3

Foretaste of Horror

Hatred… fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen. There can be no other aim for us than to hold out and to protect our homeland.

Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt to his wife

after visiting the scene of Soviet atrocities near

Nemmersdorf, in East Prussia, 26 October 1944

I

The disastrous collapse of Army Group Centre, steamrollered by the Red Army as its gigantic summer offensive, ‘Operation Bagration’, drove back the Wehrmacht, then the smashing of the Army Groups North Ukraine and South Ukraine, and the cutting off in the Baltic of Army Group North left the German east precariously exposed. The scale of the calamity from the German perspective could scarcely be exaggerated. In 150 days, the German army in the east lost more than a million men, dead, wounded or missing – 700,000 of them since August. Put another way, more than 5,000 men a day were dying. Only around a third of the losses could be made good. On 1 October 1944 the overall strength of the Wehrmacht was just over 10 million men. Of the 13 million who had served since the war began, 3 million were lost.¹

The disaster on the eastern front in summer 1944 was in terms of human loss by far the worst military catastrophe in German history, worse than the First World War slaughterhouse at Verdun, way beyond the losses at Stalingrad.² Army Group Centre, its operative strength of around half a million men grossly inferior to that of the Soviet forces, was like a house of cards waiting to be knocked over. In the first phase of the offensive, 25 divisions with more than 250,000 men of Army Group Centre were destroyed.³ By the end of July the Red Army had swept through Belorussia, recovering all the territory lost since 1941, and through eastern Poland to the Vistula. On the northern flank of the advance, the Red Army had also overrun much of Lithuania, including the main cities of Vilnius and Kovno. The borders of East Prussia, the farthest eastern frontier of the Reich, now lay perilously close. In a short-lived incursion on 17 August, Soviet troops did, in fact, cross the East Prussian border near Schirwindt, entering the Reich for the first time, though on this occasion they were quickly repulsed.⁴

To the south of Army Group Centre, further disaster rapidly unfolded. Army Group North Ukraine (the former Army Group South, renamed earlier in the year) suffered huge losses in intense combat as the Red Army drove into Galicia, in southern Poland, taking Lemberg (Lvov) and forcing a German retreat of nearly 200 kilometres over a 400-kilometre-wide area. Of the 56 divisions of Army Group North Ukraine (including some Hungarian divisions), 40 were partially or totally destroyed. As Soviet troops on the northern flank pressed on north-westwards to the Vistula and the approaches to Warsaw, the southern flank pushed German forces back towards the Carpathians. The desperate German attempt to defend Galicia was a recognition of the strategic and economic importance of the region. By mid-August almost the whole of the Ukraine and most of eastern Poland were in Soviet hands, while the basis had been laid for attacking the crucial Upper Silesian industrial belt, 200 kilometres to the west.⁵ Meanwhile, on 1 August, Warsaw’s martyrdom had begun with the rising of the Polish Home Army. As the Red Army stood inactive in the vicinity, unwilling to assist the rebels, the SS moved in to destroy the rising and pulverize the Polish capital.⁶ In the unfolding tragedy over the following two months, the city was turned into a ruined shell, with some 90 per cent of its buildings destroyed and 200,000 civilians left dead amid the terrible German reprisals.⁷

In the Balkans, too, where Romanian oil, Hungarian bauxite and Yugoslav copper were crucial to Germany’s war economy, the Wehrmacht suffered crippling defeats, leading to the defection of its allies in the region. The position of the German Army Group South Ukraine, around half of it composed of war-weary Romanian units, was already weakened by mid-August through the withdrawal of 11 out of 47 divisions to help shore up the battered Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine. When a major Soviet offensive began on 20 August, many Romanian units, with no further stomach for the fight, deserted. Three days later, following an internal coup, Romania sued for peace and changed sides. During the next few days, Army Group South Ukraine was demolished. The German 6th Army, reconstituted after Stalingrad, was again encircled and destroyed. In all, 18 divisions of the Army Group ceased to exist; the rest were forced into headlong retreat to the west and north-west. Within a fortnight, more than 350,000 German and Romanian troops had been killed or wounded, or had entered captivity.⁸ Huge quantities of armaments were also lost, as were the Ploesti oilfields, vital for the German war effort, on which Hitler had always placed such a premium. Bulgaria soon followed Romania’s example, switching sides and declaring war on Germany on 8 September. German occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia was now no longer viable. Control over the Balkans was as good as at an end. And for the Red Army, the approaches to Slovakia and Hungary lay open, and behind them the Czech lands and Austria.⁹

At the opposite end of the eastern front, on the Baltic, Army Group North fought throughout the summer in a desperate attempt to avoid being cut off. The Soviet advance had opened up a huge gap between Army Group North and what was left of Army Group Centre. Entreaties to Hitler, already in early July and later, to allow Army Group North to withdraw to a more defensible line to the west were predictably rejected. The Baltic could not be surrendered, since Swedish steel, Finnish nickel and oil shale (used by the navy) from Estonia were vital for the war effort. But Hitler was also influenced by the need to retain the Baltic harbours for trials of the new generation of U-boats, which, Grand-Admiral Dönitz had impressed upon him, still offered a chance for Germany to turn the fortunes of war in her favour by throttling supplies to Britain and cutting off Allied shipment of men and matériel to the Continent.¹⁰ Bitter fighting continued throughout July and August as Army Group North was forced to retreat some 200 kilometres to the north-west and evacuate parts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, though it was able for the time being to prevent the Red Army from breaking through to the Baltic. What contribution, if any, to Army Group North’s resilience was made by the fanatical and ferocious leadership of its Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Schörner – one of Hitler’s outright favourites – is hard to say. Schörner, the most brutal of Hitler’s commanders, was unremitting in his demands for ruthless and fanatical fighting spirit, and in his merciless punishment of any that he deemed to be falling short of his demands.¹¹ His tactical errors, however, accentuated the plight of the Army Group.¹² Almost a quarter of a million strong, comprising three armies, its situation remained precarious, facing Soviet forces on three sides and mainly dependent upon supplies by sea across the Baltic. Meanwhile, by 2 September Germany’s important northern ally, Finland, had pulled out of the struggle and was soon to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union.

After a brief lull in the fighting, the Red Army opened a big northern offensive on 14 September. By the end of the month, the Wehrmacht had pulled out of Estonia and most of Latvia with great losses of men and equipment. The main forces had managed to withdraw, however, and were concentrated on a shorter front. A Soviet breakthrough in the area of Riga was held off – though not for long. In early October the Red Army forced its way through to the Baltic coast, just north of Memel. With that, the main forces of Army Group North were cut off from East Prussia. The German retreat from Riga was by then under way and the city fell to the Soviets in the middle of the month. By the end of October, intense German efforts to re-establish links with Army Group North had irredeemably failed. The Army Group’s defences were by now stabilized. But its 33 divisions were completely cut off on the Courland, the peninsula north-west of Riga. Apart from 3 divisions that were promptly evacuated and a further 10 divisions brought out by sea in early 1945, its main forces, comprising around a quarter of a million frontline troops, so badly needed elsewhere, would remain there, isolated and of little further strategic relevance, until the capitulation in May 1945.¹³

From the Baltic to the Balkans, Germans armies had reeled at the ferocious onslaught of the Red Army in the summer months of 1944. In those months, the magnitude of the losses and the secession of crucial allies meant that Germany’s hopes of a victorious outcome to the war in the east had vanished. Goebbels was among those in the Nazi leadership who plainly recognized this. In September, he took up a Japanese suggestion for separate peace soundings with the Soviet Union and put the proposal to Hitler in a lengthy letter.¹⁴ Hitler took no notice of it. Whether there was the remotest chance of Stalin showing an interest in coming to terms with Germany when his forces were so rampantly in the ascendancy might well be doubted. But the issue could not be put to the test. Hitler’s silent veto was sufficient to rule out any possibility of an approach. The structures of Nazi rule ensured that there was no platform of any kind where Hitler’s adamant refusal to contemplate a negotiated end to the war, east or west, could be deliberated, let alone challenged.

In the Soviet Union, as with the Americans and British, the scale of Germany’s defeats raised expectations that the war might be almost over. It could have been, too, had Stalin and his military advisers, like the western Allies, not made strategic errors in their operational planning. Mighty though ‘Bagration’ was, the attack on four fronts was less decisive than the attack that the Germans had feared most: a huge, concentrated surge through southern Poland to Warsaw and from there to the Baltic coast, east of Danzig, cutting off two entire Army Groups (Centre and North) and opening the route to Berlin.¹⁵ The colossal battering the Wehrmacht had taken in the summer fell short, crippling though the losses were, of the decisive death blow that such a manoeuvre could have inflicted. The armies of the east, as in the west, could be patched up to fight on. Rapidly dwindling reserves of manpower and weaponry were dredged up. It was a mere plaster on a gaping wound. But it allowed the war to continue for several more months of mounting horror and bloodshed.

