The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  High hopes were entertained for a new generation of submarines, equipped with powerful batteries that would enable them to remain submerged for long periods so that they could not be detected by radar. The new craft were built for speed so that they could overtake convoys and sink them before the accompanying destroyers could steam into action. The first of the new U-boats was delivered in June 1944, and over 150 had been built by February 1945. But they had been rushed into production before being properly tried and tested, and many of them succumbed almost immediately to teething troubles. In any case, without aerial reconnaissance they would have found it difficult to locate their targets. A crash programme of construction of a long-range reconnaissance aircraft, the Ju290, had to be called off in the summer of 1944 after the damage inflicted by Allied air raids on production centres had made the futility of the project clear. Soon afterwards, the U-boat bases on the French coast fell into Allied hands. The new U-boats did not succeed in sinking a single ship, though the priority given to the construction programme, and the hopes held out for its success, convinced Hitler that the commander of the U-boat fleet, Admiral D̈nitz, was one of the few remaining leaders in the armed forces who still possessed the will to victory that he demanded.67

  Another wonder-weapon, dubbed the V-3, was intended purely as a measure of revenge against the British. An enormous gun with a barrel over 150 metres long, it was intended to shoot shells all the way from the Continent to the middle of London, boosting them with small explosions as they went up the barrel and so increasing their velocity. It was still under development when Allied bombs destroyed the firing site, and by the time the facilities had been repaired the war was irrevocably lost.68 Yet another wonder-weapon, a four-stage rocket with powder instead of liquid fuel, was to lead eventually to the multi-stage, solid-fuel rockets of the postwar era, but the army never succeeded in producing more than a handful, which were launched from the end of 1944 against Antwerp, but overshot and fell into the sea. The only damage done by this weapon was when a trial firing sent a rocket whizzing towards a nearby farm, killing several chickens and a dog and injuring two cows.69 The list of wonder-weapons was seemingly endless. In early April 1945 Albert Speer encountered the Labour Front leader Robert Ley with Martin Bormann and others deep in discussion:

  Ley came rushing towards me with the news: ‘Death rays have been invented! A simple apparatus that we can produce in large quantities. I’ve studied the documentation; there’s no doubt about it. This will be the decisive weapon!’ With Bormann nodding confirmation, Ley went on, stuttering as always, to find fault with me. ‘But of course your Ministry rejected the inventor. Fortunately for us, he wrote to me. But now you personally must get this project going. Immediately. At this moment there’s nothing more important.’70

  Speer’s team soon found that the inventor was an eccentric amateur who was asking for equipment so out of date that it had not been manufactured for forty years.71

  In the end, the main significance of the wonder-weapons was as a propaganda device that offered hope to those who still wanted Nazism to win. The German media carried lurid stories of the devastation caused by the V-1 and V-2, trying to satisfy people’s demand for effective retaliatory action on the British that would bring the bombing raids to an end. Many of these were invented. In all, fewer than 6,000 V-1s fell on Britain and just over 1,000 V-2s. 31,600 houses were destroyed, mostly in London, and nearly 9,000 people were killed by the two weapons, with 24,000 being injured. This damage did not compare to the devastation inflicted by Allied bombing in Germany, and in no way met the demand for massive retaliation. People called the V-1 the Volksverdummer Nr 1 (Stultifier of the People Number 1) or the Versager Nr 1 (Failure Number 1). Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was aware of this scepticism. So the co-ordinated media pumped out vague promises of new, as yet unspecified wonder-weapons of a far greater destructiveness. As early as 19 February 1943 Hitler was talking in public of ‘hitherto unknown, unique weapons’ that were on the way and would turn the tide of war.72 Yet such promises soon lost any potency they might have had. Even in November the same year, a joke about them was doing the rounds. It revealed how well people knew that Germany’s lack of resources was losing the war. ‘1950,’ so went the imaginary report. ‘Meeting in the Leader’s headquarters about the date fixed for Vengeance. It is postponed once more because there is no agreement on whether the two airplanes should fly side-by-side or one in front of the other.’73

