by Ian Kershaw
Once Dönitz had agreed to the capitulation in Rheims, a rapidly accelerated desperate attempt was made to transport westwards troops still on the eastern front before the surrender took effect. Hurriedly, he instructed the Army Groups South-East, Ostmark and Centre to fight their way back to Eisenhower’s domain with the aim of being taken prisoner by the Americans.109 A flotilla of German ships ferried backwards and forwards across the Baltic to try to carry soldiers and – with lower priority – refugees to the west. Overland, soldiers and civilians alike fled in their droves beyond the Elbe and from Bohemia towards Bavaria. Many of the soldiers were from Army Group Ostmark, left leaderless at Rendulic´’s surrender, and now flooding back pell-mell towards the American lines, up to 150 kilometres away in the west.110 Wild rumours circulated among soldiers in the east that the Americans would set free their German prisoners and rearm them ‘to throw the Bolsheviks out of Germany’. Even though most soldiers were hoping for an end to the war, they would, one recorded in his diary, all have been prepared to fight on if they could attack the Russians alongside the Americans ‘for the homeland must sometime be liberated again’.111
Schörner endeavoured as ever through ferocious discipline and vehement exhortation to keep his army together. On 5 May he issued a final proclamation to the soldiers of Army Group Centre. ‘Only the eastern front of the southern army groups remains unbroken,’ he told them. According to the order given him by the head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, nominated by the Führer, Grand-Admiral Dönitz, it was the task of his soldiers to carry on fighting ‘until the most valuable German people are saved’. It was his intention, he declared, to lead his troops in formation, heads held high ‘in proud bearing’ back into the homeland. No picture of disintegration was to be conveyed in this final phase. Any attempt to break ranks and seek an independent way back to the homeland ‘is dishonourable treason towards comrades and people and must be dealt with accordingly. Our discipline and our weapons in the hand are the guarantee for us to leave this war in decency and bravery.’112
The plight of Army Group Centre, once Dönitz had been forced to agree to the capitulation in Rheims, was unenviable in the extreme. Bringing back Schörner’s troops was seen as imperative on 6 May, but the capitulation made this impossible.113 The order to retreat had come too late. The Soviet attack from the north, from Saxony towards Prague, blocked the path.114 On 7 May a British plane flew a German General Staff officer, Colonel Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, south from Flensburg to meet Schörner to explain the unavoidability of the capitulation in Rheims and press the urgent case for his men to fight their way to the west. From Pilsen, Meyer-Detring was escorted by forty American soldiers to Schörner’s field headquarters, where they met next day.115 He described the background to the unavoidable total capitulation. An orderly retreat, the colonel told Schörner, had been ruled out by the speedy conclusion of the capitulation. He gave Schörner the order to leave all heavy equipment behind and to move his divisions to the south-west as rapidly as possible. Schörner issued the command to comply with the stipulations of the surrender, though was doubtful that troops would obey if it meant abandoning their fellow soldiers fighting to escape Soviet captivity or meaning that they themselves would fall into Russian hands. The Czech uprising had led to a breakdown in communications. ‘Leadership possibilities’, he added, scarcely existed any longer ‘and he saw no possibility everywhere of preventing complete disorganization and non-compliance with the terms’. There was the danger that individual troop sectors or lower-ranking commanders would take matters into their own hands, ignoring orders and simply trying to fight their way to the west.116
In his proclamation of 5 May, Schörner had promised his soldiers: ‘You can have trust in me, that I will lead you out of this crisis.’117 But after his return from years of Soviet captivity, Schörner, facing trial in West Germany on account of his brutal treatment of his soldiers under his command,118 was forced to defend himself vehemently against accusations levelled by his own former Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Natzmer, that he, the most fervent follower throughout of Hitler and the most ferocious adherent of fighting to the last, had left his troops in the lurch at the end. It was said that on 8 May he had fled in civilian clothing by plane to the Austrian Alps, hiding for some days in a hut before handing himself over to the Americans, who a few weeks later delivered him to the Russians.119 According to Schörner’s own later account, he left Army Group Centre only on the morning of 9 May, when his command had been removed following the capitulation. He had, he claimed, been led to believe from Flensburg that the capitulation could be postponed until around 12 May, and he had until then to bring his troops home. Taken completely by surprise by the sudden news of the Rheims surrender, which, through communications difficulties, reached him only after a costly delay of several hours, he had been unable to fulfil his promise of 5 May to lead his troops back in formation and instead, on 7 May, had given the orders for an organized flight.120 To the end of his life he asserted that his flight to Austria had been with the intention of carrying out Hitler’s orders to establish an Alpine front to continue the fight.121 But although Schörner left his troops as he claimed on 9 May when his command had formally ceased following the capitulation, it remains the case that the men whose discipline he had enforced with a rod of iron were now suddenly abandoned to their fate.122 And the justification he gave for his flight to Austria shows, true or not, that even now he was prepared to argue that he was following an order from Hitler.
