by Ian Kershaw
At the grass roots, a not dissimilar, if differently accentuated, process of dissociation from Nazism was under way. Everywhere, the symbols of Nazism, where they still survived, were rapidly destroyed. No one willingly admitted to having been an enthusiastic follower of the regime. Initially, there were numerous denunciations of those functionaries who, only a year or two earlier, had strutted arrogantly in their Nazi uniforms and acted like ‘little Hitlers’ in their localities.145 But as the ‘big-shots’ were gradually rounded up, the ‘major war criminals’ put on trial and the attention of the Allies shifted to the process of denazification at lower levels, the impression was increasingly given that hardly anyone had really backed the regime, but had at best under duress gone along with policies dictated by the tyranny of Hitler and his henchmen.
‘Everybody pulls away from Adolf, nobody took part. Everybody was persecuted, and nobody denounced anybody,’ was the cynical assessment of a young Berlin woman in May 1945, listening to voices in the queues for vegetables and water.146 A report written in June 1946 by the Lutheran pastor in Berchtesgaden, a predominantly Catholic district nestling below the Obersalzberg, Nazi Germany’s ‘holy mountain’ where Hitler had built his Alpine palace, expressed sentiments that were far from uncommon in the months after the demise of the Third Reich. The pastor spoke of ‘all the disappointments under the National Socialist regime and the collapse of the hopes harboured by many idealists’. He also referred to the ‘revelation of all the atrocities of this regime’. Then came the dissociation from Nazism. He regretted that ‘our people as a whole is nevertheless still held responsible for the misdeeds of National Socialism although the vast majority throughout all those years had only the single wish, to be liberated from this violent regime because it saw its most sacred possessions of family, church and personal freedom destroyed or threatened’. His neighbour, the priest of the Catholic parish of St Andreas in Berchtesgaden, emphasized that ‘our truly believing population, good middle-class and farming families, fundamentally rejected Nazism’, that 80 per cent of the local Catholic population was opposed to the Party, horrified by the stories of the ‘brutal manner’ of Party leaders on the Obersalzberg, which had been ‘hermetically sealed’ off from the village below.147
In a prisoner-of-war camp in the winter of 1945–6, Major-General Erich Dethleffsen, former head of operations in Army High Command, began his memoirs of the last weeks of the war with his own reflections – thoughtful, if emphasizing lack of knowledge of barbarity, and guiltless exploitation by a ruthless regime – on how Germans were facing the trauma that still held them in its grip:
It is still only a few months since the collapse. We haven’t yet gained the distance in time, or in mind, to be able to judge, to some extent objectively, what was error, guilt and crime, or inexorable fate. We Germans are still too taken up by prejudice. Only slowly, in shock, and with reluctance are we awakening from the agony of the last years and recognizing ourselves and our situation. We search for exoneration to escape responsibility for all that which led to the recent war, its terrible sacrifices and dreadful consequences. We believe ourselves to have been fooled, led astray, misused. We plead that we acted according to the best of our knowledge and conscience and knew little or nothing of all the terrible crimes. And millions did know nothing of them; especially those who fought at the front for homeland, house and home, and family and believed they were only doing their duty. But we are also ashamed that we let ourselves be led astray and misused and that we knew nothing. Shame mainly finds expression at first in defiance and undignified self-denigration; only gradually and slowly in regret. That is how it is among the nations. We are experiencing that now in our people…148
