CHAPTER SIX
SHADOWS OF DEFEAT
MOST OF THE German people had not wanted war in 1939, but gained greater satisfaction than they expected from the early years of victory. Lieutenant Leopold Goesse, a young Austrian cavalry officer, thoroughly enjoyed the 1940 Norway campaign, in which finally he watched British soldiers fleeing to their boats. Heinz Knoke, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, felt himself “enraptured” by an encounter with his triumphant Führer in December 1940. When Knoke heard rumours of the impending German invasion of Russia in June 1941, he wrote in his diary: “The idea appeals to me. Bolshevism is the arch-enemy of Europe and of European civilization.” Eleonore Burgsdorf and her family filled the cellars of their home in East Prussia with Scotch whisky, French cognac and champagne brought to them as presents by the heroes of Germany’s campaigns in the west. Many German soldiers revelled in Paris leaves, and rejoiced at their distant glimpse of Moscow.
All sensations of that kind perished, however, with Stalingrad. By the winter of 1944, the reality of war seeped into almost every corner of the Reich. Few households had been spared some personal sacrifice to the demented ambitions of Adolf Hitler. It was a custom in bereaved German families to distribute among friends a black-bordered memorial card, bearing a photograph and brief details of a lost son. Millions of such souvenirs of death now stood above fireplaces in millions of homes. Katharina Minniger, a twenty-two-year-old from the village of Hausach in the Schwartzwald, lost her brother Ludwig soon after Stalingrad. Her parents sent out the customary tokens of remembrance for him. Over the two years that followed, she was dismayed to see the neatly printed cards arrive again and again to mark the passing of old schoolfriends: “Joseph Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Victor Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Willi Enders—lost on a ship to Africa”; “Willi Webers—died Eastern Front aged 19.5,” and likewise for many more. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a Luftwaffe flak officer, now believed that when the Allies completed their triumph all Germans of working age would be deported to become slaves in Russia. Eighteen-year-old Klaus Salzer, a tall, serious, classically handsome middle-class Königsberger, was unwillingly conscripted to the paratroops in October 1944. As the boy left home, he lingered in the hall, gazing at its heavy, familiar furniture. “Why are you looking at everything like that?” demanded his mother. “Because I shall never see it all again,” said Klaus sadly. Indeed he did not, for he was killed in action a few months later.
“The vain hope that the war would end before Christmas 1944 faded out as the autumn dragged along,” wrote Paul von Stemann, a Danish correspondent in Berlin. Rationing tightened: “housewives counted potatoes as if they were gold nuggets.” The fat porter at the city’s grand Esplanade Hotel began to look like a circus clown, his uniform hanging in loose folds on his shrunken frame. Smart folk drank a lot, because there was little else to do—no books to buy, no films or theatres to visit, no sport or radio entertainment or social life. Privileged people seized opportunities to escape to the countryside for weekends. Yet even in great houses the small talk was bleak. When von Stemann went to stay with friends in Bavaria and asked his hostess how life was treating her, she responded tersely: “My uncle was hanged the other day.” This was Berlin Police President Graf Wolf Heinrich von Helldorff, one of the July plotters against Hitler.* 7 “Missie” Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian aristocrat who maintained a diary of wartime life in Berlin, shocked her old cook Martha by dossing down on one sofa in the drawing room one night, while a young man slept on another. “In meiner Jugend kam so etwas nicht vor, aber dieser 20. Juli stellt alles aus den Kopf!” sniffed Martha, “In my young days that couldn’t have happened, but this 20 July has turned everything topsy-turvy.” So it had for Missie Vassiltchikov, some of whose closest friends had already been executed.
Even in the face of looming catastrophe, most German civilians focused their minds upon the small details of their own daily lives, because that is human nature. Maria Hustreiter was troubled by the difficulty of getting shoes. She was a fourteen-year-old small farmer’s daughter living at Landshut, thirty miles north-east of Munich. In the country, there was usually enough to eat. The household received a steady stream of city visitors, who walked miles to farmhouse doors hoping to barter their household goods for food. The people of Landshut were all conscious of the town’s only Jew, a kettle-seller. Somehow, in that isolated rural community, the man was left alone to survive the war, which afterwards became a source of relief and even pride to his neighbours. Maria’s two elder brothers were in the army. Her mother prayed constantly to Our Lady for their deliverance, but one would never return.
There was church every Sunday and the inevitable Nazi school parades, but no parties, no dancing. In that simple community in those simple days, she was too young to think about boys. Two French prisoners, amiable young men, lived with them and helped to till their eighty acres. The family knew very little about events beyond their small world. “I understood that the war was not good, but life went on.” Her immediate awareness of the conflict stemmed from watching the distant glow of Munich, Regensburg, Nuremberg, lit up by flames under bombing. Sometimes, the family found their fields littered with “window,” the tinfoil strips dropped by Allied planes to baffle German radar. There was once a terrible time after a big raid, when the railway was cut. A train loaded with livestock en route to the slaughterhouse in Munich was obliged to halt for days on the track beside the Hustreiter farm. The sounds of pigs squealing and cattle lowing in despair haunted even a country girl like Maria, familiar with the traumas of animals.
The countryside was full of evacuees from the bombed cities. Ten-year-old Jutta Dietze from Leipzig lived on a farm in Saxony with her mother and three siblings for more than a year after their home was destroyed. They were expected to work hard in the fields, for the local farmers tolerated rather than welcomed their uninvited guests. They ate each day at a big table among a mixed gathering of French PoWs from a nearby camp and Russian labourers who slept above the stables. The bathroom of the farmhouse was crammed with every kind of household valuable from carpets to grandfather clocks, bartered for food by families who had trudged out from nearby Chemnitz. Unsurprisingly, the children adapted to their new circumstances more easily than the adults. Dietze family photographs of the period show the young ones grinning cheerfully as they posed among the animals in their rural idyll, even as Germany plunged towards final disaster.
Cities in the east of the country, hitherto immune from air attack, were now experiencing the devastating bombardments with which western Germany was already familiar. The tempo of destruction increased relentlessly. A Darmstadt housewife wrote to her husband at the front after a raid by the RAF’s 5 Group on 12 September which precipitated a firestorm and killed 12,000 people: “This is now a dead town.” Another woman reported from Wiesbaden: “13 full alerts and 18 warnings last week. We all broke down. 13 people were killed in one shelter.” Emmy Suppanz wrote to her son from Marburg on 23 November: “Yesterday, against my will I had to go through one part of the town. Sepp, it was dreadful. Luckily I didn’t have to go through the quarter where the station is, for it is said to be much worse there . . . Everyone is now talking such a lot about the new weapons, even Karl-Ludwig who is usually so discreet, so perhaps they really will come soon. Do you still believe in them?”
