by Ian Kershaw
By that time, Germany – militarily and economically – was on its knees. But as long as Hitler lived, there could be no prospect of surrender.
II
The savage brutality inflicted on those they had conquered – most of all in the eastern parts of Europe – was now rebounding on the German people. In the last months they reaped the whirlwind of the unconstrained barbarism Hitler’s regime had sown.
As news of the Red Army’s advance spread like wildfire, East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and other eastern regions were filled with panic-stricken refugees, often scarcely equipped to cope with the bitter cold, fleeing with or without their possessions by any means they could find, many of them on foot. ‘The roads are full of refugees, carts, and pedestrians,’ one eye-witness recalled. ‘Now and then cars packed with people and suitcases go by, followed by envious looks from those on foot. Again and again there are jams. People are gripped by panic as the cry goes up: “The Russians are close!” People look at each other. That can’t be possible. Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’35
Another report, from Königsberg, where the main square was thronged with refugee-wagons, mainly driven by women, and a fearful population not daring to think of the future, described the scene on 26 January: ‘It’s night as we leave the house. On the old road to Pillau the wagon-wheels grind endlessly as they pass by. Alongside, people of every age and position pull their sledges or push fully-laden prams. No one looks back.’36 One woman remarked: ‘The Führer won’t let us fall into Russian hands. He’ll gas us instead.’37 No one took any notice of such an extraordinary remark. Others discussed how much cyanide was needed to commit suicide; it was as if they were talking about what to have for the next meal.38
A boy fleeing from the collapsing front in Poland travelled, together with his mother and sister, for two days and two nights in an overcrowded train heading for Breslau. From the window of the train, he observed the bodies of German soldiers along the wayside, hanged with notices round their neck denouncing them as cowards and deserters, and roads full of slaughtered cattle which their owners had been unable to drive off.39 A couple who managed to jump on the last train to leave from Breslau told of ‘refugees who almost trampled each other to death, of bodies thrown out of unheated goods trains during the journey, of those trekking coming to a standstill on the streets, of mothers gone mad who did not want to believe that the babies they carried in their arms were already dead.’40 Within days, Berlin was among the cities swarming with refugees from the east, bitter and angry. ‘Those who have lost everything, also lose their fear,’ as one account put it. The police, for the time being, did not intervene.41
Horror stories filtering out and exploited by propaganda about the treatment of the German population unable to leave before Soviet troops arrived intensified the panic.42 ‘The refugees arriving here from, the eastern Gaue are bringing for the most part quite shattering news of the misery of the fleeing population which, partly in panic, has sought refuge within the Reich from the Bolsheviks,’ was noted in a regional report from Lower Bavaria.43 All too often the horror stories were true as soldiers of the Red Army, frequently drunk and out of control, wreaked vengeance for what had been done to their own people on the families who fell into their hands in orgies of plundering, rape, beatings, killings, and other forms of terrifying maltreatment.44 One careful estimate suggests that as many as 1.4 million women were raped in the eastern territories – some 18 per cent of the female population of those regions. In East Prussia, the percentage may well have been much higher.45
Fear of capture by the Red Army was by no means confined to the civilian population. Reports reaching Himmler left no illusions of collapsing morale among German troops in the battle zones of the east. This was especially pronounced among the units hastily put together from ‘stragglers (Versprengte)’ – soldiers who had broken away from their original units as these had been broken up by enemy action or had scattered in disarray. Here, there was no semblance of corporate spirit or readiness to fight. Fear of atrocities and summary shooting on capture by the Red Army dominated; panic prevailed.46 Robbery and plundering by German soldiers were also reported. Desertions were sharply on the increase. Retreats could be seen to be turning into routs. The last train to leave the West Prussian town of Bromberg carrying refugees westwards had many of its places snatched by armed soldiers at the expense of women and children who were left behind. Nazi Party functionaries were often also at the forefront of the rush to leave for safer havens.47
To combat the unmistakably growing signs of demoralization and disintegration, improvised courts to mete out summary punishment were established not just within the Wehrmacht but also for the civilian population.48 The slightest utterance that smacked of defeatism could result in immediate and draconian retribution.49 The terror which had earlier been ‘exported’ to the subjugated peoples under the Nazi jackboot was now being directed by the regime, in its death throes, at the German people themselves. It was the surest sign that, apart from ever-dwindling numbers of fanatics and the desperadoes with nothing to lose, the regime had forfeited any basis of mass support.
