by Ian Kershaw
V
The German people – even more so the ‘enemies of the people’ in the regime’s grasp – were subjected to far more rigorous controls as the enemies encroached closer towards the borders of the Reich. Coercion now became an omnipresent element of daily life. Alongside the restrictions of Goebbels’ total-war measures, and inroads into the workplace through recruitment to the front, went increasingly long hours on the shopfloor. Any worker suspected of slacking was threatened with being treated in the same way as deserters. Foreign workers – now constituting around a fifth of the labour force in Germany – were particularly vulnerable to police round-ups, and investigations of the existence of any subversive material, that could result in their being sent to concentration camps, or worse.98
For Germans, orders for evacuation in areas close to the front could come at an hour’s notice. In bombed towns and cities, people had to comply with commands barked out by local Party officials, and by the police and military authorities. Surveillance had become intensified. The regime’s suspicions of the population it controlled mounted as memories and fears of a repeat of 1918 revived. Communist cells were penetrated and broken up, their members and other suspected opponents of the regime arrested and often subjected to torture.99 The police were alerted to the threat of internal unrest and instructed to take immediate measures to nip in the bud any signs of disturbance to public order. The Higher SS and Police Leaders were given powers by Himmler to put down with all means at their disposal any unrest in their areas and immediately to deal with those threatening security and order.100 Party officials were handed extra weapons to deal with ‘internal unrest or other extraordinary circumstances’.101 Germany was increasingly an atomized, dragooned society run on the basis of fear. It was also by this stage an entirely militarized society.
In his new capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Himmler was able to extend his policing powers to the military sphere. Hitler gave him full authority to ‘establish order’ in the areas behind the fighting zone and sent him, at the beginning of September, to the western border region to put a halt to the retreat of the ‘rear-lines’ troops. Within twenty-four hours, according to Goebbels, he had stopped the ‘flood’ of retreating soldiers, and the images of panic that accompanied them.102 The Gauleiter were instructed that all returning members of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, police, OT and Reich Labour Service, as well as ‘stragglers’, were to be picked up and turned over to the Replacement Army by 9 September. Local Party leaders were to report to their District Leaders by 7 p.m. the previous evening the numbers of stragglers in their area, and they in turn would pass the information to the Gauleiter within two hours, who would then immediately inform the commander of the Defence District.103 Himmler was proud of his achievement in arresting the disintegration in the west, and recommended ‘brutal action’ to deal with manifestations of ‘rear-lines’ poor morale.104 By the middle of September, 160,000 ‘stragglers’ had been rounded up and sent back to the front.105
Himmler’s decisive action was rewarded by Hitler by a further remit. It arose from a combination of the increased concern for inner security together with the need felt to provide border protection, especially in the east, following the Red Army’s inroads in the summer. Since early in the war, the Wehrmacht had been ready to conscript civilians in an emergency to support local defence operations. The police were also involved in earlier planning for militias. Himmler had in 1942 set up a ‘Countryside Watch’, later followed by an ‘Urban Watch’, made up mainly of members of Nazi affiliates not called up to the Wehrmacht, to help local police in searching for escaped prisoners of war and repressing any potential unrest from foreign workers. By the end of 1943, the ‘Urban’ and ‘Countryside’ Watches comprised in all around a million men. Some Gauleiter had then in 1943 and 1944 taken steps to form their own ‘Homeland Protection Troops’, reaching beyond Party members to include all men aged eighteen to sixty-five. These did not, however, at this stage find favour with Hitler, who sensed they would have a negative impact on popular morale.