Such words, and many other accounts in similar vein in the early months after Germany’s total defeat, convey – even if they can only faintly express – some sense of the trauma felt by people who had undergone the desperate last phase of the war and were now being fully confronted with the magnitude of the crimes committed by their fellow citizens. For the generation that endured the apocalyptic collapse of the Third Reich, it was a trauma that would never fully pass. It is unsurprising, then, that in German memory of the Third Reich, the final Armageddon of 1944–5 came to overshadow all else. The rise of Hitler amid the almost complete rejection of liberal democracy as Germany’s economy crumbled, the first triumphant years of the regime when so many had rejoiced at national resurgence and economic recovery, and the early phase of the war with German military power laying the base for the conquest and ruthless exploitation of almost the whole of the European continent: these were more distant, less sharp memories. What had accompanied the ‘good times’ – the persecution of unloved minorities, first and foremost Jews, and the violent repression of political opponents, the terroristic framework on which the ‘people’s community’ had been built – had been tolerated if not welcomed outright then, and could later be viewed as mere ‘excesses’ of the regime. ‘If only National Socialism hadn’t become so depraved! In itself it was the right thing for the German people,’ the view expressed by a German officer in British captivity just after the capitulation, was not an uncommon one.149 According to Allied opinion surveys in the immediate post-war years, about 50 per cent of Germans still thought National Socialism had been in essence a good idea that had been badly carried out.150
What really lasted in memory was the experience, devastating for so many Germans, of those last terrible months. It was perhaps not surprising, then, that the Germans thought of themselves as the helpless victims of a war they had not wanted, foisted on them by a tyrannical regime that had brought only misery to the land and produced catastrophe.151 One man from a town in the east, whose mother had killed herself out of fear of the Russians, complained many years later: ‘There were memorials for everybody: concentration camp prisoners, Jewish victims, Russians who had fallen. But nobody bothered about the other side.’152 In the generation that experienced it, this sense of being the victims – exploited, misled, misused – of the uncontrollable tyranny of Hitler and his henchmen that in their name perpetrated terrible crimes (though, it was often averred, less heinous than those of Stalin) has remained, scarcely diluted.
Of course, it was not wholly incorrect. Germans themselves were in this final phase of the war indisputably also victims of events far beyond their control. The bombed-out homeless were evidently victims – of a ruthless bombing campaign, but also of the expansionist policies of their government that had prompted the horror. The women, children and elderly people forced to flee their homes and farmsteads in eastern Germany and join the millions trekking through ice and snow were also victims – of the Red Army juggernaut and of the self-serving Nazi leaders in their areas, but also of the war of aggression waged by their government against the Soviet Union that had invited such terrible reprisals. The soldiers dying in their thousands at the fronts in those horrific last months were themselves in a sense victims – of a military leadership using draconian methods to coerce compliance in the ranks, but also of an inculcated sense of duty that they were fighting in a good cause, and of a political leadership prepared for its own selfish ends to take the country into oblivion rather than surrender when all was evidently lost.
Yet, considering themselves victims, few stopped to consider why they had allowed themselves to be misled and exploited. Few of those bombed in the Ruhr had given much thought to the arsenal of weapons they were producing for the regime and enabling it to attack other countries and bomb the citizens of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, Belgrade and many other cities, inviting the obliteration of their own cities in return. As long as the bombs were falling elsewhere, on others, they had no complaints. Few of those expelled from East Prussia in such horrific circumstances in early 1945 were willing to recall that the province had been the most Nazified in Germany, that its support for Hitler had been far above average before 1933, or that they had cheered to the rafters during the 1930s as their area benefited from Nazi polic
ies. Most people throughout Germany were unwilling to recollect their earlier enthusiasm for Hitler, their jubilation at his ‘successes’ and the hopes they invested in a brave new world for themselves and their children to be constructed on German conquest and despoliation of Europe. None wanted to dwell on what horror their own fathers, sons or brothers had inflicted on the peoples of eastern Europe, let alone ponder the reports (or rumours bordering on hard fact) they had heard of the slaughter of the Jews. The gross inhumanity for which Germany had been responsible was suppressed, forced out of mind. What remained, seared in memory, was how the Third Reich had gone so tragically wrong.
