6

Terror Comes Home

The Führer expects that the Gauleiter will implement the task placed before them with the necessary severity and consistency and ruthlessly suppress every sign of disintegration, cowardice and defeatism with the death sentences of the summary courts martial. Anyone not prepared to fight for his people but who stabs it in the back in its gravest hour does not deserve to live and must fall to the executioner.

Bormann’s directive on the establishment of summary courts martial, 15 February 1945

I

For the mass of the German population, the consequences of the inability to repel the enemy in the west through the Ardennes offensive had still not sunk in before the onslaught from the east in the second half of January 1945. The traumatic impact of this calamity now brought home to almost everyone that the end of the war was approaching; that Germany faced total defeat and enemy occupation in the near future. The days were plainly numbered for a regime that in ever more people’s eyes had brought such misery upon the country. With this recognition, the signs of disintegration within the civilian population and among ordinary soldiers started to mount. The regime responded in characteristic fashion: by hugely stepping up the repression at home.

Of course, repression had been an intrinsic part of the Nazi regime from the outset. The legal profession had fully collaborated in the escalating persecution and responded at every stage to the extra-legal violence of the police and the Party’s organizations by intensifying its own repression. But the repression of the pre-war years, omnipresent though it was, had concentrated on ‘outsider’ groups. The regime’s social and political control rested ultimately on the general acknowledgement by Germans that it would act ruthlessly against those who stood in its way or were deemed in some way or another to be its enemies. As long as the repression was aimed at ‘outsiders’ and ‘undesirables’, however, it was accepted, even welcomed, by the majority of the population.¹ And as long as individuals who did not belong to a politically or racially targeted group conformed, or did not have the misfortune to be deemed an ‘inferior’ in some way, to be excluded from the ‘people’s community’, they were not likely to fall into the clutches of the Gestapo.

Once the war started, the violence built into the system gained new and powerful momentum. In the main, it was exported. The brunt of it was borne by the peoples of the countries conquered in the early, triumphant phase of the war. But repression at home against any signs of political non-conformity also intensifed. Jews, as always the top-ranking racial enemy and blamed incessantly in relentless propaganda for the war, were subjected to ever worsening, horrific persecution, especially when deportations to the east began in 1941.² And terroristic repression was arbitrarily directed at the increasing numbers of foreign workers from the conquered countries, especially when the fortunes of war turned against Germany – a point symbolically marked by the catastrophe at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/3. By this time, the legal system had effectively capitulated to the untrammelled might of the SS-police security apparatus. As the losses at the front mounted alarmingly and the pressures on the civilian population within Germany grew commensurately during the course of 1944, the regime became ever more sensitive to signs of dissent. Even so, criticism of the regime widened, as the authorities’ own monitoring services plainly indicated. Hitler’s own popularity – the focal point of ‘positive’ propaganda – had by now visibly waned. The Party was suffering a severe drop in its standing. Morale at the front, especially after the collapse in France, was wavering.

Dissolving support for the regime, which propaganda struggled vainly to combat, meant inexorably a greater recourse to terroristic repression. Following the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, and with Germany facing mounting adversity in the last months of the year, the population, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was increasingly forced into line in the total-war drive. Incautious remarks or any signs of what were deemed defeatism or subversion were ruthlessly punished. It was becoming an ever more dangerous regime for its own citizens.

Even so, from February 1945 onwards the terror within Germany moved to a new plane. The regime’s leaders, Hitler at the forefront, could now plainly see that, short of a miracle, defeat was staring them in the face. Propaganda parroted slogans aimed at boosting the readiness to hold out and fight on. But for most people now this was obviously whistling in the wind. As propaganda failed, violence intensified. The regime’s reflex to outright violence marked a combination of fear, desperation, defiance and revenge. Fear of another 1918; increasing wariness of the explosive potential of the millions of foreign workers in the country; desperation at the impending total defeat and the collapse of the regime; defiance of all forces – internal as well as external – seen to be dragging Germany to perdition; and revenge against all those who had stood against Nazism and would rejoice at its downfall: the combination created a new level of violence arbitrarily directed against anyone seen to block or oppose the fight to the finish.

The worst of the retribution was, as ever, reserved for the regime’s designated enemies. The last months would prove murderous for Jews, foreign workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp internees as the vestiges of control over increasingly untrammelled violence dissolved. But the majority German population was now also subjected in increasing measure to wild reprisals for perceived defeatism. The slightest ill-judged remark or perceived minor opposition to the self-destructive course of the regime could prove disastrous for any individual. As the military fronts closed in on the Reich, the terror, once exported, was rebounding in the death-throes of the regime on the population of Germany itself. It was a mark of increasing desperation. Just as with the vain efforts of propaganda, terror could do nothing to halt the continued slide of morale. But it was more than sufficient to prevent any prospect of the misery, suffering and, by now, detestation of the Nazi regime in wide swathes of the population being converted into the type of revolutionary mood that had characterized the last stages of the First World War in 1917–18.

II

By the end of January, the regime was becoming seriously concerned at the signs of collapsing morale, both at home and – even more worryingly – at the front. Even from within the SS – however difficult it was, there above all, to admit it – there were voices prepared to acknowledge a deepening crisis.

On 26 January SS-Hauptsturmführer Rolf d’Alquen, staff officer in the propaganda department of Army Group Upper Rhine, wired a panicky message to his brother in Berlin, Standartenführer Gunter d’Alquen, editor of the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps. ‘The mood among the fighting troops has become more nervous and serious by the day on account of the events on the eastern front,’ he stated. Many who came from the eastern regions had their personal anxieties. ‘If the situation gets worse in the next days,’ he continued, ‘it can be reckoned that the fighting spirit of the troops will be paralysed by worries that can no longer be borne.’ The mood among the civilian population of the area was similar, he indicated. He wanted ‘a redeeming word from Führer Headquarters’ and asked, cautiously but pointedly, if it was possible to ascertain whether Hitler had told his entourage what he had in mind to master the crisis. Both among the troops and in the civilian population, it was clear that the front could only be held for a short time with existing weapons, he remarked. What hopes remained were invested in a weapon ‘that could nullify all that has been endured and all setbacks, and produce the decisive change on the fronts’.

He requested that the state of morale at the front should be brought to the Führer’s attention. This, almost certainly, did not happen. But his account did reach Himmler. D’Alquen’s message was relayed to Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal adjutant, with a covering note that it was ‘typical for the psychological situation of the troops, but also for those there responsible for propaganda’. Himmler lost no time in replying. Though the troops had suffered setbacks, he declared, it was d’Alquen himself who was most depressed. His suggestion was ‘absolutely impossible’. The troops must be told to do their duty, however hard it was. When the west was protected, the Wehrmacht in the east would be ready to absorb the assault before ‘becoming active again’. ‘From you yourself’, Himmler closed, ‘I expect the inner bearing of an SS man.’³

A few days later, Himmler’s own newly created Army Group Vistula was reporting that the officers ‘no longer had the troops firmly in hand’ and ‘signs of dissolution of the worst kind’ were occurring as soldiers – and not just in occasional instances – ‘pulled off their uniforms and tried in every way to obtain civilian clothing in order to get away’.⁴ The western Allies did not, however, for their part, based on their interrogations of captured soldiers, expect large-scale desertions. ‘The strongest deterrent against desertion continues to be fear of retaliation against one’s family,’ was their assessment. The feeling that the end of the war was close was a further reason not to take the high risk of deserting. Around 65 per cent of those interrogated in mid-February thought the war would be over in weeks. They fought on, it was adjudged, through desire for self-preservation, apathy (about all but their own immediate military situation) and an automatic sense of obedience.⁵ In the mayhem of the evacuations from the east, soldiers were said to be mingling with the evacuees, ‘marking time’ and trying to avoid further fighting, ‘in expectation of the coming end’, since the military police had either disappeared themselves or were helpless to control the massively overcrowded trains.⁶

Martin Bormann, in the Party Chancellery, was in no doubt, from reports he was receiving, of soldiers affecting civilian morale through their defeatist attitude. ‘What? You’re still listening to Hitler?’ one soldier who had returned to the Magdeburg area was heard to remark. He was off home, he said, and by the time the authorities had found him the war would be over anyway. Luckily for him, no one took his details and he got away with it. In the Sudetenland, soldiers pouring back in flight from the east were said to present a depressing sight. Often, they would enter shops to demand goods even though they had no ration coupons. When challenged, they retorted that the war was over anyway and there would be no need for ration cards. Their view was that the consequences of defeat would not be as bad as they were painted.⁷ From the Cologne-Aachen area in early February, Bormann heard of a ‘gathering inner uncertainty’ and belief in ‘a certain leadership crisis’ in the Wehrmacht, though the Waffen-SS was seen to stand out in distinction.⁸

These impressions of low morale among soldiers within Germany were reinforced by a report of an NSFO – couched, naturally, in Nazi language – of his impressions gathered during a journey through several parts of the country. He registered ‘symptoms of threatening developments for the future’. Deserters often found support among the civilian population, he claimed, also for their allegations that sabotage by officers – echoes of the Stauffenberg plot still reverberated here – had caused Germany’s defeat. Discipline was undermined and officers themselves apathetic, the report noted. People in central Germany, naturally worried by events in the east, were telling soldiers on the western front that they should let in the Americans so that the Bolsheviks would not get to them, a view he regarded as an obvious danger to morale. Stories that armaments factories had been closed down because of coal and transport difficulties were also affecting morale. Soldiers hearing that the armaments industry was no longer working saw the war then as unquestionably lost. Predictably, the report concluded that drastic measures needed to be taken to counter such worrying signs, advocating ‘flying courts martial’, ‘merciless’ implementation of orders and ‘radical measures carried out with all force’ as a necessary response.⁹

Reports from the eastern regions of Germany in mid-February could only have made depressing reading for Himmler. He heard that recognition of German military impotence was ‘the root of almost all signs of demoralization among the troops’, who generally accepted that the war was lost. Looting of property by the Wehrmacht in places where the civilian population had fled, also seen as a sign of collapsing morale, was commonplace. Many soldiers, officers and Volkssturm men were to be found detached from their units and wandering in the woods on the eastern banks of the Oder, trying to cross into Germany. Their morale was suitably poor. In despairing mood, they often blamed National Socialism for all their suffering, viewed the war as lost and wanted peace at any price. Himmler and the SS, it was acknowledged, were also openly criticized. And leaders among the groups of stragglers were telling them not to resort to arms if they encountered Soviet troops, but to surrender without a fight.¹⁰

