Wednesday, 18 April 1945: American troops are at the gates of the town of Ansbach, administrative capital of Central Franconia. The Nazi District Leader has fled during the night, most German soldiers have been moved to the south, the citizens have been camped out in air-raid shelters for days. Any rational thinking signals surrender. But the military commandant of the town, Dr Ernst Meyer – a fifty-year-old colonel of the Luftwaffe, with a doctorate in physics – is a fanatical Nazi, insistent on fighting to the end. A nineteen-year-old theology student, unfit for military service, Robert Limpert, decides to act, to prevent his town being destroyed in a senseless last-ditch battle.
Limpert had witnessed the complete devastation through Allied bombs of the beautiful city of Würzburg the previous month. This had prompted him to the dangerous venture of distributing leaflets earlier in April pleading for the surrender of Ansbach, its picturesque baroque and rococo buildings still intact, without a fight. He now takes an even bigger risk. Around 11.00 a.m. on that lovely spring morning he cuts the telephone wires which he thinks connect the commandant’s base with the Wehrmacht unit outside the town – a futile attempt at sabotage, in fact, since unbeknown to him the base had just moved. He is spotted doing so by two boys, members of the Hitler Youth. They report what they have seen, and the matter is urgently taken up by the local constabulary. A policeman is sent to Limpert’s home, who finds the young man in possession of a pistol and incriminating evidence, and arrests him.
The local police report the arrest to the head of the remaining civil administration in Ansbach, who telephones the military commandant, currently out of town. Predictably enraged by what he hears, the commandant hastens to the police station and peremptorily establishes a three-man tribunal consisting of the head of the constabulary, his deputy and the commandant’s own assistant. After a farcical ‘trial’ lasting a mere couple of minutes, in which the accused is not allowed to speak, the commandant pronounces him sentenced to death, the sentence to be carried out immediately.
As a noose is placed round his neck at the town hall gate, Limpert manages to struggle free and make a run for it, but within a hundred metres is caught by police, kicked and pulled by the hair before being hauled back screaming. No one in the assembled crowd stirs to help him. Some in fact also punch and kick him. Even now his misery is not over. The noose is again put round his neck and he is hanged. But the rope breaks, and he falls to the ground. The noose is once more put round his neck, and he is finally hoisted to his death in the town hall square. The commandant orders the body to be left hanging ‘until it stinks’. Shortly afterwards he apparently requisitions a bicycle and immediately flees the town. Four hours later, the Americans enter Ansbach without a shot being fired and cut down the body of Robert Limpert.1
As this grim episode shows, in its terroristic repression the Nazi regime functioned to the last. But it was not only a matter of the rabid Nazi military commandant, Colonel of the Luftwaffe Dr Meyer, ruthlessly dispatching a perceived traitor and saboteur, an agent of the regime imposing his will through superior force. Even faced with such fanaticism, the policemen, aware that the Americans were on the verge of entering the town, might have acted to save themselves future trouble with the occupying force by dragging out the arrest and interrogation of Limpert. Instead, they chose to follow regulations and carry out their duty as they saw it as expeditiously as possible, continuing to function as minor custodians of a law that, as they later claimed to have seen at the time, was now no more than the expression of the commandant’s arbitrary will.
The same could be said for the head of the local civilian administration. He, too, could have used his experience and awareness of the imminent end of the fighting to procrastinate. Instead, he chose to do what he could to hasten proceedings and cooperate with the commandant. The townsfolk who had found their way into the town hall square and saw Limpert escape could have rallied to his aid at such a juncture. Instead, some of them even helped the police to drag the struggling young man back to his execution place. At every level, then, in these extreme circumstances and in these final moments of the war, as far as Ansbach was concerned, those wielding power continued to work in the interests of the regime – and in doing so were not devoid of public support.
