2

Collapse in the West

We want to build a new Europe, we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.

An officer on the western front, September 1944

‘Victory must be ours…. One does one’s duty and it would be cowardice not to fight to the end.’ ‘We don’t give up hope. It is all up to the leaders. Something quite different will happen from what everybody expects.’ ‘If we don’t win, Germany ceases. Therefore we shall win.’

Views of captured German soldiers on the western front, September 1944

I

At the time of the attempted uprising on 20 July, the progress of the American and British armies in Normandy had, from an Allied viewpoint, remained disappointingly slow and arduous. They had still not broken out of a relatively constricted area of north-western France. From the German perspective, it still looked in mid-July as if the Allies could be held at bay. By winning time, new possibilities could open up. All was far from lost.

The landing in early June had by now been fully consolidated. The Americans had pushed westwards that month to take the important port of Cherbourg, but it had taken twenty-three, not the expected fifteen, days and they found the harbour so wrecked that it was six weeks before it could be opened up to Allied cargoes. The city of Caen had been a D-Day objective but its environs were fully secured by the Allies, in the teeth of fierce German resistance, only in mid-July. Then as the British pushed southwards towards Falaise, they became embroiled in further heavy fighting before their advance in the ill-fated ‘Operation Goodwood’ was called off, amid torrential rain and heavy losses of men and tanks, on the very day that Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded in Hitler’s headquarters. Five days later, the big offensive ‘Operation Cobra’, starting with a huge carpet-bombing assault on German lines, aimed at a strong thrust by American troops to punch through numerically inferior German defences, further pulverized from the air, south-westwards to Avranches, near the French coast. By 30 July the offensive had succeeded. Late that night Avranches was in Allied hands.¹ A major breakthrough was now possible. The road westward to the coastal ports of Brittany lay exposed (though it was to be weeks before stiff German resistance was overcome and the ports captured). To the south lay the Loire. Eastwards, towards Paris itself, only weakened German forces now stood in the way of the Allies.

Hitler’s thinking so far had been to play for time. He had reckoned that further dogged German resistance would ensure that the Allies continued to make only slow progress. His priority in the west was to hold the U-boat bases on the French coast, essential for the war in the Atlantic on which so much still hinged, in his view, and fanatical defence of the harbours to deny the Allies the possibility of large-scale troop reinforcements. Containing the Allies in north-western France and gaining time would allow defences to be strengthened and preparations made for a major German offensive, an idea already germinating in Hitler’s mind. Inflicting a defeat on the western Allies and halting their presumed march to victory would then force them into armistice negotiations.²

He was now faced, however, with the implications of the Allied capture of Avranches. It was an ominous development. Characteristically, he chose not to respond by withdrawing German troops to new lines to the east. Instead, he commissioned Field-Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge – whose idea it had originally been – to launch a quick counter-offensive westwards through Mortain, aimed at retaking Avranches, splitting the American forces and re-establishing the German lines. Kluge’s attack took place in the early hours of 7 August, but was effectively over after a single day. German troops did succeed in regaining Mortain and advancing about 11 kilometres. But, subjected to ceaseless bombardment, they could get no further. By insisting on Kluge continuing the attack long after wisdom dictated swift withdrawal, Hitler invited disaster. Since Kluge faced increasing danger of encirclement by American forces, Hitler eventually allowed a retreat from the Mortain area on 11 August, but as late as 15 August refused Kluge’s entreaty to withdraw 100,000 troops in great peril near Falaise.

Hitler’s suspicions of his field-marshal boiled over when he could not reach him by radio that day, and he peremptorily dismissed him from his command, replacing him by the trusted troubleshooter, the tough and unyielding Field-Marshal Model. Soon afterwards, correctly fearful that he would be put on trial before the dreaded People’s Court for his connection with the conspiracy against Hitler (even though he had been careful not to join the plot), Kluge committed suicide. Model eventually extricated around 50,000 men from the rapidly tightening ‘Falaise pocket’. But roughly the same number were captured and another 10,000 men killed, while huge quantities of armaments and equipment had to be abandoned. During August, the German army in western Europe had in all lost over 200,000 men killed, injured or captured.³

It had been a disaster. A full-scale German retreat turned into little short of a rout. It could even have been worse had the Allies pressed home their advantage, closed the pocket enveloping the German troops, and prevented so many hardened warriors and seasoned officers from escaping to fight again another day. Even so, the Allies could now race northwards and eastwards. German morale seemed on the verge of collapse.⁴ When Paris fell on 25 August, it was without a fight. Withdrawal was also under way from parts of Belgium and Luxemburg. By the end of August, some 2 million Allied soldiers were already in France, others rapidly adding to that number. To the north, the Allies could drive on to the Channel ports. The Allied push into Belgium brought the liberation of Brussels on 3 September and, next day, the capture of Antwerp. Meanwhile, American and French troops had landed on the coast of southern France on 15 August. By late that month they had taken Marseilles and advanced on Lyons. It was little wonder, then, that Allied optimism peaked around this time. The Germans, it seemed, could not last through the winter. The war was approaching its final stages. It would all soon be over.

Unexpectedly, however, the Allied advance stalled. The aim evinced at the beginning of September by the Allies’ supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, of pressing forward to the Reich borders on a broad front before German defences could be consolidated soon proved an impossibility.

The Allies fared worst in the northern sector. Serious tactical errors brought the advance there to a halt. The arrogant British commander, Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, impatient to exploit the German disarray and press boldly ahead into the Ruhr and on to Berlin, made costly mistakes that vitiated his aims – headstrong and immensely risky as these would have been anyway. The conflict of strategy and personality between Montgomery and Eisenhower was unquestionably damaging to the Allies at this vital time. Montgomery’s failure to exploit the important capture of the undestroyed Antwerp port by pressing forward to secure the Scheldt estuary left the crucial port unusable until the end of November and allowed large numbers of German troops who could have been cut off in the area to escape. This was compounded by the disaster at Arnhem, where Montgomery’s insistence on a daring airborne assault to cross the Rhine resulted in high British losses. The risky offensive ‘Market Garden’ began on 17 September but was in effect already over three days later. From then on, hopes of a rapid advance across the Rhine and into Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr, had to be abandoned.

On the southern sector of the front, the US Third Army under General George Patton had sped eastwards during the second half of August, crossed the Meuse and reached the Mosel. Patton was optimistic that he could drive on into Germany, and that the war could be rapidly won. The first step was to press over the Mosel into Lorraine. The important industrial belt of the Saar beckoned thereafter. But in early September Patton’s advance slowed almost to a halt. His supply line to Cherbourg was almost 650 kilometres long. His tanks were simply running out of fuel. And Eisenhower had given priority for the time being to Montgomery’s intended drive into the Ruhr. A furious Patton was held back. As his rapid advance became almost immobilized, German defences facing his attacking forces were urgently strengthened and placed under the command of the redoubtable General Hermann Balck, battle-hardened from the eastern front and high in Hitler’s favour. The momentum had been lost. It would be a further two months and much hard fighting before fierce German resistance at Metz, the fortress heartland of Lorraine, would be overcome.⁵

The best prospects lay in the central sector of the front. The US First Army, under General Courtney Hodges, advancing north-eastwards from the Paris area in late August, had destroyed several German panzer divisions, taking 25,000 prisoners, before reaching Mons, in Belgium. Part of the army, the V US Corps, then turned south-east to advance through Luxemburg and almost to the German border near Trier by 11 September, while the VII US Corps drove directly eastwards towards Aachen. Around 6 p.m. on 11 September, the first American troops set foot on German soil, just south of Aachen, a city by now largely free of defending troops and with a panic-stricken population. But the Americans pressed their advance over too wide an area. German forces regrouped and, through tenacious fighting, blocked the larger and stronger American forces. Within five days, reinforced German units had succeeded in repulsing the American attack. German authorities were able – for the time being – to restore their control over Aachen and prevent any American breakthrough in the direction of Cologne. Another chance had been missed. It would take a further five weeks of bitter fighting before Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands, on 21 October. And it would be nearly six months before Cologne, only 90 kilometres or so away, was taken.

Meanwhile, Rundstedt had been recalled as Commander-in-Chief West (in overall command of the army in that theatre) on 5 September, leaving Model, a brilliant defence strategist, to take charge of Army Group B (one of two Army Groups on the western front; the other, Army Group G, was commanded by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz). Under Model’s command, the German defences, helped by shortened supply lines and hardened reinforcements, both salvaged from Normandy and brought across from the eastern front, had been strengthened. By mid-September the Allies stood close to the German border over a long stretch of the front from Belgium almost to Switzerland. But it was now clear that expectations which the Allies had held for months, drawing on the experiences of the First World War, of the sort of German collapse that had happened in 1918 were misplaced.⁶ The war was set to drag on.⁷

The Allies had shown hesitation and made costly errors at crucial junctures. But the Germans had made their own major contribution to prolonging the war. For Germany, despite fierce and courageous fighting by the outnumbered forces of the Wehrmacht, the collapse in France had come as a dreadful shock. Within a little over three months, the Allies had liberated France and reached Germany’s borders. Soon, it was evident, the war would be fought on German soil. Under Model’s able command, however, they had survived the critical, but not fatal, defeat near Falaise. Since then, they had surprised the Allies with the tenacity, even fanaticism, of their fighting. Though outnumbered, they had shown energy and initiative. And they had some technically superior weaponry and tanks – if in insufficient quantities. The main weakness was not on the ground, but in the air, where the Luftwaffe was increasingly paralysed and Allied superiority immense.⁸ Even so, German defence was stubborn, and not easy to break down. Unlike the Russian army in 1917, the German army the following year, the Italian army in 1943, or other instances where heavy defeats had produced a collapse in morale with devastating political consequences, the German armed forces in late summer and autumn of 1944 were far removed from the point at which they were unwilling to fight on any further. What lay behind the extraordinary tenacity of the fighting front in the west?