Even so, as war fortunes deteriorated, the Wehrmacht also prepared plans for larger, more formalized militias. With the Red Army approaching the Reich’s eastern frontier, General Heinz Guderian, the recently appointed Chief of the General Staff, proposed what he called a Landsturm (taking its name from the Prussian militias which fought against Napoleon’s army in 1813), to be composed of men exempted for whatever reason from military service, who would help to strengthen border protection in the east. Guderian recommended the deployment of alarm units which would carry out guerrilla-like warfare in their own localities. Every officer would act ‘as if the Führer were present’. Guderian advocated the use of cunning, deception and fantasy, claiming that Red Indian-style action could be successful in fighting for streets, gardens and houses and that the Karl May stories about cowboys and Indians in the Wild West – much liked by Hitler – had proved useful as training manuals.106
Guderian’s fanciful schemes never materialized. They were overtaken by plans for the creation of a nationwide organization under Party, not Wehrmacht, control. Some Gauleiter, encouraged by Bormann, had already in August created militias in their own regions. The leader of the SA, the Nazi stormtrooper organization, Wilhelm Schepmann, and Robert Ley, head of the enormous Labour Front, separately contemplated in early September the construction of a Landsturm for national defence, each imagining he would lead it.107 Hitler’s view, as the conflict between Schepmann and Ley surfaced, was that Himmler was the only person capable of building the envisaged Landsturm. Goebbels agreed, as usual, with Hitler. Schepmann would rapidly succumb to ‘the lethargy of the SA’, while if the task were given to Ley, ‘only pure idiocy would come of it’.108
Quietly, however, from behind the scenes, another Nazi leader scented a chance to extend his power. With the enemy close to Germany’s borders, east and west, and a perceived possibility of internal unrest, the way was open for Martin Bormann, working together with Himmler, to devise proposals for a national militia and persuade Hitler that its organization and control had to be placed in the hands of the Party rather than be given to the ‘untrustworthy’ army, thereby ensuring that it would be subjected to the necessary Nazi fanaticism. By the middle of September, Bormann had worked out drafts, approved by Himmler, for a decree by Hitler on the establishment of a ‘People’s Defence’ (Volkswehr).109 Within a few days, the name had been changed to the more stirring ‘People’s Storm’ (Volkssturm). Himmler told Defence District commanders on 21 September that ‘if the enemy should break in somewhere, he will encounter such a fanatical people, fighting like mad to the end, that he will certainly not get through’.110
Hitler’s decree on the establishment of the Deutscher Volkssturm, dated 25 September though actually signed next day and reserved for publication until mid-October, stipulated that the new militia was to be formed of all men between sixteen and sixty who were capable of bearing arms. The Gauleiter, under Bormann’s direction, were given responsibility for summoning the men, forming them into companies and battalions, and all attendant organizational matters. The political aspects of the new militia were left to Bormann, acting on Hitler’s behalf. This gave Bormann enormous scope for defining his remit. Himmler, as Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army (not as head of the SS and police), was placed in charge of the ‘military organization, the training, weaponry and armaments’ of the Volkssturm. Its military deployment, under Hitler’s directive, was in his hands, though he delegated its running to the head of the SS Central Office and General of the Waffen-SS, Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger.111 The very division of controls outlined in the decree guaranteed in a fashion characteristic of the Third Reich, that there would be continuing disputes about responsibility and control. But, powerful though Himmler and the SS were, the victor in conflicts over control of the Volkssturm turned out to be Martin Bormann. His constant proximity to Hitler enabled him to fend off attempts to reduce his dominance in this
new domain by playing on the unique position of the Party to imbue the ‘people’s community’ with the fanatical spirit of National Socialism in the defence of the Reich.112
Militarily, the value of the Volkssturm turned out over subsequent months to be predictably low. The loss of the many men – too old, too young, or too unfit for military service – who would die in Volkssturm service would be utterly futile. The creation of the Volkssturm certainly amounted to a desperate move to dredge up the last manpower reserves of the Reich. But it was far from an admission by the regime that the war was lost. In the eyes of the Nazi leadership, the Volkssturm would hold up the enemy, should the war enter Reich territory, and help Germany win time. New weapons, they presumed, were on the way. The enemy coalition was fragile. The more losses could be inflicted on the enemy, particularly on the western Allies, the more likely it was that this coalition would crumble. A settlement, at least in the west, would then be possible. Seen in this way, time gave Germany a chance. Moreover, the Volkssturm would achieve this goal through the inculcation of genuine National Socialist spirit. It would embody the true Nazi revolution as a classless organization, where social rank and standing had no place, and through fanatical commitment, loyalty, obedience and sacrifice.113 It would also, it was imagined, help to raise popular morale.114 In reality, these Nazi ideals were far from the minds of the vast majority of those who would trudge unwillingly and fearfully into Volkssturm service, minimally armed but expected to help repel a mighty enemy. A minority, impossible to quantify precisely but including many Volkssturm leaders, were, even so, convinced Nazis, some of them fanatical. Even in the dying days of the regime, Volkssturm members would be involved in police ‘actions’ and atrocities against other German citizens seen to be cowards or defeatists. So whatever its obvious deficiencies as a fighting force, the Volkssturm – a huge organization envisaged as comprising 6 million men115 – served as a further vehicle of Nazi mobilization, organization and regimentation. As such, it played its own part in preventing any internal collapse and ensuring that a war, rationally lost, would not be ended for some months yet.
