by Ian Kershaw
As the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, though effectively in disgrace for the failings of air defence and present at Führer Headquarters only when he had to be, remained loyal, however resigned he was to Germany’s impending fate.117 Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim, Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Air Fleet on the eastern front, already in mind as a possible replacement for Göring, was another convinced National Socialist, a participant in the putsch attempt of 1923, and utterly committed to Hitler to the very end. Other senior Luftwaffe officers were also fanatical about continuing the fight, however hopeless it seemed. Whether or not leaders of the Luftwaffe felt this way, hopes that something could be saved for the future made most of them ultra-cautious about doing anything that would prompt disfavour.118
Guderian, as Chief of the Army General Staff, was as a consequence of his disagreements with military dispositions becoming increasingly frustrated and estranged from Hitler, though, as we have noted, he had usually come down on his side when Reinhardt had desperately been trying to get decisions to retreat in East Prussia. However much he disagreed with Hitler’s decisions, Guderian accepted them and tried to implement them as well as he could. Soon after the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 he had wanted every General Staff officer to be an NSFO.119 He had also served on the ‘Court of Honour’ that had thrown fifty-five army officers out of the Wehrmacht in disgrace.120 He remained a loyalist, if by now a disillusioned one. And at the top of the Wehrmacht, lapdog loyalty was assured in Keitel and Jodl. The military establishment, contrary to its later claims, remained, therefore, committed to Hitler, and to a strategy which, ruling out any form of capitulation, could logically only lead to further immense bloodshed and ultimate self-destruction.
What above all enabled the military struggle to continue, though at inevitable cost on other fronts, was the belated acceptance that massive reinforcements for the east had to be found. Losses on the eastern front in January and February were more than 450,000.121 But the front had to be strengthened beyond these losses. The navy and the Luftwaffe made available tens of thousands of sailors and airmen for the land war.122 The Replacement Army scraped together many more, often from those in reserved occupations previously exempted from call-up. The Volkssturm mobilized in total over half a million men, grossly lacking in weapons, to serve on the eastern front, suffering horrendous losses as they did so.123 But since genuine reserves were as good as exhausted, and new recruits were often scarcely trained boys of sixteen or seventeen, many of the reinforcements could only come from the west or the south. On 19 January, six days into the Soviet offensive, Lieutenant-General August Winter, deputy head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, presented a memorandum whose basic premiss was that the war would be decided over the coming weeks in the east. Winter stated the necessity, forced by the emergency in the east, ‘at the cost of other theatres of war and with conscious acknowledgement of the serious risk involved for the western theatre of concentrating maximum forces in the eastern theatre for the great decisive battle’.124 The order resulted in a further forty divisions being dispatched to the east. Aircraft, anti-aircraft batteries, tanks and heavy artillery were now overwhelmingly also sent east, to the neglect of other fronts. By 12 February, thirty-three divisions had been sent to the eastern front, with another twelve to follow by early March. But eighteen of these divisions could be provided only by weakening the fight against the British and Americans in the west and in northern Italy.125 The eventual final phase of the Allied advance in the west was, therefore, directly presaged by the collapse of the Wehrmacht in the east.
In the meantime, increasing desperation on the part of the regime’s leaders and their representatives at lower levels, coupled with the evident signs that morale was crumbling at home as well as on the fronts, intensified the resort to measures of extreme repression. These were now directed not just at helpless, persecuted minority groups, but at the German population itself. The terror that had been exported eastwards for so long was coming home to the Reich.
6
Terror Comes Home
The Führer expects that the Gauleiter will implement the task placed before them with the necessary severity and consistency and ruthlessly suppress every sign of disintegration, cowardice and defeatism with the death sentences of the summary courts martial. Anyone not prepared to fight for his people but who stabs it in the back in its gravest hour does not deserve to live and must fall to the executioner.