The first time Melany Borck, a sixteen-year-old evacuee in Schleswig-Holstein, saw British bombers’ pyrotechnic markers drift down through the night sky towards Hamburg fifteen miles away, she merely watched curiously, without great emotion. When a burning British aircraft plunged into the sea nearby, she and her parents, watching, felt a shock of revulsion untinged by partisan satisfaction. “We simply said: ‘Oh, my God.’ ” Yet with each month, their own circumstances worsened. They found that the experience of war made everyone abandon thought for the future. Like Frontsoldaten, they occupied themselves solely with demands of the moment: how to find food for the next meal, bandages for the next trainload of wounded arriving at the local hospital, electricity to cook with, space to sleep in a house crammed with twenty-two evacuees and refugees. As the horrors increased, everyone in Melany’s small world became imbued, like the rest of Germany, with the same desperate yearning: “Please God, let it be over.” There was one significant variation of this sentiment: some Germans yearned for peace on any terms; others still craved victory, and believed that this might be attained.
Every domestic radio set manufactured in Germany during the war bore a notice warning, “DO NOT TUNE TO FOREIGN STATIONS!,” but many people did. Fourteen-year-old Eggert Stolten’s mother was an ardent Nazi. She did not try to stop her son listening to the BBC and Radio Switzerland, but instead maintained a withering commentary on the statistics given by the British for the distances the Allies had supposedly advanced, and the prisoners they had captured. “It’s lies, all lies!” said Frau Stolten. “Our numbers are the right ones!” She was immensely proud of having become a Party member before 1933. “We wanted to change things,” she told her son. Eggert Stolten said: “Nobody’s morale was broken by bombing. Everybody just thought: ‘Those murdering bastards!’ ” Nonetheless, in their local shelter in Düsseldorf during the raids, when people were thinking rather more about God than about their Führer, some people objected to the big poster of Adolf Hitler on the wall, observing uneasily: “We don’t like seeing him down here.” One of the first big RAF raids on the Ruhr destroyed the Stoltens’ new house and obliged them to go and live deep in the countryside of Thuringia. Yet being “de-housed”—as that apostle of area bombing Lord Cherwell categorized the German family’s experience—did nothing to diminish Frau Stolten’s unshakeable faith in victory.
What seems noteworthy is not how many people found the war terrible, but how many—especially at the humbler end of the social spectrum—still found life tolerable, almost until the end. Regina Krakowick lost everything when her Berlin flat was bombed in 1943, but she and her husband retained an impressive capacity to enjoy themselves. Johannes was a tailor, whom a bone-marrow deficiency rendered unfit for military service. The couple thought this a wonderful piece of good fortune, though because Johannes was tall and handsome and apparently healthy he incurred spiteful comment from people who did not know his medical history. The couple were regular play- and movie-goers as long as the theatres stayed open. They continued to entertain enthusiastically almost to the end. They saved up rations for weeks for their parties, at which Johannes’s sister Louise played the accordion and the hosts produced their hoarded quota of schnapps. Until the first weeks of 1945, there always seemed to be just enough to eat, with some help from a family vegetable plot on the edge of the city. “We knew nothing about politics,” said Regina, who was twenty-five, “but we went on hoping for final victory, because we could not conceive of what would happen to Germany if she lost the war.”
Shortages of all kinds were endemic. There was no shoe polish, little to read. Clothes were scarce, both for civilians and soldiers. Over 300,000 volunteers worked in 60,000 collection centres around the country, receiving donations of clothing for soldiers and refugees. “The ‘people’s sacrifice’ demands of us that we hand over everything we do not use every day,” an official circular exhorted. “It is not enough to give up old clothing, or a few rags.” Yet, even after Goebbels banned publication of almost all books as an economy measure, a torrent of Nazi propaganda material continued to flow. Men of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division were bemused to find in a German house a new children’s book entitled Mama, Tell Me About Hitler, which dwelt enthusiastically upon the SS “and that beautiful black uniform which we love so well.” “Faithful to the Führer, loyal to the death,” Germans were urged to sing, “He will lead us one day, out of this distress.” The record of Germany’s churchmen throughout the Nazi era was indifferent, to say the least. Yet it seems remarkable that a priest of any kind could be found to deliver the German Army’s prayer, that mockery of Christianity:
Your hand, O God, rules over all empires and nations on this earth
In your goodness and strength bless our German nation
And infuse in our hearts love of our Fatherland.
May we be a generation of heroes . . .
Especially bless our Führer and commander-in-chief in all the tasks which are laid upon him.
In the wake of the army’s bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, treachery real or suspected had become an obsession within the Third Reich. Most Germans, whether on the battlefield or at home, perceived no possibility of escaping their fate. But German diplomats stationed in neutral countries, often with their families, possessed exceptional opportunities to vote with their feet. In November 1944, Himmler sent a scornful memorandum to the foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, about “negative tendencies” within his ministry: “We are getting more and more reports of betrayals of the state.” There was Dr. Zechlin of the Madrid embassy, a known anti-Nazi who had refused repeated orders for his recall, and was now apparently ensconced in a Spanish monastery. Germany’s Madrid ambassador, Dr. von Deberlein, was married to a Spaniard and defiantly declined to return to Berlin. Consul Schwinner in Lausanne was reported as having declared publicly that the Soviet Union was a peaceful country, invaded by Germany. Schwinner had since vanished. Dr. Krauel, consul in Geneva, likewise acknowledged in a letter home that “he had no intention of returning to the lion’s den.” Krauel was summoned back to Berlin, but instead settled down at a Swiss sanatorium. Himmler quoted complaints from the Propaganda Ministry that Germany’s foreign policy “seems moribund.”
