The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  On March 7, 1945, American troops found the only remaining intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, fifteen miles south of Cologne, and poured across. Three weeks later all Allied armies were across the Rhine—the last natural barrier to the interior of the Reich. In the first days of April the Ruhr was encircled by British and American forces, trapping 430,000 German troops. The Ruhr pocket held out until April 12–13 before surrendering. Allied commanders were eager to launch a drive for Berlin, to beat the Russians into the capital of the Third Reich. They were fifty miles from Berlin, but General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of allied forces, refused to give the order to advance on the city. In February at Yalta, the Big Three—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—had come to an agreement about zones of occupation for defeated Germany, and Berlin was deep inside the Soviet zone. Eisenhower was not about to sacrifice thousands of British and American lives to take the Nazi capital only to turn it over to the Russians. He also understood that while the Americans were only fifty miles from Berlin, they were overextended and at a troop strength of only fifty thousand. The Soviets, with a far greater force, were forty miles from Berlin and would have launched their offensive earlier had the Western Allies pressed on. As events later in the month would demonstrate, the price the Soviets paid for taking the city would be extremely high.

  From January onward, German roads were clogged with long straggling columns of Allied POWs and concentration camp inmates herded on desperate marches deeper into the dwindling territory of the Reich. A flood tide of panicked civilians fleeing the rampaging Red Army surged westward, inundating Germany’s already ravaged cities and exacerbating the mounting chaos. They brought with them hair-raising tales of rape, wanton destruction, and uncontrolled pillaging by the marauding Red Army. The barbarian hordes were approaching, pushing before them a wave of suicides by local Nazi leaders and ordinary party members. In East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, ancient German cities fell to the Soviets. Instead of allowing German forces there to retreat to more realistic defensive lines, Hitler called for Königsberg, Breslau, and other cities to become fortresses to hold back the Russians. His generals thought this foolish but, as usual, they complied. The Red Army simply bypassed them and continued toward Berlin.

  At the same time, the Allied bombing of Germany reached its deadly crescendo. Massive raids by the Anglo-American air forces devastated Dresden, Pforzheim, Würzburg, Magdeburg, Nuremberg, and other cities, large and small, laying waste to much of the country and leaving hundreds of thousands of German civilians dead or homeless. Most of the Germans killed by Allied bombing in the war died in 1945. In fact, January and February were the deadliest months of the Second World War; in addition to the civilian casualties, 1.4 million German soldiers fell in the last four months of the war, roughly 14,000 every day. Soldiers of the once-mighty Wehrmacht also deserted in alarming numbers, discarding their uniforms, hoping to be swallowed up in the torrent of refugees. Thousands were caught and summarily shot or hanged. By mid-1944 more than 26,000 death sentences had been imposed on Wehrmacht personnel for desertion or undermining of the war effort, although the exact number of those executed is impossible to determine with confidence. But between January and May 1945 the number of soldiers sentenced to death in the regular military court system stood at approximately 4,000, while the figures for those executed by the “flying courts-martial” may have been closer to 6,000 or 7,000. As the troops quickly realized, these “flying courts” were little more than roaming death squads.

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  Nor were such draconian measures reserved for the military. Civilian morale was in a free fall. One report from regional authorities in early February spoke for many when it stated that in December morale had improved due to the Ardennes offensive and the New Year’s radio address by the Führer. But then the Soviet winter offensive in January sent Russian troops deep into Germany, producing in the public “deep disappointment and . . . a great horror. Because of these developments the public has been gripped by strong disappointment . . . as well as fear and worry. Many consider the war already lost.” The situation was so dire that the regime felt compelled to create special courts that operated on roughly the same principles as the military drumhead tribunals but were intended for civilians. Any German—man, woman, or child—who in any way failed to support the war effort, disrupted military operations, or showed “defeatist tendencies” could be tried and executed on the spot as a traitor. In these final, increasingly chaotic months more than ten thousand civilians were executed by such tribunals for “defeatism,” treason, or “undermining military operations.”

