The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  While the most faithful of his followers wallowed in maudlin pity for his plight, Hitler’s thoughts turned increasingly to suicide. Sheltering from an air raid in the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery shortly after the German defeat in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler briefly gave way to despair. The army had betrayed him, he said; the air force was a broken reed. ‘I know the war is lost,’ he told his adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, and he continued: ‘Most of all, I’d like to put a bullet through my own head.’ But if he was to perish, then Germany would perish too. ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’96 When it came to public propaganda, Hitler and Goebbels now focused increasingly on the threat of annihilation they saw coming from the east. Fear was to galvanize Germans into fighting on. On 21 January 1945, in an editorial for the Reich, Goebbels ranted despairingly against ‘the world conspiracy of a parasitic race’, the Jews, who had succeeded in mobilizing the entire world against National Socialism. Despite everything, he proclaimed defiantly, ‘not Europe, but the Jews themselves will perish’.97

  Despite such bluster, it was clear to most Germans that the war was now drawing to a rapid close as the Red Army, now regrouped and re-equipped after its rapid advances of the previous months, resumed the attack once more. After the loss of the Romanian oilfields, the German army desperately needed to cling on to its source of supplies in Hungary or there would be virtually no fuel left to power its remaining tanks, lorries, mobile artillery and transport vehicles. Hitler refused permission to the German forces in Budapest to withdraw, and the Hungarian capital was soon surrounded by Soviet forces. A major offensive aimed at breaking the encirclement failed in February 1945, with the loss of nearly 30,000 men killed or captured. An armoured thrust by the Sixth SS Panzer Army, taken out of the Battle of the Bulge, failed just as decisively, and by the end of March the Red Army had occupied almost the whole of Hungary. In the north, the German forces in Latvia held out, but they were completely isolated. The main Soviet attack came in the central sector, in mid-January, when armoured formations of the Red Army took advantage of the removal of key German units to the Hungarian campaign to pulverize the German front and crush the remaining German armour. By the end of January, the Red Army had occupied most of prewar Poland. Some pockets of resistance remained, notably the city of Breslau, which held out until May. But the Red Army now stood on the river Oder, at the gates of the German Reich. It had captured the major industrial area of Silesia and gained control over the oilfields of Hungary, and it was nearing Vienna. Its commanders paused to regroup and build up munitions and supplies for the final offensive.98

  In the west, after the failure of the German counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bulge, 1.5 million Americans, more than 400,000 British and Canadians and 100,000 Free French troops assembled at the end of January for an attack on the Rhine. They took more than 50,000 prisoners as they advanced, driving the German forces across the river. On 7 March 1945, as American troops reached Remagen, they noticed German soldiers desperately trying to blow up the bridge across the river, the last one left standing. Rushing up reinforcements, they drove across and established a bridgehead the other side, allowing many troops across before the bridge finally collapsed. By the time the Rhine had been crossed, another 300,000 German troops had been captured and a further 60,000 killed or wounded. The Americans pushed on eastwards, towards Saxony, while Canadian forces advanced into Holland. British forces drove north-east towards Bremen and Hamburg, and yet more American divisions mounted a huge encirclement operation in the Ruhr, capturing more than 300,000 German prisoners. On 25 April 1945 American troops met their Red Army counterparts for a ceremonial handshake at the small town of Torgau on the river Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. Others were heading south-east towards Munich, aiming to meet Allied forces advancing towards the Brenner Pass from northern Italy, where a final assault had begun on 9 April 1945. The Red Army had already entered Vienna on 3 April 1945, as American troops were pushing into Austria from the west. Amidst constant negotiation, the invading forces agreed a rough division of territory between themselves as the final reckoning approached. Despite some doubts on the British side, the German capital was left to the Red Army to take. Soviet forces now held complete command of the skies, and possessed overwhelming superiority in armour, artillery, ammunition and manpower on the ground. In fierce fighting in March and early April 1945, they destroyed almost all the remaining German armies, and the fortresses on which Hitler had set such hopes, in East Prussia and Pomerania, while Rokossovskii launched a massive assault into Mecklenburg in the north. By the middle of April 1945, two and a half million men were now poised for the final attack on Hitler’s capital.

