by Ian Kershaw
A sense of relief in Germany that the eastern front appeared to be stabilized was said to have been dissipated in mid-August through the depressing news of the Allied breakthrough in the west, for which the population had been completely unprepared.10 Optimists suggesting that the war could yet be won with a supreme effort had a hard time in the gathering gloom of opinion about the huge superiority of enemy forces, scepticism about the promised new ‘wonder weapons’, and feelings that the total-war effort, though generally welcome, had come too late and would, in any case, not be evenly spread in its burdens. Letters from loved ones at the front, and even official news bulletins from France, were cited as indicators that Germany could not compete with the Allied supremacy in men and weaponry. ‘I don’t believe we’ll be able to stop the storm of the enemy,’ one quoted letter home ran. ‘Their superiority is far too great, in the air and above all with tanks, tanks and still more tanks.’ ‘Where are the great reserves that have always been talked about?’ people were asking. In the depressed mood, the desire for an early end to the war was all the stronger, and with it the view that the consequences of defeat would be less dreadful than claimed. Scepticism and defeatism were becoming inseparable.11
By early September reports from propaganda offices across the country were indicating that the mood of the people had reached its lowest point during the entire war. Since the general tenor of such reports – more so than those of the SD – was to emphasize the pro-Nazi sentiments of the population, the clear indication of depression and hopelessness conveyed at this time is all the more striking. A sense of insecurity was widespread. Those with ‘negative’ attitudes were gaining in numbers and undermining morale through defeatist comments and ‘concealed criticism of the leadership’. Many were asking why the Allied landing had not been halted, why total war had not been proclaimed earlier, and why the ‘poison’ that had produced the uprising of 20 July had not been spotted earlier and destroyed. The criticism was aimed at the Führer himself, even if people were too wary to mention him directly.
Those holding such views could see no way to improve the situation and repel the enemy. The wounded soldiers and refugees streaming in from the west only bolstered their pessimism. Ordinary soldiers and the ‘homeland’ were not to blame, they were saying, if it all went wrong and Germany were to lose the war. It was not a matter of fate. The ability of the generals was called into question; and the leadership had not done everything necessary. Above all, the sense of powerlessness in the face of immense enemy superiority in numbers and equipment was dispiriting. Women with children were especially prone to anxiety about the future, it was said. Thoughts of suicide were increasingly common. Hopes in the new weapons were fading, particularly since it was felt that everything had been done too late to make a difference. People were saying that if Lorraine and the Saarland could not be held, the loss of centres of vital armaments production would force Germany to surrender. Few thought that the Westwall – the huge line of German fortifications that had been built in 1938, known to the western Allies as the ‘Siegfried Line’ – would hold up the enemy advance any more than the French ‘Maginot Line’ had stopped the Wehrmacht’s march into France in 1940. With the enemy at the borders of the Reich, the desertion of Germany’s allies – Romania had sued for peace and joined the war against Germany on 25 August, Finland was on the verge of breaking off relations with Germany, other countries were about to follow suit – and exposure with no defence to intensified ‘terror from the skies’, it was difficult to avoid pessimism.12
Refugees from Rombach in Lorraine contributed to a worsening of the mood in factories in the border area with rumours that they had been shot at during their evacuation by train, that enemy parachutists had dropped near Metz, and that the German retreat had been a rout, with officers leaving their soldiers in the lurch as they fled eastwards in whatever vehicles they could find. On top of that, they were saying, the V1 was no longer being fired. Predictably, the report was dismissed in Berlin as mere exaggeration. That did not diminish, however, the damage that was being done by such rumours.13 A similar story was provided to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler by his friend from schooldays and now head of the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, Professor Karl Gebhardt, during a visit to the western front in early September. The population of Trier, he reported, had been disturbed by the numerous rumours in circulation and by the ‘unpleasant sight’ of Wehrmacht vehicles streaming in from Aachen. The ordered evacuation of Eupen-Malmédy – a former enclave of Belgium, annexed by Germany in 1940 – had turned into a panic flight of the German population, in the company of Party functionaries who evidently had no intention of returning.14
The Party’s evacuation of Aachen (the first major German city in Allied sight) and adjacent areas close to the Westwall on the approach of the Americans had been nothing less than a shambles. Evacuation plans had been laid, and on 11 September Hitler’s approval had been given. The evacuation began around midday on 12 September. It had scarcely begun, however, when, as it seemed amid the start of heavy artillery attacks and repeated air raids that the fall of the city was imminent, panic had broken out among the population. It was impossible, amid gathering chaos, to carry out an ordered evacuation. By mid-evening, some 10,000 frightened civilians were crowded onto Aachen’s stations, desperate to get away but with transport made extremely difficult by the bombs raining down on adjacent tracks. Thousands took matters into their own hands, rushing eastwards from the city on foot in long columns, jamming nearby roads. The Nazi authorities themselves estimated shortly afterwards that some 25,000 had managed to leave between 11 and 13 September, to add to the 20,000 who had left the previous week.
