by Ian Kershaw
For ordinary citizens, too, thoughts of suicide were commonplace. This was especially the case in Berlin and eastern parts of Germany, where despair and fear combined to encourage such thoughts. ‘Many are getting used to the idea of putting an end to it. The demand for poison, a pistol and other means of ending life is great everywhere,’ an SD report had already noted at the end of March.43 ‘All Berliners know that the Russians will soon be in Berlin, and they see no alternative – other than cyanide,’ one pastor had remarked around the same time. He blamed the rise in suicidal tendencies on the horror stories in Goebbels’ propaganda about the behaviour of the Soviets.44 This was undoubtedly a major contributory factor. But the propaganda had, as we have seen, some basis in fact, and tales of terrible experiences at the hands of Soviet soldiers, especially the rape of German women, circulated by word of mouth and independently of Goebbels’ machinations. Women committed suicide rather than face the likelihood of being raped. Others killed themselves afterwards. More would have done so had they possessed the means.45
In Berlin, where suicide statistics, if incomplete, exist, the trend is plain to see. At the peak in April and May, during the battle of Berlin, 3,881 people killed themselves. Overall in 1945 there were 7,057 suicides in the city, 3,996 of them women, compared with 2,108 in 1938 and 1,884 in 1946. In Hamburg, by contrast, there were only 56 suicides in April 1945.46 In Bremen, flattened by repeated bombing, suicides rose markedly in 1945, but the level remained in fact lower than it had been in 1939.47 There was a sharp rise in Bavaria in the final phase of the war, though the figure of 42 suicides in April and May 1945 was scarcely on a comparable scale with that of Berlin and accountable at least in part by the disproportionate number of Nazi functionaries there who took their own lives. Some other parts of western Germany also had modestly increased suicide rates in 1945, but nothing remotely comparable with those of Berlin.48 Plainly, the suicide wave was first and foremost a phenomenon of those parts of Germany where fear of occupation by the Red Army was most acute.
Panic gripped the people in eastern localities as the Red Army approached. Along the front line, in numerous places in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia and Brandenburg, there were hundreds of suicides. No overall total can be calculated, but it is presumed to have been in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.49 In Demmin, a town in western Pomerania of some 15,000 inhabitants before the war but by this time also housing numerous refugees, more than 900 people, the majority of them women, committed suicide in the three days following the arrival of the Red Army on 1 May.
There was enormous fear in Demmin in the days before the Russians entered. The feeling of terror mounted as the frightening noise of Soviet tanks rolling into the town could be heard. German soldiers fled that morning, blowing up the bridges over the two local rivers as they went. White bedsheets were hung out of windows to offer surrender, though a group of Hitler Youth fired at the Soviets. One man shot his wife and three children before blasting off a Panzerfaust, then hanging himself. Families barricaded themselves into their homes, blocking the doors with furniture. Then they heard loud, foreign voices, banging and kicking at the doors, before Red Army soldiers, many looking very young, broke in, demanding watches and jewellery. The other ominous demand was ‘Frau, komm!’ Plundering, marauding troops, often under the influence of drink, roamed the streets. The town’s representatives were peremptorily shot. The houses of suspected Nazi Party members were set on fire, and the flames spread, engulfing neighbouring properties until much of the town centre was burning.
In the horror, women were paralysed with the all too justified fear of being raped. They tried to hide, or dressed in men’s clothes, but were all too often found. Many were raped numerous times. In this scene of Sodom and Gomorrah (as it appeared to one witness), terrified individuals decided on the instant to kill themselves, and sometimes their families, with whatever method was to hand – poison, shooting, hanging, or drowning in the local rivers, the Peene or the Tollense. In one case, the death of thirteen family members is recorded. In another, a mother pushed her two tiny children in a pram while her six-year-old followed on his bike. Under a large oak tree on the edge of town, she poisoned her children, then tried to hang herself but was cut down by Soviet soldiers. She said she had seen propaganda posters claiming that the Russians killed children by putting an axe through their skull. There was something approaching mass hysteria among the townsfolk. Entire families headed for the river, tied themselves together, and plunged into the cold water. Many elderly people were among those who took their lives that way. For weeks afterwards, swollen corpses were found floating in the rivers. In some instances, panic-stricken women took their children by the hand and jumped into the water. One girl, eleven years old at the time, fleeing from her burning home, was dragged back by her grandmother as her mother suddenly grabbed her and made for the riverbank. ‘We all thought we were going to burn to death,’ she recalled, many years later. ‘We had no hope left for life, and I myself, I had the feeling that this was the end of the world, this was the end of my life. And everyone in Demmin felt like that.’50
The rampaging of the Red Army and the gross maltreatment of the conquered German population were only gradually brought under control by the Soviet authorities once the war was over. But in the first days of May 1945, the war still continued. And so did the suffering.