  The German armed forces had little left to throw at the enemy. In March 1945, some 58,000 sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were sent into the fray: their training was perfunctory, and however indoctrinated they might have been in the Nazi cause, they were no match for the tough veterans of the Red Army or the well-equipped battalions of the British and Americans and their allies.99 German losses on the Eastern Front had risen from 812,000 in 1943 to 1,802,000 in 1944. By the end of the year, over three and a half million German troops had been killed or captured by the Red Army. Overall, more than 450,000 members of the German armed forces were killed in January 1945, 295,000 in February, 284,000 in March and 281,000 in April: indeed, over a third of all German troops killed during the war died in its last four and a half months. By the end of 1944 some 800,000 German troops were in the custody of the Western Allies, a figure that had climbed to over a million by April and four million by the time the war was over. 700,000 members of the German armed forces were in Soviet camps. By April 1945 there were 600,000 sick and wounded soldiers, airmen and sailors in hospital.100 In the second half of 1944 alone, the air force lost more than 20,000 planes. The command of the skies passed to the Allied bombers, the Red Army and the invasion forces in the west.101 Speer was redoubling his efforts to increase arms production, and in September 1944 almost 3,000 fighter planes were completed. But the more territory Germany lost, the faster the war economy shrank. In particular, the loss to the Red Army of major industrial areas in the east, notably Upper Silesia, deprived the Reich of key economic resources. It was no longer possible to recruit fresh forced labour from the occupied areas. Germany’s sources of fuel in Romania and Hungary were gone. The attempt to provide a substitute by manufacturing synthetic fuel had proved futile. There was no longer any defence against the destruction now raining down continually on German cities from the air. The German armies were no longer disciplined, effective and motivated fighting forces but rapidly shrinking in number, demoralized and disorganized, little more than an armed rabble. 102

  II

  Nazi propaganda now concentrated increasingly on instilling fear of the invader into the German people. Hitler’s written message read out over the radio on 24 February 1945, the anniversary of the promulgation of the Nazi Party programme in 1920, warned that Germans would be shipped off to Siberia as slaves if the Red Army proved triumphant.103 The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and ‘an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it’.104 Hitler’s final appeal to the troops on the Eastern Front, issued to all ranks on 15 April 1945, used fear as its main weapon in calling for resistance to the last man: ‘The deadly Jewish-Bolshevik enemy with his masses is beginning his final attack. He is attempting to destroy Germany and exterminate our people ... The old men and children will be murdered, women and girls will be degraded as barracks whores. The remainder will march to Siberia.’ But Germany would be spared this fate if they stood firm. ‘The Bolshevik ... will bleed before the capital of the German Reich.’105 Goebbels made a point of repeating these warnings in detail in these final weeks. He dragged up once more
the allegation that the Allies intended to exterminate the German race. His warnings were echoed by Heinz Guderian, Chief of the Army General Staff, who declared that all the Red Army wanted to do in Germany was to rob, rape and kill.106

  20. The End of the War

  But such dire warnings had for some time been just as likely to backfire as to succeed. Many Germans, as we have seen, felt that they had no right to criticize the Red Army in view of the atrocities that Germany had committed itself. It was not just the Jews whose maltreatment aroused such feelings of guilt. A Party member in the Stuttgart area was reported to have asked rhetorically: ‘Weren’t our SS people frequently even more cruel towards Germans, their own fellow-citizens, than the Russians have been towards the East Prussians? We have shown the others how to deal with political enemies.’107 Public exhortation to carry on fighting had equally little effect. On 24 February 1945 Bormann issued an appeal on the anniversary of the proclamation of the Nazi Party programme in 1920. Anyone who thought of retreat or surrender, he said, was a traitor to the nation. Self-sacrifice would be rewarded by victory. If only the German people’s will stood firm, Germany would triumph.108 Not long afterwards, in Berlin, three women were observed looking at a poster displayed in the shop window of the KdW department store, proclaiming: ‘Berlin is working, fighting and standing.’ A few more bombing raids like the previous day’s, one was overheard saying, ‘and the only thing standing will be ruins . . . We didn’t see much evidence of Berlin fighting last Sunday. The Americans dropped their bombs wherever they wanted. They flew all over the sky without any opposition, without any fighting.’109 In the invaded areas, people began to seek a way of surrendering. Their attempts did not go down well with Nazi fanatics. ‘In a session of the town council,’ noted Lore Walb, who had gone back from Munich to her home town of Alzey in the Rhineland, ‘Dr Sch. also pleaded for the surrender of the town, since further struggle is pointless, and in order to preserve everything that still remains. The District Leader [of the Nazi Party] was of course in favour of fighting to the finish.’110 In one rural part of western Germany, soldiers who tried to set off explosive charges in front of the advancing Americans were attacked by local people with pitchforks.111

  As propaganda failed, terror began to take its place. On 15 February 1945 Reich Justice Minister Otto-Georg Thierack ordered that anyone attempting to avoid his duty to fight on, thus jeopardizing Germany’s determination to win, would be tried by a drumhead court-martial, consisting of a criminal court judge, a Nazi official and an officer of the armed forces, the Military SS or the police, and, if found guilty, executed on the spot.112 As these makeshift courts swung into action, the more fanatical and energetic Nazi Party officials quickly dispensed with the rules. On 18 March 1945 Field Marshal Model ordered the military police to shoot any soldiers or civilians engaged in acts of sabotage. ‘Where a white flag appears,’ Himmler instructed his officers in the SS and police, ‘all the male persons of the house concerned are to be shot. There must,’ he added, ‘be no hesitation in carrying out these measures.’113 And in his last orders to the soldiers of the Eastern Front, in mid-April 1945, Hitler repeated that there was to be no retreat, no surrender: ‘Anyone who gives you the order to retreat must be arrested immediately if you do not know exactly who he is, and if necessary is to be killed on the spot, quite irrespective of whatever rank he may carry.’114 ‘Strength Through Fear’ became the slogan of the hour, replacing ‘Strength Through Joy’ - in German the initials, KdF, were the same.