Army Group Centre had been the last largely intact Wehrmacht force in the field. The vast majority of its troops were taken into Soviet captivity, along with most other German soldiers still left on the eastern front at the total capitulation. It has been estimated that 220,000 soldiers were taken prisoner by the Red Army between 1 and 8 May, and as many as 1.6 million after the capitulation.123 Around 450,000 of those earlier fighting in the east had been able – though not all in the last week of the war – to reach the relative security of western lines.124 Eisenhower’s refusal to the end to contemplate any breach of the coalition with the Soviet Union, his insistence at his meeting with Jodl on 6 May upon unconditional surrender on all fronts, and the speed of the final moves to sign the capitulation had ruined Dönitz’s intention of bringing the troops in the east back to the west and keeping them out of the hands of the Red Army. At a cost of continuing the war for more than a week after Hitler’s death, Dönitz did partially succeed. In the overall balance, no more than around 30 per cent of the 10 million German troops entered Soviet captivity, though far more soldiers had fought in the east than in the west.125 Despite the flight to the west in the first week in May, the great majority of those on the eastern front when Dönitz took office were still there at Germany’s surrender. They were marched off to the east and forced to endure years of Soviet captivity. A great many did not return. On the best estimates, about a third of those captured during the entire war in the east, around a million German prisoners of war, died in Soviet hands.126
Dönitz, as we have seen, had endeavoured to postpone the inevitable defeat as long as possible, through a series of partial surrenders calculated to find time to bring back the troops – and, as a much lower priority, civilians – from the east, and also in the hope, if rapidly fading, that even now the wartime coalition of the western powers and the Soviet Union might crack. The strategy was largely, if not totally, a failure, and at a high cost. Did Dönitz have an alternative? Only once Eisenhower’s ‘blackmail’ (as Dönitz saw it) of complete capitulation within hours could not be avoided were the troops still engaged in the east instructed to fight their way to the west. The order, as the fate of Army Group Centre shows, came too late for most of them. Instead of gambling on the potential of a series of partial surrenders in the west, following the model which had worked in Italy, Dönitz’s best option was arguably to have opened the western front completely – ordering the troops in all areas facing the Allies simply to stop fighting
and lay down their arms. This would have allowed the western powers to advance their lines immediately and rapidly to the east, shortening the lines to those still trapped there. Simultaneous orders to the three Army Groups still in the east to fight their way back straight away towards the western powers might well, then, have saved far more of them than turned out to be the case, even if the flight from the east had been chaotic rather than the planned and orderly retreat that German military leaders dreamed of.127 The speculation is, of course, pointless. The mentality in the high ranks of the German leadership ran counter to such notions. Even officers in British captivity had as late as spring 1945 rejected the idea of German officers simply allowing the western Allies to break through as incompatible with military honour.128 For Dönitz, whose acute sense of military honour had married so easily with his fervent belief in the ideology of National Socialism, orders to troops in the west unilaterally to stop fighting without formal capitulation would have been impossible to contemplate. So the war, even with Hitler dead, could not be immediately ended, but was forced to drag on until, with the civilian population demoralized and resigned to their fate, Germany’s armies had either been destroyed or were on the verge of destruction. This time there could be no claim, as in 1918, that the army had been defeated not on the battlefield but through subversion at home.
