by Ian Kershaw
12. On this issue, see the excellent study of how German experiences in the final war months helped the beginnings of recovery after capitulation by Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London, 2009.
INTRODUCTION: GOING DOWN IN FLAMES
1. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945–1966, vol. 1, ed. Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann and C. F. Rüter, Amsterdam, 1968, Nos. 010, 029, pp. 115–29, 645–59; Elke Fröhlich, ‘Ein junger Märtyrer’, in Martin Broszat and Elke Fröhlich (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vol. 6, Munich and Vienna, 1983, pp. 228–57; Stephen G. Fritz, Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, Lexington, Ky., 2004, pp. 153–8; Hans Woller, Gesellschaft und Politik in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone: Die Region Ansbach und Fürth, Munich, 1986, pp. 48–55. Dr Meyer, the town’s former military commandant, was sentenced in December 1946 by the Ansbach district court to ten years in a penitentiary.
2. See the valuable collection of essays on the terror of the last phase in Cord Arendes, Edgar Wolfrum and Jörg Zedler (eds.), Terror nach Innen: Verbrechen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Göttingen, 2006.
3. Members of the Munich police constabulary, for instance, were paid continually through to May 1945. Backpay for a cleaner in the department who had not been paid in April was claimed at the end of June. – BHStA, Munich, Minn 72417, Nr. 2415f27, Gehaltszahlung, 28.6.45, 2415f28, Zahlung von Arbeitslöhnen, 28.6.45. At the other end of the spectrum, Himmler’s former chief of his personal staff and in the last phase of the war Wehrmacht plenipotentiary in Italy, General der Waffen-SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, still drew a salary of 2,226.80 Reich Marks (1,551.90 Reich Marks net) in April 1945, at a time when he was in fact secretly plotting the unilateral surrender of German troops in his region. – BAB, BDC, SSO-Karl Wolff, Gehaltsabrechnung, April 1945, 31.3.45. I am grateful to Horst Möller and Michael Buddrus for this information, and to Jonathan Steinberg for the suggestion to look for it.
4. Information kindly provided by Wolfgang Holl, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Bad-Godesberg, and by Holger Impekoven, currently working on a history of the Stiftung between 1925 and 1945, to whom I am indebted for an exposé of his project.
5. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1969, p. 467; BA/MA, N648/1, NL Dethleffsen, Erinnerungen, fo. 7 (1945–6).
6. Andreas Förschler, Stuttgart 1945: Kriegsende und Neubeginn, Gudensberg-Gleichen, 2004, p. 10.
7. Christian Hartmann and Johannes Hürter, Die letzten 100 Tage des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Munich, 2005, Day 78, 21 Feb. 1945 (and for the following). The football hardly measured up to modern Premiership standards. The teams had to be improvised from what players – often soldiers on leave – were available. The last final for the German championship took place on 16 June 1944 in front of 70,000 spectators in Berlin, when Dresden beat Hamburg 4–0. After that, because of limited transport capacity and the ever worsening war fortunes, matches were restricted to regional ‘Sportgaue’.
8. For an interesting comparison of the potential for a coup d’état in Italy and in Germany, see Jerzy W. Borejsza, ‘Der 25. Juli 1943 in Italien und der 20. Juli 1944 in Deutschland: Zur Technik des Staatsstreichs im totalitären System’, in Jürgen Schmädeke and Peter Steinbach (eds.), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, Munich and Zurich, 1986, pp. 1079–85.
9. Michael Geyer, ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction’, in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century, Göttingen, 2006, p. 40. An almost identical question was posed by Doris L. Bergen, ‘Death Throes and Killing Frenzies: A Response to Hans Mommsen’s “The Dissolution of the Third Reich: Crisis Management and Collapse, 1943–1945” ’, German Historical Institute, Washington DC, Bulletin, 27 (2000), pp. 26–7: ‘We need to ask what made people not only tolerate [Hitler’s regime] but fight and kill for it until the bitter end.’