VI
Germans without weapons in their hands were by late summer 1944 likely to be holding spades instead. As the enemy approached Germany’s frontiers, conscription – also for women – to dig fortifications, trenches, bunkers, tank traps and roadblocks was introduced. Bormann, here too, orchestrated operations from the centre. His agents, the Gauleiter in their capacity as RVKs, organized the work at regional level. The Party’s District, then Local, Leaders ensured that it was done. Party affiliates like the Hitler Youth assisted in the mobilization and deployment. The police were once more on hand to force waverers into line. Again, as the prospect of fighting on Reich soil loomed ever larger, the impositions of the regime on its citizens and the level of controls to which they were subjected on a daily basis intensified sharply.
The frantic fortification-building through conscription of the local population had started in the east in July, following the Red Army’s breakthrough, when Gauleiter Koch persuaded Hitler to commission the construction of an extensive ‘Eastern Wall’ as a bulwark against Soviet inroads.116 The collapse in the west in August then rapidly necessitated the adoption of similar methods to reinforce defences, particularly along the Westwall, whose pre-war array of 14,000 bunkers over a length of 630 kilometres was in urgent need of strengthening. On 20 August Hitler ordered a people’s levy, under the leadership of four western Gauleiter, for the construction of western fortifications. At the end of the month, he empowered additional Gauleiter to enlist civilian workers to strengthen northern coastal defences as a protection against invasion and to levy the population for work on the Westwall. Extra labour, where necessary, had to be provided by neighbouring Gaue.117 The entire border of the Westwall on the German side was now to be placed in defence readiness. The RVKs were responsible for arranging the accommodation and feeding of hundreds of thousands of workers, and taking steps to evacuate the population in a strip of about two kilometres depth behind the Westwall.118
As with the Volkssturm, Robert Ley had ambitions of taking charge of the nationwide command of fortification work. Ley, who had a doctorate in chemistry, was among the most fanatical Nazis, possessed of an almost mystical belief in Hitler. At the end of 1932, Hitler had made him head of the Party’s organization and a few months later boss of the mammoth German Labour Front. The ambitious Ley was always looking to extend his own empire, early in the war taking over responsibility for housing in Germany. But his arbitrary and arrogant exploitation of his power, and his public reputation for drunkenness, made him enemies in high places. And in trying to take control of fortification work, to the pleasure of Goebbels, who held Ley’s organizational capabilities in scant regard, he was to be disappointed.119 Once more, Martin Bormann, close to Hitler and possessing his confidence, was in a position to gain exclusive control of the new range of powers. On 1 September Hitler gave Bormann sole authority to instruct the Gauleiter, in his name, on all measures relating to fortifications. No other Party agencies had any rights to intervene. Bormann would name commissioners, directly responsible to him, who could commandeer Party members where necessary to assist in carrying out the work – through supervision and controls, that is, not through actually digging themselves. Robert Ley, as Reich Organization Leader of the Party, was at Bormann’s disposal in providing such members – a clear victory for the head of the Party Chancellery over one of his rivals.120
The work began without delay, and with great urgency. On 3 September the Essen National-Zeitung spoke of the ‘entire frontier population’ being involved in extending defences on the western borders, and the men and women of the Gaue in the west starting ‘with spades and shovels’ to work ‘to ensure the freedom of our homeland’.121 By 10 September, 211,000 women, youths, and men too old for military service, along with 137 units of the Reich Labour Front and Hitler Youth formations were engaged in heavy labour on the Westwall. The minimum period for conscription was stipulated as six weeks. After that, Germans, though not foreign workers, could be replaced by others.122 Bormann reminded the Gauleiter at the beginning of October of the urgency of completing entrenchments before the onset of the cold and wet autumn weather when women, girls and youths could be deployed only to a limited extent and when illness among men was sure to increase and be exacerbated through shortage of equipment, clothing and accommodation.123