Soon afterwards on the late evening of 12 September, Party officials, Gestapo, police and fire-service joined the panic and fled, leaving the people of the city leaderless. Precisely at this juncture, the divisional staff of the 116th Panzer Division arrived, under the command of General Gerd Graf von Schwerin. In the absence of Party leaders, Schwerin took responsibility on 13 September for restoring order, not least to allow for troop movements. ‘Wild’ evacuation was halted. Citizens were directed into bunkers. Reckoning that the Americans were about to arrive, Schwerin left a note, written in English, informing the commanding officer of the US forces that he had stopped ‘the stupid evacuation’ of the population. At the time there were still between 20,000 and 30,000 people in the city, most of whom were in fact evacuated in the following days.
When German forces, unexpectedly, proved able for the time being to repel the American attack and prevent the occupation, the Nazi authorities seized upon Schwerin’s note, which had come into their hands, to cover their own lamentable failings. The matter was taken as far as Hitler himself. Schwerin was promptly dismissed, and Hitler ordered the utmost radicalism in the defence of the city. An investigation found, however, that Schwerin had acted properly within his responsibilities, and that the failure had plainly lain with the Party authorities. Schwerin was converted in fickle post-war memory into ‘the saviour of Aachen’. In fact, there had been no defiance of orders or humanitarian action on Schwerin’s part. He had undertaken no act of resistance. In crisis conditions he was simply carrying out to the best of his ability what he saw as his duty in line with the military demands of the regime.15
Goebbels noted ‘extraordinary difficulties’ in the evacuation of the territories close to the Westwall and the population of the border districts being ‘thrown here and there’, but saw this as unavoidable at such a time of crisis.16 A few days later, acknowledging that the situation in Aachen had become ‘critical’, he advocated the principle of ‘scorched earth’ in the question of evacuation. With the future of the nation at stake, little consideration could be given to the people of the area.17 Goebbels was put fully in the picture – if in a scarcely unbiased account – about the ‘desolate situation’ and the evacuation of Aachen by the Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen, Josef Grohé (whose authority had been badly damaged by t
he flight of his subordinates). Party and Wehrmacht had stood at loggerheads. The Party had left the city. A general chaos had ensued. ‘Unprecedented scenes’ had taken place on the roads eastwards from Aachen. The situation there and in Trier – whose centre (including the great hall of Emperor Constantine dating from the early fourth century) had been badly damaged by bombs in mid-August, and which in the night of 13/14 September was under sustained artillery attack – had to be regarded as ‘extremely serious’.18
Speer, returning from a visit to the region, where he had been driven through the masses streaming away, echoed the accounts of the ‘debacle’.19 The troops he had seen were exhausted. The newly established Volksgrenadier divisions contained many older recruits who could not cope with the physical demands. There was a big drop in the effective strength of the fighting forces and a growing crisis of confidence. Party functionaries labelled officers in general ‘criminals of 20 July’ and blamed them for the military setbacks in both east and west; soldiers themselves dubbed officers ‘saboteurs of the war’ and accused them of lack of fighting spirit. The troops had been badly affected by the mishandling of the evacuation of Aachen. The trains had been stopped without any notice and women, children and old people had been forced to leave on foot. Columns of refugees were to be seen everywhere, sleeping in the open air and blocking roads. There was a chronic shortage of munitions, weapons and fuel.20 In the report he sent to Hitler, Speer noted the contrast between soldiers in shabby and tattered uniforms and Party functionaries in their gold-braided peacetime uniforms, the sarcastically dubbed ‘Golden Pheasants’ (Goldfasane), who had not been visible in organizing the evacuation of Aachen’s inhabitants or helping to reduce the misery of the refugees.21