  Towards the end of the war even the most optimistic and convinced followers of Nazism were beginning to have their doubts about the wonder-weapons. On 3 September 1944 Inge Molter wrote to her husband Alfred:

  Fred, darling, we’ve got to keep going until the new weapons are ready, it can’t be that the enemy will force us on to our knees before that happens. Darling, I simply can’t believe that. Will it all have been in vain, will there be no more Germany? No, darling, I can’t believe that. But unfortunately this view is very gradually trickling through into the shops and everywhere that one sees several people gathered together .74

  On 12 November 1944 a concerned radio listener sent a letter to the head of the news service in the Propaganda Ministry, Hans Fritsche, asking: ‘Why haven’t at least some of the new weapons been put into action, when the enemy is standing so close before our borders to the west and the east?’ He did not receive an answer.75 By March 1945, Germany’s situation, wrote the university student Lore Walb, was ‘unspeakably bitter’:

  And in this situation the government is still talking of victory! In my innermost heart I too do not want to believe that our people are destined to downfall. But if you only think about them just a little, things look very black. You can’t see any chink of light any more. The new weapons haven’t turned up, and will most likely never turn up. I certainly believe that they were planned and that construction of them was begun, but at this point they won’t succeed in getting them ready any more.76

  ‘Until the last few days,’ reported the Security Service of the SS at the end of March 1945, ‘people retained a remnant of the belief in a miracle that has been so skilfully and purposefully nurtured by the propaganda about the new weapons.’ But this small residue of hope had to be seen as a kind of psychological defence mechanism to cope with the despair that was now overwhelming the German people. The report concluded: ‘Nobody believes that we can still escape a catastrophe with the methods and possibilities of waging war that have existed up to now. The last spark of hope remains rescue from outside, or a completely exceptional set of circumstances, or a secret weapon of enormous power. This hope too is being extinguished.’77

  V

  If new weapons could not rescue Germany, then perhaps new soldiers could. Already at the end of 1943 the call-up of increasingly older age-cohorts of men to the armed forces was prompting a variety of popular jokes. ‘Vengeance will come,’ so one went, ‘when you see notices on the old people’s homes: “Closed because of the call-up”.’78 On 26 September 1944, in a desperate attempt to deal with the shortage of military personnel, Hitler ordered the creation of the ‘People’s Storm’ (Volkssturm), in which all men from the ages of sixteen to sixty were required to take up arms, and to undergo training for a final stand. They were to be organized by the Party, with the aim, Hitler said, of defending the German people against the attempt of its ‘Jewish-international enemies’ to annihilate them. All of them had to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, allegiance unto death. The official date for the launch of the People’s Storm was chosen by Himmler as 18 October, the anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon’s army in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in 1813. This was to be a national uprising just like the one that - in popular legend - had ended French rule over Germany just over 130 years before. But the reality fell far short of the rhetoric. The men of the People’s Storm were never going to be a very effective fighting force. They had no uniforms - there was no way of providing them by this stage - and had to come in their own clothes,
bringing with them a rucksack, a blanket and cooking equipment. The arms and ammunition they needed were never fully forthcoming, and by the final stage of the war they were little more than a poor imitation of an army. Wandering out from his woodland hiding-place one day, the Social Democratic schoolboy Ullrich S. noted 400 men of the People’s Storm come into the nearby village. ‘Tired and exhausted, most of them were wearing uniforms borrowed from the air force, or plundered. A few only had their mufti. I only saw 5 soldiers in all who were bearing arms, the rest were not even carrying a bayonet.’ With the characteristic disdain of the adolescent for the middle-aged, he added: ‘Most of them were between 45 and 60 years of age. The whole crowd made a very pitiable impression on us. They almost looked like an old people’s home on an outing.’79 This view was widespread. ‘Two men with shovels are walking across the graveyard,’ went one popular joke of the day. ‘An old man shouts after them: “So you want to dig out reinforcements for the People’s Storm?” ’80 For the men of the People’s Storm, however, enlistment was more than a joke. No fewer than 175,000 were eventually killed fighting against the professional armies of the Russians and the Western Allies.81