  Up to 10,000 people were summarily executed in this final phase of terror and repression.115 They included a significant number of the 190,000 or so criminal offenders who now crowded Germany’s state prisons and penitentiaries, many of them put there by political repression or the wartime crackdown on looting, theft and ‘undermining morale’. As the Allied armies advanced, the prison authorities began to evacuate the jails. The governor of the women’s penitentiary in Fordon, near Bromberg, took out the 565 inmates under guard on 21 January 1945, and marched them to another women’s prison at Krone, 36 kilometres away. Only forty of them reached their destination. ‘It was about minus 12 degrees,’ reported the governor, ‘and it was very icy. As a result, the prisoners as well as the warders were falling over all the time . . . During the march,’ he continued, ‘I observed numerous prisoners who were left behind, struggling to drag themselves forward. Many were sitting or lying by the side of the road, and nothing could induce them to get up again.’116 When the Krone prisoners were evacuated in their turn, the same scenes repeated themselves. Coming across the column, an SS unit on the retreat gunned down one group of the prisoners, while other women prisoners were taken roughly out of the line by passing German soldiers and raped.117

  All over Germany and the incorporated territories, state prisoners were forced to go on similar marches, some of them to concentration camps. Some, classified by penal officials as reformable, were released into a special formation of the Military SS. Thousands of the supposedly incorrigible, on the other hand, were simply taken out and shot. At Sonnenburg, a penitentiary located to the east of Berlin, the regional state prosecutor, Kurt-Walter Hanssen, a former personal assistant of Martin Bormann, had most of the prisoners murdered by a unit of SS and police officers brought in for the purpose on 30 January. The prisoners were made to kneel down in groups of ten, and were shot in the back of the neck; sick inmates were shot in their beds in the prison infirmary. More than 800 prisoners were killed in the space of a few hours, the majority of them foreign forced labourers who had been jailed for infringements of the harsh rules under which they had been obliged to live and work. The rest - a mere 150 - who had been classified as ‘useful’, were marched out in the direction of Berlin. For those left behind, conditions worsened dramatically with the arrival of evacuated prisoners from elsewhere; food supplies became even more scarce, disease was rife, and death rates rocketed. Reich Justice Minister Thierack personally ordered a large number of prison executions as late as April 1945. Army commanders who saw prison inmates as a military threat also ordered executions: Field Marshal Walter Model, surrounded by the Americans in the Ruhr area, ordered penitentiary inmates to be selected and executed if they were found to be ‘dangerous’: these included a number of German political prisoners as well as foreign workers. Altogether, 200 prisoners, including a number who were only on remand, were shot in this area over the following week.118

  Model’s murderous actions paralleled those of Hitler himself and reflected a similar mentality. The more desperate the military situation became, the more vital it seemed to such men to eliminate anyone who might threaten the regime from within. Obsessed to the end with the imaginary precedent of 1918, Hitler did not want another ‘stab in the back’. ‘I’ve ordered Himmler, in the event of there some day being reason to fear troubles back at home,’ he had said some years earlier, on the night of 14- 15 September 1941, ‘to liquidate everything he finds in the concentration camps. Thus at a stroke the revolution would be deprived of its leaders.’119 This included foreigners, such as the 141 French resistance workers who were shot in Natzweiler the day before the camp was evacuated in the face of the advancing Allied armies. Most of all, however, Hitler’s murderous attention was turned towards his internal enemies.120 The trials and executions of those involved in the bomb plot of 20 July 1944 continued almost to the end. On 4 April 1945 an evil chance led to the discovery of Admiral Canaris’s personal diaries. Reading them in his Berlin bunker, Hitler convinced himself that Canaris and his fellow-conspirators had been working against him from the outset. All his remaining enemies had to be killed, he decided. He began by ordering the head of the SS Security Service, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to do away with the surviving plotters. On 9 April 1945 Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer and two other political inmates of Flossenb̈rg concentration camp were stripped naked and hanged by crude ropes from wooden hooks in the courtyard. The bodies were immediately cremated. To Hitler’s thirst for revenge was added Himmler’s
determination that prominent opponents of Nazism should not survive into the postwar era. As Gestapo chief Heinrich M̈ller told Helmuth von Moltke, ‘We won’t make the same mistake as in 1918. We won’t leave out internal German enemies alive.’121 On the same day as Canaris and the others were executed, as the Red Army was closing in on the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, one of the inmates, Georg Elser, who had narrowly missed killing Hitler with a home-made time-bomb in November 1939, was moved out of his quarters in the camp to Dachau, where the commandant interviewed him briefly before having him taken out and shot in the back of the neck. Himmler had given orders for the execution, and instructed the camp authorities to attribute his death to a British air raid. A week later it was duly announced as such in the press.122 A further series of murders took place between 20 and 24 April in Berlin, where the SS shot more of the people who had been involved in the bomb plot of July 1944.123