III
Dönitz’s cabinet, fully formed on 5 May, bore only partial resemblance to the one nominated by Hitler. All that Dönitz had learnt from Bormann, arising from Hitler’s Testament, was the names of three intended ministers: Bormann, Goebbels and, to replace Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, the Reich Commissar in the Netherlands.51 In establishing his administration, set up in the northernmost extremity of the Reich in somewhat primitive accommodation in the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik after a hasty departure from Plön as British troops approached, Dönitz had to presume that Bormann and Goebbels were dead or captured, while Seyß-Inquart was involved in negotiations with the Allies about a partial capitulation and also therefore unavailable to take up his nominated position. In any case, Dönitz was determined to form his own cabinet, not simply take over one prescribed for him.52
Nevertheless, continuity was the hallmark of the new government. What was later claimed to have been an ‘unpolitical’ cabinet included several high-ranking SS officers and a Party Gauleiter (Paul Wegener of Gau Weser-Ems). The Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, an SS-Obergruppenführer, who had in effect run the ministry as Himmler’s State Secretary during the last months of the war, had been a participant in the notorious Wannsee Conference that in January 1942 had determined policy on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. Herbert Backe, the Minister for Agriculture, had the rank of an SS-Gruppenführer and had helped shape policies imposing starvation on occupied Soviet territories. Otto Ohlendorf, deputy State Secretary in the Reich Economics Ministry, was an SS-Gruppenführer who had formerly headed the SD-Inland in the Reich Security Head Office and had led Einsatzgruppe D in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. As late as 16 May Ohlendorf was in discussion with Dönitz about reconstructing the security service, also for possible use by the occupying powers.53 (In all, 230 of the 350 or so members of Dönitz’s administrative personnel in Flensburg had belonged to the security services.54)
There was no place for Himmler, viewed as an obvious liability in any prospective dealings with the western Allies. But it was easy to see why he thought he might have a part to play and sought after 2 May to enter the Dönitz government. He offered his services to Dönitz in any capacity, but, enquiring how the Wehrmacht regarded him, perhaps had his eye on taking over as War Minister.55 Himmler argued that he would be crucial in the struggle against Bolshevism and required only a brief audience with General Eisenhower or Field-Marshal Montgomery to gain recognition of this. He was told in no uncertain terms, however, that ‘every Englishman or American who thought for half a second of speaking to hi
m would in the next half a second be swept away by public opinion in England and the USA’.56 His ‘treason’ against Hitler in the last days was reportedly also a reason why Dönitz rejected any involvement in his administration by Himmler.57 Dönitz finally broke off relations with him on 6 May, after which the once mighty and greatly feared police chief, as one prominent member of the Dönitz administration later put it, ‘turned himself into a poor petitioner and disappeared without trace’.58 He fled in disguise before being captured by the British in north Germany, escaping trial and a certain death sentence by swallowing a poison capsule in custody.
Old survivors from pre-Hitler governments who had served throughout the Third Reich were the Labour Minister, Dr Franz Seldte, the Transport Minister and Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the former Finance Minister, now elevated to chief minister (Leitender Minister) and also placed in charge of foreign affairs. Dr Julius Dorpmüller, Reich Transport Minister since 1937, also continued in office. Speer was brought in to oversee what was optimistically termed ‘reconstruction’. Not least, there was continuity in the military leadership. Dönitz’s own replacement as head of the navy was Admiral-General Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. But the crucial positions as chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff were held, as before, by Field-Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl, who had made their way north to join Dönitz shortly after Hitler’s death.59 In the days that followed, Keitel and Jodl, alongside Dönitz and Krosigk, were the key players.60 The remainder had largely bit-parts.
