The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  only two and one third million: Longerich, Joseph Goebbels, pp. 541–42.

  The Jews, Goebbels claimed, were behind the attack: Evans, The Third Reich at War, pp. 275–80.

  strategy of area bombing: Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1980), pp. 1–34.

  devastation and industrial man-hours lost: Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, pp. 200–201.

  “to destroy one industrial city after another”: Gestapo report of July 27, 1942, in Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 11, p. 4006.

  “attrition whose distant end is not yet in view”: Gestapo report of August 31, 1942, in Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 11, p. 4146.

  even the sober Halder agreed: Clark, Barbarossa, p. 209.

  forces moving south across the Don: After the war General Kleist claimed that “the Fourth Panzer Army . . . could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July but was diverted to help me in crossing the Don. I did not need its aid, and it simply got in the way and congested the roads that I was using.” Clark, Barbarossa, p. 209.

  “ ‘All of us feel that the end, victory, is near’ ”: Ibid., p. 21.

  “That’s what the Russians need, to stop them resisting”: Ibid., p. 218.

  “the desire for an end to the war soon”: Gestapo report, September 3, 1942, in Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 11, p. 4164.

  “only a few very small places left not captured”: Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism, vol. III, p. 842.

  for Hitler’s ambitions in the East: Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 398.

  “rise up, and storm burst forth!”: W. A. Boelcke, ed., Wollt Ihr Den Totalen Krieg? Die geheimen Goebbels-Konferenzen, 1939–1943 (Munich, 1969).

  “of the Columbus House they would have done it”: Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 735.

  the regime was ebbing away: Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth,” pp. 192–98.

  the people’s faith in the regime was badly shaken: Ibid., pp. 180–89.

  the Führer and his people began to loosen: Ibid., pp. 169–99.

  the shrunken, blackened corpse of her child: Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940–1945 (New York, 2014), pp. 259–62; and especially Hans Nossack, The End: Hamburg, 1943 (Chicago, 2004).

  never “straighten all that out again”: Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 370; see Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed, pp. 144–48.

  “the Jews will destroy the German people”: Rudolf Höss, quoted in Pridham and Noakes, eds., Nazism, vol. III, pp. 1175–76.

  a smoothly functioning European-wide industrial operation: Graml, Antisemitism in the Third Reich, pp. 181–83.

  “has never been written and can never be written”: Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism, vol. III, p. 1199.

  Untermenschen (subhumans) all: See Longerich, The Holocaust; Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. II; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews; and Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York, 1982).

  “in undisputed possession of the initiative”: Guderian, Panzer Leader, p. 312.

  Chapter 17: Apocalypse

  weighed heavily on the home front: Gestapo report, March 16, 1944, in Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 16, p. 6412.

  “to strengthen the defenses in the West”: Reprinted in Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, p. 400.

  only Hitler could release them: Ibid., pp. 408–9.

  somewhere between the Scheldt and the Seine: Ibid., pp. 434–37; Weinberg, A World at Arms, pp. 681, 684–85.

  was staggering, on the cusp of defeat: Weinberg, A World at Arms, pp. 700–702; and Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far (New York, 1974).

  not in the end political in nature: See Arno Klönne, “Jugendprotest und Jugendopposition. Von der HJ-Erziehung zum Cliquenwesen der Kriegszeit,” in Broszat, Fröhlich, and Grossmann, Bayern in der NS-Zeit, pp. 589–620; and Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, 1989).

  paranoia flourished: Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2011), pp. 207–46.

  one step ahead of the Gestapo: See Shareen Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Fish-Harnack and the Red Orchestra (Oxford, 2000); Anne Nelson, Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends who Resisted Hitler (New York, 2009); and Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945 (Toronto, 1996).

  were arrested and sent to Dachau: Regierungsbericht, Munich, June 7, 1944, in BHSTA, MA 106 695.

  “the National Socialist Party and its dictatorship”: Toby Axelrod, Hans and Sophie Scholl: German Resisters of the White Rose (New York, 2001); and Ulrich Chaussey and Franz Josef Miller, eds., The White Rose: The Resistance by Students Against Hitler, 1942/43 (Munich, 1991).

  “Manifesto of the Munich Students”: See Ulrich Chaussy and Gerd R. Ueberschär, eds., “Es lebe die Freiheit!,” Die Geschichte der Weissen Rose und ihrer Mitglieder in Dokumente und Berichten (Munich: Fischer Verlag, 2013).

  could convince the Führer to step aside: For an analysis of the various plans for a post-Hitler government, see Hans Mommsen, “The Social Views and Constitutional Plans of the Resistance,” in Hermann Graml et al., The German Resistance to Hitler (London, 1967), pp. 55–147.

  Hitler and his regime must go: Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945 (MIT Press, 1977), and Peter Hoffmann, The German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  participants in the plot to kill the Führer: Thomas Childers, “The Kreisau Circle and the Twentieth of July,” in David Large, ed., Killing Hitler (Cambridge, UK), pp. 104–17.

  would support it at the appropriate time: Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance; see also his Stauffenberg (Toronto, 2008).

  Again he carried a bomb: For the most detailed account of the plot and Stauffenberg’s role in it, see Peter Hoffmann, Widerstrand, Staatsstreich, Attentat (Munich, 1970).

  about Freisler’s outrageous conduct: Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 643; Kershaw, Hitler, vol. II, pp. 691–93.

  “we would have won long ago”: Ibid., p. 687.

  He chose suicide: Ibid., p. 733.

  “nothing else matters”: Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 638.

  touted as the “Speer miracle”: Richard Bessell, Nazism and War (London, 2004), pp. 127–29. See also Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (New York, 1994), pp. 268–71.