And even in those terrible last months of the war, few, it seems, preoccupied as they were by their own pressing existential needs, were prepared to give much thought to the real victims of what was taking place – the armies of foreigners who had been taken to Germany and forced to work against their will, the hundreds of thousands of inmates of concentration camps and prisons, more dead than alive, and the bedraggled and grossly maltreated prisoners, most of them Jews, on the death marches of the final weeks. The racial prejudice that Nazism could so easily exploit was something that few later wanted to admit to. But the old ideas died hard. According to American opinion surveys in October 1945, 20 per cent of those questioned ‘went along with Hitler on his treatment of the Jews’ and a further 19 per cent remained generally in favour but thought he had gone too far.153
A lasting partial affinity with Nazi ideas was not all. As the Third Reich disintegrated, an inevitable ambiguity lingered in most people’s minds.154 The overwhelming desire to see the war end was almost universal in these last months. It went along with the fervent wish to see the back of the Nazi regime that had inflicted such horror and suffering on the people. But one of Nazism’s great strengths in earlier years had been its ability to usurp and exploit all feelings of patriotism and pride in the nation and turn them into such a dangerous and aggressive form of hypernationalism that could so easily become racial imperialism. The collapsing regime in 1944–5 did not erase, among all those who had come to detest Nazism, the determination still to fight for their country, to defend their homeland against foreign invasion, and especially – years of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, but also the bitter experience of conquest in the eastern regions, had done their job – to protect against what was viewed as an alien, repugnant and inhumane enemy to the east. So people wanted to see an end to Nazism, but not an end to the Reich. Since, however, the fight to preserve Germany was still directed by the very people whose policies had wrecked the country, the Nazi regime could still, if in a negative way, bank on support from both soldiers and civilians to the end. In western parts of Germany, the relatively lenient treatment by the American and British conquerors (if not by the French) inevitably prompted a more rapid erosion of the regime and swifter process of disintegration in civilian society and within the army than was the case in the east. There, despite the by now almost universal feelings of revulsion towards the Nazi Party and its representatives, people had little choice but to place their trust in the Wehrmacht and hope that it could stave off the Red Army.
The ambiguity in attitudes of ordinary Germans, civilians and soldiers, in the last dreadful months of the war was even more prevalent in the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht’s officer corps. We have seen ample evidence, leaving aside fanatics like Dönitz or Schörner who associated closely and directly with Hitler, of the belief-systems and mentalities of generals who felt obliged to carry out orders that they thought were senseless, who were contemptuous of the Nazi leadership, but nevertheless saw it as their unswerving duty to do all they could to fend off enemy conquest, above all in the east. Defence of the homeland, not ideological commitment to Nazism, was what counted for the majority of high-ranking officers. But their nationalist and patriotic feelings sufficed to keep them completely bound up in the service of the regime which they had been so ready to serve in better times. After the failure of the bomb plot of July 1944, scarcely a thought to ‘regime change’ was given among the generals, who could see more plainly than anyone that Germany was heading for complete catastrophe. This was ultimately crucial. It meant that Hitler would remain in power, the war would go on, and there would be no putsch from within. Only once Hitler was dead did it seem feasible to move towards surrender. And only then, in conditions of complete collapse and impotence, were the links that bound the military leadership to Hitler and his regime reluctantly broken.
Conclusion:
Anatomy of Self-Destruction
This book began by pointing out the extreme rarity of a country being able and prepared to fight on in war to the point of total destruction. It is equally rare that the powerful elites of a country, most obviously the military, are unable or unwilling to remove a leader seen to be taking them down with him to complete disaster. Yet, recognized by all to be taking place and, increasingly, to be inevitable, this drive to all-enveloping national catastrophe – comprehensive military defeat, physical ruination, enemy occupation and, even beyond this, moral bankruptcy – was precisely what happened in Germany in 1945. The preceding chapters have tried to explain how this was possible. They have shown the long process of inexorable collapse of Europe’s most powerful state under external military pressure. They have also tried to bring out the self-destructive dynamic – by no means confined to Hitler – built into the Nazi state. Most of all, they have sought to demonstrate that the reasons why Germany chose to fight to the very end, and was capable of doing so, are complex, not reducible to a single easy generalization.
