7

Crumbling Foundations

Is there nobody there who will restrain the madman and call a halt? Are they still generals? No, they are shitbags, cowardly poltroons. They are cowards! Not the ordinary soldier.

Diary entry of an officer in the west, 7 April 1945¹

I

By March 1945, Allies were closing in east and west for the kill as the Reich’s military weakness was fully exposed.² The eastern front was reinforced at the expense of the west, but the troops were invariably already battle-weary and, increasingly, ill-trained young recruits. The huge losses could simply no longer be made good. The fighting strength of divisions had fallen drastically. The greatly weakened, though still tenaciously fighting, German forces faced an impossible task in trying to halt the Red Army, once it had regrouped and consolidated its supply lines after the big advance of January. In the west, the Ardennes offensive had inflicted a temporary shock rather than a major reversal on the western Allies. They soon regathered and prepared for the assault on the western frontiers of the Reich, against a Wehrmacht whose impoverished resources were incapable, despite its tough rearguard action, of repelling immensely superior might. The task was rendered completely hopeless through the near total impotence of the Luftwaffe, whose limited capability in the west had been cut back in order to supply – wholly ineffectively – the eastern front.

After the disasters of January, the Army High Command did all it could to reinforce the front in Pomerania and along the Oder. Army Group Vistula, commanded by Himmler and comprising twenty-five infantry and eight panzer divisions, defended an extensive sector running from Elbing in the east to the Oder, little more than 80 kilometres north-east of Berlin. The whole of its southern flank, however, faced the Red Army, impatient to press northwards towards the Baltic coast. Once a weak German counter-offensive in mid-February had fairly easily been parried, the loss of Pomerania – allowing the Soviets to secure their northern flank for the coming assault on Berlin – swiftly became unstoppable. On 4 March, the Red Army reached the Baltic coast between Köslin and Kolberg. The coastal town of Kolberg was a vital strategic stronghold. The spectacular colour film Kolberg (referred to in an earlier chapter), which Goebbels had commissioned, depicted the town’s heroic defence against Napoleon’s forces.³ This time there was, however, to be no heroic defence. Kolberg was besieged on 7 March and declared by Hitler a ‘fortress’ to be held at all costs. The town commandant held out only until the civilians – including around 60,000 refugees, many of them wounded – could be shipped away by the navy,⁴ then left himself over the sea on 18 March, along with the town’s remaining defence force.⁵

Other Pomeranian strongholds were lost soon afterwards. By 20 March, after days of bitter fighting, Stettin’s harbour and wharves had been wrecked and could no longer be used by the German navy, though German troops held onto a bridgehead and the city itself, now largely deserted, fell to the Soviets only towards the end of April. Gotenhafen (Gdynia) held out until 28 March and the key city of Danzig till 30 March, enabling the navy to ferry many desperate refugees and wounded civilians and soldiers to safety. By this time, German forces in Pomerania had been broken, then crushed. What remained of them, around 100,000 men, retreated to the long thin Hela peninsula, facing Gdynia in the Bay of Danzig, and the Vistula delta, where they remained down to the capitulation. Overall, between the beginning of February and middle of April Army Group Vistula suffered losses of around 143,000 officers and men killed, wounded or missing.

In East Prussia, the battered forces of Army Group North still comprised thirty-two divisions in early February, twenty-three of them, belonging to the 4th Army, in the heavily fortified Heilsberg pocket, about 180 kilometres long and 50 deep. A second grouping was besieged in Königsberg, a third, the 3rd Panzer Army, contained on the Samland peninsula. For a brief time in mid-February, intense fighting opened up a corridor from the encircled Königsberg to Pillau, the last remaining port in German hands in the province. This enabled some civilians in Königsberg to escape and provisions to be brought in for the garrison. Once the corridor was closed off again, the fate of the remaining inhabitants of Königsberg was sealed, though capitulation did not follow until 9 April. Meanwhile, the position of the troops in the Heilsberg pocket had worsened sharply. The replacement of Renduli´c by Colonel-General Walter Weiß as Commander-in-Chief Army Group North on 12 March could bring no improvement. By 19 March, the German pocket was reduced to an area of no more than about 30 kilometres long and 10 deep, exposed on all sides to intense Soviet firepower. By the time the last remnants of the 4th Army were transported across the Frisches Haff from Balga, then to safety from Pillau on 29 March, only 58,000 men and around another 70,000 wounded could be rescued out of an original complement of half a million. The eight divisions left on Samland continued to fight on for some weeks until Pillau was eventually taken on 25 April, when the broken and demoralized remainder retreated to the Frische Nehrung. There they stayed – though with further losses through repeated heavy Soviet bombardment – until the end of the war.

On the Oder, the German 9th Army, under General Theodor Busse, sought, with weakened forces, to hold the defences of the heavily fortified town of Küstrin and the designated fortress of Frankfurt an der Oder. Reinforcements were rushed to the area, but could not compensate for the blood-letting in the fierce fighting – the Panzer Division Kurmark alone lost between 200 and 350 men a day – and the Soviets were able gradually to extend their bridgehead. By early March, Küstrin could be supplied only through a narrow corridor, 3 kilometres wide, which was closed off on 22 March. Much of Küstrin fell on 13 March after bitter street-fighting over previous days, but what remained of the fifteen battalions defending the town under the leadership of SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Reinefarth – the former police chief in the Wartheland who had also been prominent in the savage brutality used to put down the rising in Warsaw – retreated within the old fortress walls. When an attempted counter-offensive to relieve the siege failed, amid high German casualties, Guderian was made the scapegoat. He became the last Chief of the General Staff to be dismissed by Hitler, on 28 March, when he was replaced by General Hans Krebs. A second attempt to reach Küstrin that same day had to be abandoned after a few hours. Reinefarth ignored Hitler’s order to fight to the last and the garrison of almost a thousand officers and men managed to break out of the encirclement on 30 March, just before Küstrin fell. For this disobedience he was court-martialled and was fortunate to escape with his life.

Further south on the Oder, in Lower Silesia, the Red Army made relatively slow progress. Schörner’s Army Group Centre, comprising some twenty infantry and eight panzer divisions, battled ferociously, though in the end vainly. The Germans fought hard to keep open a corridor to Breslau, though once this was closed by 16 February some 40,000 troops (along with 80,000 civilians) were sealed off in the Silesian capital. Another 9,000 were encircled to the north in Glogau. Tough German resistance was unable to prevent the Soviets reaching the right bank of the Neiße near its confluence with the Oder by 24 February. In mid-March, a big drive by the Red Army in the Oppeln area overcame fierce fighting to surround and destroy five German divisions. Around 30,000 Germans were killed, another 15,000 captured. When Ratibor fell on 31 March, the last large industrial city in Silesia was lost to the Germans. What was left of Army Group Centre was forced back onto the western reaches of the Neiße and south-west into the Sudetenland.

On the southern flank of the eastern front, where nineteen infantry and nine panzer divisions were located, the intense fighting around Budapest which had lasted for weeks was finally reaching its dénouement. Ferocious street-fighting – ultimately in the sewers – came to an end on 13 February. Between them, the Germans and Hungarians had lost 50,000 men killed and 138,000 captured in the battle for Budapest. Soviet losses were even higher. Heavy fighting continued to the west of Budapest. Hitler insisted, against Guderian’s advice, on a counter-offensive centred on Lake Balaton. A successful outcome, so ran the strategic thinking, would free nine divisions to be sent to the Oder for an eventual counter-offensive there in May. It would also block the Soviet approaches to Vienna. Most crucially, it was vital to the continuation of Germany’s war effort to retain control of the remaining oil wells in the region. Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army, refreshed since the failure in the Ardennes, was sent down to spearhead the attack, which began on 6 March. The German forces battled their way forwards around 20–30 kilometres over a 50-kilometre stretch, but after ten days, amid heavy losses and exhaustion, the attempt ran out of steam. General Otto Wöhler, Commander-in-Chief Army Group South, gave out orders to fight to the last. But even the elite troops of the 6th SS-Panzer Army preferred retreat to pointless self-sacrifice. The orders were disobeyed as Dietrich’s men fought their way back westwards into Austria in some disarray, narrowly avoiding complete destruction, but abandoning much heavy equipment as they went. In blind fury, Hitler ordered that Sepp Dietrich’s units, including his own bodyguard, the ‘Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler’, should be stripped of their armbands in disgrace. Even General Hermann Balck, the tough panzer commander in Hungary, who himself had telephoned Guderian to request action be taken against intact units of the Leibstandarte retreating with all their weapons, thought the degradation too harsh a punishment.⁶ Worse than the prestige issue of the armbands, from a German perspective, was that by the end of March the oilfields were lost, along with the whole of Hungary. The Austrian border now lay directly in the path of the Red Army.

By the end of March, the Red Army had made significant headway on all parts of the eastern front. Berlin was now under imminent threat. In the west, too, February and March saw German defences put up stiff opposition, but ultimately crumble as the western Allies were able to cross the Rhine, the last big natural barrier protecting the Reich, and advance deep into Germany itself.

By February 1945, Germany’s western front was defended by 462,000 soldiers in fifty-nine divisions (about a third as many as on the eastern front). These were hopelessly outnumbered by the forces of the western Allies, who by this time had more than 3.5 million men on the European continent. The German divisions were smaller than earlier in the war, on average just under 8,000 men, and the actual fighting strength of each of them only about half that number – many of them young recruits, already worn down by constant fighting. Tanks, artillery and aircraft, like manpower, had had to be sacrificed for the eastern front. It was made clear to the commanders of the western army groups – Army Group H in the north under Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz (who had replaced Colonel-General Kurt Student on 28 January), Army Group B in the centre of the front under Field-Marshal Walter Model, and Army Group G in the south led by Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser – that, given the situation in the east, they could reckon with reinforcements of neither men nor matériel. The imbalance with the armaments of the western Allies was massive – and most pronounced in the air, where Allied supremacy was as good as total.

Before the Allies could tackle the crossing of the Rhine, they faced tenacious defences west of the great river from north to south. In Alsace, French and American troops had already forced the Germans back across the Rhine near Colmar in early February. The main Allied attack began, however, further north, on 8 February. Despite initial slow progress against fierce resistance, abetted by bad weather and the opening of dams to hamper tank and troop movements, Canadian and British forces pushing south-eastwards from the Nijmegen area and Americans pressing north-eastwards from around Düren took Krefeld on 2 March and by 10 March had encircled nine German divisions near Wesel, capturing 53,000 prisoners, though many German troops were nonetheless able to retreat over the Rhine, destroying the bridges as they went. By this time, once the Americans had reached the Rhine south of Düsseldorf on 2 March, a long stretch of Germany’s most important river was in Allied hands, and with that a vital artery for delivery of Ruhr coal and steel blocked. On 5 March, American troops broke through weak defences (many manned by the Volkssturm) to reach Cologne. The following morning the retreating Germans blew up the Hohenzollern bridge in the city centre, the last remaining crossing in the Rhine metropolis. The problem for the Allies of gaining a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Rhine was, however, soon solved by a slice of good luck. German troops retreating at Remagen, farther south, between Bonn and Koblenz, had failed to detonate the explosives laid and the Americans, to their great surprise finding the bridge intact on 7 March, crossed and swiftly formed a small bridgehead on the eastern bank. Desperate German attempts to clear it meant that precious reserves were sucked into Remagen, to no avail.

