Poles chose to act on such knowledge. Unimaginable scarcity and repression in France and Poland sowed distrust and competition anyway among non-Jewish neighbors, and, for many, antisemitism and a preoccupation with one's own suffering deepened an attitude of “us” versus “them.”

As for the Germans, Nazi ideas proved persuasive over time, even if their extremes made many squeamish. On the home front, the deportations of German Jews to the East were no secret, and thus left many civilians feeling unsettled. Yet, many also believed that a “Jewish problem” existed, and some even asserted that the Jews were responsible for their own predicament. Nazi concepts and terminology not only shaped the attempts of German soldiers on the Eastern front to make sense of their hardships, especially after Operation Barbarossa became a war of attrition, but also discouraged them from acknowledging their own participation in the Wehrmacht's carnage. Swiss doctors and nurses, barred from treating injured Russian prisoners, were horrified at the racism and anti-humanitarianism that saturated German self-justifications. Even devout Christians in the Wehrmacht shared the Nazi vision of an apocalyptic struggle with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which, in their minds, mitigated their own feelings of guilt about their participation in the horrific treatment of civilians and prisoners-of-war.

If the occupation was nightmarish for civilians in general, it was worse for Jews. The Nazi regime's determination to eliminate them entirely deprived them of the little agency that others possessed. To be sure, ghettoized Jews resented the collaboration of the Jewish councils (Judenräte) and the Jewish police, but they realized that their near-total isolation had left their own leaders with “choiceless choices” (270). The unpredictability of deportations to death camps and conflicts between wealthier and poorer Jews, as well as the German need for Jewish labor, sowed divisions among Jews, leaving those who survived, temporarily, with mixed feelings of relief and guilt at not having been one of the murdered. The length of the war, Fritzsche continues, tormented other subject populations, whose members bounced between joy at Allied victories and depression arising from German tenacity. It was especially horrific for the Jews, especially at the height of the deportations to the death camps in 1942 and 1943, when the Allies’ distance and limited possibilities for help closer to home failed to hinder the ongoing genocide. As David Sierakowiak, a young prisoner in the ghetto in Łódż remarked in November 1942, after the Allies had invaded North Africa, “They are doing everything except coming here, damn them!” (199). The search for historical precedents to explain the Jewish catastrophe and to account for the seeming absence of God collided with the lack of any precedent for the so-called Final Solution: its “omnivorous quality” (217), “the terrible isolation and the total silence of the rest of the world” (218), and the murder of children were unmatched in history. To cope with the unfathomable, Jews wrote voluminously in order to leave a detailed record of their struggles—despite the inadequacy of words to convey the depths of their plight.

Fritzsche's approach follows that of his previous book, Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), whose subjects documented in their own writings how they “became” Nazis. The contribution of Iron Wind lies not only in highlighting the most important distinction between World War II and its predecessor, but also in demonstrating how hunger, fear, preexisting prejudices, and profound insecurity ensured that the Social Darwinian world for which the Nazi regime strove became a reality. The terms collaboration and resistance remain useful if we avoid seeing them as polar opposites. Yet, Fritzsche goes beyond this dichotomy to present a more precise description of civilian conduct and the abandonment of empathy and social solidarity as the cost of muddling through.