II

Had the Allies seen reports that were reaching the German leadership at this time on the demoralization among the German civilian population on the western borders of the Reich and within the Wehrmacht produced by the disastrous military collapse in the west, they might have been encouraged in their ‘collapse theory’ based upon the events of 1918.⁹ Such reports certainly did not give the impression that Germany was capable of fighting on for a further eight months.

A sense of relief in Germany that the eastern front appeared to be stabilized was said to have been dissipated in mid-August through the depressing news of the Allied breakthrough in the west, for which the population had been completely unprepared.¹⁰ Optimists suggesting that the war could yet be won with a supreme effort had a hard time in the gathering gloom of opinion about the huge superiority of enemy forces, scepticism about the promised new ‘wonder weapons’, and feelings that the total-war effort, though generally welcome, had come too late and would, in any case, not be evenly spread in its burdens. Letters from loved ones at the front, and even official news bulletins from France, were cited as indicators that Germany could not compete with the Allied supremacy in men and weaponry. ‘I don’t believe we’ll be able to stop the storm of the enemy,’ one quoted letter home ran. ‘Their superiority is far too great, in the air and above all with tanks, tanks and still more tanks.’ ‘Where are the great reserves that have always been talked about?’ people were asking. In the depressed mood, the desire for an early end to the war was all the stronger, and with it the view that the consequences of defeat would be less dreadful than claimed. Scepticism and defeatism were becoming inseparable.¹¹

By early September reports from propaganda offices across the country were indicating that the mood of the people had reached its lowest point during the entire war. Since the general tenor of such reports – more so than those of the SD – was to emphasize the pro-Nazi sentiments of the population, the clear indication of depression and hopelessness conveyed at this time is all the more striking. A sense of insecurity was widespread. Those with ‘negative’ attitudes were gaining in numbers and undermining morale through defeatist comments and ‘concealed criticism of the leadership’. Many were asking why the Allied landing had not been halted, why total war had not been proclaimed earlier, and why the ‘poison’ that had produced the uprising of 20 July had not been spotted earlier and destroyed. The criticism was aimed at the Führer himself, even if people were too wary to mention him directly.

Those holding such views could see no way to improve the situation and repel the enemy. The wounded soldiers and refugees streaming in from the west only bolstered their pessimism. Ordinary soldiers and the ‘homeland’ were not to blame, they were saying, if it all went wrong and Germany were to lose the war. It was not a matter of fate. The ability of the generals was called into question; and the leadership had not done everything necessary. Above all, the sense of powerlessness in the face of immense enemy superiority in numbers and equipment was dispiriting. Women with children were especially prone to anxiety about the future, it was said. Thoughts of suicide were increasingly common. Hopes in the new weapons were fading, particularly since it was felt that everything had been done too late to make a difference. People were saying that if Lorraine and the Saarland could not be held, the loss of centres of vital armaments production would force Germany to surrender. Few thought that the Westwall – the huge line of German fortifications that had been built in 1938, known to the western Allies as the ‘Siegfried Line’ – would hold up the enemy advance any more than the French ‘Maginot Line’ had stopped the Wehrmacht’s march into France in 1940. With the enemy at the borders of the Reich, the desertion of Germany’s allies – Romania had sued for peace and joined the war against Germany on 25 August, Finland was on the verge of breaking off relations with Germany, other countries were about to follow suit – and exposure with no defence to intensified ‘terror from the skies’, it was difficult to avoid pessimism.¹²

Refugees from Rombach in Lorraine contributed to a worsening of the mood in factories in the border area with rumours that they had been shot at during their evacuation by train, that enemy parachutists had dropped near Metz, and that the German retreat had been a rout, with officers leaving their soldiers in the lurch as they fled eastwards in whatever vehicles they could find. On top of that, they were saying, the V1 was no longer being fired. Predictably, the report was dismissed in Berlin as mere exaggeration. That did not diminish, however, the damage that was being done by such rumours.¹³ A similar story was provided to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler by his friend from schooldays and now head of the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, Professor Karl Gebhardt, during a visit to the western front in early September. The population of Trier, he reported, had been disturbed by the numerous rumours in circulation and by the ‘unpleasant sight’ of Wehrmacht vehicles streaming in from Aachen. The ordered evacuation of Eupen-Malmédy – a former enclave of Belgium, annexed by Germany in 1940 – had turned into a panic flight of the German population, in the company of Party functionaries who evidently had no intention of returning.¹⁴

The Party’s evacuation of Aachen (the first major German city in Allied sight) and adjacent areas close to the Westwall on the approach of the Americans had been nothing less than a shambles. Evacuation plans had been laid, and on 11 September Hitler’s approval had been given. The evacuation began around midday on 12 September. It had scarcely begun, however, when, as it seemed amid the start of heavy artillery attacks and repeated air raids that the fall of the city was imminent, panic had broken out among the population. It was impossible, amid gathering chaos, to carry out an ordered evacuation. By mid-evening, some 10,000 frightened civilians were crowded onto Aachen’s stations, desperate to get away but with transport made extremely difficult by the bombs raining down on adjacent tracks. Thousands took matters into their own hands, rushing eastwards from the city on foot in long columns, jamming nearby roads. The Nazi authorities themselves estimated shortly afterwards that some 25,000 had managed to leave between 11 and 13 September, to add to the 20,000 who had left the previous week.

Soon afterwards on the late evening of 12 September, Party officials, Gestapo, police and fire-service joined the panic and fled, leaving the people of the city leaderless. Precisely at this juncture, the divisional staff of the 116th Panzer Division arrived, under the command of General Gerd Graf von Schwerin. In the absence of Party leaders, Schwerin took responsibility on 13 September for restoring order, not least to allow for troop movements. ‘Wild’ evacuation was halted. Citizens were directed into bunkers. Reckoning that the Americans were about to arrive, Schwerin left a note, written in English, informing the commanding officer of the US forces that he had stopped ‘the stupid evacuation’ of the population. At the time there were still between 20,000 and 30,000 people in the city, most of whom were in fact evacuated in the following days.

When German forces, unexpectedly, proved able for the time being to repel the American attack and prevent the occupation, the Nazi authorities seized upon Schwerin’s note, which had come into their hands, to cover their own lamentable failings. The matter was taken as far as Hitler himself. Schwerin was promptly dismissed, and Hitler ordered the utmost radicalism in the defence of the city. An investigation found, however, that Schwerin had acted properly within his responsibilities, and that the failure had plainly lain with the Party authorities. Schwerin was converted in fickle post-war memory into ‘the saviour of Aachen’. In fact, there had been no defiance of orders or humanitarian action on Schwerin’s part. He had undertaken no act of resistance. In crisis conditions he was simply carrying out to the best of his ability what he saw as his duty in line with the military demands of the regime.¹⁵

Goebbels noted ‘extraordinary difficulties’ in the evacuation of the territories close to the Westwall and the population of the border districts being ‘thrown here and there’, but saw this as unavoidable at such a time of crisis.¹⁶ A few days later, acknowledging that the situation in Aachen had become ‘critical’, he advocated the principle of ‘scorched earth’ in the question of evacuation. With the future of the nation at stake, little consideration could be given to the people of the area.¹⁷ Goebbels was put fully in the picture – if in a scarcely unbiased account – about the ‘desolate situation’ and the evacuation of Aachen by the Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen, Josef Grohé (whose authority had been badly damaged by the flight of his subordinates). Party and Wehrmacht had stood at loggerheads. The Party had left the city. A general chaos had ensued. ‘Unprecedented scenes’ had taken place on the roads eastwards from Aachen. The situation there and in Trier – whose centre (including the great hall of Emperor Constantine dating from the early fourth century) had been badly damaged by bombs in mid-August, and which in the night of 13/14 September was under sustained artillery attack – had to be regarded as ‘extremely serious’.¹⁸

Speer, returning from a visit to the region, where he had been driven through the masses streaming away, echoed the accounts of the ‘debacle’.¹⁹ The troops he had seen were exhausted. The newly established Volksgrenadier divisions contained many older recruits who could not cope with the physical demands. There was a big drop in the effective strength of the fighting forces and a growing crisis of confidence. Party functionaries labelled officers in general ‘criminals of 20 July’ and blamed them for the military setbacks in both east and west; soldiers themselves dubbed officers ‘saboteurs of the war’ and accused them of lack of fighting spirit. The troops had been badly affected by the mishandling of the evacuation of Aachen. The trains had been stopped without any notice and women, children and old people had been forced to leave on foot. Columns of refugees were to be seen everywhere, sleeping in the open air and blocking roads. There was a chronic shortage of munitions, weapons and fuel.²⁰ In the report he sent to Hitler, Speer noted the contrast between soldiers in shabby and tattered uniforms and Party functionaries in their gold-braided peacetime uniforms, the sarcastically dubbed ‘Golden Pheasants’ (Goldfasane), who had not been visible in organizing the evacuation of Aachen’s inhabitants or helping to reduce the misery of the refugees.²¹