Farther south, Trier fell on 1 March. General Patton’s 3rd US Army, after struggling since mid-February to overcome strong resistance, was able to force the defenders back across the Rhine and Mosel by 10 March – the day after Field-Marshal von Rundstedt had been relieved of his command for the last time and replaced as Commander-in-Chief West by the tough Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, adjudged to have acquitted himself well in the rearguard action in northern Italy. Three days later the Americans were crossing the Mosel and preparing to attack the Saarland, still producing about a tenth of German iron and steel. Kesselring refused to evacuate such a vital industrial area. Intense fighting followed, but there could be only one outcome. The German forces eventually retreated into the eastern Saarland, then the Palatinate, and finally across the Rhine, suffering severe losses (also inflicting them on the enemy). By 25 March the Saar was lost to Germany. By that time the Americans had also occupied Kaiserslautern, Worms and Mainz. Meanwhile, Koblenz had fallen on 17 March.

Six days later the entire stretch of the Rhine from Koblenz to Ludwigshafen was in American hands, and a second bridgehead over the river had been established at Oppenheim, south of Mainz, where troops had crossed in assault boats in a daring manoeuvre on the night of 22/3 March. That day, the British commander, Field-Marshal Montgomery, led his forces over the Lower Rhine at Wesel and by the end of March had consolidated an extensive bridgehead on the eastern bank of the river. The basis for the assault on the Reich’s biggest industrial region, the Ruhr, was thereby laid. Farther south, now the Americans were over the Rhine, fierce German resistance was unable to halt their progress deep into the western parts of the Reich. Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Frankfurt am Main were in American hands by 29 March, Heidelberg two days later. From here on, the advance into central Germany and, to the south into Bavaria, would rapidly unfold.

In the defence of Rhine positions, the Germans had suffered appalling losses, with more than 60,000 men killed or wounded and 293,000 taken prisoner. The loss of tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry as the troops had been hastily forced back over the Rhine and Mosel was huge. German fighting-power, weak enough at the onset of the Allied offensive, was now drastically diminished. Even the paper strength of the divisions, itself much reduced during the fighting of February and March, belied the reality that only a minority – many of them raw recruits – were by now capable of frontline service. Defences otherwise were dependent upon the poorly equipped Volkssturm and hastily assembled units transferred from the Luftwaffe and navy.

If Allied superiority on all fronts in manpower and armaments was ultimately simply overpowering, the characteristic refusal by Hitler and the High Command of the Wehrmacht to countenance tactical retreats until it was too late exacerbated the losses. Coupled with this was the rejection of all entreaties by Guderian and others to withdraw German forces still located outside the Reich’s borders. These included, most prominently, 200,000 battle-hardened troops stranded in Courland, together with forces occupying the Low Countries, Scandinavia and still fighting in northern Italy. The main reason for the catastrophe nevertheless lay in the consistent refusal by the Reich’s leadership to surrender and determination to fight on when any realistic hope had long been extinguished.⁷

By the end of March, then, Germany’s enemies were across the Oder in the east and across the Rhine in the west. That even now there was a readiness to fight on when little if anything could be gained, though continued destruction and heavy loss of life were thereby guaranteed, is little less than astonishing. The readiness should not, however, be mistaken for widespread popular commitment to the German war effort. In the east, it is true, fear of the Soviets was a strong deterrent to defeatism and willingness to surrender. For most people, however, whether in the army or among the civilian population, there was simply no alternative but to struggle on under the terroristic grip of the regime in the dwindling parts of the Reich that were still not occupied.

II

All the indications point to a slump in morale within the Wehrmacht, especially in the west, as the defences gave way and the enemy pressed into the Reich. It was matched by the state of civilian morale. The regime reacted to try to combat the signs of disintegration, as always, through ramping up still further its propaganda efforts and through ferocious repression to serve as a deterrent.

The Party went to great lengths in March 1945 to intensify propaganda efforts to sustain and improve the fighting spirit within the Wehrmacht and among the civilian population. At the start of the month, Bormann sought support from the Gauleiter for a new propaganda drive that aimed to avoid any empty slogans but to reinforce a fanatical will to resist. A ‘Special Action of the Party Chancellery’ was set up to organize intensive propaganda activity through deputations of Party functionaries (in Wehrmacht uniform) and army officers.⁸ Propaganda, it was accepted, had to be improved.⁹ Based on recommendations from Goebbels, it had also to be far more realistic than hitherto – an oblique recognition of some of the failings of hopelessly optimistic prognoses. Soldiers had to be given answers to the central questions preoccupying them: whether there was still a point in fighting; and whether the war could be won. A number of themes had to be highlighted: that Germany still had enough supplies of armaments and food and sufficient reserves of manpower and matériel (none of which was true, belying the emphasis on realism); the development of new ‘miracle’ weapons (on which there was by now all too justified widespread disbelief);¹⁰ the effectiveness of the ‘Panzerfaust’ (the German type of bazooka, widely associated with the Volkssturm’s despairing defensive efforts); and the fact that the Americans had to deploy their forces over a huge area (which, of course, had not stopped them making massive inroads through German defences).¹¹

None of this was much of a recipe to restore the rapidly waning confidence and slumping morale. Party speakers serving with the Wehrmacht were selected to address the troops – all the more necessary since transport difficulties were preventing written material from reaching them. In the Gau of Hessen-Nassau, arrangements were made to bus Party speakers chosen by the Reich propaganda leadership to frontline troop units. The leaflets such speakers were to distribute included reminders to ‘think of the mass murder of Dresden’ to encourage them in the belief that the British and Americans, as their destruction of the homeland through terror-bombing showed, were no better than the Bolsheviks. The only lesson was to stand and fight to the last.¹²

Another approach was to try to deflect attention from complaints and grievances by turning the spotlight on the enemy. This included disparaging the Americans as inferior to the Germans in every respect other than the sheer might of their weaponry, and the claim that Britain was at the limits of its tolerable losses. More remarkably, criticism of German mishandling of occupied territories was to be met with assertions that German measures had, in fact, been superior to those of the Allies, that ‘we could in any case have a really good conscience in the question of treatment of most of the peoples hostile to us’. Understanding for the tasks of the Party and its achievements in the war effort could be improved through comparing these with the running of the First World War.¹³

The ‘speaker action’ included advice on how to deal with commonplace criticisms. Defeatist talk, for instance, had to be met with insistence that only determination and the will to resist could master the crisis. Blame attached to the Party for the war was to be countered by emphasizing that war had been declared on Germany, not the other way round, and that the enemy aimed to destroy not just the leadership but the very existence of Germany; that it would be far worse than after 1918. A rejoinder to the widespread view that the ‘air terror’ was the most unbearable burden of all and accompanying expressions about unfulfilled promises was that hardships had temporarily to be endured to allow time to produce better weapons. Pessimistic remarks that Germany had been unable to do this with its industry intact and could therefore hardly hope to do so with so much of it destroyed were to be turned round by saying that the loss of territories meant a smaller industrial output sufficed. Finally, dejection at enemy inroads in east and west had to be faced down by instilling confidence that counter-measures had been taken and would become stronger, that the fight was continuing at the front and at home, and that it was necessary to hold out to allow time for military and political decisions to ripen. The tenor of all speeches had to be an insistence that Germany would not lose the war, but would still win it. The people had to be given the conviction that there was a united fighting community which would on no account give in, but would be determined to endure the war with all means in order to gain victory.¹⁴

Little of this could sound convincing to any but the wilfully blind and obtuse. People in Berlin likened propaganda to a band playing on a sinking ship.¹⁵ Most soldiers as well as civilians could see the hopelessness of the situation and form their own judgements on the feeble attempts of propaganda to contradict the glaringly obvious. The diary entries of a junior officer on the western front, who kept a careful eye on propaganda statements, comparing them with reality as he saw it, give one impression of feelings as the Americans advanced through the Rhineland. ‘Wherever you go, only one comment: an end to the insanity,’ he observed on 7 March, the day after Cologne had fallen. He did admit, however, that the occasional optimist, such as one of his comrades, a former Hitler Youth leader and ‘a great show-off’, still existed – though such figures could provide no grounds for their optimism. He could barely believe the reports of street-fighting in the ruins of Bonn. ‘Ruins!’ he remarked. ‘That is the legacy for people after the war. How differently Ludendorff acted [at the end of the First World War] when he recognized that all was lost. To some extent still conscious of his responsibility.’ The unspoken criticism of Hitler was obvious. Commenting on what proved to be the last ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ on 11 March, the diarist noted: ‘How the dead are being misused, their memory and their sacrifice…. There should and must now be an end.’¹⁶

Reports reaching the Propaganda Ministry in early March told of many soldiers looking bleakly towards a bitter end to the war.¹⁷ Goebbels himself acknowledged in early March in exhorting Party propagandists to ever greater exertions that troop morale was a problem in parts of the army.¹⁸ On 11 March he noted that ‘the morale of our troops and our population in the west has suffered exceptionally…. Something can only now be achieved in the west through brutal measures, otherwise we’ll no longer be master of the developing situation.’¹⁹ Hitler briefly contemplated scrapping the Geneva Convention, which stipulated good treatment for prisoners of war, to encourage his soldiers to fight as hard on the western as on the eastern front.²⁰ But there were problems in the east, too. Guderian felt forced to provide a vehement denial of a scathing report about defeatist attitudes even among the general staff of Schörner’s Army Group Centre. Though the report was inevitably coloured by the usual Party antagonism towards General Staff officers, the officers’ recorded criticism of the poor quality and wavering resolve among the infantry is unlikely to have been fabricated.²¹

In Danzig, there was talk of ‘a second Stalingrad’, since the army gave the impression of being paralysed and lacking in initiative. Hundreds of soldiers were said to have deserted their posts at Küstrin (described as no more than ‘one single heap of rubble’ at the end of the siege), where there were plain signs of demoralization. They had fled westwards along with Volkssturm men only to be picked up by the Security Police and forced back into their units. Given the reported scale of looting by German troops in Küstrin, people muttered grimly that the Russians could be no worse.²² Looting of houses and other property by retreating soldiers was by now, however, almost everywhere a commonplace occurrence, despite the threat of severe sanctions for those involved.²³ There were other indications of army indiscipline. A Party District Leader in the Halle-Merseburg region reported a minor mutiny of 200 soldiers from a panzer division, and complained about the inability of police checks at stations to pick up deserters. At the fall of Trier, most of the Volkssturm defenders were said to have gone over to the enemy. Others did all they could to avoid military duty.²⁴ German troops on the Mosel, surprised by American tanks, had simply fled in whatever vehicles were to hand, leaving their arms and equipment behind.²⁵

Of course, there were plenty of exceptions to the widespread longing of so many ordinary soldiers for the end of the war. One long letter home from a battalion sergeant-major based in Wiesbaden, just after the Americans had crossed the Rhine at Remagen, reveals an undiluted Nazi mentality and sense of unbroken defiance – though his own comments make plain that he was a rarity among his comrades, and he admitted that ‘we can no longer rely 100 per cent on our soldiers’. He scorned American hopes, as he saw them, that Germans would lay down their weapons, or would fight with them against the Russians, as ‘Jewish tricks’. Though he admitted the situation was extremely grim, he refused, he said, to lose his belief

that we’ll nevertheless win the war. I know that I’m laughed at by many people or thought mad. I know that there are only a few apart from me who have the courage to claim this, but I say it over and again: the Führer is no scoundrel, and not so bad as to lie to an entire people and drive it to death. Up to now the Führer has always given us his love and promised us freedom and carried out all his plans. And if the Führer prays to God that He may pardon him the last six weeks of this war of the nations then we know that there must and will be an awful and terrible end for our enemies.