Forming a cabinet had not been Dönitz’s first priority on taking over the government, though he had been keen to appoint a Foreign Minister. He had wanted Hitler’s first Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, but was unable to reach him. Instead, he gave the post to Krosigk, whom he barely knew but had found impressive at a meeting in Plön at the end of April.61 Krosigk had no obvious qualifications other than the interest he had shown in previous weeks in bombarding Goebbels in particular with wholly unrealistic propositions for seeking a negotiated settlement to the war. He was practically the only choice available to Dönitz and carried no especially harmful baggage from the Hitler years.
It was not just in personnel that there was no clean break with the immediate past. The old forms and structures were maintained. The organization of the High Command of the Wehrmacht – as much of it as had survived – continued to function seamlessly. The Nazi Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still hung in government offices. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting was used even now in the Wehrmacht. And summary courts, with their grisly sentences, were not abolished.62 Astonishingly, sailors were still being sentenced by court martial and executed even after the signing of total capitulation.63 Mentalities, too, remained unaltered. Retaining the existence of the Reich by saving what could be saved was a central objective. Ribbentrop, like Himmler, had represented the unacceptable face of the old regime and was excluded by Dönitz from the new administration. But a letter from Ribbentrop to the new head of state composed (though in the event, it seems, not sent) on 2 May, probably in the vain hope that he would be invited to join the new administration, was clearly written with a view to influencing policy direction.
The aim, wrote Ribbentrop, must be to give the Reich government under Dönitz’s leadership the chance to rule from a free German territory. Because of the difficulty of the ‘unconditional surrender’ demand, the attempt should be made to persuade Eisenhower and Montgomery that taking Schleswig-Holstein would be at a high price in Allied lives, and to imply that the British army would someday need the Germans at its side in the fight against the Soviet Union. He suggested an offer to evacuate gradually the German presence in Scandinavia in return for retention of a Reich government in Schleswig-Holstein. This first step would slowly be extended, leaving behind the formula of unconditional surrender and enabling negotiations to take place with the western Allies that would enable them to present an ‘alibi’ acceptable to the Russians. The programme in foreign policy would be to bring together all Germans in Europe, without subjugation of other peoples and offering freedom of all nations in Europe and cooperation in upholding peace. At home, there would be an ‘evolution in ideological questions’, where these might threaten peace. He saw only two possibilities for the future. The first would be complete occupation, internment of the Reich government, administration of the country by the Allies and, in the foreseeable future, a return to a limited form of democracy under Allied tutelage including Democrats, Communists and Catholics. National Socialism would be eradicated, the Wehrmacht completely demolished, and the German people condemned to slavery for decades. Alternatively, through the attempt at a policy of cooperation with all nations, at least superficially also with Russia, and recognition of a Reich government and its programme under Dönitz’s leadership, Germany would remain as a nation, and with it also the National Socialist system and a smaller Wehrmacht, thus paving the way for recovery for the German people.64 Ribbentrop, like Himmler, was soon disabused of his hopes of continuing his career. But variants of the ideas advanced in his unsent letter were certainly not absent from the leaders of the new administration.