Xaver Dorsch, one of Speer’s leading subordinates, in charge of fortifications, and offering his own impressions of a visit to the area on 12–13 September, commented on the damaging impression left by the botched evacuation, and how striking it had been that so few Party functionaries had bothered about the refugees. The unnecessary evacuation could, he thought, lead to a catastrophe if the Allied advance continued during subsequent days. He feared disintegration in the army through the anger stirred up by Party officials blaming Wehrmacht officers for the retreat in France.²²

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Police, left Himmler in no doubt about the disastrous situation when he wrote at length in mid-September about the mood of the population during the evacuation and occupation of the western border regions. The evacuation in Luxemburg – annexed to the Reich in August 1942 and attached to the domain of the Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier, Gustav Simon – had been carried out in an atmosphere of total panic. The Gauleiter’s measures had been overhasty, and the civilian administration had broken down. Following Simon’s order to evacuate, fortification work on the Westwall had ceased and the workers had left. The mood of these workers had in any case been poor. They had been badly organized by the Party officials, who had then set the worst kind of example by merely supervising but not working themselves. The failings of the Gau administration were evident in the evacuation of 14,500 citizens in the Saarburg district, where there was panic and chaos. The transport laid on was hopelessly insufficient. The lucky ones left by special train, some of the women, children and sick by bus. But most trudged away by foot, in long, wretched columns who occupied the roads for days, their possessions trailing along in horse-drawn wagons. Clothing, shoes and blankets for the evacuees were in short supply.

As a result of the chaos, there was a good deal of anger directed at the Party. Many people refused to follow the Party’s orders to leave (which were often confused and contradictory); others could not find accommodation and came back. In Aachen, where thousands of citizens had defied the evacuation orders, pictures of the Führer had been taken down and white bedsheets hung from windows in gestures of surrender. The Party had lost face through the flight of its functionaries. Organization was poor; women and children became separated in the evacuation. And there had been little sign of anything resembling a ‘people’s community’. Those with access to cars sped away, unconcerned for anyone else. It was every man for himself.²³

Kaltenbrunner listed some prominent individuals who had left Luxemburg and Trier prematurely to bring their families to safety. The Gauleiter himself and the District Leader (Kreisleiter) of Metz were among those noted as deserting their posts in a separate report to Himmler about the uncontrolled refugee movements in Lorraine, endangering troop movements. The railways had stopped running because the German personnel had fled, and the civilian administration had detonated essential installations before pulling out so there were electricity and water shortages and the telephones did not function. Russian prisoners of war had been left free to roam the countryside, posing a threat to security.²⁴

One officer, Lieutenant Julius Dufner, stationed at Kyllburg, a small spa town in the Eifel, in the Bitburg area just north of Trier, jotted his own first-hand account of the desolate conditions in his diary. ‘The war is lost!’ he stated baldly on 1 September. In Trier itself, he observed a day later, there was nothing more to be had. Fuel was in such short supply that vehicles would soon be unable to move. ‘We want to build a new Europe,’ he wrote, ‘we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.’ When reproachful citizens asked soldiers why they were retreating, they answered that they, too, wanted to go ‘home to the Reich’. It had all been a bluff, he wrote, alluding to the ‘miracle weapons’. That was what happened when an advertising boss – he meant Hitler – became supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. Files and papers were being destroyed in huge quantities. ‘Everything that seemed at one time indispensable is today valueless and nothing at all.’ Who was to blame for it all, the diarist asked. Not those in lowly places, was his answer, those who simply did not want to fight and die for a lost cause. Everything had become crystal clear. All that talk of the new Europe, of young and decrepit peoples, of Germanic leadership, of revolutionary zeal: it was ‘baloney’, a ‘swindle’. He would not have said such things out loud.

As enemy artillery started firing on Trier on the evening of 13 September, and the evacuation of the inhabitants began next day, hundreds of emergency workers – ‘a column of wretched looking, careworn old men and also young lads from the Hitler Youth’ – traipsed into the city through the rain to dig fortification ditches. These might have fended off Huns and Mongols, Dufner mused, but it seemed doubtful that they could hold up modern tanks. Few of the workers had anywhere to sleep. But there was no complaining, just resigned acceptance. It looked as if the last reserves were being summoned up. As Bitburg itself came under fire, officers still managed to celebrate the birthday of one of their comrades with fine Saar wine and Sekt.²⁵ It was a case of drink today; there might be no tomorrow.

Such partying with the enemy on the doorstep would have confirmed the widespread prejudice among Nazi functionaries, much of the civilian population and many frontline soldiers about the Etappengeist – the ‘spirit of the rear lines’ – the weak and decadent lifestyle of officers still able to enjoy the good things in life while others were dying for their country. This was the alleged cause of the collapse in France.²⁶ Behind the front were the lines of communication, the bases for provisioning, administration, transport, field hospitals and for the planning staffs of the fighting army. This all constituted the Etappe, an essential element in the structure of any military machine, but, as in the First World War, one much derided by the ordinary front soldiers at the dirty end of the fighting, all too ready to spread to their loved ones back home scurrilous rumours of officers enjoying creature comforts and high living away from the bitter warfare.

‘That our rear-line jackasses flood back in such wild panic’, Goebbels commented, ‘can only be put down to their lack of proper discipline and that they have been more taken up during their long period of occupation in France with champagne and French women than military exercises.’ He blamed lack of leadership by the generals for the ‘debacle’.²⁷ The Gau office in Baden reported to the Party Chancellery in early September that the attitude of the retreating units ‘breathed the worst sort of rear-lines air, disorderly uniforms, a lot of drunken good-time girls and soldiers hanging together in the worst and most dubious groups, lorries loaded with the most various goods, fittings from apartments, beds, etc. These images reminded war veterans of the conditions of 1918.’²⁸ In the immediate wake of the collapse of the German army in the Allied breakthrough at Falaise, Himmler had issued orders to the Higher SS and Police Leaders – his main agents in security issues – in western areas, through cooperation with military commanders to abolish once and for all ‘the repulsive German rear lines in France’, and send those involved to the front or put them to work.²⁹ A few days later, Martin Bormann passed on to Himmler a letter he had received from Karl Holz, the acting Gauleiter of Franconia, containing reports of ‘ill-discipline, subversion and lack of responsibility’ in the rear lines in France. Holz suggested sending in ‘general inspectors’, comprised of ‘energetic and brutal National Socialists’, to clear up the malaise, though Himmler found it impossible to oblige unless he were given details.³⁰

A description of the military failings that had led to the Allied breakthrough at Avranches – ‘the most serious event of the summer’ – found its scapegoat in the alleged cowardly behaviour in the rear lines, while praising German efforts that had prevented a worse catastrophe.³¹ A report by the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police) reached a similar conclusion. The failure of officers during the retreat in the west had shaped the mood, reflecting the alleged distrust of officers since 20 July. Instances were adduced from soldiers’ accounts of poor behaviour of officers – similar, according to one, to that of 9 November 1918 – and indicating signs of disintegration in the army.³² Among the strongest denunciations was one from the office of General Reinecke, head of the National Socialist Leadership Staff of the Army, based upon a visit to the western front in late September and early October to assess the work of the NSFOs. These, it was said, were working well. Conditions earlier in the rear lines in France had been ‘scandalous’. For four years, those behind the rear lines had lived in a ‘land of milk and honey’. The retreat in 1918 at the time of the revolution had been like the proud march of a guard regiment compared with this ‘fleeing troop rabble’.³³

For all their obvious bias in the need to find scapegoats for the disastrous collapse in the west, such reports give a plain indication of low morale and signs of disintegration in the retreating German army. Added to the chaos produced by the evacuations in the border region, the panic among the population and the contempt for the Party that the flight of its functionaries had sharpened, the potential for a growing, full-scale collapse similar to 1918 could not altogether be ruled out. The slowing down of the Allied advance and the accompanying strengthening of German defences did much to ensure that this did not happen. So did the political measures undertaken to stiffen the resolve to fight on and prevent any undermining of either the fighting or the home front. But these in turn rested on attitudes that were sunk in resignation, not burning with rebellion, and were persuaded at least in part by the cause for which they were told Germany was fighting, and ready, therefore, to comply, however unenthusiastically, with the ever tighter regulation of their lives and the demands of the war effort.