II

Behind the capacity to keep on fighting lay, as in the west, attitudes in the Wehrmacht which were not uniform in nature, but essentially resilient, and structures of government and administration, crisis-ridden but still intact. For the civilian population there was little choice but to grit their teeth and carry on. In conditions of perpetual emergency, the regime put people under extreme pressure to conform and collaborate. Private space to avoid such pressure dwindled almost to zero point. Ad hoc, piecemeal measures to attempt to hold off the inroads of the Red Army could, therefore, be implemented by a workforce now embracing almost the entire adult (and youthful) population, seldom (other than within parts of the Hitler Youth) enthusiastic, sometimes willing, often grudging, but scarcely ever rebellious. At the root of the readiness to comply, however reluctantly, a sentiment prevailed that was far more searing and penetrating than in the west: fear.

In East Prussia, the most exposed of Germany’s eastern provinces, the fear was palpable. Older citizens still had memories of the incursion of the Russians in the opening phase of the First World War before the Germans finally beat them back in February 1915. Some 350,000 people had fled in hasty evacuations as the Russians approached in August and September 1914. By the time the Russian troops had been forced out of East Prussia, according to German reports (though there is no reason to doubt their essential veracity), towns and villages had been ransacked, more than 40,000 buildings destroyed, several thousand inhabitants deported to Russia, and around 1,500 civilians killed.¹⁶ Thirty years later, the fear rested not just on old memories. The anti-Bolshevik propaganda, relentlessly pumped into the population by the Nazis, had seemed less abstract in this region than in western outposts of Germany. And for three years, soldiers had been passing through East Prussia backwards and forwards to the eastern front. Those with ears to hear had heard stories – not just vague rumours, but often concrete detail – of disturbing happenings in the east. Not only tales of the intense bitterness of the fighting, but news of atrocities perpetrated against the civilian Russian population and massacres of Jews had filtered back. The war against the partisans, it was well known, had been brutal. It had been no holds barred. As long as the war had been going well, what German soldiers had been doing to Russians and Jews had been of little concern. Many, influenced by propaganda, had no doubt approved. But now the tables had been turned: the Soviets were in the ascendancy, crushing German forces, pressing on the borders and threatening to break into East Prussia.

Elsewhere in the eastern provinces, the danger of Soviet occupation was not so imminent. But the fears were little different from those of the people of East Prussia. The Nazi Party had gained some of its greatest electoral successes before 1933 in the eastern regions of Germany – largely, apart from the Silesian industrial belt, Protestant and rural. Border issues, resentment at the territorial losses in the Versailles Treaty, and revanchist feelings had contributed to making these regions disproportionately stalwart in their backing for Hitler’s regime after 1933. The early war years, sheltered by German occupation of Poland and the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, had been relatively calm for eastern Germany. But the start of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought the regions far closer to the fighting front. Some compensation derived from the new military importance of the eastern provinces; the location of government and army bases close to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, for instance, produced some economic benefits for the region. Following the rapid conquests by the Wehrmacht, the reality of war, even in the east, seemed at first far away. The area was also free from the heavy bombing – East Prussia suffered from some light Soviet bombing sorties in June 1941, but little more – that increasingly beset the western parts of Germany from 1942 onwards. In fact, one of its main roles was as a reception area, forced to take in large numbers of evacuees sent from the bomb-threatened towns and cities of western Germany. By early 1944 about 825,000 evacuees were housed in eastern regions.¹⁷ They were often seen as a burden, providing a real test for the solidarity of the much-vaunted ‘people’s community’. The presence of the refugees, in such numbers, was a clear sign that the war was close to home. The east had so far been spared the worst. That was now to alter rapidly.

Unsurprisingly, panic had spread like a bush fire through the east in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s collapse.¹⁸ As the Red Army’s advance then slowed and the German front gained some semblance of stability, the initial panic had subsided. But the population remained subdued, depressed and acutely worried. A general nervousness prevailed. Any negative news had a pronounced impact on people. ‘The unfavourable and dangerous military situation in the east has such a depressing effect on the mood of the great proportion of the population’, the SD reported in early August, ‘that the same anxious fears about the further development of the war can be heard in all strata.’¹⁹ Influenced by letters home from the front, and from the stories of evacuees from formerly occupied parts of Poland, people were sceptical about the capacity of the German forces to halt the Soviet advance completely and were not convinced that the danger for East Prussia had subsided.²⁰ The fears were that the Soviets would eventually succeed. And everyone, it was said, was aware of the threat of Bolshevism. What that meant in concrete terms was left unstated.²¹ But the implications of dire consequences should the Soviets break through were plain enough. By early October, following the defection of Germany’s eastern allies, the destruction of the 6th Army in Romania and the penning in of Army Group North in the Courland, the mood in the German east sank to ‘zero point’.²²

Fear was also a prime motivating factor for many frontline soldiers. Aware, at least in general terms if not always specifically, of at least some of what German troops had done in the occupied Soviet Union, fear of falling into the hands of the Red Army was intense, and highly understandable. Whatever the feelings towards the British and American enemies in the west, nothing there equated to this. Alongside it went the fear of being one of the growing, countless victims of the eastern war. While fear of dying and hopes of survival were common to all soldiers, of whatever army, on whatever front, the reported casualties and intensity of the battles in the east sent a special shiver of anxiety down the backs of those learning that they had been called up to serve on the eastern front. Not surprisingly, though official reports were loath to admit it, there was growing anxiety about the call-up.²³ And anyone summoned to serve fervently hoped it would be in the west, not in the east.

As in the west, the attitudes of soldiers actually fighting at the front varied. Army reports in August and September indicated the predictable negative impact of the retreats and recognition of the great superiority of the enemy in men and heavy weapons. Young replacements and older men produced through the ‘combing out’ of the total-war recruitment actions were said to be particularly affected by the nerve-wracking intense fighting with such heavy losses. They feared another major Soviet offensive, and their powers to resist were said to be shaken. Anxiety and war-weariness were seen as the cause. ‘Serious, but nevertheless confident’ was, however, the somewhat unlikely gloss put on the mood in general. ‘Unconditional trust in the Führer’ was, of course, ritualistically asserted. But from Army Group North, cut off in the Baltic, it was reported that the known ‘Bolshevist conditions’ and the fear of never seeing the homeland again if the war were lost served to strengthen fighting morale. And those soldiers whose fighting spirit fell below expectations were subjected to increasingly ferocious discipline. Worries about the threat to East Prussia and their families were recorded from soldiers with homes in the eastern regions.

A more positive mood among the troops of the 4th Army in East Prussia at the beginning of October was said to have arisen from the stabilization of the front and better conditions for soldiers in the area. A summary of the attitude of soldiers on the Italian front the previous month almost certainly applied, too, to the troops in the east. Frontline soldiers, the report indicated, had little time for reflection. Individual events came and went in a blur. Only the general impression remained. The physical and psychological pressures of battle demanded of the soldier that he do his duty to the limits of the possible. Whatever the input of the NSFOs, their impact was short-lived. Very soon, daily worries and cares took over again. Ideals and grand causes were not at stake, the report implied. The soldier ‘fights because he is ordered to do so, and for his naked life’.²⁴

As this lapidary comment implies, for soldiers, but also for the civilian population, compulsion and duty were main reasons why people kept going. And what alternative was there? In addition came fear, and the strong feeling that the homeland – meaning, in concrete terms, families and property – had to be defended. Such sentiments could easily be exploited by the regime. But behind the propaganda, the rhetoric, the exhortations and the hectoring, belief in National Socialism, in the Party and even in the Führer was dwindling fast, impossible though it is to be precise about the levels of remaining support.