Even the threat of summary execution was insufficient to halt the evident signs of demoralization and war-weariness – especially noticeable in the western parts of the Reich. Appeals to heroism, sacrifice, holding out to the last man, fell largely on deaf ears. Most people, soldiers as well as civilians, wanted nothing more than to survive, and to see an end to the bombing, fighting, and suffering. They would have agreed with the scornful comment of a Berlin journalist: ‘Hold out. Most stupid of all slogans. So, they’ll hold out until they’re all dead. There’s no other salvation.’50 In contrast to the situation on the eastern front, many – boosted by rumours of good treatment in districts captured by the Americans – were by now prepared to take their chances under the western Allies rather than to continue the struggle. ‘The population is evidently waiting for the entry of the Americans,’ ran a Wehrmacht report from the area around Mayen, a small town between Rhine and Mosel, ‘and has sabotaged directly or indirectly all measures taken by German soldiers to defend places. As I observed myself, white flags were prepared, everything indicating Party membership was burned, and the fighting soldiers were urged to put on civilian clothing…’ Similar reports came in from other districts in the Rhineland.51
In the south of the country it was little different. People in the Augsburg region were said to be following ‘with horror the events in the east of the Reich, where the storm-flood of the Soviets surges over (umbrandet) the borders of the homeland.’52 War-weariness, deeply downcast mood, great anxiety, and loss of any hope for a favourable outcome to the war were registered generally. The constant fear of air-raids plagued the nerves. ‘Today was terrible with the planes (Fliegern)’, one woman from the Black Forest noted in her diary in February. ‘It’s never been as bad. Almost the whole day they were flying backwards and forwards. We were terribly afraid. It can’t go on like this for much longer.’53 The despondency was maximized where devastating raids – such as the attack on Nuremberg on 2 January that destroyed 29,500 homes, killed 1,794 persons, and wiped out the medieval ‘Old town’ – caused massive damage and loss of life.54 In Dresden, bodies of the tens of thousands killed in the raid on 13 – 14 February – men, women, and children – were piled high and loaded on to any available lorry or cart. Tractors dug mass graves, but the dead could not be buried fast enough and the stench of rotting corpses forced the authorities to turn to mass cremations on the old market square – an unforgettable experience for those forced to witness it.55
One boy, deployed with others in the Deutsches Jungvolk – the preparatory organization for the Hitler Youth – to help in emergency clearance work after a raid on his small home-town in Thuringia, observed soldiers carrying out charcoaled corpses from a neighbouring burnt-out house
. They were the first dead that he and his friends had seen in the war ‘and we were so shocked that we lost all our courage’.56 Even so, the Hitler Youth probably contained, outside the dwindling ranks of Party fanatics, most of the remaining idealists – reared on myths of heroism, ready to follow the call to the last, tirelessly serving as helpers on flak units, tending refugees, looking after the wounded, clearing up after air-raids, and trying ultimately to fend off Soviet tanks with bazookas. One boy, injured in an air-raid, managed to stand to attention when an officer came by, asking him if he was in pain: ‘Yes, but that’s not important,’ he replied. ‘Germany must be victorious.’57
Such voices were by now largely confined to the naïve and the blindly credulous. Fear of instant and ferocious reprisals made most people cautious in the extreme in their comments, other than to close friends and relatives. It was too early for inquests on the causes of the war, let alone for moral reflections. But, aware that the suffering and sacrifice demanded of them in the war had been immense, but in vain, they looked to assign blame. However camouflaged the language, it was obvious that this was directed at the Party leadership – and at Hitler himself.58