It was, therefore, imperative to stay ‘brave and strong. What use are all our material advantages if we end up later somewhere in Siberia?’ he added. He was confident that Germany would strike back within the next few weeks with new weapons that would ‘end this desolate situation’ and decisively turn the war in Germany’s favour. ‘We must firmly believe in Germany’s future – believe and ever more believe. A people that has so courageously lost so much blood for its greatness cannot perish…. Only our faith makes us strong, and I rely on the words of the Führer that at the end of all the fighting there will be German victory.’²⁶

As the Allies crossed the Rhine and pushed into Germany, such naivety was distinctly a minority taste. By the end of March, only 21 per cent of a sample of soldiers captured by the western Allies still professed faith in the Führer (a drop from 62 per cent at the beginning of January), while 72 per cent had none. A mere 7 per cent still believed in German victory; 89 per cent had no such belief.²⁷ A detailed report to the Propaganda Ministry from Hessen-Nassau in late March, as the Americans were advancing into the Main valley, painted a dismal picture of disintegration, antipathy between the military and Party leadership in the area, organizational disorder, and civilians refusing orders to evacuate, on the grounds that they had nowhere to go and, in any case, ‘it’s all over’. Many people, propaganda offices reported in March, had given up hope and there was a widespread view that the war was lost for Germany – though there remained a readiness, it was claimed, to continue doing their duty since it was recognized that capitulation would mean the ‘complete destruction of the German people’.²⁸

The defeatism was furthered, and much bitterness caused, by troops fleeing eastwards as fast as they could go, leaving badly trained and poorly equipped Volkssturm units behind and displaying a complete lack of ‘comradely’ behaviour towards the wounded and civilian evacuees as they brusquely commandeered vehicles for their retreat.²⁹ The long-serving Gauleiter of the area, Jakob Sprenger (who had already requested permission to set up summary courts martial in his Gau), added that the morale of the troops was influenced by the defeatism of the civilian population. The sense that defeat, at least at the hands of the western Allies, would mean the end of German existence was scarcely apparent. White flags had been shown in various places on the approach of enemy troops and the erection of tank barriers blocked.³⁰

The population of numerous places on the Mosel acted in similar fashion, exhorting the troops to cease fighting to avoid further destruction.³¹ A despairing SD agent wrote to Bormann of his bitter disappointment, shared with the many now serving on the western front who had come from the east and had, like himself, lost everything at the hands of the Bolsheviks, when they saw the defeatist attitude of the civilian population in Gau Moselland as Allied troops approached. People showed friendliness towards the Americans, he reported, but hostility towards their own troops. Propaganda attempts to inculcate hatred of the enemy were a complete failure. The Hitler greeting had disappeared from use; no rooms any longer had pictures of the Führer adorning them; white flags had replaced the swastika banner. Weapons were concealed or thrown away. There was, of course, no willingness to serve in the Volkssturm. And the attitude towards the Party was one of total ‘annihilatory’ rejection.³²

In the Rhineland, civilians were said to have hurled insults at soldiers, accusing them of prolonging the war and causing additional misery by blowing up bridges and digging tank traps. They cut wires and engaged in minor acts of sabotage, prepared white flags of surrender, burnt Party emblems and uniforms and encouraged soldiers to put on civilian clothes and desert.³³ Such acts of localized opposition were, even so, not typical of the majority of the population. The longing for an end to the war was certainly near universal, but doing anything to shorten it was highly risky. Most people were not prepared to risk their lives at the last moment. This, together with an ingrained acceptance of authority, meant that resigned compliance rather than resistance was the norm.³⁴ And however extensive outward expressions of rejection of the continued war effort were on the western front, they were rare if not non-existent in the east, where the civilian population was wholly dependent on the fighting troops to keep the feared enemy from their throats.

Army discipline still held by and large, and not just in the east. Even so, desertion by troops was by now a serious concern for the military and Party leadership. Goebbels noted in early March that ‘the desertion plague has worryingly increased. Tens of thousands of soldiers, allegedly stragglers but in reality wanting to avoid frontline service, are said to be in the big cities of the Reich.’³⁵ Discussions in the Party Chancellery to tackle the problem included the suggestion – found to be impracticable in the circumstances of mounting disorganization – of a nationwide ‘general raid’ on a specific day to round up all detached soldiers. Another was to leave executed deserters hanging for a few days in prominent places, a tactic said to have been effectively deployed in the east as a deterrent. (One woman, describing her flight from Silesia as a young girl, recalled her horror at seeing four corpses left to swing from lamp-posts with notices pinned to their bodies, telling passers-by: ‘I Didn’t Believe in the Führer’, or ‘I am a Coward’.³⁶) Such fearsome reprisals, which probably had much support from those who felt they were doing their utmost for the war effort,³⁷ were to be accompanied by emphasizing the motto of Gauleiter Hanke, holed up in besieged Breslau, that ‘he who fears death in honour will suffer it in dishonour’.³⁸ On 12 March, Field-Marshal Kesselring, the new Commander-in-Chief West, announced as one of his first orders the establishment of a motorized special command unit of military police to round up ‘stragglers’, who, he declared, were threatening to endanger the entire prosecution of the war in the west. Three days earlier, a ‘flying court martial’ (mentioned in the previous chapter) had been set up under the fervent loyalist Lieutenant-General Rudolf Hübner – a dentist in civilian life and cheerful executioner who allegedly said it gave him great satisfaction to shoot a general who had neglected his duty – to counter desertion and defeatism.³⁹ The first victims were five officers found guilty of failing to detonate the bridge at Remagen and peremptorily condemned to death.⁴⁰ Four were shot that very day. The fifth, luckily for him, had been captured by the Americans.⁴¹ Model and Kesselring proclaimed the verdict to all their troops as a deterrent example, adding that the ‘greatest severity’ was expected of the courts martial.⁴²

As the desperation increased, other frontline commanders also threatened, and deployed, harsh enforcement of discipline, even if Colonel-General Schörner stood out, as we have seen, for the scale of his brutality. Rendulic´ ordered unwounded ‘stragglers’ who had left their units to be summarily shot. Himmler, as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula, published orders that after 25 March any ‘straggler’ would be sentenced by drumhead court and shot on the spot.⁴³ Demands for fanatical defence of the Reich accompanied such severity. Unambiguous politicized fanaticism, as Stalin’s troops had displayed, was required by Schörner in the east.⁴⁴

In the west it was scarcely less savage. Paul Hausser, a Waffen-SS general commanding Army Group G in the south of the front, recommended the imprisonment of family members as a deterrent and ordered his soldiers under pain of punishment immediately to open fire on any soldier seen crossing the lines.⁴⁵ The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group H, based in the Netherlands, Colonel-General Blaskowitz, was certainly no SS extremist. In fact, he had been castigated by Hitler in 1939 for ‘Salvation Army methods’ for courageously criticizing the barbarity of the SS in Poland. But in the harshness of the treatment of his own troops in the last war months, Blaskowitz was no different to other generals, threatening deserting soldiers on 5 March with being ‘summarily condemned and shot’.⁴⁶ ‘The enemy must have to fight for every step in German land through the highest possible bloody losses,’ Rundstedt had ordered at the beginning of March.⁴⁷ His successor in the western command, Kesselring, sought the assistance of the Party’s Gauleiter to impress upon the public the need to fight for German towns and villages, now within the war zone, with absolute fanaticism. ‘This struggle for the existence or non-existence of the German people does not exclude in its cruelty cultural monuments or other objects of cultural value,’ he proclaimed.⁴⁸ Jodl appealed to commanders in the west to ensure that the enemy encountered a ‘fanatical will to fight’ among troops defending the Reich. Regard for the population, he added, could currently be no consideration.⁴⁹

Generals were no mere tools of Hitler, much as they claimed to have been such in their post-war apologetics. They acted from conviction, doing all in their power to inspire, and compel, their troops to ever greater efforts. Though they subsequently liked to portray themselves as professional soldiers doing no more than their patriotic duty, they were in fact the most indispensable component of the dying regime. Though few shared Schörner’s undiluted belief in the doctrine of National Socialism, they all accepted some of its articles of faith. The combination of extreme nationalism (meaning belief in German superiority and the unique glory of the Reich) and anti-Communism, together with a passionate resolve to prevent the occupation and – as they mostly believed – the destruction of Germany, sufficed to sustain their undiminished exertions in a lost cause. A distorted sense of duty was a strong additive. Without their extraordinary commitment to continuing the struggle when rational assessment demanded an end to the destruction, the regime would have collapsed.⁵⁰

Among the military leaders displaying greatest fanaticism in the final weeks of the Reich, counter to the post-war image he cultivated, was Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. His series of short situation reports were seen as so valuable by Bormann for their defiant fighting spirit that he had them sent out to Gauleiter and other leading Party functionaries. The first of Dönitz’s reports, on 4 March, began:

There is no need to explain to you that in our situation capitulation is suicide and means certain death; that capitulation will bring the death, the quick or slower destruction, of millions of Germans, and that, in comparison with this, the blood toll even of the harshest fighting is small. Only if we stand and fight have we any chance at all of turning round our fate. If we voluntarily surrender, every possibility of this is at an end. Above all, our honour demands that we fight to the last. Our pride rebels against crawling before a people like the Russians or the sanctimony, arrogance and lack of culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

He appealed for a sense of ‘duty, honour and pride’ to fight to the last.⁵¹

In the navy, more than in the Luftwaffe (where morale had suffered from its heavy losses and from the drastic decline in public standing as Allied bombers dominated the skies) or the army, such appeals were not without effect. In 1918, the revolution had begun with the mutiny of sailors in Kiel. Sailors schooled in the Third Reich were well aware of this ‘stain’ on the navy’s history. Not that there was any likelihood of a repeat in 1945. As in the other branches of the Wehrmacht, attitudes and forms of behaviour varied widely. War-weariness was evident. But desertion, mutiny and indiscipline in the navy were rare. For the most part, morale remained high and readiness to fight on was present to the end – when, indeed, thousands of sailors were transferred to help in the battle of Berlin. Since taking over as Commander-in-Chief at the end of January 1943, Dönitz had done all he could to instil in the navy the ‘most brutal will to victory’ that derived from National Socialist ideology. Bolstering the readiness to utmost resistance in the ‘fight with the western powers, Bolshevism and Jewry’ was the message passed on by one of his subordinate officers, the head of a destroyer flotilla based at Brest.⁵² How much this sort of rhetoric shaped the unbroken fighting spirit of ordinary sailors is nevertheless hard to judge. Other factors may well have been more significant.