Whatever people thought, however, the omnipresence of the Party and its affiliates was sufficient to keep them in line, all the more so given the urgency of the defence measures that were implemented with all speed and pressure in the eastern regions in the wake of the Red Army’s rapid advance. A first priority was to build a network of defence fortifications and entrenchments along the eastern borders of the Reich and strengthen those already in existence. The principle of deeming specified towns or cities ‘fortresses’ to be held to the last – a tactic unsuccessful in Russia as the Red Army swept around them – was now introduced in eastern Germany as the Wehrmacht retreated. More than twenty such ‘fortresses’, including the most important and strategically valuable towns, were established in Germany and the occupied parts of Poland, with eventual disastrous consequences for the inhabitants of most of them. In addition, the organization of a huge programme of fortification work thoughout eastern Germany at breakneck speed now fell to the Party under the direction of the Gauleiter, as Reich Defence Commissars (RVKs). Over the course of the summer, before the work started to recede in the autumn, ceasing at the end of November,²⁵ around half a million Germans (many of them youths, older men, and women) and foreign workers were conscripted to do long, back-breaking daily work in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Brandenburg in building what became generally known as ‘Eastern Wall’ (the Ostwall), to complement that in the west. An estimated 200,000 were deployed in East Prussia alone. In German occupied parts of Poland (Danzig-West Prussia, the Warthegau and what was left of the General Government, the central region of Nazi-occupied Poland) the work was undertaken by Polish forced labourers.²⁶

Frontier defences in the east had been erected before the First World War. New fortifications were then constructed during the Weimar Republic, when Poland was seen as a major military threat. The pre-war years of the Third Reich had seen these extended and new defences built. Despite rapid acceleration of construction work, and one stretch of almost 80 kilometres along the Oder–Warthe rivers that was more heavily fortified than the Westwall, the defensive line was far from complete by the time war broke out. For five years thereafter, with German occupation pushed so far to the east, a heavily fortified line within the Reich frontiers seemed unnecessary. At any rate, it remained largely neglected until the collapse of Army Group Centre in summer 1944, at which point no worthwhile defences stood between the Red Army and East Prussia.²⁷ The attempt was now made to remedy this deficiency within a matter of weeks through conscripted labour and rapidly improvised organization.

On 28 July 1944, transmitting Hitler’s decree of the previous day for the construction of fortifications in the east, Guderian, the newly appointed Chief of the Army General Staff, declared that ‘the whole of eastern Germany must immediately become a single deep-echeloned fortress’. The State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, amplified the order, laying out details for implementation of the construction work to the eastern Gauleiter and Hans Frank, boss of the General Government. The fortification workers would need spades, pickaxes, blankets, eating utensils and marching rations. Their overseers were to have pistols and other weapons – a hint of the possible need for harsh action to stamp their authority on a recalcitrant workforce. The Reich Transport Ministry and railway authorities would organize transport. Building materials and equipment would come from OT offices. Horses and carts were to be used as far as possible for carrying the building materials. Rations would be allocated through provincial food offices or, in the case of the General Government, through deep inroads into the provisions of the region.²⁸

At the beginning of September, Hitler made it clear that command over the fortification work was exclusively in the hands of the Party, to be deployed by the RKVs under Bormann’s direction.²⁹ In reality, the Gauleiter, as RKVs, had a good deal of independence in the way they ran affairs in their provinces. Erich Koch, the brutal Gauleiter of East Prussia, one of Hitler’s favourite provincial chieftains, led the way in dragooning the population of his province into compulsory labour service. Already on 13 July he had decreed that the entire male population of specified districts between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five were to be conscripted with immediate effect for fortification work. Anyone defying the order would be subject to punishment by military court. Shops and businesses not absolutely necessary for the war effort were closed and their owners and workers sent to dig. Trains leaving the East Prussian border were controlled, and men taken off them and brought back for construction work.³⁰ Koch’s example was followed by the other eastern Gauleiter. A report from Königsberg in East Prussia, noted by British intelligence authorities, indicates the effect of the conscription on daily life in the province.

Great simplifications have been introduced in the everyday life of the population. In restaurants guests must go to the kitchen with their plate, so that all waiters and male kitchen staff can dig. The newspapers no longer publish regional editions but only one standard edition. Thus editors, compositors and printers are released for digging. Every business which is not of importance to the war has been closed. Every East Prussian fit for military service has been called up. The large gates of Königsberg University have been closed. The students and all men employed at the University are digging.

Even harvest workers were taken away at the most crucial point of the agricultural year to dig, though in separate waves so that the garnering of the harvest was not impaired.³¹

Anxiety probably underpinned an early readiness to help in the digging operations, notably in East Prussia, closest to the front line. Certainly, there was a positive initial response to appeals to take part as the local population, most readily members of the Hitler Youth, rallied round in an emergency, though propaganda about the enthusiasm of the diggers should be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt.³² The Party itself, though claiming there was a good deal of understanding for the necessity of the digging action, was aware of the extensive criticism of its poor organization of the entrenchment work and lack of conviction that the fortifications had any military value.³³ Practical difficulties – poor accommodation and food, transport difficulties, even a shortage of spades – and the very nature of such cripplingly hard toil, digging the baked ground hour on hour in the heat of summer, soon withered whatever good spirits had prevailed at the outset. Women in Pomerania wrote to Goebbels complaining that they had received no medical inspection before deployment, that they had to sleep on straw mats in primitive communal quarters, and that food and sanitary arrangements were lamentable. For foreign workers and prisoners of war, needless to say, the conditions were far worse.³⁴

The behaviour of Party officials and overseers often did not help. There were reports of Party officials drinking, skiving, siphoning off food and drink meant for diggers, of their high-handed behaviour and dereliction of duty setting the worst example to the conscript workers. Driving up to the columns of diggers in a car, inspecting the ranks without picking up a shovel, and bawling at elderly men and women actually doing the work was not guaranteed to encourage enthusiastic commitment to the task or endear the Party to the conscripts. Unsurprisingly, there were attempts to evade the work. Even veterans of the First World War, it was reported in East Prussia, had absconded, less than enamoured by the work they were being compelled to carry out, and worried that the front was so close. They had to be hauled back by the police.³⁵

The weeks of grinding toil by hundreds of thousands of men and women were militarily as good as worthless. Even Goebbels saw that the East Prussian fortifications erected by Koch were pointless unless troops and weaponry were poured in to hold them.³⁶ On paper, the achievements looked considerable: 400 kilometres of defences erected in Pomerania, for instance, and a 120-kilometre ring to hold five armed divisions around the newly designated fortress of Breslau.³⁷ Much was made by propaganda once the Russians had been forced back about the value of the entrenchments, eulogizing about the usefulness of all the hard work that had gone into them. But in reality, the kilometres of earthworks, entrenchments and hastily constructed, inadequately manned, fortifications were never going to stop, or even hold up, the Red Army for long. Their worth had been severely limited. And of the designated ‘fortresses’, Königsberg, it is true, only fell in April 1945, and Breslau held out until 6 May. All this meant was that the futile loss of life of civilians, let alone of front soldiers, was magnified.

If the digging marathon in the east served any purpose, it was in large part as a propaganda exercise, demonstrating the continued will to hold out. How effective the propaganda function was is difficult to assess. It has been claimed that the endeavour shown in the fortification work bolstered the patriotism of the east German population and their resolve to defend the homeland; that the communal work served as an inspiration elsewhere in Germany, underpinned faith in the Party, and boosted military morale through showing the troops that, in contrast to 1918, they had the undiluted backing of the ‘home front’. Such claims are impossible to test accurately, but almost certainly greatly exaggerated.³⁸

It would be a mistake to presume that the brash propaganda trumpeting of the fortification effort had no effect at all. Conceivably, it did help to solidify patriotic feeling in eastern Germany. And it conveyed a sense that the actions of ordinary Germans mattered in the fight to hold off the Red Army. But at most it boosted a readiness – from fear, if nothing else – to defend the homeland that was already present. Outside the eastern regions, and perhaps within them, too, people were as likely to see the frenetic entrenchments less as a heroic achievement than as a panic move, a sign that the situation was indeed extremely grave.³⁹ As for faith in the Party, this was so sharply on the wane in the summer and autumn of 1944 – whatever the lingering reserves of hope in Hitler himself – that it was as good as impossible for the fortifications programme to alter the trend, apart, perhaps, from impressing a few gullible waverers in the eastern regions by the energetic actions of Koch and other Gauleiter. Finally, while soldiers were doubtless gratified to hear of solidarity at home, it is questionable whether their fighting morale drew much inspiration from news of a huge digging programme carried out by the young, the old, and female labour on fortifications about whose defensive qualities against the might of the Red Army a level of scepticism was only too understandable.

Whatever the dubious propaganda value of the fortification drive, it was overshadowed by its objective function in providing a further vehicle for control of the population. This is not to say that many of the workers were not idealistic patriots, and not a few of them enthusiastic backers of the Party’s efforts to mobilize all that remained of the population for the task. But after the first, short-lived surge of enthusiasm, not many, it could with some justification be surmised, were true volunteers who would have come forward without being conscripted. The digging programme quite literally wore the population out, ground them down into compliance, showed them again that there was no alternative, that the Party controlled all facets of civilian life. It was a further means of trying to inculcate into the population the spirit of the ‘last stand’ – with the classic Hitlerian choice of ‘hold out’ or ‘go under’. Reluctant compliance rather than a readiness to swallow such imperatives was the stance of most ordinary citizens. Few were prepared to go under. But as the threat to the eastern frontiers of the Reich mounted, they had little choice but to fall in line with the diktats of those in power who were determining their fate.