III

The most crucial step was to shore up the crumbling western front. Model had to do the best he could to regroup a broken army in the immediate aftermath of Falaise. The size of the field army in the west had dropped from 892,000 men at the beginning of July to 543,000 on 1 September. The command structures had, however, been left intact. They now served as the basis for the organization of new units. Supply lines were shortened, fortifications strengthened (particularly along the Westwall) and minefields laid. Most importantly, desperately needed reinforcements were rushed to the west. The new divisions created were, to be sure, improvised units, lacking the best equipment and weaponry.³⁴ They were strengthened, however, in September when hundreds of tanks and other armoured vehicles were sent west from the hard-pressed eastern front. New levels of uncompromising enforcement were also introduced on the western front, including rigorous measures to round up ‘stragglers’ and assign them to new units. At the same time, some two hundred NSFOs were dispatched into the western defence districts to prop up faltering morale. The NSFOs, military police and Party agencies provided backing for the army in imposing a network of controls along the front to stiffen the shaky discipline.

On 10 September Field-Marshal Keitel, head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, advocated ‘extreme ruthlessness’ to stamp out any signs of subversion of morale. Less than a fortnight later, citing Hitler’s express instructions, he issued directives to counter the ‘signs of dissolution in the troops’ through ‘extreme severity’, including the use of summary courts with immediate executions in view of the troops to serve as a deterrent.³⁵ More than a hundred soldiers were shot by SS units while fleeing from the front during the following weeks. On 14 September, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, newly reinstated as Commander-in-Chief West, ordered the Westwall to be held ‘down to the last bullet and complete destruction’. Two days later, Hitler amplified the command. The war in the west, he declared, had reached German soil. The war effort had to be ‘fanaticized’ and prosecuted with maximum severity. ‘Every bunker, every block of houses in a German town, every German village, must become a fortification in which the enemy bleeds to death or the occupiers are entombed in man-to-man fighting,’ he ordered.³⁶

The combination of emergency means – through organization, supplies, recruitment and enforcement – succeeded for the time being in bolstering a desperate situation. Towards the end of September, the outlook was, if not rosy, at least much better than it had been a month earlier.

Just how effective the orders by Hitler and Rundstedt for a ‘do or die’ spirit of last-ditch resistance were in practice is not easy to judge. Feelings of helplessness in face of the might of the enemy, resignation, pessimism, defeatism, and blind fear as battle approached, were not easily dispelled, however urgent the appeals to fight to the last, however remorseless the control mechanisms to ‘encourage’ total commitment, however ferocious the threats for attitudes less than fanatical, however severe the punishment for perceived failure of duty. War-weariness was widespread, as it was among the civilian population. Most soldiers on the western front were preoccupied with survival rather than fighting to the last bullet. Colonel Gerhard Wilck, the commander at Aachen, forcefully reminded by Rundstedt ‘to hold this ancient German town to the last man and if necessary to be buried in its ruins’, repeatedly professed his intention of fighting to the final grenade. His actions did not follow his words. Instead, he made preparations to surrender.³⁷ Soon after the city’s capitulation on 21 October, Wilck found himself in British captivity. Speaking to his fellow officers, unaware that his conversation was bugged by his captors, he criticized the last-ditch mentality of the Wehrmacht High Command. Among his troops, the feeling was that the sacrifice of the 3,000 men forced to surrender at Aachen ‘merely to defend a heap of rubble for two or three days longer’ was ‘a useless waste’.³⁸

Attitudes were, nevertheless, not uniform. The forces on the western front in mid-September included armoured and infantry divisions of the Waffen-SS, known for their fanatical fighting and imbued with Nazi values.³⁹ Towards the end of 1944, the Waffen-SS overall comprised 910,000 men, and had some of the best-equipped panzer divisions.⁴⁰ But fervent Nazis were by no means confined to the Waffen-SS. They were also found in the branches of the much larger conventional armed forces. Some SS men even served there, and not in the Waffen-SS.⁴¹

Alongside critical letters back home from the front (which ran the danger of being picked up by the censors, with drastic consequences) were letters with a strongly pro-Nazi tone.⁴² Around a third of the Wehrmacht’s soldiers had experienced some ‘socialization’ in the Nazi Party or its affiliates (often greatly enhanced by wartime experience itself). Anyone born after 1913 and serving in the armed forces had been exposed to a degree of Nazified ‘education’, if only in the Reich Labour Service or compulsory military service (introduced in 1935).⁴³ It was not surprising, therefore, to find that Nazi mentalities still found expression.

An Allied report from 4 September on morale, based on the questioning of captured soldiers, painted a varied picture of attitudes. It found unmistakable signs of low morale among infantrymen. It nevertheless pointed to high morale among paratroopers, junior officers and SS men. Some representative comments were cited. ‘Victory must be ours…. One does one’s duty and it would be cowardice not to fight to the end.’ ‘We don’t give up hope. It is all up to the leaders. Something quite different will happen from what everybody expects.’ ‘If we don’t win, Germany ceases. Therefore we shall win.’ ‘Spirit against material. It has never yet happened that mere technology has conquered spirit.’ ‘I have done my part and have given my Führer, Adolf Hitler, that which can only be given once,’ ran one soldier’s last letter to his wife. ‘The Führer will do it, that I know…. I have fallen as a soldier of Adolf Hitler.’ Faith in German victory, the report concluded, was most strongly correlated with ‘devotion to Hitler personally, identification with National Socialist doctrine, [and] exoneration of Germany from war guilt’.⁴⁴

Another report, a week later, drew conclusions on the ideological sources of continued Wehrmacht fighting morale from observations during about a thousand interrogations carried out during August. Most prominent were: fear of return to a Germany dominated by Russia; conviction in the rightness of the German cause and belief that the Allies had attacked Germany rather than grant her just and necessary concessions; devotion to Hitler, who had only the welfare of Germany at heart; and feeling that the ‘unconditional surrender’ policy of the Allies meant that the German people could not expect the western powers to help in post-war reconstruction. About 15 per cent of captured soldiers, it was said, held such beliefs ‘with fanatical conviction’, and had an influence on doubters, while up to 50 per cent were ‘still devoted to Hitler’. There was a good deal of admiration among combat soldiers for the fighting capacity of the Waffen-SS.⁴⁵

As with soldiers at the front, the stance of ordinary citizens towards the war and the regime varied widely. Germany, despite more than a decade of Nazi rule, had remained, beneath the veneer of uniformity, in some senses a pluralistic society. Beliefs that were a deeply ingrained product of earlier socialist and communist subcultures could find no expression. But they were suppressed, not eradicated. Fervent Christian beliefs and traditions, institutionally underpinned within the Protestant and, especially, the Catholic Church, persisted despite relentless Nazi ideological pressure. On the other hand, the years of indoctrination and compulsion to conform had not failed to leave a mark. And the ever more pressing external threat to the country affected, in one way or another, all Germans and provided its own impulse to conformity. The panic at the approach of the Americans had been confined to the regions in the vicinity of the front. Even there, some had endeavoured, Canute-like, to hold back the rising tide of alienation from the regime. Away from the border provinces, there was no indication of collapse. Nothing suggested that the widespread pessimism about the war was likely to result in a popular uprising. Despite the gathering gloom it had described, the weekly propaganda report on 4 September concluded that the people were ready for any sacrifice to avoid destruction or enslavement. They would not ‘throw in the towel’.⁴⁶ The Nazi leadership itself distinguished between ‘mood’ and ‘attitude’, accepting that people were hardly likely to be of sunny disposition if their houses were being blown to bits and their lives upturned by the war, but praising the forbearance and readiness to fight which marked their underlying determination to overcome the hardships and attain victory.⁴⁷ This was, of course, a useful internal rationalization of the population’s reaction to incessant bad news, and a way of shaping the propaganda of total war. But it was not altogether misleading. For among the pessimists were still many, if a minority impossible to estimate in size with anything approaching precision and certainly diminishing sharply, who – outwardly at least – upheld the positive lines of propaganda, were loyally supportive of the regime, and expressed sentiments redolent of years of exposure to Nazi doctrine.

Some, without question, still thought that Hitler would find a way out of the crisis, and wanted him to speak to the people to provide reassurance.⁴⁸ Goebbels was in receipt of a hefty postbag of letters exuding, among ‘genuine National Socialists’, deep confidence that the crisis would be mastered.⁴⁹ There was still hope, if rapidly dwindling, in parts of the population that the promised new ‘wonder weapons’ would reverse war fortunes.⁵⁰ Attitudes towards those not seen to be sharing the burdens and wholly committed to the war effort, and especially to anyone perceived in some way to be ‘subversive’, were uncompromisingly hostile and often aggressive in demanding recrimination. The ferocious reprisals against the ‘traitors’ of 20 July were reportedly greeted with satisfaction by many.⁵¹ Despite the widespread worry and anxiety about the war, the slightest hint of opposition still invited terrible retribution, which the police could enforce only through help from ordinary citizens. Listening to foreign broadcasts, increasingly common despite the dangers, frequently led to trouble. Anyone bold enough to make openly defeatist remarks or criticize Hitler’s leadership outright was still likely to be denounced to the authorities by zealous loyalists.⁵² And the more radical Goebbels’ total-war measures appeared to be, especially if targeted at the better-off and privileged, the more approval they apparently found. More than 50,000 letters had been received by the Propaganda Ministry by the end of August, most of them from workers, the middle classes and soldiers, approving in strong terms the total-war measures adopted, but often wanting to go further in their radicalism.⁵³ Whatever the growing popular fears, anxieties and depression about the state of the war, the SD adjudged, with some reason, that the will to resist was still there, though people were doubting whether resistance would be worthwhile.⁵⁴