Dönitz had ensured that naval crews had good welfare provision – material and psychological. And the war at sea, for all its perils, was somewhat detached from the daily brutalities of the land war in the east. For some, indeed, the part they played in helping to rescue tens of thousands of stranded refugees gave the continued war some purpose and sense of idealism. Others perhaps found purpose in the claims of the naval leadership that the continued war at sea was tying down enemy forces, and that the navy would be an important bargaining counter in any negotiated settlement. Most important of all, however, was almost certainly the feeling of comradeship, enhanced by the close confines of a ship or submarine, where class divisions were less apparent than on land as officers and men lived cheek by jowl sharing exactly the same dangers.⁵³

Finally, as in the remainder of the Wehrmacht and among the civilian population, there was another factor at work, impossible to quantify, but doubtless widespread: passive acceptance of the situation since there was no obvious alternative. If this did not amount to positive motivation, it certainly did not pose any barrier to the military system continuing to function – and, with that, to the war continuing.

III

High-ranking military officers had possibilities of a wider perspective on the war than might be expected among the rank-and-file. What did the generals see as the purpose of still fighting on at this stage? Was there any sense of rationality, or was nothing left beyond a fatalistic dynamic that could not be halted short of total defeat? Was there any clear-sightedness at all?

Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, in the last phase of the war Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in Italy, pointed out a few years later that, following the great increase of size of the army in the course of the conflict, the number of generals by 1945 had risen to around 1,250, though he estimated that only about fifty had any insight into the overall strategic position. Addressing the question of potential political power of the generals to block the disastrous course of the war, he took the view, naturally involving more than a tinge of apologetics, that ‘even among the field-marshals, the slightest attempt to bring together a majority to unified action against Hitler would have been condemned to failure, and become known to Hitler, apart from the fact that the troops would have refused to go along with such a move’. He rejected the notion that generals serving at the front could have resigned in protest. This would simply have meant abandoning their troops, and would have flown in the face of all sense of comradeship and honour. It would have been cowardice. Finally, voluntary capitulation would have been feasible only if the troops had been prepared to follow the order, which they would not have done, he claimed.⁵⁴

The war, Vietinghoff wrote on release from captivity, was unquestionably lost once the Rhine front had collapsed in March 1945. Ending it at that point would have spared countless victims and massive destruction. It was the duty of the Reich leadership to draw the consequences and negotiate with the enemy. Since Hitler refused to entertain such a proposition, this duty fell to everyone in a position of responsibility able to do something to achieve that end. ‘In this situation, the duty of obedience reached its limits. Loyalty to the people and to the soldiers entrusted to him was a higher duty’ for the commander. However, in taking such action he had to be sure that the troops would follow him. This Vietinghoff still felt, at the beginning of April, with German troops holding a line south of Bologna, unable to guarantee. The majority of the troops, he claimed – an exaggerated claim at this stage, in all probability – still had faith in Hitler. And the regime would swiftly have blamed the commander for treachery, exhorting the troops not to obey him. Solidarity among the fighting troops would have collapsed, as some would have wanted to carry on the fight, others to surrender.⁵⁵ It would be some weeks yet before Vietinghoff finally agreed to a capitulation in Italy. Even then, he was unsure until late in the day, so he later implied, about the readiness of the troops to surrender.

Post-war memoirs by former military leaders frequently, like Vietinghoff’s, have a self-serving flavour. They can nonetheless still illustrate ways of thinking that shaped behaviour. Vietinghoff shared the sense of obedience, honour and duty that had long been bred into the officer corps and posed a psychological barrier to anything that smacked of treason. He at least did eventually act, though by then the Red Army was almost literally at the portals of the Reich Chancellery. His uncertainty about the readiness of the troops to follow orders to surrender also sounds plausible. And whether he would have sought a partial capitulation even at such a late stage had he been serving on the eastern or western front might reasonably be doubted. For all its apologetics, Vietinghoff’s account gives an indication of why German generals could not contemplate breaking with the regime.

Though numerous generals confided their opinions to paper after the end of the war, contemporary expressions of their private views are relatively rare. Few generals in those hectic weeks had time to compile diary entries or other current reactions to events. They had in any case, like everyone else, to be wary of expressing any critical, let alone defeatist, comments that might fall into the wrong hands. Penetrating their public stance is, therefore, difficult.

Some insight into the mentality of German generals in the last phase of the war can be gleaned from the private conversations – which they did not know were being bugged – of those in British captivity. These were, of course, by now viewing events from afar and without any internal insights into developments. On the other hand, they could express their views freely without fear that they would be denounced as traitors or defeatists and suffer for their criticism of the regime. Strikingly, despite recognition that the war was undoubtely lost, these high-ranking officers drew quite varied conclusions – depending, in part, on their susceptibility to Nazi thinking and propaganda. Some of the more Nazified officers believed that ‘if Bolshevism triumphs today, then it will be a question of the biological annihilation of our people’. Speculation after the failure of the Ardennes offensive that Rundstedt might surrender in the west in order to fight on in the east was dismissed as impracticable. The western Allies would not accept a partial surrender; Rundstedt could in any case do nothing because SS panzer divisions among his Army Group would not allow it; and there was the fear that anyone attempting such unilateral action would be killed immediately.⁵⁶ Non-Nazi, relatively critical, officers were still in February and March 1945 evoking ‘elementary military honour’ in demanding that ‘nobody in the front line, not even the commander-in-chief, can even consider whether or not he should carry on fighting’. Honour was a crucial consideration. ‘Whatever defeats they may yet suffer,’ ran another comment, ‘this nation can only go down with honour.’⁵⁷

A lower-ranking officer, captured at Alzey (between Worms and Mainz) in mid-March 1945, gave his Allied interrogators his own views, based on what he had gleaned at Army General Staff headquarters at Zossen, on why the Germans kept on fighting. The ‘realists’ in the General Staff, he said, ‘expected the Rhine and Elbe lines to collapse and meant to go down fighting. Whilst Hitler was in power it was not considered possible for the German forces to lay down their arms.’ Any attempt to overthrow him was presumed out of the question after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot the previous July. The intentions were to hold the line of the Oder as long as possible and when this was no longer tenable to make a fighting withdrawal to the Elbe. In the west, the priority was to wipe out the Remagen bridgehead. It was not anticipated that the Allies would be able to cross the Rhine anywhere else. In the north, troops would be withdrawn from western Holland to hold the line on the Lower Rhine. ‘It was believed’, he added, ‘that the line of the Elbe in the east and of the Rhine in the west could be held for as long as proved necessary. It was envisaged that sooner or later a split would occur between the US and UK on the one hand and the USSR on the other, which would enable Germany to restore her position.’ The re-emergence of the Luftwaffe, with production of jet-fighters as a first priority, was seen as a prerequisite for the strategy, so oil refineries and other vital installations were provided with especially heavy anti-aircraft defences.⁵⁸

One contemporary glimpse of the thinking of a high-ranking officer based inside the Reich, away from the front lines, is afforded by letters (cautiously couched to avoid anything smacking of defeatism) of Colonel Curt Pollex, from 9 January 1945 Chief of Staff to the head of Wehrmacht Armaments. Pollex was a cultured individual and no Nazi. But he was fatalistic and passive, accepting that he could do nothing other than continue with his duties – which, of course, helped the regime in his own sphere still function – and brace himself for the hurricane soon to come. He had a realistic sense of impending disaster, but felt in his way as helpless as the millions of soldiers and civilians in lowly positions to do anything to prevent it, or see any alternative.

‘Everything is carrying on at present as if it would be all right at the end,’ he wrote on 5 March. He mentioned hopes in the U-boats, but was evidently sceptical. He did not know how anyone could still believe Goebbels, still proclaiming the impact of V-weapons. He was equally dubious about talk of ‘an aeroplane that they call Germany’s bird of fate’, something to change the course of the war. If a change was to come, it had to be very soon, he remarked drily. He just carried on with his duties. ‘My people understand me,’ he added. He immersed himself in his work, ‘acting as if everything were as it is written in the newspaper’. But he refrained from criticizing Goebbels’ speech at the end of February, leaving open the outcome of future developments and whether the Führer and Goebbels might prove right in the end. Perhaps there would after all be a change in fortune. ‘The Führer claims it will be so. I’m just a poor fool with no sixth sense who unfortunately sees nothing,’ he remarked, with scarcely veiled sarcasm. He had not imagined the Americans crossing the Rhine so quickly. ‘But it’s not fully out of the question that we could still master this situation,’ he added, again seeming to doubt his own words. There were still those, he acknowledged, who shared Hitler’s confidence in final victory; plainly, he was not among their number. It was obvious to him that Hitler would not capitulate. He thought it would end with a battle on the Obersalzberg. There were ‘wonderful things in preparation’, but they would come too late. Even now, however, there were signs that he had not altogether given up hope. Conflict between the Russians and the Americans would still give Germany a chance, just as a motor-race could be decided by a puncture 100 metres from the finishing line. Away from such reveries, work seemed pointless. He was just going through the motions. Orders by now had in any case little effect. An ‘ostrich-policy’ operated as people buried their heads in the sand.⁵⁹

Pollex could entertain his quasi-philosophical reflections, well away from the front. Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici, brought in on 20 March by Hitler to replace Himmler – whose command of Army Group Vistula had laid bare his evident incapacity for military leadership – and use his recognized abilities as a defensive strategist to try to hold the front in Pomerania, made his assessments much closer to the action. An archetypal Prussian career officer who had served in the First World War and had long experience of command in the Second, Heinrici was a strong patriot but had always kept his distance from the Party. Soon after the war, in British captivity, he provided his own explanation for the continued fight down to the end, however despairing the situation. He praised the fighting spirit, determination and resolute defence of German troops on the Oder against greatly superior enemy might. He was well aware of the deficiencies in armaments, the lack of fighting experience of around half his troops, and the fact that some of the more experienced soldiers, having narrowly survived so many battles, had lost the will to fight to the last as the end approached. None of this overshadowed, however, the overall strategic picture, which, he said, was clear both to the leadership and to the ordinary soldier. As long as German forces could hold the Rhine, the defence of the Oder did not seem hopeless, and was certainly worth fighting for. Once the enemy was over the Rhine and pressing on towards the Elbe, however, ordinary soldiers inevitably asked themselves whether there was any point to carrying on. What made them do so he attributed primarily to their sense of ‘patriotic duty to halt the advance of the Russians’. It was clear to every soldier what could be expected from the Russians. And it was seen as imperative to protect the civilian population as far as possible from the sort of horror that had occurred east of the Oder. Beyond that, he said, the military leadership believed that it could not undermine any possible bargaining position in negotiations through premature collapse. When hopes that the Oder could be held proved vain and German defences were smashed, disintegration swiftly followed. ‘If the soldier decided to fight on, then this was no longer to halt the enemy but to save his own life or not to fall into Soviet captivity.’ Terror, he stated, was no longer sufficient to compel soldiers to fight. Survival alone was now the driving force.⁶⁰

After the war, Dönitz argued – attributing much responsibility to the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender – that ‘no one in authority could have signed an instrument of capitulation without knowing full well that its terms would be broken’ by soldiers in the east refusing to accept orders to stay and enter Soviet captivity and instead, like the civilian population, choosing to flee westwards.⁶¹ Whatever his self-justificatory motivation in such remarks (which clash with his contemporary demands for a fanatical fight to the last), Dönitz did have a point in the implication that the millions still serving on the eastern front would have felt betrayed and might well have taken matters into their own hands in trying to get to the west. Whether this would have been worse for them than what did actually happen is a moot point.