This was the case, too, with service in the Volkssturm, launched in a fanfare of publicity on 18 October by a speech given by Himmler at Bartenstein in East Prussia and broadcast to the nation. Keitel, Guderian and Koch were present as Himmler addressed thirteen assembled companies of Volkssturm men. The date had been carefully chosen as the anniversary of the highly symbolic ‘Battle of the Nations’ in Leipzig in 1813, the clash which had brought Napoleon’s defeat on Prussian soil. The date was a crucial one in propaganda depictions, resonating in German history and evoking the legendary defence of the homeland by the Landsturm, as, faced with slavery at the hands of the French, an entire people rose up to repel the invaders. Reading out Hitler’s proclamation of the Volkssturm and reminding his audience of the significance of the anniversary, Himmler announced that the Führer had called on the people to defend the soil of their homeland. ‘We have heard from their own mouths’, he declared, ‘that we have to expect from our enemies the destruction of our country, the cutting down of our woods, the break-up of our economy, the destruction of our towns, the burning down of our villages and the extirpation of our people.’ Of course, the Jews were as ever portrayed as the root of the intended horror. Men of the Volkssturm, stated Himmler, pointing out that East Prussians had formed its first battalions, must therefore never capitulate.⁴⁰

There was for the most part a sceptical response, to judge from reports on the reception of propaganda. There was a growing feeling that ‘we are being pressed into a hopeless defence’, and the announcement of the Volkssturm was often interpreted as confirmation of the exhaustion of Germany’s forces.⁴¹ Any early enthusiasm swiftly evaporated as doubts were raised about the military value of the Volkssturm and anxieties voiced that those serving would not be covered under the international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, but would be viewed as partisans.⁴² There were fears that they would be summarily executed on capture, and the enemy would take reprisals against the civilian population – views betraying knowledge of how the Germans had themselves behaved in the occupied territories.⁴³ The regime sought to allay the anxieties and define the duties of the Volkssturm within the Hague Convention of 1907. The fears were not baseless, however, as the treatment of captured Volkssturm men by the Red Army would highlight.⁴⁴ In any case, the frequent reluctance to serve in the Volkssturm was in vain. Over the next weeks, the Party’s organizational tentacles would reach far into German civilian life to drag into service hundreds of thousands of mainly middle-aged men, badly armed and poorly equipped. Few were fired by the fanaticism demanded by the regime’s leaders. However, they could rarely avoid service. Exemptions were hard to attain. And the Volkssturm’s commanders – many of whom had some background in the military and in the Party or its affiliates – were generally far more committed than the men they led to the ideals of the organization, however limited they were in ability and competence.⁴⁵ So detachment from Nazi ideals and fanaticism was not easy in this mammoth organization in the hands of the Party with a strength of 6 million men by the end of November and potentially embracing twice as many.⁴⁶ If only a fraction of this number was actually involved in combat, the further militarization and regimentation of civilian society was massive.

The military futility and pointless heavy loss of life among Volkssturm men in action would be fully laid bare in the first months of 1945. But in East Prussia, where Koch had proposed local militias as early as July, the Volkssturm would have an earlier baptism of fire. More than a week before Himmler’s announcement of its existence, the Volkssturm had its first taste of action in the outer suburbs of the fortified Baltic port of Memel (north of East Prussia, annexed by Germany in 1939). Two lightly armed companies of Volkssturm men in civilian clothes with only green armbands to distinguish them took heavy casualties as they helped to stave off weak Soviet attempts to break the defensive perimeter until regular troops could arrive to stabilize the position.⁴⁷

Little over a week later, the Volkssturm was in action again. This time it was within the borders of East Prussia. For on 16 October the Red Army crossed the German frontier into its easternmost region. It was the start of eleven days that would leave a searing mark on the mentalities of Germans in the eastern regions of the Reich – and not just there.

III

On 5 October Soviet troops launched their attack in Memel and five days later were on the Baltic, surrounding the town. The 3rd Panzer Army, weakened though it had been, managed to hold out in the siege until reinforcements arrived, with the help, as we noted, of much battered Volkssturm units. Two days before the Red Army’s attack, local civilians were still frantically digging trenches and anti-tank ditches. The Wehrmacht wanted the area evacuated.⁴⁸ But only on 7 October were evacuation orders belatedly issued by the Party authorities. Anyone not obeying was to be treated as a traitor. Panic and chaos resulted, all the more so when the local District Leader of the Party countermanded the order and decreed that people should for the time being stay where they were. The confusion was all the greater since there had already been an earlier partial evacuation of Memel and surrounding districts in early August, but the population had returned when the danger had receded. There was initially some sense, therefore, that this, too, would prove to be a false alarm. But when the order to leave was finally given, on 9 October, it was for many already too late. Thousands were left behind, cut off by the rapidly advancing front. Many were reluctant to leave their farms unprotected against what they saw as a ‘roaming mob’ of prisoners of war and Polish workers. They missed the chance to escape. Most who could – predominantly women, children, the elderly and infirm, since men were generally held back for service in the Volkssturm and other duties – took to the road in horse-carts, or on foot, carrying with them a few possessions hastily thrown together. Rumours that the Red Army was in the immediate vicinity caused renewed panic. A sense of terror was widespread.

Explosions and fear of air raids sometimes caused the refugees to take cover where they could, in the fields away from the road. Women fell on their knees to pray. It was a race against time as main highways became cut off by Soviet troops. Abandoned wagons and household goods littered the roadside. The lucky ones, after an anxiety-ridden wait on the shores, finally crammed into a fleet of little boats that ferried them, though without their livestock and most of their possessions, to temporary safety over the abutting saltwater inlet, the Kurisches Haff, to improvised billets in parts of East Prussia. Some sought to swim across, and were drowned. The last most of those fleeing saw of Memel was a red glow in the night sky. An estimated third of the population fell into Soviet hands. There were stories of plunder, rape and murder by Red Army soldiers.⁴⁹

The fate of Memel marked the start of more than two weeks of dread and horror for the population close to the East Prussian border. Worse was yet to come. As General Guderian later commented, ‘what happened in East Prussia was an indication to the inhabitants of the rest of Germany of their fate in the event of a Russian victory.’⁵⁰

On 16 October, the Red Army began its assault on East Prussia itself amid a barrage of artillery fire over a 40-kilometre stretch of the front and intensive air raids on border towns. There was as good as no defence offered by the Luftwaffe, and the German 4th Army, severely weakened in the collapse of Army Group Centre in the summer, was forced to pull back westwards. On 18 October Soviet troops advanced across the German frontier. Within three days they had penetrated German lines and forced their way some 60 kilometres into the Reich across a front of around 150 kilometres. The border towns of Eydtkau, Ebenrode and Goldap fell into Soviet hands, while Gumbinnen and Angerapp narrowly escaped that fate, though the former was heavily damaged through air attacks and Soviet troops reached the outskirts. The Soviets reached as far as the village of Nemmersdorf in the early morning of 21 October where, despite their finding a key bridge over the river Angerapp intact, the offensive halted.

The leadership of Army Group Centre had expected that the Soviet attack, when it came, would be the prelude to a huge offensive that might break through into Germany’s heartlands. As it was, the Soviets’ pause in Nemmersdorf gave the 4th Army the opportunity to regroup, muster its strength and, with panzer reinforcements, attempt a daring and successful encirclement manoeuvre against superior forces that took the attackers completely by surprise and inflicted heavy losses. Soviet commanders, impressed by the Wehrmacht’s counter-offensive, immediately went on the defensive and pulled back their troops. By 27 October their offensive was abandoned. On 3 November German troops freed Goldap – reduced to ruins and plundered by Red Army soldiers – and two days later the ‘first battle of East Prussia’ was over, at a cost of extremely high losses on both sides. A highly damaging Soviet breakthrough to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg had been prevented. German soldiers – especially those who came from the eastern regions – despite often limited training and inadequate weaponry, had fought furiously to fend off the invaders. Even so, a border strip of East Prussia, 100 kilometres broad and up to 27 deep, stayed in Soviet occupation. The front in this area stayed stable until January.⁵¹ But East Prussians were from now on a highly endangered species.