Among the civilian population, morale had dipped to an equally low ebb. Propaganda reports in mid-February indicated ‘a profound lethargy’ as an attitude said to be prevalent among the middle class and peasantry. Their resigned view – ‘a creeping poison’ – was that all was lost anyway, and the war would be over within a few months.¹¹ Soldiers travelling through Berlin reported that the mood in the west was ‘catastrophic’, as everyone was just waiting for the end of the war, which could not be long delayed. In the Reich capital itself, pessimism had caught hold among the population. There was widespread criticism of failed promises of new weapons, though fear of the consequences of falling into the hands of the Soviets was said to underpin a readiness to fight on.¹² Fatalism and dulled indifference were commonplace. ‘We’ll take it as it comes. We can’t alter things,’ people felt. ‘Everything that looks like propaganda or is spoken as such is flatly rejected,’ it was reported.¹³ Similar disbelief in propaganda claims was registered in southern Germany, where the mood was ‘very depressed’ and there was little hope in a favourable end to the war for Germany, especially since the promised new weapons had never materialized.¹⁴ People in Vienna thought they had been led up the garden path about the new weapons. There was a general feeling that the situation was hopeless. Alongside widespread apathy, individuals were fearful. Many were said to be contemplating suicide. ‘I’ve already taken all steps to do away with my family,’ was one comment. ‘I’ve enough poison.’¹⁵ The war was ‘the same swindle’ as in 1914–18, the rural population in the Alpine district of Berchtesgaden were saying. ‘If people had imagined in 1933 what was to come, they would never have voted for Hitler,’ was the view in an area where once huge crowds of ‘pilgrims’ had gathered to try to catch a glimpse of the Führer at his nearby residence on the Obersalzberg.¹⁶

The resignation, apathy, dislocation and sheer fatigue at the attritional suffering – quite apart from the suffocating repression of the regime – meant, however, that the collapsing morale could not be converted into a revolutionary fervour. Reports by observers from neutral countries smuggled out to the western Allies provided graphic descriptions of the depressed mood in Berlin as preparations were made for the defence of the city, the chaotic situation on the railways, panic buying of food in central Germany and the appalling living conditions throughout the country. But such reports were adamant that there was no possibility of an internal revolution.¹⁷

Even so, the Nazi authorities were taking no chances. For them, the alarm bells were now ringing loudly, despite repeated routine protestations about the ‘solid inner bearing’ of the people. A worrying indicator was the crumpling of the Party’s authority and collapse in its standing. This had largely disintegrated in the west the previous autumn. Now it was the same in the east – and increasingly everywhere. Refugees flooding in from the east were from late January onwards pouring out their bile on the failings of Party officials in the botched evacuations – prominent among them as a target the East Prussian Gauleiter, Erich Koch.¹⁸ Relations between the army and the Party were tense. Given the current mood on the eastern front, Himmler was told (in response to a suggestion that Party leaders should be sent to serve effectively as political commissars with the troops) that individuals in Party uniform would be killed.¹⁹ The Party uniform, it was claimed, acted like a red rag to soldiers.²⁰ It was little different among the civilian population. Party functionaries, well aware of their unpopularity, had to be reminded by the Munich Gauleiter, Paul Giesler, of their obligation to wear their uniform on duty – and ordinary Party members their badge at all times – under penalty of exclusion from the Party.²¹ The intense hatred and contempt for the representatives of a Party by now widely seen as responsible for Germany’s ruination was meanwhile as good as ubiquitous. Cases of what were understandably seen as gross dereliction of duty by Party leaders scandalized the population and pushed their public standing still further into the mire.²²

Hans Frank, Hitler’s viceroy in the General Government of Poland, was hugely corrupt even by Nazi standards. In his domain almost 2 million Jews had been gassed to death in the camps at Belz˙ec, Sobibor and Treblinka and a reign of terror imposed on the subjugated Polish population. Frank fled on 17 January from the Wawel Castle in Kraków, where he had lived since 1939 in untold luxury and despotic splendour. He and his large entourage headed first to a castle at Seichau in Silesia. When they moved again on 23 January, they left behind rooms littered with the remnants of large stores of food and wine, much of it squandered in a lavish farewell party, to the fury of a local population that had been forced to acclimatize to the privations of war. Lorry-loads of valuables and looted art treasures were sent on to Frank’s eventual residence amid the Bavarian lakes.²³

However, it was the flight by Gauleiter Arthur Greiser from his headquarters in Posen in mid-January that gained particular notoriety. Greiser, who was to be executed in 1946 by the Poles upon whom he had inflicted years of torment and suffering in the ‘Warthegau’, had been one of the most ruthless of the Nazi provincial rulers. He was proud of having the ear of Hitler and Himmler, and had played a significant part in establishing the Chełmno death camp in his region, where more than 150,000 Jews were gassed between the end of 1941 and 1944. With the Red Army rapidly advancing and by 17 January almost at the borders of his Gau, Greiser still kept up appearances about the strength of German defences. Inwardly, he was close to panic. Unwilling to see his Gau as the first to be evacuated, he refused to give the necessary orders. A partial and belated order for the easternmost parts of the Gau was eventually given on the night of 17/18 January, after Greiser had witnessed thousands of troops running away. But most of the population were unaware of their peril. He still professed to his staff that Posen would be defended. In reality, he knew that there was no possibility of stemming the Soviet onslaught. On 20 January, Greiser called Führer Headquarters and gained Hitler’s approval, passed on to him by Bormann, to evacuate the Party offices in Posen and move his entourage to more secure surrounds in Frankfurt an der Oder. Greiser told his staff that he was being recalled to Berlin by order of the Führer to undertake a special task for Himmler. That evening, accompanied by an aide, he fled from Posen. Whatever lorries could be found were sequestrated for the transfer of the property and files of the Gau offices; the initial objections of the military authorities were overcome on the grounds that the evacuation was an order of the Führer. Greiser’s flight left the Gau in chaos and a frantic stampede of the population trying to escape by whatever means they could. Most were overtaken by Soviet troops. Around 50,000 died fleeing from the Warthegau.²⁴

The Hitler order was a complication when criticism of Greiser arose within the Party itself. It transpired, however, that Greiser had engineered the permission to leave at a time when evacuation was being refused to ordinary citizens – Posen had been designated a fortress town, to be held at whatever cost – and had misled Hitler into believing that the fall of the city was imminent. (In fact, the Red Army was then still about 130 kilometres away, and Posen did not finally capitulate until late February.) Goebbels, long an admirer of Greiser but aware of the damage he had now caused the Party, regarded the Gauleiter’s action as shameful, cowardly and deceitful. He thought Greiser should be put before the People’s Court (where a death sentence would have been the certain outcome), but could not persuade Hitler – presumably embarrassed by his own authorization – to impose the severe punishment he felt was merited.²⁵ As it was, the ‘Greiser case’, propaganda agencies reported, was still ‘doing the rounds’ weeks later, amplifying the accounts from refugees about ‘the failure of the NSDAP in the evacuation of entire Gaue’.²⁶ Bormann was forced to issue a circular to the Party, attempting to counter the negative rumours about the behaviour of the political leaders in the Warthegau. He defended Greiser, stating that he was prepared to serve with the military command in Posen but left the city on the express orders of the Führer. He threatened harsh punishment for any functionaries leaving the population in the lurch.²⁷

Greiser was, in fact, far from the last of the Party ‘bigwigs’ to leave his charges stranded after demanding of them that they should hold out to the last. But he was, for Goebbels, ‘the first serious disappointment’, an indicator that ‘everything was breaking up’ and the end was not far off.²⁸

III

The signs that the determination to hold on was starting to wobble even within the Party itself now prompted moves to shore up the faltering morale by strenuous and repeated exhortation – backed at every point by merciless punishment for those seen to fail in their duty.

On 23 January, Wilhelm Stuckart, as acting Reich Plenipotentiary for Administration (deputizing for Himmler in the latter’s capacity as Reich Minister of the Interior), demanded that administrative officials of state authorities in the eastern Gaue (including Mark Brandenburg and Berlin) carry out their duties to the last possible minute in areas threatened by the enemy before then attaching themselves to the fighting troops. Rigorous measures were to be taken against those seen to fail. When Stuckart circulated his missive to the highest state authorities on 1 February, he included a copy of Himmler’s order, issued two days earlier, stipulating that anyone leaving his position in any military or civilian office without being ordered to do so should be punished by death. An added list of ‘punishments’ specified that those guilty of cowardice and dereliction of duty were to be shot immediately. To reinforce the message, Himmler drew attention to the examples from the town of Bromberg, where Party and state officials had behaved less than heroically on the approach of the Red Army. The police chief had apparently deserted his post. A local army commander had gone against orders in retreating from a defensive position. The Government President (head of the regional administration) and the mayor of Bromberg were subsequently degraded and sent to serve in punishment battalions faced with especially dangerous tasks, as was the Party’s District Leader, having first been expelled from the Party. All had been forced to attend the execution of the Police President, SS-Standartenführer Carl von Salisch, shot by firing squad for cowardice. The army commander was also shot.²⁹ On 11 February, Himmler put out a proclamation to the officers of Army Group Vistula, whose command he had just taken over, expecting of them ‘a model of bravery and steadfastness’ in the decisive phase of the struggle against the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik danger’, and a ‘fanatical will to victory and burning hatred against these Bolshevik sub-animals’, but reminding them that the police chief in Bromberg had been shot for not fulfilling the demands of his office.³⁰

Bormann was by now, on Hitler’s behalf, repeatedly instructing Party leaders on the need for exemplary behaviour (also from their wives, some of whom had left threatened areas before evacuation orders had been issued), again with the threat of severe reprisals for those found lacking.³¹ He felt it necessary to pass on Hitler’s reminder that all orders were binding, to be implemented ‘if necessary by draconian measures’ and to be carried out by subordinates ‘without contradiction’ and swiftly. The German people had to understand more than ever at this time ‘that it was led by a strong and determined hand’, that ‘signs of disintegration and arbitrary actions would be ruthlessly nipped in the bud’ and that neglect by subordinate organs of the Party would ‘on no account be tolerated’.³² Any Party leader failing in his duties, abandoning his people to find safety for himself and his family or gain some other advantage, distancing himself from the NSDAP, or ‘fleeing as a coward instead of fighting to the last’ was to be evicted from the Party, brought before the courts for judgement and subject to ‘the most severe punishment’.³³ In his circular – stated to be not for publication – on 24 February 1945, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme, Bormann reminded all Party members in unequivocal terms that anyone thinking of himself, of quitting and making off, would be a ‘traitor to the people and murderer of our women and children’. Only steadfastness down to death without concern for one’s own life served as a defence against ‘the elemental storm from the steppes, the methods of the inner-Asiatic hordes’. The Führer demanded, and the people expected, of every Party leader ‘that he holds out to the end and is never concerned for his own salvation’. For the Party rank-and-file, too, the call of the hour meant to follow unconditionally the sense of higher duty. ‘Anyone seeking to save his life is with certainty, also through the verdict of the people, condemned to death. There is only one possibility of staying alive,’ he declared (with some contradiction); ‘the readiness to die fighting and thereby to attain victory.’³⁴ For now, the Party still – just about – held together.