  Faced with festering resentment from the exhausted population and gripped by a mounting sense of desperation, the Nazis issued fanatical appeals—and threats—to fight “to the last bullet.” The only hope for the Reich, Hitler believed, was to hold out until the “unnatural” alliance against him broke apart and a separate peace with either the Western powers or with the Soviets could be negotiated. Consequently, as the ground war moved into Germany, every farm and hamlet, every village, town, and city was to be turned into a fortress; soldiers and civilians were exhorted to fight fanatically to the last man, woman, and child, inflicting maximum casualties on the enemy and slowing the Allied advance. In an appeal typical of this apocalyptic policy, the Nazi Gauleiter of Upper Franconia warned his beleaguered population that “if coal, gas, and electricity are in short supply now, what is all that compared to our enemies’ sadistic Jewish plans for our destruction. And even if our food rations were cut still further, we would look back at these reduced living conditions as a paradise if the Bolshevik and his plutocratic helpers become masters of the Reich. . . . All our men will be taken to Siberia. Our women will be violated, our children dragged away.” There could be only one answer: “Fight, Fight, and Fight still more.” Defeatism would not be tolerated. “Cowards, trouble makers and traitors,” he warned, would be ruthlessly “exterminated.”

  To augment the army now fighting on German soil, the Nazis mobilized a home guard, the Volkssturm, pressing all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty into military service. Poorly equipped and hardly trained at all, some of these ragtag units did fight with dogged determination, especially in the East, but most were quickly crushed; many simply evaporated in the heat of battle, melting away before the enemy. It is estimated that 50 percent of German military losses in 1945 were from Volkssturm personnel.

  As the vise gradually closed on the Third Reich in the first four months of 1945, the cataclysmic violence of Hitler’s war engulfed the German heartland with unimaginable force, and life in the Third Reich assumed an apocalyptic, almost surreal quality. The war-weary population found itself trapped between the onrushing Allied armies, a remorseless assault from the air, and a fanatical regime that in its death throes turned on its own people. The vicious Nazi reign of terror that had spread across Europe since 1939 came home to the Reich, and Germans discovered that they had as much to fear from their own criminal regime as from their onrushing enemies. “Now Hitler has declared war on us,” one woman dolefully observed.

  On April 7, Himmler sounded the alarm, issuing an order that reflected the desperate state of affairs: “At the present moment in the war everything depends above all else on the stubborn, unflinching will to hold on. Hanging out white sheets, opening already closed tank barriers, failing to report to the Volkssturm and other displays [of defeatism] are to be met with the harshest measures. If a white flag appears on any dwelling, all men of that house are to be shot. There can be not a moment of hesitation in carrying out this action.” But in these final weeks of madness, a volatile compound of fatalism, fear, and desperation ignited a spark of open rebellion in a number of towns in western and southern Germany. Localized clashes between Nazi officials and German civilians occurred in numerous villages and towns, as ordinary Germans tried to save their communities from certain destruction in what was clearly a futile effort to stave off the invaders. In many locales, it was wome
n, accompanied by their children, who confronted the Nazi leadership, marching into village squares to demand that their town or village be spared. These uprisings were not ideological in nature. They were not protests against the Nazi system or Hitler’s leadership. They were inspired by a desire to survive, to save their towns or villages from needless destruction.