In the east especially, a passionate desire for an end to the war, detestation of the Party, criticism of the regime, and even loss of faith in Hitler were perfectly compatible with soldiers’ continued determination to repel the Russian invaders on Reich soil who posed such a threat to families and homes. And ultimately, as Heinrici points out, when all idealism had vanished and pure desperation took hold, soldiers fought on for self-survival.

In the west, the situation was different. Certainly, on the western front, despite the attempts of propaganda, equivalent anxieties about falling into the hands of the Americans or the British rarely existed beyond the ranks of Party functionaries. Once the enemy had reached German soil and then crossed the Rhine, there was, even so, still much determination to repel the invader. Unable to see beyond the immediate battlegrounds, many soldiers were compelled to believe, beyond what their senses were telling them, that they were still fighting to gain time – for the leadership to fend off the Soviets, seek a worthwhile peace settlement, see the breakup of the enemy coalition. Who knew exactly? Moreover, units on the western front also included many soldiers whose homes and families were in eastern or central regions of Germany and who saw fighting on as necessary as long as the British, Americans and French remained in alliance with the Soviets. Some unquestionably thought the western Allies would eventually see sense and realize that the real war was against Russia. ‘Germany is saving Europe and England and America from being gobbled up by Bolshevik Russia,’ claimed officers captured in the west. ‘The British and Americans will one day … awaken to the real situation and will join the Germans in holding off Russia.’⁶² Beyond such motives were more immediate, unpolitical feelings: the unwillingness, as in most armies, to leave close friends and comrades in the lurch. The sense of comradeship often provided its own motivation for fighting on when idealism was lacking.

And ultimately there was the sense that there was nothing to be done about it. There was no potential for mutiny or rising to overthrow the regime. The scale of harsh repression was simply too great. Stepping out of line was little less than suicidal. And when it happened, desertion was usually an individual act, not mass mutiny. It reflected a desperate attempt at personal survival, not a collapse of the military order.⁶³ Apart from the savagery of reprisals and fears for one’s family, the capacity to organize any mutiny was as good as absent, in part because the sheer intensity of the fighting and scale of losses at the front left no chance to organize political action, partly too because constant losses left little continuity in the manpower of troop units. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to struggle on.

The situation in 1945 contrasted sharply with the revolutionary conditions of 1918.⁶⁴ ‘In 1918 we experienced more open revolutionary tendencies,’ commented one cavalry general in British captivity in March 1945. ‘As the end drew near, the men were already behaving in a very insolent fashion. They don’t do that now.’⁶⁵ In the last months of the First World War, there had been a gathering collapse of authority in the military command. Perhaps as many as a million soldiers in the final weeks, encouraged by the stirring revolutionary mood at home, among workers and soldiers in home-based garrisons, and aware of peace demands in the Reichstag, voted with their feet against continuing to fight. In 1918 military discipline had been much in line with that of the other belligerent powers, losses were smaller, German cities had not been reduced to rubble, civil society was largely intact, pluralist politics continued to exist; most crucially, there had been no brutal Russian occupation of eastern Germany and threat to the Reich capital itself, and there had been no western invasion of the Reich. German troops could return home seemingly undefeated in the field.

There had also been the Workers’ Councils in factories, bodies to give voice to the simmering unrest and to organize mass strikes and protest meetings. There had been no equivalent of the Nazi Party ensuring through its ruthless hold over the population that ‘organizational space’ to engender a popular uprising was totally unavailable. Not least, there was no equivalent to the terroristic police apparatus of 1945. In 1918, rejection of the Kaiser and Germany’s ruling class, extensive within the army and within the population, could be openly expressed and ultimately transformed into revolutionary action. In 1945, detestation of Hitler and the regime or heated criticism of policies that had produced the misery of a lost war were sentiments best swallowed. The faintest whiff of insurrectionary sentiment could spell instant brutal retaliation.

Paradoxically, therefore, increasing defeatism among ordinary soldiers not only failed to prompt them to lay down their arms or rise in mutiny against their superior officers but was compatible with continued readiness to fight on. Exhausted, demoralized troops provided no basis for insurrection. If one sentiment could sum up the myriad views of soldiers, it was probably fatalism – hoping for the best because that was all anyone could do. They saw no alternative but to carry on. Change could only come from above, but there were no indications that it ever would.

IV

For the civilian population, the sense of helplessness as the maelstrom gathered force was almost totally embracing. In bomb-ravaged big cities, conditions by March 1945 were intolerable, though the countryside, for all its privations, fared better. The misery was near universal as people simply awaited the end of the war, unable to do anything to hasten it, left to their fate to face the continued bombing and the inroads of the enemy, with all the uncertainty, anxiety and – in the east – downright fear that entailed. The only hope was that the war would soon end and that the British and Americans would arrive before the Russians.⁶⁶ A graphic display of feeling in one Alpine village, said to mirror ‘the true attitude of the people’, was the refusal of the soldiers, Volkssturm men and civilians assembled for Heroes’ Memorial Day on 11 March to return the ‘Sieg Heil’ to the Führer at the end of the Wehrmacht commander’s speech.⁶⁷ The SD summed up attitudes at the end of March: no one wanted to lose the war, but no one believed Germany could now win it; the leadership was to blame (confidence in it had collapsed ‘like an avalanche’ in recent days), there was much criticism of the Party, ‘certain leaders’ and propaganda; the Führer was still ‘the last hope’ of millions – a necessary ritualistic concession in such reports – but was more vehemently ‘by the day included in the question of confidence and the criticism’; finally, the feeling that fighting on was pointless was by now eating at the readiness to continue, at self-belief and at belief in other people.⁶⁸

Shortage of food was becoming a big issue in the cities. Owing to lack of transport, acute shortages – exacerbated by hoarding, especially by military personnel – had existed in Rhineland cities before the Allies arrived.⁶⁹ ‘Hunger, terror from the air and the military situation’ determined the popular mood, according to a report from Stuttgart in late March. ‘A large section of the population is already completely at an end as regards bread, fats and foodstuffs.’⁷⁰ There were serious worries about food supplies in Berlin, too, as rations were reduced again.⁷¹ Many claimed they already had nothing to eat – though ‘painted and powdered ladies wearing expensive furs and afternoon dresses’ were said still to frequent the few remaining restaurants.⁷² Anxieties were said to be mounting over likely future acute shortages. The Allies, it is true, had reported adequate supplies of food hidden away – some of it allegedly looted from the homes of neighbours who had evacuated – when they marched through the Rhineland.⁷³ But even in the country, where farmers especially always seemed to have sufficient in store, the diminished rations were making themselves felt. ‘Just enough if you can sleep the whole day,’ bemoaned one worker in south Germany, where there was much ‘bad blood’ over shortages of potatoes and other foodstuffs.⁷⁴ Many individuals tried to pretend that they had lost their ration cards as applications for substitute cards soared after the drop in rations was announced.⁷⁵ Directives from Bormann – perhaps emanating from Hitler himself – instructing the Gauleiter to coordinate measures to make more use of wild vegetables, fruits, berries, mushrooms and herbs to mitigate food-ration reductions, and wild medicinal herbs to compensate for shortage of medicines, were unlikely to have been warmly welcomed.⁷⁶

Cuts in electricity and gas supplies and severe coal shortages were commonplace in big cities. Drains were often blocked by bomb damage. Water could in some places be had only from standpipes in the street. People in some rural areas had to resort to cooking on stoves fired with peat.⁷⁷ Schools and universities had mainly closed by now. Some schools were requisitioned as field hospitals for the wounded.⁷⁸ Floods of refugees placed a massive additional burden on housing and other public services. Welfare work was made more difficult by the lack of unified control, resulting – typical for the Third Reich – in conflicting demands from different agencies.⁷⁹ Hospitals could not cope with the high numbers of casualties from air raids. In early March, Bormann ordered the incorporation of the personnel of hospitals and clinics into the Volkssturm.⁸⁰ There was huge disruption of the railways. If a journey had to be undertaken and even if a place on a train could be found, delays of many hours were to be expected. People coped as best they could under the extremely difficult circumstances. But the cuts in public services had complicating side effects. Electricity cuts meant, for instance, that shops were shutting early, when it became too dark for business, leaving no possibility for those in work to buy food in the early evening hours. And once the electricity was restored, in mid-evening, there was often an air-raid alarm so that people had no time to eat.⁸¹

A source of particular concern to the millions of families desperate for news of sons, brothers, fathers or other close relatives at the front was that postal services were in a state of near collapse. By late March, post offices had often been put out of action by bombing. Telephone, telegraph and rail communications had largely broken down for ordinary citizens, and often, too, for public authorities and businesses.⁸² The Reich Post Minister, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, laid down stipulations for ensuring a minimum postal service. If trains were unavailable, motor vehicles had to be used to shuttle post to the nearest functioning railway station. If no vehicles were available, local transport had to be requisitioned. In the last resort, the most urgent post was to be carried by bicycle or on foot in rucksacks.⁸³

There was, it is true, still a veneer of what passed for ‘normality’ in the diminishing parts of Germany not under occupation or sucked into the fighting zones, though anything resembling civic society had long since vanished. One of the few places bomb-threatened people of big cities found any semblance of communal activity in these weeks was in the air-raid shelter.⁸⁴ Work itself, however hard, tedious and long, must have been for many a distraction from the heavy worries and burdens of daily life. And wages and salaries continued to be paid as Germany collapsed. Newspapers still appeared – though by March there were only 814 of them (compared with 2,075 daily papers in 1937), and they were only two to four pages in length. Periodicals had been cut back still further because of the shortage of paper and other difficulties; only 458 out of 4,789 in pre-war times were still in circulation.⁸⁵ Radio remained the most important means of communication (though power cuts meant big interruptions to programmes), not just for propaganda but also for entertainment programmes. The main transmitters in big cities continued to function to the end. Not least, the radio was crucial for giving warnings of approaching bombers, while receivers in air-raid shelters passed on Party directives following raids.⁸⁶ Despite stiff penalties, many continued surreptitiously to listen to enemy broadcasts, especially the BBC. People could still find escapism in the cinema. Entertainment films provided a temporary release from the horrors and misery of reality. They were more attractive than the ‘fight-on’ propaganda conveyed through films like Kolberg (which can only have reminded people of what was actually happening in the town at the time) or newsreels that could only show Germany’s desperate plight. However, bombing of cinema buildings, blackouts and air-raid alarms had taken their toll on attendance. And for those who did go to the cinema, leaving the building was to re-enter a reality beyond the imagination of any film producer.