On 9 May the Wehrmacht issued its final report. ‘From midnight the weapons are silent on all fronts. On command of the Grand-Admiral the Wehrmacht has ended the fight that had become hopeless,’ it ran. ‘The struggle lasting almost six years is thereby over.’ The ‘unique achievement of front and homeland’ would, it stated, ‘find its final appreciation in a later, just verdict of history’.129 The war, caused primarily by Germany’s expansionist aims and ultimately spreading to most parts of the globe, had left over 40 million people dead in the European conflict alone (leaving aside those killed in the Far East) – more than four times the mortalities of the First World War, once seen as the war to end all wars.
V
Oddly, the capitulation was not quite the end for the Third Reich. The Dönitz administration, an ever more pointless curiosity, was allowed to continue for a further fifteen days in office, its sovereignty confined to a tiny enclave in Flensburg. SS-uniforms were swiftly discarded and civilian dress adopted. A couple of ministers, Backe and Dorpmüller, were ordered to fly to Eisenhower’s headquarters to provide advice on the first steps of reconstruction.130 Keitel, still Chief of the OKW, was arrested on 13 May and Jodl, who three days after he had signed the capitulation in Rheims was belatedly and by now somewhat pointlessly awarded the Oak Leaves to go with his Knight’s Cross, took over the running of a largely redundant OKW. Government business went on – if in a surreal way. It was little more than the pretence of government. Dönitz and his remaining colleagues discussed the issue of the national flag, because the swastika was banned by the enemy powers. Another emblem of Hitler’s Reich was at stake. Since pictures of the Führer had been removed or defaced by members of the Allied forces the question arose as to whether as a preventive measure they should all be taken down. Dönitz was opposed since, until now, the incidents had all been localized. Three days later he relented in part, conceding their removal in rooms where there were meetings with members of the occupying forces.131
Deprived of all effectiveness, the cabinet still felt it had ‘a responsibility to help the German people where it could’.132 This was hardly at all. A cabinet meeting took place every morning at 10 a.m. in an old schoolroom. It seemed to Speer as if Krosigk, the acting head of government, was making up for all the years under Hitler in which there had not been a single cabinet meeting. Members of the government had to bring their own glasses and cups from their rooms. They discussed, among other things, how to re-form the cabinet and whether to include a Church minister. Dönitz, still addressed as ‘Grand-Admiral’, was driven backwards and forwards from his apartment 500 metres away in one of Hitler’s big Mercedes that had somehow found its way to Flensburg.133 This was not the only element of continuity with Hitler’s regime that the Grand-Admiral held to. At a meeting with Admiral-General von Friedeburg on 15 May, Dönitz stipulated that ‘defamatory orders’ to remove medals were to be refused, that the soldier should be proud of his service for the Wehrmacht and people during the war, and that ‘the true people’s community created by National Socialism must be maintained’. The ‘madness of the parties as before 1933 must never again arise’.134
On 15 May Speer wrote to Krosigk asking to be released from his duties as Acting Minister of Economics and Production, stating that a new Reich government was needed, untainted by any connection with the Hitler regime. He still cherished hopes that he might be seen as useful to the Americans.135 He received no reply, and two days later, described as ‘Minister Speer’, was still involved in the administration.136 The entire cabinet considered resigning, but did not do so. The prime consideration was the ‘Reich idea’ and the question of sovereignty. State Secretary Stuckart, now heading the Ministry of the Interior, produced a memorandum stipulating that unconditional surrender did not affect the further existence of the Reich as a state under international law. Germany had not ceased to exist as a state. Moreover, Dönitz had been legally appointed by the Führer as head of state and therefore Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, whose oath to Hitler had passed to him automatically. Dönitz could only resign by appointing a successor. As regards legal theory, the Reich continued in existence.137
The pantomime of the rump Dönitz regime did not last long. On 23 May, Dönitz, Friedeburg and Jodl were suddenly summoned to the temporary headquarters of the Allied Control Commission, located on the steamship Patria, a former German passenger ship of the Hamburg-Amerika line, now moored in Flensburg harbour. Three Wehrmacht limousines ferried them the short journey. Dönitz was wearing full dress uniform and carrying his gold-tipped baton. On arrival, they were ushered up the gangplank and into a lounge to await Allied representatives, who entered the room some minutes later. US Major-General Lowell W. Rooks, heading the Allied mission, then read a prepared text: ‘I am under instructions… to tell you that the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, has decided, in concert with the Soviet High Command, that today the acting German Government and the German High Command shall be taken into custody with the several members as prisoners-of-war. Thereby the acting German Government is dissolved.’138
The Third Reich was over. The bankrupt concern was liquidated. The long process of reckoning was about to begin. But the debts for crimes against humanity of such magnitude would not, and could not, ever be repaid.