As discipline slackened worryingly in the Wehrmacht, too, there was a similar resort to threats of drastic sanctions. Hitler let it be known through Keitel, at the time that the eastern front was collapsing and his own orders were being challenged by his generals in East Prussia, that if military leaders failed to carry out commands unconditionally or transmit absolutely reliable dispatches he would demand ‘the most ruthless punishment of those guilty’ and would expect the courts to be severe enough to pass the death sentence.³⁵

One plain indicator of the collapsing front was the enormously swollen number of ‘stragglers’ heading back to Germany. Though many had genuinely become separated from their units, others were feigning detachment from their units in the hope of avoiding further front service. The distinction between those who had deserted and those who, genuinely or not, had ‘lost’ their units was increasingly blurred. Intensified efforts were now made to pick up ‘stragglers’ and return them to the front, sometimes using special military police detachments.³⁶ Even on the wildly overcrowded station in Breslau in late January, as desperate evacuees fought to get on the last trains west, military police were searching for anyone in uniform to send them back to fight the Russians.³⁷ At the end of the month, Himmler appealed to the German people to adopt a hard line towards ‘shirkers’, ‘cowards’ and ‘weaklings’ who were failing in their duty. He urged women, especially, to show no sympathy for ‘shirkers’ who tagged onto evacuation treks travelling westwards. ‘Men who take themselves from the front are not deserving of bread from the homeland,’ he declared. They had instead to be reminded of their honour and duty, be treated with contempt and be sent back to the front.³⁸ The Wehrmacht laid down detailed regulations for seizing ‘stragglers’ and returning them to frontline duty, ominously adding ‘in so far as in individual cases judgement by a military court is not necessary’.³⁹

The commandant of Schneidemühl, a designated fortress, was commended by Himmler in late January for shooting down retreating soldiers with a pistol then hanging a notice round their necks saying ‘this is what happens to all cowards’.⁴⁰ The ‘bitter experiences in the east’, Bormann noted, showed that in the face of enemy inroads ‘there is no longer an absolute reliance on the steadfastness of the front troops’. Consequently, in early February, in preparation for the expected enemy offensive in the west, he asked Himmler to provide an increased number of ‘interception squads’ of the kind that had been successful in the collapse in France the previous summer to pick up retreating soldiers ‘through rigorous intervention’ and return them to ‘joyful fulfilment of their duty’. The squads were to be backed up, he told the western Gauleiter, by all the force at the disposal of the police and Volkssturm.⁴¹ From the local level upwards, regular reports were to be sent to the Gauleiter in the eastern regions, and from there to military commanders, on the ‘stragglers’ caught. Western Gauleiter were also to pay particular attention to the problem on account of expected hostilities in the region.⁴²

A few days later, Himmler transmitted an order to the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the western regions advocating use of maximum severity, in tandem with the military authorities, in rounding up ‘stragglers’ and ‘shooting looters and deserters on the spot’, in order to remove any obstacles from the western front in the forthcoming ‘heavy attacks’. Bormann had the order passed on in 130 copies to all Party leaders at central and regional level.⁴³ ‘Should anyone intervene too harshly’, Himmler stated, in ‘combing out towns and barracks for so-called stragglers or soldiers journeying about with pretended march and travel orders’, it was better than not intervening at all.⁴⁴ He had by then, on 12 February, announced the implementation in Army Group Vistula of an order, which he found ‘so excellent’, put out for Army Group Centre by the inimitable Colonel-General Schörner. Among the exhortations, in classical Nazi diction, to fanatical hatred against the enemy and the need for iron resolve with ‘our homeland at stake’, was the threat that ‘stragglers who don’t immediately register for redeployment or follow orders’ would be placed before a court martial and charged with cowardice.⁴⁵ The result in such an event was invariably a foregone conclusion. Schörner’s way of dealing with ‘trained stragglers’, as he dubbed them, was even in Goebbels’ eyes ‘fairly brutal’. ‘He lets them be hanged from the next tree with a notice attached saying: “I’m a deserter and have refused to protect German women and children.” That, naturally, has a good deterrent effect on other deserters or those who think of deserting,’ the Propaganda Minister observed.⁴⁶

At the end of February, Bormann reckoned there were up to 600,000 soldiers in the Reich avoiding front service. A priority throughout the Reich was to track them down and round them up. The public had to be made aware of the problem and a tough approach adopted, in contrast to 1917–18. Drastic measures were necessary if ducking out of duty was not to spread. ‘Every shirker has to be aware that he will with great probability be caught in the homeland and then without doubt will lose his life.’ At the front, there was the mere possibility that he would die. At home, avoiding his duty, he would certainly do so, and in dishonour. Only when this message sank in ‘shall we master this cowardice disease’, he concluded.⁴⁷

Some estimates put the number of deserters down to the end of 1944 at more than a quarter of a million. This can be no more than informed guesswork, and may well include honest ‘stragglers’ as well as those who, for whatever reason, could take no more and took enormous risks to lay down their arms. The figure relates, however, to the period before the collapse of the eastern front in January sent the numbers of ‘stragglers’ (and those actually deserting) spiralling – perhaps doubling – in the last four months of the war.⁴⁸ If the overall scale of the phenomenon must remain no more than an approximation, at least the figures for those punished for desertion by military courts – though not arbitrarily shot or otherwise ‘executed’ in arbitrary action – are known. Compared with 18 cases in the German army in the First World War, those in the Wehrmacht sentenced for desertion during the Second World War numbered, in a sharply rising trend, some 35,000. Around 15,000 of these received the death penalty.⁴⁹

Apart from desertion, any perceived undermining of the war effort brought rapid and harsh retribution. The contrast in severity, both with the sentencing in the German army in the First World War and with that of the Allies in the Second, is striking. For a variety of perceived serious offences, a total of 150 German soldiers had been sentenced to death in the First World War, 48 of whom were actually executed. German military courts passed, in all, some 30,000 death sentences against German soldiers during the Second World War, with 20,000 carried out. During the Second World War the British executed 40, the French 103, the Americans 146.⁵⁰

The higher the rank, the less likely it was that perceived military failings would incur severe sanction. Generals might be dismissed, as Harpe, Reinhardt and Hoßbach had been on the eastern front in January. But they were not disgraced, let alone sentenced to death or subjected to other forms of severe punishment (though not a few voices in the public could be heard still talking darkly, in tones reminiscent of the aftermath of the July plot in 1944, of ‘traitors and saboteurs’ in high places⁵¹). Still, as the military situation worsened and the regime became increasingly ready in its mounting desperation to resort to violence within, even high officers needed to tread warily. Colonel Thilo von Trotha, in the Army General Staff, would have recognized the warning shot across the bows from a personal acquaintance, none other than Colonel-General Schörner, in late February. ‘Among ourselves, a frank word,’ wrote Schörner. ‘I received a hint yesterday, most confidentially, of course, that your attitude to the Party and its representatives is occasionally somewhat reserved. One could have the impression that you don’t place sufficient value in certain things such as the National Socialist leadership of the army….’ ‘Dear Trotha,’ he continued, ‘I trust you have understood me. Either we succeed in having fanatical supporters and unconditional loyalists of the Führer at the top, or things will go wrong again.’⁵²

A few days later, in a lengthy and secret missive to the commanders-in-chief and generals in command, Schörner amplified this message in a broad attack on the failure of leadership in the staffs of some parts of the army. He praised the soldiers who had learnt to be brutal and fanatical in ‘almost four years of an Asiatic war’, and had recently in fighting on the river Neiße taken no prisoners. In contrast, he scourged the indifference, bourgeois lifestyles, lack of ‘soldier personalities’ and ‘defeatist tiredness of spirit’ of officers who were unable to stir the troops through fanaticism. ‘I am in agreement with the commanders-in-chief and generals in command and with every front soldier,’ he wrote, ‘that in the Asiatic war we need revolutionary and dynamic officers.’ Stalin, he added, would have got nowhere if he had waged war with bourgeois methods. Schörner demanded ‘clear and unambigous fanaticism, nothing else’.⁵³

The scarcely veiled threat in Schörner’s letter to Trotha and his exhortation to leading generals is a further pointer to the lack of unity in the higher ranks of the army. Though many high-ranking officers had long since inwardly turned against the Nazi regime, the spectrum of attitudes reached at the opposite extreme as far as fanatics like Schörner. In such a climate of division, distrust and fear, any prospect of a common front against Hitler could be completely ruled out.