In the rhetoric of the Nazis that winter, it is striking to notice how often “fanatical”—a pejorative word in the eyes of Americans or Englishmen—was used as a term of approbation by everyone from Hitler downwards. “I have never before seen such a wholesale use of ‘fanatical’ and ‘fanaticism’ . . . the word is repeated in every article,” noted Victor Klemperer as he read his Sunday paper in Dresden that October. A local gauleiter issued a proclamation to the people of one city threatened with imminent allied occupation:
When the enemy reaches the German positions in the West, let him be met with our fanatical resistance . . . The eyes of our children, who want to see a future, plead for us to resist to the last breath . . . The voices of hundreds of thousands who have died on the battlefield for the honour and freedom of the Fatherland, or lost their lives through enemy terror attacks from the air, cry out to us. The spirit of fighters for freedom throughout our glorious history implore us not to weaken or to show cowardice at this decisive moment in our struggle for survival.
The order was given for every available man between sixteen and sixty to report for duty digging defences, while the remainder of the city’s population was to be evacuated.
In addition to nightly air-raid duties, millions of boys and elderly men were now spending six hours a week training with their local Volkssturm home defence units, usually in icy huts or warehouses. They practised judging distances, deployment in open order and simple infantry tactics. All of this seemed worthless, however, when arms were chronically short. “What is lacking is familiarity with weapons,” a disgruntled Volkssturm father wrote to his son at the front. This was a deficiency that would never be fully remedied. Among the elderly, there was no eagerness to die in the futile defence of one’s town or village. The dangerous people were the children, whose entire conscious lives had been spent under Nazism. Goebbels had succeeded all too well with a generation of young Germans. A dreadful number were now ready to sacrifice themselves, ancient rifle or Panzerfaust in hand, in a rite of passage which they embraced with awful enthusiasm.
Helmut Fromm, who was serving as a teenage telephonist with a flak battery outside Heidelberg, once went to the cinema with some fellow gunners. They were in the midst of watching a movie entitled Der Katzenstag when the manager appeared at the end of their row, and ordered them out. “This film is not for young people,” he said sternly. Back at the battery, the boys pinned up a notice beside their 88mm gun proclaiming “This is not for young people.” Fromm, who had already been wounded by a near-miss from a British bomb, observed that it was typical of the Nazis to allow you to die for the fatherland at sixteen, but not to watch adult movies until you were eighteen. A friend of his old headmaster, a major on the General Staff, said to Fromm crossly: “You should be doing your exams, not going to the front.” Yet the bespectacled boy soon afterwards found himself posted to an infantry regiment in Poland.
For the average German family, the cost of living had risen by some 13 per cent since 1939. Rural people seldom went hungry, but city-dwellers found it difficult to buy an increasing range of commodities, on or off ration. The bread allowance did not much diminish throughout the war, until April 1945. But a weekly allocation of 400 grams of meat in June 1941 had fallen to 362 grams in 1944, and would descend to 156 grams in February 1945. The fats ration, 269 grams a week in June 1941, fell to 156 grams by January 1945. “Well, my dear Hans,” Julius Legmann of Zittau in Saxony wrote in October to an NCO friend at the front, “we were very glad to learn from your letter that you are well and fit, and also that all you good fellows in the army are well fed and not getting such dreary food as we do in the homeland . . . Here it’s a case of a lot of work and not much to eat . . . We should like something with some fat in it for once in a way, instead of just potatoes with nothing to go with them.”
Albert Speer, as armaments minister, was still accomplishing monthly miracles. In October 1944, Germany built more than five tanks and assault guns for each one that had been manufactured in January 1942. Production even increased towards the end of the year, as winter weather hampered Allied bombing. Yet after the war, amid Speer’s orgy of self-abasement, he acknowledged the recklessness of his forecasts, especially those concerning future aircraft production. He perceived “something grotesque” about his efforts in the last months of the war to convince subordinates that new industrial exertions might yet arrest the Allied tide. As factories were destroyed by bombing and sources of raw materials were overrun by the Russians, production would inexorably shrink. It was one of the paradoxes of the Second World War that, while Speer directed industry to tremendous effect, Germany’s war economy was incomparably less efficient than those of the Allies, including Russia’s. The efforts of some brilliant managers and industrialists, the dogged achievements of their workforces, were set at naught by massive policy failures. Speer’s performance was less remarkable in overcoming difficulties created by Allied bombing and raw-material shortages than in surmounting the follies of Hitler, Himmler and Göring. Contrary to widely accepted myth, the German war economy was a shambles. It is frightening to contemplate the consequences had it been otherwise.
The Greater German Reich created by Hitler embraced a population of 116 million people and an area of 344,000 square miles including much of Poland and Czechoslovakia, together with Alsace-Lorraine. Yet German industry had become heavily dependent upon foreign labour: 28.6 million German factory workers—14.1 million men, 14.5 million women—now required the support of 7.8 million foreigners, and still there were never enough hands at the lathes and assembly lines (not surprising, one might think, when to sustain morale the Nazis encouraged Germans to retain their domestic servants, of whom almost a million and a half were still butlering and maiding to the very end). Some of the foreign workers were volunteers, who had come to Germany in search of higher wages than they could hope to earn in their own occupied countries. Most, however, were forced labourers, rounded up in tens of thousands by German troops in France, Poland, Russia and every other nation under Nazi domination, for shipment under guard to Germany. The failure to exploit their individual skills, the policy of treating them merely as working animals—sending the biggest and fittest to the mines, for instance—was one of the most serious mistakes of Hitler’s war economy.
Though all the labourers suffered hunger, the intensity of their sufferings varied immensely. The west Europeans were treated far better than the peoples from the east, whose plight will be examined below. In addition, German industry and agriculture were bolstered by 1.8 million prisoners of war. By 1945 imported workers of one kind or another made up a fifth of Germany’s entire civilian labour force. Almost every community and farm in Germany possessed its quota of enemy aliens, some resigned to their lot, many treated as neither more nor less than slaves. Without them the German war economy would have collapsed long before it did. Since the Germans troubled themselves little about protecting PoWs and foreign workers from air raids, allied bombing killed thousands of such Nazi captives. A statistical breakdown of 8,000 victims of the catastrophic RAF raid on Darmstadt in September 1944 showed that 936 were military personnel; 1,766 were male civilians, 2,742 female; 2,129 children; 368 prisoners of war; and 492 foreign labourers. These proportions were approximately replicated in every German city which suffered bombardment. The RAF’s legendary Dambusters’ raid in 1943 killed 147 Germans, together with 712 prisoners of war and foreign labourers, 493 of these Ukrainian women. Among 720 victims of a typical RAF raid on Berlin, 249 were slave labourers permitted no access to shelters.