Outside the most war-ravaged zones and the worst bombed areas of the big cities, a still functioning, if hugely creaking, bureaucracy and the far-reaching tentacles of Party control ensured that skeletal and emergency administration, accompanied by much hand-to-mouth improvisation, continued in some measure to operate.

Routine administration carried on – even with much reduced personnel through recruitment to the Wehrmacht. Forms, more of them than ever, had to be completed, reports filed, the myriad tasks of minor bureaucracy (which civil servants down the ranks had always done) still undertaken. The usual local health and social welfare, finance and economic issues, even building planning, continued amid the mayhem, however unreal it often seemed.⁸⁷ And local police stations were still sending in their reports on maintenance of ‘order’ down to the end. Much of the work of local and regional authorities was, however, inevitably preoccupied with finding housing for those bombed out of their homes, trying to cope with the influx of refugees, organizing food rations and distribution of increasingly stretched provisions, regulating air-raid measures⁸⁸ and the deployment of the hard-pressed fire service (many of whom were volunteers, taken out of their normal work for fire-brigade duties).⁸⁹ Few of the lower-ranking civil servants were by now, if they ever had been, inspired by gung-ho Nazi propaganda and sloganeering about fighting to the last ditch. But hardly any would have contemplated doing anything other than what they saw as their duty to ensure that they carried out their work as conscientiously and efficiently as possible. They were merely small cogs in a big machine. But they did their best, even at this late stage, to ensure that the machine continued to function as well as possible.

In any case, much of their work had been usurped by Party functionaries.⁹⁰ Here the level of political commitment was still far greater, and where it was flagging a sense of self-protection against possibly costly reproaches from higher Party offices could produce its own activism.⁹¹ Local and District Leaders, down to Block Leaders based in tenement blocks, would do all they could to carry out the directions of the Gauleiter in all matters of civil defence, organizing anti-aircraft batteries, the running of air-raid bunkers, clearing up after air raids and, through the NSV, providing whatever social welfare was possible.⁹² But all this frenetic activism was coupled with still unceasing attempts to mobilize the population and instil in them the need to fight on. However ineffective the actions of the local Party functionaries were in practice, and whatever antipathies they now encountered as the end approached, they still served as a crucial control mechanism on the population. Even the NSV, the huge Party welfare organization (which had employed more than 60,000 people full-time, mainly women, in mid-1944⁹³), was in essence still a vehicle for political control, whatever work it did – in addition to (and often in competition with) state-run welfare – to help the victims of bombing raids, provide for wounded soldiers, organize evacuations or take care of refugees. The Party’s organizational structures, still incorporating (if affiliates are included) huge numbers of citizens, mobilizing young Germans as ‘flak helpers’ in anti-aircraft defence, and half a million women for service as ‘Wehrmacht assistants’ (then some of these even for fighting),⁹⁴ ensured that the overwhelming majority of citizens remained compliant even as the regime crumbled. Few were prepared to risk stepping out of line. Political dissidence could prove lethal for any individual, and was regarded by most people as not just foolhardy but unnecessary as the end loomed.

At higher levels of state administration, the erosion had intensified. Following the heavy bombing of the government district of Berlin in early February, especially, the work of major state ministries was heavily impaired. New addresses were circulated almost weekly as improvised accommodation had to be found for the ministerial staff. The Finance Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, for example, had to move his office to his home in the suburb of Dahlem.⁹⁵ Parts of ministries were now increasingly evacuated from the Reich capital. It was seen by many as ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’.⁹⁶ Coordination of work was ever more difficult. Written communication between ministerial officials could often only be achieved now through a courier service. And much of the work was merely trying to reconstitute files destroyed in bombing raids. Central government administration increasingly resembled rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.⁹⁷

Practically all matters of substance outside the military sphere had anyway been taken over by the Party. The Gauleiter remained the key figures in the provinces still not occupied – bulwarks of loyalty to Hitler and diehards without a future, who in varying degrees according to ability, temperament and attitude represented the radical drive of the Party to mobilize all forces for the ‘last stand’, even when any semblance of rationality told them that all was lost. Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr of Württemberg, for instance, Party boss in the region since 1928, was determined, in the face of the evident longing of the people of the area for peace, that there would be no surrender in his domain. He threatened instant execution for anyone showing a white flag or obstructing German defences.⁹⁸ Karl Wahl, the Gauleiter of Swabia, centred on the city of Augsburg in the west of Bavaria, had also run his province without interruption since 1928. He counted as one of the less extreme of the Gauleiter (an image he was keen to burnish after the war), and as a result did not stand high in the esteem of Hitler and Bormann.⁹⁹ In mid-March, however, after the debacle of Remagen, Wahl recommended to Bormann the use of suicide pilots to fly their planes loaded with bombs into the Americans’ temporary supply bridges over the Rhine. A new heroism, not known in history, was needed, he claimed. ‘There are surely sufficient loyal followers of the Führer who would be prepared to sacrifice themselves if they could save the people through their deed…. Is it not better that a few dozen choose to die than that, by not undertaking this essential emergency measure, tens of thousands must lose their lives …’¹⁰⁰ Nothing came of the idea. Perhaps Wahl proposed it cynically, reckoning with its rejection but believing it would uphold his credentials as a fanatical backer of the Führer’s cause. Even so, the proposal illustrates the stance that Germany’s ruling cohorts felt they had to display in the last weeks of the war. It was rapidly coming to be the rule of the desperadoes.

By the end of March Wahl was promoting in his Gau the creation by Goebbels and Labour Front leader Robert Ley of partisan organizations to engage in terroristic guerrilla activity to hinder the enemy advance (and at the same time to combat and deter defeatism), the so-called ‘Werwolf’ and ‘Freikorps “Adolf Hitler” ’.¹⁰¹ The idea of a partisan-style movement had been first mooted in 1943, and it took preliminary organizational shape under the aegis of the SS in the autumn of the following year, when the name ‘Werwolf’ – resonating in German tradition with connotations of ferocious defiance as well as shadowy lupine terror – was attached to it.¹⁰² Some guerrilla activity was carried out on the eastern front and to a lesser extent in the west in the winter months of 1944–5, though it could inflict no more than pinpricks on the advancing enemy. Its most notable activities were terroristic in nature. A number of American-appointed mayors in the newly occupied parts of western Germany were assassinated, for instance, most notably the Mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, in March 1945. Once the western front had crumbled and the Allies were pressing deep into Germany, underground resistance movements began to gain more importance in Nazi thinking, particularly when the Party leadership started to show interest in them. Martin Bormann saw their potential for tackling defeatism and possible insurgency within the Reich. But ‘Werwolf’ took shape, however dimly, in public consciousness only when Goebbels turned it into a propaganda enterprise, muscling in on the territory both of the Party Chancellery and of the SS, though with Hitler’s backing.

On 1 April, Werwolf Radio began broadcasting its tirades against the Allies, exultant news of real or imaginary acts of sabotage, and dark threats against ‘defeatists’ and ‘traitors’ in the homeland.¹⁰³ Just before this, Ley, one of the zanier zealots in the last phase, had approached Hitler with the notion of creating an organization similar to that of the Werwolf, aimed at mobilizing young fanatical activists, equipped with little more than bicycles and bazookas, to shoot down approaching enemy tanks. Hitler agreed to the establishment of a Freikorps bearing his own name. Goebbels’ only objection was that it was under the leadership of a man he regarded as little more than a clown. He himself expected much of the partisan activity, chiefly ‘to hunt down every German traitor on the side of the western enemy’, though he prided himself that the Werwolf had caused horror in the enemy camp and aroused fears of a ‘partisan Germany’ that would cause unrest in Europe for years.¹⁰⁴ This was an overestimation of Allied fears – though the Allies certainly took seriously the prospect of having to combat guerrilla warfare as they fought their way through Germany, and of the likelihood of a ‘national redoubt’ in the Alps where the Nazis would continue to hold out.¹⁰⁵ It also grossly overrated the appetite for partisan activity among the exhausted German people.

Overall, the Werwolf and Freikorps ‘Adolf Hitler’ added up to little. Their victims – an estimated 3,000–5,000 killed (including continued post-war activity) were not insignificant in number.¹⁰⁶ But for the Allies, they were – beyond the worries they initially aroused – no more than a minor irritant. And among the German population they had little support – though there was undoubtedly some appeal to fanaticized Hitler Youth members.¹⁰⁷ Their main capacity was to terrorize, and this they did to the very last days of the war, when they were still engaged in sporadic and horrific murders of those wanting to avoid rather than promote pointless destruction as the Allies marched in. Ultimately, the partisan organizations of these weeks represented the regime’s lasting and massive capability for destructiveness. But just as great in these weeks was its capacity for self-destructiveness.

V

The deepening fissures in the foundations were now starting to show, too, among the regime leadership. One sign was the increasing desperation with which, even at this late hour, efforts were made to prompt a search for a political solution to the end of the war. As war fortunes had plummeted, leading Nazis – among them Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Göring and even Himmler – had pondered seeking a negotiated exit route from the path leading inexorably towards Germany’s doom. But whenever tentative suggestions had been made for exploring an opening, whether with the western powers or even with the arch-enemy, Bolshevik Russia, Hitler had been dismissive. He persisted with his dogmatic stance that negotiations were carried out from a position of strength, so could only follow a major German military success. The Ardennes offensive had been a last attempt to acquire such a bargaining position. Since then, the calamitous cave-in on the eastern front followed by the disastrous collapse in the west as the Allies pushed over the Rhine and Mosel meant that hopes of acquiring any sort of worthwhile negotiating position became more illusory by the day. Even at the beginning of March, Hitler purported to believe – or at least held to the fiction – that the Rhine could be held, the Soviets pushed back, and some sort of deal then done with Stalin.¹⁰⁸ He was shrewd enough to know how unrealistic this was, even before the Rhine was crossed. Any negotiated end would, in any case, have inevitably meant Hitler’s own end, as he well knew. Negotiations would now more than ever have amounted to capitulation. This would have upturned everything that had driven his political ‘career’: that there would be no repeat of the ‘shameful’ capitulation of 1918.