That extensive reserves of loyalist backing continued to exist in the face of increasingly extreme adversity is no surprise. The Nazi Party, making strenuous efforts to counter the losses in its ranks of those killed during service in the Wehrmacht, had around 8 million members – about a tenth of the population (a significantly higher proportion of adults) – in 1944.⁵⁵ Not all members, of course, were fervent activists or devoted followers. Increased pressure, for example on Hitler Youth groups, to join the Party as war fortunes went into steep descent was not guaranteed to produce fanatics for the cause. Even so, members, however they had come to join, had at least superficially shown some commitment to Hitler and the regime and, once in the Party, were more exposed than the rest of the population to demands to conform. The Party’s organizational tentacles stretched far into community life. The 42 regions (‘Gaue’), 808 districts, 28,376 local groups, 89,378 ‘cells’ and 397,040 ‘blocks’ into which Germany was divided by the Party’s administration ensured that not only members were subjected to invasive controls and routine surveillance. Besides the passive membership, there were the functionaries, who, even if they wanted to, could barely escape regular doses of indoctrination during their work for the Party. In July 1944, functionaries in full-time employment by the Party and its affiliates numbered 37,192 men and as many as 140,000 women, around 60,000 of those in the Nazi welfare organization, the NSV (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, National Socialist People’s Welfare). An estimated 3 million citizens served the Party in some unpaid capacity.⁵⁶

This army of apparatchiks constituted a major instrument of social and political control, usually working in close cooperation with the police and other forces of repression, so that for ordinary citizens the space to organize any form of oppositional behaviour was simply not available. Beyond that, however, the Party functionaries formed a still significant basis of the ‘charismatic community’ attached to Hitler’s leadership. Though Hitler’s popular appeal was in steep decline, the functionaries, who had in better times provided the core of Führer worshippers, were still less likely than most to break all allegiance. Beyond any lingering, if by now often diluted, devotion, the functionaries had long since pinned their colours to the mast. The Party had given them careers, social standing, privileges, financial advantages, and often – in varying degrees – some kind of power, if only at the local level, over their fellow citizens. Not a few felt they had no option but to stand or fall with the Party, and with Hitler, on account of their actions in earlier years. Some undoubtedly had bad consciences or at least qualms at possible post-war ‘revenge’ for their involvement in past events. Many had justified fears for a future without Hitler, for what might happen to them when their Party positions dissolved and what fate might hold for them should the enemy succeed in defeating and occuping the country. The higher the position, the greater the zealotry they had shown, the dirtier their hands, the more cause they had to worry. This meant in turn that they had little or nothing to lose as the end approached.

For the present, however, other than in the perimeter regions touching on the fighting zone, the Party showed no outward signs of crumbling. In fact, its revitalization by Martin Bormann in the second half of 1944 meant that it played a significant role in bolstering the home front. Its activities formed part of an increasingly frenzied effort by the regime to overcome huge and mounting difficulties. And, for the time being, the effort had some success in staving off complete military catastrophe and keeping Germany fighting – at enormous cost in death and destruction.

IV

The impetus behind the appointment of Goebbels as Plenipotentiary for Total War, triggered by the failed bomb plot, had been the destruction of Army Group Centre in the Red Army’s offensive in late June and July. No sooner had the programme been initiated than the additional grave losses through the collapse of the western front in August added massively to the demands for huge labour savings, already targeted, to provide men for the front. Goebbels had provided 300,000 men by 1 September. But Hitler now wanted another 450,000 men during the following month.⁵⁷ The new circumstances brought the breakdown in the earlier coalition of interests between Goebbels and Speer which had prompted Hitler to agree to the total-war effort. From late August onwards, as the implications of the disaster on the western front became plain, Goebbels and Speer were increasingly at loggerheads.

Goebbels had thrown himself with his customary enormous energy into his new role as Plenipotentiary for Total War. The planning committee he established, headed by Werner Naumann, his State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, had swiftly prepared a raft of measures aimed at manpower savings to provide soldiers for the Wehrmacht. Speed of action and an image of dynamism were objectives in themselves for Goebbels, and the haste and improvisation frequently created rather than solved difficulties. But whatever the doubts about the effectiveness of the measures introduced, they made deep incisions into public life. Postal services were cut back, theatres closed, the number of orchestras reduced, film production pared down, university study for all but a few working in disciplines essential to the war or incapable of war service halted,⁵⁸ publishing houses shut down, newspapers limited to a few pages only or discontinued. The age for labour conscription for women was extended from forty-five to fifty. By late August, men were required to work sixty and women forty-eight hours per week.⁵⁹

Goebbels was careful to keep Hitler abreast of the measures he introduced, and cleverly played to the Dictator’s mood.⁶⁰ But he did not always have his own way. He eventually succeeded in overcoming Hitler’s initial resistance to increasing further the age for women’s labour duty to fifty-five,⁶¹ and particularly to the closure of theatres and variety shows, as well as the abolition of some magazines that he liked. Hitler drew the line, however, at Goebbels’ plans to stop the production of beer and sweets. Even the Bolsheviks had never halted sweet production, Hitler stated, and thought they were necessary not only for citizens at home, but also for soldiers at the front. And, as regards beer, he feared above all ‘severe psychological repercussions in Bavaria’, and thought the move could provoke popular resentment.⁶² Hitler’s instinct, much more pronounced than that of Goebbels, for avoiding popular discontent remained undiminished, and was again demonstrated in mid-August in the directive he gave to finance the provision of 190,000 bottles of egg-flip to be handed by the NSV to those in the west suffering from bomb-damage (though why anyone bombed out of house and home would have welcomed the repulsive liqueur is another question).⁶³

Cuts in administration in government offices also proved less easy to implement than Goebbels had imagined. The Reich Defence Commissars were instructed, for instance, in early September, with recourse to Hitler’s instructions, that they should desist from commandeering personnel in ministerial offices or the administrative departments in the Länder for service in the newly established divisions of the Wehrmacht.⁶⁴ And while the Prussian Finance Ministry was finally abolished – a move of little significance, first mooted the previous year – the equally redundant bureau of the Prussian Minister President (one of Göring’s panoply of offices) was retained.⁶⁵ The ‘combing-out’ process did produce substantial gains in some areas. More than 250,000 men were let go by the Post Office and more than 50,000 from the railways, among other significant reductions. But overall, the reductions in staff fell short of expectations.⁶⁶ And those released were, predictably, often too old or too unfit for active military service. In fact, able-bodied men were to be found in large numbers only in exempted occupations in the armaments industry, an area in which it made scant sense to lose skilled and experienced workers to have them replaced by less well-trained men.⁶⁷ The obvious tension between providing men for the Wehrmacht and retaining them for armaments production was bound to lead to conflict between the erstwhile allies, Goebbels and Speer. As the need mounted for men to compensate for the losses on the western front, and at the same time the pressures on Speer grew to provide the munitions and weaponry to address the deficiencies created by abandoned matériel, the conflict was not long in coming.

Until the collapse in the west, Speer had publicly at least professed optimism.⁶⁸ He was, in fact, still telling Goebbels in early September that the armaments industry would be adequately provisioned until the beginning of 1946, even if all the occupied territories were lost.⁶⁹ And he had initially been accommodating towards Goebbels’ requests for manpower. At the beginning of August he had offered 50,000 men from armaments production for the total-war effort.⁷⁰ On the evening of 9 August, he had quickly reached agreement with Goebbels, and indicated his readiness to make 47,000 hitherto exempted employees in the less critical sectors of the armaments and related industries available, with the assurance that replacements would be found.⁷¹ At this point he was still optimistic of obtaining the necessary labour for his own domain from the total-war effort. But the harmony was soon to end. Control over the entire war economy was at stake.⁷² By the beginning of September, Goebbels had come to count himself among Speer’s most bitter opponents.⁷³

Goebbels did not mind whose toes he trod on to reach by one means or another the extravagant savings in manpower he had promised Hitler. And the Gauleiter predictably competed with each other to make the highest savings. Speer found himself on the receiving end of high-handed actions which he saw as extremely damaging to armaments production.⁷⁴ At the beginning of September, Goebbels was still expecting Speer to find the promised 50,000 men that month. But the tug of war between the two of them had started, and the conflict deepened as the month progressed.⁷⁵ Without a base of support within the Party, and seen as unreasonably insistent on protecting his own domain from the sacrifices other areas had been forced to make, Speer faced a losing battle. He had to contend with powerful enemies. Not just Goebbels and Bormann, but also Himmler and Robert Ley, were among his critics. Attacks by the Party, and interference at the regional level by the Gauleiter, grew.⁷⁶ He did his own cause little good when he admitted to Goebbels at the beginning of September that production was holding up well despite the loss of men in exempted positions that he had been compelled to provide for the Wehrmacht.⁷⁷

Speer felt his only recourse was to appeal directly to Hitler. He did so in a lengthy memorandum on 20 September defending himself against strong allegations from Goebbels and Bormann that his ministry was a ‘collection of reactionary economic leaders’ and ‘hostile to the Party’. Claiming that his task was ‘non-political’, he objected to the Party’s intervention in his sphere of responsibility and wanted the Gauleiter made responsible to him, not Bormann, in armaments matters.⁷⁸ But Hitler was never going to transfer any control over the Gauleiter from the Party to Speer’s hands. Bormann told the Armaments Minister in no uncertain terms that, as regards the total-war effort, he was subordinate to Goebbels.⁷⁹ In any case, Speer no longer had the influence with the Dictator that he had enjoyed in earlier years. His repeated argument that this war was a technical one, and that more and better weaponry would decide it,⁸⁰ rather than simply supplying more men to the Wehrmacht, fell on deaf ears, when Hitler and Goebbels both insisted on the obvious counter-argument that increased supplies of both men and weapons were a necessity. Goebbels, constantly supplying Hitler with progress reports on the success of his total-war effort, seemed bound to end up the winner in the conflict.