Above all, Germany faced a desperate shortage of fuel. The loss of eastern oilfields to the Soviets, together with American bombing, had imposed upon Hitler’s empire a crisis that was strangling the training of pilots, the deployment of armies, even the movement of tanks on the battlefield. Charcoal-driven cars, trucks and buses, together with horses and carts, had replaced petrol-fuelled transport throughout Germany, for everyone save the armed forces and the Nazi bureaucracy. Allied assaults on communications imposed chronic delay on all train journeys. Astonishingly, however, so dense was the rail net that until the spring of 1945 it remained possible to travel by train across the country for anyone willing to endure interruptions, diversions and sometimes Allied strafing. German soldiers continued to receive rations and mail in the most desperate circumstances. “It was fantastic how well the logistical arrangements worked, almost to the end,” observed Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder.
One of the few merits of Germany’s vastly shortened lines of communication was that many soldiers now received mail from home a week after it was posted, rather than a month or more, as was commonplace in the days when Hitler’s frontiers extended to the Balkans and the Crimea. Any benefit that correspondence may have rendered to men’s morale was undone, however, by the nature of the tidings which Germany’s defenders received from their loved ones. Corporal Rudolf Pauli was sent a letter by his fiancée in Hornsburg on 5 October: “Since last night, our Adelheid is pretty nervy. As soon as she hears the drone of a plane, she runs as fast as she can. Privately, I had always hoped the war would end this year, but I have now given up on that. It seems that the war will go on for ever. There will be no peace until everything is destroyed.”
Many civilians, even in areas such as East Prussia and Silesia, which now lay close to the Red Army, found it difficult to comprehend the notion that their entire world was on the verge of extinction, that the streets in which they shopped, the farms on which they milked cows, the communities in which they had lived their lives, would forever be destroyed within a matter of months. It was hard for any ordinary person to discover the truth. And what was truth, anyway? An alarming number of German people retained some hope that the Führer’s promised “wonder weapons” might yet avert defeat; that fissures among the Allies would undo Germany’s oppressors. Many Germans found it unthinkable that the Western allies, fellow citizens of a civilized universe, would allow their country to be delivered into the clutches of Stalin’s barbarian hordes. Few German civilians felt shame or guilt about what their nation had done to Europe. Instead, more than a decade of the most brilliantly orchestrated propaganda culture in history had imbued almost all, young and old, with a profound sense of grievance towards their country’s enemies and invaders, a passionate resentment against the Allied armies and air forces. Germany’s enemies were now destroying centuries of culture through bombing, while assisting the Red Army to reach the very frontiers of the Reich. As to such matters as concentration camps, Jews or even the plight of slave labourers who worked in factories within daily sight of the civilian workforce, most people shrugged that this was the regrettable order of things forced upon Germany by her persecutors.
“There was no guilt about what Germany had done in the world—or only a very little, at the very end,” observed Gotz Bergander, a Dresden teenager who became a post-war historian. “They said: ‘Who started this war? Germany was only defending itself.’ ” A collective self-pity underpinned German behaviour in the last phase of the conflict, embracing all from Adolf Hitler to the humblest civilian. Bergander, an uncommonly thoughtful young man, once observed to a friend that everywhere the Germans had gone in Europe they had been uninvited. His friend shrugged: “That’s the way war is.” Bergander said afterwards: “Everyone was convinced that we were surrounded by enemies.” He and his family listened avidly, if perilously, to the BBC. He heard the famous “black propaganda” broadcasts of the British journalist Sefton Delmer, and—far more effectively from the Allied viewpoint—Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. To young Bergander, American music possessed the status of holy writ. He thought: people who can make music like this must win the war. The cultural life which had meant so much to the Dresden teenager was being stifled month by month in the winter of 1944. Opera and ballet houses closed, as artistes were drafted for labour service. Most hotels abandoned their usual musical entertainments. Cafés still flourished, however. Piano and poetry recitals continued until a late stage.
On 3 December 1944, Hitler surprised his circle by leaving the Reich Chancellery to take tea with the Goebbels family in their home at 20 Hermann Göring Strasse. Goebbels, according to his aide Rudolf Semmler, “stood to attention with his arm stretched out as far as it would go.” The children, dressed up for the occasion in long gowns made from curtain fabric, curtsied prettily. The Führer complimented their mother on how much they had grown. He presented Frau Goebbels with a small bunch of lily-of-the-valley, explaining apologetically that this was the best he could do, since her husband had closed all Berlin’s flower shops. Semmler noticed a thermos protruding from the briefcase inscribed with a large painted white “F,” and realized that Hitler, by now terrified of poison, had brought his own refreshments. But the occasion was a great social success, and delighted the hosts. “He wouldn’t have gone to the Görings,” observed Magda Goebbels smugly. It was one of the last events of her life which gave unmingled satisfaction to this doomed, unboundedly foolish woman.
SOLDIERS
AFTER THE FAILURE of the July bomb plot against Hitler few officers, far less ordinary soldiers, contemplated revolt. “Most Germans realized that it was necessary to end the war—but still they did not want to lose it,” a German historian observes. “The July plot had made Hitler seem immortal. Ironically, it increased his authority rather than weakened it.” Dr. Karl-Ludwig Mahlo, a twenty-nine-year-old Luftwaffe doctor, endorsed this view: “After 20 July,” he said, “we felt that it must be Hitler’s destiny to survive. We really believed in him. Hitler did a lot for me. I had a wonderful youth. We were young, we were so much indoctrinated by propaganda, by the years of victory reports. Afterwards, people said: ‘How could you have believed in this man?’ Yet we did—totally.” Mahlo was disturbed, however, when some Luftwaffe comrades returned from a 1944 Berlin medal presentation by Hitler to report tersely: “He looks terrible.”
In the smart Grossdeutschland Division, officers and men reflected a wide political spectrum. “There were some serious Nazis—especially those who had attended the Adolf Hitler schools,” said Lieutenant Tony Saurma. But most thought little about politics, only about the survival of Germany—and of themselves. After the July plot, the commanding officer warned Saurma, son of a Silesian aristocratic family: “You blue-blooded types had better be careful now, or you’ll find yourself in trouble.” Saurma’s uncle had already been imprisoned for his alleged role in the anti-Nazi Resistance. “I think you’d better write a letter to Dr. Goebbels,” Colonel Willi Lankeit told Saurma thoughtfully. The young officer indeed wrote to the propaganda minister, who was known slightly to the Grossdeutschland’s commander, assuring him of his loyalty to Germany’s rulers.