Incidents as harrowing as this case, where local inhabitants attempted to prevent futile destruction at the very end and encountered savage reprisals, while others were still prepared to back the repression of the regime’s functionaries, were no rarity in these final stages of the most terrible war in history. Dozens of other cases could be chosen as illustration of the continued functioning of the regime’s terror – now, in the last months of the conflict, levelled at its own citizens as well as at foreign workers, prisoners, Jews and others long regarded as its enemies.2
It was not just in the ever wilder displays of terror by fanatics and desperadoes that the regime kept going to the last. Most important of all was the behaviour of the military. If the Wehrmacht had ceased to function, then the regime would have collapsed. The signs of dissolution and disintegration in the Wehrmacht were manifold in the later states of the war, most obviously so in the west. Soldiers deserted, despite the threat of brutal punishment. By early 1945, certainly in the west, most felt that to continue the struggle was senseless, and yearned only to be back with their families. Yet the Wehrmacht continued the fight. Generals and field commanders still issued their orders, even in the most hopeless of circumstances. And the orders were obeyed.
Beneath the hail of bombs, in the mayhem of destruction of towns and cities as the Reich collapsed to immensely superior force in east and west, a semblance of ‘normality’ in the mounting chaos was sustained as bureaucracy strained every sinew to continue functioning. Of course, the Reich was shrinking by the day, channels of communication were collapsing, the transport network was as good as at an end, basic utilities like gas, electricity and water were no longer available to millions of homes, and bureaucratic administration faced any number of huge practical problems. But where Germany had not yet fallen under occupied rule, there was no descent into anarchy. Civil administration continued, however ineffectively in the face of extreme adversity and immense dislocation. Military as well as civilian courts continued to hand out ever more severe sentences. Wages and salaries were still being paid in April 1945.3 Grants awarded by a leading academic body in Berlin were made down to the last weeks of the war to foreign students, even now regarded as an investment for continued German influence in the ‘new Europe’.4
Despite mounting handicaps, distribution of the ever more restricted food rations was maintained with difficulty and, increasingly by improvised means, post continued after a fashion to struggle through. Limited forms of entertainment still somehow functioned as a conscious device to sustain morale and distract attention for a short while from the unfolding disaster. A last concert by the Berlin Philharmonic took place on 12 April, four days before the Soviet assault on the Reich capital was launched. The finale from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was, of course, on the programme.5 Some cinemas remained open. Only a week before Stuttgart capitulated on 22 April its citizens could find momentary distraction from their trauma through a visit to the cinema to see The Woman of my Dreams.6 Even football matches were still played. The last game of the war took place as late as 23 April 1945, when FC Bayern Munich, ‘Gaumeister’ of 1945, beat their local rivals TSV 1860 Munich 3–2.7 Truncated newspapers still appeared. The main Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was published in the unoccupied part of southern Germany to the very end. Its last edition, on 28 April 1945, two days before Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker, carried the headline: ‘Fortress Bavaria’.
The reasons for Germany’s collapse are evident, and well known. Why and how Hitler’s Reich kept on functioning till the bitter end is less obvious. That is what this book seeks to explain.
The fact that the regime did hold out to the end – and that the war ended only when Germany was militarily battered into submission, its economy destroyed, its cities in ruins, the country occupied by foreign powers – is historically an extreme rarity. Wars between states in the modern era have usually ended in some kind of negotiated settlement. The ruling elites of a state facing military defeat have generally sued for peace at some point, and eventually, under some duress, reached a territorial agreement, however disadvantageous. The end of the First World War fitted this pattern. The end of the Second was completely different. The rulers of Germany in 1945, knowing the war was lost and complete destruction beckoned, were nevertheless prepared to fight on until their country was practically obliterated.