Speer again addressed Hitler directly in rejecting Goebbels’ demands for 100,000 armaments workers to be recruited for the September quota of total-war recruits (beyond the 200,000 he had provided since 25 July). These could not be delivered, he claimed, without impairing armaments production. He needed time to prepare for the large inroads into his workforce, and with difficulty could only manage to offer 60,000 from 25 October, then the remaining 40,000 by 15 November. To his frustration, he then found, on returning from a visit to the western front at the end of September, that Hitler had decided that most of the 60,000 were to be sent to the army earlier than he had stipulated, something he described as ‘an extraordinarily serious and drastic measure’.⁸¹

He nonetheless infuriated Goebbels by his obstinacy in resisting further demands to surrender exempted workers from the armaments sector. And as the autumn drew on, and Hitler recognized the achievements of Speer – ‘an organizer of genius’ – in surmounting extraordinary difficulties to maintain armaments production, the latter’s bargaining hand became stronger.⁸² His efforts had reinstated him in Hitler’s favour. Try as he might, Goebbels failed to persuade Hitler to come to a decision to compel Speer to release a further 180,000 exempted workers from the armaments industry.⁸³ Speer’s attritional, and time-consuming, battle with Goebbels over the retention of his workers had led in the end, therefore, to something approaching stalemate. Hitler had, as so often, proved reluctant to reach a decision in a dispute of significance between two of his leading paladins. The infighting between the heavyweight ministers could, however, find no resolution if Hitler was not prepared to offer one.

The long-running dispute over scarce manpower was regarded by Speer as a major drain on his energy and resources. Despite this, he made extraordinary efforts in the wake of the setbacks in the west to enable Germany to fight on.

The high point of armaments production for the entire war had been reached in July 1944. The level attained, however, flattered to deceive. It has aptly been described as being like the last sprint of the marathon runner before he sags, energy expended.⁸⁴ During the autumn, all spheres of production fell sharply. The main reason was the huge increase in Allied bombing – 60 per cent of all bombs dropped over Germany fell after July 1944. Following the Allied breakthrough in France, September brought a crucial acceleration in the devastating air raids. With Allied aircraft now able to use bases closer to the German borders, and the Luftwaffe more and more paralysed through destruction and through lack of fuel, sustained attacks on industrial installations and transport networks had become far easier. Raw materials production fell by almost two-fifths in the autumn months. Allied attacks on seven mineral-oil works on the same day, 24 August 1944, resulted in a drop of two-thirds in production of aircraft fuel in September, contributing greatly to the ineffectiveness of remaining air defences. Massive damage was caused to the industrial infrastructure as power stations were put out of action. Gas and electricity supplies were badly affected. Gas output in October was a quarter down on what it had been in March. Repeated attacks on the rail network of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, on the lines, locomotives, other rolling stock, bridges and marshalling yards, as well as waterways and Rhine shipping, caused massive disruption to transport arteries with huge knock-on effects in supplies to industry, not least coal provision from the Ruhr. At least, as yet, the coal mines themselves in the west remained largely unscathed. The decline in output of vital weaponry was not to be stopped, despite levels of production attained still outstripping those of 1942.⁸⁵

What remains little less than astounding, however, is not why armaments production fell drastically, but how, given the extent and well-nigh insuperable nature of the problems, Speer was able to keep it at such a relatively high level.

Speer’s rapid grasp not just of problems, but their possible solutions or at least amelioration, his enormous energy coupled with unquestioned talent for organization, and the authorization he had to push through changes, thanks to his manipulation of his frequent armaments briefings with Hitler, all contributed to his ability in autumn 1944 to paper over the widening cracks. He was preoccupied with doing all he could to maximize fuel supplies (badly affected by air strikes against the hydrogenation plants in central Germany since the spring), to build up air defences through increased fighter production, to keep transport moving and to save all that was possible for industry in the evacuation of border areas.⁸⁶ In pressing the demands of the armaments industry, he strived constantly to protect his own domain from the other ‘big beasts’ in the Nazi jungle, to prevent the Party from undermining the ‘self-responsibility of industry’, and to avoid deliberate ‘home-made’ destruction to industrial installations as German troops retreated, to add to that of the enemy.

Speer paid two visits to the western border regions in September, the first, from 10 to 14 September, taking in Karlsruhe, Saarbrücken, the vicinity of Metz, the Westwall to Trier, then Aachen to Venlo. He identified significant weaknesses in munitions and fuel supplies, and serious problems as territories were evacuated. He established, for instance, that the quartermaster-generals of the armies in the west had too little contact with business agencies and were failing to make use of the experience of the latter in the western regions to help, for example, master transport problems. He pointed, as a way forward, to how Hermann Röchling, the steel magnate, had liaised daily with military leaders in the Saar to ascertain their munitions requirements and organize deliveries accordingly. He recommended setting up an office attached to the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief West which could directly incorporate business in producing and delivering the equipment needed by the troops. A simple measure to improve supplies was to use the columns of lorries deployed in bringing back important salvaged equipment from the front and returning empty, to carry supplies for the frontline troops the other way. And clarifying organizational lines to make maximum use of the industrial area close to the border in supplying the western front directly would, he indicated, save wasteful journeys by lengthy transport routes used for carrying armaments from other parts of Germany. His main concern was ‘that production would continue in the endangered areas to the last minute’ and he opposed, therefore, what he saw as premature evacuation. Even under artillery fire, munitions production could go on just behind the front to a very late stage.⁸⁷ He sent a series of orders to the western Gauleiter in September, instructing them to see that production was not curtailed prematurely, and that – given the possibility of recovering the territories vacated (mere rhetoric to placate Hitler, to judge from Speer’s later account⁸⁸) – the evacuation of industry eastwards should follow only the disabling, not destruction, of industrial plant. Speer’s report to Hitler also stressed the shortage of weapons, repeating a point in his running dispute with Goebbels that troops without heavy weaponry were pointless and that ‘in this war, which is a technical war, a levée en masse is not decisive’.⁸⁹

Speer’s second journey to the western front, from 26 September to 1 October – carried out at such a tempo that his travel companions found it difficult to keep up with him – emphasized the urgent need to shore up the border zone west of the Rhine, and his anxiety about the threat to the Rhineland-Westphalian industrial area, which provided half of German armaments. ‘If significant losses of territory occur here through enemy operations,’ he warned, ‘it would be far more serious than all the losses in the other theatres of war.’ His report to Hitler was a further advertisement for his own achievements. The troops were enthusiastic, he commented, about the improved model of the Tiger tank that had been produced. The supplies of new weapons had contributed greatly to restoring morale after the retreat from France, and there was now confidence that a new line of resistance could be held, underlining the importance of delivering more weapons and munitions to the front line. This could not be done, he pointed out, if, as had happened previously, valuable skilled workers were taken out of tank production, something which tank commanders themselves did not want to happen. His conclusion was effectively, then, a further plea to make no more withdrawals from the armaments industry to provide recruits for the Wehrmacht.⁹⁰

In fact, to a limited extent at least, he was prepared to see manpower go the other way. Desperate to mobilize all labour resources to sustain armaments production, he complained to Himmler at the end of October that full use of concentration camp prisoners was being hindered through shortage of guards, and suggested – probably to little effect – that a contingent of suitable Wehrmacht soldiers could be transferred to the SS to take on guard-duty.⁹¹

Without Speer’s extraordinarily strenuous efforts to sustain armaments production and organize the repeated rapid repair of railway lines and bridges destroyed in bombing, the war would have surely been over earlier. He later gave the impression that he viewed the continuation of the war as senseless from the time of the Allied invasion, and that by September it was a ‘hopeless situation’.⁹² In recognition of this, everything he did, according to his subsequent account, was directed at preventing the destruction of German industry. Doubtless, this was indeed one objective. Speer had at least one eye on a Germany after Hitler (in which, probably, he hoped to play some significant part). Germany would need her industry, and in his emphasis on immobilization rather than destruction, Speer was naturally working in full agreement with leading industrialists, who, unsurprisingly, combined an all-out effort to manufacture armaments with thoughts, not to be aired in public, of survival after defeat.⁹³ But contemporary records from his ministry do not suggest that this was the sole, or even the dominant, aim. Rather, it seems, Speer was genuinely doing everything in his power to enable Germany’s war effort to continue. The extremes of energy and endeavour he deployed are not consonant with someone who thought fighting on was senseless and the situation hopeless. He could have done less without endangering himself. It would have brought the end, which he claimed to see as inevitable, closer. Without doubt, he recognized by this time that ‘final victory’ was out of the question. Did he also believe, at this point, that total defeat was the only alternative? He appears to have been far from ready to admit that the Reich was doomed. For some months yet, he thought it possible that Germany could avoid the worst. Had he done less to prolong the war, the worst might indeed have been avoided for millions.