  Although citizen revolts had taken place in a number of villages and small towns, by far the largest of these women’s revolts took place in the cathedral city of Regensburg on April 23, 1945. Responding angrily to the Gauleiter’s call for fanatical resistance, some one thousand women accompanied by their children, many in baby carriages, and a sprinkling of men gathered in the market square, demanding that the city be handed over to the Americans without resistance. The Nazis broke up the demonstration and arrested about thirty of the protesters, many more or less at random. By evening all had been released except for a local timber merchant and Johann Maier, a Catholic priest who spoke at the demonstration. The agitated Gauleiter phoned from his headquarters south of the city and ordered that “the leaders of these rabble rousers be hanged immediately.” When the local party leader objected that, legally speaking [!], a special tribunal must be held, the Gauleiter bellowed, “Fine. Hang them first, then convene the tribunal!” The priest was hanged in the dead of night, and his body left dangling on the gallows in the market square throughout the following day. Around his neck the Nazis had hung a sign reading: “Here dies a saboteur.” Two days later the Nazi leadership slipped quietly out of town, and on April 27 the Americans entered the city. Not a shot was fired.

  In the spring of 1945 towns and cities over the Reich were falling one after another, overrun by Allied forces or surrendered by the local military authorities. Just a day before the women’s demonstration in Regensburg American troops staged a victory parade through the ruins of Nuremberg, site of the huge Nazi rallies of prewar days. The city was a desolate sight. More than 90 percent of its buildings lay in ruins, a grisly testament to the devastating Allied air raids and the savage house-to-house fighting as the city fell. To mark the defeat of this city so closely associated with Hitler, the American 3rd Infantry Division marched into the main arena of the party congress grounds, moving in formation beneath the speaker’s tribunal where Hitler had mesmerized mammoth crowds before the war. Following the parade, American engineers exploded the huge stone wreath and swastika that looked down over the grounds. It was a moment of high symbolism.

  In January, Soviet forces had encountered the virtually deserted camp at Auschwitz. In the sprawling complex where more than a million human beings had been murdered, they discovered 7,500 prisoners miraculously still clinging to life and some 600 corpses. Ten days earlier Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all the camps in the East, stressing that “not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy.” He also ordered the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria, in fact, all traces of the vast crimes committed there. They were not successful in this, but on January 17 roughly 60,000 inmates of the camp were evacuated, sent on forced marches in the bitter cold and snow to the west. Two thirds of them never reached their destination, first at the camp at Gross-Rosen, then the giant camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

  As Anglo-American forces moved deeper into Germany, they encountered the Nazi concentration camps located on German soil—Ohrdruf (April 9), Buchenwald (April 11), Bergen-Belsen (April 15), and Flossenbürg (April 23). The Soviets had come upon Majdanek in the previous July, with its gas chambers and crematoria still in place, though that information was not widely shared. The horrors they found in these hellholes revealed the raw ideological core of the Third Reich—mass graves, bodies piled in heaps, the living little more than skeletons, crematoria, some still clogged with bodies, storage bins of gold extracted from teeth, bags of women’s hair, spectacles, suitcases, dentures, clothing, including in one camp thousands of pairs of baby shoes. In between Allied troops stumbled upon scores of smaller satellite camps where the horrors were as gruesome as in the larger main camps; only the scale of suffering was smaller. The hideous scenes that greeted the soldiers sent shockwaves through the Allied High Command, the political establishment in the United States and Britain, and a dazed international public numbed by five years of total war. Unlike Auschwitz, which was no longer in operation when the Russians reached it in January, the camps inside Nazi Germany had not been evacuated. In fact, in the spring of 1945 their populations were swollen by arrivals from the extermination camps in the East. By mid-April, Dachau, built to hold 5,000 inmates, was swamped by 30,000 men and women, all existing in conditions of unimaginable filth, disease, and starvation. More than 10,000 prisoners had already died in Dachau and its subsidiary camps since January; hundreds were dying each day.

  The camp’s Jewish prisoners were for the most part recent arrivals, survivors of the death camps in the East. Most had been evacuated to Buchenwald just days before its liberation, and then marched on foot or crammed into boxcars and open coal cars to begin a long nightmarish journey south. Throughout central and western Germany, in the ever-shrinking territory controlled by the Reich, the SS forced tens of thousands of prisoners on torturous “death marches” from concentration camps, large and small. Barely clinging to life, the exhausted new arrivals found themselves delivered into a filthy, hellish compound literally overflowing with the living and the dead. Among the thousands of inmates who milled listlessly about, hundreds of bodies littered the grounds; corpses were stacked like cordwood beside the long rows of squalid barracks and were piled high against the walls of the crematorium, which had long since ceased to operate. There were simply too many dead to burn. Since the beginning of April transports from Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and other camps to the north and east had swamped the SS authorities, who no longer bothered to record the thousands of new prisoners that were dumped inside the gates.