The Allied demand for ‘unconditional surrender’, often seen as ruling out any alternative to fighting on to the end, provides no adequate explanation. German propaganda of course exploited the demand in its ceaseless efforts to bolster the will to hold out, claiming that the enemy, west and east, intended to destroy Germany’s very existence as a nation. But ever fewer people in the last months, as we have seen, believed such messages, at least as regards the western powers.
More significant were the implications of the policy for the regime’s elite. Certainly, ‘unconditional surrender’ was grist to Hitler’s mill, insistent as he was that there could be no consideration of capitulation. And ‘unconditional surrender’ did make it impossible to end the war in the west – which most German leaders, though not Hitler, would have been prepared to negotiate – without also ending it in the east. Even the Dönitz administration following Hitler’s death rejected this option – since it meant condemning nearly 2 million German soldiers to Soviet captivity – until Eisenhower gave it no choice in the matter, thus ensuring that the war went on for a further eight days of bloodshed and suffering. On the other hand, the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ did not lead to any reconsideration by the Wehrmacht High Command of German strategy from early 1943 onwards – in so far as any overall strategy existed beyond an ideologically framed self-destructive drive to hold out to the point of total perdition.1 It provided useful justification for fighting on to the end. But it was not the cause of the determination to do so.
The claim that it undermined the possibility of the resistance movement gaining wider support and a greater possibility of toppling Hitler also remains a doubtful proposition.2 In any case, ‘unconditional surrender’ did not, of course, prevent an attempted coup d’état. Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators in the bomb plot of July 1944 acted in full awareness of the Allied demand, and, had they succeeded, would immediately have tried to sue for peace terms. And most of Hitler’s paladins, and numerous generals, would have been willing, as we have noted, at one point or another to parley their way to a settlement, if Hitler had agreed, undeterred by the uncompromising Allied position.
So although ‘unconditional surrender’ was undoubtedly a factor in the equation, it cannot be regarded as the decisive or dominant issue in compelling the Germans to fight on.3 Churchill himself later rejected the claim that ‘unconditional surrender’ had been a mistake which had prolonged
the war. In fact, he went so far as to state that an alternative statement on peace terms, which the Allies had several times attempted to draft, would have been more harmful to any German attempts to seek peace since the conditions ‘looked so terrible when set forth on paper, and so far exceeded what was in fact done, that their publication would only have stimulated German resistance’.4
Nor can Allied mistakes in strategy and tactics, weakening their own efforts to bring the war to an early end and contributing to the protracted end to the great conflict also by temporarily boosting the confidence of the German defenders, be seen as the key factor. Important errors were certainly made, and contributed to the inability of the Allies, after the Normandy landings in the west and the Red Army’s surge through Poland in the east, to finish off Germany by Christmas, as they had in their early optimism initially thought possible.
As we saw in earlier chapters, in the west, the divergence in strategic aims between Eisenhower and Montgomery, underpinned by their personal differences (owing mainly to the latter’s overbearing personality and some ingrained anti-American prejudice in the British military elite), prevented full exploitation of the breakthrough in France in August 1944, which had left the German western front in great disarray. As a result, compounded by the British failure to secure the port in Antwerp and by the disaster at Arnhem, the Wehrmacht was able to reinforce western defences and bring the Allied attack almost to a standstill for several precious weeks. The Allies never fully regained their momentum – and suffered a further temporary setback in the Ardennes offensive – until March 1945. On the eastern front, the Red Army’s mistakes in operational planning also meant that the massive assault of the summer of 1944, devastating though it was for the Wehrmacht, did not bring an early end to the war. A bold thrust to the Pomeranian coast, which German defence planners had feared, would have cleared the way for a much earlier attack on Berlin than in fact took place and could possibly have brought total collapse long before May 1945.