“We retained some illusions,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder of the 18th Volksgrenadiers. “We thought it impossible that the Americans would allow the Russians to sweep Europe. We thought that, when the Americans had defeated us, they would turn on the Russians. And we believed that we must do everything possible to prevent Russia from overrunning our country.” Schröder was the son of a prominent anti-Nazi retired officer, who had died in 1935. Yet he argued that even the Waffen SS were motivated by patriotism rather than ideology: “12th SS Panzer’s men were always said to have been ‘fanatical young Nazis,’ but this was not so. I knew those people. They were fighting for Germany, not for Hitler.” Luftwaffe ace Heinz Knoke was appalled by the July bomb plot: “The ordinary German fighting soldiers regard the unsuccessful revolt as treason of the most infamous kind.” Major Karl-Günther von Hase was a scion of an old Pomeranian military family. He joined the army in 1936, “believing that I could pursue a military career without thinking of politics.” He learned differently after the July plot. The Nazis hanged his father, military commandant of Berlin, as a leading participant. Yet, even after this horror, von Hase considered that it was his own duty to fight in defence of Germany to the end. He retained a deep professional respect for the Waffen SS: “We always liked to have them on our flanks, because we knew how good they were.”
The condition of the nation’s soldiers was worse than that of the civilians in one important sense. They knew more. From personal experience, the men fighting along almost 2,000 miles of front in the east, 700 miles in the west, had grown familiar with the overwhelming might of the Allied armies. All save the dedicated Nazis knew that their nation retained scant hope of military victory. Beyond this, every man who had served in the east knew what Germany had done to the Soviet Union, and what manner of enemies were the Russian people. German soldiers could anticipate the retribution that would fall upon their Heimat, or homeland, their own families and loved ones, if the Red Army reached them. The Allied commitment to accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender, rejecting all negotiation of terms, together with the revelation of the American Morgenthau Plan for the post-war pastoralization of Germany—reducing Hitler’s people to a nation of peasants, stripped of industrial capacity—had provided Goebbels with a propaganda feast. “The Jew Morgenthau sings the same tune as the Jews in the Kremlin,” trumpeted Berlin Radio. A characteristic German fatalism about their nation’s march to destruction persuaded most men of the Wehrmacht that there was no alternative save to fight on until they were released by death or the good fortune of Anglo-American captivity.
Wilhelm Pritz, an infantry sergeant, spent the autumn of 1944 in a military hospital in Germany, praying that he would not have to return to the Eastern Front. He had gone to Russia for the first time in April 1942, and was wounded by mortar fragments during the assault on Sebastopol. After some months in hospital, he rejoined his unit on the Volga in March 1943: “Almost everyone I knew was gone. They were very short of men.” He contracted frostbite in the trenches, which cost him another two months in hospital, followed by a spell as an instructor at an infantry training centre. In the autumn of 1943, he was sent to the Ukraine. One of four sons of a Coblenz factory worker, he had by now lost one brother killed in Russia, while a second brother was missing and would never return: “my parents prayed that I would not have to go east again.” In October 1943, he was among German forces encircled and cut off in their bridgehead on the Dnieper Bend. Pritz was manning an anti-tank gun when a Russian grenade exploded against the shield. A fragment knocked out two of his teeth. As he fled towards the river, grenade splinters wounded him in the back. His colonel, a ferocious fighter, stood raging among the carnage: “Why are you running, you miserable cowards? Where are your rifles?” The Russians clubbed the colonel to death when they overran his position.
Pritz and hundreds of others swam the Dnieper amid Russian fire, the water red with blood. On the western bank, he walked for three hours under Russian shelling among hundreds of men in similar condition, before reaching a field hospital. His wounds were not serious, and he was soon returned to duty. On 1 November, however, a Russian sniper inflicted a scalp wound which kept him in hospital until January. Then he was sent to southern Poland, for several terrible months of hand-to-hand fighting and headlong retreats, serving among men of whom he knew nothing and whose morale was at rock-bottom. On 19 August 1944, in the midst of an enemy attack Pritz raised his hand above the lip of a foxhole to seize his rifle at exactly the moment a Soviet grenade exploded near by, tearing open his arm.
A comrade used his neck scarf to make a tourniquet. Bleeding heavily, Pritz crawled away through an immense field of sunflowers, enemy machine-gun fire slashing through the blooms above his head. He hitched a ride on an ammunition truck to the battalion mess area, where some men were sitting eating goulash. He sat down shakily, and himself began to eat. Then came a storm of mortar and small-arms fire, and the Russians were upon them again. The dazed Pritz was helped on to a cart with the cooks. He preserved only shadowy memories of the hours that followed, as a great column of refugees and retreating soldiers trudged east under constant fire. At one point, German Nebelwerfers systematically blew a path through the refugees for the troops. The wounded soldier finally lost consciousness, and awoke in hospital.
When Pritz was discharged, his prayers to escape the east were answered. In October 1944, he was drafted to a heavy mortar unit confronting the Americans in the Saarland. After Russia, he found the posting “a vacation.” His experience is not unrepresentative of that of the German soldier of the period, save that he survived. He possessed no pretensions to heroism. He simply continued to obey orders, as he had learned to do since his childhood in the Hitler Youth. In the autumn of 1944, the frontiers of Germany were being defended by a few hundred thousand genuine Nazi zealots, and millions of men like Wilhelm Pritz. A veteran of twenty-two who had known horrors no man should have to see, he now yearned only for survival.
For all its ferocious discipline and draconian punishments, however, the German Army was increasingly troubled by the problem of desertion. An order of 20 November issued by 708th Division in Alsace warned that any unit which posted “missing” figures in excess of 25 per cent after a battle would be subjected to special investigation. Many Alsatians serving in the Wehrmacht seized the opportunity granted by proximity to their homes to slip away. There was a row when it was discovered that a company commander in 352nd Volksgrenadier Division had written to the families of six of his men who were missing, believed to be Allied prisoners, saying: “The Americans opposite us have been fighting fairly, they have treated German prisoners well and fed them. If your husband is a PoW, you will probably receive news of him through the Red Cross.” The division’s National Socialist political officer exploded in fury at the suggestion that captivity might prove a tolerable fate for a German soldier. “The contents of this letter will have a demoralising effect,” wrote the NSPO, “because people at home may influence soldiers in this direction. Unit commanders are held responsible for ensuring that biased information of this kind is suppressed.” An American intelligence report recorded on 5 December: “A PW of 353rd Division captured in GROSSHAU had been sentenced to death for cowardice before the enemy and . . . thought this entitled him to gratitude from our side.” In the last months of the war, there was a drastic increase in court-martial sentences on delinquent German soldiers. Beyond 15,000 recorded executions—and many more unrecorded—tens of thousands of men were dispatched to penal battalions, where the possibility of survival was no higher than in their Soviet equivalents. A total of 44,955 men were sent for trial in October 1944 alone, and many of these received long sentences at hard labour. Desertion became a very serious problem for Hitler’s forces in the last months of the war.