Already on 2 May, Dönitz laid down his aims. The only policy was to try to negotiate a series of partial surrenders in the west, while continuing the fight in the east, at least until as many Germans as possible, soldiers and civilians, could be rescued from the clutches of the Soviets. ‘The military situation is hopeless,’ the minutes of the first meeting of his administration began. ‘In the current situation the main aim of the government has to be to save as many German people as possible from destruction through Bolshevism. In so far as the Anglo-Saxons oppose this aim, they must also be combated.’ In the east, therefore, ‘continuation of the struggle with all available means’ was required, while ending the war against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ was ‘desirable’ to avoid further sacrifice. This was blocked, however, Dönitz went on, by the Allied demand for unconditional total surrender, which would mean at a stroke handing over millions of soldiers and civilians to the Russians. The aim was, therefore, capitulation only to the western powers. But since their political conditions made this impossible, it had to be attempted through ‘partial actions’ at the level of the Army Groups, utilizing existing contacts.65
IV
Developments in the Netherlands appeared to hold out some hope. Even in mid-April, the German authorities there had been uncompromising in their determination to stave off the Allies. The biggest danger to the Netherlands was the deliberate inundation of the countryside. The Wehrmacht had flooded 16,000 hectares in coastal areas in July 1944 in an attempt to hinder the Allied advance.66 The prospect now was that this dire tactic would be extended. At a meeting with leaders of the Dutch Underground Movement, Reich Commissar Seyß-Inquart had threatened destruction of locks and dykes in western Holland, which would have made ‘the country uninhabitable during a number of years for several million people’, and, had it been carried out, would have inordinately exacerbated the famine of the previous winter. The Allied response had been that, should this happen, Seyß and Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Netherlands, would be treated as war criminals.67
With defeat certain and imminent, this reaction evidently concentrated German minds. As soon as Hitler was dead, the stance changed. Seyß, as Dönitz and his colleagues noted, now successfully engaged in talks with Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to alleviate the food crisis in the Netherlands. Even so, Seyß himself reported on 3 May that a partial capitulation would be difficult to achieve. Smith had offered discussions about possible armistice negotiations, but Seyß, on the instructions of Blaskowitz, had refused, awaiting a directive from Dönitz. Meanwhile, the fight for ‘Fortress Holland’ was to be continued. However, there was to be ‘no flooding of the land’. An ‘honourable transition’ – surrender by any other name – would, it was thought, bring ‘a small credit’ to the German
administration.68
During the morning of 2 May Dönitz had already been confronted with the unexpected news of the surrender of Army Group C in Italy.69 Moves to engineer a capitulation in Italy dated back to March, to the clandestine meetings in Switzerland, mentioned in Chapter 7, between Himmler’s former right-hand man, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, and the head of the American intelligence services, the OSS, in central Europe, Allen Dulles. Cautious steps towards a capitulation had quickened throughout April as the military situation in Italy had worsened. The German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, remained anxious that news of the continued dealings between Wolff and Dulles should not leak out. Even at this stage, German generals were fearful of the dire consequences should they be seen to be implicated in treasonable activities. Vietinghoff also argued – justifying his hesitancy, though by the end of April a dubious proposition – that Goebbels would create out of any disclosure of the capitulation soundings a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, and deflect blame from the Reich leadership on to the ‘traitors’ in Italy who had prevented a last-minute change in war fortunes.70
There were other difficulties. The likelihood, as it seemed, that Hitler would be flown out of Berlin to establish an ‘Alpine fortress’ in the Berchtesgaden area was a complication, leaving the Gauleiter of the Tyrol, Franz Hofer, torn between his continued loyalty to the Führer and his desire to prevent his province becoming a battleground. Hofer’s continued backing for Hitler remained a worry for Vietinghoff and those trying to reach terms with the Allies. His support for the armistice negotiations could not be taken for granted. Field-Marshal Kesselring, based by late April in southern Bavaria and responsible for military direction in the southern part of the Reich (from 28 April for the military command over the entire southern front, covering Italy and the Balkans as well as the south of Germany), was a further problem. As late as 27 April, Kesselring was still hesitant. At a meeting that day in Gauleiter Hofer’s house with Vietinghoff, the Gauleiter and the German ambassador in Italy, Dr Rudolf Rahn, Kesselring backed the steps that were being taken and agreed to be associated with them. But he added a cautionary rider. It had to be presumed, he stated, ‘that the Führer was basing his proclamation “Berlin will remain German; the fight for Berlin will bring the great turn in war fortune” on a reasoned basis.’ As long as he had faith in that, Kesselring added, he could not act on his own accord. He was prepared to let his name be used in the moves towards capitulation, but added ‘that an end only came into question for him if the Führer was no longer alive’.71 The bonds with Hitler were evidently vital for Kesselring even in what were obviously the closing days of his power. Reports on foreign radio stations on the evening of 28 April that Hitler was dead turned out to be untrue. Kesselring still wanted to wait, though the military situation was worsening by the hour. The deterioration was reported by Kaltenbrunner – unaware of the suicide in the bunker – in a message for Hitler sent in the early morning of 1 May, though, because there were no communications with Berlin, relayed to Dönitz. Kaltenbrunner, informed by Gauleiter Hofer, noted the demand for capitulation by 29 April, mentioning, too, the death of Mussolini at the hands of partisans.72