  On a railway siding just beside the main gate the Americans came upon some fifty boxcars. The transport had arrived on April 27 from Buchenwald via Flossenbürg. Its cargo, two thousand men and women, piled in a ghastly tangle of skeletal limbs and shrunken torsos, had died en route or were left to starve at the very gates of Dachau. The American colonel in command recalled that “the first thing I saw was that terrible train. I walked past car after car. It was all I could do to believe it. Suddenly, a soldier about ten or fifteen yards behind me, yelled, ‘Hey, Colonel! Here’s a live one!’ Immediately, I ran back to the car. There, almost buried under a mass of dead bodies, was a hand that was waving so feebly you could hardly notice it. But it was moving!” One survivor among the two thousand. When he was finally untangled from the bodies around him, the man, hardly more than a skeleton, looked frantically from one soldier to another, repeating in sheer disbelief, “Frei? Frei?”

  As the Red Army breached the frontiers of the Reich and charged westward, a wave of terror swept over the German population. A stampede of panicked refugees poured into the roads, some two million in all, fleeing the Russians. With them they carried hair-raising tales—many of them true—of rape, random violence, summary executions, and barbaric behavior. By February Soviet spearheads were within sixty miles of Berlin, preparing for a titanic assault on the German capital. Three giant army groups—fronts, the Russians called them—were assembled along the Oder—1.5 million troops, 3,300 tanks, 10,000 aircraft, and 28,000 heavy guns and the dreaded Katyusha rocket launchers—“Stalin Organs,” they were called. Arrayed against them were 600,000 German troops, composed for the most part of old men and boys from the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth. In April 1945 Berlin was a city of women, old men, and children. Military units were drained of personnel, so that what appeared on the briefing maps as divisions or regiments were mere shells, some only phantoms.

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  Hitler did not trust his generals, especially after the attempted Putsch, and they, even the most loyal, were appalled at his lack of judgment. Virtually all agreed that Autumn Fog h
ad been an “incomprehensible” disaster, followed by his order for German troops to fight on the west bank of the Rhine. In January, as the Red Army approached Berlin, he ordered the Sixth Panzer Army to Hungary, where he argued he would surprise the Russians and inflict on them a game-changing defeat. Madness, the generals believed, but they complied. On January 21 he appointed Himmler, who despite his abiding affection for uniforms, had no military experience, as the commander of the newly formed Army Group Vistula.

  Since Stalingrad, Hitler had had no comprehensive military strategy. Neither did the professionals of the General Staff. All that Hitler had to offer was an apocalyptic “fight to the last man.” His generals recognized the awful consequences of such a death wish, but nonetheless acquiesced in Hitler’s suicidal decisions. Hitler’s judgment was rarely challenged, and when it was, his reaction was unbridled fury. When at a military conference in early February, Guderian had confronted the Führer, questioning the wisdom of appointing Himmler to lead Army Group Vistula, he was treated to one of the colossal outbursts that all close to the Führer had witnessed before. To the horror of Keitel and others in Hitler’s entourage, Guderian refused to back down, and Hitler completely lost control. How dare the general speak to him in such a manner, how dare he contradict his strategic judgment! “His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, [Hitler] stood there in front of me,” Guderian remembered, “beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst of rage Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head, and the veins stood out on his temples.” Himmler, as Guderian predicted, was quickly overwhelmed by the responsibility of command and resigned after only a few weeks, unable to master the deteriorating military situation and the attendant stress. Guderian was sacked in March.