‘Trust in the leadership shrinks ever more,’ ran a summary, compiled in early March, of letters monitored by officials of the Propaganda Ministry, ‘because the proclaimed counter-blow to liberate our occupied eastern provinces did not take place and because the manifold promises of an imminent shift in fortunes have proven incapable of fulfilment… Criticism of the upper leadership ranks of the Party and of the military leadership is especially bitter.’59 Shortly afterwards, a report from the Propaganda Office in Halle-Merseburg – the sort of report usually keen to refrain from any hint of negativity – summed up the mood in that area in language which, however coded, could not disguise the extent of anti-Hitler feeling: ‘Those who still unwaveringly and unshakeably trusted the words of the Führer that the historic shift in our favour would still take place in this year were said to have a very hard time in face of the doubters and miseries. Whatever the unshakeable faith in the Führer, people are not refraining from remarking that, for certain, the Führer could not be informed by the military authorities about the true situation, otherwise it would not have come to the present serious crisis.’60
A graphic illustration of feeling towards the man who had so recently been the focus of such unprecedented adulation arose in a remembrance ceremony on 11 March 1945 for the dead of the war around the memorial in Markt Schellenberg, a small alpine town lying within a few minutes’ drive of Hitler’s residence on the Berghof: ‘When the leader of the Wehrmacht unit at the end of his speech for the remembrance called for a “Sieg Heil” for the Führer, it was returned neither by the Wehrmacht present, nor by the Volkssturm, nor by the spectators of the civilian population who had turned up. This silence of the masses,’ commented an observer from the local police, ‘had a depressing effect, and probably reflects better than anything the attitudes of the population.’61
In most people’s eyes, Hitler, the leader so many of them had come close to adoring, was now hindering an end to their suffering. The perception was correct. He was also prolonging even now the end of the far greater suffering of Nazism’s victims.
The torment of these victims – in prime place among them, as ever, the Jews – continued unabated. In contrast to the general ‘mood of catastrophe’, the few Jews remaining within Germany could at least begin cautiously to hope that the end of the regime would not be long delayed once the Soviet offensive had begun in mid-January. But the hopes were still hedged with anxiety that the mortally wounded regime could turn upon them at any moment, or that even at this late hour they would be deported.62 When most of the small number of Jews still existing in Dresden and deemed fit for work were rounded up in mid-February for ‘evacuation’, they knew they had to interpret what lay before them as a ‘march into death’.63 One of those left behind remarked to Victor Klemperer, the former specialist in French literature at Dresden’s technical university: ‘We’ve only got a stay of execution of about eight days. Then they’ll fetch us from our beds at six in the morning. It’ll be no different for us than for the others.’64 It was, as the remarks indicate, still a life ruled by the most acute fear. But the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews and others in the clutches of the SS in the camps in the east was infinitely more dreadful. Their lives continued to hang by a thread on the arbitrary whim of their persecutors as the rapid breakthrough of Soviet troops brought a final and terrible phase of their agony.
The death camps in Poland had been closed one after the other as the Red Army advanced, with hurried attempts made to conceal the evidence of genocide. But over 700,000 prisoners of differing nations, creeds, ethnic groups (prominent among them, of course, Jews) and political persuasions still remained incarcerated in the huge, sprawling web of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.65 Over a third of them would die in the horrendous forced marches those in the eastern camps now had to endure as they were driven – starving, frozen, exhausted, eating snow to still the raging thirst – in terrible treks, five abreast, at gunpoint westwards through icy blizzards, and at punishing pace, by their merciless captors whose hatred showed no signs of diminishing even at this late stage.66 There were mixed reactions among those who encountered the trekking columns on the streets, often adding to the crowds of refugees fleeing from the oncoming Red Army. Some – the merest ripple of humanitarianism in the unrelenting sea of cruelty – took pity on the prisoners, offering them titbits of food (which the guards prevented them from accepting). Others reacted with hostility to the human wrecks trudging by.67 Seeing themselves as Hitler’s victims did not even at this late hour necessarily offer an antidote to vindictiveness towards those persecuted by the regime. Frequently building upon pre-existing phobias and prejudice, the years of Nazi outpourings of hatred towards ‘enemies of the state’, towards Jews above all, had done their work.