Hitler retained at the core an extraordinary inner consistency – a dogmatic inflexibility that had terrible consequences for his country. Refusal to contemplate negotiations was for him both logically consistent and easy since his own life was forfeit anyway whether Germany capitulated or fought on. It was not that he worked out a ‘choreography’ of downfall.¹⁰⁹ It was quite simply that there was no way out. With the war lost (as even he, inwardly, by now recognized) there could be no possible alternative in his mind to fighting on to the last. Going down in glory was for him, wedded to the heroic myths of the Germanic past, inconceivably greater than the ‘coward’s’ way out of surrender – and negotiations from weakness amounted to the same thing. The ‘heroism’ would set an example for later generations, as he emphasized to Goebbels.¹¹⁰ To his soldiers, he underlined once again on Heroes’ Memorial Day in mid-March: ‘The year 1918 will… not repeat itself.’¹¹¹

Of the top-ranking Nazi leadership below Hitler, only Goebbels, still the worshipping acolyte, was prepared to follow the same line to its logical conclusion. He had at numerous points wanted to negotiate. But after the Allies crossed the Rhine, he was clear-sighted enough to see that Germany’s last hope of a political settlement had collapsed.¹¹² His decision, as he told Hitler in early March, that he, his wife Magda and their six children would stay in Berlin come what may was consistent with his view that fighting on with honour was all that was left.¹¹³

He was scornful when he heard, early in March, that Ribbentrop – whom he utterly despised (a sentiment that unified the otherwise scarcely harmonious Nazi leadership) – was making overtures to the western powers. He was then irritated when these led to exaggerated stories in the western press, but full of derision when the ‘abortive escapade’ predictably came to nothing. At least it was plain, he remarked, ‘that hopes of an internal revolution in Germany against National Socialism or the person of the Führer are illusory’.¹¹⁴

Even now, however, Ribbentrop had not wholly given up. In mid-March, immediately following this failed attempt, he summoned Dr Werner Dankwort, deputy ambassador in Stockholm, to fly back to Berlin. He told an incredulous Dankwort that it was now a matter of gaining time to unleash the new weapons, long in preparation but now almost ready, which would restore the initiative to Germany, turn around the fortunes of war and fend off the threat to the country’s existence. ‘Germany has won the war if it does not lose it,’ he said, with his own brand of reasoning. The western Allies had rejected every attempt he had made to help prevent the westwards advance of Bolshevism. Other ways had to be tried. Dankwort was left to ponder these thoughts over the following days, when he was summoned twice more to Ribbentrop’s presence. On his third visit, Ribbentrop, in some excitement, informed him that the redoubtable Soviet emissary in Stockholm, Mme Alexandra Michailowna Kollontay, was leaving for Moscow and not expected to return. He wanted Dankwort to find a suitable intermediary to propose a message for her to take to Moscow: that the western Allies would, once the war was over, use their military superiority to remove from the Soviet Union territory it had conquered during the war, and that Germany alone would be in a position to guarantee a large portion of the lands would stay in Soviet hands.

It was an unlikely proposition. In any case, as Ribbentrop told Dankwort, he had first to obtain the Führer’s approval. The Foreign Minister promptly rang Hitler’s bunker, to be told that the Führer was in a briefing which would last until midnight. An air-raid alarm disturbed the wait, allowing Dankwort to experience the dismal mood – ‘below zero’ – as the Foreign Minister’s staff descended into the cellars. Ribbentrop himself disappeared into his private air-raid shelter. It was after midnight when the all-clear sounded and, back in Ribbentrop’s office, the call from Hitler finally came through. It was a short conversation. Dankwort heard Ribbentrop say in a resigned tone: ‘Thank you. Good night.’ The Foreign Minister turned to Dankwort. ‘The Führer let me know that he regards every attempt as pointless. We must fight to the last moment.’ Dankwort could scarcely believe the pointlessness of his arduous journey to the Reich capital. He took the first plane he could back to Stockholm, heartily relieved to escape from the Berlin madhouse.¹¹⁵

Himmler had by now for some time been secretly looking to a possible future after Hitler, while continuing to show himself to be the most loyal of the Führer’s paladins. SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in the Reich Security Head Office, had persuaded Himmler in mid-February to meet Count Folke Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family and vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross. Bernadotte was in Berlin to explore possibilities of negotiating the release of prisoners, especially those from Scandinavia, from concentration camps. From Himmler’s point of view, it was a chance to show himself in a good light – conciliatory, an honest broker – and to look to a possible opening to the west. The Swedish connection was taken further in March through the intermediacy of Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, who had moved to Sweden, though he retained property in Germany. The fact that the end of the war was evidently approaching, that Hitler as adamantly as ever excluded all possible exit routes other than going down in flames, and that Himmler had no intention of joining him in the self-immolation made the Reichsführer open to the potential that Bernadotte and his foreign connections might offer. When Goebbels visited him in hospital in Hohenlychen at the beginning of March, where the Reichsführer was suffering from an angina attack, Himmler accepted that the morale of the troops had slumped and that the war could not be militarily won, but he thought from instinct that ‘a political possibility’ would open up sooner or later.¹¹⁶

By the middle of March, he was all the more ready to contemplate alternatives after enduring an almighty dressing-down from Hitler over his failings as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula. (Hitler had apparently already in February rebuked Himmler as a ‘defeatist’. In his command of the defence of Pomerania, Himmler had actually been too weak to countermand tactical interference from Hitler which he knew to be catastrophic, as well as demonstrating that he had no knowledge of how to handle an army.¹¹⁷) Hitler, in his characteristic search for scapegoats, held Himmler personally responsible for the inability to hold the Red Army in Pomerania, reproaching him with ‘secret sabotage’ and direct disobedience. The Reichsführer was relieved of his command on 20 March. The retreat, against orders, of Sepp Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army in Hungary, resulting in Hitler’s furious demand that Himmler remove the insignia of the ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’, was a further humiliation for the Reichsführer. Guderian claimed to have tried on 21 March, just prior to his own dismissal, to persuade Himmler to use his foreign connections to try to secure an armistice.¹¹⁸ Himmler refused point-blank. He could still not risk an open breach with Hitler.

Himmler had the reputation of being the most feared man in Germany. But he himself knew that was not true. He was fully aware that he remained completely dependent on a higher power. He feared Hitler even at this stage – and with justification. But a serious estrangement had now clouded their relations. Himmler was practically in disgrace. His resentment must have encouraged him to take further his soundings with Bernadotte. Against Hitler’s wishes, he agreed to allow concentration camps to be handed over to the enemy (a promise he did not keep), and permitted small numbers of Jews and thousands of Scandinavian prisoners to be released. There was still no direct suggestion from Himmler that he might be involved in negotiations with the west. But by the beginning of April, Schellenberg – doubtless at Himmler’s prompting – was sounding out Bernadotte about the possibility of arranging a capitulation on the western front. Bernadotte refused, saying that the initiative had to come from Himmler. At this juncture it was still not forthcoming. But Bernadotte recalled Schellenberg telling him that Himmler had talked of a capitulation in the west and ‘but for Hitler’ would not have hesitated to ask him to approach the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower. It would not be long before Himmler made his move.¹¹⁹

In the meantime, one of Himmler’s former closest associates, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, head of his personal staff until being transferred in September 1943 to Italy as Supreme SS and Police Leader there, then from July 1944 as Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht (effectively German military governor in the occupied parts of the country), had already edged towards capitulation south of the Alps. Through intermediaries, Wolff had in February secured a link to the American secret service, the OSS, and arranged a clandestine meeting in Zurich on 8 March with its head of European operations, Allen W. Dulles. Another meeting followed on 19 March, when Wolff undertook to arrange for the unconditional surrender of German forces in Italy. Various interests pushed in the same direction. Wolff plainly had an eye on saving his skin through gaining immunity from prosecution for war crimes. The Wehrmacht leadership in Italy, certainly once Kesselring (who would not commit himself to Wolff’s move) had been replaced on 10 March by the more sympathetic if still highly cautious Vietinghoff, was favourably disposed to steps towards ending a conflict that could now be continued only at huge and senseless cost.

The Allies saw obvious gain in liquidating the front south of the Alps, where the two armies of Army Group C, around 200,000 men,¹²⁰ were still fighting a tenacious rearguard battle, and eliminating the danger of continued resistance centred on the feared Alpine redoubt. Even Hitler, who seems to have had a vague indication of Wolff’s intentions (though not his detailed plans, which amounted to treason), was prepared to let him proceed – at least for the time being. He had been non-committal – taken by Wolff to be a tacit sign of approval – when the latter had, in early February in Ribbentrop’s presence, carefully hinted at negotiations through his own contacts to win time for Germany to develop its secret weapons and to drive a wedge through the Allied coalition. The use of Italy as a possible bargaining pawn in any dealings with the western powers meant that there was no attempt made from Berlin to halt Wolff’s manoeuvring.

Nor was Wolff, in fact, the only leading Nazi trying to secure a deal with the Allies in Italy. None other than the feared head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was at the same time taking his own secret soundings about a separate settlement with the western Allies. Nothing conclusive had materialized from either Wolff’s or Kaltenbrunner’s feelers by the end of March. Still, it was the case by now that the head of the SS, the head of the Security Police, and the SS leader in Italy were all, independent of each other, pursuing ways to avoid the Armageddon that Hitler was inviting. Mutual distrust and fear of Hitler ruled out any collaboration in either bypassing or confronting him. Nevertheless, the leadership of the Third Reich was starting to crumble.¹²¹

The most enigmatic member of Hitler’s court was also beginning to distance himself from Hitler. Over the previous months, Albert Speer had consistently tried to prevent the complete destruction of German industrial plant as the Wehrmacht retreated. This had an obvious rationale for the war economy: it meant production could continue as long as possible, and possibly be restored if lost territory were to be recaptured. But by the spring of 1945 other motives were taking over. Speer’s close connections with industrialists inevitably led him to look to a world beyond Hitler, where it would be necessary to rebuild their factories. He recognized that even after a lost war the country would require an economic infrastructure; the German people would survive their Dictator and need a functioning economy to support them. Not least (and increasingly), considerations of his own future after likely defeat – perhaps hoping to inherit what was left of power in the Reich – made him insist on temporary immobilization of industry, not its wanton destruction.¹²²

Hitler’s thinking ran, as it always had done, along diametrically opposed lines. In his characteristic fashion of posing only stark alternatives he had early in his ‘career’ declared that Germany would be victorious or it would cease to exist. The more any semblance of victory had evaporated, the more his thoughts had turned to the opposite pole: defeat would be total, the German people would have deserved to go under through proving too weak, and there was, therefore, no need to make provision for their future. Destruction wherever and whatever the cost, to bar the enemy advance and its inroads into Germany, was what he wanted. Speer had often had to struggle to water down the orders for destruction of industrial plant, which the High Command of the Wehrmacht had been ready to pass on, to turn them merely into immobilization. Usually, as we have seen in earlier chapters, he had succeeded, pandering to Hitler’s lingering hopes, in persuading the Dictator to accede to his wishes by arguing that the Reich would need the industries again when it reconquered the lost territory. It was an argument, however contrived, to which Hitler was susceptible. But with the enemy now on Reich territory and the fiction of reconquest harder to uphold, the issue of destruction or immobilization was bound to arise again – and in radical fashion.