The divisions ran throughout society. Far from the united ‘community of fate’ trumpeted by Nazi propaganda, this was a riven society where individuals looked more and more to their own narrow interests – acquisition of the necessities of life and, above all else, survival. ‘Never have the German people lived in such inner division,’ was the verdict of one colonel in February 1945.⁵⁴

Despite the flood of reports telling them they were fighting a losing battle, Goebbels’ propaganda chiefs intensified rather than lessened their efforts as Germany’s plight worsened. Newspapers were distributed in Ruhr cities even after the worst bombing raids (though a suggestion that they be dropped by aeroplane was rejected as absurdly impractical).⁵⁵ But even Goebbels himself was sick of the empty pathos of repeated exhortations to ‘Believe and Fight’, or to stay ‘With the Führer to Final Victory’.⁵⁶ In the absence of reliable information and in often frank disbelief of official reports, rumour inevitably spread like wildfire and was difficult to control, most of all when it related to evacuation of the population in areas close to the front.⁵⁷ One suggestion (later adopted) was to dispatch special units of, in all, around 1,500 Political Leaders of the Party to key points on the eastern and western fronts to stiffen morale, notably in the west, given the expected hostilities there, to prevent ‘signs of crisis’ arising as had been the case in the east as areas had been evacuated and then fallen to the Red Army. The special propaganda units would not come under Wehrmacht command, but be directed by Bormann and Himmler, with the task of ‘organizing and mobilizing the entire strength of the people of the areas in question for total deployment and the war effort’.⁵⁸

Directives for verbal propaganda issued in mid-February tried to do the near impossible in emphasizing the positives for Germany in the current war situation. The Soviet advance into German eastern territories had been at such a cost of men and matériel that the Bolshevik fighting strength was decisively weakened, it was claimed, opening ‘an extraordinary chance’ for German counter-attacks. The German leadership knew that attack was the best form of defence, and would act accordingly. In the west, the length of Allied supply lines was a weakness, whereas German lines were short, units more easily manoeuvrable and, through the addition of the People’s Grenadier divisions, the Wehrmacht was stronger than the previous summer in Normandy. Not least, the deep-echelon fortifications system, it was claimed, allowed reserves to be directed at the right moment to positions under pressure and at the same time force the enemy into a damaging war of attrition.⁵⁹

Little of this sounded convincing. And rallying-cries such as Himmler’s to his divisional commanders in Army Group Vistula, passed on for wider circulation, that ‘strong hearts triumph over mass and matériel’, accompanied by examples of heroic action at the front, must have sounded empty to most people.⁶⁰ Other than in reinforcing defiance among the already committed regime loyalists, propaganda was for the most part by now visibly failing in its objectives.

There was, however, one notable exception. Fear, all the more so after the traumatic events in January, was the prime motivator to hold out and fight on in the east. It formed a bond – even in a negative way forging a kind of integration as all else was falling apart. And in embellishing the already existing – and well-justified – anxieties of the consequences of Soviet conquest, propaganda still had a significant role to play, both among civilians and in the Wehrmacht. Troops were drilled with the need to combat the ‘Asiatic storm from the east’, and reminded through examples from distant history – such as the defeat of the Hungarians near Augsburg in 955 and of Ottoman forces besieging Vienna in 1683 – that such attacks had always been repelled by fanatical defence when the enemy reached German soil.⁶¹ Even for some leading Nazis, playing on the fears of a population whose nerves were so stretched through the emphasis on Soviet atrocities went too far.⁶² But there could be no question of playing down one of the last effective propaganda weapons to hand. Already in mid-February propaganda preparations were being laid for the defence of Berlin. Leaflets were drafted, addressed to ‘The Defenders of Berlin’, urging ‘fanatical hatred’ in the fight to repel the Bolsheviks. ‘It’s about countless German women and children who place their trust in you,’ the draft proclamation ran. ‘Every house a fortress, every street passage a mass grave for the Red hordes.’ ‘Hatred against hatred! Fight to the last! Bloody revenge and thousandfold retaliation for the Bolshevik atrocities in our homeland!’⁶³

Fear of Bolshevism was undoubtedly an important factor in sustaining the readiness to fight on, particularly in those parts of Germany most obviously exposed to advances by the Red Army. The further the population was removed from the immediate threat of Soviet occupation, and the more probable it was that the area would fall to the western Allies, the less direct resonance, however, the shrill anti-Bolshevik hate-propaganda was likely to have. And in the western parts of the Reich, there was little outright fear of Anglo-American occupation, other than among diehard Nazis and funtionaries of the regime. Reports filtering back from areas already occupied even led to claims that the behaviour of the Americans was better ‘than our German troops’.⁶⁴ The reality was that, however much the propaganda machine went into overdrive, only a dwindling minority of Germans remained fully committed to the regime. These did, however, include among their number those who still had power of life and death in their hands. A word out of place could bring a denunciation and the direst of consequences. As the hold of the regime slipped and propaganda was widely disbelieved, repression was increasingly all that was left.

A major reflection of the enhanced emphasis on repression and terror within was the decree issued on Hitler’s orders on 15 February by the Reich Justice Minister, Otto Georg Thierack (and impatiently awaited by Gauleiter in threatened areas⁶⁵), introducing the establishment of summary courts martial (Standgerichte) in areas threatened by the enemy. Each court was to be chaired by a judge and to comprise in addition a Political Leader of the NSDAP or one of its affiliates and an officer of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS or police. The members of the court were to be nominated by the Gauleiter, as Reich Defence Commissar for the region. The court was to deal with all offences that could endanger fighting morale and could issue only three verdicts: death penalty, exoneration or transfer to a regular court. The Reich Defence Commissar was to confirm the verdict and determine place, time and manner of an execution. ‘The Führer expects’, Bormann added in his covering ordinance to the Gauleiter, ‘that the Gauleiter will implement the task placed before them with the necessary severity and consistency and ruthlessly suppress every sign of disintegration, cowardice and defeatism with the death sentences of the summary courts martial. Anyone not prepared to fight for his people but who stabs it in the back in its gravest hour does not deserve to live and must fall to the executioner.’⁶⁶ Some days earlier, Bormann had informed the Gauleiter that this now gave them ‘the weapon to destroy all those pests of the people’ and declared his expectation ‘that this instrument will be used as the Führer would wish, ruthlessly and without respect to the standing or position of the person concerned’.⁶⁷

Bormann’s guidelines, indicating Hitler’s wishes, give clear enough indication that the new courts had little to do with conventional justice. They were, in fact, no more than a façade for increasingly arbitrary and wild terror, ‘instruments of destruction in legal drapery’.⁶⁸ Death sentences were scarcely more than a formality, all the more so since the judges were themselves under pressure to show their loyalty.⁶⁹ Around 6,000–7,000 death sentences are known to have been handed out by the summary courts martial, though in countless other cases the executioners did not even wait for the farce of a quasi-judicial sentence.⁷⁰ The summary justice became even more arbitrary and unconstrained after 9 March, when their reach was extended by Hitler’s decree creating the ‘flying court martial’ (fliegendes Standgericht).⁷¹ The courts travelled around Germany dealing with those accused of undermining the war effort in whatever way, and wasting no time before reaching their verdict – usually sentence of death, meted out by the senior officer presiding over the court, and without any appeal.⁷² By then, all semblance of centralized control over judicial action was visibly disintegrating, and authorized lawlessness and criminality in the name of upholding the struggle of the German people were becoming rampant as the last phase of the regime was entered.

IV

In lashing out wildly at anyone seen to impair in the slightest the imperative of fighting to the last in an obviously lost war, the regime was like a wounded animal in its death-throes. Any action that smacked of nonconformity could spell disaster for ordinary German citizens. For the designated internal enemies of the regime, the terror by now knew no bounds. Armies of foreign workers (many of them from the Soviet Union and other parts of eastern Europe) and vast numbers of prisoners in jails and concentration camps were now exposed, within Germany itself, to the untrammelled brutality of the regime’s desperate henchmen. The terror, greatly escalating since the autumn, was hugely magnified by the impact of the collapse of the eastern front.

The closer Germany’s enemies approached the borders of the Reich, and the more imminent defeat became, the more the representatives of the regime saw cause to worry about the security threat from the millions of foreign workers labouring under conditions of near slavery to keep the armaments industry going and to keep the country fed (since almost half of those employed in agriculture were foreigners). The precise number of foreign workers by February 1945 is unknown. The previous summer, there had been not far short of 6 million, all forced labourers, and almost 2 million prisoners of war registered within Germany – in all comprising over a quarter of the total workforce. Of these, some 4.5 million – probably, in fact, an underestimate – were from the east, predominantly Poland and the Soviet Union, and were regarded both as racial inferiors and as a particular danger.⁷³ The threat of internal unrest, not in terms of a revolution by the German population but as a possible rising by internal enemies, not least foreign workers, was taken seriously by the regime. Instructions were laid down, for example, at the beginning of February for the defence of the government district in Berlin in the event of internal unrest.⁷⁴

The feeling that foreign workers could pose a serious problem as military defeat loomed was not confined to Nazi paranoiacs. Even the previous August, one general in British captivity had mused that 10 million foreign workers would rise up at the approach of enemy armies.⁷⁵ Women – their husbands and sons away at the front, or dead – left to run farms with the aid of foreign workers, were worried about their personal safety (though as it turned out they seldom had actual cause to fear).⁷⁶ In the big cities, the anxieties were palpable. In Berlin the previous autumn Friedrichstraße station had housed, according to Ursula von Kardorff, a young journalist, an ‘underworld’ almost excusively inhabited by foreigners, including ‘Poles with glances of hatred’, and a ‘mix of peoples such as was probably never to be seen in a German city’. Any outsider was looked at with suspicion, she wrote. The foreign workers were reputedly ‘excellently organized’, with their own agents, weapons and radio equipment. ‘There are 12 million foreign workers in Germany,’ she said in a telling exaggeration perhaps reflecting her own inner concern, ‘an army in itself. Some are calling it the Trojan Horse of the current war.’⁷⁷

Numerous reports pointed out that foreign workers were becoming increasingly assertive as they sensed the end of their torment approaching. They were also a very visible presence in big cities. The perception that they were an internal danger mirrored in good measure the appalling living and working conditions to which they had been reduced. Bombing had left hundred of thousands of them homeless, with no alternative but to frequent air-raid shelters, station waiting-rooms, or other public places, or find the floor of a ruined office or apartment block to lay their heads down. Food shortages meant they were often forced to steal or loot bombed-out buildings to survive. As any semblance of an ordered society broke down – the fabled ‘peace and quiet’ beloved of the German middle classes was long a thing of the past – the foreign workers offered an obvious scapegoat for the upsurge in criminality and lawlessness. Their image had come to resemble the caricature portrayed by the increasingly worried authorities, who reacted with characteristic harshness. Minor offences were dealt with savagely. Foreign workers were regarded not just as brigands, but also as saboteurs, though in fact there was little action that amounted to political resistance; for the most part it was simply a daily struggle for survival.⁷⁸