By this time, the Gauleiter had been given widened powers by Hitler in the event of the war encroaching onto German territory. Amending his decree of 13 July through further decrees on 19 and 20 September, Hitler accorded the Gauleiter, as RVKs, executive power in civilian matters in operational areas with rights to issue legally binding decrees and directives to all agencies of the state administration. With this, Bormann’s own centralized authority was bolstered still further, though Hitler yet again muddied the waters, providing for conflict and demarcation disputes, since his decree stipulated that coordination of the measures determined by the RVKs rested with Himmler.124
Bormann was by this time at the height of his powers. Through his presence at Führer Headquarters, his ability to control access to Hitler to a large extent and to influence his thinking, his exploitation of his position to outmanoeuvre other bigwigs in the Third Reich’s constant power-struggles, his control of the elaborate Party machine, and his capacity for sheer hard work – as his frequent letters to his wife, Gerda, indicate, he was working almost round the clock – Bormann had become perhaps the most pivotal figure after Hitler himself in the top Nazi echelons. And he was still an absolutely committed true believer. Unlike Himmler or Speer, he appears to have had no alternative personal agenda in mind for a world without Hitler. And unlike Himmler, Goebbels, Göring and Ribbentrop, he seems never at any moment to have contemplated any form of negotiation with the enemy as a way of ending the war. He was content to be Hitler’s mouthpiece, with all the power that gave him. Acknowledging to his wife in late August t
hat it was hard to see a silver lining as the fronts closed in on Germany, he nonetheless added: ‘In spite of it all, our faith in the Führer and in victory is completely unshaken, which is truly necessary, for in this situation very many people begin to soften up understandably.’125 A few weeks later, he even found it possible to look back upon the catastrophic months of 1944 with some satisfaction because, despite military collapse in east and west, ‘the national community has stood its test, and we are so far able to overcome the thousand difficulties which the enemy’s domination of the air creates for us’.126 His optimism probably arose from necessity. Like the other leading Nazis, he knew he had no future after Hitler.
During 1944 the Party Chancellery that Bormann ran – sarcastically dubbed by Goebbels on one occasion the ‘Paper Chancellery’ because of the streams of directives flooding out of it – issued 1,372 circulars, announcements or orders, alongside numerous other instructions and Führer orders.127 State bureaucracy still functioned, though increasingly as an administrative organ for directives and intitiatives emanating from the Party. Civil defence in all its ramifications, organization of mass conscription for entrenchment work, mobilizing non-servicemen for the Volkssturm, providing welfare for evacuees, and implementing the myriad orders for total war, were all in the hands of the Party that now controlled Germany as never before.
For ordinary Germans, there was scarcely any avenue of life free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates. In the armed forces, too, the scope for escaping Nazification had diminished. The repercussions of the failed bomb plot, the need to demonstrate loyalist credentials, extended deployment of NSFOs, increased surveillance and fear of falling into the clutches of Himmler (who now possessed greater room for intervention in the military sphere) left their mark on both officers and men. Whether at the front or in the civilian population, as the war had come close to home, and the popular base of the regime had shrunk, compliance with ever more invasive controls had come increasingly to dominate daily life.