  The draft for the People’s Storm was deeply unpopular. People were well aware of its futility in military terms, and the sacrifices they were being asked to make were bitterly resented. In Stuttgart, the red posters put up around the city on 20 October 1944 advertising the creation of the People’s Storm reminded citizens of the red placards used to announce executions. ‘It’s announcing an execution too,’ people were reported saying, ‘namely the execution of the German people.’82 Recruitment was completely indiscriminate. The draft for the People’s Storm thus caught many unsuspecting and reluctant men in its net. One of its victims was the theatre critic, writer and pseudo-aristocratic fantasist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen. When the People’s Storm was set up he was living peacefully on his little estate in the Bavarian hills with his second wife, Irmgard, whom he had married in March 1935, and their three daughters, born in 1939, 1941 and 1943. At this point, his own history of lies and deceptions came back to haunt him. Reck had boasted widely of having enjoyed a heroic military career during the First World War as a Prussian officer, so it was scarcely surprising that the leadership of the People’s Storm in the nearby town of Seebruck asked him to enlist.

  Reck, who had in fact never been on active service and never fired a shot at anybody in his life, ignored the request. Four days later, on 13 October 1944, he was arrested on the orders of the military recruitment office in Traunstein for undermining the German military effort and imprisoned for a week. The Gestapo now had their eye on Reck. They knew him apart from anything else as the author of books whose thrust was unmistakeably anti-Nazi, such as his study of the Anabaptists’ reign of terror in sixteenth-century M̈nster (subtitled ‘History of a Mass Delusion’) and his account of Charlotte Corday’s assassination of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, both published in 1937.

  Unable to get at him on the basis of such subversive books because they had after all been published perfectly legitimately in Germany, with the approval of Goebbels’s censorship apparatus, the Gestapo acted instead upon a denunciation passed to them by the director of the publishers Knorr and Hirth, in Munich, Alfred Salat, who had seen a letter sent to his colleague Fritz Hasinger by Reck on 10 July 1944 about his royalties. An aside in the letter that referred to the ‘Mark of today’ as being worth ‘only half of what you get elsewhere for a more powerful coinage’, coupled with general if rather vague complaints about the way publishers had treated their authors since 1933, was enough to have Reck arrested on 29 December 1944 on the charge of ‘insulting the German currency’ and ‘statements denigrating the state’. When the jail where he was being held in Munich was destroyed by bombing, on 7-8 January 1945, Reck was transferred with the other prisoners to the concentration camp at Dachau, where the Gestapo ordered him to be kept for further interrogation. Conditions in the camp worsened rapidly in the last months of the war, and Reck soon fell ill. He was transferred to the block reserved for the sick, and, though he recovered sufficiently at one time to be released back into normal custody in the camp, he became sick again, and died at 8.30 a.m. on 16 February 1945. The death certificate gave the cause of death as enterocolitis, but a number of witnesses, including Reck’s neighbour in the hospital block, the camp doctor who attended him in the final days and saw him die and the medical clerk in the camp, subsequently testified that he had died of typhus, a disease the presence of which in the camp officials even at this late stage were eager to deny.83

  Not only older civilians like Reck, but also young boys and, increasingly, girls, were drafted in to man anti-aircraft guns and searchlights during bombing raids and take part in the war effort in other ways. Even Party officials were complaining in October 1944 of the ‘recruitment of age-cohorts that are scarcely able to carry out any practical tasks’, as adolescents from the Hitler Youth were called up for work on building defences ‘on almost all borders of the Reich’.84 On 17 March 1945, for example, all fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old pupils of the elite Napola secondary school at Oranienstein were enlisted to man the western defences. Five days later an SS instructor arrived to teach the other pupils how to use hand-held anti-tank guns.85 Women too were drafted into the armed forces as auxiliaries and subjected to military discipline. One young East Prussian woman told how her unit of raw recruits had been together for three weeks, learning how to use a pistol, when enemy fighter-planes strafed their training camp. One girl who was on guard outside the camp ran for cover. For this she was condemned to death:

  We were all forced to stand by the fence and watch our comrade being shot . . . A whole series of girls fainted. Then we were driven back to the camp . . . The impression that this execution had made on us was indescribable. All of us did nothing but stay in bed and cry for the whole day. None of us went to work. For this we were all locked into cells . . . We had to stay there for 4 days on nothing but bread and water. We were allowed to take a copy of My Struggle or the Bible with us, but I declined the offer.86

  The futility of this final draft of young women into the armed forces was nowhere clearer than in the case of the twenty-three-year-old Rita H., a seamstress, whose duties consisted of little more than helping the evacuation of army administrative offices, including the burning of incriminating documents. As the women tried to light a fire in the pouring rain, ‘the singed papers and files were lying around the whole area, for the wind was repeatedly rummaging through our little heaps of paper. It was strange,’ she added, writing as a pious Catholic, ‘and yet wonderful to stand there like that and in a way to experience the downfall of a Godless government.’87

  ‘ W E ’ L L TAKE A WORLD WITH U S’

  I

  Hitler’s last speech, broadcast on 30 January 1945, the twelfth anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor, aroused more sympathy than enthusiasm among his listeners. He did not even bother to hold out the hope that the ‘wonder-weapons’ would turn the situation around. Instead, he railed as ever against the ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’ that was hell-bent on the annihilation of Europe. Germans, he said, had to continue resisting until victory was achieved. There was to be no stab in the back as there had been in the First World War. Not even committed Nazis found the speech inspirational. As Melita Maschmann later wrote:

  During the last months of the war I always had to fight back tears when I heard Hitler’s voice on the radio or saw him on the newsreels. One’s conscious mind might refuse to recognize the signs of an imminent collapse, which were becoming more and more obvious, but the immediate impressions one received through one’s eyes and ears could not be falsified, and one’s heart was gripped with fear at the appalling truth: the newsreels showed an ageing man, who walked with a stoop and glanced anxiously about him. His voice sounded shrill with despair. Was he, then, destined to fail? For us he embodied the unprecedented effort that had made the German nation tak
e over the government of the continent. In looking at him one saw the sum total of all the countless sacrifices of lives, health and property which that effort had demanded. Had all this been in vain?88

  Many of the most committed Nazis, or the most naive, continued to hope against hope that it had not. One fifteen-year-old girl, whose entire education had been aimed not least at building up an image of Hitler as a father-figure, could write in her diary after recording the latest military disasters: ‘Our poor, poor Leader, he can’t be sleeping at night any more, and yet he’s had Germany’s good in mind.’89

  The tone of her remarks was far from exceptional in such circles. Now trained as an air force officer, Albert Molter joined in a party held to listen to Hitler’s speech in his officers’ mess. Patriotic songs were sung, and extracts from Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter were performed.90 Then the radio was switched on and everyone settled down to listen. ‘As always,’ Albert wrote to his wife Inge, ‘it was wonderful to hear the Leader’s voice. How heavy must be the burden he bears. Seen in this way it’s almost mean to listen to the Leader’s words in the hope that they will bring a decision. But actually a decision has been taken. No miracle will rescue us except that of German grit.’91 In response, his wife compared the cause of National Socialism to that of Christianity, and Hitler’s supposed sufferings to those of Jesus. Christ’s life, she recalled, had ended in crucifixion. ‘Fred, darling,’ she asked her husband, ‘are we to be asked for a similar sacrifice so that our idea can last for ever?’92 Their identification with Hitler was complete. ‘We must stand by Germany, by the Leader,’ wrote Alfred to his wife on 9 March 1945, ‘only in this way will we stand by ourselves.’93 Shortly afterwards, his unit was sent to Berlin to fight alongside the infantry defending the German capital. Within a few weeks, the British had occupied Nienburg, where Inge was now living, and arrested her Nazi father. ‘Our beloved, beautiful Germany,’ she wrote in despair to her husband, ‘all her sacrifices, all her heroism in vain.’94 He never replied. By the time she wrote this letter, he had gone missing in action. His body was never found.95