Already in November 1944 Himmler had issued a decree empowering regional offices of the Gestapo to implement ‘measures of atonement’ as ‘reprisal for grave acts of terror and sabotage’. The measures were to be directed ‘usually against persons from foreign peoples who don’t come into question as perpetrators but belong to the entourage of the perpetrator’.⁷⁹ The terror was plainly aimed to serve as a deterrent, opening up thereby a freeway to arbitrary killings, decided at the local level. Gestapo execution squads were recruited in numerous cities and equipped with a general remit to shoot ‘looters, deserters and other rabble’.⁸⁰ The decentralization of any control over executions effectively became complete by February 1945 when the head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, authorized local police chiefs to use their own discretion on when they saw fit to execute foreign workers, especially Russians.⁸¹ The heads of the Gestapo stations in Düsseldorf, Münster, Dortmund and Cologne had been warned on 24 January that ‘elements among the foreign workers and also former German Communists’ would take advantage of the current situation to engage in ‘subversive’ action. In all reported cases, the response should be ‘immediate and brutal’. Those involved were to ‘be destroyed, without requesting special treatment beforehand from Reich Security Head Office’.⁸²

Arbitrary executions of foreign workers now became commonplace. At least 14 Russians were executed by a shot in the back of the head, then tumbled into a ready-made pit, in a labour camp near Dortmund on 4 February; 24 members of a presumed subversive group, the ‘Kowalenko Gang’, were hanged or shot in Duisburg between 7 and 10 February; 74 persons were murdered in Cologne⁸³ (where, as we noted in an earlier chapter, something approaching a local war between dissidents and the police had been going on since the autumn) on 27 February and another 50 hanged in Gestapo headquarters on the day before the Americans occupied the city at the beginning of March. In the north of Germany, the Kiel Gestapo regularly carried out mass executions from January onwards, totalling around 200 prisoners by the end of April. One such was the shooting of 20–25 persons in late January or early February, and 17 Russian prisoners on 1 March. In the east of the country, in the penitentiary of Sonnenburg, near Frankfurt an der Oder, as many as 753 Gestapo prisoners, among them around 200 foreigners, were massacred on 30–31 January.⁸⁴ Even this was only the beginning of an orgy of killings of foreign workers in big cities across Germany in the final weeks of the war.

For the legions languishing in Germany’s prisons and concentration camps, the situation was even worse. The concentration camp population at the beginning of 1945 numbered around 700,000 prisoners from all over Europe, just under a third of them women, an estimated 200,000–250,000 of them Jews, the rest mainly political internees, watched over by 40,000 SS guards. A further 190,000 or so prisoners, many of them interned for ‘political’ offences, were held in German penal institutions at this time.⁸⁵ This entire population of the dispossessed, beyond the reach of any conventional judicial constraints, however harsh, and utterly exposed to the whim of their captors, was now in the greatest peril. Hitler had made no bones about the need to eradicate any internal threat on enemy approach. Probably in February 1945 he issued verbal orders to blow up the concentration camps on the approach of the Allies. According to Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, the Reichsführer-SS told him at the beginning of March that ‘if National Socialist Germany is going to be destroyed, then her enemies and the criminals in concentration camps shall not have the satisfaction of emerging from our ruin as triumphant conquerors. They shall share in the downfall. Those are the Führer’s direct orders and I must see to it that they are carried out down to the last detail.’⁸⁶

Himmler himself had already, in June 1944, passed executive powers to the Higher SS and Police Leaders to take necessary action in the event of a rising of prisoners on enemy approach.⁸⁷ Camps were to be evacuated and those interned there moved back into other camps. Should this not be possible, they were to be liquidated.⁸⁸ In January Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in the east, telling their commanders that Hitler held them responsible for ensuring that no prisoner should fall alive into enemy hands.⁸⁹ Precise responsibilities were, however, as so often in the Third Reich, left unclear. When the camps came to be evacuated, it was amid much confusion and panic rather than through precise implementation of clear orders from above.⁹⁰

Two imperatives, at least partially contradictory, played their part in the confusion. One was that prisoners should not fall living into the hands of the enemy, presumably to prevent their giving testimony about the barbarity of their treatment, and also because they might be used as hostages in any possible deal with the Allies. The other – offering the most slender of lifelines for the prisoners – was the need, still bizarrely felt even at this juncture, to retain them for their economic value as slave-labourers for the war effort. Extermination versus economic exploitation had long been a contest of Nazi racial policy. The contest continued to the last.

Himmler was by now playing a double game, demonstrating his unquestioned loyalty by maximum ruthlessness and brutality, exactly along the lines that Hitler would wish, while seeing his concentration camp empire as a pawn in possible feelers towards the western Allies with an eye on retaining a place in the post-Hitlerian order. Resorting to a long-held view in leading Nazi circles, he continued to entertain the vague notion that Jews could be used as hostages or a bargaining tool with the enemy. An attempt had already been made, in spring 1944, to barter the lives of Hungarian Jews for lorries to be used on the eastern front, in a fairly transparent tactic to try to split the enemy coalition. And in October 1944, Himmler met the former Swiss Federal President, Jean-Marie Musy, the go-between in an attempted deal to arrange the release of Jews in German hands against a payment of 20 million Swiss francs from Jewish sources in the United States. Himmler and Musy met again in the Black Forest on 12 January, when the Reichsführer agreed to transport 1,200 Jews to Switzerland every fortnight in exchange for $1,000 for each Jew to be paid into a Swiss account in Musy’s name. On 6 February the first train-load of Jews from the camp at Theresienstadt in north-west Bohemia did actually reach Switzerland, and 5 million Swiss francs were deposited in Musy’s account. But Ernst Kaltenbrunner, involved in his own soundings (which eventually came to nothing) to ransom Jews, sabotaged the deal. Kaltenbrunner brought to Hitler’s attention press reports of the arrival of the first transport of Jews in Switzerland, together with an intercepted piece of intelligence suggesting, wrongly, that Himmler had negotiated with Musy about asylum for 250 Nazi leaders in Switzerland. An enraged Hitler promptly ordered that any German who helped a Jew to escape would be executed on the spot. Himmler immediately halted the transports, though he was soon to attempt another route to try to use the Jews as a bargaining pawn with the Allies, this time through Sweden. For now, Hitler and Himmler still needed each other. But Hitler’s suspicions of his ‘loyal Heinrich’ can only have been sharpened by what he had learnt.⁹¹

It would be asking too much to look for coherence in Nazi policy in these weeks, even in the area of killing the defenceless, in which the regime excelled. In any case, the speed of the Soviet advance in the east, where some of the largest camps were situated, meant that decisions were usually taken ‘on the ground’, in maximum haste and often chaotically, by the local SS leadership, and frequently lacked any clarity of goal other than to evacuate the camp forthwith and prevent the enemy taking the prisoners alive.⁹² Mass killing of huge numbers of prisoners at the last minute, as guards were taken by surprise by the rapidity of the Soviet advance, was impractical. Leaving them alive for the enemy to find was explicitly ruled out (though in practice this sometimes happened with those too weak to transport away). That left forcing them, weakened and emaciated by their capitivity, ill-clothed and with scarcely any food, to be moved westwards, often on foot since insufficient transport was available, through the ice, snow and glacial winds of midwinter. The result was predictably murderous, but the horror was more usually a matter of improvisation within the remit of general guidelines rather than following clearly prescribed orders from above. For the guards, in any case, the haste of the marches, and the shooting or clubbing to death of stragglers and others who could not keep up the pace, was less dictated by the worry that the prisoners would fall into enemy hands than the fear of being taken captive themselves.⁹³

The chaos of the actual evacuations of camps and prisons did not mean that no plans had been laid for the removal of the incarcerated when the enemy arrived. The judicial authorities in Berlin had, in fact, already in late 1944 devised guidelines for evacuating the inmates of penal institutions, which were passed on in early 1945 to areas close to the front lines. Prisoners were divided according to the severity of the offence and racial criteria. Remaining Jews and ‘half-Jews’, Sinti and Roma, Poles, and the most serious categories of habitual criminals, psychopaths and ‘asocial subversive prisoners’ were on no account to be freed or allowed to fall into enemy hands. If they could not be transferred to the police and removed, they had to ‘be neutralized by shooting them dead’ and the evidence ‘carefully cleared up’.⁹⁴ The Soviet advance was so fast, however, that the 35,000 or so prisoners in seventy-five jails and penitentiaries in the path of the Red Army could not be transported back to central Germany in any orderly fashion.