The reason why the Soviet attack had halted after occupying a good position on reaching Nemmersdorf became plain when German troops were able to retake the village on 23 October, barely forty-eight hours after it had fallen to the Red Army. What the German soldiers found awaiting them was a scene of horror. The name of Nemmersdorf soon became familiar to most Germans. It told them what they might expect if the Red Army were to conquer the Reich.

The fate that would overtake Nemmersdorf and the inhabitants of neighbouring districts was compounded by the lamentable failure of the Nazi authorities – repeated with even graver consequences a few months later – to evacuate the population in good time.⁵² Evacuation in the whole imperilled area was chaotic. Koch was the paradigm example of power draining from the centre to the provincial Party chieftains, a development that would intensify generally in early 1945. Abetted by his deputy, Paul Dargel, he had complete control over evacuation measures. Supported by Hitler, Koch refused to countenance early evacuation because of the fears that it would begin a stampede out of the province, and would send defeatist signals to the rest of the Reich. The population were to remain as long as possible as a sign of unwavering morale and determination. The Wehrmacht’s own wishes to have the area cleared were ignored.⁵³ The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Colonel-General Reinhardt, was himself reduced to paroxysms of futile rage at Koch’s high-handed behaviour in the region.⁵⁴ When evacuation orders were finally given, they were predictably chaotic in their execution. Dargel and other Party functionaries could not be located for hours. A District Leader briefly emerged, only to disappear into a local pub and drink himself into a stupor. A lorry commandeered to help with the evacuation did not turn up; it had allegedly been sequestered by a Party office to carry off stores of food and drink. At the most critical time, Party functionaries – the only people who could give orders – had failed miserably in their duties.⁵⁵

Nemmersdorf, the most westerly point of the Soviet incursion, was heavily involved in the belated, chaotic evacuation. As Soviet troops approached, inhabitants of nearby towns and villages fled in panic, and at the last minute. Horse-drawn covered wagons from all around queued to cross Nemmersdorf’s crucial bridge. People took what few possessions they could and fled for their lives. Helped by the cover of thick autumnal mists, most in fact managed to get across the bridge to safety further westwards even in the final hours before the Red Army arrived. But for some, inhabitants both of Nemmersdorf and of other nearby townships, it was too late. They woke in the early hours of 21 October to find Soviet soldiers already in their villages.⁵⁶

The battle-hardened soldiers of the Red Army had fought their way westwards out of their own country, through Poland and now, for the first time, into the country of the hated enemy. As they had advanced through wastelands of death and destruction, they had witnessed the legacy of the savage brutality of German conquest and subjugation and the scorched-earth devastation of a once imperious army in headlong retreat. They saw the unmistakable signs of the terrible suffering of their own people. Soviet propaganda directly encouraged drastic retribution. ‘Take merciless revenge on the fascist child murderers and executioners, pay them back for the blood and tears of Soviet mothers and children,’ ran one typical proclamation in October 1944.⁵⁷ ‘Kill. There is nothing which the Germans aren’t guilty of’ was the exhortation of another.⁵⁸ Reaching German soil, and encountering for the first time a civilian enemy population, pent-up hatreds exploded in violent revenge. As German troops moved into villages and townships retaken by the Wehrmacht after days of Soviet occupation, they came across the corpses of murdered civilians, grim indicators of the atrocities that had taken place. The worst had taken place in Nemmersdorf itself, which came to symbolize these early atrocities of the Red Army.

Details of what exactly happened in Nemmersdorf, however, remain murky. From the outset, fact became difficult to separate from propaganda. Some testimony, given a few years afterwards, which left a lasting mark on the gruesome imagery of events, is of doubtful veracity. According to the most vivid account, provided some nine years later, a Volkssturm man whose company had been ordered to assist in the clearing up of Nemmersdorf after the attack spoke of finding several naked women nailed up through their hands to barn doors in crucifix positions, of an old woman whose head had been split in two by an axe or spade, and of seventy-two women and children bestially murdered by the Red Army. All the women had allegedly been raped. The bodies had been exhumed and the findings established, he claimed, by an international commission of doctors.⁵⁹

A report compiled by the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police), dispatched on 25 October, two days after the Soviet troops had left the village, to interrogate any witnesses and discover what had happened, paints, however, a somewhat different picture – though one which was grim enough. There had been plundering, the report registered, and two women had been raped. The corpses of twenty-six persons, mainly elderly men and women, though also a few children, were found. Some lay in an open grave, others in a ditch, by the roadside or in houses. Most had been killed by single shots to the head, though the skull of one had been smashed in. But there were no lurid descriptions of crucifixions. A German doctor from a regiment in the district had inspected the corpses. Himmler’s own personal doctor, Professor Gebhardt, had, remarkably, also found his way to Nemmersdorf within a day of the Soviet troops leaving, though, presumably, someone of his rank was not needed simply to establish the cause of death. Already, it seems, leading Nazi authorities had earmarked Nemmersdorf for special notoriety. Propagandists were swiftly on the scene following the recapture of the area, keen to exploit Soviet ill-deeds to bolster the German determination to fight, and not slow to exaggerate where it served their purposes.⁶⁰

Naturally, German propaganda made the most of the exposé of Soviet atrocities. The most grisly scenes may have been a fabrication. On the other hand, the atrocities were not simply a propaganda invention or later concoction. General Werner Kreipe, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, visiting the Panzerkorps ‘Hermann Göring’ near Gumbinnen and in the Nemmersdorf area within hours of the Red Army pulling out, claimed in his diary entry that bodies of women and children were nailed to barn doors, and ordered the outrages to be photographed as proof.⁶¹ If the photographs were taken, they have long since disappeared. A machine-gunner among the German troops who entered Nemmersdorf on 22 October recorded in the diary jottings he kept secreted in his uniform the discovery of ‘terrible incidents involving mangled bodies’, some mutilated, one old man pierced with a pitchfork and left hanging on a barn door, sights ‘so terrible that some of our recruits run out in panic and vomit’.⁶² The numbers killed in Nemmersdorf may have been smaller than alleged, though some of the more inflated figures probably included those also killed by Red Army soldiers in other nearby localities.⁶³ Conceivably, too, there were fewer rapes than claimed, though some certainly took place and the later behaviour of the Red Army on its passage through eastern Germany offers no grounds to presume the best of its soldiers. Colonel-General Reinhardt visited the district on 25 October. He wrote to his wife the following day that ‘the Bolsheviks had ravaged like wild beasts, including murder of children, not to mention acts of violence against women and girls, whom they had also murdered’. He was deeply shaken by what he had seen.⁶⁴ Whatever doubts are raised about the actual scale of the murders and rapes, and necessary though it is to remember the nature and purpose of propaganda exploitation, the atrocities were no mere figment of propaganda. Terrible things did happen in and around Nemmersdorf.

Moreover, whatever the truth about the precise details of the atrocities, propaganda acquired a reality of its own. In terms of the impact of Nemmersdorf, its likely effect was to underpin the determination of soldiers to fight on at all costs in the east, to struggle to the utmost to avoid being overrun by the Red Army and to encourage civilians to take flight at the earliest opportunity. The image of Nemmersdorf turned out to be more important than precise factual accuracy about its horrific reality.

IV

The propaganda machinery was soon in action. Goebbels instantly recognized the gift that had come his way. ‘These atrocities are indeed dreadful,’ he noted in his diary, after Göring had telephoned him with the details, ‘I’ll make use of them for a big press campaign.’ This would ensure that the last doubters were ‘convinced of what the German people can expect if Bolshevism really gets hold of the Reich’.⁶⁵ Head of the Reich Press Office Otto Dietrich gave out instructions for the presentation of the story by the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB; German News Agency), responsible for circulating news items within and outside Germany. ‘It is specially desirable’, the directive ran, ‘that the DNB report brings out the horrific Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia in a big and effective way and comments on them with extreme harshness. The monstrous Soviet bloodlust must be denounced in the layout and headlines.’ It was not a matter of attacks on big landowners and industrialists, it had to be stressed, but on ordinary people, targeted for annihilation by Bolshevism.⁶⁶

The headlines duly followed. ‘The Raving of the Soviet Beasts’ bellowed the Nazi main newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, on 27 October.⁶⁷ ‘Bolshevik Bloodlust Rages in East Prussian Border Area’, and ‘Bestial Murderous Terror in East Prussia’ proclaimed regional newspapers in eastern Germany.⁶⁸ Other organs of the coordinated press followed suit.⁶⁹ Maximum shock was the intention in the stories of plunder, destruction, rape and murder. Commissions of doctors, it was said, had confirmed the murder of sixty-one men, women and children and the rape of most of the women. There was reference to a crucifixion. Photographed lines of corpses conveyed graphic images of the horror.⁷⁰ A front-page photograph of murdered children in the Völkischer Beobachter had an accompanying warning of what would happen if Germans did not sustain their defences and fighting spirit.⁷¹

The mood in eastern parts of Germany made a propaganda campaign on the revelations from Nemmersdorf timely. Reports from propaganda offices had acknowledged, before news of Nemmersdorf had broken, that ‘the gains of territory by the Bolsheviks in East Prussia had produced deepest consternation’, all the more so since Gauleiter Koch had declared in a speech only days earlier that no more land would be given up to the enemy. Bitter reproaches were also made against Koch by East Prussian refugees, arriving in Danzig in a pitiable state and saying that they had first been told by retreating soldiers that ‘the Bolsheviks were on their heels’.⁷² It was in this climate of wavering morale that Goebbels saw the propaganda value of the Red Army atrocities.