VI
For Germany itself – leaving aside the untold misery and suffering and vast numbers of war casualties suffered by the citizens of other countries – a colossal price was paid for continuing the war to the bitter end. In the ten months between July 1944 and May 1945 far more German civilians died than in the previous years of the war, mostly through air raids and in the calamitous conditions in the eastern regions after January 1945. In all, more than 400,000 were killed and 800,000 injured by Allied bombing, which had destroyed more than 1.8 million homes and forced the evacuation of almost 5 million people, the vast majority of the devastation being inflicted in the last months of the war.139 The Soviet invasion then occupation of the eastern regions of Germany after January 1945 resulted in the deaths – apart from the immeasurable suffering caused and the deportation of many German citizens to an uncertain fate in the Soviet Union – of around half a million civilians.140
German military losses in the last phase of the war were immense, as high in the last ten months of the war as in the four years to July 1944. Had the attack on Hitler’s life in July succeeded and the war then been promptly brought to an end, the lives of around 50 per cent of the German soldiers who died would have been saved. A total of 5.3 million servicemen out of the 18.2 million who served in the army, Luftwaffe, navy and Waffen-SS lost their lives during the entire course of the conflict. Of these, 2
.7 million died down to the end of July 1944. As many as 49 per cent of deaths, or 2.6 million (more than 1.5 million of them on the eastern front), were killed in the last ten months. Towards the very end 300,000–400,000 were dying each month.141
In the ruins of their country, people could look only dimly and with great foreboding into an uncertain future. Enormous relief that the war was finally over mingled with dismay at the catastrophe that had engulfed Germany and anxiety about life under enemy control. For the vast majority, the victory of the Allies was not seen as liberation. And for those in central and eastern Germany, Soviet rule was a fearful prospect. Passivity and compliance marked the behaviour of the subdued German population as the victors took over. After the ferocious pounding the country and its people had taken over previous months, there was no appetite for the sort of insurrectionist guerrilla activity that so often meets an occupying force.142 Probably, too, a conditioned readiness to comply with authority played its part. Most importantly, the existential demands of daily life did not alter with the capitulation. The drain on energies through doing no more than surviving in the ruins, getting by in chaotic circumstances, finding lost loved ones, mourning personal losses and trying to pick up the pieces of broken families and homes, was enormous.
As the heavy hand of occupation started to be felt, deep recriminations began to be voiced and the arrests of tens of thousands of Nazi functionaries and others implicated in the Hitler regime gathered pace.143 Germans in high places and low were meanwhile already laying the foundations of their apologia, attempting to establish distance between themselves and the crimes of Nazism. Claims for the exoneration of the Wehrmacht were under way in Flensburg. Keitel, just prior to his arrest, had asserted that the Wehrmacht had had nothing to do with the SS (apart from the Waffen-SS) or SD, and bore no responsibility for them. And as news and what was described as ‘mounting enemy propaganda about conditions in German concentration camps’ spread, Dönitz and Jodl were among those who saw the need of a public statement ‘that neither the German Wehrmacht nor the German people had knowledge of these things’.144 The myth of the ‘good’ Wehrmacht, which had such currency for decades in post-war Germany, was being forged.