Dispirited Wehrmacht soldiers, hastening to the rear amid a Russian attack, shouted angrily at men of the Grossdeutschland Division, waiting patiently for the Soviets in their positions: “You silly sods are just keeping the war going!” Yet even as late as the winter of 1944 Germany possessed some outstanding fighting formations. “We knew we were still pretty good,” said Sergeant Max Wind of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers with pride. “The important thing in war is not the equipment, but the man behind it. The allies’ biggest mistake was ‘unconditional surrender.’ If there had been a chance of a deal, we would have taken it. Hitler did not play the role people think. He was simply our leader. The issue was Germany. It was common knowledge what the enemy would do if they won—and what indeed they did. Knowing that, we only wanted to fight.”
Twenty-six-year-old Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division had endured many hardships in the course of the war. His father, a proud First World War veteran and estate owner, had urged him to volunteer for military service, “because that is how a man grows up.” Schaefer-Kuhnert was wounded once in France in 1940, then twice again in Russia, where he also survived typhus. He had known the exhilaration of marching towards apparent victory, “cheering like schoolboys” as his battery lobbed shells at the Kremlin in 1941. He had experienced the bitterness of retreat in the years that followed. Kursk, the vast tank battle of 1943, had been a turning point for Schaefer-Kuhnert, as for many thousands of other German soldiers. Before the battle began, his commanding officer said one night: “Do you think we can still win the war?” Schaefer-Kuhnert, contemplating the vast armoured force Germany had assembled, replied: “If we can’t do it with what we’ve got here, then it’s the beginning of the end.” The panzers did not “do it” at Kursk. Yet the gunner was shocked by the conspiracy of German officers against Hitler in July 1944. He thought the bomb plot was “utterly wrong,” and did not change his mind for many years.
By the autumn of 1944, “We recognized the inevitability of defeat, but we had to consider what we owed to our honour as soldiers. We had to stick together.” He was appalled by the breakdown of discipline he saw during the retreat from France, “men fleeing loaded down with loot, taking girls, driving commandeered civilian vehicles . . . already there was a breakdown.” One battery in his own regiment was now equipped with captured Russian mortars, because it lacked sufficient 105mm guns. Yet he found confronting the U.S. Third Army in Lorraine a very much more acceptable experience than the Eastern Front. “You were fighting against human beings, who shared broadly the same philosophy. Once we agreed a truce with them, to remove dead and wounded from the battlefield. One of our men carried a wounded American from no-man’s-land to their lines, and came back loaded with chocolate and cigarettes the ‘Amis’ had given him. That could never have happened in the east.” Schaefer-Kuhnert “took it for granted that we must go on to the end, whatever that meant.”
Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt expressed sentiments that were widely shared: “I knew that I was against the Nazis—but I did not know what I was for. Like most German soldiers, I thought that it was my duty to fight, and by day we did fight. But at night we prayed for the war to end. I felt no personal sense of shame. Once, when I saw a train loaded with Russian prisoners, I felt a stab of pity. But then I also felt: ‘Such is war.’ I didn’t know the ‘German Resistance’ existed. I read Marcus Aurelius. From him, I learned that it makes no sense to fight what you cannot change.” Sergeant Otto Cranz said: “I get so angry when people ask why we did not join the heroic resistance to Hitler. One could do nothing.”
“I wonder what Hitler’s thinking now,” mused General Weiknecht, a Wehrmacht captive in Soviet hands. General Friedrich von Paulus, the vanquished commander of Stalingrad, said savagely: “He’s trying to find some way of inspiring the nation to new sacrifices. Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy. We Germans have been tricked by this usurper.” Colonel-General Strekker asked: “Why has the Lord been so angry with Germany as to send us Hitler? Is the German nation so base as to deserve such a punishment?”
POSTERITY IS bemused by the banality of Hitler and the coterie of gangsters who formed the leadership of the Third Reich. It is scarcely surprising that during the 1944–45 campaign they sought refuge in military and political fantasies, and committed themselves to a struggle to the end. Most tacitly acknowledged that their own lives were forfeit, and they were therefore indifferent to the fate of others. Through the last months of the war, many Nazi officials, Gestapo agents and SS men showed themselves eager to encompass the deaths of as many enemies of the Third Reich as possible before their own time came. Beria reported to Stalin on 19 September the discovery of a concentration camp near Tallin in Estonia. A squad of sixty SS had been rushed there, on the eve of its liberation by the Red Army, and 1,600 Jews—“mostly doctors, artists and scientists”—together with 260 Russian PoWs, had been murdered in a matter of hours, leaving only eighty survivors. Such actions were commonplace. In the spring of 1945 there was a rush to kill surviving critics of National Socialism within the Nazis’ reach before they could be delivered by the Allies.
It is much harder to comprehend the behaviour of the generals such as Guderian and von Rundstedt, with their intelligence, high military competence and pretensions to honour, than that of the senior Nazis. Most of Germany’s senior commanders had been dismissed for suffering defeats on the battlefield, only to be reinstated when their successors proved incapable of doing better. The generals complained constantly about the humiliations to which they were exposed, professed to despise Hitler, privately acknowledged that the war was lost. Yet, month after month, they attended the Führer’s military conferences, endured his ravings about “wonder weapons,” Wallenstein and Frederick the Great, then returned to their headquarters to continue the direction of his doomed war.