Bormann’s directive on the establishment of summary courts martial, 15 February 1945
I
For the mass of the German population, the consequences of the inability to repel the enemy in the west through the Ardennes offensive had still not sunk in before the onslaught from the east in the second half of January 1945. The traumatic impact of this calamity now brought home to almost everyone that the end of the war was approaching; that Germany faced total defeat and enemy occupation in the near future. The days were plainly numbered for a regime that in ever more people’s eyes had brought such misery upon the country. With this recognition, the signs of disintegration within the civilian population and among ordinary soldiers started to mount. The regime responded in characteristic fashion: by hugely stepping up the repression at home.
Of course, repression had been an intrinsic part of the Nazi regime from the outset. The legal profession had fully collaborated in the escalating persecution and responded at every stage to the extra-legal violence of the police and the Party’s organizations by intensifying its own repression. But the repression of the pre-war years, omnipresent though it was, had concentrated on ‘outsider’ groups. The regime’s social and political control rested ultimately on the general acknowledgement by Germans that it would act ruthlessly against those who stood in its way or were deemed in some way or another to be its enemies. As long as the repression was aimed at ‘outsiders’ and ‘undesirables’, however, it was accepted, even welcomed, by the majority of the population.1 And as long as individuals who did not belong to a politically or racially targeted group conformed, or did not have the misfortune to be deemed an ‘inferior’ in some way, to be excluded from the ‘people’s community’, they were not likely to fall into the clutches of the Gestapo.
Once the war started, the violence built into the system gained new and powerful momentum. In the main, it was exported. The brunt of it was borne by the peoples of the countries conquered in the early, triumphant phase of the war. But repression at home against any signs of political non-conformity also intensifed. Jews, as always the top-ranking racial enemy and blamed incessantly in relentless propaganda for the war, were subjected to ever worsening, horrific persecution, especially when deportations to the east began in 1941.2 And terroristic repression was arbitrarily directed at the increasing numbers of foreign workers from the conquered countries, especially when the fortunes of war turned against Germany – a point symbolically marked by the catastrophe at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/3. By this time, the legal system had effectively capitulated to the untrammelled might of the SS-police security apparatus. As the losses at the front mounted alarmingly and the pressures on the civilian population within Germany grew commensurately during the course of 1944, the regime became ever more sensitive to signs of dissent. Even so, criticism of the regime widened, as the authorities’ own monitoring services plainly indicated. Hitler’s own popularity – the focal point of ‘positive’ propaganda – had by now visibly waned. The Party was suffering a severe drop in its standing. Morale at the front, especially after the collapse in France, was wavering.
Dissolving support for the regime, which propaganda struggled vainly to combat, meant inexorably a greater recourse to terroristic repression. Following the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, and with Germany facing mounting adversity in the last months of the year, the population, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was increasingly forced into line in the total-war drive. Incautious remarks or any signs of what were deemed defeatism or subv
ersion were ruthlessly punished. It was becoming an ever more dangerous regime for its own citizens.
Even so, from February 1945 onwards the terror within Germany moved to a new plane. The regime’s leaders, Hitler at the forefront, could now plainly see that, short of a miracle, defeat was staring them in the face. Propaganda parroted slogans aimed at boosting the readiness to hold out and fight on. But for most people now this was obviously whistling in the wind. As propaganda failed, violence intensified. The regime’s reflex to outright violence marked a combination of fear, desperation, defiance and revenge. Fear of another 1918; increasing wariness of the explosive potential of the millions of foreign workers in the country; desperation at the impending total defeat and the collapse of the regime; defiance of all forces – internal as well as external – seen to be dragging Germany to perdition; and revenge against all those who had stood against Nazism and would rejoice at its downfall: the combination created a new level of violence arbitrarily directed against anyone seen to block or oppose the fight to the finish.