Of course, it was far from Speer alone. He presided over a huge empire, run by an immense bureaucratic machine – 70,000-strong in early 1943.⁹⁴ He had highly able heads of his ministerial departments and ruthless lieutenants in Xaver Dorsch and Karl Otto Saur (increasingly his arch-rival for Hitler’s favour). Saur himself, said after the war to have ruled by fear and to have treated his staff – as well as his workforce – brutally, was not yet at the point where he accepted the war was lost.⁹⁵ At the intersection of the military and industry, Speer had the closest connections with Germany’s leading industrialists, keen to preserve their factories, but also still to maximize production for the war effort. And he was backed by the enforcement agencies of the Party, the police, the prison service and justice administration – tens of thousands of prisoners had by now been put to work in armaments⁹⁶ – as well as being supplied by Fritz Sauckel, the crude and brutal Reich Plenipotentiary for Labour, with the legions of foreign workers who slaved in armaments factories in near indescribable conditions.⁹⁷ But Speer’s initiative, dynamism and drive were the indispensable component that made the ramshackle armaments empire function as well as it did. His personal ambition and determination not to lose his own power-base meant that he was personally not ready to capitulate. He remained prepared to use his remarkable energies to fend off attempted inroads into his empire by Goebbels, Bormann and the Gauleiter, playing on the support from Hitler that he never entirely lost. And, of course, he showed no scruples in the utterly inhumane treatment of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, forced to slave to enable the Reich to continue fighting long after reason dictated that the war should be ended.

V

The German people – even more so the ‘enemies of the people’ in the regime’s grasp – were subjected to far more rigorous controls as the enemies encroached closer towards the borders of the Reich. Coercion now became an omnipresent element of daily life. Alongside the restrictions of Goebbels’ total-war measures, and inroads into the workplace through recruitment to the front, went increasingly long hours on the shopfloor. Any worker suspected of slacking was threatened with being treated in the same way as deserters. Foreign workers – now constituting around a fifth of the labour force in Germany – were particularly vulnerable to police round-ups, and investigations of the existence of any subversive material, that could result in their being sent to concentration camps, or worse.⁹⁸

For Germans, orders for evacuation in areas close to the front could come at an hour’s notice. In bombed towns and cities, people had to comply with commands barked out by local Party officials, and by the police and military authorities. Surveillance had become intensified. The regime’s suspicions of the population it controlled mounted as memories and fears of a repeat of 1918 revived. Communist cells were penetrated and broken up, their members and other suspected opponents of the regime arrested and often subjected to torture.⁹⁹ The police were alerted to the threat of internal unrest and instructed to take immediate measures to nip in the bud any signs of disturbance to public order. The Higher SS and Police Leaders were given powers by Himmler to put down with all means at their disposal any unrest in their areas and immediately to deal with those threatening security and order.¹⁰⁰ Party officials were handed extra weapons to deal with ‘internal unrest or other extraordinary circumstances’.¹⁰¹ Germany was increasingly an atomized, dragooned society run on the basis of fear. It was also by this stage an entirely militarized society.

In his new capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Himmler was able to extend his policing powers to the military sphere. Hitler gave him full authority to ‘establish order’ in the areas behind the fighting zone and sent him, at the beginning of September, to the western border region to put a halt to the retreat of the ‘rear-lines’ troops. Within twenty-four hours, according to Goebbels, he had stopped the ‘flood’ of retreating soldiers, and the images of panic that accompanied them.¹⁰² The Gauleiter were instructed that all returning members of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, police, OT and Reich Labour Service, as well as ‘stragglers’, were to be picked up and turned over to the Replacement Army by 9 September. Local Party leaders were to report to their District Leaders by 7 p.m. the previous evening the numbers of stragglers in their area, and they in turn would pass the information to the Gauleiter within two hours, who would then immediately inform the commander of the Defence District.¹⁰³ Himmler was proud of his achievement in arresting the disintegration in the west, and recommended ‘brutal action’ to deal with manifestations of ‘rear-lines’ poor morale.¹⁰⁴ By the middle of September, 160,000 ‘stragglers’ had been rounded up and sent back to the front.¹⁰⁵

Himmler’s decisive action was rewarded by Hitler by a further remit. It arose from a combination of the increased concern for inner security together with the need felt to provide border protection, especially in the east, following the Red Army’s inroads in the summer. Since early in the war, the Wehrmacht had been ready to conscript civilians in an emergency to support local defence operations. The police were also involved in earlier planning for militias. Himmler had in 1942 set up a ‘Countryside Watch’, later followed by an ‘Urban Watch’, made up mainly of members of Nazi affiliates not called up to the Wehrmacht, to help local police in searching for escaped prisoners of war and repressing any potential unrest from foreign workers. By the end of 1943, the ‘Urban’ and ‘Countryside’ Watches comprised in all around a million men. Some Gauleiter had then in 1943 and 1944 taken steps to form their own ‘Homeland Protection Troops’, reaching beyond Party members to include all men aged eighteen to sixty-five. These did not, however, at this stage find favour with Hitler, who sensed they would have a negative impact on popular morale.

Even so, as war fortunes deteriorated, the Wehrmacht also prepared plans for larger, more formalized militias. With the Red Army approaching the Reich’s eastern frontier, General Heinz Guderian, the recently appointed Chief of the General Staff, proposed what he called a Landsturm (taking its name from the Prussian militias which fought against Napoleon’s army in 1813), to be composed of men exempted for whatever reason from military service, who would help to strengthen border protection in the east. Guderian recommended the deployment of alarm units which would carry out guerrilla-like warfare in their own localities. Every officer would act ‘as if the Führer were present’. Guderian advocated the use of cunning, deception and fantasy, claiming that Red Indian-style action could be successful in fighting for streets, gardens and houses and that the Karl May stories about cowboys and Indians in the Wild West – much liked by Hitler – had proved useful as training manuals.¹⁰⁶

Guderian’s fanciful schemes never materialized. They were overtaken by plans for the creation of a nationwide organization under Party, not Wehrmacht, control. Some Gauleiter, encouraged by Bormann, had already in August created militias in their own regions. The leader of the SA, the Nazi stormtrooper organization, Wilhelm Schepmann, and Robert Ley, head of the enormous Labour Front, separately contemplated in early September the construction of a Landsturm for national defence, each imagining he would lead it.¹⁰⁷ Hitler’s view, as the conflict between Schepmann and Ley surfaced, was that Himmler was the only person capable of building the envisaged Landsturm. Goebbels agreed, as usual, with Hitler. Schepmann would rapidly succumb to ‘the lethargy of the SA’, while if the task were given to Ley, ‘only pure idiocy would come of it’.¹⁰⁸

Quietly, however, from behind the scenes, another Nazi leader scented a chance to extend his power. With the enemy close to Germany’s borders, east and west, and a perceived possibility of internal unrest, the way was open for Martin Bormann, working together with Himmler, to devise proposals for a national militia and persuade Hitler that its organization and control had to be placed in the hands of the Party rather than be given to the ‘untrustworthy’ army, thereby ensuring that it would be subjected to the necessary Nazi fanaticism. By the middle of September, Bormann had worked out drafts, approved by Himmler, for a decree by Hitler on the establishment of a ‘People’s Defence’ (Volkswehr).¹⁰⁹ Within a few days, the name had been changed to the more stirring ‘People’s Storm’ (Volkssturm). Himmler told Defence District commanders on 21 September that ‘if the enemy should break in somewhere, he will encounter such a fanatical people, fighting like mad to the end, that he will certainly not get through’.¹¹⁰

Hitler’s decree on the establishment of the Deutscher Volkssturm, dated 25 September though actually signed next day and reserved for publication until mid-October, stipulated that the new militia was to be formed of all men between sixteen and sixty who were capable of bearing arms. The Gauleiter, under Bormann’s direction, were given responsibility for summoning the men, forming them into companies and battalions, and all attendant organizational matters. The political aspects of the new militia were left to Bormann, acting on Hitler’s behalf. This gave Bormann enormous scope for defining his remit. Himmler, as Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army (not as head of the SS and police), was placed in charge of the ‘military organization, the training, weaponry and armaments’ of the Volkssturm. Its military deployment, under Hitler’s directive, was in his hands, though he delegated its running to the head of the SS Central Office and General of the Waffen-SS, Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger.¹¹¹ The very division of controls outlined in the decree guaranteed in a fashion characteristic of the Third Reich, that there would be continuing disputes about responsibility and control. But, powerful though Himmler and the SS were, the victor in conflicts over control of the Volkssturm turned out to be Martin Bormann. His constant proximity to Hitler enabled him to fend off attempts to reduce his dominance in this new domain by playing on the unique position of the Party to imbue the ‘people’s community’ with the fanatical spirit of National Socialism in the defence of the Reich.¹¹²