Forced marches of prisoners who were in no physical condition to endure the treks of more than 30 kilometres a day on icy roads and tracks with hardly any food and without warm clothing or adequate footwear were chaotically undertaken. Many simply dropped by the wayside, exhausted, frozen and starving. Others were shot by trigger-happy guards, themselves desperate to flee from the oncoming Soviets. In one march of women prisoners, forced to cover 36 kilometres in a day in a temperature of minus 12 degrees Celsius, only 40 out of 565 arrived at their destination. But on some marches, a third of the prisoners managed to escape. Their guards were often too few in number and more concerned to save their own skins than to bother about the prisoners. Some guards just left their charges and fled into the unknown. Even so, the death rate during the prison evacuations was high, while several thousand prisoners were simply shot dead in their penitentiaries in the last months of the war to add to those who died on the forced marches.⁹⁵

For the inmates of the concentration camps, the death toll on the forced marches was far higher still. By 27 January, when the Red Army reached Auschwitz, by far the biggest concentration camp (which, with its nearby satellites, had combined a huge slave-labour complex with an immense extermination capacity), only about 7,000 of the weakest prisoners – barely more than living skeletons – remained of a camp population that had once comprised as many as 140,000 terrorized individuals, the bulk of them Jews. Gassing operations had been halted in November 1944. About 1.1 million victims, around a million of them Jews, had perished there.⁹⁶ Killing installations had been dismantled, and attempts made to erase the traces of the camp’s murderous activities.⁹⁷ The unexpected swifness of the Soviet advance had caused panic among the Auschwitz guards, though reasonably clear guidelines had been laid down for the clearance of the camp. These included orders from the camp commandant, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, to shoot stragglers on the march or any prisoner trying to flee.⁹⁸

Beginning already on 17 January some 56,000 prisoners, resembling ‘columns of corpses’,⁹⁹ had marched off, in great fear and abject misery, scantily clad and without food, trudging through heavy snow in piercing cold. Some were forced to push wheelbarrows carrying the guards’ belongings. Another 2,200 were transported by train six days later in open coal wagons with no protection from the glacial conditions. The guards scarcely knew where they were going, apart from the targeted destination of the camp of Groß-Rosen, some 250 kilometres to the west. Minimal food supplies were requisitioned in the villages the prisoner columns passed through. What rest the prisoners were allowed had often to be spent in the open; even barns or schoolrooms could sometimes not be used for overnight stays since they were already full of refugees. ‘Any of the prisoners who could not go further was shot,’ recalled just over a year later one member of a column of about 3,000, mainly Jews, who left Auschwitz-Birkenau on foot in freezing conditions on 18 January. ‘It was a complete shooting-festival.’¹⁰⁰

‘Every hundred metres there’s an SS milestone’ – the SS’s own term for another corpse they had left in the gutter by the roadside with a bullet in the head – recalled another survivor, who endured sixteen days of the barely imaginable horror before arriving at Groß-Rosen. On the first awful night of the march, he had been forced to stand with the other prisoners for eight hours overnight in the freezing cold of a factory yard belonging to one of Auschwitz’s subsidiary camps, without food or drink, not even permitted to move to relieve himself. By the time they moved on next morning, seventy prisoners were dead. The column tramped on as if in a trance, prisoners eating snow to quench a raging thirst. Whenever there was a fragment of food to be had, prisoners in near delirium fought each other for it, to the amusement of their guards.¹⁰¹ On one day, 23 January, after marching for nine hours through the fierce cold, the prisoners caught a glimpse of a signpost telling them that they were 2 kilometres farther from Gleiwitz than when they had started that morning. Little wonder that some thought the torture had no point, other than marching on until they were all dead. Some yearned for death to end their misery, and the SS were glad to oblige. For others, survival was all that counted.¹⁰² For many, there was no survival. Up to 15,000 Auschwitz prisoners, most of them Jews, died on the marches.¹⁰³

For those who reached Groß-Rosen, the agony of the marches was far from over. Initially a small camp, Groß-Rosen, at an important rail junction in Silesia 60 kilometres south-west of Breslau, had swollen to become a huge complex comprising numerous subsidiary camps, and held 80,000 prisoners. As camps and prisons in the General Government of Poland had been closed down over previous months and new prisoners had arrived on almost a daily basis – many of them swiftly to be pushed out again – Groß-Rosen’s overcrowding reached monstrous proportions, with some of the barrack-huts forced to house up to nine times their normal complement. Hygiene and sanitation were as good as non-existent, illness and infestation rampant. Rations consisted of bread and a spoonful of jam, with half a litre of salty soup distributed three times a week. ‘We are a thousand men lying in a room with space for maximum two hundred,’ jotted one prisoner in his diary notes. ‘We can’t wash, we get half a litre of swede-broth and 200 grams of bread. Up to today there are 250 dead in our barracks alone.’¹⁰⁴ And as conditions deteriorated, the terror inflicted by the guards became even more arbitrary.

Many of the tens of thousands teeming into Groß-Rosen from Auschwitz were there only a couple of days before being transported onwards in open railway wagons on journeys that could last up to a fortnight before arrival at one of the equally overcrowded and grotesquely brutal hellholes in the Reich, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dora-Mittelbau or Mauthausen (in Austria). On 8–9 February, the main camp at Groß-Rosen was itself evacuated in chaotic haste, though some of the outlying auxiliary camps fell into Soviet hands before the prisoners could be removed. The prisoners received a piece of bread each for the journey before being crammed like cattle into open goods-wagons, so tightly and without protection against the bitter elements that many did not survive the journey. Others were shot even on the way to the station and some while trying to escape. Many others – 500 in one transport of 3,500 – were murdered at the station. Bodies lay strewn along the railway lines.¹⁰⁵ Around 44,000 prisoners from Groß-Rosen reached other camps within the Reich. The number who died en route is not known, but was evidently very large.¹⁰⁶

For a third huge concentration camp complex in the east, at Stutthof near Danzig at the Vistula estuary, detailed evacuation plans had been worked out the previous summer. The idea was to ship a section of the prisoners westwards from Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdynia), while the remainder would head over land to a temporary stationing at Lauenburg in Pomerania, before being moved on to camps in the Reich itself. A number of subsidiary camps were closed down at the approach of the Red Army in January and the 22,000 prisoners, the majority of them women, held there were moved out. The massacre at Palmnicken in East Prussia, mentioned in the previous chapter, was the result of one such evacuation, but was far from the sole slaughter of prisoners removed from the subsidiary camps, particularly those not capable of undertaking the forced march, whom the SS did not know what to do with. The threat from the Red Army’s advance to the vicinity of Elbing and Marienburg on 23–4 January, leaving them only about 50 kilometres from Stutthof, led also to the hastily reached decision to evacuate the main camp. On 25 January, each taking 500 grams of bread and 120 grams of margarine for the trek, around 11,000 prisoners were forced out into the wintry wastes for a seven-day march to Lauenburg. German and the small number of Scandinavian prisoners were better treated than the Jews, Poles and Soviets. Clear orders were given that the prisoners were to march in rows of five and that any trying to flee or showing any signs of rebellion were to be ruthlessly shot down. By the time they reached Lauenburg, between 1 and 4 February, two-thirds of the prisoners were dead. Most were unfit to travel further into the Reich. An estimated 85 per cent – 9,500 out of 11,000 who started the terrible march to Lauenburg, mostly Jews – did not survive.¹⁰⁷

Some 113,000 concentration camp prisoners, in all, set out on the death marches in January and February.¹⁰⁸ A cautious estimate is that at least a third did not survive. Those on the marches could expect little help from the villagers of the places they passed through. The guards did what they could to keep the prisoners segregated and, where there was some contact, prevented attempts by anyone prepared to show sympathy by throwing them a piece of bread or another morsel. In other instances, people were hostile to the prisoner columns. Whether from fear of the guards, of the prisoners or of both, or approval of the treatment of the Reich’s ‘enemies’, most bystanders kept their distance. Often, too, the marches were passing through already evacuated districts or diverted to avoid contact with refugee treks.¹⁰⁹ Of those who did manage to survive the terrible ordeal, the barely describable suffering was far from at an end. Having reached grossly overcrowded concentration camps within Germany, where conditions of existence – it could scarcely be called living – were deteriorating drastically by the day, in the last, wild weeks of the Third Reich they were forced to endure still further death marches even more chaotic than those they had already barely survived.

V

In another way, too, terror came ‘home into the Reich’ on a new scale. This was the terror from the skies, given its lasting symbol by the Allied raids on 13–14 February 1945 which ruthlessly obliterated the historic and beautiful centre of Dresden, a city labelled, on account of its cultural glory, ‘Florence on the Elbe’.

By this time, hardly any German city or town of any size had wholly escaped the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign and many had experienced death and destruction at the hands of the bombers on numerous occasions. Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris had presided over the campaign to destroy German cities since 1942.¹¹⁰ Northern and western cities, most easily reachable from British bases, had been the first to be targeted. By 1943, British night-time ‘area bombing’ was linked to day-time American so-called ‘precision raids’ (often, in fact, considerably less than precise) as the severity of the attacks grew in the proclaimed strategy of ‘round-the-clock bombing’. In a specially terrible and devastating attack on Hamburg in July 1943, around 40,000 citizens perished in horrific firestorms. The cities of the Rhine–Ruhr industrial belt were relentlessly and repeatedly attacked as the bombing intensified over 1943 and 1944. Cologne, Essen (home of Krupp), Dortmund, the Ruhr ‘coal-pot’ Bochum, and other major parts of the industrial conurbation were reduced to heaps of rubble. As Allied control of the skies grew and air bases could be situated closer to Germany, cities in the middle and south of the country became more frequent targets. Kassel and Darmstadt, Heilbronn, Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich were among those to suffer fearful attacks. The great metropolis Berlin, its sheer size as well as distance from enemy bases an obstacle to the level of destruction caused in some other cities, was attacked 363 times in all during the course of the war. The heavy raid on 3 February inflicted the worst destruction in the capital to date, laying waste the government district and the historic buildings of the city centre (though, luckily for Berliners, causing only a fraction of the death toll the Allies had intended).¹¹¹

There was a sharp escalation of the bombing as Allied strength grew and the Luftwaffe was increasingly rendered ineffective. In 1942, a total of 41,440 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany. In 1943 the figure rose to 206,000 tons, and in 1944 expanded more than fivefold to 1,202,000 tons. And 471,000 tons, or more than twice the amount dropped in the whole year of 1943, were dropped between January and the end of April 1945.¹¹² The 67,000 tons dropped by the RAF in March 1945 amounted, in fact, to almost as much as the entire tonnage unloaded onto Germany during the first three years of the war.¹¹³ Some of the most devastating attacks were made on near defenceless populations in the very last weeks of the war with the near obliteration of Pforzheim, ‘Gateway to the Black Forest’, on 23–4 February, killing 17,600 people (a quarter of the population), and the savage bombing – militarily quite pointless – of Würzburg, on 16 March, leaving 4,000 dead out of 107,000 inhabitants as incendiaries destroyed 90 per cent of the beautiful baroque centre, a cultural gem, within seventeen minutes.¹¹⁴

Germany was paying a dreadful price, reaping the whirlwind for what it had begun, even before the war, with the merciless bombing of Guernica in 1937, then, once the war had started, in the ruthless attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and densely populated parts of London. In all, it is adjudged that Allied bombing of Germany killed close to half a million people. A third of the population suffered in some way. More than a quarter of the homes in Germany were damaged by attacks from the air.¹¹⁵

In this terrible catalogue of death and destruction through enemy bombing, the ferocious attack on Dresden on 13–14 February holds a special place. There were perfect conditions for complete aerial annihilation: good weather for bombing, the almost total absence of air defences, the lack of provision by the Nazi leadership of even semi-adequate air-raid shelters (apart from the bunker built for the use of Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann), and a city overcrowded by the accommodation of thousands of refugees to add to the population of 640,000. All this was the target of a double British incendiary and explosive attack of enormous severity that ensured the complete firestorm which turned the old town into a raging inferno. This was followed by a further heavy raid next lunchtime, now by the Americans.