10. Alfred Vagts, ‘Unconditional Surrender – vor und nach 1943’, Vf Z, 7 (1959), p. 300. The demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ had arisen from the perception, especially strong in the USA, that it had been a costly mistake to concede an armistice instead of insisting on German surrender in 1918, thereby opening the way for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend propagated on the German Right that Germany had not been militarily defeated at all in the First World War. This time, the Americans and the British were agreed, there would be no repeat of the mistake and no scope for misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Germany’s unconditional surrender was regarded as the very basis for lasting future peace. – See Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 438–9.
11. A number of leading German generals were adamant after the war that the Allied demand had been a mistake and had lengthened the conflict. – Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War Two, New Brunswick, NJ, 1961, pp. 137–47. General Westphal remarked in his memoirs that the demand for unconditional surrender ‘had welded us to a certain extent on to the Nazi regime’, and that it was impossible to have laid down weapons and opened up the western front to the Allies without being given some sort of security for Germany. He claimed that news of the Morgenthau Plan to break up Germany and turn it into a pre-industrial country, then the result of the Yalta Conference, ‘left every initiative by us completely without prospect’ and that there was, therefore, no other way than to fight on. – Siegfried Westphal, Erinnerungen, Mainz, 1975, pp. 326, 341. Grand-Admiral Dönitz’s adjutant, Walter Lüdde-Neurath, also claimed that it had been decisive for the readiness to fight on at any price. – Walter Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz: Die letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches, 5th edn., Leoni am Starnberger See, 1981, p. 22.
12. Reiner Pommerin, ‘The Wehrmacht: Eastern Front’, in David Wingeate Pike (ed.), The Closing of the Second World War: Twilight of a Totalitarianism, New York, 2001, p. 46. See also the comment of Klaus-Jürgen Müller, ‘The Wehrmacht: Western Front’, in the same volume, p. 56, that ‘unconditional surrender’ added to the fear of senior military leaders of being accused of perpetrating another ‘stab in the back’.
13. Bodo Scheurig, Alfred Jodl: Gehorsam und Verhängnis, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1991, p. 286, remarks that for General Jodl (and unquestionably for other military leaders) the demand for unconditional surrender provided a ‘flimsy excuse’ (‘fadenscheiniger Vorwand’).
14. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939–45, pb. edn., Novato, Calif., n.d. (original Eng. language edn., London, 1964), p. 316.
15. The classics were Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1951, and Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
16. See Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, Bonn, 1999, for a collection of later evaluations and applications of the concept.
17. See, as representative of the new research trend, Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2009.
18. Heinrich Jaenecke, ‘Mythos Hitler: Ein Nachruf’, in Kriegsende in Deutschland, Hamburg, 2005, p. 223.
19. This notion underpinned the path-breaking ‘Bavaria Project’ in the 1970s. The volumes of essays arising from the project and published in the series Bayern in der NS-Zeit, ed. Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich et al., Munich, 1977–83, carried the subtitle ‘Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt’ (‘system of rule and society in conflict’).
20. Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won, London, 1979.
21. See especially, Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, Hamburg, 2007 (though the work deals only with the pre-war period) and Peter Fritsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2008.
22. DRZW, 9/2 (Herf), p. 202.
23.
Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2005.
24. See Fritsche, pp. 266–96.
25. Quotations from Fritsche, pp. 269–71.
26. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford, 2001, pp. 1, 3, 226.
27. For a thoughtful analysis of the importance of the legacy of 1918, not just for Hitler but for the entire Nazi regime, see Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich: Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft, Opladen, 1977, ch. 1.
28. The most forthright statement of this is in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Nationalsozialismus: Bewegung, Führerherrschaft, Verbrechen, Munich, 2009, esp. chs. 2, 7, 11, 14, extracts assembled from his monumental Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4: 1914–1949, 3rd edn., Munich, 2008. The concept of ‘charismatic rule’ is, of course, drawn from Max Weber. See his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th rev. edn., Tübingen, 1980, pp. 140–47, 654–87. Although Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, criticizes notions that Hitler began his ‘career’ with innate personal charismatic qualities – something few serious historians have claimed – and emphasizes the propagandistic manufacture of his charisma in the 1920s (in an argument that comes close to portraying the Germans as victims of techniques of sophisticated mass seduction), he appears nevertheless to accept that the Nazi regime was based upon ‘charismatic rule’.