Militarily, the value of the Volkssturm turned out over subsequent months to be predictably low. The loss of the many men – too old, too young, or too unfit for military service – who would die in Volkssturm service would be utterly futile. The creation of the Volkssturm certainly amounted to a desperate move to dredge up the last manpower reserves of the Reich. But it was far from an admission by the regime that the war was lost. In the eyes of the Nazi leadership, the Volkssturm would hold up the enemy, should the war enter Reich territory, and help Germany win time. New weapons, they presumed, were on the way. The enemy coalition was fragile. The more losses could be inflicted on the enemy, particularly on the western Allies, the more likely it was that this coalition would crumble. A settlement, at least in the west, would then be possible. Seen in this way, time gave Germany a chance. Moreover, the Volkssturm would achieve this goal through the inculcation of genuine National Socialist spirit. It would embody the true Nazi revolution as a classless organization, where social rank and standing had no place, and through fanatical commitment, loyalty, obedience and sacrifice.¹¹³ It would also, it was imagined, help to raise popular morale.¹¹⁴ In reality, these Nazi ideals were far from the minds of the vast majority of those who would trudge unwillingly and fearfully into Volkssturm service, minimally armed but expected to help repel a mighty enemy. A minority, impossible to quantify precisely but including many Volkssturm leaders, were, even so, convinced Nazis, some of them fanatical. Even in the dying days of the regime, Volkssturm members would be involved in police ‘actions’ and atrocities against other German citizens seen to be cowards or defeatists. So whatever its obvious deficiencies as a fighting force, the Volkssturm – a huge organization envisaged as comprising 6 million men¹¹⁵ – served as a further vehicle of Nazi mobilization, organization and regimentation. As such, it played its own part in preventing any internal collapse and ensuring that a war, rationally lost, would not be ended for some months yet.

VI

Germans without weapons in their hands were by late summer 1944 likely to be holding spades instead. As the enemy approached Germany’s frontiers, conscription – also for women – to dig fortifications, trenches, bunkers, tank traps and roadblocks was introduced. Bormann, here too, orchestrated operations from the centre. His agents, the Gauleiter in their capacity as RVKs, organized the work at regional level. The Party’s District, then Local, Leaders ensured that it was done. Party affiliates like the Hitler Youth assisted in the mobilization and deployment. The police were once more on hand to force waverers into line. Again, as the prospect of fighting on Reich soil loomed ever larger, the impositions of the regime on its citizens and the level of controls to which they were subjected on a daily basis intensified sharply.

The frantic fortification-building through conscription of the local population had started in the east in July, following the Red Army’s breakthrough, when Gauleiter Koch persuaded Hitler to commission the construction of an extensive ‘Eastern Wall’ as a bulwark against Soviet inroads.¹¹⁶ The collapse in the west in August then rapidly necessitated the adoption of similar methods to reinforce defences, particularly along the Westwall, whose pre-war array of 14,000 bunkers over a length of 630 kilometres was in urgent need of strengthening. On 20 August Hitler ordered a people’s levy, under the leadership of four western Gauleiter, for the construction of western fortifications. At the end of the month, he empowered additional Gauleiter to enlist civilian workers to strengthen northern coastal defences as a protection against invasion and to levy the population for work on the Westwall. Extra labour, where necessary, had to be provided by neighbouring Gaue.¹¹⁷ The entire border of the Westwall on the German side was now to be placed in defence readiness. The RVKs were responsible for arranging the accommodation and feeding of hundreds of thousands of workers, and taking steps to evacuate the population in a strip of about two kilometres depth behind the Westwall.¹¹⁸

As with the Volkssturm, Robert Ley had ambitions of taking charge of the nationwide command of fortification work. Ley, who had a doctorate in chemistry, was among the most fanatical Nazis, possessed of an almost mystical belief in Hitler. At the end of 1932, Hitler had made him head of the Party’s organization and a few months later boss of the mammoth German Labour Front. The ambitious Ley was always looking to extend his own empire, early in the war taking over responsibility for housing in Germany. But his arbitrary and arrogant exploitation of his power, and his public reputation for drunkenness, made him enemies in high places. And in trying to take control of fortification work, to the pleasure of Goebbels, who held Ley’s organizational capabilities in scant regard, he was to be disappointed.¹¹⁹ Once more, Martin Bormann, close to Hitler and possessing his confidence, was in a position to gain exclusive control of the new range of powers. On 1 September Hitler gave Bormann sole authority to instruct the Gauleiter, in his name, on all measures relating to fortifications. No other Party agencies had any rights to intervene. Bormann would name commissioners, directly responsible to him, who could commandeer Party members where necessary to assist in carrying out the work – through supervision and controls, that is, not through actually digging themselves. Robert Ley, as Reich Organization Leader of the Party, was at Bormann’s disposal in providing such members – a clear victory for the head of the Party Chancellery over one of his rivals.¹²⁰

The work began without delay, and with great urgency. On 3 September the Essen National-Zeitung spoke of the ‘entire frontier population’ being involved in extending defences on the western borders, and the men and women of the Gaue in the west starting ‘with spades and shovels’ to work ‘to ensure the freedom of our homeland’.¹²¹ By 10 September, 211,000 women, youths, and men too old for military service, along with 137 units of the Reich Labour Front and Hitler Youth formations were engaged in heavy labour on the Westwall. The minimum period for conscription was stipulated as six weeks. After that, Germans, though not foreign workers, could be replaced by others.¹²² Bormann reminded the Gauleiter at the beginning of October of the urgency of completing entrenchments before the onset of the cold and wet autumn weather when women, girls and youths could be deployed only to a limited extent and when illness among men was sure to increase and be exacerbated through shortage of equipment, clothing and accommodation.¹²³

By this time, the Gauleiter had been given widened powers by Hitler in the event of the war encroaching onto German territory. Amending his decree of 13 July through further decrees on 19 and 20 September, Hitler accorded the Gauleiter, as RVKs, executive power in civilian matters in operational areas with rights to issue legally binding decrees and directives to all agencies of the state administration. With this, Bormann’s own centralized authority was bolstered still further, though Hitler yet again muddied the waters, providing for conflict and demarcation disputes, since his decree stipulated that coordination of the measures determined by the RVKs rested with Himmler.¹²⁴

Bormann was by this time at the height of his powers. Through his presence at Führer Headquarters, his ability to control access to Hitler to a large extent and to influence his thinking, his exploitation of his position to outmanoeuvre other bigwigs in the Third Reich’s constant power-struggles, his control of the elaborate Party machine, and his capacity for sheer hard work – as his frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, indicate, he was working almost round the clock – Bormann had become perhaps the most pivotal figure after Hitler himself in the top Nazi echelons. And he was still an absolutely committed true believer. Unlike Himmler or Speer, he appears to have had no alternative personal agenda in mind for a world without Hitler. And unlike Himmler, Goebbels, Göring and Ribbentrop, he seems never at any moment to have contemplated any form of negotiation with the enemy as a way of ending the war. He was content to be Hitler’s mouthpiece, with all the power that gave him. Acknowledging to his wife in late August that it was hard to see a silver lining as the fronts closed in on Germany, he nonetheless added: ‘In spite of it all, our faith in the Führer and in victory is completely unshaken, which is truly necessary, for in this situation very many people begin to soften up understandably.’¹²⁵ A few weeks later, he even found it possible to look back upon the catastrophic months of 1944 with some satisfaction because, despite military collapse in east and west, ‘the national community has stood its test, and we are so far able to overcome the thousand difficulties which the enemy’s domination of the air creates for us’.¹²⁶ His optimism probably arose from necessity. Like the other leading Nazis, he knew he had no future after Hitler.

During 1944 the Party Chancellery that Bormann ran – sarcastically dubbed by Goebbels on one occasion the ‘Paper Chancellery’ because of the streams of directives flooding out of it – issued 1,372 circulars, announcements or orders, alongside numerous other instructions and Führer orders.¹²⁷ State bureaucracy still functioned, though increasingly as an administrative organ for directives and intitiatives emanating from the Party. Civil defence in all its ramifications, organization of mass conscription for entrenchment work, mobilizing non-servicemen for the Volkssturm, providing welfare for evacuees, and implementing the myriad orders for total war, were all in the hands of the Party that now controlled Germany as never before.

For ordinary Germans, there was scarcely any avenue of life free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates. In the armed forces, too, the scope for escaping Nazification had diminished. The repercussions of the failed bomb plot, the need to demonstrate loyalist credentials, extended deployment of NSFOs, increased surveillance and fear of falling into the clutches of Himmler (who now possessed greater room for intervention in the military sphere) left their mark on both officers and men. Whether at the front or in the civilian population, as the war had come close to home, and the popular base of the regime had shrunk, compliance with ever more invasive controls had come increasingly to dominate daily life.

The regime had appeared during the summer to teeter close to the edge. It had survived an internal uprising, but its armed forces had been pummelled in east and west. As summer had turned into autumn, it had stabilized the military situation and redoubled its energies at home to galvanize an often reluctant or truculent population into action to shore up defences and provide manpower for the front and the armaments industry.

In mid-October, Aachen – by now a ruined shell, its remaining inhabitants cowering in cellars – became the first German city to fall into enemy hands. But by this time, attention had switched to the east. There, in East Prussia, the population was already gaining a horrific foretaste of what Soviet conquest would bring.