People taking cover in makeshift shelters were suffocated. Those on the streets were sucked into the devouring firestorm. When survivors emerged onto the streets after the first attack, they were caught up in the second, which magnified greatly the ferocity of the firestorm and widened the area of devastation. Those diving into the large reservoir in the middle of the city to escape the flames, among them people who were injured or non-swimmers, found that, unlike swimming-pools, there was no easy way of getting out, since the walls were of smooth cement, and many drowned. On the burning streets, charred corpses lay everywhere. Basements and cellars were full of bodies. In the main station, which had been crammed with refugees, there were ‘corpses and parts of bodies wherever one looked, in the tunnel passages and waiting-rooms in horrific numbers. Nobody got out of here alive.’¹¹⁶ In the pandemonium, the difference between death and survival was a hair’s breadth – often a matter of pure luck. The best hope was to reach the Elbe, and the safety of the river. When the firestorm finally blew itself out and the bombers of next day’s raid had dispatched their lethal loads and left for home, Dresden was a city of the dead.¹¹⁷ But for a few, remarkably, the night of horror brought salvation. The remaining Jews of the city had been awaiting their imminent deportation, and were aware what that meant. In the chaos, they were able to rip off their yellow star, join the homeless ‘aryan’ masses, and avoid deportation to their deaths.¹¹⁸

Even at this late stage of the war, and amid all the mayhem of the ruined city, the regime showed a remarkable capacity for organizing an improvised emergency response. Aid teams were dispatched to Dresden the morning after the attack. Two thousand soldiers and a thousand prisoners of war, together with repair teams from other cities in the region, were rushed in. A command post and communications system were erected to coordinate work. Within three days, 600,000 hot meals a day were being distributed. Martial law was declared and looters arrested and, in numerous cases, executed forthwith. The gruesome task of collecting charcoaled bodies started, some of it undertaken by prisoners of war. With bureaucratic precision, the city’s authorities collected and counted the corpses. More than 10,000 were buried in mass graves on the edge of the city. Thousands more were cremated between 21 February and 5 March in huge pyres on the Altmarkt, in the centre of town. The official report on the victims of the bombing, compiled in March, spoke of 18,375 dead, 2,212 seriously injured, 13,718 slightly injured, and 350,000 homeless. Taking account of others still presumed to be lying beneath the masses of rubble in the inner city, the report estimated the death toll at 25,000 – still accepted as the most reliable figure.¹¹⁹

This figure is lower than the grim toll of mortalities in Hamburg in July 1943, though as a proportion of the population higher (if considerably smaller than in Pforzheim, which, measured in this macabre way, suffered the worst raid of the entire war).¹²⁰ The shock of Dresden was all the greater since it had long presumed that, as such a cultural jewel, it would be spared the fate of other big cities in the Reich. Of course, Munich’s reputation as a city of priceless art and architecture had offered no protection against as many as seventy-three air raids.¹²¹ And the centre of Würzburg, a testament to the rococo genius of Balthasar Neumann, was almost totally wiped out in March.¹²² But Munich, apart from its art treasures, was the ‘capital of the [Nazi] movement’ (as it had been labelled since 1933). And the flattening of Würzburg (where despite the level of destruction the death toll was perhaps a fifth of Dresden’s) might have been a bigger shock had it preceded, not followed, the bombing of the Saxon capital. Dresden had been a huge attack, and, with the end of the war in sight, had caused immense loss of life and had destroyed a city of singular beauty. Perhaps all this was sufficient of itself to turn Dresden, of all the cities mercilessly pounded from the air, into the very symbol of the bombing war.

There was, however, something else. Dresden gave Goebbels a propaganda gift. He seized upon an Associated Press report, which, remarkably, passed the British censor, and spoke not inaccurately of a policy of ‘deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres’.¹²³ Within days he was castigating a deliberate policy to wipe out the German people by terror-attacks aimed, not at industrial installations, but at the population of a peaceful centre of culture and the masses of refugees, many of them women and children, who had fled from the horrors of war. The numbers of refugees in the city and killed in the attack were inflated in the reportage (though many had, indeed, fallen victim to the bombing, and the Allies were well aware that refugees had poured into the city in recent weeks in the wake of the Red Army’s advance). Also deliberately misleading was the image of a city without war industries, devoid of military signifiance. Its position as an important railway junction gave it some importance, and most of its industry was involved in war production. The attempt to disrupt the passage of German troops through Dresden to reinforce the eastern front, and thereby to assist the Soviet offensive, was, in fact, the rationale behind the bombing of Dresden along with other eastern cities (including Berlin).¹²⁴ It was, nevertheless, the case that the main target in Dresden had been the heavily populated area of the old town, not the more outlying industrial installations. Not least, Goebbels magnified the number of victims, by the simple device of adding a ‘0’ onto the official figure. Instead of 25,000 dead – itself a vast number – Goebbels created a death toll of 250,000.¹²⁵ From horrific reality, he created even more horrific – and long-lasting – myth.

He and other Nazi leaders also used the bombing of Dresden to emphasize the need to fight on – the only response possible, his weekly newspaper Das Reich claimed, to the threat to Germany’s existence posed by the western Allies as much as by the Soviets.¹²⁶ It seems unlikely that most ordinary Germans drew this conclusion from the devastating attack. True, there were voices to be heard – echoing Goebbels – that Germany would not be forced by terror to capitulation.¹²⁷ But they were probably the exception. Letters to and from the front speak of the horror at the news of what had taken place, but not of strengthened morale or determination to hold out.¹²⁸ Doubtless, the prevalent hatred of ‘air gangsters’ gained some new sustenance. For the most part, however, the destruction of Dresden probably signified for most people not the need to resist to the last, but the helplessness against such wanton devastation and the futility of fighting on while Germany’s cities were being obliterated. And Dresden, the most glaring manifestation of the Nazi regime’s inability to protect its own population from the bombers, brought no deflection of the mounting antagonism of the German people towards their own leaders. ‘Trust in the leadership shrinks ever more,’ ran a summary of letters monitored by the Propaganda Ministry in early March. ‘Criticism of the upper leadership ranks of the Party and of the military leadership is especially bitter.’¹²⁹

VI

The horror inflicted on Dresden did little or nothing to hasten the end of the war. But it was a reminder to many that the end was not far off. The regime’s leaders, too, were well aware – not that they would openly acknowledge it – that the game was up, that it would be a matter of weeks, not months, before Germany was totally crushed. They could intensify the terror and repression directed now also at their own population and throttle any possibility of a repeat of 1918. But they were powerless to stop the flood tide of impending defeat.

The outward façade of invincibility had to be maintained. Robert Ley, the Labour Front Leader, whose public utterances – and reputation for drunkenness – were an embarrassment to Goebbels and other leading Nazis,¹³⁰ even managed to draw positives from the Dresden inferno, declaring that as a consequence the struggle for victory would no longer be distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture.¹³¹ Yet privately Ley could see as well as anyone how desperate the situation was on the fronts.¹³² Even within leading SS circles, Himmler held to the myth that the war would turn out well for Germany. Rituals were to continue as usual. Himmler wrote to Obersturmführer Freiherr von Berlepsch to congratulate him on the birth of his eighth child and let him know that the ‘light of life’ (Lebensleuchter) – part of the pseudo-religious cultism within the SS – for little Dietmar could be sent only after the war.¹³³ The Reichsführer-SS let it be known among his leading aides that he wanted every year in May to establish which book he would give to higher SS leaders at the ‘Julfest’ – the order’s pagan version of Christmas. A list was to be provided by 30 April 1945 on which the titles of the books in question were to be presented.¹³⁴ And replying to the father of one of his godchildren, who had written to thank him for all the presents to his family, mentioning that a Christmas plate (Julteller) had arrived broken, Himmler had Rudolf Brandt, his aide, provide assurance that, should a small contingent be available after the war, ‘I will gladly again send you a Christmas plate’.¹³⁵ Speaking privately to Albert Speer, Himmler kept up pretences. ‘When things go downhill, there’s always a valley-bottom, and only when that’s reached, Herr Speer, do they go up again.’¹³⁶ This maintenance of illusions came from a man, wavering between his own growing sense of delusion and hard-headed awareness of realities, who was already making tacit overtures to the enemy with an eye to his post-war future.