The sensationalized propaganda barrage was, however, less successful than Goebbels had expected. The first reactions indicated that there was some scepticism about reportage seen as a propaganda manufacture.⁷³ In this Goebbels was hoist with his own petard. Earlier in the month he had given directions to his propaganda specialists to portray ‘the conditions in the areas occupied by the Anglo-Americans exactly as dramatically and drastically as in those occupied by the Soviets’. This had been a response to accounts ‘that our people, should it come to it, would prefer to fall to Anglo-American rather than Soviet occupation’. Such a possibility could not be left open to the ordinary citizen – ‘the little man’ – because it would reduce the determination to fight. ‘On the contrary, he must know… that if the Reich is lost, to whichever enemy partner, there is no possibility of existence for him.’⁷⁴

In reality, the Nazi authorities were well aware that the people of those parts of the west that had already fallen to the Americans had been on the whole well enough treated and had often, indeed, welcomed the enemy and attuned rapidly to occupation.⁷⁵ Goebbels himself recognized that reports of atrocities committed by British and American troops were not believed, and that it was easy for people – apart from Party functionaries – to give themselves up to the British or Americans since they would be treated leniently. People thought the Americans especially were not as bad as they had been portrayed in the German press.⁷⁶ Propaganda reports were now telling Goebbels that evacuees from the west were spreading the feeling that ‘peace at any price’ would be preferable to the continuation of the war.⁷⁷ And, certainly in parts of the Reich far away from the travails of the east German population, people were inclined to see the accounts of refugees as exaggerated.⁷⁸

Propaganda backfired, too, in another way. One report commented ‘that the highlighting of Bolshevik atrocities in the East Prussian border areas’ was rejected ‘since the propaganda about Nemmersdorf signified in a certain sense a self-incrimination of the Reich because the population had not been evacuated on time’.⁷⁹ The allegations were countered only with weak (and false) arguments which claimed that the area directly behind the fighting zone had long been evacuated, that the surprise Soviet assault had overrun refugee treks but that the local population of Nemmersdorf had already left, that the numbers evacuated by the Party had been entirely satisfactory and proof of its energetic and successful work, and – with some contradiction – that people had had to work behind the lines as long as possible to bring in the harvest that was much needed for provisioning the rest of the Reich with food.⁸⁰ All in all, Goebbels himself was eventually forced to concede that ‘the atrocities reports are not bought from us any longer. In particular, the reports from Nemmersdorf have only convinced a part of the population.’⁸¹

Elsewhere, far away from the eastern borders of the Reich, another – extremely telling – reason was given for being unimpressed by the horror propaganda about Nemmersdorf. The SD office in Stuttgart reported in early November that people were calling the press stories ‘shameless’ and asking what the intention of the leadership might be in publishing pictures of the atrocities. Surely the Reich’s leaders must realize, the report went on,

that every thinking person, seeing these gory victims, will immediately contemplate the atrocities that we have perpetrated on enemy soil, and even in Germany. Have we not slaughtered Jews in their thousands? Don’t soldiers tell over and again that Jews in Poland had to dig their own graves? And what did we do with the Jews who were in the concentration camp [Natzweiler] in Alsace? The Jews are also human beings. By acting in this way, we have shown the enemy what they might do to us in the event of their victory…. We can’t accuse the Russians of behaving just as gruesomely towards other peoples as our own people have done against their own Germans.

There was no need to get too worked up ‘because they have killed a few people in East Prussia. After all, what does human life amount to here in Germany.’⁸²

The Reich was a large country. And Stuttgart was almost as far from Nemmersdorf as it was possible to be. Revealing as these reported remarks are about knowledge of German crimes against humanity, especially of genocidal actions towards Jews, the people of Stuttgart could feel that there was much distance between themselves and whatever Soviet atrocities had taken place on the Reich’s easternmost borders. The population of the eastern areas of Germany had every reason to be more alarmed at the proximity of the Red Army. For ordinary civilians, helplessly squeezed between the refusal of the Party authorities to evacuate them westwards and the oncoming assault from demonized enemy forces, the horror propaganda from Nemmersdorf almost certainly helped to induce a sense of intense fear. Certainly, there was profound relief when the Wehrmacht beat off the incursion and some stability returned to the area.⁸³ In trumpeting the successes in repelling the enemy, propaganda did not hesitate to emphasize the value of all the work that had gone into building the fortifications in the east, which, it was claimed, had held up the Red Army. The Volkssturm engagement was also glorified.⁸⁴ But Goebbels was keen not to overplay the ‘miracle of East Prussia’. It was important, he remarked, ‘not to praise the day before evening’.⁸⁵ This was a sensible sentiment. When the Red Army returned to East Prussia, this time to stay, in January 1945, blind panic, not determination to fight to the last, characterized the behaviour of the vast majority of the civilian population of the region.

It would be as well, however, not to presume that scepticism or cynicism about the propaganda reports about Nemmersdorf meant that Goebbels’ efforts had been fruitless. Contrary to indications that the atrocity stories had failed in their impact, the summary report from propaganda offices in mid-November claimed that those who had initially doubted the written accounts had altered their views in the light of the published photographs. People were ‘filled with hatred’, ready to fight to the extreme.⁸⁶ However varied the response of the civilian population had been, it seems certain that for two groups in particular – groups that bore power – Nemmersdorf carried a message less of panic than of the need to hold out at any cost.

For representatives, high and low, of the Nazi Party and its affiliates, the violence and cruelty of the invaders in East Prussia had offered a foretaste of what seemed certain to await them should they fall into Soviet hands. Hitler himself reacted characteristically to the news and pictures from Nemmersdorf. ‘He swore revenge and fanned the flames of hatred,’ his most junior secretary, Traudl Junge, later wrote. ‘ “They’re not human beings any more, they’re animals from the steppes of Asia, and the war I am waging against them is a war for the dignity of European mankind,” he fumed. “We have to be hard and fight with all the means at our disposal.” ’⁸⁷ Hitler, least of all, was under no illusions about his fate should the Soviets capture him. On no account could that be allowed to happen. The route he would eventually take out of catastrophic defeat was already prefigured. He had informed the Gauleiter of Vienna and former Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, as early as mid-1943 that the only way he could end the war was by shooting himself in the head.⁸⁸

He extended the implications of his own fate to that of the German people. He had told his assembled Gauleiter as long ago as October 1943 that the German people had burnt their bridges; the only way was forward. Their very existence was at stake.⁸⁹ He was not alone in the sentiment that there was nothing to lose. Goebbels was glad that bridges had been burnt; it bound people to the cause. In informing Party leaders of the mass killing of the Jews the previous autumn, Himmler had also been deliberately spreading the complicity, so that those present knew that there was no escape from the conspiracy of the implicated.⁹⁰ At lower levels of the Party, too, the behaviour of many functionaries on the approach of the enemy – attempts to conceal membership of Nazi organizations, burning insignia, hiding uniforms and, most commonly, flight – betrayed their anxieties about what awaited them if they fell into enemy hands. But where the petty apparatchiks might hope for safety in obscurity, the Nazi bigwigs were left with no obvious choice other than to hold out. Desperation bred determination.