CHAPTER 1. SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
1. Rudolf Semmler, Goebbels – the Man Next to Hitler, London, 1947, p. 147 (23.7.44). Semmler (real name Semler) was a press officer in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. The original German text of his diary entries appears to have been lost.
2. Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45, London, 2004, pp. xi, 15, 17.
3. MadR, 17, pp. 6645–58, reports for 14 and 22.7.44.
4. This sketch is based upon: Jochen von Lang, Der Sekretär: Martin Bormann. Der Mann, der Hitler beherrschte, Frankfurt am Main, 1980; Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, Harmondsworth, 1972, pp. 191–206; and The Bormann Letters, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1954, pp. vi–xxiii.
5. For a full study of this obnoxious individual, see Ralf Meindl, Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch – eine politische Biographie, Osnabrück, 2007. See also Ralf Meindl, ‘Erich Koch – Gauleiter von Ostpreußen’, in Christian Pletzing (ed.), Vorposten des Reichs? Ostpreußen 1933–1945, Munich, 2006, pp. 29–39.
6. BAB, R43II/684, fo. 61, Kritzinger to Lammers, 13.7.44. And see Alastair Noble, Nazi Rule and the Soviet Offensive in Eastern Germany, 1944–1945: The Darkest Hour, Brighton and Portland, Ore., 2009, pp. 82–3.
7. BAB, R43II/393a, fo. 47, Vermerk for Lammers, 11.6.44.
8. ‘Führer-Erlasse’ 1939–1945, ed. Martin Moll, Stuttgart, 1997, pp. 432–3.
9. Bernhard R. Kroener, ‘Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet’: Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm. Eine Biographie, Paderborn, 2005, pp. 670–73; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: Biographie, Munich, 2008, p. 720 (and now in general the most authoritative account of Himmler’s personality and career).
10. Eleanor Hancock, National Socialist Leadership and Total War 1941–45, New York, 1991, p. 127.
11. TBJG, II/12, p. 522 (22.6.44).
12. DRZW, 5/2 (Müller), p. 754.
13. e.g. MadR, 17, pp. 6657–8 (22.7.44).
14. BAB, R3/1522, fos. 4–16, Memorandum on ‘Total War’, 12.7.44. And see Wolfgang Bleyer, ‘Pläne der faschistischen Führung zum totalen Krieg im Sommer 1944’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 17 (1969), pp. 1312–29; also Gregor Janssen, Das Ministerium Speer: Deutschlands Rüstung im Krieg, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, 1968, pp. 271–2.
15. Peter Longerich, Hitlers Stellvertreter: Führung der Partei und Kontrolle des Staatsapparates durch den Stab Heß und die Partei-Kanzlei Bormann, Munich, 1992, p. 195. In his Nuremberg testimony, Speer suggested, presumably with his success in instigating the planned meeting in mind, that his letter had prompted Hitler to appoint Goebbels as Plenipotentiary for Total War (IWM, FO645/161, p. 10, 9.10.45).
16. Dieter Rebentisch, Führerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 514.
17. Peter Longerich, ‘Joseph Goebbels und der totale Krieg: Eine unbekannte Denkschrift des Propagandaministers vom 18. Juli 1944’, Vf Z, 35 (1987), pp. 289–314 (text pp. 305–14). And see Hancock, pp. 133–6.
18. BAB, R3/1522, fos.23–45, Memorandum on ‘Total War’, 20.7.44. And see Hancock, pp. 129–33; and Janssen, pp. 272–3.
19. Kroener, p. 705.
20. Speer did not pass the memorandum to Hitler, via the latter’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, until 29 July, the day after he sent a copy to Himmler. – BAB, R3/1522, fo. 48, Speer to Himmler, 28.7.44.
21. BA/MA, N24/39, NL Hoßbach, typescript, ‘Erinnerungen’, May 1945.
22. Lagebesprechungen im Führerhauptquartier: Protokollfragmente aus Hitlers militärischen Konferenzen 1942–1945, ed. Helmut Heiber, Berlin, Darmstadt and Vienna, 1963, p. 219 (20.12.43) (Eng. edn., Hitler and his Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945, ed. Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, London, 2002, p. 314).
23. Quoted in Andreas Kunz, Wehrmacht und Niederlage: Die bewaffnete Macht in der Endphase der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft 1944 bis 1945, Munich, 2007, p. 61.
24. Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, Da Capo edn., New York, 1996, p. 336.
25. Friedrich-Christian Stahl, ‘Generaloberst Kurt Zeitzler’, in Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.), Hitlers militärische Elite, vol. 2: Vom Kriegsbeginn bis zum Weltkriegsende, Darmstadt, 1998, p. 278.
26. General Heusinger had evidently changed tack since spring 1944, when he had followed Hitler’s line of not yielding a metre in the east and intending a later offensive to win back the Ukraine, providing the expected Allied landing in the west could be repulsed. – Jürgen Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat: Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, Munich, 2007, p. 189. After the war Heusinger was a strong critic of Hitler’s military leadership.
27. IWM, EDS, F.5, AL1671, 1.8.44; printed in ‘Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung’: Die Opposition gegen Hitler und der Staatsstreich vom 20. Juli 1944 in der SD-Berichterstattung, ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1984, vol. 2, pp. 654–8 (and see also vol. 1, pp. 125–6, 515).
28. A point made by Förster, pp. 131ff., and in his contribution to DRZW, 9/1, p. 621 as well as by Heinemann in the same volume, p. 883. See also Kunz, pp. 105ff.
29. Ardsley Microfilms, Irving Collection, D1/Göring/1.
30. BA/MA, N24/39, NL Hoßbach, typescript, 19.5.45.
31. Hans Mommsen, ‘Social Views and Constitutional Plans of the Resistance’, in Hermann Graml et al., The German Resistance to Hitler, London, 1970, p. 59.
32. Joachim Kramarz, Stauffenberg: The Life and Death of an Officer, November 15th 1907–July 20th 1944, London, 1967, p. 185.
33. Marlis Steinert, Hitlers Krieg und die Deutschen, Düsseldorf and Vienna, 1970, pp. 476ff.
34. Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung: Die Kaltenbrunner-Berichte an Bormann und Hitler über das Attentat vom 20. Juli 1944. Geheime Dokumente aus dem ehemaligen Reichssicherheitshauptamt, ed. Archiv Peter, Stuttgart, 1961, pp. 1–11 (reports from 21, 22 and 24.7.44).
35. BAB, R55/601, fos. 54–63, Tätigkeitsbericht, weekly report of the head of the Propaganda Staff, 24.7.44.
36. BAB, R55/601, fos. 69–70, Tätigkeitsbericht, weekly report of the head of the Propaganda Staff, 7.8.44. Guderian, speaking to General Balck, blamed Field-Marshal Kluge’s involvement with the conspiracy for the collapse in the west. – BA/MA, N647/12, NL Balck, Kriegstagebuch, Bd. 11, fo. 89, entry for 10.9.44.
37. The plot immediately gave Hitler his explanation of the disaster on the eastern front. See the comments he made to Jodl at the end of July. – Lagebesprechungen im Führerhauptquartier, pp. 246–8 (31.7.44); Hitler and his Generals, pp. 446–7. Those close to Hitler passed on the
interpretation. Writing to Gauleiter Eggeling in Halle, Bormann claimed that the collapse of Army Group Centre had been connected with the conspiracy, and pointed to the role of Major-General Henning von Tresckow. – BAB, NS6/153, fos. 3–5, Bormann to Eggeling, 8.9.44. Bormann eventually felt compelled to rein in the generalized attacks on the officer corps, particularly some higher officers, in connection with the bomb plot and the collapse of Army Group Centre that had been made in Party meetings. – BAB, NS6/167, fos. 69–71, Party Chancellery, Bekanntgabe 254/44, Stellungnahme zu den Vorgängen im Mittelabschnitt der Ostfront und zu den Ereignissen des 20.7.1944, 20.9.44; also in BAB, NS19/2606, fos. 25–7.
38. BAB, R55/603, fo. 508, Party Chancellery, Abt. II B4, Vertrauliche Informationen, 13.9.44.
39. BAB, R55/603, fo. 380, Hauptreferat Pro.Pol, Dr Schäffer to Abteilung Rfk. Dr Scharping, 18.8.44.
40. BfZ, Sammlung Sterz, Gefr. Günter H., 2.8.44.