A curious mixture of unreality and ‘business as usual’ prevailed, too, in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy. Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the long-serving Finance Minister who had held office since 1932, before Hitler’s accession to power, dispatched numerous letters in early 1945 to Nazi leaders and government ministers offering advice on the conduct of the war. Little notice was taken of them. His main preoccupation, however, was the desolate state of Reich finances. In January he compiled a lengthy dossier, sent to leading figures in the regime, which began by stating: ‘The current finance and currency situation is characterized by rising costs of war, falling state income, increased money supply and smaller purchasing power of money.’ It was urgently necessary, he concluded, drastically to restrict money supply by reducing Reich expenditure and by increases in postage, rail and local transport prices, and by raising taxation on tobacco and alcohol, visits to the cinema, hotel accommodation, radio licence fees and newspapers, as well as increasing the war supplement on gas, water and electricity prices. With remarkable logic – justifying the post-war impression of him as an individual of singular ineptitude, an utter ‘ninny’¹³⁷ – he reasoned that ‘it cannot be objected that essential provisions for the population are thereby being made more expensive’ since ‘a large part of the population has already been entirely without regular access, or with only restricted access, to water, gas and electricity for months’.¹³⁸ He presented his proposals for a fourfold rise in property tax to a meeting of ministers on 23 February, lamenting Bormann’s absence from the meeting and his unwillingness to discuss the dangers of a collapse of the currency. All he could get out of the Party Chancellery was a suggestion that a programme should be devised by state officials after which Bormann would be able to judge whether it could be ‘politically implemented’.¹³⁹ In any normal political system, the imminent collapse of the state currency would have been a matter of the utmost priority. To the Nazi leadership, in the conditions of February 1945, it was of no consequence. Undeterred, Krosigk continued to work on his plans for tax reform, which were criticized in late March by Goebbels – as if they were about to be implemented – for placing the burden upon consumer tax rather than income tax. By that time, it was at best an arcane issue: most of the country was under enemy occupation.¹⁴⁰

Constantly in Hitler’s close proximity, Martin Bormann was more aware than most of the true scale of the disaster closing in on Germany. His frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, show his anxious recognition of the plain realities of the military situation, brought home to him at first hand by the bombing of the Reich Chancellery on 3 February. The day following this heavy raid, he feared (he wrote) that ‘the worst phase of our fortunes is still to come’ and told Gerda frankly ‘how very unpleasant – indeed, if I am completely honest, how desperate the situation really is’. But pretence had to be maintained, and he added: ‘I know that you, like myself, will never lose your faith in ultimate victory.’¹⁴¹ Next day he wrote again, first with scarcely veiled pessimism about the outlook on the western front, but then reverting to a form of fatalistic hope in the future:

Anyone who still grants that we have a chance must be a great optimist! And that is just what we are! I just cannot believe that Destiny could have led our people and our Führer so far along this wonderful road, only to abandon us now and see us disappear for ever. A victory for Bolshevism and Americanism would mean not only the extermination of our race, but also the destruction of everything that its culture and civilisation has created. Instead of the ‘Meistersinger’ we should see jazz triumphant…¹⁴²

Gerda replied: ‘One day, the Reich of our dreams will emerge. Shall we, I wonder, or our children, live to see it?’ Martin interpolated some words in his wife’s letter at this point: ‘I have every hope that we shall!’¹⁴³ In another letter to her, a little later, he added: ‘As I have often emphasized, I have no premonitions of death; on the contrary, my burning desire is to live – and by that I mean to be with you and our children. I would like to muddle on through life, together with you, as many years as possible, and in peace.’¹⁴⁴

Goebbels was, for many Germans, the outward face of the regime in the last months, appearing in public more frequently than any other Nazi leader, visiting troops at the front as well as urging on bombed-out civilians – a constant driving force, in his radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, to ever greater efforts to hold out and fight on. He still worked feverishly to drum up new recruits for the Wehrmacht and, now, to plan the defence of Berlin (for which he saw Bolshevik methods in Leningrad and Moscow as a possible model).¹⁴⁵ He remained among the most utterly fanatical Nazis, widely regarded alongside Himmler as one of ‘the strong men’ of the regime.¹⁴⁶ He urged rapid sentencing by drumhead courts martial and execution to address the ‘miserable mood’ among the 35,000 ‘stragglers’ and deserters recently rounded up, looking to Stalinist methods to restore order and combat sunken morale.¹⁴⁷ His fanaticism led him to advocate the execution of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war in response to the bombing of Dresden.¹⁴⁸ He was still a figure of remarkable dynamism, able not just to put on a show for the masses, but also to fire up those in his entourage and continue to represent the face of optimism and defiance. Yet he was among the most clear-sighted of the Nazi leaders. When, in early February, his wife Magda lamented the loss of so many territories that Germany had once conquered and the weakness now unable to prevent the threat to Berlin itself, Goebbels replied: ‘Yes, sweetheart. We’ve had it, bled white, finished. There’s nothing to be done.’¹⁴⁹

Despite such sentiments, he had not conceded defeat. He still saw in late February, so his aide Wilfred von Oven recorded, a slim chance of avoiding complete disaster if Germany were to gain some time, then – a delusion he shared with other leading Nazis – negotiate to let in the western Allies to join in a fight against Bolshevism. But he readily admitted that Hitler did not share this view and still insisted that 1945 would bring the decisive change for the better in Germany’s fortunes.¹⁵⁰ He was sceptical about Hitler’s extraordinary adherence to undiluted optimism.¹⁵¹ But a visit to the Führer bunker was nevertheless invariably an antidote to any fleeting moments of depression. The atmosphere there, increasingly given to flights from reality, usually dissipated his doubts and pandered to his willingness to believe in some near miraculous change in war fortunes.¹⁵² After one visit, in mid-February, he came away enthused by discussions with the architect Hermann Giesler, who had just shown a fascinated Hitler his model of Linz as it was to be after the war. Giesler told Goebbels, as he had indicated to Hitler, that he thought most German towns could be rebuilt within three to five years. Goebbels found himself, as in 1933 at the end of the struggle for power, longing to take part in the work of reconstruction.¹⁵³ He still pressed, as he had long done, for a radicalization of the home front, the dismissal of Göring and Ribbentrop (both of whom he regarded as utter failures and an obstacle to any new initiatives), and a search even at this late stage for a political solution to end the war. But he remained, as always, a faithful acolyte of Hitler, unwilling and unable to take an independent step. He saw Hitler as a stoical disciple of Frederick the Great, fulfilling his duty to the end, ‘a model and an example to us all’.¹⁵⁴ For Goebbels, too, reality and illusion were by this time closely interwoven.

More realistic than other Nazi leaders in his appraisal of the situation was Albert Speer. On 30 January, as it happened the twelfth anniversary of the ‘takeover of power’, he submitted a lengthy memorandum to Hitler outlining the armaments situation for February and March. He pointed out the dire consequences from the loss of Upper Silesia, hitherto Germany’s last intact coal-producing area. He provided figures demonstrating the dramatic fall over the previous year of weapons and munitions production. At the current levels of coal and raw steel capacity, it was, he wrote, impossible to sustain the German economy for long. Collapse could only be delayed for a few months. After the loss of Upper Silesia, the armaments industry was no longer remotely in a position to cover the demand for weaponry to replace losses at the front. Speer concluded his memorandum in underlined bold type: ‘The material superiority of the enemy can accordingly no longer be countered by the bravery of our soldiers.’¹⁵⁵

Goebbels drew the logical conclusion from the memorandum – which he recognized as showing ‘things as they really are’ – that Speer was indicating the need to try to find a political way out of the war. But he saw no prospect of that.¹⁵⁶ He was right to be pessimistic. Hitler forbade Speer to give his memorandum to anyone else – somewhat belatedly, since Goebbels and others had already seen it – and, referring specifically to its conclusions, told him coldly that he alone was entitled to draw conclusions from the armaments situation.¹⁵⁷ That was an end to the matter, as Speer acknowledged.

Hitler’s authority was still intact.¹⁵⁸ In sustaining his unchallengeable leadership position, he could thank, now as before, in no small part his provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter. Although he had to insist in early February that the Gauleiter blindly follow orders from Berlin and stop the tendency ‘to govern in their own way’ – actually a tendency that grew, rather than diminished, in the last weeks of the war – he was soon afterwards lavishing praise on them for their utter dependency in controlling matters of civil defence.¹⁵⁹ Most of them, like Gauleiter Albert Forster of Danzig-West Prussia, had probably given up hope of a positive outcome to the war for Germany.¹⁶⁰ But whatever their private feelings and the secret hopes some of them cherished of escaping the tightening vice, they remained a group of outright loyalists.

Summoned to what turned out to be their last meeting with Hitler, in the Reich Chancellery on 24 February 1945, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Party Programme, the Gauleiter – minus Koch and Hanke, unable to leave East Prussia and Breslau respectively – initially shared criticisms and complaints with each other, not least about Bormann. But they were ‘all still full of belief in victory’, at least on the surface. In truth, they were anxious about betraying any defeatist sentiment. Karl Wahl, Gauleiter of Swabia, had the feeling, so he wrote later, that ‘they all lived on the moon’.¹⁶¹ When Hitler finally arrived, they were shocked at his appearance – that of an old, ill, physical wreck of a man, whose left arm shook the whole time. Tears came into Wahl’s eyes at the sight of such a decrepit individual; for him, it was ‘the end of the world’.¹⁶²

Hitler had begun the meeting by shaking hands with each individual Gauleiter for what seemed an age, looking them in the eye as he did so. But his speech, an hour and a half long, was a disappointment. He spoke at great length, as he had done so often, about the past – the First World War, his entry into politics, the growth of the Party, the triumph of 1933, the reshaping of Germany thereafter – but hardly touched upon what they had come to hear: how Germany stood in the war. What he had to say about the impact of new U-boats and jet-planes was less than convincing. The much-vaunted ‘miracle weapons’ were not even mentioned. It seemed a far cry from the old Hitler. But after the formal proceedings, he relaxed visibly in their company over a simple meal until, their own conversations petering out, they all found themselves listening, as ever, to a monologue. Hitler spoke now with a verve earlier lacking about the certainty that ‘the alliance of madness’ ranged against Germany would break up into two irreconcilable fronts, and of the dangers for the west in a pyrrhic victory that would raise Bolshevism to a dominant position in Europe. ‘Our depressed mood evaporates,’ recalled one Gauleiter, Rudolf Jordan, Party boss of Magdeburg-Anhalt. ‘The disappointment of the last hours has vanished. We experience the old Hitler.’ They were left in no doubt: he would fight on to the bitter end.¹⁶³

That much was clear, as it always had been. There could be no talk of defeat, no talk of surrender. It was good to have burnt one’s bridges.¹⁶⁴ On the evening of 12 February the communiqué from the Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had met for a week in crucial deliberation to determine the post-war shape of Europe, was read in Berlin. The communiqué stipulated that Germany would be divided and demilitarized, the Nazi Party abolished, and war criminals put on trial. There could now be no lingering doubt for Nazi leaders that Germany’s fate was sealed; there would be no negotiated end to the war; ‘unconditional surrender’ meant just that.¹⁶⁵ For Hitler, it simply confirmed what he already knew. ‘I’ve always said: “there can be no question of a capitulation!” ’ was his response to Yalta. ‘History does not repeat itself!’¹⁶⁶