The other crucial sector in which the impact of Nemmersdorf and all that it signified was unmistakable was within the army, especially among those soldiers who came from eastern parts of Germany. In the west, the collapse following the Allied breakthrough in France had brought disarray and damaged morale. The recovery there could not conceal the fervent desire among many soldiers for a swift end to the purgatory of continued fighting. It was possible to see falling into enemy hands in the west as a release. The likely death sentence appeared to be to fight on rather than end up a captive. In the east, the feelings were very different. Colonel-General Reinhardt reflected undoubted widespread sentiments when he saw what the Soviet troops had done in East Prussia almost immediately following their expulsion from the area. He wrote to his wife of the ‘rage, the hatred, which fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen’. ‘There can be no other aim for us’, he added, ‘than to hold out and to protect our homeland.’ For soldiers from East Prussia and neighbouring regions, it was no longer a matter of abstract patriotic defence of the homeland, however, let alone fighting for the cause of the Führer. The lives and well-being of their loved ones were at stake. The fury and thirst for revenge at what had been done was palpable. ‘I was there yesterday [25 October 1944] in this area to visit my troops after their successful attack,’ Reinhardt went on, and ‘experienced the blind fury with which they have slain entire regiments’.⁹¹

A glimpse, if at a later date, of the impact of events in East Prussia on the mentalities of ordinary soldiers far from the areas in possession of the Red Army is provided by the diary of a member of the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief’s staff in Norway. The reports of ‘murder, torture, rapes, abduction to bordellos, deportations’ had a devasting effect on the troops, he recalled. It encouraged the ‘mystical belief’ that salvation would come at the last. Those with a clearer view of the likely future kept quiet since maintaining the discipline that, below the surface, had weakened was the imperative, and this seemed feasible only ‘with the aid of false hopes’. Concern for relatives was, however, growing by the hour.⁹²

Of course, soldiers, even those from the directly affected eastern border areas of the Reich, did not all think alike. But sufficient numbers fighting on the eastern front, and also many of those transferred to the west, appear to have been convinced that they were indeed engaged, as Hitler, Goebbels and others kept reminding them, in a struggle for their very existence, and that of their comrades and loved ones back home. The Soviet incursion served as a graphically horrible reinforcement of existing stereotypes about the ‘Bolsheviks’.⁹³ It was not in the first instance a matter of firm ideological belief in Nazi doctrine or the redemptive powers of the Führer.⁹⁴ It was simply a belief that, in the east at least, it was a life-or-death struggle against barbaric enemies. And for those less than wholly convinced, there was the intensified apparatus of repression, control and severe punishment within the Wehrmacht itself. A rising trend in death sentences for desertion, unwillingness to fight, undermining morale and other offences mirrored the decline in Germany’s military fortunes.⁹⁵

The ‘war of annihilation’ on the eastern front had always been qualitatively different from the nature of the conflict in the west. The ideological confrontation in the east, the savagery of the fighting on both sides, the ‘barbarisation of warfare’⁹⁶ that openly targeted the wholesale destruction of civilian life, and, not least, the genocidal dimension present from the launch of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in June 1941, had no real equivalents in the west, even though their impact was felt throughout the German-occupied parts of the European continent. This is not to underplay the severity of the bitter fighting in the west, such as in Normandy following the Allied landings, where German troops, certainly down to the collapse in mid-August, had fought tenaciously and with losses that for a time matched the rate of attrition in the east.⁹⁷ Nor is it to forget the harshness of civilian life under German occupation beyond eastern Europe, let alone the tentacles of genocidal policy that reached out into all corners of the Nazi empire. The subjugated peoples of the Balkans, Greece, Italy (in the last phase of the war) and other countries suffered grievously from mounting atrocities and merciless reprisals for any form of resistance as occupying German forces became more desperate. The Germans perpetrated atrocities in the west, too, most horrifically the massacre by the Waffen-SS of hundreds of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane in France in June 1944. But what was rare in the west was the norm in the east. Awareness of the fundamentally different character of the war in east and west had been recognized throughout German society since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The incursion of the Red Army onto German soil, and the terrible experiences for the civilian population that ensued, now sharpened the perceptions of that division between eastern and western fronts, both for soldiers and civilians.

For the latter, experiences of the war in the west were now almost entirely dominated by the wanton destruction and terror from the skies. Goebbels’ postbag was almost exclusively taken up with letters – which he thought ‘to some extent alarming’ – about the effects of the air raids and the despair that there was no defence against them. What was the use of morale, the letter-writers were asking, if the bombing was wrecking the means to carry on the fight? The letters, Goebbels remarked, reflected a worrying level of apathy in continuing the struggle.⁹⁸ For most people in the western regions so badly afflicted by the bombing, the end of the war could not come soon enough. It would mean liberation from the misery. True, few preferred the prospect of life under an occupying force. But life would nevertheless go on. Propaganda claims that conquest by the western Allies would destroy German existence were widely disbelieved. There was little fear of the Americans or British. The fear here was of the bombers. ‘Fear, fear, fear, nothing else is known to me,’ wrote one mother in September 1944, worried sick about her daughter at school as bombers crossed the skies in broad daylight, and anxious too about her husband at the front. At least he was in the west, she wrote. ‘To fall into the hands of the Soviets would mean the end.’⁹⁹

In the eastern regions, fear of the Soviets was all-encompassing, and borne out by Nemmersdorf and what that signified. It encouraged the readiness among civilians to dig ditches, undergo any necessary privations and do all that was humanly possible to fend off the worst. It also produced mass panic when occupation was imminent. Naturally, people in these regions, too, desperately wanted the war to end. But for most of them, still largely unaffected by the bombing that was a daily scourge for the western population, the end of the war in any acceptable way had to entail release from the dreadful fear of a Soviet takeover and saving their families, possessions and homeland from occupation by a hated and feared enemy. So desire for a rapid end to the terrible conflict was mixed with the desire for the war to continue until those ends were attained. This meant that hopes had to be invested in the capacity of the Wehrmacht to continue the fight and to stave off the worst.

For soldiers, the divide between east and west was little different. Certainly, troops on the western front fought doggedly and resolutely. According to later reflections of a high-ranking officer under Model’s command, they had no great ideals any longer, though there was often still some flickering belief in Hitler and hopes in the promised miracle weapons. Most of all, they had nothing more to lose.¹⁰⁰ Their fighting qualities were often grudgingly admired by the western Allies. But outright fanaticism was mainly to be found among units of the Waffen-SS. And, for most soldiers, the prospect of capture was not the end of the world. On the eastern front, fanaticism, though not omnipresent, was far more commonplace. The mere thought of falling into Soviet hands meant that holding out was an imperative. No quarter could be expected from the enemy. Nemmersdorf showed, it seemed, that fears of Soviet occupation were more than justified, that propaganda imagery of ‘Bolshevik bestiality’ was correct. The war in the east could not be given up. There could be no contemplation of surrender when what was in store was so unimaginably terrible.

V

Increasingly dreadful though the predicament was of the German population, bombed incessantly in the west and living in terror of Soviet invasion in the east, the fate of Nazism’s prime ideological target, the Jews, was infinitely worse.

Hitler had sought in the spring to harden fighting morale and commitment to Nazi principles of all-out racial struggle when he addressed a large gathering of generals and other officers about to head for the front. He told them how essential it had been to deal so ruthlessly with the Jews, whose victory in the war would bring the destruction of the German people. The entire bestiality of Bolshevism, he ranted, had been a product of the Jews. He pointed to the danger to Germany posed by Hungary, a state he depicted as completely under Jewish domination, but added that he had now intervened – through the occupation of the country that had taken place in March – and that the ‘problem’ would soon be solved there, too. The military commanders interrupted the speech on several occasions with rapturous applause.¹⁰¹ They were being made complicit through their knowledge of what had happened to the Jews in much of Europe and was now happening in Hungary.

In the summer of 1944, as the Red Army was smashing through Army Group Centre in Belorussia, trainloads of Jews were still being ferried from Hungary to their deaths in the massive extermination unit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Upper Silesia. By the time the deportations were stopped in early July by a Hungarian leadership responding to the mounting pressure from abroad, the Nazi assault on the largest remaining Jewish community in Europe had accounted for over 430,000 Jews.¹⁰² The crematoria in Auschwitz struggled to keep up with the numbers being gassed to death – more than 10,000 a day that summer.¹⁰³ At the end of July, the Red Army, advancing through Poland, had liberated Majdanek near Lublin, and encountered for the first time the monstrosity of the death camps, publicizing the findings in the world’s press (though few in Germany had access to this).¹⁰⁴ Auschwitz-Birkenau was, however, still carrying out its grisly work. With the closure of Belz˙ec, Sobibor and Treblinka in 1943, and a final burst of exterminatory work at Chełmno in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp, was the last in operation. Jews from the Łódz´ ghetto in Poland were gassed there in August; transports from Slovakia and the camp at Theresienstadt on what had once been Czech territory arrived in September and October. In November, satisfied that the ‘Jewish Question’ had, to all intents and purposes, been solved through the killing of millions and anxious at the growing proximity of the Red Army, Himmler ordered the gassing installations to be demolished.¹⁰⁵

It is striking how little thought of what might be happening to Jews appears to have impinged upon the consciousness of Germans, wholly and not unnaturally preoccupied with their own suffering and anxieties. Propaganda continued to pour out its anti-Jewish vitriol, blaming Jews for the war, and linking them with Germany’s destruction.¹⁰⁶ But these were by now weary platitudinous abstractions. Most ordinary citizens appear to have given no consideration to the actual fate of the Jews or to have pondered much about what might have happened to them. Relatively few people within Germany had first-hand, detailed knowledge of the murderous events that continued to unfold to the east; the ‘Final Solution’ was, of course, officially still preserved as a closely guarded state secret. But, in any case, overwhelmed by their own anxieties, few Germans were interested in what was happening, far away, to an unloved, where not thoroughly hated, minority.