Authoritarian regimes facing defeat in unpopular wars and seen to be heading for disaster do not usually survive to preside over outright catastrophe. Some in the past have been overthrown by revolution from below, as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918 (in the latter case after the military elite had already taken steps to end a lost war). Others – a more usual development – are toppled by a coup from within, by elites unwilling to be taken down with the failing regime and wanting to salvage something. The deposition of Mussolini by his own Fascist Grand Council in 1943 is a prime example. In Germany, by contrast, the regime, though universally recognized, not just by ordinary people but by those in positions of power, civilian and military, to be heading for the buffers, fought on until it was completely destroyed and, unlike 1918, under foreign occupation.8 Approximate parallels come to mind only in the cases of Japan in 1945 (which, however, surrendered while the country was still unoccupied) and more recently – and in this case very faintly (given the very short-lived and militarily one-sided war) – in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The contrast between 1918 and 1945 in Germany again raises the question: how and why was Hitler’s Germany able to fight on to the bitter end? Was no other conclusion to the terrible conflict possible? And if not, why not? ‘The real puzzle’, it has been aptly remarked, ‘is why people who wanted to survive fought and killed so desperately and so ferociously almost to the last moments of the war.’9
Of course, in the First World War there had been no Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’. The formula produced by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and agreed by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was the first time that a sovereign state had been formally offered no terms short of total and unconditional capitulation.10 This was often seized upon in the early post-war years, particularly by German generals, as the sole and adequate explanation for Germany’s prolonged fight, since, it was claimed, the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ ruled out any alternative.11 Some former soldiers long after the war ended still insisted that it had helped to motivate them to keep on fighting.12 It is certainly possible to argue that the demand was counter-productive, and that it simply played into the hands of Nazi propaganda. As such, it contributed, at least initially, to strengthening the will to hold out, but it is doubtful whether attributing blame to the Allies for a mistaken policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ amounts to any more than what one scholar has called a ‘flimsy excuse’.13 According to General Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of Operations in the OKW, ‘hardly any notice was taken of it’ in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and ‘there was no examination by the OKW Operations Staff of its military consequences’.14 In other words, it made no difference to the strategy – or lack of one – adopted by the German military leadership in the last phase of the war. Answers to the question of why Germany fought on have consequently to be sought less in the Allied demand, whatever its merits or failings, than in the structures of the German regime in its dying phase and the mentalities that shaped its actions.
Why, unlike in 1918, did the German people not rise up against a regime so obviously taking them to perdition? In the early post-war era, for the German people just starting to pick up their lives again after the trauma of such death and destruction, and not anxious to dwell upon any deeper causes of the catastrophe that had beset their country, it seemed unnecessary to look much further for explanation than the terroristic nature of the Nazi regime. It was easy, and in some ways reassuring, for Germans to see themselves as the hapless victims of ruthless oppression by their brutal rulers, stifled in any scope for action by a totalitarian police state. The feelings were understandable and, as subsequent chapters will show, certainly not without justification. Of course, there was an undeniably apologetic strain to the way such an explanation could be, and was, used in post-war Germany to exculpate almost the whole society from the crimes placed at the door of Hitler, the all-powerful Dictator, and a clique of criminally ruthless Nazi leaders. But scholarly interpretation, too, in the post-war era placed the overwhelming emphasis upon terror and repression in the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem that dominated so much historical and political science literature at that time (though without direct focus on the last phase of the war).15 A society coerced into acquiescence, unable to act because of the comprehensive coercion of the highly repressive ‘totalitarian state’, provided, it seemed, sufficient explanation.
Terror is unquestionably critical to the question of how and why the regime continued to function to the end. As we shall see, the level of terroristic repression, which now boomeranged back from the treatment of conquered peoples to be directed at the German people themselves as well as perceived ‘racial enemies’, does indeed go a long way towards explaining why there was no revolution from below, why an organized mass uprising was not possible. Given the level of repression, together with the immense dislocation in the last months, a revolution from below, as at the end of the First World War, was an impossibility. But terror cannot completely explain the regime’s capacity to fight on. It was not terror that drove on the regime’s elites. Terror does not explain the behaviour of the regime’s ‘paladins’ – both those who shared Hitler’s Götterdämmerung mentality and were ready to see Germany go down in flames, and the far greater number of those seeking to save their own skins. It does not explain the continued functioning of a government bureaucracy, both at central and local levels. Not least, it does not explain the Wehrmacht’s readiness – at any rate the readiness of the Wehrmacht leadership – to continue the fight. Nor, finally, does terror explain the behaviour of those in the regime at different levels prepared to use terror to the very last, even when it served no further rational purpose.
Although after the end of the Cold War the ‘totalitarianism’ theorem underwent something of a renaissance,16 its emphasis upon terror and repression in controlling the ‘total society’ has never regained the ground it held in the early post-war era as an interpretation of the behaviour of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich. On the contrary: recent research has increasingly tended to place the emphasis upon the enthusiastic support of the German people for the Nazi regime, and their willing collaboration and complicity in policies that led to war and genocide.17 ‘One question remains,’ a German writer remarked. ‘What was it actually that drove us to follow [Hitler] into the abyss like the children in the story of the Pied Piper? The puzzle is not Adolf Hitler. We are the puzzle.’18 Such a comment, leaving aside the suggestion of bamboozlement, presumes an essential unity, down to the end, between leader and led.