The worst of the retribution was, as ever, reserved for the regime’s designated enemies. The last months would prove murderous for Jews, foreign workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp internees as the vestiges of control over increasingly untrammelled violence dissolved. But the majority German population was now also subjected in increasing measure to wild reprisals for perceived defeatism. The slightest ill-judged remark or perceived minor opposition to the self-destructive course of the regime could prove disastrous for any individual. As the military fronts closed in on the Reich, the terror, once exported, was rebounding in the death-throes of the regime on the population of Germany itself. It was a mark of increasing desperation. Just as with the vain efforts of propaganda, terror could do nothing to halt the continued slide of morale. But it was more than sufficient to prevent any prospect of the misery, suffering and, by now, detestation of the Nazi regime in wide swathes of the population being converted into the type of revolutionary mood that had characterized the last stages of the First World War in 1917–18.
II
By the end of January, the regime was becoming seriously concerned at the signs of collapsing morale, both at home and – even more worryingly – at the front. Even from within the SS – however difficult it was, there above all, to admit it – there were voices prepared to acknowledge a deepening crisis.
On 26 January SS-Hauptsturmführer Rolf d’Alquen, staff officer in the propaganda department of Army Group Upper Rhine, wired a panicky message to his brother in Berlin, Standartenführer Gunter d’Alquen, editor of the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps. ‘The mood among the fighting troops has become more nervous and serious by the day on account of the events on the eastern front,’ he stated. Many who came from the eastern regions had their personal anxieties. ‘If the situation gets worse in the next days,’ he continued, ‘it can be reckoned that the fighting spirit of the troops will be paralysed by worries that can no longer be borne.’ The mood among the civilian population of the area was similar, he indicated. He wanted ‘a redeeming word from Führer Headquarters’ and asked, cautiously but pointedly, if it was possible to ascertain whether Hitler had told his entourage what he had in mind to master the crisis. Both among the troops and in the civilian population, it was clear that the front could only be held for a short time with existing weapons, he remarked. What hopes remained were invested in a weapon ‘that could nullify all that has been endured and all setbacks, and produce the decisive change on the fronts’.
He requested that the state of morale at the front should be brought to the Führer’s attention. This, almost certainly, did not happen. But his account did reach Himmler. D’Alquen’s message was relayed to Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal adjutant, with a covering note that it was ‘typical for the psychological situation of the troops, but also for those there responsible for propaganda’. Himmler lost no time in replying. Though the troops had suffered setbacks, he declared, it was d’Alquen himself who was most depressed. His suggestion was ‘absolutely impossible’. The troops must be told to do their duty, however hard it was. When the west was protected, the Wehrmacht in the east would be ready to absorb the assault before ‘becoming active again’. ‘From you yourself’, Himmler closed, ‘I expect the inner bearing of an SS man.’3
A few days later, Himmler’s own newly created Army Group Vistula was reporting that the officers ‘no longer had the troops firmly in hand’ and ‘signs of dissolution of the worst kind’ were occurring as soldiers – and not just in occasional instances – ‘pulled off their uniforms and tried in every way to obtain civilian clothing in order to get away’.4 The western Allies did not, however, for their part, based on their interrogations of captured soldiers, expect large-scale desertions. ‘The strongest deterrent against desertion continues to be fear of retaliation against one’s family,’ was their assessment. The feeling that the end of the war was close was a further reason not to take the high risk of deserting. Around 65 per cent of those interrogated in mid-February thought the war would be over in weeks. They fought on, it was adjudged, through desire for self-preservation, apathy (about all but their own immediate military situation) and an automatic sense of obedience.5 In the mayhem of the evacuations from the east, soldiers were said to be mingling with the evacuees, ‘marking time’ and trying to avoid further fighting, ‘in expectation of the coming end’, since the military police had either disappeared themselves or were helpless to control the massively overcrowded trains.6