For most, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, apart from the nagging worry that the ill-deeds perpetrated by German overlords might well come back to haunt them in defeat and occupation. This concern was present in two ways, both more subliminal than overt. As the reported comments from Stuttgart, referred to earlier, indicate, there was a gathering sense that Germany was now reaping what it had sown, that the misery its population was undergoing amounted to retribution for what had been done to the Jews and others. And another sentiment not infrequently encountered in this period was that the Jews would return with the occupying forces to take their revenge. The sentiment, commonplace enough, was directly expressed in one letter home from the front in August 1944. ‘You know that the Jew will exact his bloody revenge, mainly on Party people. Unfortunately, I was one of those who wore the Party uniform. I’ve already regretted it. I urge you to get rid of the uniform, it doesn’t matter where, even if you have to burn the lot.’¹⁰⁷ Not a few, especially no doubt among hardened Nazi believers, felt that the bombing and destruction of German towns and cities itself amounted to that revenge. Incessant Nazi propaganda about the power of world Jewry had made a lasting mark.¹⁰⁸

For the few Jews remaining within the Reich, living as pariahs, keen to keep a low profile, with almost no contact with non-Jews, it was a shadowy world, a completely uncertain, highly precarious, anxiety-ridden existence – though in ways that contrasted with the anxieties and uncertainties of the mass of the population. The academic Victor Klemperer, an intelligent observer living in Dresden whose marriage to a non-Jew had enabled him to avoid deportation, was full of apprehension simply at the late return of his wife from a rare and brief absence from their home. She was carrying parts of the secret diary he was keeping to be hidden by a friend in Pirna, not far away. If it should fall into the hands of the authorities it would spell death not just for himself, but for his wife and for friends he had mentioned by name.¹⁰⁹ He and his wife did share with the mass of the population the fear of bombing. However, here too there were major differences. Bombing for Nazism’s victims was a sign of Germany’s impending defeat and personal liberation from a terroristic regime.¹¹⁰ But Klemperer’s existential fear was that he would survive a raid, be evacuated, separated from his wife and sent somewhere to be gassed.¹¹¹ There was anxiety, too, shared with friends, about surviving another winter of war with provisions of food and fuel scarcely sufficient to keep a person alive. ‘Another winter is a horrible prospect,’ he wrote.¹¹² Another acquaintance looked grimly into the future, foreseeing malnutrition, shortage of medicines, spread of epidemic diseases, no end to the war and eventually death for all remaining bearers of the yellow star. Klemperer was aware, if without detail, of the fate of the Jews of eastern Europe. In these very days he was given another report by a soldier on leave of ‘gruesome murders of Jews in the east’.¹¹³

His reaction to the events in East Prussia also contrasted with that of the non-Jewish population. While they had their fears of Bolshevism confirmed, his own worry was what the implications were for Jews. He remarked on the new agitation against Jews unleashed by Martin Mutschmann, the Gauleiter of Saxony, then added: ‘and the Bolshevik atrocities in East Prussia, about which the people probably believed, could be turned against us’.¹¹⁴

For the countless other victims of the regime – Jews, hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, more than 7 million foreign workers and prisoners of war,¹¹⁵ and further millions of former political opponents of the Nazis – the end of the war was a moment they yearned for. In autumn 1944, however, that end was still not in sight. Their misery was set to go on.

VI

Intense war-weariness was by now widespread throughout much of German society, within the civilian population and also among ordinary soldiers. One keen foreign observer in Berlin recalled, long after the events, his sense that autumn that Germans felt themselves to be in an avalanche gathering pace as it headed for the abyss. What made them carry on was a question repeatedly in his mind and that of his associates. Beyond terror he thought ‘inertia and habit’ – apathy and the need for some normality, a search for routine even in the midst of extreme abnormality, which he saw as ‘not a specific German, but a universal characteristic’ – provided some explanation.¹¹⁶ To such speculation could be added the sheer debilitating lethargy that arose from constant intense anxiety about the fate of loved ones, ever-present fear of bombing, the daily dislocations of sheltering from (or clearing up after) air raids, overwork and exhaustion, the queuing for greatly reduced rations, malnutrition, and the constant sense of helpless exposure to events beyond anyone’s control. Since there was no option, no obvious course of action open to individuals that would not result in self-destruction and would in any case change nothing, people simply got on with their lives as best they could.

Politically, the war-weariness meant extensive and growing aversion to the Nazi regime, though with no potential to turn sentiment into action. Not just the Nazi Party, but Hitler himself was drawn into the front line of criticism for bringing war to Germany and causing such misery.¹¹⁷ An outward sign was that the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting was disappearing.¹¹⁸ ‘Providence has determined the destruction of the German people, and Hitler is the executor of this will,’ was said by one SD station at the beginning of November to be a common view.¹¹⁹ Except in such negative ways, as a cause of the horror and obstruction to ending it, Hitler, once almost deified by millions, had come by now to play little overt part in people’s consciousness.

A dwindling proportion of Germans were, it is true, still unbending in their support for the regime, retaining a fanatical determination to fight to the last. Most, however, increasingly saw themselves as victims of Hitler and his regime, often now overlooking how they had in better times idolized their leader and cheered his successes, and how their own treatment of others was rebounding in misery for themselves. The war had come home to Germany, a battered, broken country, its industrial and transport framework collapsing, besieged by economically and militarily superior forces to the east and west. Whatever hopes had been invested in ‘wonder weapons’ had largely evaporated. Only further devastation lay in store. Most people simply wanted the war to end – and hoped that Anglo-American occupation would keep the Bolsheviks from their throats.¹²⁰

Such feelings, if not universal, were widely held – though to no avail. They were not shared by those in power – by the regime’s leadership, the High Command of the Wehrmacht, military commanders, and those directing the Party, whether at the centre or in the provinces. Moreover, though the system had taken a terrible pounding through military defeats and relentless bombing, it still continued – more or less – to function. Astonishing resilience and even more remarkable improvisation enabled state, Party and military bureaucracies to operate, if not normally, then still with some effectiveness. Above all, the mechanisms of control and repression were in place. No organizational capacity to challenge them existed.

And at the very pinnacle of the regime, there was, as always, not the slightest inclination to contemplate either negotiation or surrender. Hitler made this plain, yet again, in his proclamation of 12 November.¹²¹ He left no one in any doubt: as long as he lived, the war would go on. He had, in fact, been planning for weeks what, given the resources available, would almost certainly be a final, desperate attempt to turn the tide. Remaining on the defensive could prolong the conflict, he reckoned, but would never wrest the initiative from the enemy. A decisive strike was imperative. If such a venture were to be attempted, the imperilled eastern front appeared to be the obvious choice. After all, the prospect of a Bolshevik breakthrough and ultimate victory was too ghastly for anyone to contemplate. The Army Chief of Staff, Guderian, responsible for the eastern front, put the case strongly. But against Guderian’s advice, Hitler was adamant that an offensive would have the greatest chance of success, not somewhere along the extensive eastern front, but at a specific vulnerable point of the Allied lines in the west, with the intention of driving on to Antwerp.¹²² Inflicting an incisive defeat on the western Allies would not simply be crucial for the war in the west; it would also revive morale and then allow forces to be transferred to the east to bolster the chances of repelling the expected winter offensive of the Red Army. If it failed, however, not only would the western Allies be able to continue their march on the borders of the Reich against a greatly weakened Wehrmacht, but the eastern front would be left enfeebled and exposed.

It was, as all in the know could see, a highly risky strategy. A betting man would not have put much of a wager on its chances of success. But, from Hitler’s perspective, it was almost all that was left. ‘If it doesn’t succeed, I see no other possibility of bringing the war to a favourable conclusion,’ he told Speer.¹²³ On 16 December, the new offensive was unleashed on the Americans with unexpected ferocity. Germany’s last serious military hope of affecting the outcome of the war now lay in the balance.