Whereas the emphasis used to be placed on society and regime in conflict19 – essentially presuming a tyranny over a mainly reluctant but coerced people – this has shifted to a society in harness with the aims of the regime, largely in tune with and supportive of its racist and expansionist policies, fully behind its war effort. Relentless Nazi propaganda had done its job; it was ‘the war that Hitler won’, according to an interpretation advanced many years ago.20 The Nazis were successful, it is now frequently claimed, in inculcating in people the sense that they were part of an inclusive national-racist ‘people’s community’, integrated by the exclusion of Jews and others deemed inferior and unfit to belong to it, unified by the need to defend the nation against the powerful enemies surrounding it and threatening its very existence.21 ‘Notwithstanding the disillusionment and bitterness of large parts of the German population in the last war years, the “people’s community” remained intact to the bitter end’, one scholar has asserted.22 Moreover, Hitler’s regime had ‘bought off’ the German population, securing loyalty through a standard of living sustained by plundering the occupied territories.23 Though it is usually acknowledged that this ‘people’s community’ was starting to crumble in the face of impending defeat, lasting support for Nazism – bound together through knowledge of terrible German crimes – is still advanced as a significant reason why Hitler’s regime was able to hold out to the end.24 ‘The basic legitimacy of the Third Reich remained intact’, another historian has claimed, ‘because Germans could not envision a desirable alternative to National Socialism’, demonstrating ‘remarkable commitment to National Socialism in the war’. Their subsequent sense of betrayal by Nazism ‘rested on a strong identification with the Third Reich right up to the moment of abandonment’.25 In perhaps the apogee of this approach, it has been suggested that ‘the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945’. ‘Some’, it is acknowledged, hinting at a tiny minority, ‘had had enough’, but the consensus that had underpinned the dictatorship from the outset, the argument runs, held up to the end.26
The chapters which follow will provide a good deal of evidence to cast doubt upon this intepretation. They will question whether either the scale of terror or the extent of support for the regime can provide an adequate explanation for its ability to hold out until Germany was smashed to smithereens. Yet if neither terror nor support fully explains it, what does?
A number of questions immediately arise. Beyond the significance of the Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’, one could ask how far Allied mistakes in strategy and tactics, which certainly occurred, weakened their own efforts to bring the war to an early end and temporarily boosted the confidence of the German defenders. But whatever significance might accrue to such factors, the determining reasons for Germany’s continued fight have surely to be explained internally, from within the Third Reich, rather than externally, through Allied policy. What weight, for instance, should we attach to the feeling of Nazi leaders that they had nothing to lose by fighting on, since they had in any case ‘burnt their boats’? How significant, indeed, was the greatly expanded scope of the Nazi Party’s powers in the final phase, as it sought to revitalize itself by evoking the spirit of the ‘period of struggle’ before 1933? In what ways did a highly qualified and able state bureaucracy contribute, despite increasing and ultimately overwhelming administrative disorder, to the capacity to hold out? How important was the fear of the Red Army in sustaining the fight to the end? Why were German officers, especially the generals in crucial command posts, prepared to fight on even when they recognized the futility of the struggle and the absurdity of the orders they were being given? And what role was played by the leading Nazis beneath Hitler – in particular the crucial quadrumvirate of Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels and Speer – and the provincial viceroys, the Gauleiter, in ensuring that the war effort could be sustained despite mounting, then overwhelming, odds until the regime had destroyed itself in the maelstrom of total military defeat? In particular, how indispensable was the role of Speer in continuing to defy enormous obstacles to provide armaments for the Wehrmacht? Finally, though far from least, there is the part played by Hitler himself and the lasting allegiance to him within the German power elites.