Martin Bormann, in the Party Chancellery, was in no doubt, from reports he was receiving, of soldiers affecting civilian morale through their defeatist attitude. ‘What? You’re still listening to Hitler?’ one soldier who had returned to the Magdeburg area was heard to remark. He was off home, he said, and by the time the authorities had found him the war would be over anyway. Luckily for him, no one took his details and he got away with it. In the Sudetenland, soldiers pouring back in flight from the east were said to present a depressing sight. Often, they would enter shops to demand goods even though they had no ration coupons. When challenged, they retorted that the war was over anyway and there would be no need for ration cards. Their view was that the consequences of defeat would not be as bad as they were painted.7 From the Cologne-Aachen area in early February, Bormann heard of a ‘gathering inner uncertainty’ and belief in ‘a certain leadership crisis’ in the Wehrmacht, though the Waffen-SS was seen to stand out in distinction.8
These impressions of low morale among soldiers within Germany were reinforced by a report of an NSFO – couched, naturally, in Nazi language – of his impressions gathered during a journey through several parts of the country. He registered ‘symptoms of threatening developments for the future’. Deserters often found support among the civilian population, he claimed, also for their allegations that sabotage by officers – echoes of the Stauffenberg plot still reverberated here – had caused Germany’s defeat. Discipline was undermined and officers themselves apathetic, the report noted. People in central Germany, naturally worried by events in the east, were telling soldiers on the western front that they should let in the Americans so that the Bolsheviks would not get to them, a view he regarded as an obvious danger to morale. Stories that armaments factories had been closed down because of coal and transport difficulties were also affecting morale. Soldiers hearing that the armaments industry was no longer working saw the war then as unquestionably lost. Predictably, the report concluded that drastic measures needed to be taken to counter such worrying signs, advocating ‘flying courts martial’, ‘merciless’ implementation of orders and ‘radical measures carried out with all force’ as a necessary response.9
Reports from the eastern regions of Germany in mid-February could only have made depressing reading for Himmler. He heard that recognition of German military impotence was ‘the root of almost all signs of demoralization among the troops’, who generally accepted that the war was lost. Looting of property by the W
ehrmacht in places where the civilian population had fled, also seen as a sign of collapsing morale, was commonplace. Many soldiers, officers and Volkssturm men were to be found detached from their units and wandering in the woods on the eastern banks of the Oder, trying to cross into Germany. Their morale was suitably poor. In despairing mood, they often blamed National Socialism for all their suffering, viewed the war as lost and wanted peace at any price. Himmler and the SS, it was acknowledged, were also openly criticized. And leaders among the groups of stragglers were telling them not to resort to arms if they encountered Soviet troops, but to surrender without a fight.10
Among the civilian population, morale had dipped to an equally low ebb. Propaganda reports in mid-February indicated ‘a profound lethargy’ as an attitude said to be prevalent among the middle class and peasantry. Their resigned view – ‘a creeping poison’ – was that all was lost anyway, and the war would be over within a few months.11 Soldiers travelling through Berlin reported that the mood in the west was ‘catastrophic’, as everyone was just waiting for the end of the war, which could not be long delayed. In the Reich capital itself, pessimism had caught hold among the population. There was widespread criticism of failed promises of new weapons, though fear of the consequences of falling into the hands of the Soviets was said to underpin a readiness to fight on.12 Fatalism and dulled indifference were commonplace. ‘We’ll take it as it comes. We can’t alter things,’ people felt. ‘Everything that looks like propaganda or is spoken as such is flatly rejected,’ it was reported.13 Similar disbelief in propaganda claims was registered in southern Germany, where the mood was ‘very depressed’ and there was little hope in a favourable end to the war for Germany, especially since the promised new weapons had never materialized.14 People in Vienna thought they had been led up the garden path about the new weapons. There was a general feeling that the situation was hopeless. Alongside widespread apathy, individuals were fearful. Many were said to be contemplating suicide. ‘I’ve already taken all steps to do away with my family,’ was one comment. ‘I’ve enough poison.’15 The war was ‘the same swindle’ as in 1914–18, the rural population in the Alpine district of Berchtesgaden were saying. ‘If people had imagined in 1933 what was to come, they would never have voted for Hitler,’ was the view in an area where once huge crowds of ‘pilgrims’ had gathered to try to catch a glimpse of the Führer at his nearby residence on the Obersalzberg.16