It is interesting to compare the German command structure with that of the Allies. The Russian system worked remarkably well from 1942 onwards, once Stalin showed himself willing to delegate to able commanders. Stalin shared Hitler’s monomania and paranoia, but acquired vastly better strategic judgement. The U.S. Chiefs of Staff directed their forces with great managerial skill, though their effectiveness was weakened by inter-service rivalries. Roosevelt displayed no inclination to play the warlord as Churchill did, nor to impose his authority upon the military decision-makers except on the largest issues. Churchill’s generals often complained about their master’s military fantasies, eccentricities and egotism. In small matters, Britain’s prime minister could behave high-handedly and pettishly. But on great decisions, however loud his protests, he accepted the advice of the military professionals. He possessed an extraordinary instinct for war. The partnership of Brooke and Churchill created the most efficient machine for the direction of the war possessed by any combatant nation, even if its judgements were sometimes flawed and its ability to enforce its wishes increasingly constrained.
By contrast, for all the tactical genius displayed by German soldiers fighting on the battlefield, they could never escape the consequences of serving under the direction of a man who rejected rationality. Hitler believed that his own military skills and judgement were superior to those of any of his professional advisers. He immersed the leadership in a morass of detail, wasting countless hours of his commanders’ time, about armament design and the movements of trifling numbers of men and tanks. He allowed Göring, his old political crony, to remain leader of the Luftwaffe even when it was plain that it was collapsing as a fighting force through huge errors of policy and management. He gave Himmler a battlefield command which caused that master of mass murder to suffer a nervous collapse. His insistence upon sustaining to the end of the war heavily garrisoned German “fortresses” in the Channel Islands, Scandinavia and the Aegean for reasons of prestige deprived Germany of prodigious numbers of men and quantities of precious arms and matériel, which might significantly have influenced the battles of 1945 if they had been withdrawn to Germany while there was still time.
One of Hitler’s greatest follies in the last years of the war was the devotion of enormous scientific and industrial effort to the so-called Vergeltungswaffen—“retaliation weapons.” The V1 was a small pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine, catapulted from launch ramps located at hundreds of sites in Holland after the loss of those in France and Belgium. The first was fired at England on 13 June 1944, and in the weeks that followed 2,451 others followed. About two-thirds crashed prematurely, were toppled by British fighters (which perfected a clever manoeuvre of flying alongside the bomb, then flicking a wingtip under its fins) or were shot down by anti-aircraft fire. Many of the remainder fell on and around greater London, bringing renewed misery to a people exhausted by years of blitz and privation. The most destructive single V1 explosion took place at the Guards Chapel near Buckingham Palace during a service, in which 121 people died. By March 1945, over 10,000 V1 “flying bombs” had been fired, causing 24,000 casualties in England and many more in Belgium.
The V2 was the world’s first ballistic missile, fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, impossible to intercept and destroy because it travelled at supersonic speeds. The first V2 crashed on Chiswick in west London on 8 September 1944, killing three people and injuring seventeen. By 27 March 1945, some 1,050 rockets had fallen on England, killing 2,700 Londoners. A further “wonder weapon,” the V3 long-range gun designed to fire on London, was used only briefly in the winter of 1944 against Antwerp and Luxembourg, to little effect. The V-weapons caused great apprehension and misery among the civilians of England and Belgium, but it should have been evident to the rulers of Germany that dumping small payloads of explosive with indifferent accuracy on the enemy could not conceivably justify the slave labour, materials and commitment of highly skilled personnel and technology necessary to create the delivery systems. The technology was extremely advanced, but it was futile, as even Hitler seemed to grasp in the last months. On the night of 17 December, a V2 crashed into the Rex cinema in Antwerp during a crowded show. When Hitler was informed that 1,100 people including 700 soldiers had been killed or wounded, by a characteristic irony he was reluctant to credit the report. “That would finally be the first successful launch,” he observed sarcastically. “But it is so fairytale that my scepticism keeps me from believing it. Who is the informer? Is he paid by the launch crew?”
Had Hitler forsaken the propaganda rewards of raining V-weapons on England—to negligible military and industrial effect—and concentrated his firepower on the Channel ports, the consequences could have been serious for the Allied armies. Yet there was never the remotest possibility that any of the “wonder weapons” could change the outcome of the war. The Germans had made no significant progress with developing the only device that might have done so—an atomic bomb. The folly of persisting with the V-weapon programme, which drained Germany’s shrinking resources merely to torment the enemy’s population, highlighted the irrationality of Nazi behaviour as defeat beckoned.
Three forces determined Germany’s ability to sustain the war. The first was the organizational genius of Speer. It was ironic that the most cultured member of the Nazi leadership, and the only one to display practical concern for the fate of the German people in the midst of defeat, alone provided the means to enable Hitler to fight on until May 1945. The second factor was the effectiveness of the machinery of internal repression, for which Himmler was responsible. One of the bleakest lessons of modern history is that while half-hearted dictatorships often collapse, those willing to sustain policies of implacable ruthlessness, slaughtering all enemies real or imagined, frequently survive until the natural death or military defeat of their principal. Himmler’s task was made easier by the fact that hundreds of thousands of his agents knew that their crimes irretrievably committed them. Goebbels’s contribution was also vital. His programme of national indoctrination, maintained over a decade, perverted the reasoning processes of one of the best-educated societies on earth. Here was a significant difference between the German and Soviet tyrannies. Whatever the Russian people’s commitment to the war, many were privately cynical about Stalin’s rule. By contrast, a formidable proportion of Hitler’s subjects retained their belief in his policies. The self-delusion of the German people flagged only when the fabric of their society literally collapsed about their heads.
The third force in enabling Hitler to continue the war was the support of the Army. The only people who realized that Germany was doomed, and also possessed the power to do something about it, were its generals. Beyond the Army’s feeble attempt in July 1944, they failed to act upon their knowledge to save the German people from Hitler. This is the basis for their claims upon the contempt of history. On 10 September, two months after the dismissal of Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt as C-in-C West, he was once more summoned to Hitler’s presence and invited to resume his role. He was sixty-eight, and showing signs of age, stress and some over-indulgence in alcohol. He was taking a cure at Bad Tolz when Hitler’s message came. The lean, leathery old veteran tersely accepted recall to duty, observing later that he considered it his duty as a German officer. “Duty” and “honour” were words constantly on the lips of Wehrmacht generals, both then and afterwards. Yet von Rundstedt’s pretensions were crippled by his participation in the so-called Court of Honour which presided over the dismissal of many officers from the German Army for their roles in the July bomb plot, in most cases as a preliminary to their execution. Von Manstein, who was regarded for some years after the war as an honourable man as well as a brilliant commander, has been exposed by modern research as deeply implicated in massacres of Jews and prisoners in the east. He happily accepted large cash hand-outs from Hitler, which in a moment of sublime optimism he used to buy an estate in East Prussia as late as October 1944. If von Manstein, von Kluge, von Rundstedt and others had faithfully followed Hitler’s military instructions in the second half of the war, it would have been over much sooner. As it was, however, again and again they defied the Führer’s demented orders, in the exercise of their best professional judgement.