  Hitler favorite, became a public darling: Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, pp. 552–89.

  total munitions production fell by 55 percent: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy, vol. VI, p. 143; Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York, 2002), p. 162.

  was literally running on empty: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy, vol. VI, p. 12.

  assembly areas or soldiers at the front: See Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944–1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 124–76.

  in January 1945, to 28,000 in March: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy, vol. X, p. 127.

  “break in Germany’s war morale”: Goebbels, Tagebücher, March 22, 1945, vol. 15, Part II, p. 569.

  people whispered in scorn: Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), pp. 169–99.

  impede the Allied advance in the West: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale, vol. II, pp. 44–45.

  it was simply too late: Report of the Regierungspräsident, December 11, 1944, BHSTA, MA 106 696.

  “delivered over to the whims of the enemy”: Gestapo report, July 14, 1944, in Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 17, pp. 6650�
�51.

  that fear had become a grim reality: Report of the Regierungspräsident München-Oberbayern, December 7, 1944, and Regensburg, March 10, 1945, both in BHSTA, MA 106 695 and MA 106 696.

  “has increasingly come in for criticism”: District report for Regensburg, March 10, 1945, BHSTA MA 106 696. See a similar report for München-Oberbayern, November 8, 1944, BHSTA MA, 106 695.

  “ ‘but in spite of National Socialism’ ”: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale, vol. I, p. 51.

  “Hitler to thank for all this misery”: Schedule B Interviews, Numbers 61294 and 61154, National Archives, RG 23.

  to keep weary Germans at their jobs: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale, vol. I, pp. 14–15.

  “to get a little food cooked”: Schedule B, Interview Number 61890k, NARA, USSB, RG 23.

  “Bleib übrig!” (Survive!): Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, p. 2.

  They were overruled by Hitler: Weinberg, A World at Arms, pp. 765–71.

  At Malmedy that distinction was erased: Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II (New York, 1997), pp. 135–36.

  the last desperate gasp of the Third Reich: Evans, The Third Reich at War, pp. 657–58; see also Anthony Beevor, The Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge (New York, 2015).

  by the failure of the Ardennes offensive: Nicolaus von Below, Als Hitlers Adjutant, 1937–1945 (Frankfurt, 1980), p. 398.

  “it was a burning corpse”: Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, vol. II, pp. 409–10.

  “were little more than roaming death squads”: Stephen G. Fritz, Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians and the Death of the Third Reich (Lexington, KY, 2004), pp. 190–91.

  “Many consider the war already lost”: Report of the Regierungspräsident Regensburg, February 9, 1945, BHSTA, BA-MA.

  “undermining military operations”: Fritz, Endkampf, pp. 117, 191.

  would be ruthlessly “exterminated”: “Für Freiheit und Ehre,” Fritz Wächter, Gauleiter, in Regensburger Kurier. Amtliche Tageszeitung des Gaues Bayreuth der NSDAP, February 6, 1945.

  were from Volkssturm personnel: Fritz, Endkampf, p. 191.

  “hesitation in carrying out this action”: Childers, “ ‘Facilis descensus averni est.’ The Bombing of Germany and Issue of German Suffering,” Central European History, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, pp. 75–105.

  villages from needless destruction: For the uprisings in Ochsenfurt and Bad Windsheim and the role of women in those events, see Fritz, Endkampf, pp. 120, 142.

  Not a shot was fired: This account is taken largely from Ruckdeschel’s postwar trial in Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, C. F. Rütter, et al., eds., Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945–1966 (Amsterdam and Munich, 1968–1998), pp. 236–51. Also see Hildebrand Troll, “Aktionen zur Kriegsbeendigung im Frühjahr 1945,” in Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Anton Grossmann, eds., Bayern in der NS Zeit. Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt, vol. IV (Munich, 1981), pp. 645–84; and Kershaw, The End, pp. 324–26.

  It was a moment of high symbolism: Fritz, Endkampf, pp. 174–75.

  then the giant camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany: Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 410–16.

  “death marches” from concentration camps, large and small: Kershaw, The End, pp. 331–36.

  repeating in sheer disbelief, “Frei? Frei?”: Colonel Donald Downard, quoted in Sam Dann, ed., Dachau, 29 April 1945: The Rainbow Liberation Memoirs (Lubbock, TX, 1998), p. 74.

  Guderian was sacked in March: Guderian, Panzer Leader, pp. 412–14.

  “April will be the turning point for us”: The Grand Alliance did not collapse, as Hitler predicted it would, but this is what passed for good news in the Führerbunker in April 1945. Toland, Adolf Hitler, pp. 860–61.

  Time was running out: Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945.

  frivolity seemed out of place under the circumstances: Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde. Hitlers Sekretärin erzählt ihr Leben (Munich, 2002), p. 177.

  “the mission I set for the nation”: Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 870.

  “I called it the Isle of the Departed”: Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 598.

  if he had no future, neither did they: Ibid., p. 800ff.

  “empty, burned out, lifeless”: Ibid., pp. 605–6.

  whose grip on reality was tenuous: Toland, Adolf Hitler.

  “to end their lives at this historic site”: Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 607.

  his pistol lay at his feet: There are many accounts of these last few hours of Hitler’s life. I have drawn on Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde, pp. 165–206; Kershaw, Hitler, vol. II, pp. 827–28; Toland, Adolf Hitler, pp. 881–91; and still very useful, Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 255–89.

  a world without Hitler, without National Socialism: Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde, p. 193.

  10,000 of whom died, mostly by suicide: Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City (New York, 2005); and Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, p. 326ff.

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