A simple – though self-evidently inadequate – answer to the question of how and why Germany held out to the bitter end is, in fact, that Hitler adamantly and at all times refused to contemplate capitulation, so that there was no alternative to fighting on. Even catacombed in his bunker, the borders of fantasy and reality increasingly blurred, Hitler’s hold on power was not over until his suicide on 30 April 1945. A central tenet of his ‘career’ had been revenge for the national humiliation of 1918; the ‘1918 syndrome’ was deeply embedded in his psyche.27 There would, he frequently and insistently declared, be no repeat of 1918, no new version of the ‘cowardly’ capitulation at the end of the First World War. Destruction with honour intact through fighting to the end, upholding the almost mythical military code of battling till the last bullet, creating a legend of valour for posterity out of the despair of defeat, and above all enshrining in history his own unique, self-perceived heroic legacy, was in his mind infinitely preferable to negotiating a ‘disgraceful’ surrender. Since he personally had no future after defeat, a suicidal approach was not hard to adopt. But it was not just personally self-destructive. It meant also condemning his own people and country to destruction. The German people, in his eyes, had failed him, had not proved worthy of his leadership. They were expendable. Without him, in fact, his monstrous ego told him, everything was expendable. In his crudely dualist way of thinking, it had always been victory or destruction. He unwaveringly followed his own logic.
Hitler’s own central part in Germany’s self-destructive urges as the Reich collapsed is obvious. Above all, his continued power provided a barrier to any possibility, which his paladins were keen to explore, of negotiating a way out of the escalating death and destruction. But this only brings us back to the question: why was he able to do this? Why did his writ continue to run when it was obvious to all around him that he was dragging them down with him and taking his country to perdition? Accepting that Hitler was a self-destructive individual, why did the ruling elites below him – military, Party, government – allow him to block all rational exit routes? Why was no further attempt made, after the failed coup of July 1944, to impede Hitler’s determination to continue the war? Why were subordinate Nazi leaders and military commanders prepared to follow him down to the complete destruction of the Reich? It was not that they wanted to follow him to personal oblivion. As soon as Hitler was dead, they did what they could to avoid the abyss. Almost all Nazi leaders fled, anxious not to follow Hitler’s example of self-immolation. Military commanders were now prepared to offer their partial capitulations in rapid succession, fighting on only to get as many of their men as possible into the western zones and away from the Red Army. Some harboured fantasies of being of future service to the western Allies.
Total capitulation followed in just over a week from the final act of the drama in the bunker. The mopping-up of Nazis on the run, now with nothing left to fight for, swiftly ensued. The occupation began its job of sorting out the mayhem and trying to set up new forms and standards of government. So Hitler was without question crucial to the last. But his lingering power was sustained only because others upheld it, because they were unwilling, or unable, to challenge it.
The issue stretches, therefore, beyond Hitler’s own intractable personality and his unbending adherence to the absurdly polarized dogma of total victory or total downfall. It goes to the very nature of Hitler’s rule, and to the structures and mentalities that upheld it, most of all within the power elite.
The character of Hitler’s dictatorship is most appropriately depicted as a form of ‘charismatic rule’.28 Structurally, it resembled in some ways a modern form of absolutist monarchy. Like an absolute monarch, Hitler was surrounded by fawning courtiers (even if his ‘court’ lacked the splendour of Versailles or Sanssouci); he depended upon satraps and provincial grandees, bound to him through personal loyalty, to implement directives and see that his writ ran; and he relied upon trusted field-marshals (handsomely rewarded with large donations of money and property) to run his wars. The analogy rapidly fades, however, when crucial components of the modern state – an elaborate bureaucracy and mechanisms (here chiefly in the hands of a monopoly Party) to orchestrate popular support and control – are included. For an important part of the edifice, crucially bolstering Hitler’s authority and creating for him untouchable, almost deified status, towering above all the institutions of the Nazi state, was the mass plebiscitary backing that a combination of propaganda and repression helped to produce. However manufactured the image was, there can be no doubt of Hitler’s genuine and immense popularity among the great mass of the German people down to the middle of the war. From the first Russian winter of 1941, nevertheless, everything points to the fact that this popularity was sagging. From the following winter – the winter of the Stalingrad debacle, for which he was directly held responsible – it was in steep decline. In terms of mass appeal, therefore, Hitler’s ‘charisma’ was terminally undermined as the war turned sour and the defeats mounted.