The deaths of some five million Germans, as well as those of millions more of their enemies and captives, may be blamed as much upon such “men of honour” as von Rundstedt, who continued to support Hitler and to direct his armies, as upon the Nazi leadership. He appeared a caricature of the aloof, unemotional, aristocratic Prussian General Staff officer. In the 1944–45 campaign, von Rundstedt was granted little latitude by Hitler. The field-marshal remarked acidly that he was permitted only to post the guards outside his own headquarters. Yet he continued to show outstanding gifts as a commander, directing the defence of western Germany against overwhelming forces, his Führer’s interventions foremost among them. There was nothing to love in von Rundstedt, but his professional skills commanded the respect of his subordinates and his enemies.
Militarily, Germany’s generals in the winter of 1944 could not escape a fatal conundrum. Even if Hitler’s decisions were demented and his refusal to sanction retreats condemned hundreds of thousands of men to die, what alternative strategy could be deemed rational, except surrender? Phased withdrawals to shorten the front and save troops from encirclement, which senior commanders constantly advocated, were militarily logical but offered no realistic prospect of changing the outcome of the war. The Allies profited at least as much as the Wehrmacht by every German withdrawal from a salient or abandonment of a beleaguered “fortress.” Guderian, von Rundstedt, Model and their disgraced comrades such as von Manstein knew that any course of action could only delay the inevitable. It is hardly surprising that a substantial number of senior officers in the final months suffered nervous collapses or shot themselves. The strain of presiding over carnage which could not save Germany, but which merely deferred the day of reckoning for the Nazi leadership, proved unbearable for many officers, save the most brutally insensitive such as Schörner. Most of the military leaders who continued to serve Hitler to the end justified themselves by pleading that they were pursuing the salvation of the German people from Soviet vengeance. Yet such claims can hardly explain the ingenuity and determination with which they also defended the Western Front.
The German Army, with its perverted vision of honour, failed the German people, and the world, by maintaining its loyalty to Hitler. For the rest of their lives, senior soldiers cited their oath of loyalty to Hitler to justify their continued participation in the war. Even after 1945, many German veterans refused to see that a pledge of allegiance to a man who had created an illegal tyranny could possess no conceivable legitimacy. More pragmatically, the Army’s leaders seized upon the Soviet threat to justify fighting on, when any rational analysis demonstrated that the war must be ended at any price. Continued resistance to the Russians made sense only if this was coupled with swift admittance of the Western allies to Germany. The American historian Omer Bartov, in his merciless analysis of the wartime Wehrmacht, argues that its behaviour was dictated by a far closer attachment to Nazi ideology than most of its officers acknowledged, then or later. “Even officers with little reason to be enamoured with Hitler and his regime often shared many of Hitler’s prejudices,” he writes. Bartov argues that many German commanders shared Hitler’s fantasies of conquest and grandeur, racial genocide and Germanic world rule, along with his obsessive loathing of communists and Jews. He overstates his case, but there is something in it.
Hitler’s generals, whether SS officers or old Prussian aristocrats, allowed themselves to lapse into fulfilling their duties in a moral vacuum. They abandoned coherent thought about the future and merely performed the immediate military functions that were so familiar to them. The old cliché about the robotic mentality of the German soldier is ill founded. On the battlefield, the Wehrmacht displayed much greater tactical imagination and energy than its opponents. But Germany’s generals in the last months of the war indeed behaved as automatons, amid the whims and obsessions of their monstrous master. Most turned against Hitler not because they acknowledged that he was evil, but because they realized that he was losing the war.
Many of Germany’s wartime soldiers became brutalized. It is untrue that mass killings were carried out only by members of the SS. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was often involved in the slaughter of civilians and prisoners. Its men had been subjected throughout their childhood and youth to conditioning of an extraordinary intensity, especially about the sub-human status of Jews and Slavs. The Potsdam Military History Institute’s monumental history of the 1939–45 experience demonstrates conclusively the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Barbarossa plan, which required the starvation of millions of Ukrainians not as an accident of war but as a specific military objective, to enable the diversion of Ukrainian wheat to feed Germany.
Germany’s soldiers perceived themselves as a vastly more civilized people than their Soviet enemies. In everyday matters such as table manners, so they were. Some Western allied officers, especially after the war, allowed themselves to be deluded by German social courtesy, and sometimes by prisoners’ impressive command of the English language, into respecting German combatants not only as skilful adversaries, but as men not unlike themselves. British fighter pilots, for instance, hastened to embrace Luftwaffe counterparts such as Galland and Knoke as fellow “knights of the air.” Such sentimentality ignored the fact that these men were dedicated Nazis, who had eagerly supported Hitler’s crimes. Likewise, many officers and men of the Wehrmacht were complicit in actions and policies, especially towards partisans, which placed them beyond the pale of civilization, and betrayed the very values they professed to be upholding against the Soviets.
Most of the courageous Germans who had dared to oppose Hitler were now dead or in cells awaiting execution, where their grace and dignity did more to redeem the German people in the eyes of posterity than anything achieved by the Wehrmacht on the battlefield. “A remarkable year is drawing to a close for me,” Helmuth von Moltke wrote in December to his wife Freya from Tegel, where he lay imprisoned for his role in the Resistance to Hitler.
I spent it predominantly among people who were being prepared for a violent death, and many of them have suffered it meanwhile . . . With all these people I lived in the same house, took part in their fate, listened when they were taken away for interrogations, or when they were removed altogether, talked with almost all of them about their affairs, and saw how they coped with it all . . . here at Tegel, already about ten of my group have been executed. . . . These violent killings eventually became such an everyday matter that I accepted the disappearance of individuals sadly but as a natural event. And now I tell myself, it is my turn.
A total of 5,764 people were executed in 1944 for their alleged roles in the German Resistance, and a further 5,684 in 1945. Of these, barely 100 were directly implicated in the July plot. Von Moltke concluded his last letter before the Nazis hanged him: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.”