In what was by far the biggest of the camps, the immense complex of terror at Auschwitz, not far from Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, some of the huge crematoria had been dismantled and blown up – one of them in a rising by Jewish prisoners – during autumn 1944.68 But the horror continued without respite. There were still over 65,000 prisoners of numerous nationalities – the majority of them Jewish – in Auschwitz and its numerous subsidiary camps in mid-January 1945, as the Red Army approached. As desperate attempts were were made to cover up traces of unimaginable inhumanity, the arrangements to evacuate the camps were improvised with great haste. A last note smuggled out by two prisoners just before the clearance of the camps started gave a foretaste of what was to come: ‘Now we are experiencing evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the SS – drunks… The intentions change from hour to hour since they don’t know themselves what orders they will get… This sort of evacuation means the annihilation of at least half of the prisoners.’69
For five days, beginning on 17 January, long columns of emaciated, starving, and frozen prisoners left the camp complex and were driven westwards by SS guards in forced marches of up to 250 kilometres. Some 56,000 left on foot, another 2,200 were at the end of the evacuation sent by rail.70 Hundreds too weak or sick to begin the marches were shot in the camps. The mortalities on the terrible journeys were predictably enormous. Those dropping by the wayside, unable to sustain the punishing pace, or attempting to escape were shot on the spot. Even stopping for the briefest of moments for the most basic human necessity was to risk incurring the wrath of the guards. ‘It was as if they were shooting at stray dogs… They didn’t care and shot in every direction, without any consideration. We saw the blood on the white snow and carried on walking.’71 In one of the marches alone, around 800 prisoners were murdered by their SS guards.72 After days of marching on starvation rations in freezing conditions, the survivors reached the more and more disastrously overcrowded concentration camp at Groß-Rosen in Lower Silesia.73 Most were dispatched within a short time in open rail way-wagons in journeys lasting u
p to two weeks in the midst of winter to more than ten other camps, including Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, and – in their tens of thousands – to Bergen-Belsen, near Celle in north-west Germany, now grossly overcrowded and rapidly descending into the depths of the hell-hole found by stunned and horrified British soldiers in April 1945.74
On 26 January, an SS unit blew up the last of the crematoria in Birkenau. The next day, the SS guards retreated in heavy fighting as Soviet troops liberated the 7,000 exhausted, skeleton-like prisoners they found in the Auschwitz camp-complex. They also found 368,820 men’s suits, 836,244 women’s coats and dresses, 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes, 13,964 carpets, large quantities of children’s clothes, toothbrushes, false teeth, pots and pans, and a vast amount of human hair.75
III
The man at the centre of the rapidly imploding system that had unleashed such unpredecented horror and misery boarded his special train at Ziegenberg, his western headquarters, on the evening of 15 January 1945 and, with his regular entourage of orderlies, secretaries, and adjutants, left for Berlin. As one wit pointed out, Berlin was more practical as headquarters; it would soon be possible to travel from there both to the eastern and western front by suburban railway. Hitler was still able to raise a laugh.76 But his hopes of military success in the west were definitively at an end. Trying to stave off the Soviet offensive in the east was now the urgent priority.77 His departure had been prompted by Guderian’s opposition to his order on 15 January to transfer the powerful Panzer Corps ‘Großdeutschland’ from East Prussia to the vicinity of Kielce in Poland, where the Red Army was threatening to break through and expose the way forward through the Warthegau. Not only, Guderian pointed out, was the manoeuvre impossible to execute in time to block the Soviet advance; it would at the same time gravely weaken the defences of East Prussia just as the Soviet attack from the Narev was placing that province in the utmost peril. As it was, the ‘Großdeutschland’ troops sat in railway sidings while the Führer and his Chief of the General Staff argued on the telephone about their deployment. Hitler would not rescind his order. But the dispute helped to persuade him that he needed to direct affairs at closer quarters. It was time to move back to Berlin.78