Xaver Dorsch, one of Speer’s leading subordinates, in charge of fortifications, and offering his own impressions of a visit to the area on 12–13 September, commented on the damaging impression left by the botched evacuation, and how striking it had been that so few Party functionaries had bothered about the refugees. The unnecessary evacuation could, he thought, lead to a catastrophe if the Allied advance continued during subsequent days. He feared disintegration in the army through the anger stirred up by Party officials blaming Wehrmacht officers for the retreat in France.22
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Police, left Himmler in no doubt about the disastrous situation when he wrote at length in mid-September about the mood of the population during the evacuation and occupation of the western border regions. The evacuation in Luxemburg – annexed to the Reich in August 1942 and attached to the domain of the Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier, Gustav Simon – had been carried out in an atmosphere of total panic. The Gauleiter’s measures had been overhasty, and the civilian administration had broken down. Following Simon’s order to evacuate, fortification work on the Westwall had ceased and the workers had left. The mood of these workers had in any case been poor. They had been badly organized by the Party officials, who had then set the worst kind of example by merely supervising but not working themselves. The failings of the Gau administration were evident in the evacuation of 14,500 citizens in the Saarburg district, where there was panic and chaos. The transport laid on was hopelessly insufficient. The lucky ones left by special train, some of the women, children and sick by bus. But most trudged away by foot, in long, wretched columns who occupied the roads for days, their possessions trailing along in horse-drawn wagons. Clothing, shoes and blankets for the evacuees were in short supply.
As a result of the chaos, there was a good deal of anger directed at the Party. Many people refused to follow the Party’s orders to leave (which were often confused and contradictory); others could not find accommodation and came back. In Aachen, where thousands of citizens had defied the evacuation orders, pictures of the Führer had been taken down and white bedsheets hung from windows in gestures of surrender. The Party had lost face through the flight of its functionaries. Organization was poor; women and children became separated in the evacuation. And there had been little sign of anything resembling a ‘people’s community’. Those with access to cars sped away, unconcerned for anyone else. It was every man for himself.23
Kaltenbrunner listed some prominent individuals who had left Luxemburg and Trier prematurely to bring their families to safety. The Gauleiter himself and the District Leader (Kreisleiter) of Metz were among those noted as deserting their posts in a separate report to Himmler about the uncontrolled refugee movements in Lorraine, endangering troop movements. The railways had stopped running because the German personnel had fled, and the civilian administration had detonated essential installations before pulling out so there were electricity and water shortages and the telephones did not function. Russian prisoners of war had been left free to roam the countryside, posing a threat to security.24
One officer, Lieutenant Julius Dufner, stationed at Kyllburg, a small spa town in the Eifel, in the Bitburg area just north of Trier, jotted his own first-hand account of the desolate conditions in his diary. ‘The war is lost!’ he stated baldly on 1 September. In Trier itself, he observed a day later, there was nothing more to be had. Fuel was in such short supply that vehicles would soon be unable to move. ‘We want to build a new Europe,’ he wrote, ‘we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.’ When reproachful citizens asked soldiers why they were retreating, they answered that they, too, wanted to go ‘home to the Reich’. It had all been a bluff, he wrote, alluding to the ‘miracle weapons’. That was what happened when an advertising boss – he meant Hitler – became supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. Files and papers were being destroyed in huge quantities. ‘Everything that seemed at one time indispensable is today valueless and nothing at all.’ Who was to blame for it all, the diarist asked. Not those in lowly places, was his answer, those who simply did not want to fight and die for a lost cause. Everything had become crystal clear. All that talk of the new Europe, of young and decrepit peoples, of Germanic leadership, of revolutionary zeal: it was ‘baloney’, a ‘swindle’. He would not have said such things out loud.