Structurally, however, his ‘charismatic rule’ was far from at an end. Even compared with other authoritarian regimes, Hitler’s was personalized in the extreme, and had been from the outset, back in 1933. No politburo, war council, cabinet (since 1938), military junta, senate or gathering of ministers existed to mediate or check his rule. Nothing approximated, for instance, to the Fascist Grand Council which triggered Mussolini’s deposition in 1943. A vital hallmark of this personalized ‘charismatic rule’ had been, from the start, the erosion and fragmentation of government. By mid-1944, when this book begins – at a point of intense shock and internal restructuring in the immediate aftermath of the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944 – the process of fragmentation had become greatly expanded and magnified. No unified body posed a challenge to Hitler. Put another way, the structures and mentalities of ‘charismatic rule’ continued even when Hitler’s popular appeal was collapsing. They were sustained in the main not by blind faith in Hitler. More important, for arch-Nazis, was the feeling that they had no future without Hitler. This provided a powerful negative bond: their fates were inextricably linked. It was the loyalty of those who had burnt their boats together and now had no way out. For many of those who by this time were lukewarm if not outrightly hostile to Nazism, it was often as good as impossible to separate support for Hitler and his regime from the patriotic determination to avoid defeat and foreign occupation. Hitler represented, after all, the fanatical defence of the Reich. Removing Hitler (as was attempted in July 1944) could be, and was, seen by many, in a rehashing of the 1918 myth, as a ‘stab in the back’. Not least, as everyone was aware, the Dictator still had a ruthless apparatus of enforcement and repression at his disposal. Fear (or at least extreme caution) played an obvious part in the behaviour of most. Even the highest in the land knew they needed to tread warily. Whatever the range of motives, the effect was the same: Hitler’s power was sustained to the very end.
As the end neared, and central government fragmented almost completely, life-and-death decisions passed ever further down the hierarchy to the regional, district and local levels to the point that individuals like the military commandant in Ansbach acquired arbitrary and lethal executive power. But this radicalization at the grass roots, crucial though it was to the mounting irrationality of the final phase, would have been impossible without the encouragement, authorization and ‘legitimation’ provided from above, from the leadership of a regime in its death-throes facing no internal challenge.
Perhaps the most fundamental element in trying to find answers to the question of how and why the regime held out to the point of total destruction revolves, therefore, around the structures and mentalities of ‘charismatic rule’. Linking such an approach to a differentiated assessment of the ways in which ordinary Germans responded to the rapidly gathering Armageddon offers the potential to reach a nuanced assessment of why Nazi rule could continue to function to the end.
The chapters that follow proceed chronologically, beginning with the aftermath of the failed bomb plot of 20 July 1944 – a caesura in the governmental structures of the Third Reich – and extending to the capitulation on 8 May 1945. By combining structural history and the history of mentalities, and dealing with German society from above and below, the narrative approach has the virtue of being able to depict in precise fashion the dramatic stages of the regime’s collapse, but at the same time its astonishing resilience and desperate defiance in sustaining an increasingly obvious lost cause. The focus throughout is exclusively on Germany: what the Allies, often puzzled themselves by the German willingness to carry on fighting under hopeless circumstances, were thinking, planning and doing forms no part of the analysis. Of course, this was scarcely unimportant for the course of the war, and what happened on the battlefield in the various theatres of war was ultimately decisive. But this is no military history, and the relevant stages of the Allied advance on Germany, east and west, are tersely summarized, primarily in order to provide a framework for the subsequent assessment.
Since we know the end of the story, it is hard not to ask why contemporaries did not see as obviously as we do in retrospective: that the war was plainly lost, at the absolute latest by the time the western Allies had consolidated their landings in France and the Red Army had advanced deep into Poland in the summer of 1944. But, until surprisingly late, that was not how they did see it. Certainly, they knew that the great vistas of 1941–2 could not be realized. But the German leadership, not just Hitler, thought there was still something to be gained from the war. Strength of will and radical mobilization, they thought, could prolong the conflict until new ‘miracle weapons’ came along. The war effort would be sustained so far that the Allies would look for a negotiated way out of mounting losses as advances were blocked or reversed. A split between east and west would materialize, and Germany would still be able to hold on to some territorial gains and, eventually with western aid, turn against the common enemy of Soviet Communism. Such hopes and illusions, if harboured by a rapidly dwindling number of Germans (especially once the Red Army reached the Oder in late January 1945), lingered almost to the end. So even in the final, terrible phase of death and devastation, faced with insuperable odds, the fight went on amid a mounting series of regional collapses, driven by increasingly irrational but self-sustaining destructive energy.
Trying to explain how this could be so – how the regime, torn apart on all sides, could continue to operate until the Red Army was at the portals of the Reich Chancellery – is the purpose of this book.