At the beginning of March, the deliberate destruction of the transport infrastructure by the military was causing great concern to Ruhr industrialists.¹²³ Speer, who had meanwhile secured control over transport to add to his other extensive powers,¹²⁴ travelled west to reassure them that temporary paralysis, not permanent destruction, of industry and transport infrastructure remained the policy. Any opposition to the orders to this effect had to be ‘broken’. He repeated his key argument. ‘We can only continue the war if the Silesian industrial belt, for example, or also parts of the Ruhr district are again in our hands…. Either these areas are brought back… or we have definitively lost the war.’ A unified approach was essential. It was pointless to paralyse industry only to find that the military were destroying all means of transport. He would speak to the commanders-in-chief of the Army Groups and try to obtain a directive from Hitler. He went on to underline the duty to ensure the repair of water supplies and provide food for the civilian population. After food, coal was the most urgent area of production. Alongside troop transports, food supplies would have priority, even over armaments, a point he said he had cleared with Hitler. These measures were not put forward on humanitarian grounds, but to retain the ‘strength of resistance of the population’. The war, Speer’s remarks made plain, was far from over. He spoke further of concentrating steel production on munitions. And he repeated the priorities for transport which Hitler had decided – on his suggestion – for areas being evacuated: troop transports first, then foodstuffs, and finally, where possible, refugees.¹²⁵

Hitler was still insisting on the evacuation of the population from the threatened western areas back into the Reich so that men capable of fighting should not be lost to the enemy. The Gauleiter of such areas knew how impracticable this demand was. Goebbels saw it as another ‘heavy loss of prestige’ for Hitler’s authority.¹²⁶ Even Goebbels accepted that evacuation was not possible, influenced by a report Speer had given him in the middle of the month. Speer, he commented, had expressed irritation at the evacuation orders. He had taken the view ‘that it is not the task of our war policy to lead a people to a heroic downfall’. The Armaments Minister told Goebbels that the war was in economic terms lost. The economy could hold out for only another four weeks – implying until about mid-April – and would then gradually collapse. Speer, noted Goebbels, ‘strongly opposes the position of destroyed earth. He explains that if the artery of life through food and in the economy should be cut off to the German people, that must be the enemy’s job, not ours.’ If Berlin’s bridges and viaducts were to be detonated as planned, the Reich capital would face imminent starvation.¹²⁷

A conflict was plainly brewing. Speer had learnt that Hitler intended the destruction of factories, railways, bridges, electricity and water installations rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands. He approached Guderian, seeking his help to prevent the madness of measures which would destroy the crucial economic infrastructure and ensure lasting misery and poverty for the civilian population. He and Guderian agreed that the detonation of bridges, tunnels and railway installations required special permission. A furious Hitler refused to implement the draft decree.¹²⁸ On 15 March, Speer gave an unvarnished picture of realities. The collapse of the economy was no more than four to eight weeks away, after which the war could not be continued militarily. A firm order was needed to prevent the destruction of vital installations in Germany. ‘Their destruction means the elimination of every further possibility of existence for the German people.’ Speer concluded: ‘We have the duty to leave the people all possibilities that could secure them reconstruction in the more distant future.’¹²⁹

Speer passed the memorandum to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, and asked him to deliver it at a suitable moment. Below eventually did so on 18 March, though the Dictator already knew what was coming. In an attempt to lessen the anticipated hefty reaction and demonstrate his continued loyalty, Speer asked for a signed photograph of Hitler for his fortieth birthday next day.

He also gave Hitler another memorandum – one which he never mentioned after the war.¹³⁰ It was a shorter document, and couched in a wholly different tone. It began by stating that, since economic collapse was unavoidable, drastic measures were needed to defend the Reich at the Oder and the Rhine. Defence beyond these borders was no longer possible. So for the coming eight weeks, it was crucial to take every ruthless measure needed to mobilize all possible resources, including the Volkssturm, for the defences along these two rivers. Forces currently in Norway and Italy should be transferred to serve in this defence. Only such measures had a chance of securing the front. He concluded: ‘Holding out tenaciously on the current front for a few weeks can gain respect from the enemy and perhaps thus favourably determine the end of the war.’¹³¹

Speer’s motive in producing this second memorandum is unclear. Possibly he hoped it would soften the blow of the first, though he never subsequently claimed this. His silence about the second memorandum is telling, since its wording ill fitted his cultivated post-war image of being the one Nazi leader to have tried to act humanely and broken with Hitler before the end. Perhaps more likely, it was written to try to head off any charges – dangerous in the climate – by Hitler or those in his entourage that he was a defeatist and practically a traitor to the cause.¹³² Maybe, since the ‘current front’ on the Rhine was on the verge of being lost, it was an obliquely clever way of encouraging Hitler to draw the conclusion that now was the time to end the war.¹³³ If so, it is odd that Speer never made this point in any of his post-war statements. The final possibility is that Speer actually believed what he was saying – that a last-ditch effort could still wring some sort of deal from, presumably, the western Allies. He later sought to portray himself as one whose early recognition of Germany’s inevitable defeat made him selflessly work for the preservation of the economic basis needed for the people’s survival. But the memorandum of 18 March shows how late he was in accepting that the war was irredeemably lost.¹³⁴ His efforts to restrict the destruction of the economic infrastructure and acceptance that, economically, Germany was close to the end were still compatible with an assumption that the war could not be won but was not yet totally lost. Up to this point, Speer told Hitler only a few days later, he had still believed in a good end to the war.¹³⁵ It was not rhetoric. As the memorandum shows, until then Speer had remained a ‘believer’ of sorts. The continued destruction that fighting on would inevitably entail might have been reconciled by Speer with his attempts otherwise to restrict demolition of the economic infrastructure on the grounds that this was ‘collateral’ damage rather than wilful self-destruction. At the very least, with this memorandum Speer was showing Hitler that he still stood by him.¹³⁶ The conflict with Hitler over destruction of the means of production was a serious one. But it did not amount to a fundamental rejection of the leader to whom he had been so closely bound for more than a decade.

Hitler wasted no time in providing his answer to Speer. Already on 18 March he overrode all objections in ordering the compulsory evacuation of the entire civilian population of threatened western areas. If transport was not available, people should leave on foot. ‘We can no longer take regard of the population,’ he commented.¹³⁷ Next day came Hitler’s notorious ‘scorched earth’ decree, his ‘Nero Order’, completely upturning Speer’s recommendations to spare destruction wherever possible. ‘All military transport, communications, industrial and supplies installations as well as material assets within Reich territory, which the enemy can render usable immediately or within the foreseeable future, are to be destroyed.’ Responsibility for the implementation of the destruction was placed in the hands of the military command as regards transport and communications and the Gauleiter as Defence Commissars in the case of industry and other economic installations.¹³⁸

Down to 18 March, Speer, for all his criticism of measures guaranteed to destroy any basis of post-war reconstruction, had, as his memorandum of that day shows, still believed that there was something to be gained from continuing the war. But on that day, then confirmed by the ‘scorched earth’ decree, his attitude dramatically changed. The breaking-point came when Hitler told him point-blank: ‘If the war is lost, then the people too is lost. This fate is irreversible.’ It was not necessary, therefore, to provide even for their most primitive future existence. On the contrary, it was better to destroy even this basis, because ‘the people had shown itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the east. What will remain after this struggle will be in any case only the inferior ones, since the good ones have fallen.’ At these words, Speer told Hitler in a handwritten letter he delivered to the Dictator some days later, he was ‘deeply shocked’. He saw the first steps to fulfilling these intentions in the destruction order of the following day.¹³⁹

During the days that followed, backed by Walther Rohland and his colleagues in the Ruhr Staff of his Ministry, Speer travelled through western Germany trying (partly by using Nazi arguments that the installations were necessary to sustain production for winning the war) to overcome the initial readiness of the Gauleiter to implement Hitler’s order. How easy it would have been in practice for them to carry out the destruction might actually be doubted. It seems likely that industrialists and factory bosses would have cooperated with local Party functionaries to block many attempts at senseless destruction.¹⁴⁰ Speer also persuaded them that Hitler’s evacuation orders were impracticable.¹⁴¹ Model, too, after some hesitation came round to accepting Speer’s arguments and agreed to keep destruction of industrial plant in the Ruhr to a minimum, though the military, as implementation orders show, would have been prepared to carry out the destruction.¹⁴² In Würzburg, Gauleiter Otto Hellmuth, generally seen as one of the more moderate Party bosses, was all set to go ahead with implementing the ‘Nero Order’. It would, indeed, be pointless though, he admitted, if there were no chance of a change in the situation at the last minute. He asked Speer when the decisive ‘miracle weapons’ were going to be deployed. Only when Speer told him bluntly: ‘They’re not coming’, did he agree not to destroy the Schweinfurt ballbearing factories.¹⁴³

Hitler had, however, meanwhile learnt of Speer’s efforts to sabotage his order. When the Armaments Minister, on his return to Berlin, was summoned to meet him, he met a frosty reception. Hitler demanded that he accept that the war could still be won. When Speer demurred, Hitler allowed him twenty-four hours to consider his answer. On his return – after composing a lengthy, handwritten justification of his position, which, in the event, he did not hand over – Speer said merely: ‘My Führer, I am unconditionally behind you.’¹⁴⁴ That sufficed. Hitler felt his authority intact; there had been no loss of face; Speer had backed down.¹⁴⁵ A brief glimpse of the old warmth between the two returned. Speer exploited the situation to obtain from Hitler the crucial concession and vital qualification of his earlier order, that the implementation of any destruction lay in the hands of his Armaments Minister.¹⁴⁶ With that, Speer was able to prevent the ‘scorched earth’ that Hitler had ordered (though the Wehrmacht nevertheless blew up numerous bridges within Germany as it retreated).¹⁴⁷ It was an important victory, even if it might cynically be interpreted as aimed as much at securing Speer’s own future existence as that of the German people.¹⁴⁸ And on top of Hitler’s inability to insist that his evacuation orders were carried out, it was a further sign, as Goebbels recognized, that Hitler’s authority was waning.¹⁴⁹

This was, nevertheless, not the point of collapse. The foundations were shaking. But they still – just about – held together. Decisive in that, as ever, was the leadership position of Hitler himself. Though the leaders of the Third Reich plainly saw Hitler’s days as numbered, they still knew that they openly crossed him at their peril. Ribbentrop dared not take his peace feelers further without Hitler’s imprimatur. Himmler and Kaltenbrunner were extremely careful to hide their own soundings. Wolff, too, knew what dangerous ground he was treading, though at least he had some geographical distance between him and Berlin. And Speer had ultimately retreated from complete confrontation. He had avoided the possibility of the severe sanctions that might then have arisen, even if he now saw Hitler’s favour in armaments matters turn from him to his long-standing rival, Karl Otto Saur. In no case had any of the paladins looking to their own positions in a post-Hitler future openly challenged the Dictator. Apart from fear of the consequences, since Hitler could still call upon powerful military and police forces to back him, each of them still acknowledged that his own powers still rested on the higher authority of the Führer. Divided among themselves, fearful of the consequences, and still beholden to Hitler, they posed no threat of a fronde.¹⁵⁰ Hitler’s power was set to go on to the end.