As enemy artillery started firing on Trier on the evening of 13 September, and the evacuation of the inhabitants began next day, hundreds of emergency workers – ‘a column of wretched looking, careworn old men and also young lads from the Hitler Youth’ – traipsed into the city through the rain to dig fortification ditches. These might have fended off Huns and Mongols, Dufner mused, but it seemed doubtful that they could hold up modern tanks. Few of the workers had anywhere to sleep. But there was no complaining, just resigned acceptance. It looked as if the last reserves were being summoned up. As Bitburg itself came under fire, officers still managed to celebrate the birthday of one of their comrades with fine Saar wine and Sekt.25 It was a case of drink today; there might be no tomorrow.
Such partying with the enemy on the doorstep would have confirmed the widespread prejudice among Nazi functionaries, much of the civilian population and many frontline soldiers about the Etappengeist – the ‘spirit of the rear lines’ – the weak and decadent lifestyle of officers still able to enjoy the good things in life while others were dying for their country. This was the alleged cause of the collapse in France.26 Behind the front were the lines of communication, the bases for provisioning, administration, transport, field hospitals and for the planning staffs of the fighting army. This all constituted the Etappe, an essential element in the structure of any military machine, but, as in the First World War, one much derided by the ordinary front soldiers at the dirty end of the fighting, all too ready to spread to their loved ones back home scurrilous rumours of officers enjoying creature comforts and high living away from the bitter warfare.
‘That our rear-line jackasses flood back in such wild panic’, Goebbels commented, ‘can only be put down to their lack of proper discipline and that they have been more taken up during their long period of occupation in France with ch
ampagne and French women than military exercises.’ He blamed lack of leadership by the generals for the ‘debacle’.27 The Gau office in Baden reported to the Party Chancellery in early September that the attitude of the retreating units ‘breathed the worst sort of rear-lines air, disorderly uniforms, a lot of drunken good-time girls and soldiers hanging together in the worst and most dubious groups, lorries loaded with the most various goods, fittings from apartments, beds, etc. These images reminded war veterans of the conditions of 1918.’28 In the immediate wake of the collapse of the German army in the Allied breakthrough at Falaise, Himmler had issued orders to the Higher SS and Police Leaders – his main agents in security issues – in western areas, through cooperation with military commanders to abolish once and for all ‘the repulsive German rear lines in France’, and send those involved to the front or put them to work.29 A few days later, Martin Bormann passed on to Himmler a letter he had received from Karl Holz, the acting Gauleiter of Franconia, containing reports of ‘ill-discipline, subversion and lack of responsibility’ in the rear lines in France. Holz suggested sending in ‘general inspectors’, comprised of ‘energetic and brutal National Socialists’, to clear up the malaise, though Himmler found it impossible to oblige unless he were given details.30
A description of the military failings that had led to the Allied breakthrough at Avranches – ‘the most serious event of the summer’ – found its scapegoat in the alleged cowardly behaviour in the rear lines, while praising German efforts that had prevented a worse catastrophe.31 A report by the Geheime Feldpolizei (secret military police) reached a similar conclusion. The failure of officers during the retreat in the west had shaped the mood, reflecting the alleged distrust of officers since 20 July. Instances were adduced from soldiers’ accounts of poor behaviour of officers – similar, according to one, to that of 9 November 1918 – and indicating signs of disintegration in the army.32 Among the strongest denunciations was one from the office of General Reinecke, head of the National Socialist Leadership Staff of the Army, based upon a visit to the western front in late September and early October to assess the work of the NSFOs. These, it was said, were working well. Conditions earlier in the rear lines in France had been ‘scandalous’. For four years, those behind the rear lines had lived in a ‘land of milk and honey’. The retreat in 1918 at the time of the revolution had been like the proud march of a guard regiment compared with this ‘fleeing troop rabble’.33