by Ian Kershaw
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 fu
rious 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.